Not that long ago as part of a large amount of frustation on my part, I vented on what I viewed as a huge issue with healing in Wrath. Now… I was flipping through some incoming traffic and came across this very interesting article over at Procrastination Amplification by Scrusi. They brought up a very interesting point.
In my original article, I felt that a great deal of the reason that healing had burned so many healers out was the sheer difficulty. Scrusi contends that difficult encounters would wake healers up and actually there’s a great deal of boredom involved with healing. Ok… I’m 3 weeks into my horde transformation. Lets see what I’ve learned.
Healer Quality
In my previous guild, we were very much what I’d call finesse players. We had a handful of players that were really into maximizing their characters. These were the people pushing the upper limits of their class learning to average about 5k DPS on a 10 man. These same people pushed the tanks to really stretch their abilities.
Otherwise we had a lot of 2.5-3k DPS style people. That’s respectable. Its not a slouch, but given their gear levels, its entirely possible to do considerably more damage than that. But we tuned our encounters to adjust for how our people played.
For an example…. on the Iron Council fight, we made sure to interrupt Stormcaller Brundir to pull him all the way to the back. That meant that his chain lightnings weren’t hitting the raid and only the tank and his healer had to eat any of that damage. It simplifies the job of the healers up front. Its more of a finesse technique.
Enter my new guild. The first time I ever got to see them do Iron Council I tried to pull the same technique we always did. I started moving Stormcaller Brundir toward the back and they all stared at me like I was on crack. The healers said, “Look its a waste of time, we’ll just heal through the damage”.
Ok wait… you want to run that by me again? My last healers bitched and moaned constantly about how the chain lightning damage just overwhelmed them and they ran out of mana. You’re just going to heal through the damage? Wow…… And we are talking about 2 pally healers and a druid healer or shaman healer. Not an extremely “raid healer” friendly setup.
Thinking back, what it sounds like we ran into was an issue of healer quality. In fact, we had a couple of healers who stopped playing due to well… in retrospect… boredom. Hmmm maybe Scrusi is on to something here.
DPS to Healer?
We have a healer in my new guild who actually went from being a ret pally capable of 6k DPS to being the guild’s main healer. For her, she described it as a nice break. With DPS, she was constantly watching her rotation and trying to figure out how to push the limits. With healing, it was a nice mental break.
She’s trying to plan a wedding for next year, so it was a nice easy way to spend her evening just playing whack a mole in reverse.
Hmmm point two for boredom. Ok… maybe I missed the mark a bit here.
Examining my own level of boredom….
I have done quite a bit of healing this expansion. We were short on healers and honestly I needed to fill in on the Alliance side off and on. What I found was really a lot of boredom.
Almost inevitably I ended up being the raid healer. We had a pally and a shaman (yeah I know shaman can raid heal too, but I wasn’t in charge of healing assignments). The fights I found most interesting? XT-002, Iron Council, Ignis, Hodir, Mimiron
Why? Because it kept me moving the entire time. I’d end the fight sitting there almost panting from working so hard. Constant raid damage. Always having to make decisions on who lived and who died. Basically, you’re playing triage trying to keep people alive and ensure that your entire raid doesn’t just keel over.
Of course for the counter point, the ones I found most boring were ones like…
Kologarn… extremely predictable pattern
Auryaya … zzzzzzzzzzzzz
Razorscale
Thorim
Freya
Ok… I have to admit, maybe the problem with healers is a lack of choices. Really lets look at what I’m doing when I’m healing as a druid.
Tank healing:
Lifebloom, Rejuv, Regrowth.. Nourish with the occassional Swiftmend
Raid healing:
Rejuv, Swiftment, Wildgrowth, Nourish
Really its pretty mindless. Tank healing is a bit more interesting, but its all about pattern and timing.
Ok does that mean that if you find healing challenging that you suck? No… it probably means your inexperienced. Or it might mean your doing something wrong. Or it might mean your raid can’t figure out how NOT to stand in bad stuff. Or it might mean your tanks just aren’t that good or your backup healers aren’t that good.
I guess what I’d like to see then is some different dynamics thrown into fights. Or give healers something more interesting to do than just making them spam the same button over and over.
Tags: Raid Healing
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Easiest way to turn a boring healing fight into a more exciting (albeit challenging) fight is to reduce the number of healers for that fight.
As an example, two healers on Anub is quite a bit more challenging and definitely made me feel like I accomplished something.
Spot-on Starman. Thanks for the link & good luck with your new guild. Sounds like a sensible bunch of people
Yeah it sounds like what you’re calling a finesse strategy is more like trying to smokescreen the raid’s weaknesses. Setting things up to compensate for the healers inexperience, which makes sense if that’s your weak point, but it sounds like your healers started improving and the strategies didn’t change… so then they started getting bored.
That’s one thing that’s probably the hardest to manage leading raids, knowing what individuals are thinking about their role in raids. Eventually most people are going to want more to do or more responsibilities in raids to feel like they contributed something once they get comfortable. Once people reach that comfort level I guess sometimes it best to throw a little more at them. Not necessarily do a boss in a different way just to make it more difficult but to do it more efficiently, faster.
Heh, toward the end of the retirement of the tree I was just rolling rejuv. For a challenge I would try and let people get low and time lifebloom procs to bring them back up.
I think the #1 reason I retired the healer is I didn’t care if certain people died. Why save a 1.5k dps, why even care if they live, at that point you have to way their health bar against the healers mana pool. Nobody should have that much power in the game.
I love the lock, there are so many things I can do to save myself in a run WHILE dps’ing. I think the salvation to healing is giving dps classes more ways to save their own bacon, then giving healing classes a way to dps maybe? just throwing stones into the wind here.
Yeah, I’ve tried to think of ways healing could be more fun and thought maybe letting them dps part of the time might be the answer, but I’m not sure how that should work. Would damage being smoother and less spiky allowing for lulls during the fight that didn’t need much healing help out? where healers could stop healing for a few seconds and change gears to start casting spells at the boss, not sure if that would be more fun or not.
I was wondering about something like a buff that a healer could put on their group, which would slightly amplify the damage output of a player whenever their health was at max and have this increase in damage count as the healers damage to the boss. That would give a raid healer a little more to do in keeping the raid topped off, plus the work a healer did towards this would translate to the dps meters.