Image courtesy of bewinca
Each Saturday for the next five weeks, I will be writing about one barrier of the raid healer. Healers are often overshadowed and looked over since we are expected to simply know what to do. With luck, this five part series will help you to become a better raid healer whether you are a varsity or a freshman.
So far, I have covered:
- Being the indecisive healer
- Handling criticism from other players
- Limiting yourself because of tunnel vision
Barrier 4: Confidence
“The arrogance of the young is a direct result of not having known enough consequences. The turkey that every day greedily approaches the farmer who tosses him grain is not wrong. It is just that no one ever told him about Thanksgiving.”
Harry Golden
At an end game level, raiding becomes as much of a mental game as it does pressing keys. You as a healer need to take care that you don’t overstep your bounds.
Overconfidence
There are some Guilds that suffer from players who do too little. They don’t bring 100% of their game. They consistently underperform. But then you look at the other end of the spectrum. There are players that exist (like me) who bite off way more than the can chew. I’d like to think that I can heal it all and if I didn’t have a global cooldown, I probably could. The problem is that this is not always the case.
There’s going to be fights in the game where you MUST have more than one healer on one target. Get used to it.
I’ve wiped my share of raids where I thought I could keep a player up, but I discovered quickly that they were taking more damage then I could mitigate and heal through. Even during raid healing, I find that I overextend myself by dropping heals on the main tank, the off tank, AND the hunter that’s tanking the bow in Kael’s room. It helps to swallow your pride once in a while and say that you need an extra set of hands on that one target. .
Tips
Sad to say, there’s not much in terms of advice that I can offer on the subject. It all boils down to you as a player to determine the strength of your own ability. If you know for a fact that you can handle healing, then there’s no problem. But if you’re unsure, it’s best to ask for another healer on your assignment until you can mentally gauge the amount of health that you can restore. If there appears to be no problem, then you’re golden. If there is a problem, at least you have an extra cushion to help you out.
I think one of the key things here is the ‘over-extending’ yourself piece. It’s easy to start ‘helping’ the other healers and dropping heals on their targets especially if their target’s health is low for instance, but then when you run out of mana it suddenly isn’t so cool 🙂
I think Ego did a post on this kind of discipline to stick to your target and to trust your fellow healers to do the job on their targets.
I think that the key to overcomming overconfidence are:
Knowing that you can handle your assignment (and a bit more as needed), and doing so efficiently and effectively.
Trusting that your fellow healers are capable of their assignments, and will call for assistance when they are unable to do so.