Hi guys! A message from your friendly neighborhood resto druid here.
(see me? I’m doing VuhDo!)
Ok, Cataclysm’s been out for a while and some of you may have noticed healers rerolling as DPS, or complaining a lot, or just sitting in a corner weeping quietly into their tea. Maybe you have noticed. Maybe you laughed, or felt lost, wondering what exactly is going on.
It’s up to all of us to prevent healer burnout! If you’re a raid leader, you’ll want to watch closely for this. Find one of your healers who you can count on being honest with you and ask. Chances are your healers are sharing their complaints amongst each other and she’ll have her finger on the pulse of the heal team. Even if your heal team is two people, it’s important to know.
For everyone else, even people who just run a dungeon now and then, there’s things you can do. Simple things. Things that will make your healer love you.
Buff Up: What buffs do you bring, and do they stack with everyone else’s? If you’re a paladin and there’s a druid in group, give Might. If you’re a lock and there’s no priest, can you pull out your imp for the stamina bonus? Hunters, what does your pet bring to the fight? Focus Magic/Dark Intent – Resto druids will kill for these buffs, and they’re not too shabby for other healers either.
Take responsibility for your own health. Out of combat, eat some food. In combat, if you use a bandage, Gift of the Naaru, or some class ability to regain health, your healer will love you. Paladins? Word of Glory on yourself. All the time. Let’s do this. Spriests? A quick Power Word Shield at the right time can really take the stress off the healer. Say Baron Ashbury just got done asphyxiating you – toss on a shield and go back to dps. Most classes have some ability to help heal themselves. Even mages can glyph Evocate to return heals.
Help dispel. I can’t say this enough. Know what you can dispel, what your healer can dispel, and watch for it. Short version: Curses: mages, druids, shaman. Disease: priest, paladin Poison: Druid, Paladin. Magic effects: all healing classes, Shadow priests.
If you are in heroic SFK, and you’re a mage and you have a priest healer, when you get to the last boss, remove those damned Cursed Bullets. They are basically impossible to heal through right now, but easy as pie if you just remove them. Please, please remove them.
Interrupt Abilities: Every ability that is interruptable, should be. This is something Reversion is really big on. The more things get interrupted, the less damage the tank and everyone else takes. Most melee classes have 10-second-cooldown interrupts. Use them all the damn time. I don’t care if it hurts your dps; it helps the fight more than words can say.
Stun Things: See ‘interrupts’.
Debuff the Boss: Like the above. It interferes with your perfect rotation a tiny little bit, but that Faery Fire really helps out. Know what debuffs you have and bring them. If you don’t know, make like a mongoose and go and find out.
Related topic: remove enrage effects wherever you can. Druids, hunters, and rogues can all remove enrages. It might take a while to learn what one looks like. This will reduce the damage the tank is taking.
Mages, don’t forget Spellsteal! Any time a mob has something cool, steal it and use it to kill him!
Don’t Stand In Bad -I think that says it all
Crowd Control: If there are five mobs in a group and you control one until at least one of the other four is dead, you have reduced the amount of damage incoming at any one time by 20% (Rev: It is actually almost 25% assuming you are single targetting things down and you CC one target for the whole fight. I will do the math in anothre post.). That’s equivalent to healing that amount of damage for the same length of time – so congratulations, mages, you just joined team healer! I know this can be tricky to do, especially if the tank doesn’t believe in crowd control, but ask pretty much any healer and she’ll tell you, crowd control is awesome and amazing. If you crowd control a healer, it usually shortens the duration of the fight noticeably, so you’ll make your daily heroic run faster – much faster than just aoe’ing would be!
Help with Aggro: Yeah, this helps the healer! The tank is designed to take big hits. The warlock is not. If the warlock is taking hits, the healer has to either let him die or keep him alive and too often, that drains our mana. So if you can misdirect onto the tank, drop aggro, or otherwise help out, please do so.
Move Faster: So you are moving out of the bad stuff… Good for you. But you probably can move out of it faster. Most things are timed so that if you move the instant something appears you will take no damage at all. If you reguarly are taking damage from things you can move away from you need to move faster.
Look, most of this is common sense and I might not be telling you anything you don’t know: but it’s easy to forget and pick up bad habits. For whatever reason we healers are way too willing to put up with a bad tank or bad dpsers not doing this stuff. We shouldn’t, and that’s our responsibility, but just know that even if your healer doesn’t say anything, she probably is really appreciating it when you do these things.
Oh. Yes. And mages? Please always give me mage food. I promise to throw out a table when I’m maging, too.
/steals the murloc doll and replaces it with a melee dps
Probably my biggest two irritants right now are the take responsibility for your own health and the help with debuffs. I can’t count the number of times we’ve been between pulls, have mage food, and still the dps stand around at half health while I’m sitting there happily munching some cake because I have to have mana to heal them on the next pull when they once again stand in front of mobs, pull aggro, or both. And I cringe whenever we get a random ret pally, because a good number of them do not cleanse themselves or bother to use Word of Glory on themselves.
See how I only said themselves? I would be happy if they JUST cleansed themselves. Going out of their way to cleanse others would be icing on the cake.
Bottom line – identify what abilities you have that bring utility to your groups and learn how to use them. Yes, that is somewhat counter to doing max dps, but it is IMPORTANT. You can’t dps if you’re dead, and if you tunnel-vision dps over everything else, I’m likely to only heal you if no one else needs any.
I couldn’t agree more, I once remember asking a paladin to cleanse poisons in a OK run. They were ret and gave me a bunch of lip because he didn’t want to bother with it. I decided after that I didn’t want to be bothered healing either. >.<
Cleansing is seriously important. If a Ret pally doesn’t use decursive, then they’re more fail than fail (does that make sense?). I try to hit it no-matter-what whenever it dings at me. Usually, someone else gets there first, but I do try. And all the more so since analogue pointed out in one of our many runs of Lost City that there is a lot of poison damage in there.
As far as self-healing goes… On my mouse with a 12 button keypad on the side… Right under my thumb is Holy Radiance – hitting all the time when available, and just below that is Word of Glory. I may swap those two as the mana cost of HR is kind of steep, although that really hasn’t been a problem. HR may not help the raid all that much, but in my view, anything that heals everyone even a little bit is worth using. Especially with all we hear about the healing being so difficult.
I think the problem with most ret pallies, is that they want to be on the top of the damage meters (where we used to be). There was an interesting article about that on WOW Insider. We’re just not going to be there for awhile, if ever again. We’re back to our original role of strong-damaging raid support. I can deal with that as long as we don’t go back to the Kara days of nobody wanting a ret along…
My damage dealing has suffered considerably with the repentance, self-healing, and decursing duties, but I can deal with that as long as leads (party and raid) remember that I’m trying to do a whole lot more than I used to have to do, and my damage-dealing will suffer because of that.
Useless comments here I’m sure as any ret pallies that read this blog are probably already doing all this, but just in case… We have a new job description ret pallies, learn it and live it!
From a healer perspective I’d prefer Ret pallies use Word of Glory on themselves to using HR. HR just doesn’t make a dent in the party’s health, while a ret pally can pretty much keep himself alive with WoG once he gets good. That takes a huge burden off me as a healer. Melee folk take so much splash damage these days…
Change will be made when the game comes back up. Thanks for your input.
“I don’t care if it hurts your dps; it helps the fight more than words can say.” Some classes (warriors and mages, that I can think of offhand) have talents to do MORE damage after they successfully interupt a spell.
Fury warriors also have built-in self-healing. Hopefully as healers get used to not always having to top off the melee, that will be useful and not just the overhealing that it is now.