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The latest patch 5.4 newsRaid Rx: Basic healer raid design
by Marcie Knox 
Dec 25th 2007 at 2:15PM
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. Last week I promised you pink tutu's and syncronized healing moves. See that picture? That's all you're getting. Merry Christmas. Being a healer is about living with dissapointment (at the dps), ok?
So anyways... You have 25-people chomping at the bit to see more than just Karahzan/ZA. W00t! But from a healing standpoint, who do you invite and how many? I'm here to help.
Basic Raid Design
You have 25 slots. About 6-8 of them will be healers, which is roughly the same ratio that you had in Karahzan and even old school 40-mans, if you can remember back that far. The rest of the raid will be a couple of tanks, some off-tanks, and loads of dps. On average, you'll have 7 healers, so that's going to be my basis.
The key to Burning Crusade raiding is variety. Straight off, you're going to need one of each of the healing classes like I've said before. No joke. If you are missing a class, you're missing their utility. Yes, of course you can fake it for a while, but trust me - you will hit trick fights where each class becomes the critical one. /cough Hydross /end cough Start recruiting now to fill any gaps.
Well, that's easy. Slap 4 people in raid slots and you're 57.1% done. The real question becomes what to do with the remaining 3 slots? Well, I'm not just here to look pretty in a pink skirt. Let's examine each healing class and what balance you should aim for.
Druids - It's been my experience that no more than one resto druid plays WoW per server. And they're Alliance. If you have two, hug them tightly and bring the second one on fights were there's no aggro wipe (i.e. not Hydross or Morogrim).
Priests - With their jack-of-many-trades spell selection, I try to always bring at least two. If you have a lot of priests, more than other healing classes, it's ok to bring three. On fights where low aggro healing is critical, more is better. The more you have, the more you should encourage them to coordinate their specs. You only need one with imp spirit per raid. (I just wanted to say "more" one more time.)
Paladins - Ok, I'll be blunt here. I use them for filler. They stack very well buffs-wise and millions of 1k-1.8k heals flying around a raid never hurt anyone. Ideally you'll have 3 in a raid to cover all the buffs (this includes any ret/prot ones you might have). If you have tons of pallies, don't be afraid to bring 4 total. Like priests, the higher the number attending, the better they need to coordinate their specs. There's no excuse not to have kings, imp devotion/conc auras and imp wisdom in a raid.
Shamans - You really, really need at least one, but two for some of the fights is great, especially if there's a ton of AoE damage. From an overall raid standpoint, you need 3 total for the dps buffs, so be willing to work with the raid leads on this. In other words, you may need to run with extra resto's for the good of the group. Hopefully you have some enh/elem around if you're low on resto, though. If you don't have any resto at all, you can limp along with a CoH priest for at least a little while, but you're going to need those totems.
Example Raid Groups
These are in order of most ideal to least, imo. That doesn't mean one at the bottom can't work. You'll just be sacrificing some synergy. I'm also assuming you keep the same group for the entire evening. If you swap people out, then the perference changes based on the fight. And these are "Ideal" and may not be representative of what you actually have to work with.
From Most Ideal
Priest (2), Paladin (3), Druid (1), Shaman (1)
Priest (1), Paladin (3), Druid (1), Shaman (2)
Priest (2), Paladin (2), Druid (1), Shaman (2)*
Priest (3), Paladin (2), Druid (1), Shaman (1)
Priest (2), Paladin (2), Druid (2), Shaman (1)
To Least Ideal
*Better than the ones above it if you have a ret/prot pally, too.
Now it's your turn to explode in anger that I just listed your raid comp as "Least Ideal". Hit up the comments below with your take on how many of each class is best. I'm expecting lots of inconsolable rage. Don't let me down!
Next week I'll use 500 words to describe the depth of complexity that is paladin healing. Stay tuned!
Marcie Knox has been healing lead for over a year, including old school AQ40/BWL/Naxx. She has suffered through holy priest and now basks in the glory that is healadin. Her pally is currently dodging waves of mobs in MH and she totally killed all her constructs in BT. Like killed dead.
Filed under: Druid, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, Tips, How-tos, Raiding, Buffs, Raid Rx (Raid Healing)
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 3)
anonymoose Dec 28th 2007 4:57PM
I apologize I'm not replying direclty to some comments, as I'm not always seeing the "reply" button for folks I want to respond to.
Arberius wrote:
"In a previous comment you said that Inspiration was useless in SSC/TK and beyond. Why would that be? Prot warriors are not at the armor cap I don't think. Looking on WoWWiki the increase in Time To Live that 1k of armor gives you is constant no matter how much armor you have up to the cap, and the more armor you have, the more 25% boost from Inspiration is going to increase it, and therefore the more additional Time To Live it will give the tank. Which means that the value of Inspiration goes up, not down, as tanks gear improves until they hit the armor cap with th 25% boost. And I don't think Prot warriors are ever close to the cap (am I wrong?)."
Y'know I might be wrong! Specifically I'm thinking that it might be because I run with a lot of bear tanks, who hit the armor cap early. I will ask the protadins and warrior tanks about this. The other thing to point out is that in the content where a great deal of the damage is magic damage, armor buffs do not matter.
I think what I was specifically wanted to address was that any healing class who can proc an armor buff should not rely on that as one of the amazing things they bring, especially priests who have PoM, and CoH to bring to the table, binding heal (yeah, not just for pvp anymore), as well as a wide range of situational heals. I was more concerned that anyone who would mention that first in the face of all the other far more useful reasons to bring a priest might need to know that raid leaders rarely build a heal team thinking "Oh yeah, and let's take priest/shaman xyz because they can proc an armor buff!" but they will frequently be thinking "Let's bring this priest (or these priests) because we need CoH and PoM plus the wide array of priest heals mixed in with pallies, shaman and druid heals."
Arbarius Dec 28th 2007 8:19PM
Yeah, exactly. It's a minor benefit, not a big deal, and shammys have it too. The proc will add somewhere around 9% to the time-to-live for the tank, which is nice and all but not usually a huge big deal compared to the importance of considering all the other raid buffs healers of different classes can bring, as well as the healing roles such as AoE, raid healing with chains or HoTs, and main tank healing.
Arbarius Dec 30th 2007 5:55PM
I just want to correct my previous reply to this. I said the proc on Inspiration would increase Time To Live by 9%. Actually it would be something like this:
Suppose tank has 16k armor, so their Time To Live is already about 255% of what it would be with 0 armor. The proc increases their armor to 20k, so now their Time To Live is about 290% of what it would be with 0 armor. So the relative amount of increase is 290/255 ~= 1.14, so the Time To Live went up by about 14% with the proc of Inspiration.
anonymoose Dec 28th 2007 5:03PM
"I personally think the fact that there are a lot of lame healing priests is because it's the "default" healing class and so people who don't necessarily do a lot of research and thinking might pick it, so you get a bunch of random people doing it who don't think it through. Also it seems to be popular as an alt class, and alt healers just aren't as good as people who do it all the time. Also, I'm not sure but I suspect that priests are just more complicated to do well because they simply have so many different healing spells and so it's easier for somebody not very experienced to just pick the wrong spells for a certain situation."
I'm not sure what I think of this, and certainly it can be situational based on your server. Personally I've seen more fresh new pallies than brand new priests. The challenges I've run into with priests are usually old school priests who still want to do things exactly the way they used to "back in the day" while the game around them has changed.
I can't vouch for priests being popular alts or anything else, I really don't know. I do know that with most folks still leveling shadow, but now to 70, the dramatic change from being a dps class to a heal class is huge. It used to be that someplace in the 50s people would change from shadow to heal spec, and then acquire gear and raid, so there was at least some lead in before assuming the heal role. These days I think I see more folks shadow clear to 70, switch and want to jump right into Kara.
The other thing that occurred to me today as I was playing my 20s level lock and leveling by turning in 2-3 quests (since they improved the xp gain rate) was by speeding up the leveling process (which is a good thing) we are decreasing the amount of time people get to familiarize themselves with the basics of class mechanics (which is a bad thing). This means, coming soon to your heroics and raids--fresh 70s of any class with very little time spent playing, and learning about the nuances of a class.
Arbarius Dec 28th 2007 8:19PM
Yeah, I leveled 1 to 70 as a holy healer, rarely did anything solo, and did a lot of instances along the way. This was easy because I was leveling with my brother - an arms warrior. But you're right, most people go through it all shadow. I think hard wiring your healing skills is really really important and it takes a lot of time to happen.
anonymoose Dec 28th 2007 5:08PM
"If you've got a smart priest and a stupid paladin, take the paladin ("Ok, find a mod that makes all your buttons invisible except FoL")."
Wow, I don't think I agree. My 2nd Kara ever, very early in TBC (I hit 70 very fast) we had a pally who refused to bless because we were "learning the content", and had never trained turn undead so he had to hearth out and head to the trainer. He also had a habit of doing that "falling hammer" thing at the start of a pull before the tank could tag a mob, so spent a great deal of time dead and not healing OR when he wasn't doing that was so convinced he was god's gift to healing that he would attempt to heal the whole raid and forget his primary target...the main tank.
Yeah, don't pick the stupid pally over the smart priest.
Arbarius Dec 28th 2007 8:26PM
LOL yeah. Stupid anything in a raid - not good. You're prolly better off just taking a smart DPS instead of a stupid healer.
Neg Jan 9th 2008 11:31AM
Sorry, but you're missing the point.
"The key to Burning Crusade raiding is variety"
Eh no ? With the introduction of 25 man raids it became a mather of covering your needs (tank/raid healing while maximising the amount of buffs.
You clearly do this with a 3 pally, 3 resto shaman, 1 resto drood, 1 priest setup (where 4 shamans and 0 droods could be used also, but then you always need a feral drood with imp MotW.)
Are droods/priests bad heal classes ? no, absolutely not. But you dont need all the fancy stuff they bring to the raid. Tank healing is covered by pallies and raid healing by shamans, thats the basic need of a raid and that's covered.