Recently I put up a review of the Circle of Healing Podcast, a Priest-slanted healing podcast by Dawn Moore of WoW.com, Matt Low (a.k.a. Matticus of World of Matticus and WoW.com), and Jerome “Kinaesthesia” Phillips of the US guild Vodka.

At that time I felt that there were some wrinkles which needed to be ironed out, but that there was a lot of promise in the podcast. After a short break because Dawn apparently had some computer problems, they’re back and have released episodes 3 and 3.5 (a shortened one without Matt Low), and the website (http://www.circleofhealingpodcast.com/) has also gone live. Since the quality of these two episodes is way higher, I wanted to return to the subject and give them an updated review.

I had a couple of main criticisms at the time. The first was more technical, in that there were some issues with hearing the contributors and with them hearing each other, and the volume normalisation was a bit iffy in places (Kina was very loud, Dawn was very quiet). The second was that the discussion didn’t feel quite as smooth as I personally prefer, with contributors sometimes drifting off on tangents or seeming distracted.

I’m pleased to report that these last two episodes have really stepped things up a notch. The technical niggles have been sorted out now and everyone is clearly audible, and no one made my ears bleed when they spoke.
More importantly, the dialogue between all three (or two) contributors feels a lot more fluid. I personally feel that a podcast should, if not hide, then at least not draw attention to the fact that these people are sitting in different cities, states or even countries; the dialogue should flow as if they were sitting having a chat to each other (and with us). In these latter two episodes there’s some genuine three-way discussion happening, which makes the podcast come alive somehow.

I’ve also been really enjoying the content. It’s great to have a couple of high-end raiders on the panel in Dawn and Kina, and it’s nice to have someone whose raiding experience is more towards the average experience of the audience (with apologies to Matt, I couldn’t find a better way of phrasing that!) to represent another point of view. As I said in the previous review, these are people who play WoW and heal passionately and collectively they have a huge amount of knowledge they can share and this podcast is a great vehicle for it.

The last question I had about the podcast from episodes 1 and 2 was the question of where it was aimed: healing in general or Priests specifically. It’s pretty much settled on being a Priest healing podcast, with general healing topics being hit on as they crop up. That’s fine: I started this blog intending to be a healing generalist but ended up writing almost exclusively about Priests (although there’s some more general interest articles around the place) but it’s worth bearing in mind that if you’re not interested in in-depth discussions of Priest talent trees or mechanics you might be needing your fast-forward button a bit.

Anyway now the quality has stepped right up and the podcast is really hitting its stride, I’d unequivocally recommend that you go and check out the Circle of Healing Podcast, and submit your questions to the panel so Dawn, Kina and Matt don’t have to make up any more!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Circle of Healing Podcast

I have to confess I didn’t get around to much healing on the PTR in the last couple of days, spending most of my time soaking up the scenery and making mouseover macros. I did take myself off to Vashj’ir to do some levelling though.

I will try and keep the Cata posts generally more structured than this, but I’ll admit I’m excited enough to throw up a first impressions post early, so here it is.

This is based on build 12604, and may already be out of date, although I didn’t see anything in the spell diffs that contradicts what I’ve written here.

Graphics

From the moment I zoned in, standing in the middle of Orgrimmar, I was genuinely impressed with the graphics upgrade the game has been given. The art and design folks have done a great job of updating the models and textures for the buildings and scenery to make them look a bit less 2005 and more 2010. It’s certainly no Aion, but the game world does feel a lot more real than it used to.

The most striking difference is the water texture, which is a lot more realistic-looking and less regular, and such a massive difference I feel compelled to add a screenshot. I’m sure everyone’s been poring over the screenshots on MMO-Champion for months, but I haven’t so this is new and exciting to me. Allow me my moment!

Screenshot taken while flying over the Great Sea

Absorbs in the combat log

Here’s a nice change: the combat log finally handles absorbs properly.

First, an edited screenshot from the in-game combat log:

Combat log extract showing how PW:S is reported

And here’s an excerpt from the WoWCombatLog.txt file. They’re not of the same fight section but you get the idea. For those not adept at reading this form of combatlog, I’ve bolded the event type (e.g. SPELL_AURA_APPLIED) and the amount (e.g 8615)

7/28 20:26:57.008 SPELL_AURA_APPLIED, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 8615, 0, 0

7/28 20:27:07.839 SWING_MISSED, 0xF5309BEE000C9764, “Clacksnap Pincer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 320
7/28 20:27:08.171 SPELL_AURA_REFRESH, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 6678, 0, 0

7/28 20:27:09.920 SWING_MISSED, 0xF5309BEE000C9764, “Clacksnap Pincer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 377
7/28 20:27:10.096 SPELL_AURA_REFRESH, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 6301, 0, 0

7/28 20:27:11.934 SWING_MISSED, 0xF5309BEE000C9764, “Clacksnap Pincer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 424
7/28 20:27:12.081 SPELL_AURA_REFRESH, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 5877, 0, 0

7/28 20:27:24.145 SPELL_AURA_REFRESH, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 8615, 0, 0

[…]

7/28 20:27:54.141 SPELL_AURA_REMOVED, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 17, “Power Word: Shield”, 0x2, BUFF, 3789, 0, 0

What you can see in the second log extract is the way the information is handled and reported.

First the log shows me casting PW:S on myself (“SPELL_AURA_APPLIED”), and the size of the shield as the third from last number in the list (8615).

Then you can see the log reporting that the mob failed to do damage (“SWING_MISSED”) and the reason why (“ABSORB”), and the last number on the line is the amount absorbed (320, 377 and 424).
On the next line the Power Word: Shield is refreshed (“SPELL_AURA_REFRESH”) and the third figure from the end tells you how much absorption is left in the shield (6678, 6301 and 5877).

If you re-cast PW:S before it has been fully used up, as I did in the last line in the quote above, you get another SPELL_AURA_REFRESH line with the new value of the shield. As expected, shields don’t roll over their unused portion, hence this says 8615 again. (I miss the ICC buff!)

And if PW:S fades early, you also get a report in the in-game and text-based combatlogs telling you how much remained unused. (“SPELL_AURA_REMOVED” or “Malevica Power Word: Shield fades from Malevica. (3789 Remaining)”).

For a Disc Priest in particular this is fantastic news. Not only because now we can get correct credit for our contribution (for every situation where a pugger with Recount has shown us doing less healing than the Feral Druid, there’s a situation where WoL has given us credit for every Sacred Shield going, not to mention the fun we had on the Twin Val’kyr for a week or two…) but also because it opens the door for proper estimates of how much absorption is left on a given player.
I dream of adding another power bar to each player’s frame with a PW:S indicator analogous to their health bar. It’s a nice thought, anyway.

Power Word: Barrier

Malevica standing inside her Power Word: Barrier

Is just awesome. The absorb amount seems a little low at the moment, especially given the long-ish cooldown (3 minutes), but there’s plenty of time to change this before release if necessary. It’s essentially a holy version of the DK’s Anti-Magic Zone, and it looks like someone froze Holy Nova at it’s fullest extent and made it extra golden and sparkly. I hope this animation stays, because it looks spot on. And it’s very visible too.

It’s also nicely sized at around 15 yards from side to side: you do need to group up quite close to stay inside it, but you don’t need to be stacked too tightly to be comfortable, and the edge is pretty well-defined as you can see in the screenshot above. You also get a buff Power Word: Barrierapplied while inside which you could add to Power Auras or similar so it’s easy to see when you’re inside the area of effect.

One downside of PW:B is that unlike it’s single-target counterpart it doesn’t appear to report it’s absorb amount remaining in the combatlog. You get a SPELL_CAST_SUCCESS for the spell, and a SPELL_SUMMON when the PW:B is created, and you do get an ABSORB report with a value, but there’s no indication of how much is left, in contrast to how PW:S works.

Here’s another combatlog extract for your delectation. This log shows me putting a PW:B down, standing inside it, and letting a Zin’jatar Guardian and Zin’jatar Overseer hit me for a while. Again, I’ve bolded the events and amounts.

7/29 18:12:48.351 SPELL_SUMMON, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 0xF53081E0001AA61E, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0xa28, 62618, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2
7/29 18:12:48.701 SPELL_AURA_APPLIED, 0xF53081E0001AA61E, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2111, 0xF53081E0001AA61E, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2111, 81781, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2, BUFF
7/29 18:12:48.701 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A209001AA281, “Zin’jatar Guardian”, 0xa48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 384
7/29 18:12:49.679 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A24D001AA284, “Zin’jatar Overseer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 639
7/29 18:12:50.865 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A209001AA281, “Zin’jatar Guardian”, 0xa48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 456
7/29 18:12:51.523 SPELL_PERIODIC_MISSED, 0xF530A209001AA281, “Zin’jatar Guardian”, 0xa48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, 13445, “Rend”, 0x1, ABSORB, 238
7/29 18:12:51.687 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A24D001AA284, “Zin’jatar Overseer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 632
7/29 18:12:52.708 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A209001AA281, “Zin’jatar Guardian”, 0xa48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 424
7/29 18:12:53.707 SWING_MISSED, 0xF530A24D001AA284, “Zin’jatar Overseer”, 0x10a48, 0x01000000000A5496, “Malevica”, 0x511, ABSORB, 456
7/29 18:12:54.038 SPELL_AURA_REMOVED, 0xF53081E0001AA61E, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2111, 0xF53081E0001AA61E, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2111, 81781, “Power Word: Barrier”, 0x2, BUFF

Now the tooltip for PW:B is slightly confusing. Here’s a screenshot of the tooltip taken in-game:

In-game tooltip for Power Word: Barrier

The tooltip says “Absorbs 4784 damage done to friendly targets within it each time they take damage”. This suggests that every hit has 4784 damage taken off it, but in my testing the PW:B lasted 5.3s, and absorbed a total of 3229 damage spread over multiple hits before disappearing, not quite what the tooltip suggests. Perhaps there’s a bug with the numbers, but that top figure seems to be a per-person cap, rather than per hit.
The tooltip definitely needs some clarification.

I mean, clearly a 32k shield would be massively overpowered while solo, so there ought to be a cap, but 3-4k still seems a bit low to me, compared to 8.6k PW:S casts with effectively no cooldown.

The other downside, albeit a situational one since I was mostly levelling in Vashj’ir, was that it was a bit frustrating that PW:B, as a ground-targeted spell, was not especially useful while fighting in three dimensions. Sometimes it’s not convenient to drag mobs down to ground level to cast the spell.
Again, I don’t know how I’d solve this problem while still retaining the ease of use. Maybe it’s just one of those things that we’ll have to live with. If you replace it with a more free targeting mechanic like the anti-air guns on some vehicles (Demolishers in Ulduar, I think) then it could be quite clunky to use in raids when you really just want a quick action and you’re (probably) limited to two dimensions anyway.

Tooltips

Speaking of tooltips, I was very pleased to see that spell damage/healing amounts on tooltips now update in real time, as well as cast times and mana costs (we only have the latter two in WotLK, as far as I can remember). It won’t replace DrDamage, but it’s a really nice thing to see which should have been there for a while anyway.

General UI

Getting beyond the superficial, as expected there are no addons in use at the moment on the beta realms. I’d forgotten how much fun it was working with the default action bars again after all this time.

I did nearly die on more than one occasion because I’m so used to having a HUD and having my player and target frames near the bottom of my screen rather than the top that I wasn’t paying attention to the screen.

There’s a big thread up on the beta forums with feedback and requests for the default UI. I doubt I can add anything to that list, although I do think that some of the people commenting in that thread might be missing the point a little. If you want total customisation, I think that probably ought to remain the province of addons, since customisation, especially in GUI form, costs resources.

My wishlist at this stage would be:

• The ability to move the player and target frames around. You can do this with the focus frame, so it would be nice to be able to do this with the other frames. The reasoning is that your eyes tend to be focused on the bars at the bottom of the screen (not all of us are fluent in 20 keybinds) and it’s easy to neglect something hidden away in the top corner.
• Also thinking of the player and target frames, if you turn on the health bar numerical display it pretty much entirely obscures the green bar behind it, making it tricky to see at a glance roughly how healthy you are. Perhaps this is a bigger problem because it’s compounded with the location of the frames themselves, which means you might only be taking a quick glance rather than having time to look in detail.
• Some sort of Clique-like interface alongside the key bindings interface. The trouble with this is that Clique steals the right-click which is used to access the menu for things like raid marking, inviting, inspecting, leaving groups and vehicles, etc. I don’t have a good solution to this. Thinking about it, I tend to use VuhDo to target a player and then right-click on the standard target frame to use the menu, although I’m aware that you can set VuhDo up to show the menu directly.

I’m not going to go so far as to demand fully-customisable player and party frames Pitbull-style, because I think that’s too confusing for the average beginner (and for me, quite often) and I think it’s probably best handled by addons since the choice between unitframe addons, at least for me, tends to come down to the customisation UI rather than the appearance of the frames themselves. (I didn’t get along with the older versions of Pitbull, although Pitbull4 seems to make sense to me somehow.)

I noticed that there’s an option for compact party frames, which I presume are similar to the default raidframes but for a party, but since I didn’t join a party last night I’ll have to wait and see about that one. Likewise, I’ve not seen how buffs and debuffs are handled in party or raid situations, so I have no comments to make on that.

The other big change is the vehicle UI, which completely replaces your action bars and makes it very clear you’re in a different type of situation. It’s nice to see this being revamped, rather than just replacing your main bar, although I think the new UI looks a little bit to cartoony at the moment. The health bar being represented by a jar filled with green liquid just doesn’t match any other element of the UI (the party frames just have bars) and looks a bit too cheesy for my money.

Class balance

OK, a slightly frivolous point to finish, but seriously, it felt like more than half the players I was with were Druids, most of them Moonkins. I don’t think I saw another Priest all night.

Maybe this is a sign of things to come?

Possibly Related Posts:

• [Cataclysm Beta] Healing Throne of the Tides
• [Cataclysm Beta] I’m in the beta!
• [MoP Beta] Priest Mana Regen Revisited

There’s recently been a bit of a debate over the use or not of addons for healing. I don’t want to throw more fuel on the fire, but some of the posts and commentary have been quite throught-provoking, and since I’m about to head into the Beta and my usual UI will go out the window, I thought I’ve been giving my own addon usage even more thought.

My story

I use addons to heal and pretty much always have. I remember my first healing experience in Wailing Caverns in my 20s, way back in mid-2007, clicking on party frames to target people and then clicking on the healing spells on my bars. This being early in TBC and not my first character I was well aware that there existed a wide variety of addons to help classes do their job, so it was a natural next step for me to go a-Googling and I quickly found Healbot. Thus was a click-healer made.

Although I’ve never seriously used the default raid interface to heal, I have had occasion to quickly drag out the default raidframes and heal with keybinds (not mouseover macros, just target & press number keys) in a pinch when I’ve been disconnected mid-fight. I’m far from brilliant with it, but I can be non-useless in such a situation.

Pros and Cons

For me, healing effectively means mastering two stages: decision-making, i.e. picking the right person to heal and the right spell to use, or deciding whether to dispel that thing or to leave it; and then acting on that decision, i.e. reacting in time and hitting the right person.

Addons can help in both areas, but I mostly value assistance with the first part. Addons, if you spend the time to set them up properly, can provide you with as much information as you need to make your decisions, with (hopefully) no excess clutter, although of course in reality no addon can provide perfect configurability.

The problem that was brought up recently was that near-ubiquitous use of addons for showing spell cooldowns and boss abilities or for changing health bar colours when a decurse is needed means that people are losing, or failing to acquire, a sense of timing or even a depth of knowledge of boss mechanics. This can lead to a dependence on the addons, to the point where people become (or at least feel) unable to heal without them.

The trouble is that this is predicated on the idea that the addon(s) may stop working one day and expose that dependency. As long as the addon is active and functioning, there’s no problem. As a commenter observed, you’re judged on results, not methods.

Of course if your addons do break on patch day someone who has a more “visceral” understanding will probably outperform you, as will someone who is more accustomed to using the Blizzard interface to heal. When you don’t have an addon using a special this-one-really-matters colour, someone who can recognise an Unbound Plague icon from a Plague Sickness one will be at an advantage.
That is, until the player adapts to a new addon or the old addon is updated.

Here’s a different perspective: the default UI can be thought of as simply a set of ‘addons’ designed by Blizzard and included with the game, rather than something special or sacred. The only difference is that Blizzard make sure that their ‘addons’ are working before each patch release. From that perspective, it becomes much more like a choice between Vuhdo, Blizzard, Grid and Healbot.
You simply pick your comfort point in the trade-off between reliability in extreme conditions and everyday convenience, configurability and performance.

As a fun thought experiment, consider Blizzard announcing that due to the large number of excellent addons in the community, they are removing the default UI completely, leaving it purely in API form.

Short Version?

The most important thing addons provide is the ability to provide only the information you want to make your decisions, no more and no less. This (in theory) should lead to the most optimal decisions being made in any given situation. If providing more information than the default UI is helpful, then suitably-configured addons should improve your healing.

If those addons break, you may find yourself worse off than someone using the default UI (which is unlikely to break, at least on Live) until you can readapt, adopt a new set of addons, or the old addon is fixed. For the vast majority of us this isn’t a problem, although I can see how world-first guilds might find it helpful to be able to raid and heal regardless of the situation on the day new content is released.

I’ll be shortly spending some time on the Beta realm, where my normal UI is unlikely to work, so this will be an interesting test of my “dependency” on addons.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Getting Started As A Healer
• [MoP Beta] Snapshot of the Disc Priest
• Reflections on Heroic Healing

I’m sure it’s a result of blind luck, rather than because someone at Blizzard reads my blog and decided to hand-select me for an invite, but for whatever reason I got a beta invite this morning.
And already I’ve hit a problem, I can’t copy a character to the beta realm because it claims I have no valid WoW account on my Battle.net account. Apparently this means the servers are down for maintenance. Ah well, it’s not like I could play at work anyway…

As far as the blog is concerned I will be breaking with my informal policy of not posting Cataclysm information until later in the process when it’s a lot less likely to change, because frankly I’ll have stuff to report or comment on, and this is my blog (cathedra mea, regulae meae, as Sheldon would say).

However, since I respect that people might not wish to see spoilers. So what I intend to do it flag all Cataclysm beta posts with the [Cataclysm Beta] tag just like this one is, place them all into the Cataclysm Beta post category, and tag them with “Beta”. I can’t automatically keep them out of the RSS feed, so if you do see an inadvertant spoiler I’ll apologise now, but I will do all I can do to flag these posts visibly.

Might be an interesting test of whether I can heal without addons (nothing like a good bandwagon to jump on!)

Possibly Related Posts:

• Knock, knock!
• [Cataclysm Beta] Healing Throne of the Tides
• [Cataclysm Beta] First Impressions and Thoughts

In my recent post about letting people die I talked about working with other healers as a part of the mental prioritisation process we go through.
In the comments, Everblue pointed out that having a healing team with mutual trust, knowledge of each other’s role, and enough awareness to cover for each other without overhealing is the “holy grail of raid leading”, and wondered how to create that understanding.

Well, I can’t claim to have all the answers by a long stretch, and I don’t even think I’m part of such a team at the moment, but I’ve felt something closer to it in the past. So, here’s some thoughts from me for raid leaders or guild leaders looking to build a more cohesive healing team.

I should say that, while I don’t think you can necessarily create situational awareness, you can engender an interest and cooperation between team-mates which will get you a long way towards the ideal as described by Everblue.

It would also be great to read what other people think on this subject.

Communicate

Back to basics, but if you want a strong team you need to create an atmosphere of communication and information flow. So if you don’t have one already create a healers-only channel and invite your healers into it, and if your guild is one which uses forums try and get some role-specific forums created as well.

The healing channel

The purpose of the channel is two-fold: firstly you can use it to set up and discuss assignments, so everyone knows what’s going on. If it’s in a separate channel people can pull it out into a separate chat frame to keep it prominent, or give it a different colour to help prevent it getting lost in the rest of raid chat.
The second purpose of the channel is to allow discussion of how that last attempt went, if someone is feeling overstretched on the one hand or even underworked on the other, then the assignments can be tweaked, for example.

Here’s the first big tip I’ll give: keep the channel for healers only and don’t allow intrusions. There’s nothing will get people’s backs up like being told what to do by a non-healer.
I know how tempting it is as a raid leader to try and eavesdrop on every role channel, and that’s not incompatible with this idea, but if you want a properly free and frank discussion you will have to take a back seat. Every time you make a comment, you remind people you’re there, and this might not be the best way to promote discussion.
Healers in particular can be quite sensitive types, and actually it can be quite a big step to admit you need help with something, so don’t be an overbearing raid leader.

If you’re the raid leader and a healer as well, you’ll definitely need to be in the channel, but try and keep your involvement to a minimum. Ideas from authority figures, even in a game context, are harder to argue with. On the whole though I think a healer raid leader actually has a head start, because you’ll understand what motivates the healers, which can help with trust.

However, the healing team will need to communicate with the rest of the raid from time to time, which is where suggestion number two comes in: consider nominating a “healing lead”. Now I know some guilds don’t like the idea of the extra layer of hierarchy that class or role leads provides, and I’m not talking about another guild rank, just a sort of spokesperson who can liaise with the raid leader or other role leaders to pass information around. This lets everyone’s voice be heard, without needing to stick their neck out personally if they don’t feel confident.

It might be a regular, well-liked healer, it might be the theorycrafting nut, it might be the chatty one, but someone will most likely fall into this role. Let the healers choose their “champion” rather than it automatically be the officer who happens to be a healer.
Perhaps the healing lead could set up the assignments too. It’s always better to be assigned by someone who knows you better as an individual.

Healing forums

Just as the in-game chat channels are great for discussing the immediate events during a raid, forums can be a place for more distilled reflections on assignments, roles and strategies.

As an officer or raid leader, you could perhaps try seeding discussions by posting template healing assignments for the fights you’re currently working on, and asking for suggestions. Or perhaps asking questions relevant to a healing alt, which can spark discussions. Some of the best class discussions I’ve seen have come from this sort of start, and the key here is to get people posting and building up their confidence.

You could go both ways on making the role forums private to the roles in question or open to the guild, but I’d probably suggest keeping them open, to allow the discussion to be a bit more open and to keep the discussions useful as a resource for everyone’s reference. Questions from non-healers on the forums are less likely to provoke negative or defensive reactions on forums compared to in the heat of a progression night.

Clearly, the success of this one will depend strongly on how active your members are on the forums, so exercise some judgement on this one.

Final point here: if you’re the raid leader or an officer, be sure to publicly notice and appreciate the discussions that take place. To take criticism is to expose a little vulnerability, so some positive feedback will be invaluable; just don’t go so far as to be patronising, people can spot insincerity a mile away.

Don’t blame

I touched on this one earlier when I advised keeping non-healers out of the healing channel, but I want to return to it because it’s so important: don’t refer to healing meters and don’t point fingers at individuals.

First and foremost, healing is a team effort. Someone has to be bottom of the meters, and who that is is likely to depend strongly on the fight and the team composition. Not to mention the fact that healers make many more valid contributions than just their healing output: dispels, buffs, defensive cooldowns, and more.

Linking meters fails to capture the full contribution of individual healers, and can risk characterising your healing team as a set of individuals instead of a single team. Friendly competition is one thing (I used to compete with a fellow priest to get the lowest overheal, back in SSC when it mattered) but generally healer competition is counter-productive, so any signs of it should be strongly discouraged.

But what if something actually went wrong? The tank died, for example. Surely it’s the tank healers’ fault? Maybe.

Maybe the fault is with the assignments and not enough people were assigned to tank healing. In which case the tank healers may have done their jobs perfectly well but not been able to keep up anyway.

Maybe someone just made a mistake. Nine times out of ten they know about it already. It happens from time to time, you pick the wrong person or the wrong spell, you’re on GCD just as the Impale is landing, whatever. For healers the feedback tends to be immediate and very visible, so pointing it out publicly serves no real purpose, and is quite likely to just knock the confidence of the healer in question.

Or maybe the tank should have used a cooldown, or called for one, and actually it’s their “fault”.

In any case, the point is that generally healers know when something didn’t go right, and pointing it out doesn’t really help. It’s far better to ask them collectively what went wrong and get a discussion going. If people feel safe in their environment, preferably that private channel, then they should (eventually) be able to admit they messed something up, or ask for extra help on a target, or even request a different assignment to make them feel more comfortable.
This will become a recurring theme, but early on people may be reluctant to answer these questions immediately, so take one for the team. Point out where you can see a way for you to improve (yes, there will be something, unless you’re in Paragon, and probably even then) and volunteer that. Model the behaviour and show that you’re comfortable trusting them, and in time that trust will be returned.

The other aspect of this “post mortem” is to focus less on what went wrong, and more on what will be done about it in order to win next time. Keep the discussion focused less on who failed and more on what’s needed. For example, if we’re analysing our tank death, move the discussion quickly on from “not enough healing” to thinking about assigning an extra healer or asking tanks for cooldowns.

Take an interest

You can set up the environment all you like, but if you want to get your healers working together, you need to generate some rapport as well. This might be something you do as a raid leader/officer, or you might leave it to the healing lead. I’d suggest a bit of both: if your raiders feel you care about them as individuals, they’re more likely to believe you’ll listen to them and actually value their contributions.

At this point I’ll link out to a post by Tamarind about the culture of “my door’s always open!” and why you need to go a bit further than that in reality. There’s some good nuggets in that post for anyone trying to foster a more open atmosphere.

The short version is that if you want to know something, just ask the question, don’t automatically expect people will volunteer it. And as I’ve mentioned above, if you’re asking people to lower their guard, be prepared to lower yours first.

In raids, ask how people found that assignment. Ask them what they prefer to do. Outside raids, ask them how they’re doing, and take an interest in them as a person. And again, share your own personality, preferences and your shortcomings. This is sound advice for a leader in any capacity, but if you’re actively trying to get people out of their shells and feeling comfortable, you need to make a special effort.

All in all, your healing team needs a level of mutual respect, which can only arise when the person behind the character feels valued and feels that they know something about their colleagues as well. It needs to be truly a two-way street.

Encourage criticism

This is probably best left for a later stage, because opening with this might put people on the defensive and could well be a backwards step. But once you’ve got your healers to a point where they’ve got a safe space and they’re talking to each other and communicating to the raid as a whole, and there’s no undue blame coming their way, you might be at the point where they can begin to criticise each other, constructively and gently, but always by consent.

I know everyone says on their guild apps that they appreciate constructive criticism, but not everyone is quite as ready for it as others. So perhaps put yourself on the line first. People will probably be hesitant to criticise you, and might become defensive if you criticise them, but nothing’s stopping you criticising yourself, laying yourself (metaphorically) bare and modelling how feedback can be constructive and positively-phrased.

Or you could try another approach and post links to blog posts, forum threads and or other information sources, noting how they’ve helped you to improve some aspect of your play. This also allows you to demonstrate that you’re not setting yourself up as knowing everything, that there’s always room for everyone to improve, and it also lets you provide convenient links that people might follow, rather than needing to start their own research from scratch (there’s a lot of WoW information out there, it can be daunting!).

The other thing you might consider, which may or may not be a step too far, is routinely posting links to WoL parses for raids, and allowing discussions on that basis. You’ll usually have a few analytical types in your guild who will find it interesting to go through logs and pull out interesting statistics or find some pattern that you might not have noticed.
You’ll need to be very clear that any references to “beating” others on meters, general epeening or anything else non-constructive will be moderated (and actually follow up on this). You’ll probably get a bit of that, but when it’s routine people will get bored quickly.

The thing is, by publicising things like blogs or WoL parses, you’re making it easier for people to access real examples of others in their role or class, which can make them think and question for themselves. You don’t need to point everything out to people, they’re are always more likely to value and believe what they’ve discovered for themselves.

Once you’ve got to this point, you should (hopefully) have healers who are able to refine their own healing assignments, understand each other to some degree, and with discussions of playstyles beginning to emerge you can see how healers can then begin to predict each other’s actions in a raid situation.

Maintenance

So, you’ve herded all your healers into their own channel (and evicted the mischievous warlock that tried to sneak in, there’s always one), you might have got yourself a healing spokesperson; you’ve made it quite clear that you don’t care about the meters and you’re being very careful to ask the healers if they think they could improve the raid’s situation or how the raid could help them, or what they feel about the assignments and their role; you might have them constructively criticising themselves and others; and you’re taking an interest in them as people, respecting their contributions and personalities and with general respect all round.

What else is there?

Well, it all takes work. Keep plugging away at it, keep encouraging, prompting, supporting the positive behaviours, and moderating discussions if they drift in undesirable directions. And help new joiners to understand how things work and make them feel welcome and comfortable and as unthreatened as possible.

TL;DR

The key points I wanted to raise are the following:

• Get your healers some safe space – a custom channel at least – and keep it for healers only
• Allow people to speak their minds. Value their opinions, but keep your own out!
• Avoid pointing fingers; instead, try asking what went wrong, what would help things go better
• Find out about your healers’ personalities and preferences and actually value them
• Always be honest and sincere. The best leaders can always find something genuinely positive to say, so don’t be tempted to fake it, people will tell and there goes your mutual respect
• If the atmosphere is conducive to it, begin to encourage constructive criticism
• Always model the behaviours you want to encourage. If you want people to analyse their own performance, hold your own up to examination first. If you want people to ask for help with assignments, let people know when you’re having difficulties as well.
• Your work is never done, so keep up the encouragement and support

Hopefully some of these tips will be useful. Remember that this is only one perspective, and guilds and raiders are all unique and have their own quirks and preferences, so as with any advice you should adapt it to suit your situation and constantly evaluate it to see if it’s still relevant.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Helping Out
• Assigning Healers
• What Makes Healing Hard?