Take 2 aspirin and call the healing lead in the morning…
Ok, so I’m back in the saddle here again on the blog. I apologize for my somewhat extended hiatus. I had much to take care of in the way of my personal and professional life, and just needed some time to decompress, sort our my priorities, and, I admit, indulge in a bit of wound licking. But I’m back and hoping to be in full swing on the blog again from here on out. So, better late than never, here’s my earlier promised recap on my experiences giving healing assignments out for our 25 man raids.
As I mentioned earlier this month, we have been making a couple of changes in our guild structure and in our healing corps. One of these changes was for me to get some experience giving out healing assignments as a backup for our regular healing leads. I was excited to give it a try and get into the thick of things. What I found out, above all else, is that the job requires a lot more work than I anticipated. It is, in fact, extremely hectic and stressful! If you have never had the opportunity to have this responsibility, thank your lucky stars, then thank your healing leads! Here are some of the things I learned…
The responsibility does not begin and end with assigning healers for each fight
I took healing lead responsibilities on last week for 2 nights, during which we cleared Naxxramas. Now, because we have this content on farm, and because we have many members with dual specs and with alts who also heal, I learned quickly that I was going to have to make decisions not just about what the healers would heal, but who would be healing in the first place. We have a rule in place that you can run an alt on a boss so long as your main toon could not conceivably get an upgrade from the gear dropped by that boss. So I had to determine whether some alt healers could make the run based upon this criteria. In addition, many of our healers dual spec DPS, so I had to find out who would be willing to run DPS if needed to keep the number of healers in line with the content. Finally, when one of our regular healers logged on late and there was a spot for him in the raid, I had to determine how to work him into the rotation without having too much healing in the raid. All of these decisions were left to my sole discretion, as I was the healing lead for that night. This was completely unexpected to me, and I suffered a crisis of conscience trying to determine who got to heal, who did not, and who would switch back and forth from healing to DPS as needed.
The healers have their own ideas about what they should be healing
There were several times over the course of these two evenings that I would give out healing assignments only to be met by whispers or chat in the healer channel questioning my directives. Each time this happened I either needed to defend my decision in whispers or chat, or come up with new healing assignments. In some cases, I did not feel comfortable coming out and publicly sharing my reasons for given assignments, either. Sometimes, for example, a healer was given an assignment because, in my experience of running with them, they had just not performed up to a high enough standard for me to feel comfortable with giving them more responsibility. When I was called out for this kind of a decision, I then had to go through the mental and emotional exercise of trying to decide, on the fly and as the raid waited for me to sort it out, how to handle the situation. Once or twice I was grateful that healers reminded me of how they had a special ability or proclivity for an assignment on a fight different from the one I had given. But even then I had to open up my healing assignment mod (I used Getting Things Healed), rearrange everyone, and post the new assignments. It was very hectic and nerve wracking!
The pace was breakneck!
I found that in order to keep us moving along at our regular pace, I had to get my healing assignment mod opened up the second we downed a boss so that I could start making healing arrangements before the raid would be ready for the next pull. I was working with an unfamiliar addon to do this, but thankfully Getting Things Healed was very intuitive for me and pretty easy to get the hang of. But I would literally be fighting and healing trash with the GTH mod window open and taking up most of my screen, preparing for the next boss while we fought the trash in front of it. My own healing output dropped pretty noticeably for the nights that I was the healing lead because my attention was so divided. Even when I didn’t have the window open I was constantly thinking of other things, thinking ahead, sending out whispers… “what’s the name of the mind controlled guys?” “Does the next boss require one or two off tanks?” Add to this the fact that we had, I believe, 4 tanks with us, that the tanks were constantly shifting main tank/off tank/DPS so that I was always on the fly in putting up who was healing whom. It was dizzying.
My mistakes cost money
I didn’t have enough healing power on Sapphiron for 2.. (was it 3?) attempts. We have that dragon on farm, but we were wiping. I tried to compensate by switching around one of my lower powered healers, but forgot altogether that I could just ask one of our dual specced people to switch to heals for that fight until we’d had a couple of attempts. So we wiped more than once until I figured out that it was an HPS problem and not a healing assignment problem, costing everyone in the raid gold for repair bills. This made me sad.
When you think you’ve got it under control, you don’t
We cleared construct, military wings on the first night. Then someone decided that we should knock out spider wing in a speed run for the arachnophobia achievement. O.O!!! For the healing lead, this means setting up heals for three boss fights in advance, all at once. Panic! lol! I ended up missing some of the early trash pulls in spider wing as I stood next to the 4 horsemen’s chest frantically thinking through 3 upcoming bossfights and doing all the work in advance to assign healers for them so that we could burn through all 3 fights as quickly as possible to get that achievement. (We were successful, by the way!). THAT was hectic! lol!
All my preparation wasn’t enough
Although I did a lot of preparation in terms of studying different classes’ healing styles, the boss fights, available healing assignment mods, and other considerations, I certainly did not have everything covered. What I know I missed was researching the plethora of shaman totems and shields. Our healing leads are both shamans, and they take responsibility for assigning who will earth shield which tank, and who will put up which totems. Yours truly, the leafy itinerant healing lead? Not so much. I forgot all about this when preparing and ended up, to my ongoing embarrassment, telling the shamans in the healing channel to “work out your shamminess amongst yourself.” /facepalm
In all, the experience was a good one for me. I learned a lot more about raiding that I had no idea I needed to learn. I also learned a lot about raid balance and the decisions that raid and healing leaders have to make. I do plan to volunteer to do this several more times in the near future to solidify what I’ve learned and make myself a viable resource for our healing leads to turn to when they cannot make a raid or are having a night when they just aren’t up to assignments for one reason or another. In the end, though, I can report that it is not a job that I would relish taking on full time. Raid healing is stressful in and of itself. The added responsibility of taking charge of all of my fellow healers was much larger than I anticipated, and not one that I would want to have to pick up every time I logged on to raid. Hats of to you, Dwyn and Shamrox, and to all the other healing leads out there in the World of Warcraft. You have certainly earned my respect and humility.
There are 6 Comments to "Take 2 aspirin and call the healing lead in the morning…"
Yowza! Haha, that was pretty good stuff there! I’m sure no one held your newbiness against you. I had no idea that organizing healing for a 25 man was so crazy. The only thing I ever tell people is “You’re on this tank, you’re on that one, everyone else on raid heals.” Don’t even think about it.
Sylly, I am curious on why you use a mod for healing assignments? Is it just because that is how your guild has always done things? To me, it seems overly complicated and I’m wondering if it doesn’t add more stress than is needed.
Very similar to Hummy, when I give out healing assignements it’s over vent and it’s “x and y heal tank 1, Z heal tank two, everyone else on the raid”. As we learn new content we will often switch things up as needed based on feedback from our healers. Heck, sometimes we’ve pulled and I’m giving out the healing assignments as the tank charges in!
We let the classes work out for themselves things like who is going to beacon whom or put up an earthshield on which tank, unless we want specific people doing something in a certain way due to the nature of the fight.
Of course, I recognize that this may be easier said than done. I’ve been healing with some of these people for 4 years now, and I am keenly aware of all of our healer’s strengths and weaknesses. Maybe it is easy for me to go about assignments in this way because I also have a huge hand in leading our raids, which means before we even go into an encounter I have an idea of what I want to see happen.
I guess what this ramble is REALLY trying to ask is: Would eliminating the mod make the job any easier for you?
Beruthiel’s last blog post..Working through Yogg-Saron
Beru, we use healing assignment mods in my guild. We have for a long time. The mod itself wasn’t too cumbersome, really, and it’s nice because if people forget, they can just whisper “heal” to the healing lead and their assignment will be whispered back to them. It was actually easier for me, I think, because I could work on part of the healing assignments for a boss, do something else, go back, and it was still there. I didn’t have to do all my thinking right out loud on the fly. It helps to keep the vent channel clear, as well. We have a casual guild, so we don’t always run with the same folks every night, which also sounds different from your setup. Overall, the mod I think was a help for me rather than a hinderance overall. It might be different after I’ve gotten my sea legs a bit. =)
Regarding Healing Mods:
I have a mod installed that I access by typing /macro. Always have, probably always will because all of the mod’s I’ve used are in some way limiting the flexibilty of my assignments. That said, the ability to pre-plan, and to be able to re-spam orders without flooding Vent is something I’ve found essential in most progression raiding.
Regarding Trash:
As a healing lead, I’ve always worked under the assumption that I won’t be involved in the trash unless I choose to be. Quite often I’ve gone on Auto-Follow on another healer and just sat with my macro window open fixing up the orders for the next boss or the boss after that. Sure I may not look ‘good’ on the overall healing meters, but personally I only really look at Boss healing meters, and trash if we’re wiping. Usually with trash its an assignment problem so the meters tell me who’s underused etc.
@ Brent, I disagree that a healing mod (or macro) is essential for progression raiding. Helpful, maybe. Essential, no. I’ve been raiding nearly 5 years in WoW and have never used one.
@Sylly, I can certainly see if using a mod is what you guys have always done, keeping that up. I was just wondering if the tinkering of an unknown mod was causing extra stress =) We have about 32 active raiders on our roster, and 9 of those are healers, so we very much run with the same people every raid, which probably does make it easier. The same group of people have run the encounters with us from our first wipe to “farming” the content every week, so I am sure that makes a difference!
I personally have one of each healer class (two are already at 80, the other two are sitting around 70ish, but working their way up), so I am very familiar with the play of each class, which also helps me a ton, I think.
I am sure that it will become easier the more that you do it =) Next time, I bet you only need one aspirin instead of two! =)
P.S. Glad to see you back! <3
Beruthiel’s last blog post..Working through Yogg-Saron
One thing that really helped me develop healing strategies for Naxx and Ulduar was to write brief observations for each boss fight and even trash pulls if needed. I was able to see what was needed outside of standard “X heals Z tank”, and having a concrete plan with notes kept me from feeling overwhelmed. Eventually I wrote out a sort of script outlining boss fights and I was able to quickly load phases and assignments in GTH (and yes, I feel your pain of healing trash with a giant GTH window… they should add an opacity slider).
With your dynamic healer base, you may want to break down your roster into a list as primary healers, dual-spec healers, and alternate healers. You could even note each healer’s strengths and weaknesses. And since your tanks seem to like rotating, perhaps you could create your assignments based on the mob or boss that is being tanked rather than the tank. All in all, it sounds like you did a fantastic job, putting in the effort to research your healers and rolling with the punches. One important aspect of heal assigning is to constantly evaluate yourself and your healers, and you’re humble enough to do so and make changes where needed.
Sorry for the mini-post!