A continuation of the Raid Healing Roles series. Previously, I introduced the idea that healing in a raid is different than healing in a regular instance. I also discussed some of the core philosophies of a Tank Healer and Raid Healer, as well as some tips for filling those roles as a priest.

Backup Tank Healer
The “Backup Tank Healer” is often necessary in 25 man raids, but is also a requirement in some Kara fights - Phase 2 of the Prince fight, for example, when the damage is so spiky you could hang your coat on it.

The idea behind the role of backup healer is that you are the insurance for the main tank healer. If two healers are assigned to the same target, one of you HAS to be the primary healer and the other HAS to be the secondary healer. If both of you think you’re the primary healer, then you’ll both be letting all of your heals land, you’ll both be overhealing, and you’ll both run out of mana when the fight ramps up to high gear.

The primary healer should heal normally. They should assume that they are the only healer that the tank has. They should NOT assume that someone else is healing the tank, even though they know they aren’t the only healer. Why is this?

Because the whole reason for having a backup healer is that the incoming damage is too great and too spiky for a single healer to handle it. If the primary healer gets lax and allows the tank to fall too low because “someone else may get the heal” then the tank is going to die.

If you are the primary tank healer, then you have to act as though you are the ONLY healer. The backup healer is there because there will be times when you will not be able to handle all of the incoming damage. They are there to BACK YOU UP. Not to do your job for you. If they were supposed to keep up a steady stream of heals, they wouldn’t be backup healers, they’d be primary healers.
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Not that it truly needs to be said, but no post yesterday due to an overindulgence in holiday cheer.

Hopefully you were all too busy yourselves to even notice the lack.

I did actually have perfectly noble intentions. I fell asleep Monday night and told myself I’d either post that I wasn’t going to post, or do a real post.

…and then promptly forgot all about it until this morning.

That being said, I was looking over at my sidebar and noticed that my “Essential Ego” links are a bit old and dusty.

Since you guys actually READ this stuff, do you have suggestions for posts I’ve made that ought to go up there? I’m trying to focus on truly essential priesting posts. If someone came to this site and said “bah, what a load of hogwash! Just show me the important stuff!” — that’s where I’d send them.

I plan on having a keystone post at the end of this neverending Raid Healing series. I’ll link that over in the Essential Ego area.

Anything else? Any other posts that you think would be useful to someone looking to trim off the fat, so to speak, and get to the heart of the useful Ego posts?

Suggestions very much appreciated.

Just a warning to my faithful watchers - I’m adding some extra night classes to my fictional free time next semester.

That means a very probable drop in posts while I’m taking the classes - both of them are going to be very intense, and I doubt I’ll have the mental wherewithal to keep twice-weekly posts up.

During that time, I DO intend to keep up Thursday posting, but I can’t promise that Tuesdays will remain filled. I’m going to bug EgoLock, Shatter, EgoTank, my shaman friend, and my raid leader to see if they’ll help fill in the gaps, but it’s still asking a lot to have someone take over and make sure my blog keeps updating.

I will post again just before it starts (mid January) as a final notice, but I didn’t want y’all to be blindsided by it when the time comes.

This may all be a load of hogwash - for all I know, the classes are going to be superhappyfuncake, and I’ll be posting while the teacher drones on and on.

I’m going to plan for the worst, however, and hand out gas masks and keys to underground bunkers to my readers.

…just in case. Never know when you’ll need a good gas mask, anyway, amirite?

A continuation of the Raid Healing Roles series. Previously, I introduced the idea that healing in a raid is different than healing in a regular instance. I also discussed some of the core philosophies of a Tank Healer and some tips for filling that role as a priest.

Today, we’ll talk about the flip side of that particular coin. Instead of focusing your power on a single target (the tank), you may be assigned to heal the raid as a whole.

Raid Healer
First off, let’s define “the raid”.

“The Raid” is everyone who isn’t a tank. (Again, that’s a simple, broad definition and should not be seen as an advertisement for tunnel vision healing.)

What that should tell you, as a healer, is that the damage you’re mitigating is unexpected, and probably AOE related. Since it’s not a tank, you generally can’t predict who is going to need a heal - the damage might come to anyone. It might be the rogue, it might be the warlock, could be that shaman who just got three windfury crits in a row.

One thing’s for sure, if it’s AOE damage that you’re healing, you have multiple people who all need to be brought up NOW. Another AOE might wipe them all out while you’re healing one of them back to full.

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Hey friends, EgoLock here. The Ego Priest is out sick today so wish her a Happy Birthday and merry Christmas and all that, maybe she will be back to feeling up to the task come Thursday.

For todays post I have decided to open a can of worms and let you guys do most of the work in the replies. Arent I a nice guy? You betcha!.

Here it is….

Where do “casual” and “hardcore” start and stop?

First, I pose to you friends a hypothetical scenario (maybe). A guild has had something of a recruitment run lately. Said guild is poised on the cusp, edging past the 10 man raid setting and into the vast depths of the 25 man raids. While balanced on the edge of the abyss, this guild has had said recruitment run, many have joined in a seeming short amount of time.

Now, while said guild was positioned to simply endure the 10 man raid setting, there was no force in spec what-so-ever, if you liked it you were allowed to play it, all that was asked was a measure of competence (that requirement not always being met mind you).

Now one more step forward and into the great dark unknown this hypothetical guild will go. They will have old people that have seen the inside of Kara enough to know what color the tapestry and where every single mob stands. Some of these have seen these sights grouped together some have not. And then they will have the “younger” crew. Those that have simply not had the luxury of seeing this content quite as much.

Now that the settings are out on the table, here comes the main course.

In our hypothetical scenario guild (as mentioned) never enforced any type of gearing or spec. Once that final step towards the great beyond is taken, should they start some small amount of enforcement of stat/talent point placement before “allowing” each individual to attend?

A friend sent me a birthday gift today - you’ll see it modeled on my sidebar! I love it!

Also, I now remember why I don’t do in-game screenshots for those sidebars. Egads, the pixels!

A continuation of the Raid Healing Roles series. Previously, I introduced the idea that healing in a raid is different than healing in a regular instance.

The source of these differences comes from having to coordinate your healing among multiple healers. In instances, your task is to heal everyone, regardless of role. In raid healing, there are four main “jobs” that a healer can be assigned to. I’ll cover one of them today, and the others in the following posts.

Tank Healer
You will have healers that are assigned to heal the tank. In any given encounter, the bulk of the damage should be coming on the tank - the guy best equipped to handle that damage.

As a tank healer, your job is to keep that tank alive. Tanks take spike damage. Even “uncrushable” tanks can take spike damage. A tank that’s toddling along comfortably, taking minimal damage and requiring only minor hots and infrequent greater heals will take two crits and a crushing blow, and all the sudden drop like a stone.

Repeat it with me, now. If the tank dies, your raid wipes. If the tank dies, your raid wipes. If the tank dies, your raid wipes.

Let’s say you’re in a mobile fight - Prince, for example, in Kara. The raid needs to move because there’s an infernal about to land RIGHT on top of you. What do you do, tank healer?

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Okay, this is turning into another Part 1, Part 2…thing. My apologies, I really didn’t think I’d get that involved. I was way wrong.

There is a shift, once you begin to raid heal. It’s more than just the fact that the number of people in the group is greater. It’s more than just the fact that the content is more difficult.

Your healing style, your healing goals, focus, everything…it all changes once you begin raiding.

Now, as we learned from EgoTank last week, that doesn’t mean you can respec holy the night you start Kara and expect to do as well as the healers who’ve been honing their skills in five-mans. There are a LOT of lessons that can be best learned in a five-man instance environment. Timing, the best use of your various skills and spells, positioning, panic buttons, prioritization…the list goes on and on. These should be learned in a five-man environment. Not only because they can be learned there, but because nine other people shouldn’t have to wipe on content because you couldn’t be bothered to do some five-mans to learn how to play your class/role first.

These skills are absolutely necessary, and do not change once you begin raid healing.

So what is this shift, you might be asking? If all those things are necessary for both five-man healing and raid healing, what’s the big deal?

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EgoTank took pity on my distraction this morning and allowed me to use a portion of one of his posts from the boards to fill my Thursday slot this week.

Hey, it was that or nuthin today. Plus, the man refuses to admit that he’s a damn fine writer, so I try to incite the Egotistical Legions to goad him into writing more as often as I can.

——

No, you don’t need heroic gear to start Karazhan. I didn’t have a single piece of heroic/badge gear before I started tanking Kara. You don’t even need heroic gear to do the easier heroics. You do, however, need to be able to perform your role in a fairly competent manner. Heroics can be a good test in some ways, but they’re mostly just heroic for the healer. If a healer can cut it in heroic slave pens without ridiculous amounts of CC, then they can cut it in Karazhan. If you want to test a tank’s ability to hold aggro in short duration fights or a dpser’s ability to actually be on the right target and not spam AE at inappropriate moments, a normal 5 man can suffice. If you want to test a tank’s ability to maintain a high tps over both short and long duration fights, a healer’s ability to not run OOM at the 3 minute mark, or a dpser’s ability to maintain an acceptable level of damage output and threat control, then yes, the raid environment is really the only place where one can test those things.

That does not, however, diminish the fact that the most important things are shared between raiding and 5 mans, heroic or otherwise. That being the ability to work as member of a team, the tenacity to not give up or get upset after the first bad pull or unlucky wipe, and a mindset that doesn’t involve “I’m just here because I need X item”. Sure, you can wipe your way through 5 mans without those traits, hell you can even wipe your way through Karazhan if you’re overgeared enough.

At the end of Karazhan though there’s an intersection. The turn off just doubles back and leads to where it started. The road that keeps going has a big fat neon sign like a full saberlash to your face, and it says “NO SUCKING BEYOND THIS POINT”.

Karazhan is not the start of the training course, but rather the end of it. The start of it was way the hell back in Deadmines when you were wiping on Vancleef on your very first character because the tank couldn’t hold aggro on the adds. Everything that was there to learn in every instance from then till now applies to raiding.

I’ve been tagged by Kestrel. I think this particular tag thread, unlike chain letters and five-mile-long blog fill-in-the-blanks, has a great idea behind it and an excellent purpose, so I’ll roll up my sleeves and see whether or not I can contribute meaningfully.

Lesson 5 : No matter how much you love them, you may not be able to play with your friends and family.

I blogged about this topic recently, so I won’t bore you with another long, drawn-out explanation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had friends say “Hey, you play WoW too? What server are you on? We should get together!”

It has never ever worked out for me. Not once. The people I spend my time with and play with are the ones that I met along the way, the ones that I accidentally “bumped into” and we meshed.

I can wish and hope and dream of using WoW to spend time with my friends all I want, but I know better. The recipe for a successful gaming group is too delicate. It can’t be forced.

There’s a corollary to this rule, which says that Just because someone is an exceptionally nice person that you like a lot, that doesn’t make them a good player.

I’ve met people that I could chat with for hours on just about anything. We mesh, we meld, we get along famously, and one instance pull into an invite into Sunken Temple, I found myself shocked and appalled. It was like accidentally stepping into a horrific crime scene.

But they were so nice! Such a wonderful person! How could they, oh mah gawd, did they just…surely they didn’t…and they’re wearing WHALE gear?!?

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