Forged Alliance

 

 

Inori wrote 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.

  In example one you say that all four healers would go after the -4000 person which to some extent is true, but most of us use the addon Grid for healing and it lights up when that -4000 person is getting healed by someone else in the raid at which point I would heal a -2000 person (which probably STILL wouldn't land before someone else healed him lol, thankyou Australian latency) In example two you're talking as if a healer in group 2 would have to decide which to bubble and save later and which to heal and save now, but really they'd both be healed within seconds of being damaged, I've never seen someone in a group have to wait for Bill to get healed before Fred did, unless all the healers were dead and there was only one left standing (at which point you're on your own suckers, the tank gets all the heals ) In example 3 you're saying that a prayer heal would be neccesary but by the time I cast that sucker my whole group has been healed by the rest of the raid and I'm just making pretty sparklies with my spells ....  seriously, they ARE that quick. Yes we have people who die all the time *coughFargolcough* and NOTHING you do can keep HIM up But it doesn't stop Mason from pulling, we just rezz the lil warlock and rebuff him as we're going along, hopefully one day he'll learn NOT to take the fat man's candy, but until then .... sucks to be his repair bill When the moment comes to be serious and pay attention though, our raiders are getting much better at turning the TV off and actually paying attention to what they're doing lol, and if they DO die, it's generally bad luck, in which case nothing would have saved them, or not paying attention, in which case  they deserve to die, and will get growled at by *Those Who Growl* and will pay more attention next time (hopefully) I can't remember the last time someone died and I thought "bugger, should have healed him but I thought Dudepal/Killean etc. was going to", I spam those heals, constantly, if the little red agro light flashes on Grid I start healing before people even get hit, but if they die, then they die, rezz and carry on.   wow ... I just went on and on ....  

Thanks for starting this good discussion, Inori.  Also, you should be able to edit your posts now...lemme know if you cannot.  And nicely put Dee!  I'm writing my own novel about this here... Just wanted to add my resto druid input to this conversation.  I've posted on the druid thread about this, but for resto druid healing the strength is preemptive healing on multiple tanks while reactive healing to raid dmg.  Copied straight from some forum post: "Preemptive HOT Healing on multiple targets while Reactive Raid Healing with direct heals - The idea of this style of healing is to maintain three stacks of Lifebloom on two or more tanks while also throwing out Rejuvenation+Swiftmend or Regrowth on raid targets in need of small healing. " So I'm typically in the tanks group especially as I try to stack spirit for the +heal buff (used to be with healers pre-bc before they nerfed tree buff....just so everybody knows the only group that gets the +heal buff and receives more healing is the group I'm in...it used to be the healers in the tree group got +heal to heals they casted).  So I see my job as helping to keep the tanks up by putting as many hots as needed on the tanks at all times they are taking damage, which also means they will be in range of the tree buff.  I can do this fairly easily up to 3, and even 4...although 4 really starts to pick up my threat.  Typically it's just one or two tanks which leaves my plenty of time to help raid heal.  If I have time outside the tank rotation I will lifebloom or rejuv any target taking dmg.  Grid will show me other incoming heals on the target, but I typically don't look at it unless we are stretched thin.  I often put a lifebloom or rejuv on raid targets that take damage.  Often the target will be back to 100% before a lifebloom blooms, but it's not a big deal as it's cheap, and again, OOM hasn't been a problem.  If that target doesn't get a heal, the HOT will keep on ticking and possibly will heal the raid target completely.  Keeping tanks up hasn't been our problem in 25 mans.  When we first tried HKM it was hard, and now in Mount Hyjal during the adds it was difficult...that's a tribute to our uber tanks that they've been able to mitigate spike damage so well from Gruul's to Hyjal.  When we do see spike damage during a particular phase of the fight, I need to be aware of when it's going to happen so I can plan accordingly: 1) Preemptive: trinket and re-apply all hots - my trinkets put me up to around +2600 healing for 20 secs (before they nerfed trinketed lifebloom, that would've meant a +2600 healing stack the entire fight!  craziness...with the nerf - the trinket only adds to the +heal during the time of the trinket..it's not a big deal to let lifeblooms bloom and then reapply the stack.).  So if I have 3 lifeblooms already going, I just trinket and reapply the third stack again. 2) Preemptive:  I should have a regrowth or rejuv on a tank at all times, so I can swiftmend if needed...I do this liberally, it's not mana efficient, but neither are dead tanks...again oom is not an issue yet. 3) Reactive: Cast that swiftmend, make sure it's not on cooldown, and make sure the intial spell was previously cast in step 2. 3) Reactive: Natures Swiftness - insta cast regrowth in tree, healing touch in caster 4) Preemptive/Reactive: spam regrowth continuously while keeping up hots - this is not mana efficient, it's just about canceling when not needed, and letting the real ones land while keeping up the hot rotation. 5) Reactive: leaving tree form and spamming healing touch - the good old pre-bc spam (I didn't  heal much before tree form was introduced so I don't know a lot about this).  I don't like to leave tree form and lose the mana efficiency from the form.  It's an option we can keep open however when keeping up tanks if needed.  Not typically done, would require me to re-talent for these situaitions.  But something we could look into more if we have problems keeping our tanks up. 6) Preemptive Raid Healing: just wanted to throw this in for other resto druids.  For example on hex lord when you know you're about to get a lot of raid damage, I'll start rolling lifeblooms on the non-tank raid targets before the raid damage occurs, worked great. When a tank dies when everything else in the fight has gone well I ask myself 'did I have all my hots applied?, was it a reaction issue and did I not get an insta-heal in between 2 crushing blows for example?, did I trinket?  was I spamming regrowth as fast as possible on the tank instead of raid healing?  Was it a positioning issue and was I out of position or can I find a spot where I can be close to more tanks?  So those are the changes I look at in between attempts when a tank dies, and will adjust accordingly. So that's more of a background of how I approach the fight.  As to your original question I see my job as primarily tank healing with hots and spot-healing the ENTIRE raid.  A lot of fights that are intense I won't get outside the 5 second rule once during a fight and may end up casting a spell every 1.4x seconds (haste) an entire fight.  It's the lifebloom/tree efficiency that allows this.  I could add priority to spot heal certain groups before others if other healers found that useful.  But it seems our progression is going very well and any coordination issues we've had are overall fight mechanics rather than stretching our healing efficiency at this point.  And we definitely do have healing assignments on tanks when necessary, make sure to join the fahealer chat channel during raids if you heal.  And we also have group assignments, like Lurker that are based on range rather than party make up.  For my one spell that only heals my party: Tranquility, it's on a 10-min timer and has horrible mana efficiency, I only use in emergencies and rarely. Also, one final note for tanks.  Before hard pulls I'm trying to get better at timing hots on the tanks before the pull.  You should have 3 lifeblooms, 1 regrowth, and 1 rejuv before you pull.  I have 6 seconds on lifebloom, which means I will cast the third stack, you will see the timer on the hot, and in a perfect world within that 6 seconds you have done one thing that gives you threat which allows me to re-cast within that 6 seconds to keep the lifebloom stack up without pulling aggro.  Not a huge deal, and not something right now that requires coordination on timing often, but just something I think we can get used to going forward.  

I agree with what you're saying Inori that having specific healers assigned for every task would be ideal, but it's just not necessary in practice.  Here's what I think would happen in the 3 situations 1:  3 people cast a flash heal on the -4000 person, they get healed to full(and overhealed by 3000-4000 or so).  The others were slower and saw that there were lots of heals coming in and switched targets.  The shammies casted chain heal ad probably overhealed the -4000 guy, but the two -2000s get topped off.  A bit of mana is wasted but the healing is all done pretty quick 2.  Pretty much the same as 2, except shammies would possibly target the -2000s since they're more likely to be grouped up. 3.  CoH priests would heal the group up really quick Now while #1 may not be ideal, 2 and 3 work out pretty well.  And typically #1 would work better than I stated snce i think the healers have got a feel for each other's healing style by now and kind of know what the others will do in a given situation. The big thing is that mana conservation isn't an issue on trash, and trash deaths aren't usually an issue and a most of the time there's nothing that a healer could have done (like someone standing too far from the dragonhawks in TK).  Fully raid buffed I typically have something like 800/380 regen, + the shadow priest which is another +200 and the shammy which is another decent amount.  On bosses we do things similiar to what you're suggesting though, and then it's just easiest for the shammies to chain heal, and get support from single target healers who aren't assigned to the boss on people with aggro or who are particularily low.  Or else maybe the raid is spread out and you just heal whoever is in your quadrant (which is easy to see from the range indicators on grid).  Now with that said, if healing does become an issue on trash, we'll do something like you're saying, but more along the lines of assigning healers to specific people rather than putting healers in those groups.  If people need to be in a specific group to know who they're supposed to heal, well, something is wrong.

Thanks guys.  This is very insightful and I'll try to adapt my playstyle to work better in the new world order.  Bear with me though, it'll take a while to retrain myself.  I can see Jeff rolling his eyes now as that Gheal starts to cast.  Hahaha. -HP

All I ever did on Saraphin was flash heal the raid..  It just seemed to be my role..  I'd look at WWS and think I did crappy because I didn't heal as much as Dude, but I never was going too becuase I didn't have CoH. My role was raid healing, I just usually flash healed everyone up, just to be smug and heal faster. Gheal is more efficient, but like the others have said, mana is not a problem anymore. We have a lot of well geared and skilled/quick healers. If DPS died, it's usually their fault... He'll even when the tank dies it's because the dps was attacking from the front and got parried.. Yeah that's it!!! blame it all on the DPS!!