With the 3.3 patch came Icecrown Citadel, and among other neat stuff, weekly raid quest. To be honest, even without it, PUGS were common on the server i play on, but with ICC and new weekly raid quest, there is always some activity on LFG and trade channels, day or night.
Pugging raids, and everything else that comes with it, is a never ending story. This time, i had a friend of mine complaining about healing in a certain pug she was in… it seemed to me that they had a problem with healing assignments, among other things.
Well, i am a long time healer, and to be honest, healing assignments are not necessary, especially when healers played together for some time. BUT, on the other hand, making assignments does help, especially if you’re about to venture in to newest content with 24 other brave souls from the trade channel.
After some search, i bumped in to this forum post on wow-europe forums, that covers basics when it comes to making healing assignments. Aside from the original post, whole topic is a good read.
Original post is written by Shiria, of Lightbringer EU.
I wrote this text originally for my guild. We’re into sharing responsibilities during raids and having many different people capable of doing a job in a raid. I wrote it primarily for people who has never set a healing assignment properly or never really thought about it.
While setting assignments may not be necessary in 10-mans it is a rather vital part in 25-man raids until your healers has reached such familiarity with eachother that they’re working as a proper team. That however is in my opinion a very rare thing.
Healing Leader!
- Leading the healers is about making assignments for each fight. The healers need to trust you to make those assignments properly. If they don’t then they will invariably start to do things they’re not supposed to.
- A certain level of disobedience to the assignments is a good thing from a healer, but it must be limited to helping out where someone is struggling with his assignment or adjusting in case a healer has died.
As soon as that disobedience becomes heal-sniping or moving off-track, so much that they’re not keeping their own assignment alive, you need to put your foot down.
Knowledge
What should you know in order to lead the healers and make assignments for bossfights?
1. Fight knowledge.
Just like a raid-leader you must know the fights very well. Though you need to know the basic tactical choices and positioning you will need to focus more on the damage being thrown out. When, where, how and how much?
Most boss guides are good at explaining tactics and abilities, but pretty much all of them are bad at showing the damage levels. That’s something that experience will teach you.
2. Healing class differences.
If you want to be good, you need to have a good understanding about each healing-class. What are each class strengths and weaknesses? This is not limited to healing-spells but also includes mana-returns, damage-reducing abilities, dispell-abilities, movement-limitations etc.
I will go over the basics of each class later in the text.
3. Individualism in a team.
More than for any other roll, healers need to work as a team. That means like in any team, you need to know the abilities of each healer. We are not all equally skilled and equally capable of doing each individual assignment. You need to know, what you can trust each healer with, taking into account gear, skill, attitude and if they’re having a bad/good day. How to evaluate this is something which will improve immensely with experience.
4. What happened?
We invariably wipe now and then. As healing leader, you need to get a feel for why. You need to be able to tell if it was lack of healing-power, RNG you can’t ward against or if it was an error made, either in tactic, by the tank, a healer or dps. You can safeguard in part against RNG, but not against human or tactical error. However if it was a lack in healing-power then either the tactic needs to change, or the healing assignments has to. To do this you need good communication with the tanks. An add-on where you can see the reason for deaths, damage-taken and what the source was will help with this. Many people use Recount. Personally I use Skada (Takes less memory, more pertinent and accurate data, in my opinion).
5. Healing-meters!
First of all… the standard healing-meter doesn’t mean a thing. It is an easy trap to be fooled and think it does. It is however not useless either, you just need to look deeper. Proper evaluation of healing is something which is best done from combat log-parses after the raid (which will also help you get a feel for point three above). Between attempts, having a look at activity-levels (Class adjusted healing+overhealing is the most telling, but not completely honest), who healed whom, who dispelled, who cast absorbs and on whom, which spells were used and also who died when and why. Which assignment each healer had must of course be taken into account when looking at this.
This information is not something you really need to know, but knowing will help you to evaluate the teams’ current performance and thus help with any changes that need to happen.
Setting the assignment
The difficulty in healing assignment is realizing who needs healing, when and how many healers are required for it.
Using an add-on can help make the assignment logistics easier to do and easier to follow, but everyone has different preferences. As long as it’s easy to follow the assignment, any solution is ok.
There are several healing-assignment add-ons but personally I’m using Gth (Getting things healed) but there are several other good ones available.
There are several “points of interest” that need healer assignment, but they can usually be sorted into the following:
1. Main Tank or Off-Tank
2. Multiple Tanks
3. Group Healing
4. Raid Healing with positioning
5. Raid Healing without positioning
6. Specific damage-dealing ability that may need dedicated healers. (ex. Ignis Slagpot, Kologarn Grip-victims, Mimiron Napalm Shell etc.)
7. Dispell assignment (if necessary)
8. Damage-reducing cooldown rotation (in coordination with raid-leader and non-healers.)
You will not assign all of these on every fight. This depends on the tactic and damage dealt.
Plenty of fights have several phases, where the damage, tactic and positioning changes. If that is the case then you will need to assign healing for each phase.
How do you then set up the assignments?
With experience it will become easier to do, but you can follow a basic system to start with.
- Depending on the tactic chosen you need to decide which of the above mentioned “targets” that need assignment (for each phase). This is as a minimum Main Tank and Raid Healing (with one or two gimmick-exceptions such as Patchwerk).
- Look at the damage levels you expect on each of your “targets” and decide approximately how many healers you need for each of them. If you find that only a partial healer is needed then either don’t define that “target” or put healers on multiple assignments.
- Make adjustments to your estimated healing-requirement based how the damage is dealt. Is it spiky, intermittent or constant, or a combination? Spiky damage requires more healers than steady for instance.
- Now assign your healers according to class-stereotypes.
- Make adjustments on the assignment according to each healer’s individual qualities and weaknesses. You need to make sure all the assignments can be reliably handled. This will often mean that healers get an assignment that is good for the fight and healing-team performance, but not ideal for each individual. That is more important than min-maxing output.
- If your current healers are already highly skilled and dependable, consider switching them to an assignment they normally do not get. It will give them a new challange to help them improve even more and it will keep them from being bored and loose focus. A healer that has lost focus is the first healer to be replaced.
You will get comments about your assignments. Some may complain that they don’t get to do the assignment that is most flattering to them. In the end it comes down to the fact that you have 2-8 healers to keep 25 people alive. You need to look at it as a team effort and you can’t please everyone every time.
When you wipe, look at the reason for it.
Was it a healing-power issue on one or more of the “targets” then re-evaluate the healing by going over step one through five again.
Human error? No change to healing will fix that.
RNG? See if there is something possible to do to overcome the added difficulties with RNG. No, then keep things as they were. Yes, then you might change things but take extra care not to overcompensate.
Tactical error? Minor tactic changes, just keep the assignment. Major changes, revise it from the start if needed.
You have to be very careful not to change too much or too fast after wipes. It may be an easy to spot problem, and then it’s easy to solve. Most of the time, it can be quite difficult to circle in the core problem, so you need often give it more than just one wipe to be certain of it. This is made even more difficult by the assignment disobedience mentioned in the beginning.
After several wipes it is often the case that the healing is questioned. It is not unusual for people to start calling for more and more healers. If you’re in such a situation then more often than not, it’s the tactic that needs to change. Increasing the amount of healers is often a bad idea and most of the time you shouldn’t accept it. This is of course assuming that you haven’t already seen that you actually do lack healing-power. In that case another healer or a replacement may be in order.
We usually have a lot more healers than needed for pure damage-reasons. If the entire team were able to work perfectly together without any individual- or team-mistakes throughout a fight then instead of a 6-7 healer average we would be at 3 in Heroic Ulduar. With better teamwork and better skill overhealing could be turned into effective healing and the amount of healers could be reduced. This is often what happens as experience is gathered and tactic kinks are ironed out. The reason to have more healers is lack of experience and the unpredictability of certain damage. To compensate we already have many more healers than the bare essential. When people thus start asking for more and more healers I feel confident in saying that it’s most likely the tactic, not the healing, that’s wrong. There is such a thing as unhealable-damagelevels.
