How to deal with a healer union?

[IxilaFA]

Actually, for us, it's 50-50 that a slow death is due to no heals or dps fucking up. Sometimes both.

Your healers may be fantastic at triage if you rarely get this problem, but ours have problems without my giving constant reminders or telling them directly on TS who to heal next or they will die.

I check the cast logs and it's not like they are inactive, just blindly spamming WG/CH/whatever aoe spell they have instead of holding it off for a gcd to hot up someone who's at 50% health and still taking ticking damage.

That's a little disappointing so I can understand your POV. I won't try to make claims about the quality of my guild's healers; we are fortunate that myself and the Disc Priest are usually 90th percentile average healers so we don't typically have issues with people randomly dying slow deaths without at least one of us getting to them. I won't say we haven't had other problems with managing healers, but slow deaths have legitimately not really been much of an issue for me. I usually just don't feel its necessary to constantly remind my healers to watch certain people. We had an issue on Mythic Archi the other night, for example, where someone died to Shackled Torment as a slow death and I mentioned that, we moved on, and it wasn't a problem the rest of the night.

[Dsc]

Logs. Not freaking Recount or Skada, but real live logs.

I used to run LIVE World of Logs back during our push to realm first HLK and right through to a really early Garajal kill....

It made everyone better. early on I trained my raid lead to set up groups appropriately. ( POH is a group heal) (stuff the Pallys where they can puke radiance on melee .. or whatever). From there on we can see interrupts, damage taken, mitigation, tanks getting insta gibbed or healers standing in bad forcing heals onto said tank or DPS in fire.

Usually after a wipe or three we would look at WTF was happening and adjust. It was easy. Unless it was a Drunken player or someone on a horrid computer or getting lag the problems would be smoothly squared away. At least where I was we all wanted to succeed. We were pushing for top realm/top world kills.

Sounds Like you have a pissy environment of finger pointing and defensiveness.

Live logs man.

[Summer]

This is what it felt like, DPS/Tanks must play perfectly before healers feel prepared to take any blame.

Unfortunately I can't link logs because we killed Archi last year, this thread was more to get some general thoughts as its a situation I want to fix for Legion.

He can't provide logs seeing as there's no logs of Archy prog for someone who was on break since end of BRF. I believe this was meant hypothetically :P

[MrExcelion]

As someone else suggested, healing leads are highly recommended

Can't blame him for not providing logs though, since this is a very public forum and all and could ruin his guild, but yeah that's as far as we can go without logs.

[xcess]

its ruined anyway cos nobody wants to own up, most of the times you know if you screwed up. But you dont need 5 healers, kick one first to show you dont give in to these ppl

[chooi]

1) First problem seems to be that you have a 'healer union' and your raid is split up in Healers vs. DPS/rest. Break that mindset. Your whole raid must work together as a team. The only person who should be calling out other player's mistakes is you.

2) Address the whole raid that avoiding damage and playing mechanics correctly is in everyone's best interest and that you will have a keen look on that from now on (LOGS!). Tell them that you demand teamwork and respectful behaviour from everyone. Though, be supportive towards your raiders and help them if they have problems understanding certain mechanics or don't know why they died. Don't call them out immediately. Help them to help themselves (raid awareness, using defensives, how to read logs, etc.) Sort out the players that lack the skill and/or motivation to improve and who aren't teamplayers.

3) Talk to your 'healer union' and tell them friendly but firm that you won't tolerate their behaviour towards you and the raid - be it justified (because the DPS actually do stand in shit) or not (because the healers are just making up excuses). Tell them that they shouldn't take criticism personally. (You have to provide constructive criticism (LOGS!) for that, obviously.) Sort everyone out who can't or doesn't want to live up to that.

4) Always keep recruiting. To me it looks like that the healers are in a very comfortable situation and testing how far they can go with you because they have nothing to fear. Focus on getting at least one healer who's experienced in leading (or let one of your trusted players reroll) and put him in charge of the healers. Tell him about the situation, so he can adapt to it before he's slowly 'corrupted' by the old healers. Try to integrate the 'healer union' back into the raid team by giving them some competition and/or replace them in the next weeks/months if they aren't capable/willing to cooperate.

Remember: stay firm and consistent with your decisions but also stay friendly and respectful towards your raiders. Don't let them fuck around with you but also leave everyone a door out when they stand up to their mistake. Lead by example.

[Deleted]

I feel like are overly defensive about healers. truth is healers can mess up just as easily as other players. But when a tank messes up its very obvious most of the time. When dps mess up its very easy to see in logs if you know where to look but that is much harder to do with healers. Like others said HPS isnt a great metric but healers do need to be on the ball where it matters.

If you almost always lose 1 or 2 people on wrought chaos on mythic archimonde while other healer teams can deal with it just fine you are right to ask why that is. Personal defensives might be part of the problem but imo its more likely your healer team needs to space out aoe heals differently, maybe that paladin needs to hold on to devo or that druids needs to learn to use genesis for example. "He didnt use a healthstone" is not going to solve your issue. It almost feels like some people here feel that dps have to evade every bit of damage and use defensives before healers can take any blame. Its a team effort and we are all humans that do not play perfectly. It harder for a healer to really make a difference but a good player will always try and keep improving. If a group of players band together and are unable take any critisism thats unhealthly for your team and will hurt your progress.

[Deleted]

If you almost always lose 1 or 2 people on wrought chaos on mythic archimonde while other healer teams can deal with it just fine you are right to ask why that is.

Nice example. Except it's not because 8 out of 10 times in this situation people die because they eat too many lasers.

@OP Post some logs please or are you afraid it might not be as simple as you presented it?

Nevermind it's on "behalf of a friend" lol

edit - for those asking for logs, this post is on behalf of a friend who wants to keep it confidential

[Airlick]

All 5 of my healers mid progress?

Don't talk with all 5 at the same time then. Identify the leader. Approach him privately and try to make him listen to reason. If he does, he might speak with the rest and convince them to change things up about their play. If he doesn't, remove him and hope that he can't bring the rest with him.

[nerdcrewisbestcrew]

My guild (Nerd Crew on Arthas) has this problem all the time. Healers are garbage and are the first to shit talk but stay silent when they fuck up (a lot btw). Don't know how to help you

[Deleted]

Nice example. Except it's not because 8 out of 10 times in this situation people die because they eat too many lasers.

True, but that wasnt really the point I was trying to make. If the situation is similar (so maybe 1/2 double hits each volley of 3) different healing teams can still perform differently. Anyway it was just an example.

Reading this threat almost make me feel like people think healing is:
- keep aoe heal on cd
- heal player with lowest HP
- use big cd when rl says so

And if you do that you are a good healer and dont need to try and improve. So if people die they messed up themselves.

Im not saying taking unnecessary damage is good, not at all. But if you drop people where they could have been saved your healers can do better, regardless of where the damage came from. Healing is all about adapting to the damage taken and dealing with that. If mechanics are messed up you should call out your dps, but the same goes for healers not doing what they can.

[Deleted]

The problem is usually naming and shaming for no reason. People have feelings and that's normal. It's not necessary having a rogue hearing how a priest healer should heal.

[Kakera]

Generally non-healers have 0 clue what they are talking about when it comes to healing. Let them handle it. Promote a healing officer that heals that is in charge of handling it. Non-healers shouldn't be leading healers period.

[chooi]

Nice example. Except it's not because 8 out of 10 times in this situation people die because they eat too many lasers.

Which is not always the fault of the people actually dying, though.

I guess we all know the 'oh fine, I'm safe ...FUUUUCK! *some guy moves 0.1sec before lasers* RIP.' scenario

[IxilaFA]

Which is not always the fault of the people actually dying, though.

I guess we all know the 'oh fine, I'm safe ...FUUUUCK! *some guy moves 0.1sec before lasers* RIP.' scenario

Thats not healers fault either. Except for the third Wrought which usually lines up with doggies, if someone is dying to lasers it's not really the healers fault.

[Deleted]

Why do the healers feel the need to have this 'union' in the first place?

Are they being insta-blamed for wipes before the actual death logs and what actually happened is investigated? If so, I wouldn't blame them for getting a little defensive.

Obviously healers can and do fuck up, but there's usually more to it than: "sorry I forgot to heal that guy." I mean, as a healer myself almost all of my own fuck ups may be due to failing a mechanic and getting myself killed, rather than failing to heal another player. Or I may fuck up and take a ton of unnecesary damage, which forces me to heal myself first instead of another player. Stuff like that can happen.

Are the healers responding to criticism with actual facts and arguments of what happened if they're blamed for a death/wipe? We really need more info on that, and actual examples. Without logs, we can only offer speculative advice.

[PosPosPos]

That's a little disappointing so I can understand your POV. I won't try to make claims about the quality of my guild's healers; we are fortunate that myself and the Disc Priest are usually 90th percentile average healers so we don't typically have issues with people randomly dying slow deaths without at least one of us getting to them. I won't say we haven't had other problems with managing healers, but slow deaths have legitimately not really been much of an issue for me. I usually just don't feel its necessary to constantly remind my healers to watch certain people. We had an issue on Mythic Archi the other night, for example, where someone died to Shackled Torment as a slow death and I mentioned that, we moved on, and it wasn't a problem the rest of the night.

Our healers parse really well too, have high activity uptimes etc.

I sometimes feel that they tend to blindly spam their highest pure throughput spells, even though a lower throughput spell that gives the user more control over where healing goes to would be better for certain situations.

[l33t]

Progress has been over for a long time, but reflecting on the tier I as a raid leader had a huge problem with trying to criticize and talk to healers during progress. Any discussion was met with hostility and denial as all the healers grouped together and deflected any blame leveled towards any of them. What was especially frustrating was their constant complaints about DPS whilst being unable to look at their own shortcomings so we could improve.

Have any of you guys had this problem and how did you deal with it?

edit - for those asking for logs, this post is on behalf of a friend who wants to keep it confidential

Well, to be honest chances are very high they are right. I rarely see a wipe because it was a healer's fault. Tanks could've always better played in mitigating damage; damage dealers could've always get good and drink pot/eat HS/use CD to survive, etc. Just open your logs (logs, not recount or scada) and look what healers were doing when shit hit the fan. And only if you see there healers doing nothing - like, literally nothing, then it possibly was healers fault... and even that is not a 100% possibility since there is a non-zero chance to a huge fuckup RNG in form of boss mechanics being applied to most of your healers requiring them to run away from raid for example, which is also not a healer's fault, just a middle finger of death shown to your raid by Universe.

[Deleted]

I've been a main healer for years and blamed for stupid shit pretty often. For example a DPS standing in a puddle dealing 25% of their health per second. Apparently the other healers and I weren't healing fast enough.
Actually got gkicked over that one which resulted in the others leaving

[Deleted]

From what I read you fail on a personal level as the leader.
Not a lot of people go well with a Gordon Ramsay as raidleader.
Actually you gave us NOTHING to go on. You want a guide to smashing unity but you should try to unite all your raid. THe healers obviously have a reason for them banding together like this, probably you alwas blame them and they don't fel that's justified. They are doing their best and you are only telling them they are shit but not how they can improve. You are putting them down instead of lifting them up.

What do you aim to accomplish with shattering their unity anyway? Do you want to yell at them one by one without backtalk thinking that it will improve their performance? That's not how this works.

How about instead of trying to publicly humiliate your healers you talk to them all alone. Act like you are on their side, something like:"We have a problem; the damage the raid takes is more than you can heal. God knows I can't make them take less damage so can you think of something to increase your healing output?"

"Growing a pair" aka punching down will only get you this far.