5 Raid Saving Lessons From Dr House

Today is April 28th. Does anyone know the significance of such a date? If you can’t figure it out, today is when all episodes of House begin airing! So who is House anyway? Here’s a quick excerpt courtesy of Wikipedia.

Gregory House, M.D., is a maverick medical genius, who heads a team of young diagnosticians at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. Most episodes start with a cold open somewhere outside the hospital, showing the events leading to the onset of symptoms for that episode’s main patient. The episode follows the team in their attempts to diagnose and treat the patient’s illness.

I can’t help but draw several parallels between House’s quotes and beliefs along with raid healing in WoW that I wanted to share with you.

"Everybody lies."

This is one of House’s mantras. When raiding, some raiders can lie. Whether they’re aware of it or not isn’t that important. For healers, it is absolutely crucial for us to find out why they died, how they died, where they died, and what we can do to stop it from happening again. For this reason, we turn to useful tools like WWS, Recount (which isn’t working right now), or the new death tracking replacement mod called Expiration (Note that the latest versions are always at the bottom).

Remember that these addons and such explain to us objectively how the player died and they only tell us part of the story. The other half is circumstantial. What were they doing leading up to their death? If you can figure out the answer to that question, then you can stop it from happening again. Sometimes the solution can be as simple as moving a few yards to the right or as extreme as player substitution.

"You can think I’m wrong, but that’s no reason to quit thinking."

If you don’t believe that a particular strategy or role isn’t going to work, that’s fine. I’ve been known to disagree with the way healing is done and my guild colleagues are like that with me as well. The beauty about WoW is that it forces people to think critically if they want to succeed. If something doesn’t feel right or if you think your talents are better off suited to doing something else, file it away mentally and then address the issue when the opportunity presents itself.

"Read less, more TV."

Reading boss guides are good. But they can only do so much. They’re best used for knowing the mechanics of an encounter. Now videos, on the other hand, are much more exciting. Watching videos shaves some learning time off of fights. You have a better idea of what to expect when you go into an encounter.

But nothing beats good ol’ fashioned experience.

"If we were to care about every person suffering on this planet, life would shut down."

You can’t heal everybody. If you try, you’re going to lose everybody. You get to play god in a video game and decide who gets the heals first. It’s up to the raid to pray that you make the right call. The wrong leads to a wipe and the right one leads to a clutch raid saving performance.

"Everybody does stupid things, it shouldn’t cost them everything they want in life."

Mistakes happen. I trust by now that everyone has played this game long enough to understand that sooner or later, someone is going to screw up. That doesn’t mean they should get ejected from the raid or from the guild just yet. Obviously if the same errors are repeated, you’re free to exercise your own judgment. The only way to reduce the chances of mistakes happening again is constant training and practice.