Raiding and Working with Healers - Page 3

Zerianne · 09/24/06, 4:02 AM

A lot of healers just don't notice they need to move because they are staring at health bars, while most dps classes are staring at the mobs in question. It's not a talent, it just comes with practice. You can get battle awareness pvp'ing or just doing these fights in particular. After you've progressed as far as c'thun, people that are just plain bad wiill never improve. They'll always die on Sartura, stand in exploding bugs/blizzard on Emps, get eye beamed on C'Thun, etc. But your raid just rolled up to your first real dynamic fight you've ever encountered. People just need practice.

I wouldn't be so quick to blame your healers for your failure on this boss either. Are the adds running around out of control? Make sure your rogues are doing their best to lock them down. I personally wear full dodge gear + agility pot, pop evasion first thing, and build 5cp on one then kidneyshot. I use an invuln pot when all that wears off. In short, you need your Rogues to make themselves useful too. They can lock an add down while taking 0 damage. If Sartura & friends are just running all over the place out of control, no special healer assignments or battle awareness will make them successfully keep the rest of the raid alive. Keeping Sartura herself under control is key too, and the methods for doing that (taunt rotation/stun between ww) has already been discussed.

Finally, people need to take care of themselves here. Do you have people standing around like idiots at half hp and getting one shot the moment an add comes by? People should have consumeables -- major health pots, tubers, bandages, etc., and take care of themselves the best they can. Some fights, healers can only do so much. And on this fight in particular, since they themselves have to move out of the way, they won't be able to always cast a clutch heal since that requires standing still. Make sure people come prepared and top themselves off. The fights in AQ40 only get harder. :)

• Chicken · 09/24/06, 6:35 AM

Originally Posted by Thelyna

On a slightly unrelated note, I've noticed recently there's quite a few priests using Flash Heal pretty much exclusively in our raids. Is there any diplomatic and delicate way to chivel them around to the Heal4/Heal2 goodness?

Personally I just pointed out the following when the other Priests started noticing my mana was lasting longer while I was healing about the same amounts (I basically converted to using slower heals about a week after the Priest talent revisions hit, first Priest in my guild):

You can generally count on the fact that a certain amount of damage is going to be coming in on whoever you're healing on a steady basis. Sure, you could just wait until whoever you're healing takes damage and then cast a reactive Flash Heal. But if you know someone is going to be taking, say, 1200 damage within the next 3 seconds, and you have a choice between reactively healing it or just starting up your slower spell beforehand and saving yourself a lot of mana, which would you go for? ;)

Of course, then you'll have people pointing out "But what about spike damage?", to which the answer is "By the time the spike hits, I've probably already finished one second of casting on my two and a half second spell, and my spell heals for the same as Flash Heal. So again, the only difference is the mana efficiency. Even if I haven't, I'm not healing by myself, there's generally at least 3 other people and probably more on those spike damage fights. Plus what with reflexes, it's quite likely that even if only half a second of my spell has cast it'll still hit at the same time as those reactive Flash Heals."

Of course, another problem might be that you might end up with a few Priests once they're converted that are close to refusing to use Flash Heal at all, which is just as stupid as not using the slower heals. All heals are useful in a specific situation.

tritium4ever · 09/24/06, 6:36 AM

Originally Posted by Pantone

Don't obsess too much on complicated groups or strats--just insist everyone learn to move.

My guild has never had a real strat to sartura. We have between 4 and 6 tanks grab adds and the boss, put two healers on each tank.. and the rest "heal the raid." We use no hunters, taunt rotations, or warlocks. We just have absolute chaos as all the blenders fly around slicing people. (in fact, we've had kills with an untanked add where we just told the raid to dodge it). But it works.. somehow. We just keep dodging, call out a target of opportunity and hope for the best. Tanks die and are rezzed, healers basically go to "forget your assignment and just heal whoever's around you" and all the warlocks die (Every. Single. Time). Then the boss dies and we collect loots.

Just get out of the way!

This sounds exactly like how we do Sartura. I've read lots of posts with hunters using distracting shot to pull back, warlocks using DoTs to ping pong, and choreographed taunt rotations, and I have no idea how the heck anyone can accomplish that in the chaos. We've always been like "well here let's get some tanks on each mob" and let the rest of the fight work itself out. Hell, it's the only boss encounter in the game where I don't even do healing assignments (shhh, don't tell anyone else in my guild that!)...people just naturally find the spots they need to stand in to get healing range on at least a couple tanks. Strict healing assignments tend not to work on Sartura anyway, since if an add forces some healers to move then their tank may not get any heals at all. With a raid group adept at healing anyone that they can possibly reach, this problem is minimized.

Sure it's chaotic and seemingly uncoordinated, and sure we never get perfectly clean kills with zero deaths, but we do one-shot Sartura every week with very little difficulty. People have just gotten used to the "move or die" mentality, and things work out.

Dodo · 09/24/06, 7:27 AM

If your raid is taking MASSIVE damage in the sartura fight, it's not your healers fault. It's a different story if your healers keep dying to the adds and/or Sartura.

Ideally only your melee forces get hit and nobody else. You have to change your positioning if it's very different from this. People die because they have Sartura and a royal guard on them. Or 2-3 royal guards at the same time. That is NOT a healer problem. What you are describing seems more like a problem from your damage dealers which are keeping to throw these fireballs (or whatever) at the guard even when the guard is only 10 yards away from them. Result is, that they bite the dust.

Melissande · 09/24/06, 7:46 AM

Beware of the "it's the healers fault syndrome". Strategies varies, but with our startegy on sartura, we have four categories of people taking more damage than chain bandaging/casual renews+rejuvs can heal.

1 - warriors, though we don't want more than 2 or 3 of them on the mob at a given time
2 - rogues, who have a though stun job. In this fight were they don't bitch about "too much useless dodge on our set", BTW. You have to be very carefull of your rogues, as evasion won't be up for the entire fight. Have your healers very aware of it, in a random fight an aggro'ed rogue might "evasion tank", on Sartura he will have to have to tank. The healers must be aware that the "rogue who seems to take no damage" will start being hammered as soon as evasion stops
3 - warlocks, at least while adds are still alive (they have a job of controlling the adds, being the add's target till the warrior catches aggro)
4 - retards, or at least people screwing up

Make sure your healer prioritize the first 3 categories. Failing to keep someone in catgory 1-3 up because of someone in category 4 is a mistake.

Another important thing is that heals have a limited range. Basically we make 3 autonomous add bashing group with 1 war, 1 lock, 1 or 2 rogues, 1 or 2 priest). Especially for this fight, fuck totem optimisation. You need healers in add groups to take care of their groups, wich they will very easily spot on the minimap, this is more important than getting windfury on warrior X or aura of something on player Y.

Also, your whole raid must be aware that survival is more important than being DPSing 100% of the time! So as soon as you get damaged, retreat (except for players who have tanking duties of course). Players need heals to give them HP back, but healing to stand through damage and stay "being beaten" is the privilege of players having tanking duties. So "move or die", which includes healers. Mages and hunters dying shold be mocked upon (and obviously STFU about healers). Rogues, on the other way, should be healed cautiously as they drop very fast. Of course, if your rogues have PVP sets, tell them to wear as much Stamina as they can.

Last but not least, Sartura deals no magic damage, so amplify magic for everyone.

Ashen · 09/24/06, 9:10 AM

I appreciate all of the help and the comments, but I did want to point out one thing. I'm not blaming our healers for our Sartura problems. The thing is, is that I've had a close eye on our healers since about the time we stepped into BWL. As a healer myself, it's something I concentrate on. I almost never jump to blame our healers on any wipe, unless I KNOW it was a healing problem. And even then, there are always extraneous factors that cause a wipe.

My concern is, as I mentioned, how to make things work with them.

I want to:
a.) Fix their healing. Many people mentioned downranking and precasting, things that I'm not sure all of our healers do. They helped me by also mentioning how one would approach such an issue.
b.) My largest issue is if they're stuck watching their EM's and Health bars and not the fight. We had this problem on Firemaw, where people weren't moving to find the sweet spots. They would stand there and take like 5 Flame Buffet Ticks and complain about positioning, while the rest of our healers were standing four feet away from them healing.

I'm just seeing this issue again, and it's something I wanted to address. No wipe may happen because our healers aren't moving, but at the same time, I want to strengthen them so we can handle these encounters more successfully: Skeram, Bug Trio, Sartura, Ouro, C'thun (When we get to the last two.)

I did want some help on Sartura, and I appreciate the help I got, but I would like for people to read the original post again, since I'm also asking questions on how to handle strengthening our healers in a raid environment, both in terms of healing and movement.

Malan · 09/24/06, 10:11 AM

Originally Posted by Ashen

I did want some help on Sartura, and I appreciate the help I got, but I would like for people to read the original post again, since I'm also asking questions on how to handle strengthening our healers in a raid environment, both in terms of healing and movement.

;)
I tried to help you out with that on the first page, you may want to edit Sartura out of the OP, people are just going to casually read that and then continue to post their "OMG TEH SECRET SARTURA STRAT" in response.

muteh · 09/24/06, 10:41 AM

Movement at least is very hard to teach, all you can really do is stress how important it is to avoid whatever is you need to avoid and hope that it sinks in. A lot of those who didn't get the idea on that first night will likely get it eventually (days rather than months ;) ) - it only takes a couple of deaths in the first seconds of a Sartura pull to work out that you being alive for the whole fight would be better than that one heal you were casting landing. It then takes a few more trys to actually put that into practice since it is so different to how people have healed for the last how ever many days /played came before. Nobody wants to die every time you do a boss like that and good (or at least good enough) movement isn't that hard a skill to pick up.

As for knowing if someone is a good healer or a bad healer, well, that's going to be hard to do in a quantifiable way. Healing meters can show if someone was asleep half the night but not if somebody was making intelligent choices about who and how to heal. It's been mentioned here before that the best thing to do is to discretely ask the tanks what they think about the healers. They'll have the best idea of who gets the clutch heals in, whose heals always seem to land a second after they've already been topped off and who just seems to be flash healing every 5 seconds regardless of what's happening. Then you're stuck with what you do with that knowledge - you can't very well go up to someone and say "You're a bad healer - heal better". In my opinion the best thing to do is to create an atmosphere where people want to know more about how their class works. Yes, some emergency monitor flash spammers probably do that because it's easier than prehealing with slower heals but it's likely a lot do because they don't know any better. Toss out a few links to useful sites: you can probably find some relavent threads on here and the ctmod calculator is a good demonstration of the benefits of downranking. Encourage conversation about what style of healing people are finding works best on encounters you're learning, try to get them to make suggestions about how assignments could be better. If people feel that their advice is valued (even if not always acted on) then they're going to want to make more good suggestions and therefore think more about what's happening.

Mistaya · 09/24/06, 11:37 AM

Nothing to add to the sartura strat except we pretty much say "Tanks pick something up, people try not to die and heal whoever's nearby" its hectic, messy, lots of deaths but she's a one shot every week even if it takes a while since the adds killed like all but one rogue, all the locks, and half the mages. Druids tend to die on aggro-bouncy fights like this, we are high aggro healers and have no fade. I'd imagine shammies have a similar difficulty, our pallies don't have much trouble with her though. So on to the real advice...

Your healers need to be comfortable with each other. If I am grouped with a guild mate I am always well aware of how he heals, as a druid I am very sensitive to our priests mana pools (go innervate bot!) Knowing that I'm with a pally so I need to hot more and rank up a bit or being offheal with a preist and being able to heal more outside of group is very important.

My guild is alliance so your milage may vary but heres what we do:

1. Every group has 2 healers. A druid or priest main healer and a paladin or druid offhealer.
2. Healers know what their priority is in every encounter. Unless specifically stated otherwise (patchwerk, gluth) for US the priority is:

A: Keep your group (including you!) alive. -every group has 2 healers, be talkative with your buddy healer. It is likely one of you will be demagic/depoison/decurse in some encounters make sure your buddy healer compensates for that.

B: Keep the tanks alive. -Durr. If you have a very strong heal in group (druid/priest combo) one of you should be healing MT. Again, be talkative. Healers must know what each other is doing.

C: Keep everyone else alive. -Depending on the fight who to save if given a choice between 2 people about to die will change. Example: Mages high prioirty on viscidius, low priority on razuvious.

Have a healer channel and be chatty with each other in it. Friends heal better together =p Its valuable for healers to just be healers with each other. If a tank goes down you need to be able to ask questions or confirm what went wrong outside of that snotty DPS's earshot and decide if you could have done something about it. A good healer should KNOW when he could have saved someone and failed, and improve on himself to not fail the next time. Post overhealing only if its significant enough to call atention to, but post Effective healing after DPS to give your healers a little bit of friendly competition just like the DPS has.

BWL-> AQ40 is a big step for healers as you've noticed. You said this was only your first week in there, so dont be too hard on people. They will definately learn to move by the end of it. And caps for emphasis: RUN SPEED IS BEST BOOT ENCHANT AND CHEAP MAKE THEM ALL GET IT :P

Ninjadood · 09/24/06, 11:47 AM

RE: Healers and making healers better healers

One of the biggest issues that plagues this game with regards to healing classes is two handed healers. What I mean when I say this is that there are those who use both their hands to be able to cast 1 heal. Pre-AQ, Blizzard has catered to this play style and hence the figure of the immobile healer has arisen. I've seen healers IRL spam clicking the first or second slot of their EM and using their other hand to click heal. Odds are they're not paying much attention to the actual healing they're doing and a low Overheal % is solely a virtue of them being a fast clicker.

As you know, Emergency Monitor is a great tool for specifying who needs healing(and is very configurable by class, group, etc.) I personally prefer Healer Assist's emergency monitor because it comes with some awesome addons that makes a monkey be able to play a healing class.

Your goal is to get healers out of the mindset of "I'm going to be staring at castbars playing whack-a-mole." However, when they're dedicated to even 5 raid members and have to watch healthbars this can get tricky. I subscribe to the method "Let addons do what I intend to do if the addon can do it better."
So I through these addons I specify criteria of who I want to heal so I focus less on manually finding who I want to heal, and more on my positioning and performance while healing.

A few addon's and mods can turn your worst healer into an extremely dynamic On-The-Go heal machine provided they show a desire to do so. Our goal is to make it so they are less reliant at using multiple hands/fingers to heal so that they always have a hand free to move their avatar. The healing suite I use is composed of the following:

Healer Assist- http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/a...rs-assist.html
I also use HA's Castbar and Mana Conserve Plugin
(HA's emergency monitor is more configurable than CT-RA's and has awesome features like accounting for current heals being cast on a target. Check it out!
This allows me a more dynamic Castbar that I can configure with specified text in the plugin including my overheal%. The mana conserve plugin actually changes the castbar color at >20% overheal. My castbar reads: TARGET - (--percentoverheal--) [num people healing target]

ECastingBar- http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/a...astingbar.html
(An easily configurable castbar that lets you assign dimenisons very easily. My cast bar is approximately 3/4's the width of my screen in my UI)

Decursive(of course)

If you bind the following macro to a key, that key will target the highest person on the EM list and cast Flash heal rank 5.

/script HA_SelectEmergency(1); if(UnitExists("target")) then CastSpellByName("Flash Heal(Rank 5)"); end

You can select anyone on the EM list by changing the 1 in the above script to a different number.

I have my right numberpad bound as follows-
7- Flashheal5-EMslot1 8- Flashheal5-EMslot2 9- Flashheal5-EMslot3
4- Gheal3-EMslot1 5-GHeal3-EMslot2 6- Gheal3-EMslot3

I have decursive bound to my Asterix key on the numpad.

Now that I've explained my setup, let me go into a little bit of my philosophy with regards to DPS vs. Healing. DPS generally has to worry about 2 things: Themselves and their own positioning, and the mob they are killing. Healers have a bit of a more dynamic role- They must focus on themselves and their own positioning, but they also have to reconcile that with their healing assignment(group) and group's need at that moment. They must also reconcile that their actions could be completely negated by anyone with a comparable healing assignment.

I gotta tell you, it's a harrowing experience being a healer while the only feedback you receive is ZOMG I DIDN'T GET HEALS!!!! If I'm a healer and can't recognize that you're getting damaged, in my mind it's not my fault if you die. So I have to be proactive and do everything I can to be the most dynamic healer I can. Each healer has to take that upon themselves. For me, and working with my raid healers, it's been showing them what healing is like in my shoes rather than playing whack-a-mole and hoping that you're not overhealing someone. Have your healers discuss their play styles with each other to see if some might work better for each other.

-T3h Ninjadood

When I drink we win

Althor · 09/24/06, 8:16 PM

The Sartura fight is a lot easier with the adds dead. The adds are far easier to kill with Sartura being tanked well away from the DPS.

How to achieve this on the pull? Strangely I haven't seen anyone mentioning the strat we use to seperate Sartura from her adds....which is weird as it works very well (though can take a little while to get it right but it's safe to use).

We have everyone start up mounted in 2 groups near the entrance. We have 2 rogues stealthed inside her room to the wall on left of the entrance.

The Rogues.....use *Distract*. Sartura and her adds can be Distracted. The Rogues time their Distract to seperate at least 1 of the adds (though 2 or 3 is possible too) from Sartura. The Distracted mob(s) stays there, Sartura keeps pathing to the other side of the room. When she does one of our groups at the entrance (the Sartura tanking group) charge in at full speed to reach Sartura. The rest charge in to the left to zerg rush the Cheapshotted distracted mob. Bang. One or more adds down, Sartura on the far side of the room.
Keep a warrior in between the DPS and Sartura to cut her off if she tries to head to the DPS.

Pull the adds back to where that initial one died. Once all the adds are dead it's an incredibly easy fight.

And yeah, as a healer (or anyone else): "Move bitch, get out the way, get out the way bitch, get out the way".

panny · 09/24/06, 11:57 PM

Haha, that sounds awesome Althor. I think my guild uses hunters/feral druids for that.

On healing during the fight, it's a bit hard to see incoming adds when your screen is filled with CTRA boxes and emergency meters and damage meters. Tell healers to scale down their UIs, or convert to perfect raid or something similiar. If they're hell bent on CTRA or the default raid UI, tell them to try just having tanks and rogues up and an emergency meter for the rest. Those are the people you'll want to keep track of, for the rest, you can target people by actually clicking on them instead of their CTRA box, because for once, dynamic position is what determines damage, rather than initial positioning.

Burn down the first add asap. Tell your mages/locks to burn their trinkets. It's alot less hectic with one less add. Assign a few healers specifically to each "tank" (the ones that have the most trouble moving), and tell the others to watch the rest of the raid.

Avair · 09/25/06, 9:55 AM

Our fun Satura trick: Put a stealthed rogue just to the left as you come into the room. Have him use distract to fix 1 or 2 adds as they leave that corner. Then charge. If done correct, Satura is all the way on the other side of the room by the time you agro the guards.

Plea · 09/25/06, 10:14 AM

Taunt Intercept taunt mockingblow taunt intercept taunt challenging shout taunt intercept taunt. This is 1 min, enough time to kill at least 2 of the ads; and you held your mob alone easily. You need imp intercept for a pattern like that though. Assuming you have at least 5 warriors, 2 on sartura and 1 on each ad; if none of them died everything should be extremely easy after 2 ads are down.

And, in any combat where you might lose aggro due to knockback, or aggro reset like here; when you are tanking always drag your mob away from the raid. When you estimate the aggro reset is coming position yourself between the mob and the raid, so that you will be knocked to where the mob will run towards.

About the pull, there's nothing special tbh. We just rush in when they just pass in front of us, catch them when they get closer to fankriss tunnel and taunt a random mob.

Darke · 09/25/06, 10:22 AM

I always found it ironic when healers complained that all they did was stare at health bars all day, and then when they introduced content that required mobility and control of your character while doing your job, they claimed they couldn't do it.

I definitely remember one Nefarian attempt way back in the day when, for some reason, the warning timer for Shadow Flame was way, way off. The Priests were asking if there was any other way they could tell if he was going to Shadow Flame besides the timer. I was like "Yeah, he does a really drawn out animation of him taking a deep breath before he Shadow Flames." The Priests' response was: "I can't look at the dragon and heal." My jaw just dropped. That kind of situational awareness of their environment and responding to it led to quite a few healers getting torn apart on Sartura, the Trio, Ossirian, etc. and I'm quite sure led to many of them quitting because they couldn't/didn't want to handle the way the game was going.

Thankfully most of our healers have learned how to move and heal at the same time. I would recommend sending your healers to train in BGs and tell them not to DPS but to support heal the entire time. Healing in PVP, where there are 10-15 people out to kill you, will make a healer learn to move and heal on their feet. DPSing in PVP doesn't teach them those skills.