Old School Raiding Meets TBC (mostly healing, some raid setup suggestions)

[Inori]

Firstly, thanks for taking me along for my first 25 man raid with FA.  It was a lot of fun. I wanted to share some of my observations regarding the raid and offer some suggestions.  Note that my background is in 40 man raid healing pre-TBC (Naxxramas, AQ40, BWL, MC).  I did do a 40 man Doom Lord Kazzak and Doomwalker kill right before I went on my 'WoW sabbatical', but I must say that last night was my first proper 25 man TBC raid. 1) Group Composition
When I was added to the raid, I was placed into a group with mostly healers.  This could be advantageous in situations where the healer mana pool is strained (use 4 healers + shadow priest) or where tank healing throughput is strained (use 4 healers + tree).  This situation should manifest itself only during new encounters and generally becomes unnecessary as the raid becomes better geared and/or the instance gets nerfed.  For most encounters and trash clearing, however, healers should be divided among the individual raid groups, especially priests and druids.  The reason for this is healing triage and group healing which will be discussed later in this post.  The only group which didn't always get a druid or priest were the tanking groups.  In pre-TBC raiding, we usually put the tanks in one or two groups (sometimes more for bosses like the four horsemen) with a paladin (for aura) and warlock (for imp).  DPS would be grouped in a manner that maximized buffs (e.g., moonkin + 3 caster DPS + healer; feral druid + 3 melee DPS + healer).  Notice again how there is still a healer in the DPS groups.
1a) Arranging groups to maximize party-type auras is beneficial, but the benefit from taking the healer out of the group to get just one more actually slows down the raid.  Clearing trash faster by having 4 mages with a moonkin instead of 3 mages with a moonkin is wasted when just a single person in the raid dies due to poor healing triage and the raid must now be less that person as they are resurrected, rebuffed, and drink/eat up.

[Inori]

 

[Inori]

2) Group Positioning
Setting up for void reaver, the entire raid just spread in a haphazard fashion.  This makes healing triage and group healing extremely difficult and more random.  It exposes the raid to healing dead zones as people shift in and out of position.  It also defeats the purpose of the moonkin aura since people may no longer be in range. 3) Healing Triage
By putting a healer in each group, it creates a triage system.
3a) As a group healer, you would typically help put HoTs on the tank and go into a predictive healing mode (i.e., start gheal casting/cancelling on targets likely to be damaged).
3b) As soon as the situation changes to where your party is taking damage or is about to take damage (e.g., one of the mobs targets your group's high DPS mage), you would switch priorities to your own group.  Depending on the situation, you may shield your mage and start into a flash heal spam.  If the person in your group is a warlock, you may elect to shield and go into a gheal spam.  The advantage of having 'first responder' duty is that it will stagger your heals from cross healers in other groups and minimize the overhealing that results from synchronized healing.  Since your heal will land first (if you elect to do a direct heal) or land second (if you elect to shield, then heal), you will most likely be able to see the count and timing of other incoming heals while you're in the middle of your second heal.  With this information, you could decide to cancel your heal, let it go through, or switch to a slower heal if enough fast heals are coming in to smooth the damage.
3c) If your group is not taking damage and incoming DPS on the tank is smooth (all HoTs are up and dedicated tank healers have mana), you would be scanning the raid for cross healing.  In most cases, I have my raid windows sorted by class since certain classes need more rapid response than others.  I'll include a screenshot and description in a later post.  In some cases where the raid is positioned by group or where I expect certain classes to take more damage (i.e., melee on a boss that cleaves), I'll rearrange the raid windows so that they'll receive the fastest response.
3d) As experience dicatates, you should establish a healing plan.  As you get more experience with the damage patterns caused by trash and bosses, you can use the few seconds it takes to cast your direct heals (or the global cooldown during instants) to decide who the next healing target should be.  If there's no next target, return to 3a.  If 3b or 3c is taking a lot of your focus, be sure to throw a HoT on the tanks once in a while to help smooth damage.  Use the time during your spell casts to figure out a time where a lapse in healing due to throwing out that HoT will not result in a casualty. 4) Group Healing
Priests have the advantage of having the highest throughput healing spell in the game: prayer of healing.  In 3b above, if three people in your group are damaged (or if two people are damaged and you expect more incoming damage to your group), start casting PoH.  During the three second cast, you can evaluate who in your group will need follow on healing or if you should proceed to a second PoH.  If healing priests are not divided among the groups, this potent skill is wasted.  Not having played a druid or shaman, I don't know how effective tranquility and chain healing are in terms of healing throughput.  Also note that 3d still applies; have a healing plan.  If your group is unfortunate enough to take damage where a PoH (2k in 3 sec) won't be enough to ensure anyone's survival, but a gheal will (4k in 2.5 sec), have a plan for who to target first in your group.  If you know that the mage in your group has his ice block off cooldown, know to cast the gheal on the rogue whose cloak of shadows is on cooldown since the mage can save himself and vice versa. 5) Tank Healing
For groups that end up with two healers, one healer is usually dedicated to tank healing and the other to group healing.  Note that this doesn't mean that the tank healer doesn't help cross heal.  It just means that the tank healer's triage is heavily slanted towards the tank (help cross heal if incoming tank damage is sufficiently smooth; cancel cross heals if tank burst damage appears).  As noted in 3a above, group healers also help heal the tank, but it is important to keep the DPS alive.  If DPS is dying regularly, the raid will take longer because that DPS will need to be resurrected, rebuffed, and eat/drink.  At that point, the raid waits or continues with 1 less DPS which could cause a vicious cycle (another raid member dies since mobs aren't going down fast enough, then another, and another). That's it for now since I'm posting from a lab at work while running some tests.  I'll try to get some screenshots added later as well as a link to the heal cancelling mod that I wrote.  Comments are extremely welcome.  In particular, I'd like to know how the raid healing scene has changed since we didn't have shamans before (I didn't have a Horde char that raided), everyone had a lot less stamina, mana regen was more strained, and priests didn't have all these nifty new tricks (PoM, CoH, shadowfiend).  I have a lot to catch up on.  Thanks for reading.

[Han]

Here is my (resto) shaman perspective on group makeup:   Shadow priests love resto shaman, and should generally be paired with one in their group.  They go OOM pretty fast without aggressive chain potting and some source of regen in their group (resto shaman ideally).  The extra spell damage and mana return from totems equals that much more mana for the party.  Heroism is kind of a moot point because the shaman should be able to swap groups, pop it, and then swap back (the buff stays with the members who were in the group when it was cast).  The mana return that the resto shaman gets means they can continuously spam chain heal without worrying about mana, and chain should rarely be cancelled, because even if the primary target is at full health, it will likely jump to someone who needs healing.    We have never assigned healers to heal their groups, ever.  I never healed pre-TBC so I cant speak to how it used to be, but I don't know why we don't, but it seems to have worked so far.  I don't even think about who is in my group, we just stick shamans on raid healing and assign tank healers to the tanks.  I would be curious to see how well the group oriented strat would work

[Inori]

That's good to know.  Back in the day, we had a paladin with maxed out healing gear at the time (fortunately, he used mostly plate healing gear and was kind enough to only bid DKP on cloth/leather if none of the priests/druids wanted it).  He could spam flash of light (at least I think it was flash of light; never played a pally) nonstop and never run out of mana.  Even after they nerfed downranking, he could still do it effectively.  It was great because it really smoothed out the damage and was timed differently than the slower priest heals, so we would rarely be synchronized up and overheal. In that sense, it makes sense to not split the shamans out for group healing since the chain heal crosses group boundaries already.  I wonder if the horde ever had paladin envy.  I know that I always wished that we had tremor totems since only dorf priests got fear ward at the time.

[Beiner]

Try doing Vael as Horde before Tranquil Air Totems ever existed.... WTB less aggro plz and still rush to kill him.  Vael was epic failure and ripped many horde guilds apart.  After TBC and getting a Pally, raiding up to Hyjal was EZ-Mode.  But we also had established Shamans and ran with 3 Pally Healers and 1 Pally Tank. 

[Inori]

Hahaha, I remember that.  There was a lot of forum QQing on our server, but the Horde guilds eventually got it down.  I also remembered that as Alliance, we also whined about not having poison cleansing totems for Viscidus.  Good times.

[Inori]

Here's a mod that I wrote that allows you to swap keybindings for jumping and spell cancelling. www.curse.com/downloads/details/4515/ Since I was in the habit of cancelling spells by mashing the spacebar, I wrote this mod that allows you to bind a key to a /stopcasting macro.  Since some fights still required you to jump (e.g., Thaddius), be sure to put the secondary binding for jump on a usable key.  I usually bind spacebar to spell cancel, keypad 0 to jump, and the left tick (`) to swap.  The mod allows you to swap the key bindings for jump and spell cancelling out of combat (one of the patches disabled changing key bindings in combat).  If you're in a situation that doesn't require rapid spell cancelling, you can swap your key bindings back so that spacebar is set to jump. A few notes:
1) I never updated the .toc, so you have to enable loading out of date addons.
2) I could never get the mod to correctly register the UPDATE_BINDINGS event correctly.  When you change the key bindings, you may have to hit the switch button twice to get the binding to propagate to the mod.
3) Once in a blue moon, the mod would lose its key bindings or start behaving strangely.  When that happens, go to the key bindings interface, unbind the keys, and then rebind the keys even though it looks like they're bound correctly.  I don't know if some other mod I'm using interferes with this one; I'll have to investigate this some day.

[Inori]

Here's a screenshot of raid windows arranged by class to facilitate triage.  I was using oRA2 at the time; still tweaking XPerl to look the same. img368.imageshack.us/img368/3623/wowscrnshot032607222816hp8.jpg Note that the raid bars for warriors and druids (the tanks) are closest to the group window.  This allows you to devote most of your focus to those at the top of triage.  It's kinda like driving a car, you scan most frequently ahead of you and you scan the periphery and instruments less frequently.  The DPS are laid to the right in order of survivability.  Mages were softest and were placed closest to the tanks (I guess that since all mages get iceblock now, I don't know if they should have lower priority).  Warlocks were next since they had higher stamina.  Rogues were deemed extremely survivable since they could vanish and evade if they got into trouble (now that they have cloak of shadows, even moreso).  Hunters were all the way on the right since they could feign death and since they were ranged, it would usually take a while for a melee mob to reach them giving you ample time to start prehealing once you saw the aggro indicator (or MT target target) switch.  For certain fights, you would move groups closer to the tank if you expected them to require more attention (e.g., rogues on a melee mob that cleaves). Healers were lined up on the bottom.  By grouping them together, you could scan which healers were going OOM and be prepared to heal to their group or tank more frequently (you'd have to memorize the group/tank assignments beforehand).

[Tsuni]

I healed as a Paly pre-BC from ZG up to AQ40, so I have a feel for the differences between the two. I'd say a few of the biggest changes post BC is def shamans, Circle of Healing, general raid size, Grid w/ range fading and the technicalities of the fights.

I remember splitting groups up with healers, and it was really useful cause rooms were big and you knew where at least 4 other people were in range of your heals. And with so many people needing heals, it was bad if groups were missed. Now with chain healing and circle of healing, its so easy to stabilize raid damage. One problem i had back pre-BC was finding people outside my group that were in range, but with grid w/ range fading, I don't even need to be in the group with the people i'm healing cause i know exactly who is in range. It turned from healing my group to healing my quadrant. Circle of healing is instant , scales well with healing, and isn't group specific, which makes it generally better than prayer of mending. For example, on Void Reaver, I was keeping up the melee group with CoH while still getting mana back from being in the priest/regen group. I'd say overall Post-BC allowed for a lot more flexibility.

For the most part, we haven't had many issues with people dieing from just not getting healed. Most deaths during trash were from CC issues and someone getitng one shotted, while most deaths during boss fights are usually from people getting destroyed from not moving when needed (Solarian bomb, getting whirlwinded, Spouted by lurker, etc.)

In summary, I have found post-BC to be a different beast. Personally, I guess i'm arguing for the fact that I like the whole priest regen group deal, and outside of maybe Void Reaver haven't seen much reason to split the healers among different groups as of yet.

[dudepal]

Yeah, it's really a lot different in BC.  I wouldn't put healers in other groups just for the purposes of assigning healers because I'd rather maintain the dps synergies.  A group with a hunter, feral druid and 3 rogues is going to be better than hunter, feral druid, 2 rogues and a healer.  You could just stick the healer in a different group and tell him to heal that other one if really necessary.  Prayer of Healing is still more mana efficient than CoH, but I've found regen to be much less of a problem than pre-BC, and CoH is overall more useful as you can cast it while moving on other groups, and you start topping people off right away.  It evens has a situationally longer range (40 yard cast + 18 yard effect so you could theoretically hit someone 58 yards away). On trash we've generally just had people heal whoever based on their class.  shammies chain heal the raid, priests CoH/PoM and flash heal where needed, druids hot up the tanks and so forth.  There hasn't been any trash yet where i run out of mana just spamming flash heal.  Like Tsuni said, generally people only die on trash if CC breaks or someone pulls aggro.  If something like that happens, no amount of healing is going to save the person typically. As far as tank healing goes, the amount of regen I have is pretty ridiculous.  Especially with the T5 2 piece bonus (+100 mana for every greater heal that tops the target off), I can pretty much spam rank 2 greater heal all day long.  So there isn't really a whole lot of benefit to cancelling heals.  Plus the added casts helps to keep the inspiration buff up. I think for the VR fight it doesn't make a lot of sense to assign healers to groups either, just because it's a lot easier to just move to the left or right and stay there when an orb comes, rather than move back and then move all the way forward again.  As a result, people would get split up pretty quickly.  And with druid hots and 2 priests casting CoH, the other healers basically only have to top off the tank every once and a while, or toss a renew or quick heal on anyone who accidentally gets orb.  And the people who get orbed are really low priority heals, just because hopefully they'll be more t really much to assign.   

[dudepal]

Ooops, something got funky at the end of the post there, I meant hopefully they'll be more watchful of the orbs because they had just got hit with one.

[Han]

Also with the advent of haste for healers, its hard to say if its better to stick healers with spriests and stack haste and not worry about their personal mp5 and such, thus enabling you to possibly bring 7 healers instead of 8, allowing one more dps spot, or to have the healers rely on their own regen and bring 8 and give the dps a spreist.  The sweet part about priests/druids is their ability to regen outside FSR and shamans get very little from going out of FSR.... So OOM = OOM for a while

[dudepal]

Oh, as a side note though, CoH didn't really become useful until SSC.  It was pretty much useless in kara, so until SSC a 23/38/0 spec is probably better.  And it still helps for one of the priests in the raid to be 23/38/0 just for the spirit buff which is nice. 

[WarmApplePie]

My biggest problem with healing in our raids was over heal and lack of assignments. Yes yes I know overheal means you care but if we have 40-60% overheal then drop a healer and pickup more DPS. Shazam!! I can replace my priest with my enchance shammy!! See you tonight

[dudepal]

It's realy not that simple.  Healing now pretty much means overheal.  Just the amounts of damage people take requires quick response from more than one person.  Like here's a WWS from a guild's BT run.  http://wowwebstats.com/qjjr61dxx3ekq  Almost all of the healers are in the 40-60% overheal category, except for the druids of course.   I just did a search for "Illidan" and picked that one because i recognized the guild name, but if you do a similar search you'll see simliar rates for other guilds. Like I said too, assignments aren't really necessary on the trash.  Why waste time assigning healers for every trash pull if it's just going to slow us down and gain us nothing?  If there're trash that needs assignments we can do that, but otherwise it's not necessary.

[Han]

I think its difficult for a new healer to come in to our core healing group and get a feel for it.  We have been healing together for a while, and so we have a good idea of which tanks need more heals than others, which dps don't move as quickly out of the BIG FLAMING PATCH ON THE FLOOR! etc   Also mostly, healing has just never really been a problem in terms of not killing a boss.... Its usually been a blown tanking assignment, some adds running loose, or just bad coordination on the whole.  I can't think of a single time where everything went fine but the healers couldn't keep up or went OOM.  Most of the DPS deaths are 1 or 2 shots.  Agreed @ overhealing probably being our biggest problem, and yeah I think a lot of farm encounters could be done with 6 healers and better coordination, but then again, I would much rather heal than DPS (and I think most of our healers feel the same way). 

[Inori]

dudepal wrote It's realy not that simple.  Healing now pretty much means overheal.  Just the amounts of damage people take requires quick response from more than one person.  Like here's a WWS from a guild's BT run.  http://wowwebstats.com/qjjr61dxx3ekq  Almost all of the healers are in the 40-60% overheal category, except for the druids of course.   I just did a search for "Illidan" and picked that one because i recognized the guild name, but if you do a similar search you'll see simliar rates for other guilds. Like I said too, assignments aren't really necessary on the trash.  Why waste time assigning healers for every trash pull if it's just going to slow us down and gain us nothing?  If there're trash that needs assignments we can do that, but otherwise it's not necessary.

It's not actually assigning healers for trash, but to arrange the raid such that there is no downtime while clearing trash -- tanks can just chain pull.  Of course, this is only necessary if you're trying to clear older content quickly so that you have more time to work on new content (e.g., clear all four wings of Naxx in two nights so that you have three nights to work on 4H and Sapphiron).  If you're stopping to resurrect and rebuff a casualty every pull, the extra DPS from having that fourth caster with the moonkin or fourth rogue with the feral druid is wasted.  Typically, healers would only drink for a few seconds between pulls as the tanks positioned for the next chain pull, but mana consumption back then was very efficient (~ 20% overheal).  Looking at the statements from others, it looks like mana conservation is a nonissue.

[Beiner]

I'm not healer, nor do I want to be one, so I won't speak on it on their behalf.  But from a raid perspective, the farther you go in TBC, the more DPS intensive the fights become and a certain level of DPS needs to be maintained in order to beat enrage timers, etc.  Therefore, groups are formed to maximize DPS output rather than maximize healing efforts.  Like Dudepal and others mentioned above, these fights aren't difficult to keep the raid up, but are more structured around keeping up DPS and making sure people are alert and watching their surroundings.  Unlike vanilla WOW, mana conservation is not much of an issue with the goal of keeping up the tanks.  Pre-BC, most of the fights were all about making sure the tank stays alive and outlasting and not going oom.  Not until later raids pre-bc did dps levels become even a slight issue, some fights in AQ40 and Naxx, and maybe poorly geared BWL raids.   TBC 25 mans are all about maintaining a high lvl of DPS and aggro control.    

[Inori]

The drawback to not setting up the raid in a manner conducive to triage is that it becomes a huge game of 'whack a mole' for healing.  This increases the chance that multiple healers will go after the same mole.  I suppose this is a non-issue if raid damage is so light and/or stamina is so high that not getting a heal in round 1 won't result in a casualty. Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 5   -2000     Healer       -2000 Healer         Healer     -4000   Healer         SPriest In the above situation, there's a good chance that all four healers will go after the -4000 person.  This will most likely result in two of them completely overhealing and still leaves two people without a heal until the second round of heals starts.  If the healers are spread out, everyone will get a round 1 heal since the healer in that group will give them priority. Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 5   -2000     Healer   -2000     Healer         Healer     -4000   Healer         SPriest In this case, a healer in group 2 would use their healing plan to guide how they react.  Depending on the situation, one may get a shield, the other a flash heal, and then the round 2 cross heals will top them off.  In other situations, the healer will heal just one of the them if the other is in less danger (e.g., rogue evasion). Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 5   -2000     Healer   -2000     Healer   -4000     Healer         Healer         SPriest In this situation, a prayer heal in group 2 would be in order. Note that while it may be impossible to heal through a non-tank having aggro, it may be enough to buy time for a tank to take back aggro or for the raid to kill the mob (if the mob is close to death).  If no one is dying, then the raid can drink up for a few seconds (shouldn't be a problem if you grabbed 80 drinks from the refreshment table; boy I wish we had those back in the day) while the tanks set up for the next pull and chain pull.