Assigning Healing Strategy – Part 2: Double Shifting Healers

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Image courtesy of hkarl

Welcome to the second in a 5 part series here on World of Matticus. For the next several weeks, I’ll be covering the rare topic of assigning raid heals. No one really wants to do it but it’s the most important job in the raid and I’ll provide a basic overview of the process and some advanced tips!

In case you missed it:

  1. Week 1: Recognizing Class Strengths

Throughout your raiding career as a healer, you will find that the measure of being a good healer is underscored by one question:

Do you keep your target up?

When you start approaching T6 content in Hyjal and Black Temple, keeping a player alive indefinitely (or at least, 5 minutes) is not just a good skill, it is a virtual requirement. Your healing boss should be able to put any healer on any tank for any trash pulls and not have to second guess their decision. This is the personal standard by which I base my healers on.

So what’s the next step?

Find out if your healer can keep up two targets.

As the healing stratician, I get the pleasure of doing all the assignments for all the bosses. Sometimes it has to be done on short notice and it’s nice to know I’m not the only one in the game that has to to pull off a hail Mary. Unfortunately, I don’t get much say in who stays or who goes. I can’t pick my lineup because I never know what crew I have to work with on any given week! This is a challenge unto itself because certain classes are optimized for different roles and I have to be really creative in order for our group to find success. We raided all of SSC and nearly all of TK without a Resto Druid. It’s doable but it’s tough.

Double shifting the Healer

There are going to be times where you can get away with not having a full healer’s attention on a tank. The reason for that is because there are other healer’s on said tank. I often feel uneasy having only two Paladins on a main tank. I know I would feel more at ease if there was at least one more. However, I also know that due my personnel, I can’t spare another player on them full time.

What I can do is split a healer’s attention between two tanks. If I don’t have a Druid, I’ll put a Priest on it. Generally speaking, a Druid would be my top choice due to the nature of the class. Barring that, I’d take care of it myself personally. If I’m not able to, I’ll flip a coin and pick a Paladin or a Shaman.

The principle here remains the same. What we’re doing is taking a healing class and assigning them two different players to keep alive. In the end, we’ll have something that looks like this:

Alpha Tank
– Pete the Paladin
– Paula the Priest
– Darren the Druid		 Bravo Tank
– Pierce the Paladin
– Pavol the Priest
– Darren the Druid

Understand that in most boss encounters, only one tank is necessary. But also understand that there are some fights where the boss encounter requires more than 1 tank to eat damage or to tank a different NPC. Here’s a few player examples of when double shifting is a good idea:

  • Covering a player 2nd on threat
  • Highest person with health gets a Hateful Strike
  • Multiple tanks on multiple mobs

Hopefully you’ll be able to understand the message I’m trying to convey here. Fights will become more complicated for you as you progress through the game and double shifting healers is one way of answering the challenge. Sometime early next week, I’ll illustrate in further detail how a Priest can double shift in terms of spells and things to watch out for (might use that for a WoW Insider post actually).

How about some concrete examples of which bosses to double shift on? Pulled from WoWWiki we have:

  • Supremus: Hateful strike – ~7 – 10k melee damage to the target with the highest current health inside melee range.
  • Gruul: Hurtful Strike – Always hits the second highest aggro target within his melee range; therefore essential that any melee DPS classes maintain their aggro level not only below that of the MT, but also below that of the OT.
  • Magtheridon: Phase 1 – It is theoretically possible for a moderately geared healer to cover the first two tanks on the Warlocks especially now that the encounter has been considerably nerfed.

Next week, we look at the pivot healer! See ya then!

5 Signs of the Vigilante Raider

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dark-knght

Bruce Wayne: I’m doing the best I can, with what I know.

***POTENTIAL DARK KNIGHT SPOILERS BELOW***

After my raid wrapped up on Thursday night, I was due to catch up with a dear lady friend of mine. She had free movie passes and being the gentleman that I am, I offered to help her use them! She agreed and we both watched The Dark Knight at 11 PM. Like everyone else who watched it before me, I thought it was one of the top movies this summer if not the entire year.

Whether you’ll openly admit it or not, there’s a little bit of Batman in each and everyone of us when we play WoW. Don’t believe me? Here’s my list:

Adapting roles – For certain classes, they have to adapt to the needs of the Guild. Thankfully as Priests, we don’t have this problem. Classes like Paladins have to change their specs to fill a need that the Guild has. A spectacular Resto Druid I know made the decision to go Feral after we lost a tank just to maintain the Guild. Towards the end of the movie, Batman had to turn into whatever Gotham needed him to be. In this case, he became their villain to preserve the image of Harvey Dent.

Constantly improving – Whatever challenges the game throws our way, all players need to improve themselves to face them and beat them. Batman gets chased down by dogs and has difficulty moving his head. He gets his buddy Fox to modify his suit to minimize the problems they cause. Us WoW players will always be tinkering with our gear. Sometimes we want to increase our healing throughput. Other times we like to increase our endurance and we switch our gear as necessary.

Friendly support – Where would we be without our Guildmates? Not raiding is the first answer that comes to mind. In addition, I like to cultivate and maintain a vast network of friends willing to exchange services that I may need. Batman would never have been able to fight crime without the assistance of Lucius Fox and Alfred by his side.

Sacrifice – Are you willing to swallow your pride and bench yourself for the good of the Guild? Batman made jaw dropping decision to reveal his identity to turn himself in only for Harvey Dent to cover up and sacrifice himself instead. As a raider, there are times when you’ll be called upon to do things you don’t want to do. When you accept it, you’ll find it really isn’t all that bad. Sometimes you just have to walk away.

Making tough choices – Healers face bad choices every raiding night. Who do we heal first? Both are equally important. We can’t heal one without losing the other. Batman could only save 1 of the 2 hostages and he chose incorrectly based on information that was switcheroo’d. Sometimes you can’t make calculated decisions. Not all of the information necessary to make the right choice is there. Everything needs to get pieced together but the pieces don’t fit. As a result, a hard choice needs to be made on what action is taken next.

See what I mean? There’s always a bit of a vigilante in everyone. Some of us are adept at hiding it well. Others aren’t so lucky. 

Blogging Delayed, Batman to Blame

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Curse that Batman fellow for keeping Matticus away from his writing pad and past his bed time.

Caught the 11 PM showing 3 hours after my raid ended early (BT cleared after 4:42:36 total from Tuesday and Thursday night).

Ran into a few of my friends. They’ve already seen it before but they wanted to watch it again. Then they’re going to go see it on Saturday at the IMAX theatre downtown in Vancouver.

And they have the nerve to call me obsessed. Hrmph.

Oh and yes, I did make up the 36 seconds.