The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Raid Healing Roles : Part 6 : Job Assignments
by Vonya
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, Raid Healer, Backup Healer, and Hybrid Healer as well as some tips for filling those roles as a priest.
Role Recap
A quick summary of the different roles :
- Tank Healer - Heals the main tank, the person assigned to take the controllable damage in a fight.
- Raid Healer - Heals the rest of the raid, mitigating the unexpected and/or uncontrollable damage in a fight.
- Backup Healer - Assists the Tank (or Raid) Healer with their job.
- Hybrid Healer - Primarily does dps but can be expected to assist with emergency heals on rare occasions.
Healing Classes
Alrighty, let’s take a look at the healing classes available, shall we?
- Priest - Jack of all trades. Short heals, long heals, instant heals, hots, frisbees. I AM BATMAN.
- Druid - In tree form, CANNOT CAST LONG HEALS. It sucks, but dem’s da rulez. Master of HoTs, ruling over the kingdom of Gradual Heals with an ironwood fist. I am so envious of Lifebloom I could spit acorns.
- Paladin - Undisputed king of Constant, Steady heals, with an X-Files-Worthy inability to run out of mana that makes me want to kick them in the back of the shins when they’re not looking.
- Shaman - If Blizzard gave them HoTs, they’d be cackling madly as they pushed Priests off of their already precarious position as primary healers in WoW. If there is something a shaman can’t heal, I haven’t seen it, and if you want to argue the point, I know someone who will be tapping briskly at your doorstep just before you feel a hoof inserted somewhere unpleasant.
Traditional Role Assignments
The “traditional” healing assignments for the classes are based on the way things are usually done. We’ll cover those first, since you can’t explain how something is different from the norm without covering what is “normal” first.
The best Tank Healer is the paladin. They’re able to keep a strong, steady flow of heals, and their mana regen is based on how often they crit. The more they heal, the more they crit, the more mana they get back, the longer they’re able to stay healing in a fight. Other healers LOSE mana when they heal, so longer fights they’ll go OOM more quickly than a paladin.
The best Raid Healer is the tree druid. Their powerful insta-cast HoTs handle the sporadic and unexpected damage that raid DPS (and healers) take and make it look easy. Raid healers cannot have long cast time heals, because generally more than one person needs a heal at a time.
The best Backup Healer is a Priest or Shaman. The Priest can toss frisbees and HoTs in between cancel-healing on the tanks, helping to pad the damage done and make the job of the Tank Healer easier. The Shaman can cancel-heal as well, but can also toss in a Chain Heal or two and bring up the entire dps nucleus to help out not only the Tank Healers, but the Raid Healers as well. Both of them have very nice buffs that are given if a crit heal lands, benefitting tanks more than DPSers.
The best Hybrid Healer is a caster-dps of any of the above classes. The next best Hybrid Healer is anyone that can throw a heal or use a bandage. The third best Hybrid Healer is sitting down and eating food. The fourth best Hybrid Healer is a shaman’s totem. The fifth…..(I can keep going…)…
Nontraditional Role Assignments
There is absolutely nothing wrong with following the traditional role healing assignments. There’s also nothing wrong with changing it up and doing something that might seem “absurd” or “ridiculous” to an outsider.
Putting a tree druid, king of HoTs, to be the main tank healer? Are you insane?
No…have you SEEN what rolling lifeblooms can accomplish in the hands of a skilled tree? It gives me goosebumps.
Putting a paladin, master of the steady crit heals on raid duty? Does your guild offer a bank withdrawal to handle gear repair costs?
No…have you ever watched a pally bring up an entire raid using critted quick-cast heals? The right gear and spec, and they can really do as neat and tidy a cleanup job as I’ve ever seen.
Priests or Shaman healing the main tank? You bet, we do it all the time. Heck, the shaman and I flip a coin to see who’s going to be tank healer on a run.
The traditional roles aren’t there as hard and fast rules - they’re guidelines. It’s much easier to be a main tank pally healer than it is to be a pally raid healer - but if the PLAYER is good enough, there’s certainly nothing written into the game that says “IF HealSource = Pally THEN QueueMockingLaughter(); WipeTheRaid();”
Any healer can really fill any role - it depends on how they enjoy playing the game. Personally, I very much prefer being a backup/raid healer as a priest. I feel that my incredibly diverse toolbar full of situational heals gets to be used fully in that role, and I enjoy the adrenaline rush of the raid whack-a-mole.
The priest next to me may prefer the more tunnel-visioned approach to healing, really love seeing those big heals land and watching Inspiration proc. Priests are fully capable of easily keeping a tank alive, or of keeping the raid alive. Shaman, as I said, can do anything. They can walk on water, bring themselves back from the dead, heal will skill and precision…I call hax, personally.
Does your treedruid give a maniacal grin and giggle like the bad guy from Who Framed Roger Rabbit when they get to do tank healing? Just because tradition says they should be standing back and tossing HoTs, that doesn’t mean you should kick them to the curb. (Now, if they’re constantly letting the tank die, then you can make with the kicking).
That’s the end of this particular post. I’ve honestly given up trying to predict how long my topics will be, if they’ll be a single post or a series of fifty. Coming soon, I intend to cover tiered healing, Karazhan with only two healers, role blending, and cookie recipes. Also, EgoTank gave me next Tuesday’s post, y’all are gonna LOVE it. Although if people keep writing posts ahead of time, they’re gonna be making me look bad. <.<
Also the next, a shout out to Ratshag who made a random alliance alt to send me a letter just to say hi. =] D’awwrr. If it weren’t for that whole…green…orc…thing, I’d give him a hug.
January 10th, 2008
Really enjoying this series so far. One thing I would like to correct, however, was your ascertainment of Paladins as the best “tank healers” and Druids as the best “raid healers.” While I cannot speak to whether a Paladin is a good tank healer, it is generally regarded that Druids are the best tank healers since 3 x rolling Lifebloom + Rejuvenation creates a wonderful health buffer for the tank, guards against spike damage (to allow other direct healers to “catch up” before your tank explodes), and allows for spike healing via Swiftmend. Even in ToL, we have access to Regrowth which does give us at least a portion of a direct heal. Changes in 2.3 mean that a Nature’s Swiftness + Healing Touch macro automatically deshifts you from Tree of Life (as does simply pressing our Healing Touch key), making us more than capable of responding to emergency damage.
Best of all, we can roll HoTs on multiple tanks. The best Druids with low latency are capable of rolling 3x Lifebloom on 4 tanks at once, 3 with some latency and/or an occassional Rejuvenation.
It is true that Lifebloom is a great raid-healing tool, but you have to be careful that you don’t allow your stacked LB to fall from the tanks you’re monitoring in the process or you risk losing the mana efficiency that makes the spell so glorious! =D
January 10th, 2008
“Putting a tree druid, king of HoTs, to be the main tank healer? Are you insane?”
Heh, not to mention the buff they give their group when in tree. If we have a tree druid in the raid, they are always in the MT group of course. Even with the recent nerf to Lifebloom, they are still great MT healers. Paladins too of course, since they really only heal one target at time.
Also, the thing about paladin mana regen when healing sounds oddly put if not just wrong. They don’t get mana when they heal. If they crit, they get back 50% or 60% (I think they changed it) of the mana it cost them to cast the heal, with the Illumination talent, but they’re still losing mana. So to say that the more they heal the more mana they get back just doesn’t make sense, unless I’m reading it wrong.
January 10th, 2008
@Phaelia
The nod to how strong Druids are at tank healing is done in the next section - I think that most guilds and most druids probably consider Raid Healing more suited to how the class is built.
@Esoth
From a priest’s perspective, they are regenning mana. When a priest crits, the tank either gets a short-term armor buff, or just extra heals. We lose 100% of the mana cost every time. I have played a pally myself, and spoken to others who have - the paladin’s ability to not run out of mana is legendary, even after the nerf to the mana return they get per crit.
January 10th, 2008
We use a Tree, a pally and a holy priest for main tank healing in 25 man raids. With careful use of mana pots, fiend and my Lurker trinket (+300 spirit per use) I can hang with our amazing pally for a long time. We took a group of newer guild members on a Gruul run and the raid was down to 3 prot warriors and 3 healers. The fight lasted over 12 minutes and I did not run out of mana.
January 10th, 2008
For 25-mans, we usually have 2 paladins and a druid on the main tank for constant healing (which goes well with his constant damage) and the HoTs smooth everything out. A resto shaman (when we have 1) chain heals melee, which helps both main tank healers and raid healers (since melee DPS takes lots of splash damage). Priests and any other unassigned healer takes raid healing and helping out anywhere needed (that versatility is great for situations where you just don’t know how much and how fast you need to heal). This is for traditional fights. Fights that involve multiple people tanking the same boss, or non-traditional off-tanks (like the mage tank in Gruul’s) usually putting a priest on a tank (for Hydross, the current tank has a priest and paladin, for Gruul’s, the mage tank gets a priest). And I agree, the Tree of Life druid goes in the main tank’s group. Just a thought about how to use your healers in the larger instances.
January 10th, 2008
Depending on the fight and the boss, my guild will put a druid and a priest on the tank. Those hots really help to even out the damage.
And the awesomeness of shaman heals is the reason why I’m leveling up my own shaman to go resto! I really enjoyed this series, and I’ve pointed a couple friends of mine who are baby raid healers to come check it out and learn. ^^
January 10th, 2008
Well, I guess I’m abnormal then. First off, I never did buy the ‘this class is for x healing, and this class is for y healing’ argument. I’ve recently changed guilds, and having been one of the people who did heal assignments in my old guild, I preferred a mixed class setup for MT healing. Almost always a druid/pally/priest type mix for that. My new guild does it slightly differently with a druid and two priests on the MT. The common denominator there is the druid. Stated flatly, if you don’t have the tree rolling that LB on the tanks, then the other MT healers will go into panic mode at least once during a boss fight. Welcome to the TBC era of insane high amount of crushing or multiple attack boss damage. For raid healing, I almost always put the shaman(s) on it, for the obvious chain heal reason, but I also had priests do that role because we have more than one way to heal multiple people. When it comes to it frankly I think any class can do raid healing, and any class can do MT healing - the only thing is that a druid smoothes the spike damage and makes it easier. There was a time when our guild didn’t have any trees and we had anywhere from 2-4 priests healing, and we did fine. It is the player, not the class.
The interesting thing that I find while I am MT healing is that I am able to zap my instants (and a flash or two when times get critical) around the raid *while* I’m concentrating the main tank.
For instance, while I’m healing the MT through the damage truck called Teron Gorefiend, (or Morogrim for that matter) I can also zap a PoM, renew and CoH around to help out the other healers. Now, the amount I can do that is directly related to how well the Druid is rolling the LB’s, but I can still do it. On a fight like Bloodboil; however, you would never put a priest on the MT, instead they spend their entire time on the bloodboil groups with PoM, CoH, etc.. However, I can *still* toss renews around to others.
As for our ‘precarious’ position in the healing world, I find that a little exaggerated. The fact of the matter is priests have more than one healing button, and most priests never use them. An extreme example was a priest in my old guild who used nothing but flash heal (not kidding…:( ) If you use Recount, it is easy enough to right-click -> show details on any other class and look on in envy at the amount of healing they do while clicking 1, maybe 2 buttons. However, do the same to a ‘good’ priest and you will see something entirely different. Your Batman comment I find right on the money, because we have to use our wits AND our substantial utility belt to get the job done. One thing I see frequently from apps and regular raiding priests is this sort of passiveness, where they will cancel too many spells, not keep track of renews or where their PoM is, not pre-casting, and constantly trying to save mana. I prefer a much more aggressive sort: precasting, not worrying about overhealing, not afraid of using a mana pot and is mobile.
Er…sorry for the rant. I read this place a lot, but rarely post. For the record, I’m a main healer, I’m constantly at the top of the meters or close, and have been raid Hjyal, Black Temple content for a while and on the Horde side. I’ve felt just about every priest pain one can.
January 11th, 2008
Ego: From a druids perspective, and other players who sit down and look at how the class works, the druid is a backup tank healer, used for minimizing the spikes. Let FoL, or priest mini heal, or shaman lesser healing wave sort out the 1k, cos they always do before a HoT is done anyway.
January 21st, 2008
“Does your treedruid give a maniacal grin and giggle like the bad guy from Who Framed Roger Rabbit when they get to do tank healing?”
Yes. MUAHAHAHA!
ahem… anywho, lifeblooming, rejuvin and throwing spare LBs in the raid group is the name of the tree game (most of the time, *cough!* morogrim! *cough*)
January 23rd, 2008
when you have a druid in your party the roles of raid healing and tank healing have to blend some, we excel at healing 3-4 people at once. any less and we have to less mana effecient spells to keep up. more then 4 just can’t be done. Fortunately those 4 don’t have to be the same people. so we can keep the 2 tanks stacked while also doing raid healing. lifebloom alone won’t keep the tanks up but it can easily make it so one pally could heal both tanks without a sweat (I’m thinking 10 man here)
January 24th, 2008
Hi Ego! I know this is now a bit of an older entry, but I’d thought you’d like to know I posted a short extract (the bit where you summarise the class strengths and ‘traditional’ healer roles) from this post on an internal WoW forum on my work’s intranet. The threads often end up with the age old “X class is better than Y class at healing/tanking/dps” arguments and flamings. After pasting your extract in the forum, it was flooded with positive comments like “Oh, I never thought of it like that” and “Thank you, that clears it up a lot”. One reply also demanded to know what the 5th through 20th best hybrid healers were, so theres a blog entry idea for you!
Anyway I’ve directed all those interested to your site, so keep up the good work!
Also on the subject of ‘non-traditional’ roles. We use a Retribution Pally (Retardadin lol) in our 25man and 10man raids and he is now pushing 900 dps and consistently coming top 3 in damage. (Ret Pally Judgment of Light would be one of those Hybrid Healer top 20s!) So, moral of the story, never judge any class/spec until you’ve met someone who can actually play their class!
April 11th, 2008
[...] what is happening in the raid, what data is recorded and how it is being recorded and attributed, who was assigned to what healing duty, but also a keen understanding on how the other classes perform and what their own performance [...]
May 23rd, 2008
As you reach higher and higher into the raiding scene the roles of each of the four healing classes becomes more and more clear. I frequently do the healing assignments for my guild, and I feel confident enough in my understanding of how the four classes work to disagree with your assessments.
Priests - Jack of all trades (you’re right). Priests can either spec Improved Divine Spirit to be an tank healer who never runs out of mana, or spec Circle of Healing to become a raid-healing powerhouse.
Druids - King of hots. Believe it or not HoTs are the best way to heal a tank. On a single tank, if a druid chooses to make use of all of the HoTs in his arsenal (Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, and Regrowth), his healing output and mana efficiency easily trumps every other healer out there (even Paladins). As if that weren’t enough, Druids really shine in situations with multiple tanks - as they can roll Lifebloom stacks on up to 4 tanks at a time! They’re also decent raid healers when members of the raid are taking very predictable amounts of damage, but otherwise not really.
Paladins - Paladins are a very limited healing class. They have one major strength, which is big healing on a single tank, but that’s about it. In rare situations it is a good idea to have a Paladin cast Flash of Light across the raid, but not very often. Paladins are mostly brought to give the raid Blessings.
Shamans - Resto Shamans are the ultimate healing powerhouses. Chain Heal is almost indisputably the best healing spell in the game, as it has a built-in mind of it’s own to pick out which raid members need health the most and jump to heal them. These days it’s extremely hard to find anyone who does not believe that Resto Shamans are the best raid-healers in the game. That’s not all though - Chain Heal can also double as a tank-healing spell, since it’s both extremely efficient and has the added bonus of cleaning up damage on the melee if the boss is “skinny” enough as well.