Raid Rx: Adapting to healer deaths without combat resurrection
by Matt Low 
Jun 3rd 2011 at 4:00PM
Just a quick heads up for healers: If you haven't visited Plus Heal in a while, do check it out, as it has undergone a facelift. If you've registered there in the past, you'll need to re-register, because user information was not able to be transferred.
On to this week's post. This is a classic case study for healing leaders and handling player deaths -- healer deaths, to be specific. In this case, I goofed up big time. We were tackling the heroic version of Atramedes. There are two ways that this encounter can be done:
We went for the second option. I split the healers up, four in one direction and three in the other. Somehow I ended up with three priests on one side and a mix of shaman, druids and paladins on the other. I wasn't thinking properly; for Leap of Faith reasons, I wanted at least two priests on that one side.Option 1: Move everyone together as a single unit.
Option 2: Split the raid in half and assault Atramedes on both sides.
So what else happened?
The first part of the encounter went well. No major deaths. It wasn't until after the first air phase that we started running into a bit of trouble. One of the priests dropped; stacked up too much sound. But that's okay, because there were still two of us holding the line. Another air phase kicked in again, and I was doing the dance of disc dodging.
What's that over there? Oh no, another dead priest.
A quick health check on the boss showed the blind dragon had around 30% health left. I was entirely responsible for one side now. My goal was to keep as many players on my side alive as possible for however long it took to get through 30%.
Why didn't we use our combat resurrections? I think we popped them earlier on some of our DPS players. Not a great night, but we managed to hold it together until the dragon fell over. But good grief, I don't ever want to do that again. It wasn't the hardest healing I've had to do, but it was certainly taxing mentally.
What I should have done
I had no combat resurrections available. More time was spent desperately keeping my players alive amid all the sound damage that was going on. I caught the occasional bandage or two as players were doing their part in keeping themselves alive. There was no time for me to think, and for a guy who prepares like crazy in anticipation of different things that can go wrong in a fight, this wasn't one of them.
After looking back at it now, the most simplest solution would have been to play the Red Rover card and call Joe Perez or another healer from the other side to the side I was on to compensate for the healer deaths we suffered earlier on. That would have eased significant pressure from my shoulders. Granted, it would not have been sustainable in the long run, but the two of us just had to heal long enough for the boss to crash.
The other week, we discussed combat resurrections. But sometimes we can't use them because the players who can use those abilities are the ones who are down, or the combat limitations have already been used up (meaning we can't use them for the rest of the encounter).
So what can a leader do? Calling a wipe early to come back again with full strength is an option. The alternative is to just find a way to battle through it long enough to win. If you're setting up the assignments, know where every healer is and what they're up to.
Rearranging assignments
This is the first method. It has to be done extremely quickly and decisively. This involves directly telling a healer to stop what he's doing and focus on something else. For example, maybe you have a tank healer who just dropped. You realize you have a holy priest who is raid healing. The play here would be to tell the priest to stop what he's doing and shift to healing the tank that the dead healer was covering.
That move just bought additional time for your attempts.
The adjusted healer needs to close the physical gap between his position and the tank, so it helps to pay attention and know where key players on a fight are at all times. It wouldn't do to tell a player to heal a tank, only for them to come back without knowing where that tank is.
Be decisive. Don't overthink it. The more you think about it, the more time you waste, the lower the odds of success. Just commit to knowing you might be wrong and it won't work.
Use non-healers to heal
Have a balance druid? Maybe a shadow priest? How about an elemental shaman? Don't forget that these players can easily switch to healing roles at a moment's notice. You're moving a player from DPS to healing, but sometimes that's what is needed. Even though you lose out on their DPS, you've now got their limited healing abilities. Of course, their healing spells may not be as efficient or as potent as those of someone who is a dedicated healer. But if you think about it, in the situation you're in, you might not need them to heal the whole fight from 100% to 0. They only need to help you keep players alive for maybe half a minute to a minute.
Keep a mental list of players who you can depend on to specifically off-heal if you need it. Just because a class can heal doesn't mean the players behind the characters are suited for it. I know players who strictly play DPS classes and just aren't that comfortable or dependable when it comes to clutch situations like this.
A long-term plan
The two solutions above can help you and your raid in the short term. If your healers are consistently dying, you need to find out why and figure out a solution fast, or else you're going to end up with frustrated players who are bewildered at all the healer deaths. This might end up forcing you to stack an extra healer or two to counteract the deaths preemptively.
If you find yourself doing that, it's time to take a hard look at your healers.
Need advice on working with the healers in your guild? Raid Rx has you covered. Send your questions about raid healing to mattl@wowinsider.com. For less healer-centric raiding advice, visit Ready Check for advanced tactics and advice for the endgame raider.
Filed under: Raid Rx (Raid Healing)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
emberdione Jun 3rd 2011 4:19PM
The best raiders are the ones who can change on the fly. This is why vent is so powerful. This isn't just for healers either.
In my old guild this happened: (Copied from a blog post I wrote about it)
The guild goes into Naxx 25 for the first time. Gets to the first boss (Anub). Starts fighting. Right before the first insect swarm the warrior tank goes down. DK#1 flips on frost presence, taunts, and takes off running along the wall. Cheer! The raid is saved. Gets to other side, Off tank does his job with the add and here we go again.
Suddenly DK#1, hero of the hour, goes down. DK#2 flips to frost presence, taunts, and then takes off around the circle. (We have the boss at half health.) Someone laughs and says, hey, third and fourth DK, be ready. Not too long and the second DK goes down, and sure enough DK#3 took the raid leader seriously and immediately shifted to his new role, frost, taunt and run. In the real world this is called adaptive survival. You saw a need and shifted to fill it.
Back to the story. DK#4 gets his chance to be a hero, and the boss is getting pretty low. Suddenly the off tank dies and there is an add slaughtering the raid. The two warlocks, as a team, start scorching bursting the add to get aggro and kiting him around the room into the frost mage’s aoes, effectively locking them down.
Then DK#4 goes down, with the boss at 2%. Bad-a-- mr. pvp rogue steps in, pops evasion and tanks the boss just long enough for the mages and warlocks to burn him down. By this point all the ret pallys and elemental shamans are healing. Anu goes down with 8 of 25 raid members standing. Now any hard core raiding group would hate to be a part of this story. But for us, it is the thing of Legends and we talk about it all the time. If a raid leader shouts out in the middle of a raid to switch to x. Know your class well enough to switch. (end)
I think one of the important parts about being a raid leader is having that mental list of who can switch on the fly best (as you said). It's why in Conclave our RL always puts the same two dps on Rohash, he knows that the other one can switch to being the stay behind if needed. As a good raider, you want to be on this mental list, doing whatever it takes (even if it means not topping the almighty charts) to get the kill.
The Dewd Jun 3rd 2011 5:01PM
It's a war of attrition in cases like that and mad props to everyone in that raid who pulled more than their weight. Not only is that why it's important to have voice chat of some sort but also to know your raid members.
We had a similar situation back in Naxx (10) on Heigan. Our guild's first kill resulted after a crazy holy priest with insane mana regen and myself (feral kitty) burned the last 30% on our own. We slowly lost people through both the fight and the dance until it was just the two of us left and it was our last try of the night. We could have just given up, called it, and tried again some other time but Heigan doesn't hit very hard and with only two people to heal, it was probably easier than trying to solo-heal an entire raid. I had tanking experience (I was pretty much the #3 tank in the guild back in Kara days) and a decent hybrid spec and the extra run speed boost talent made the dance phase easy.
Regardless of if it's healers, tanks, dps, whatever, if you know your raidmates you know what they're capable of and a tightly-knit group will pull through sometimes, even if the boss dies to a bubbled Holy Paladin who is the only one left swinging at the end.
Xayíde Jun 6th 2011 8:40AM
Warlocks scorching? How do you dare?! We inflict Searing Pain to generate threat, Scorch is a filthy mage's ability. =P
Dr. Rocketscience Jun 3rd 2011 5:24PM
"Most simplest"? You can writing lots good English. :P
mitch_b_666 Jun 3rd 2011 6:00PM
Better than you i think xD
vegetto375 Jun 3rd 2011 6:22PM
I have a similar story. I enter a PUG who were mostly guildies (about 6 of them) who I had pugged with before the rest were me a friend of mine and two others. We entered ICC and decided to go 3 healers, made it pass Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, the Gunship Battle, and finally we made it to Saurfang. We decided to 2 heal this fight so we can have more dps so the druid healer goes boomkin and the priest and me a resto shaman stay to heal.
The fight stars and not even 30 seconds into it the priest dies. For some reason we either couldn't, wouldn't or simply didn't brez him despite the fact of the boomkin and my feral kitty friend. And so it begins the one most intense healing fight I had ever done, now note that I pug cause I'm not a hardcore raider nor my guild raids. I popped everything my mana trinket my mana sprring totem use a mana potion and my clicking buttons on my healbot like crazy.
When Saurfang is about less than 5% left and my mana is gone I yell to my friend who was in the same room as me to intervate me and we finsh the fight the only one who died was the priest and everyone cheers. As cool as it is to know that I save us from a sure wipe I'll be more than happy to not have that happen again
GhostWhoWalks Jun 3rd 2011 7:10PM
I've certainly had some similar experiences in the new Zul-heroics. If the tank or healer dies and the boss is at less than half, do we kill ourselves and try again fresh? No way: pop those cooldowns, summon Army, and just lay into the boss to try and burn him down as fast as we can while using self-heals to keep ourselves alive. Sometimes we lose anyway, but often we just barely win.
http://youtu.be/e-VMTIPwk74
Goodk4t Jun 3rd 2011 8:08PM
Several times I had to tank on my DPS Death Knight or on my Rogue or heal on my Elemental Shaman. The most recent was today, while doing Zul Gurub: we were at last boss, Jin'do, at phase 2... last chain, healer dies, tank dies... the warrior taunts the berserker, switch to defensive stance and manage to have it to slam the chain so we can dps it... then dies. I am the only person left alive and I see a mob of ghosts coming at me. Oh shit!! I misdirect to my pet, send him to the other corner of the room and multi-shot the ghosts. As they ravage my poor wolf to pieces, I burn everything I had left to take down the chains. I won't lie, I thought about using Feint Death, save myself and start the fight all over again. I am glad I didn't...
caddydotcom Jun 5th 2011 8:07AM
On my hunter, I do love watching the tank die, because it gives me an opportunity to dismiss my pet and bring out my lava turtle. It's saved the dungeon more than a couple of times already.
What is really a shame is that healers generally don't have pets on their grid. Sure, it doesn't matter in the fight due to the pets' general resilience to AOE damage and great self-healing, but when push comes to shove and I have to switch out to a more tenacious pet, I really wish healers would adapt and start healing it instead.
ToxicPopsicle Jun 6th 2011 2:59AM
I feel that Cata has somewhat limited the ability for classes to switch on the fly to help the raid. Frost/Unholy DKs miss out on a lot of damage reduction, self healing, and crit reduction that Blood DKs get, so it's sadly less effective for them to try and salvage the encounter after a tank dies. The same goes for a Fury/Arms warrior popping a sword and board on. They pretty much have Shield Block up and then they go down. Sure, that's sometimes all it takes, but it's nowhere near as effective as it was in WotLK.
The same can be said for hybrid classes that can heal. With passive mastery and talents, the heals Boomkins, Ele shamans, and Shadow priests throw out aren't nearly as effective as they used to be (Tranquility aside, really. Have you seen those Feral Tranquility heals? Hawt). I remember on our first runs through Chimaeron, we had our ele shamans drop Healing Rain and our Shadow Priests spam Holy Nova. Initially, it helped, but then they wound up running out of mana to DPS, and we'd wipe from deaths in the Mortality phase.
Personally, I miss player being able to effectively switch on the fly. The new healing design makes it sadly ineffective for hybrids to switch to heals, and less possible for a DPS to switch to a tank.