I doubt this is a novelty to anyone else with a blog, but over the last 48 hours I’ve had about 80 spam comments caught by Akismet (<3) that essentially look like the following:

zjKjQr sbxmcovtzgxo, [url=http://plhhklapujuy.com/]plhhklapujuy[/url], [link=http://xevartzhiafn.com/]xevartzhiafn[/link], http://wnmubkzwplzk.com/

Unless those mean something when re-converted into some obscure Eastern European or Asian character set, they look an awful lot like random letters, and the URLs (obviously) don’t work. So why go to the trouble of posting them?

Is there a spammer somewhere simply being paid per comment, regardless of content? Is it a broken bot just spewing out trash instead of pulling URLs from a list? An ingenious DDoS attack on WP or Akismet?

Anyway, the healing-related posts will resume soon, this was just interesting/baffling enough for me to want to comment on it.

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This post is inspired by this week’s Blog Azeroth Shared Topic, suggested by Ecclesiastical Discipline, asking “When should a healer let someone die?”.
ED was asking about where the limit is, beyond which healers would just stop healing someone, but since I’ve not touched on the subject of triage in any depth I’ve added a bit of that as well.

Basics

The essence of triage is deciding who needs healing now, who can wait, and who you simply can’t save. The goal is to maximise the group’s performance in a given situation, which might not be the same as keeping the maximum number of people alive; that decision is one of the trickiest to make, but is sometimes necessary.

With this goal in mind, healers tend to operate with a priority list, which I’d characterise as follows:

1. Yourself – If you die, you can’t save anyone else
2. The tank – If they die, you might struggle to save other people from the damage that will follow
3. Important DPS – By this I mean people with specific jobs, such as CC, decursing, or anything else
4. People you like – This is where it gets subjective. “People you like” means people who you can trust not to die stupidly, or who you know are star DPSers on tight Berserk timer fights
5. The raid in general – Both healers and DPS are in this category. You might want to make the other healers a priority, or they might take care of themselves, so you can make this judgement individually
6. People prone to standing in fire – If you can’t trust someone to look after themselves, your precious heals might be better spent on someone else instead
7. Pets – This can depend strongly on the fight and if they are playing an active role, but generally pet classes have ways to take care of their pets themselves. It generally costs DPS, so heal them when we can, but pets really aren’t a priority. I know a lot of healers don’t show pets on their raidframes at all, which might be a step too far

As a completely random example, which definitely did not happen to me this weekend, let’s imagine we’re in Utgarde Pinnacle and, having vanquished Grauf using the conveniently-positioned harpoon launchers, Skadi the Ruthless has just landed in our midst and begun whirlwinding on the tank and two melee DPS.
Let’s further suppose that the not-terribly-well-geared Resto Druid who is healing the group only has time to heal two people before someone will die. In this case, our Druid friend falls back on the rules. The first heal goes on the tank, because he’s holding onto Skadi and a couple of adds, which we don’t want to be getting hit by. The second goes onto one of the DPS. You might have a preference (the rogue might died to just about every ability going earlier in the run, in which case you might suspect he’ll just stand in the next whirlwind), you might pick the person who’s the furthest out (allowing him to survive to get out of range), or you might simply pick whoever’s closest to the tank on VuhDo for speed.

This typically works for 5-man dungeons and perhaps 10-man raids, although when you add in the complicating factor of multiple healers or other factors, your priorities might shift a bit.

Multiple healers

As you can imagine, when you are the only healer, triage is relatively straightforward. When there’s another healer in the group as well, you will need to alter your strategy a little. For example, if you have assignments, your first priority is always to make sure your assignment is fine before helping others. There’s no point healing the raid if the tank falls over seconds later, nor is there much merit in all the healers landing a heal each on the tank and letting the raid die.

More subtly, it helps to learn to anticipate who and how other healers will heal. If your Shaman colleagues tend to go straight to the melee pack with Chain Heals, prioritise the ranged DPS and healers. In TBC, when mana was more restricted, HoT healers were advised to HoT the higher health players, since direct heals like Flash Heal, and Smart heals like Circle of Healing, would be aimed at the lower-health players first.

So when is it OK to lose someone?

The short answer is: when you genuinely have no choice. Sometimes there’s just more damage coming in than you can heal up in the time allowed, and you have to choose. Sometimes a DPS player will find themselves tanking something they really shouldn’t be tanking, and you can’t react in time to save them.

The other main time it’s acceptable to lose someone is when the advantage of letting them die outweighs the cost of keeping them alive. This used to be viable on Saurfang: before he was hotfixed to invalidate this strategy, the first player to gain Mark of the Fallen Champion would often be allowed to die, to prevent Saurfang gaining Blood Power at double the rate.

There are also some quite obscure cases as well, like using Soulstones for a quick threat drop or mana boost, or Holy Priests deliberately dying towards the end of fights to use Spirit of Redemption, but these are rare these days.

In all of these cases, remember the golden rule: triage is used to maximise the group’s performance. In these examples, that’s achieved by limiting Blood Power, or by keeping a tank alive as opposed to a DPS (one DPS lost might or might not matter to the outcome, whereas a dead tank often means a wipe), or by using a resurrection as a free mana potion.

When is it not OK to lose someone?

It’s absolutely not OK to lose someone because you were unprepared or inattentive. Sometimes the damage is just too high, but if that’s because you didn’t get your Bubbles up in time for an Infest (I’ll admit to drifting off during the Lich King’s dialogue once or twice) or because you didn’t get Rejuvs all round before Phase 3 of the Black Knight fight began, then that’s a healer failure.

It’s also, in my opinion, not acceptable to let someone die because you don’t like them, or because you’re “educating” them. If someone rips off the tank, or pulls for the tank, or persists in standing in slime, fire, void zones or odd rumbling ground, by all means drop them down the priority list compared to someone who is taking incidental damage but generally avoids getting hurt, but that person should still get heals if you have them available. Refusing to heal them at all, and worse, refusing to resurrect them, is just petty and wastes everyone’s time. Most of the time a person’s death causes problems for the rest of the group, making them work harder or making fights take longer, and it’s not fair to punish the group.

Go back to the golden rule: maximise the group’s performance. Even a DPS in fire is better than a dead DPS if you can spare the time to keep them alive.

My recommendation would be to whisper the person to explain what went wrong and how to avoid it, and to point out that you have a lot of people to heal and they’re occupying an unreasonable amount of your time. I’d suggest that most people are not (contrary to popular belief) self-centred, Recount-obsessed, mouth-breathing morons who couldn’t avoid a void zone if their life depended on it, but may just not be aware that there’s a problem. Especially in 5-mans, less so in raids.

The Poison Nova on the Ick and Krick fight is a good example of this: many people don’t run away from this automatically, but when you ask them to run away next time (usually after they’ve died, but not always) most people are happy to take the suggestion on board. The culture in heroics in this half of WotLK tends to train DPS to ignore most boss abilities since they aren’t especially life-threatening, so it’s almost to be expected.

If someone’s either particularly recalcitrant, or so obnoxious you don’t want to play with them, you’re better off either attempting to vote kick them (you’re probably not the only person who feels that way), or just politely leaving the group and counting yourself lucky you escaped.

The take-away message would be that unless you’re going to try and explain to people why you’re letting them die, chances are they’ll just write you off as either a bad healer or someone spiteful who let them die for fun, and how will that teach them anything?

Having said all that I’ll admit that sometimes I do give in to the urge and underheal people. I’m only human after all, but I always feel bad about it afterwards!

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Last night my guild and I had the pleasure of valiantly coming to the aid of the Ruby Dragonflight and slaying the invading Halion and his Lieutenants. Well, my guild did that, I was stuck listening on Vent while reinstalling every patch since November 2008 (3.0.1 onwards) because the Blizzard repair tool got a bit overzealous, but I did get finished in time for the last half-dozen attempts and the kill.

I should point out that I’ve got a strategy here on this very site, updated with info from last night. That’s where the bulk of the information on the fight is, while this will just be some extra thoughts, tips and healer-centric comments.

Trash

I didn’t actually get to see the trash, but it was quietly pleasing to hear the “hmm, maybe we need to do something about those” after a very quick wipe on an early trash pull. Most of the pulls have tricks to them: some mobs have a stacking buff depending on proximity to others, for example, which means they need to be tanked apart.
I can’t offer many more details, except to warn anyone new to the encounter to pull carefully, separate big, scary-looking mobs, face everything away from the raid and CC whatever you can as a precaution. This is my default approach to new raids, which was, to my utmost disappointment, generally unnecessary even in Icecrown.

The Lieutenants

The biggest dangers posed by Baltharus are from the knockback and the stacking damage buff. Make sure you’ve cleared the space around him so no one can pull anything extra, and keep a close eye on Baltharus for his stack of Siphoned Might. A Brand on melee quickly gave him quite a large number of stacks and we lost a tank, so keep fingers on cooldowns.
The whirlwind got a mixed response, with some people claiming they didn’t notice it and others confirming that it exists and hurts. I’d suggest getting melee DPS to run out to begin with, and see what the damage is like on those people who’re slow (you know there’ll be some) to decide if it’s safe to let people stay in.

Saviana doesn’t need any special care from a healing perspective, since the things she does can be countered by the raid as a whole playing smart. You will need to watch her for the Enrage, which can be unpleasant if your hunters or rogues are slow to dispel it, and keep an eye on people who get Flame Beacon and will be conflagrated, since this hits pretty hard.
I’d suggest making sure healers are spread out, to avoid too many running away at once, as the only major organisational thing required.

Zarithrian is also not a terribly difficult encounter. Healers will need to be careful of their aggro when adds are spawning and tanks are controlling them. Priests with Fear Ward and Shaman with Tremor Totem should be working together to keep fear off the main tank, and preferably themselves as well.
The tanks in our 25-man were swapping at 3-4 stacks (once their debuff had faded), and the damage at low stacks is very weak, just don’t get lulled into a false sense of security, and be aware that it will change.

Halion

Ah, the bit I do know about first-hand.

Beforehand

The first question is probably how many healers to take. We used 7 for 25-man normal, although it could easily have been done with fewer. For 10-man it could probably be covered by two decent healers, but a third will add some wriggle room, especially in Phase 3. On heroic the healing load is significantly higher, so 7 on 25-man and 3 on 10-man would be necessary, I think. You could argue for taking a 4th healer for 10-man heroic, but usually this means your raid is taking too much hurt, not that you don’t have enough healers, so my advice would be to address that first.

Before pulling, you need to have a plan for Phase 3, and for dispelling. You will need to split your healers in Phase 3, so those people need to know who they are. One strong MT healer should be in each group, and the Twilight Realm group would benefit from a Resto Druid because of the aura, but the exact split isn’t as important as making sure it’s relatively even. Every healing class can dispel the Mark of Combustion/Consumption debuffs (Priests and Paladins can do magic, Druids and Shaman can do curses) so this shouldn’t be a problem.

Whether or not you assign someone to dispel the Marks or just leave it as free-for-all is a decision for your raid group to come to for itself. The benefit of a dedicated dispeller is that you don’t have multiple healers running around trying to cleanse people at the same time, but leaving it free-for-all can mitigate the impact of someone running out too far from the named dispeller. If you do assign a dispeller, give them a raid icon (and a macro to reapply it, DBM gets a bit mark-happy) so people know not to run to the opposite side.
If you’re planning on heavy use of Body and Soul, that priest would probably also be well-placed to dispel, which might simplify things.

Phase 1 and the Pull

First things first, know where your tank is pulling from and where he’s going to face the boss. If he’s inconsistent, nag him until he picks a position and sticks to it. The reason for this is that Halion cleaves and stuns with his tail, so you need to know where he’s going to be so you can get in and start healing right away.

Phase 1 is really just a bit of a warm-up. Don’t get over-excited and twitch-dispel the unusual debuff that’s just popped up on your rogue (not that I put a flame patch under the melee by accident, of course not… /nonchalant) and keep an eye on where the Meteor is going to hit (melee can find it tricky to see the rune on the ground, especially under things like Consecration) and life should be fairly straightforward.

Phase 2

When he gets to 75%, move to the portal but don’t click it until you can see that the tank for Phase 2 has already gone. This applies to everyone, not just healers. We lost way too many people who went down immediately and found they had aggro, or that the tank hadn’t had time to turn Halion away.
Because of the aggro-drops when taking portals, and the delays caused by zoning between Realms, we left a tank and healer in the Physical Realm twiddling their thumbs so that the tank was ready to pick Halion up immediately when Phase 3 began. It’s not a fun job, but it is useful.

The Twilight Realm is more interesting. The AoE damage aura, Dusk Shroud feels roughly equivalent to normal Sindragosa: the average tick was a shade over 2k, which isn’t really enough to stress people out, although I suspect it will be much more of a factor on heroic.

The other big thing from a healing perspective is the requirement to heal on the run when Twilight Cutter is active. On normal mode it’s not too difficult to avoid this if you watch for the emote and then run to a position just behind where the beam will turn up (you have 5 seconds to move, and as of today DBM will show a cast timer for this to help out), and if you’re lucky you might not need to move again since the beam only sweeps out about 90 degrees.
Remember to account for latency when you move though: the beam may not be exactly where you think it is if you have high-ish latency, and the damage extends a yard or so either side of the actual animation, so give it a bit of respect, like you did for Yogg-Saron’s clouds.

The biggest problems we had in here from a healing perspective tended to be tank deaths due to healers moving or being dead. There’s not much we can do about Cutter deaths (although a bubble might make the difference if someone clips the edge of the beam, since it’s a number of very quick hits, not one big hit), people just need to learn to look up at the world and dodge.

You’ll probably blow Bloodlust/Heroism at the beginning of this phase.

Phase 3

I was mostly in the Twilight Realm for this week, so I can’t tell you too much about life upstairs. Really though you have all the information you need since nothing has really changed from Phase 1/2, although since there will be fewer healers in each Realm every healer should be watching out for the tank in case the “tank healer” has to move at the wrong moment.

The other adaptation your raid can make to make your life easier, especially as a Physical Realm healer, is to stop DPS at the transition and let the Physical Realm DPS and healers get through the portal and into position. Otherwise it’s quite possible to push Halion to high Corporeality very quickly and make the tank take double damage before healers are ready. Count to 5, or 10, whatever works for your raid, then start DPS again.

A good general tip is to have someone watch the Corporeality counter and call for DPS pauses as appropriate to keep damage under control.

Overall

Really the point to emphasise is that this is a survival fight with high mobility and awareness requirements. You will need to be aware of the area around you, and be ready to move if necessary. You should also be able to change your healing rotation to keep healing on the move, especially for the Twilight Realm and even more especially on heroic.

Other info

Keeva at Tree Bark Jacket posted a couple of PowerAuras exports for the debuffs you need to run away with. You can modify them to suit your needs, but they’re a good quick starting point.

PlusHeal also has an entire forum dedicated to this, albeit with only two posts at the moment.

Derevka at Tales of a Priest has a guide to heroic 10-man from a healer’s perspective, which is highly recommended reading.

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