How not to heal a Main Tank

Where said:
I thought the protip was to downrank, seems most of the good healers do it, although when you get up in grows on Gruul you probably need full rank, but if you use full rank the whole fight you will probably be oom by the time you need the extra big heals?
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I thought the protip was to downrank, seems most of the good healers do it.
Answer: And where are they on the meters? Yeah...
Answer #2: Read the Patch notes for +healing changes like 7-8 patches ago. ==> Check out this discussion thread. http://wow.incgamers.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-379113.html
Any Bit of +healing bonus counts.
Read the whole thread and posts btw.

but if you use full rank the whole fight you will probably be oom by the time you need the extra big heals?
Answer: Time your pots.
 
Given this scenerio:

Healer A, B and C have to heal Tank A
Healer D has to solo heal Tank B

5 minutes into the fight, Tank A dies (and dies 4 out of 5 attempts) but healer A, B and C is number 1,2 and 3 on the healing charts and Tank B hasn't died (historically dies once in ten fights, is healed by the same person everytime) but healer D is on the bottom of the healing done list and uses down ranked heals.

Who is(are) the better healer(s)?

My point is, I think the best judge of ones healing ability is by determining who's alive and who's not. Gruul is a stupid fight, the ground slam \ shatter adds an elements of total randomness. I've seen it where 15 people bounce into the middle ontop of the tank. Unless we are the borg, you can't get 15 people seperate themselves going of random directions fast enough. I've seen people get frozen in mid air, go figure.
 
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I think that (hooray) class differentiation has changed enough that both Where and Yokie are correct here. Certainly pre-2.0 (or 1.9 or whenever it was), there was a dominant strategy to use downranking. The change made it less dominant, but especially for long fights I'm not sure if it can be categorically stated that there isn't some downranked version that is over time more mana efficient.

My understanding of healers is this (ignoring "group heal" spells that aren't really relevant to MT healing)
1) Pallies have a short, cheap small heal (Flash of Light) vs. a long, costly, big heal (Holy Light)
2) Druids (Tree of Life) have an moderate, instant pure HoT (Rejuv), a short, costly hybrid HoT (Regrowth .. instant cast then a small HoT), and a unique HoT (Lifebloom) that is a very small HoT with a "bloom" at the end (but the "right" way to use the spell in raids is to build up a stack of 3 and sustain it, because it gives a sustained stream of healing for low mana)
3) Druids (Dreamstate) have a costly, big slow heal (Healing Touch) plus the HoT options. You don't see dreamstate druids in raids much b/c without spell haste gear, Healing Touch is just too slow.
5) Shammies have a small, cheap HoT (Totem), a medium heal and a big heal.
6) Priests have a mix of the big/small heals like pallies, plus HoT options plus stuff like PoM that I don't really know how it works.

Anyhow, healing has become more than just spam "fast small cheap heals" vs "big slow costly heals." Worry less about general rules across all healers, and know how to best heal with your class, given the role you've been assigned for a given boss fight. I know that for me, as a resto druid, it's not about "big vs. small" heals, it about keeping a steady stream of HoTs up on the MT. In theory I can achieve
1) 3-stack of Lifebloom, trinketed up, fully buffed and with ToL bonus: 800-1000 heal tick per second, at cost of only 220 mana every 8 seconds.
2) Rejuvenation: ticks about 500 every 3 seconds, at cost of 415 mana every 12 seconds
3) Regrowth: 3k heal plus ticks of 300 every 3 seconds, at cost of 880 mana every 21 seconds

Now I should be able to keep all of those up on a single target indefinitely. In an average 10-second period, that would be:
1) 10 x 900 = 9000 healing from Lifebloom
2) 3 x 500 = 1500 healing from Rejuv
3) 3 x 300 = 900 healing from Regrow (with an additional 3000 every other 10-second period)

So that's roughly 12-15K healing from just me every 10 seconds ... and because it's HoTs, it's largely independent of silences. That would have healing Sandric for half the damage he took during the 10 seconds of Gruul death he experienced. Instead, however, I wasn't healing him, I just had a 2-stack of Lifebloom up for 467 every second so I did more like 4500 healing, about 1/3 of potential.

And given silences, shatters, and cave-ins, I'll probably never sustain 12-15K healing per 10 seconds indefinitely. But Avesther's post earlier nails it -- what we need is some more strategic thinking in our healing assignments. If I'm focusing on just MT healing, I should be able to at least get 2/3 of that rate up (say, 9K healing per 10 seconds). If we have 3-4 healers doing that (achieving whatever the best way for their class is to achieve it), that's 27000-36000 healing per 10 seconds. That should keep any MT tank long enough for the DPS to do their job, even with cave-ins, silences, shatters, overhealing, lag, and whatever. But when those four healers are not focused, we can have the kind of gaps that killed Sandman that other night.

It's just like in BGs ... AC can have the top 3 damage and the top 3 healers, but lose horribly if all they're doing is fighting in the middle and letting the horde cap towers and flags. If we have healers each doing their own thing, the main goal ... keepign the MT up ... gets lost. With better healing coordination, we should be able to do much, much better.
 
Gods_Peon said:
Who is(are) the better healer(s)?

My point is, I think the best judge of ones healing ability is by determining who's alive and who's not. Gruul is a stupid fight, the ground slam \ shatter adds an elements of total randomness. I've seen it where 15 people bounce into the middle ontop of the tank. Unless we are the borg, you can't get 15 people seperate themselves going of random directions fast enough. I've seen people get frozen in mid air, go figure.
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True 110%.
 
Aves said hes the king of rank 1 gheal spamming, you said never downheal in a raid, aves said he keeps his target alive most of the time and you said agree 110% so which is it? you agree with aves downrank gheal spamming or you say never down rank if you wanna top the charts? full rank gheal spam will get you to the top of the charts, both gross heal and overheal:p Until its needed that is, the end of gruul you need a lot more than 2600 heals as your "big heal" like sandric showed but to say "NEVER" downrank in a raid is silly, do you let the DPS die or waste a 6k heal when they need a 2k topoff to avoid a fluke death?
 
I'm agree with Gilga. Communication seems to be the key for efficiency too, we used to have a separate channel in my old guild that was for spamming healing messages (e.g., redheal) so that whenever a spell is cast it would shoot it to a channel which would be good to know when other people are casting or not casting. Also I have another mod that shows this in a bar for a target(can't remember what its called right now).

The channel would be awesome though because we can modify our casting based on incoming heals to prevent oom.

Yokie is right though about pots. Take them when you are down 3000 instead of almost OOM and then again when the timer is up and again. Good stuff.
 
Where said:
Aves said hes the king of rank 1 gheal spamming, you said never downheal in a raid, aves said he keeps his target alive most of the time and you said agree 110% so which is it? you agree with aves downrank gheal spamming or you say never down rank if you wanna top the charts? full rank gheal spam will get you to the top of the charts, both gross heal and overheal:p Until its needed that is, the end of gruul you need a lot more than 2600 heals as your "big heal" like sandric showed but to say "NEVER" downrank in a raid is silly, do you let the DPS die or waste a 6k heal when they need a 2k topoff to avoid a fluke death?
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agreeing with aves on whos alive and whos dead. people need to pay attention, where. btw there is such thing as lessers and greaters for spell healing types. downranking isn't worth it.
Then i guess i'm also wrong for being #1 in the meters. k thx.
 
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Thats a good read and some of the linked articles are great resources too. No need to reinvent the wheel.
 
Plankeye said:
Some good discussion going on. I think I am agreeing with Ave on healing priorities. We do it for Mulgar why don't we do it for Gruul. There was an interesting read on WoWInsider on the topic of healing assignments too:

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/01/01/raid-rx-healing-assignments/
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Aves isn't saying anything new though. The priorities on who to heal should already be known though. MT->OT->Melee DPS->Your Group->Yourself. Any ranged should be able to bandage/pot "if" they can. If its on cooldown and you're about to die i think the healer should be able to notice that...lol.
Honestly also if you dont see yourself getting hit/damaged by a rock slide from Grulls....then i honestly wonder how you'll see a big ball chucked at you from Void Reaver. (because we had the same arguement there). At that point we might as well kiss SSC/TK goodbye.
For Grull's crazy throw where he throws everyone just go away from the middle and just dance around in the outer-circle or the outer-wall. hopefully everyone is able to see if they are direct line of sight walking near players or near players with Deadly Boss Mods.


I mentioned it to Mordos that the Melee DPS should stack on the rear end of him and move as the MT/OT move Grull while they are at his face. You can be anywhere around the outer boundary of the light brown circle the floor where grulls is tanked and still be able to heal any MT/OT/Melee DPS. That idea though was thrown somewhere in the trash >.>.



Can't See Dmg?
->Scrolling Combat Text (Ace)
Can't See who's in range for a raid / party heal?
->Grid (Ace)
Want to stalk cooldowns on players [heroism, pw:s, nature swift, battle rez etc] and/or see if Last Stand/Shield wall was popped by a tank...maybe you cant hear it on vent? Hey its also good for PVP.
->NECB aka Natur Enemy Cast Bar (Curse.com)
 
There was always alot of communication in MC, especially when learning a fight. And we always assigned somebody to make specific calls. Remember Beriale calling out for the tank to move their add to the kill box during the sulfuron fight? And with every add, he would remind people not to attack it on its way back. We also assigned a healer to each tank. We assigned pullers for each add. Same with domo, we called everything, but only certain people called it out. Vent was always clear for the leaders to give instruction, give updates or to change a strat mid fight.

I really don't mind spending an extra 5 to 10 minutes setting up a fight. We don't have to buff until ready to pull. I know HK for awhile, did a ready check to iniitiate pally buffs, but then, pally buffs were only 5 minutes long. I think we could spend a few minutes longer setting up the fight, do a ready check to for : Do you understand, if all yes, start buffing and consumable buffs. Do another ready cheque 60 seconds later for a go. Or Class leaders can initiate the ready to go command to the raid leader because they can use class channel to clarify duties.
 
Gods_Peon said:
There was always alot of communication in MC, especially when learning a fight. And we always assigned somebody to make specific calls. Remember Beriale calling out for the tank to move their add to the kill box during the sulfuron fight? And with every add, he would remind people not to attack it on its way back. We also assigned a healer to each tank. We assigned pullers for each add. Same with domo, we called everything, but only certain people called it out. Vent was always clear for the leaders to give instruction, give updates or to change a strat mid fight.

I really don't mind spending an extra 5 to 10 minutes setting up a fight. We don't have to buff until ready to pull. I know HK for awhile, did a ready check to iniitiate pally buffs, but then, pally buffs were only 5 minutes long. I think we could spend a few minutes longer setting up the fight, do a ready check to for : Do you understand, if all yes, start buffing and consumable buffs. Do another ready cheque 60 seconds later for a go. Or Class leaders can initiate the ready to go command to the raid leader because they can use class channel to clarify duties.
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:) yup
 
When Odd was healing a Prince fight once with Miri, I asked him if I could wait to start healing until phase 2 and 3, because I'd go oom too fast trying to top the tank off in phase 1. The fight went fine, relying on his HoTs to keep the tank up during phase 1, and my Gheals kept him up during the rest of the fight.

If you are having mana problems, stagger your healers so not everyone is going full throttle at once (and so that not everyone goes oom at once).
 
worst come to worst use Bandage heal :)

One thing for sure is that pallies should not be going OOM in any(almost) fights
 
Yokie said:
ProTip: Never downrank in a raid.
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I would'nt say that. When I was healing (and Aves said it and Where repeated it) he told me to downrank, as did Miriallia, and he was a fantastic healer.

If you have the Mana-fortitude to spam your most mana inefficient heals, then more power to you. But, if you don't, you should downrank, no questions.

Imo meters don't matter, only whats in your mana pool as far as healers go.
 
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Odale said:
I still wanna know why Sandric only had one healer on him, and a HoT on him.

No one has offered any explanations...
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I think there's a difference between "only one healer on Sandric" and "only one healer's heals hitting him during a 10-second span." We do healing assignments for HKM. We don't for Gruul. We have healers staggered throughout the rooms in groups (mostly) and so there's an implied group healing responsibility, but frankly it's a free for all. And Sandric dying as was one of those "perfect storm" missteps when despite all the healers knowing that the MT was the priority, we had ten seconds when 5-6 healers were doing something else.

What exactly happened, I don't know. Maybe one or more healers were down from a prior shatter (in general, I felt like I was having more trouble having fewer than 2-3 folks in my shatter range all night, maybe that was something ... we did have a number of Gruul newbs who just hadn't had the practice time). Maybe there was a silence for part of the time. Maybe there was pre-shatter running around for part of the time. Maybe Goodwone (OT) had just lost a lot of health and several healers were tossing her big heals. Maybe a healers or two had a lag spike. Nothing was obvious at the time ... I asked Sandric right after the wipe whether he'd sucked in sequential crits or whether we healers had let him down, and he said the latter. I don't think we had anything particularly weird going on or that we had any healers off in the corner mining khorium or anything. I would guess that the HoT ticks were my Lifebloom since they're every second, so I neglected Rejuv and was probably spot-healing the raid or running around or something. But overall, we were just disorganized.

Have any of you done that amusement park thing where the whole room of 50 people has a joystick, and you're supposed to steer "the spaceship" together ... but invariably it crashes in like 2 seconds because people's actions aren't coordinated. That's what we had.

If we assign 3-4 healers to JUST heal the MT, 1-2 healers to JUST heal the OT, and 1-2 healers to JUST heal the raid ... we should be fine. When we don't do that, it depends on individual judgment and luck ... and sometimes it works out but often (like last Friday) it doesn't. As a group, we the healers didn't do our organization homework and the raid then paid the price. Our mistake ... I strongly suspect we'll do better next time.
 
Odale said:
I would'nt say that. When I was healing (and Aves said it and Where repeated it) he told me to downrank, as did Miriallia, and he was a fantastic healer.

If you have the Mana-fortitude to spam your most mana inefficient heals, then more power to you. But, if you don't, you should downrank, no questions.

Imo meters don't matter, only whats in your mana pool as far as healers go.
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Spamming doesn't put you on the top of the meters because you're "inefficient". Obviously there is a reason why it says "HEALING DONE" LoL wow :p

Pot up if you have mana issues and if not...ask one of our lovely druids for an innervate. =)

Then again if that doesn't help then maybe you should reconsider the gear you are entering Gruul's with and any higher raids.

If you want to downrank...lol continue doing whatever you want.
 
I didn't literally mean spam, just cast your biggest heal over and over to get the job done, without trying to conserve mana.

No need to do this mess. LoL wow =P

The rest makes sense and I agree with it.
 
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