Spinning Doctors: the complexity and pressure of raid healing
I’ve had several weeks now to get used to my dual spec, splitting my time between Resto and Boomkin. I still identify as a healer almost completely, but MAN is it nice to be able to pull out my can of whoopass and feathers when it comes time to do dailies and such. I’ve even held my own as Balance on a handful of boss fights while raiding, although I still need more than a little work optimizing my performance. I can report that for me, both healing and DPS are tons of fun. But I’m sure that it will come as no surprise to any healer out there that in my experience the fun of healing, on the whole, brings much more complexity and much more pressure than DPS.
Think about it. In a typical raid encounter, healers have to be aware of exactly the same environmental factors as DPS. We almost always have to work in motion whenever the DPS does. And we do all of this while watching 10 or 25 health bars, making rapid fire decisions about how to handle variations that occur there, often debuffing on the fly, and, for druids, making decisions about who to battle rez and why. The amount of my attention that is focused on the actual visual fight unfolding in front of me is probably about 10 percent at best when I am healing. I catch that I’m standing in fire out of the corner of my eye, then decide whether I have time to finish a cast or need to move immediately, probably popping off a rejuv on myself and a Wild Growth on those around me as I move out of range of the liquid pool of putrified doom that has grown up around my ankles.
Healers are the last line of defense if someone makes a mistake. If the tank pulls early and is out of range of heals, it falls upon the healers to double time it up to where the tank is and pull miracles out of thin air to keep him on his feet. If DPS gets crazy and pulls down aggro, it is the healers who bear the brunt of that mistake, working our magic to protect the goofball who thought topping the damage charts was his sole purpose for being there. If another healer isn’t performing, the rest of the healers have to work harder to cover their performance. If they die, this is compounded. Usually you can tell the difficulty of a fight based upon the degree to which I am taller, raised up from my chair by my clenched behind.
In addition, the amount of activity I engage in as a healer during a fight is extremely high. I am casting virtually every global cooldown on most fights. As a druid, I’m often watching the health of everyone, while tracking my HOTS on up to 12 or so raidmates at a time (more if you count Wild Growth). I’m tracking my cooldowns, keeping up on debuffs, choosing from among a wide number of spells for each healing opportunity, watching my mana depletion, AND staying out of the fire.
In all, though, I think that the most pressure that I feel as a healer becomes apparent to me when someone in the raid dies. I almost always feel at least a twinge because I let that person down. Nevermind that they may not have been watching their range, or were standing in a blizzard, or have the aggro control of a drunken monkey. Nevermind that other healers have gone down around me and I’m splitting my heals over a huge range of players taking damage. I still always feel at least partially responsible for people’s repair bills, and it always makes me feel at least a little bad when they go down.
I can’t believe how different raid boss scenarios are for me when I’m specced Boomkin. My personal biggest stress right now when DPSing is getting the correct mob targeted because I have virtually no experience doing it. I fumble around a bit and it brings down my DPS. But I have no doubt that practice will improve my performance significantly, and once I’ve got my target, I’m golden. I throw up my DOTS and debuffs, then it’s just wrath, wrath, wrath >>PROC!<< starfire, starfire, starfire, more DOTS, more DOTS, dead. I can actually watch the fights (which, by the way, are much cooler than I realized). And in most cases, unless we’re pretty evenly matched with the encounter and working against an enrage timer, if I make a mistake it just ain’t that big of a deal. I’ve never pulled aggro yet off a tank, though I’ve unleashed oodles of nukes. So the worst that’s happened is I’ve missed a proc, or it’s taken me longer than it should to get a boss targeted. That’s it.
Now, I cannot say that I have tried every DPS spec. For all I know there are crazy intense rotations out there that take just as much focus and are just as complex and stressful as raid healing. But, in all honesty, I kind of doubt it. Here’s why. If you are DPSing, you are either keeping up a rotation of spells on one target, or you are keeping up a rotation of AOE spells on multiple targets which, for the duration of the AOE, you can virtually treat as one big entity. You’re killing “the boss” or you’re killing “the adds” or some such. But your focus is not necessarily divided. This is different, I think, for tanks, who have to pull the stray sheep in and keep them busy, splitting attention between multiple mobs to maintain aggro on all of them. But not so for DPS. DPS focus is at its worst when it is divided amongst single targets. Their best bet is to focus on “the boss” or “the adds,” pew pew through their rotation (single target or AOE), and get them down. Healers, on the other hand, are often called upon to carry out their spell rotations on a multiplicity of targets simultaneously.
I started thinking about all of this today because I saw a post on the official World of Warcraft forums from a healer who claimed that healers basically carried her raid and the DPS slackers in it. She was wondering if that were the case for anyone else. I would definitely dispute this about my guild. I believe the healers are as strong a part of what is going on as the tanks and the DPS. We all have to be doing our part or we wouldn’t progress. There are fights that rely heavily on healing, and those that rely heavily on DPS or tanking. But I can report that, based upon what I’ve seen so far as a dual spec’ed druid, when the healers are doing their job, they’re likely working a hell of a lot harder than other people in the raid might have to work to do theirs. There is just so much more to be aware of, and to take care of, when the buck stops with you.
There are 9 Comments to "Spinning Doctors: the complexity and pressure of raid healing"
I agree…and I disagree. I’m a lawyer, I’m allowed!
There are some fights that are 100% about healing and getting it done, and some fights that take an equal play from everyone to do the job. While I do agree that healing is extremely intense and *very* stressful at times, and that we do generally have more to do than the next person, I think that there are some encounters that are extremely stressful to DPS and Tanking as well.
For example, take pre-nerf Brutallus. Your DPS had to be spot on to get that sucker down. There was no room for someone to miss a rotation, or hit the wrong button. On top of that, they had to move out of the flames if they got targetted. That was a VERY stressful encounter for DPS, and we certainly burned some of ours out trying to hit that benchmark.
An example of an encounter for tank stress, I think, would be Illidan. From being the Illidan tank (OMG DON’T FORGET YOUR BLOCK BUTTON!) to tanking the Flames of Azzinoth (uh…kiting the flames FACING the raid = BAD!), where the entire success of your raid could be plummeted by one error, you and you alone made. Talk about some serious pressure there!
Is healing more stressful? At times, sure. But I would wager a bet that there are times when tanks and DPS feel an equal amount of pressure to perform.
I agree with you 100% however, that I would never go as far to say healers carry a raid. Each role has its part, and each part has it’s own stress factors =)
Beruthiel’s last blog post..Val’anyr Proc Explained! And yes…it IS good for druids too!
You raise some really solid points, there, Beru. I guess that my feeling is that overall healing takes more, or at least it does on the raiding content I have experienced. My guild never got so far as Black Temple or Sunwell in BC. We were working on Hyjal when the expansion came out. There are absolutely times when the ball is in the tank’s hands, or DPS’s hands. I just feel that there is more overall that I have to focus on when healing by far than when I’ve DPS’ed. Perhaps it’s because I have a raid full of experienced DPSers that are picking up MY slack… who knows? But I have just found, so far, that DPSing feels like a walk in the park in comparison to the amount of activity and stress associated with healing for me.
Great read! I always love articles that are all about healers and how unique and complicated of a job it is. With very rare occurrences I think healers are the most important part of the raid (exceptions being that new boss in the Vault, very DPS dependent). You summed it up great.
Love the picture too! “Whoa man, morphine is freakin’ great!! What about my leg? What leg?”
lol hummy, that wasn’t the exact soundtrack I heard in my mind when I saw this picture….
“…the goofball who thought topping the damage charts was his sole purpose for being there.”
You mean I’m there for another purpose? Surely, you jest!
lol no, Night. That’s your raison d’etre. Stab away! =P
You actually don’t have to go very far to find a dps rotation (or lack thereof) that rivals our healing complexity. I recently posted about cat form dps on my blog (http://runningelk.blogspot.com/2009/04/druids-cat-form-dps.html) Cats have to watch their dot timers as much as we do our HoT timers while moving constantly to stay behind a moving boss, keeping buffs on themselves, etc. I wouldn’t say it is *as* difficult as healing, but it is certainly in the same ballpark. I have tried dpsing in raids in cat form and have done reasonably well, but it is extremely stressful to keep everything going and maximizing dps.
Running Elk’s last blog post..Hunters 101 – part IV: Haste and beyond
@Running Elk:
Respectfully, I disagree. My second spec is feral dps – and after a single day of reading the wonderful blog over at Unbearably HoT (cheers!) – and following a recent “dps cycle schematic” she posted – my new kitty dps is already up in the high 3K’s – and on stand and fight encounters,I’m pushing 4.5K.
My feral kitty has “need2know” mod that helps me keep passive attention on my DoTs and CooldownTimers to monitor my big talent CDs. Remember – these cycles and timers are important to monitor with a single objective, applied to a single target on boss encounters. On trash, kitty dps is arguably a just a couple of buttons (in Naxx anyway) as you use your swipe ability for AoE damage.
Contrast that with the weeks (and possibly months) of fine tuning (through practice alone) that raid healing takes. Mouseover macros, grid fine tuning… not to mention the razor thin decision making that takes place “during a GCD” on which of the 25 targets taking damage needs your specific priority of your next 1 or 2 GCDs… followed by the next few targets. More than that, like never before, healers have been re-tooled to use most of their spells – as the situation and healing necessity demands. Accordingly – after thinking for 1 second, and prioritizing need, situational awareness, mana, boss timers, spell timers… we then have to decide the best way to heal the specific target… ie: Mage? In fire? Not likely to take additional damage? Ok HoT. Which HoT? LB? Sufficient? Probably not, Rejuv? Are other range dps taking damage? Rejuv followed by WG on that target?
Sorry to rant. But if dps is in a “ball park” – it’s a ball park in a 3rd world country when compared to what goes through a healers mind – especially a healers mind in Ulduar 25.
I have to completely agree. I’ve got my dual spec for boomkin and my dps DK which can also now tank. I healed for sooo long that when I went back to boomkin I forgot what to do. However, once I learned my rotation it is pretty easy. For the most part, I stand there and blow things up. Even my dps DK stands behind things (or the side) and blows things up. It basic rotations over and over. Once you get the gear and stats, dps is pretty much dps. Some fights make you move and change a bit but for the most part you do the same thing. With healing not only do I have to heal the tank and dps while they move, I have to move and heal myself for a huge assortment of spells. It only get compounded in 10 and 25-mans. The argument is a bit moot because it is all a team. If the tank sucks = die. If the dps sucks = die. If the healer sucks = die. However, if you set all people on an equal level of gear and ability, healing requires far more attention to detail than dps. Healers have far more to look at and process than dps. This isn’t to say any one person is better than the other. It’s a team effort but some people have to work harder.
I firmly believe not everyone can be a healer or a tank but anyone can do dps with at least one dps class. I suck as a hunter and as a rogue but give me a DK, shadow priest, boomkin, lock or mage and I can do it all day.