Loving the expansion. The dungeons are hard. Nicely hard. So far the only person I have heard saying how easy they were is a cocksure tank whose boast were not quite loud enough to drowned out the whimpering that was his healer, over in the corner, rocking back and forth moaning ‘oom… oom’.
FYI to all tanks, if you think you are doing great but your healer is a nervous wreck then you are not as good a tank as you think you are.
But this one is not about tanks… or rather it is not ONLY about tanks. I just read another blog that had a nice description of some of the trials of these new runs. It mentioned that they wiped a lot due to OOM but that she thought they had actually covered for some lesser experienced players. No offense to the other blogger but those statements are a contradiction.
The healer’s mana is everyone responsibility
There is a lot of damage in these runs. LOTS of it… however, a huge proportion of it is avoidable. It is up to every single person in the run to do their part in avoiding it. Anything less and you get OOM heals and a graveyard run. These new runs will require everyone to learn all the little tricks of their class that they never had to learn before. Everyone should recite this mantra, ‘there is ALWAYS something more that I PERSONALLY can do to make the run better’.
Breaking the habit
I have now done every run on non-heroic and many of them several times. I have done all my runs with good players. They were mostly long time players with alts and varied experience. But even running with high class players I STILL see things they are not doing or not doing well enough. For example there are lots of things mobs do to us that are interruptible casts but very few people are interrupting them. The attitude of ‘just DPS as hard as you can’ is very very hard to shake. I know we did not really need CC in the last expansion, but it is much more than that. We needed almost none of the extra tricks DPSers could do and hence no one remembers they have them.
Learning the true meaning of Christmas helping the party
I always found discussions ironic and funny about ‘tanks versus dps’ or when people were whining about DPS not getting respect. I lost count of how many times some mage would say something like, ‘I do more than just dps, when at add comes after the healer I frost nova it and blink away.’ I just wanted to pound my head on the table and shout ‘That is not helping!’ I didn’t usually because it took too long to explain the reasons why that was a bad idea.
There are things DPS can do to help. Lots of things. Very few dps seem to know what they are or when to use them or how. This is not surprising. We have not really needed those tricks. How many druids here know where your hibernate button is and that it works on dragonkin? Just yesterday a VERY solid kingslayer boomkin had to go find it in her spell book because she had never used it. How many hunters here know that distracting shot is a ‘forced attack’ and works VERY well with frost trap to CC stuff by pulling it out of the melee? A couple runs back I taught that trick to an outstanding hunter that had played one since vanilla beta. This is not to toot my horn. I only know a few tricks, mostly from classes I have played a lot. There are lots out there.
I find myself in runs where over half the classes have spell interrupts or silences but I seem to be the only one using them. I probably missed seeing some of them, but that is not my point. My point is that even very good players need to be racking their brains and burning up the internet for more tricks and tips on what THEY can do to make the fights better. Learn more CC tricks. Dig through your spellbooks for long forgotten abilities and see what they can do. And…
DON’T STAND IN THE FIRE!
As I said above most of the damage is avoidable. Some of it is only BARELY avoidable so you have to move fast. We need to hit ourselves in the head every time we find ourselves doing our rotation while standing in the bad.
Speak up
I have said in the past that more people need to be willing to point out the mistakes of others. I really believe that you don’t learn to play better until something pushes you or someone gives you a tip. I have learned plenty that way and I like to think I have offered a lot of helpful advice that way. And now is truly the time for it. There are so very many things in these instances that need to be pointed out to people. If you see someone doing something wrong please tell them. It is not being a jerk, it is being helpful (if you say it nicely). If someone can’t handle being told not to stand in that stuff then you should not be running with them anyway. And don’t assume because someone is a good player that they don’t have room for improvement.
Listen
This goes for all of us. There are always more tricks to learn and more skills to get. There are always new ways to use the skills we already have. If you think you can do more, ask. If someone makes a suggestion, listen.
Earn it
Some DPS whine that tanks and heals don’t give them enough respect… Time to go earn it. I don’t care what your meter looks like. If you are standing in the flaming whirlwind while not using your interrupts, mitigation moves, stuns, et cetera then trust me, it is not the healer’s fault she has no mana.
Do you die a lot? Maybe swap in a tanking trinket for a mitigation cooldown. Or grind some first aid. If the healer is leaving your health low he might have decided you are too expensive and expendable to heal up. So pop a bandage and a potion and help him out. Above all you should be focusing on getting your skill at avoiding damage up. In fact you should be focusing on that concept more than you focus on getting better gear.
Now tanks and dps say it with me all together, “The healer’s mana is my responsibility.” Put it on a post-it note and stick it to your screen. Tattoo it on the back of your mouse hand. Learn it, know it, love it.
“FYI to all tanks, if you think you are doing great but your healer is a nervous wreck then you are not as good a tank as you think you are.”
If I were staying in this whole new WoW (to me – just back for a month after 2 years, and having seen what’s become of the community mindset, not a day more)…
…if I *were* staying in this whole new WoW, I’d make that into a bumper sticker. And a badge. And baseball caps. And pink ribbons. And and and… you get the idea. XD
❤
Hmm, perhaps you just need a different community? We changed servers and guilds a couple months back and wow, what a different it’s made.
Unfortunately, LFD makes me despise people. XD
The social implications of LFD, I see, have come home to roost. And pelt the roof with turds.
Bravo!!
I was especially moved by your “Speak Up” paragraph. I was in my 2nd run ever of Stonecore and we had a dps that was snarky, and sarcastic and rude. Rather than offering advice he would just say “ugh, why are you all just standing there not doing it right! L2P!!!”
I’m thinking “i’m just trying to keep people alive, what is avoidable that i’m doing and why is this guy being such a dick??”
I later find out on my next run, with an excellent tank, that I needed to jump to avoid a Quake spell. After learning this trick, I went no where near OOM. I think some people forget that these instances are new to people.
I hate to admit it, but as a healer my first 1-3 runs, I’m focused on healing bars and sometimes little else. I’m trying to make myself familar with incoming damage, learn the main mechanics of the fight and keep that freaking tank up ffs. 🙂
I know as I become more comfortable with the fights, things will get better – they already are.
“If you see someone doing something wrong please tell them. It is not being a jerk, it is being helpful (if you say it nicely).”
^^
“The healer’s mana is my responsibility.”
Love this line.
And I will admit finally, normal dungeons are rough as a healer, its stressful, but lots of fun, rather then the old Wrath faceroll.
I have only random’d once, but I got lucky and got into a group that knew Hall of Orig. So it was a relatively smooth run, no wipes etc.
And as far as that line goes, that not only means preventing incoming damage if possible, it also means helping out in ways that will save healer mana for important things. Mages can decurse, ret pallys can cleanse, etc ….
Reading this from a tank perspective I can only agree. Ultimately I believe a good tank is able to optimize the dps by making it easier for them (easy dps = dead mob faster) and also help the healer by helping with positioning and cooldowns.
My healers don’t run out of mana and I’ve been begged by a few groups to stay and run multiple.
/ego stroke 🙂
My top tips to healers from the tank perspective:
– Dont stand all the way in the back, come closer! This gives me room to reposition mobs without running out of range and it faster for me to pick mobs up if ever one dares look at you and head your way.
-Moving quickly may make the difference between life and death for me. Keep and eye on me to check where I’m at.
-Don’t spam! The few times I saw healers run out of mana were healers spamming like crazy as if it was Wotlk.
As a tank there is a lot we can do to perserve the healer’s mana and keep the dps on task. However with all the new mechanics in fights we can’t single handedly do it. Not even with a good healer. There are piles and piles of fights now where there is nothing at all I, the tank, can do to keep the DPS out of the fire. Some few mechanics, moving the boss helps. But on many others it doesn’t help at all.
I totally agree that anything that the DPS can do to avoid damage needs to be done. Heals don’t oom because the boss hits hard its that they have too many heals they have to throw too fast. The slow cheap heals are the ones that need to be used and DPS help by avoiding damage.
In Cata mana conservation is all about the rate damage comes and good DPS help the group with that. I was in a pug run where the two other DPS died in the first 90% of boss life. The tank, heals, and I finished the fight, it took a while but the healer did not oom. MDing the adds to the tank and avoiding the boss abilities made it easy because the tank with the only one taking damage.
So far in Cata I have not seen a good healer oom when all the damage was focused on well prepared tank and that damage was spread out over a longer time with CC.
From a hunter point of view I love that we have to use more abilities. Trapping 2 mobs and sleeping a third on a tough pull is fun. Killing the last 5% of a boss alone by FDing, then MDing to a move commanded pet way the hell away and ping ponging the boss with distracting shot and shadowmeld was my highlight so far.
“So far in Cata I have not seen a good healer oom when all the damage was focused on well prepared tank and that damage was spread out over a longer time with CC.”
Right on. Me too. And I have seen fights where the tank needed almost no healing because of cooldown use, and repositioned the boss to give the dps places to stand and the good healer still went OOM because the dps took lots of damage.
Also from a ‘triage’ standpoint letting that one person that keeps taking hits just die is the difference between a healer going OOM and the healer ending the fight with half mana. One person that insists on standing in the fire makes all the difference.
That is another example of ‘there is always more to learn’. I have run into really good hunters that were great with their traps that still don’t know that you can frost trap two targets at the same time. Or that disengage is a great way to get out of the fire.
That pet ping pong move… totally epic. I wonder if my MD macro would default to my pet if the tank was present but dead… might have to add an extra line to it.
Gah! Now I want to level my hunter! Too bad I turned into such a tanking snob that I have to do it myself all the time 😛
[…] what of the second post? Well, Reversion over at LFM wants you to burn one phrase into your brain. Now tanks and dps say it with me all together, “The healer’s mana is my responsibility.” Put […]
The healer’s mana is my responsibility.
I hope i did okay last night. First time in a new dungeon is always hard, but i learned a lot, and hope we can do a lot more soon! Learned a bunch from this post and its replies already… Please keep em coming!
I think your deaths were due to not having as much gear as the rest of us – you had almost as few hit points as Karius and mages are supposed to be squishy. I’d have mentioned if you were totally failing over and over… and you did good on the Repentencing. Except when you Repented the sheep. I mean turtle.
lol
Yeah, that was actually kind of funny :). But still a mistake i shouldn’t have made. I’ll keep working on that!
And in my defense, that turtle did look guilty as hell, and imo needed to repent his sins
If I had a dollar for every frozen or repented sheep I’d ever seen, I’d have ….. $15.75. It happens because as the fight progresses dutiful cc’ers are trying to make sure that sheep doesn’t get loose before the tank is ready.
My favorite are when I hit the last guy with FFF to pull it and someone resheeps. Er… thanks… that was really being on the ball… now can I tank it? heh.
The healer’s mana is my responsibility!
No offense taken! Though I don’t see where the contradiction lies between “we wiped a bunch due to healer going OOM” and “some people were carried.” In fact, I think those go very naturally together: if we didn’t have to cover for mistakes on some group members’ parts, the healer wouldn’t have OOMed and we wouldn’t have wiped. Sure, we didn’t successfully cover for all the mistakes every time – thus the wiping. But we did get through the instance eventually.
I didn’t mean that had everyone been experienced we wouldn’t have had to do our part to save healer mana, just that if everyone had been experienced there would have been a little more breathing room and we wouldn’t have wiped so much. The goal should always be to play perfectly, but everyone makes mistakes; and in this sort of situation, you have a ceiling of the total number of mistakes the group can make in an encounter and still survive. It’s easy to visualize when you think of it as a filling meter, like Blood Power on H Saurfang.
When someone is making more than their share of mistakes – that is, more than (total mistakes the healer can handle)/5 – the rest of the group has to cover for them by making fewer mistakes. For example, at least one of our less experienced DPS would back out of the lasers instead of strafing out. Every time that happened, that was one or two fewer mistakes the rest of us could make before the Mistake Meter filled up and the healer was OOM. Covering or carrying does exist in this environment when one or two people make more than (mistakes you can live through ceiling)/5 – because if they weren’t being carried/covered for, that is if everyone was performing at their level, there’s no way they could clear the content.
I don’t mean to be overly harsh on the people making mistakes in that LCT run – the mistakes they were making were mostly matters of low twitch time and inefficient movement. Had we all been geared, their mistakes would have been livable, easily. It was just that because the group was mostly undergeared, the Mistake Meter was capped very low. Remember, when we went to LCT our gear and levels were such that I was the only one the dungeon finder would have allowed to queue for it. The healer didn’t have enough mana to cover for mistakes, but also didn’t have enough mana to let people who made mistakes die (because then he’d go OOM from sheer encounter length).
Excuse me, *high twitch time.
I thought I might not have made that line explicit enough. You are right for the most part in that by finishing the instance you clearly ‘carried’ successfully. By the minimum standard.
My point was that in this new expansion pretty much every wipe from OOM is a result of people not doing everything they can. Certainly gear helps but if there is a skill gap, can you are wiping from OOM then what people are not doing is probably the cause. No offence to you or your friends. Everyone is getting OOM wipes these days. My point was simply to directly tie lack of ‘raid awareness’ and OOM wipes. I.E. the more people stand in the fire (and other things) the more you wipe. The capacity to ‘carry’ people in this expansion is extremely small. Much smaller than before.
I am not trying to denigrate your particular run. I am just trying to establish the iron clad new rule that if you are having OOM wipes people are not doing what they should. On any run lots of OOM wipes means you are carrying someone, skill wise or gear wise or both. Or to put it another way, if someone thinks everyone is doing okay on their run, but they are wiping a lot to OOM, then they are incorrect; everyone is not doing ‘ok’.
In Wrath carrying someone implied, at least in my mind, that their being there did not significantly hinder the run. If there are a lot of wipes I see it more as ‘dragged’ than ‘carried’. Sorry to use your run as an example. It is certainly understandable that people with little to no raid experience are going to have a lot to learn this expansion. We all have some learning to do. I am trying to speed that learning up by clearly establishing that “OOM = the whole party failed”.
The old dynamic in a run was this:
-if the tank dies the healer failed
-if anyone else dies the tank failed
That dynamic is gone. It use to be mostly true and now it is only barely true.
The new dynamic is:
-If dps or heals die it is that person’s fault. (for standing in the bad)
-If the tank dies it is either the tanks fault or the healers fault
-If the healer goes OOM it is everyone’s fault for taking damage and/or the healers fault for not managing mana.
Obviously this new dynamic is not a handy ‘rule of thumb’ the way the old one was. The old dynamic was not always right but it was very often right. The new one is too complicated to cover everything to I just simplified the 3rd bullet point to “If the healer goes OOM it is everyone’s fault.” And then personalized it by rewording it to: The healer’s mana is your responsibility.
Not sure my wall of text made it clear…
“Though I don’t see where the contradiction lies between “we wiped a bunch due to healer going OOM” and “some people were carried.””
The contradiction as I see it was when you insert ‘successfully’
“we wiped a bunch due to healer going OOM”
versus
“people were successfully carried.”
Successful in that you finished, yeah.
Successful in that it was a smooth run with few wipes, not so much.
[…] in. For a sensible look on this from the healer point of view I strongly recommend you check out Reversion post over at […]
I know you wrote this back in Dec but I just wanted to slink by, late to the party, and say awesome post 🙂