Raid Rx: Start ranking on healing without even trying
by Matt Low 
Jan 13th 2012 at 7:00PM
It was a Thursday night. For the past few weeks, I've done Ultraxion as shadow for additional DPS time. I'm usually the swing player who can spec into both healing and DPS. Mind you, I'm not the great at shadow. This time around, we were using five healers on Ultraxion because our other regular healer wasn't able to make it that day. On 25-man, Ultraxion has six healing crystal buffs. Using five healers meant that one of the crystals would not be in use. I opened up with red crystal before sneaking the blue crystal later. I think this was the second or third time I've actually healed Ultraxion.
Alas, I was not able to catch our resident holy paladin, who aced me on the meters again. One of these days, I will catch him. I don't have a clue how. Circle of Healing and Prayer of Mending used on cooldown while dropping Prayer of Healing nukes every chance. I'm even waiting until the last possible second on Hour of Twilight before triggering the phase out (which is very dangerous, mind you, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you have the dexterity and reflexes of a hockey goalie).
It wasn't until well after the raid that I noticed we used only four healers on that encounter. Looks like our other priest didn't get the memo and stayed shadow the entire time.
Eventually, your raiding group will reach a stage where you can simply heal full tilt. You can take shortcuts and bigger risks that lead to additional payoffs (like quicker raids and personal satisfaction from ranking, for example).
If you're anything like me and have been healing in this game for over three years, you might be looking at different ways to challenge yourself and your raid. Maybe you get bored of doing farm content for the week. Maybe you weren't able to do that progression boss you wanted because a key player you were counting on slept in or couldn't make it.
Aside from healing with fewer players, one fun method would be to find ways to boost specific players on certain encounters so that they have a good showing.
Disclaimer: Don't actually try to cheese anything if you're working on progression bosses, though. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're trying to do something specific.
Now, when I'm referring to ranking, I don't just mean on the parses of individual healing meters that your raid has running like Recount or Skada. I mean ranking globally across the world, your region or your server. World of Log has a page displaying the top healers for each encounter which can be sorted by difficulty and raid size. You can even view it by class to see where you stack up against players who play the same class as you.
Let me give you a few example bosses.
Alizabel
I'll use the latest Baradin Hold boss as an example. We decided to go in there with just four healers. Three of us were going to be Atonement, while the last player was a holy paladin. So just for kicks, we wanted to boost him and see how high we could go. We figured three glyphed Power Word: Barriers and stacking up during the spinning phase would do the job. We planned for three spinning phases, but in actuality, we only had two. We dumped Power Infusion on our paladin every moment we stacked up and intentionally took extra damage to boost that level of healing.
Morchok
Waltzing into Dragon Soul, you'll see this guy standing in your way before you can enter Wyrmrest. Now, during the phase where he puts up Black Blood of the Earth, most raid groups simply run out on it. But if you have the cooldowns for it, you can actually stay in. You might not have the cooldowns to stay in more than once, though, so plan ahead and figure out which cooldowns will need to be used (I'm guessing it's going to be all of them). Remember that you want to maximize your healing going out.
If I have three wounded players in group 2 and five wounded players in group 3, I'm going to target group 3 first with that Prayer of Healing. Stick to the basics. You're not doing anything new or advanced. You're applying straight brute force. You're bypassing one mechanic that normally would've been lethal a month ago to most raid groups. Your raid should have some extra gear and such now, minimizing the risk even further.
While you won't be able to boost everyone, there should be sufficient damage going around for every healer to really chip in. If you want, you can stack the raid group in terms of buffs and feed a specific healer different cooldowns to help increase their output.
Ultraxion
I mentioned Ultraxion earlier in the introduction, but I'll talk about him here again. You can hypothetically use four healers for it in a 25-player raid. Personally, I started off with a red crystal first before aiming for the blue one. The red crystal increases my healing. When it got to the point where the blue crystal had spawned, I had about 25% of my mana remaining. Perfect timing to get the haste and mana cost reduction buff. That's how I tried to boost my own personal healing.
But alas, not good enough to catch said holy paladin. I think I even broke a sweat. One of these days, I will crush a paladin, though.
Anyway, if you're still wondering about the point of the exercise, it's not just to increase your standings. That's part of it. Playing this game for so long and doing the same job like healing means that you'll be experiencing signs of boredom and complacency when working on normal mode bosses. You don't have to stand in every bad fire, and I sure as heck don't condone it when you're actually trying and working on stuff.
But after you've killed Morchok for the 15th time, it does get a little stale. You can afford to be a little risky in some areas. Just choose wisely and make sure you have a team that can back you up.
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 2)
Matthew Jan 13th 2012 7:02PM
Why are you comparing classes with healing meters?
muffin_of_chaos Jan 13th 2012 7:22PM
Try to keep up.
Saeadame Jan 13th 2012 7:27PM
'Cause it's fun, as long as it IS all in good fun. It's like in a raid group where everyone has fantastic DPS. Does it matter that the moonkin clocked in at 14.5% of the damage and the shaman at 14.4%? Not really, but - again, provided it's all in good fun - the moonkin could rib the shaman about "beating him." A friendly competition. This is the same concept - fights are on farm, and they're boring, so healers can have a fun time taking risks to see how high they can boost their HPS, either individually or as a whole.
togaman5000 Jan 13th 2012 7:32PM
I had the same question. Most healers heal to escape the DPS mentality that is being championed in this article. Purposefully wasting mana just to look better on meters is a surefire way to look childish and to get yourself booted out of any serious progression-focused raiding team.
Quidamtyra Jan 13th 2012 9:10PM
So far the comments I see are getting angry at Matticus for wanting to have some fun in a raid... He never said he stopped doing his job in a raid to beef up his numbers, and he never said that you should, either. It's simply a few suggestions to make the same eight boss fights a little more interesting and engaging.
@Togaman5000
There is a disclaimer in there specifically saying not to fuck around if you're going for progression kills... and honestly, if you have to be told not to fuck around during progression, that's on you.
togaman5000 Jan 14th 2012 12:06AM
Quid - The issues I referred to are partly from my own guild's problems, specifically we had raiders finding it funny to equip Glaives or Shadowmourne just to out-dps other players with far inferior weapons. It was unbecoming of the players and a poor representation of the guild. Progression or not, actions speak volumes. With the circles I run with, the tactics posed in this article would be, at best, poorly received.
Stilhelm Jan 14th 2012 10:59AM
So if you had a player with Glaives during BC, or Shadowmourne during Wrath, you'd want them to *not* use those legendaries so they don't out-dps the players with inferior weapons by so much, especially in a serious progression-focused raid team?
Wiedmaier Jan 14th 2012 12:13PM
My favorite time in Wrath was seeing how much of my banana set (t1), I could wear and still heal random heroics with. Then a tank friend of mine flipped it to see how well he could do with his t2. It was a refreshing change of pace. This isn't much different. When you're on farm, comfortable with the fights and have a guild who raids without clenched sphincters, these cheese methods are good clean fun.
Kcaz64 Jan 15th 2012 4:36AM
Stilhelm... he has raiders NOW using shadowmourne and outdpsing raiders using dragon soul gear. They're using inferior weapons (1 or 2 expansions ago) and still outdpsing raiders.
To be honest, that shows that your dps are bad. That's something that has to be fixed. If their DPS is that bad, they're wasting everyone's time.
Wist Jan 17th 2012 1:58PM
Matthew isn't wrong, though. We've got this really mouthy druid in our guild that loves to harp on healing meters; about her uptime, her healing, rankings and all. But she's on raid healing, and those of us doing solo target tank healing can't match those numbers even if we could afford to throw away the mana we'd need to do so. She's even gone so far as to cast aspersions on my healing during Phase 1 of Deathwing - you know, the phase when most of the incoming damage is easily healing and raidwide anyway (I say most because those tentacles are still a bitch if people are grouped).
Yeah, if it's all in good fun, it's no problem. But it's beyond that. It's starting to be considered the basis for recognition in the raid. Honestly, it's really starting to piss me off. Forget the meters. Just do your job and be satisfied with that.
AltairAntares Jan 22nd 2012 12:46PM
I don't look at healing meters (in and of themselves) to say one person is better than the other, but I do enjoy competitiveness, and it's what prevents things from going stale for me (whether the person I'm competing against knows it's happening or not :P ).
People take things way too seriously. It's a game, make sure you're actually having fun.
jjustaposter Jan 13th 2012 7:07PM
I just run my alt with terribads. bam top 50 healing every kill.
Shrikesnest Jan 13th 2012 8:23PM
Or, zip up your pants, put the measuring tape away and do your asterisk percent ampersand job. Whichever makes you happiest, I guess.
matt Jan 13th 2012 8:44PM
I don't believe he is suggesting that you shirk your responsibility in order to top meters. What folks who don't heal may not know: farm fights aren't that fun for us. When you run your guild or at least the heal team (as Matt does) you can run some stunts like this to have a laugh and see if you can get ranked for the week on WoL.
He is pretty clear not to do stuff like this during progression and I can't imagine piping up in vent during a try-out with a new guild to suggest this stuff. Its fun let's not take ourselves so seriously as to assume that Matt is some sort of reckless idiot. The man knows what he is doing and is giving you the credit of assuming you know when it is and is not appropriate to play around with meters.
s0fa_king Jan 13th 2012 8:48PM
Man, looking at those WoL rankings makes me think that shaman healing--even with all of the buffs and encounter design-- is still way, way behind all other healing specs. I'm pretty much only doing LFR these days, and I'm usually top 3 if not number 1 on most fights. But damn. Those charts are depressing.
thontor Jan 13th 2012 10:01PM
looks like shamans do pretty well on Blackhorn, Spine and Madness
jcompguy Jan 13th 2012 10:37PM
Protip: if the content is so easy you're purposely doing the fight wrong to rank on healing meters, do more difficult content.
No one cares who's ranked what on normals.
Artemisian Jan 14th 2012 12:22AM
Has it occurred to you that there may be other reasons for doing normals? For example, a reason given in the article was a raider missing, or perhaps DPS are having difficulty with an aspect of the fight. A bored healer doesn't always just get to skip ahead.
Joe Ego Jan 13th 2012 11:52PM
What happens when you're already at the top of your game?
My 25man casual group shorted healers (really short) frequently because our healers were great but the raid as a whole wasn't progressing on hard modes.
Many guilds solo healed Heroic Valithria just because they could. That fight made the whole raid accountable for doing it right and let them get through a farm boss faster with a little more fun.
By definition, players who are playing this sort of meta game are skilled enough at the regular game to know all about those particular encounters and defeat them properly. This is a game, not some silly test of rote execution.
Sinderion Jan 13th 2012 11:55PM
As a long time and frequent reader of wow insider, I would like to appologize to the OP for about 75% of the above comments.
Sometimes people just dont bother reading the article, or, once they've found the idea they're going to attack, don't go back and make sure there was really something there to whine about in the first place.
The story isn't about healing meters, anyone fixating on that has probably recently just been picked on for underperformance on meters. This was most likely due to something they knew was their fault but all they can do is QQ. Maybe you're the one that rly has to get over it?
Try something harder? rly? some ppl have higher priorities than being on top content. sometimes the cost of doing harder things is much too high. Switching guilds, servers, and devoting WAY more time to boringness. Yes, you know it, and I know it, world firsts and such are, like most great accomplishments, some small percentage skill, and somewhere near 99% dealing with the boringness and frustration of other peoples learning processes. Why not just make the most of what you have with the people whos company you enjoy?
This article is a nicely presented set of experiences in trying to squeeze as much fun as possible out of a great game. In other words, siezing the day, no more, no less.
TL;DR: Carpe Diem, less qqing(I'd put that in latin too but... y'know... idk latin... especially forumspeak latin)