Leading raids as a DPS?

[Jinto]

There should be no issues switching between a dps and a tank, as it is, essentially, the exact same role - you just stand on the other side of the boss. Each have procs to adjust to (tanks all have that reset-cooldown on main nuke thing except for dks who gets their runes randomely refilled), and all have cooldowns they need to use at the correct time - in fact, as DPS knows exactly when they're supposed to line their cds up (EG when kiril procs for me on my hunter), while tanks doesn't know when the healers are going to get in trouble / he's going to take a spike, tanks have to be even more focused on their own things than DPS does.
Healers in general has a much harder time knowing what exactly is going on around them as they have to focus on their healing grids - they can't just work their "rotation" into their brain and do it flawlessly without looking. They have to know who's taking damage, impairing their visual focus on the fight.

Lol I don't know what kind of healers you play with but a good healer needs excellent raid awareness and awareness of encounter mechanics. Much more than a dps does.

[Wilderness]

It just takes getting used to when you switch to a new role. But anyone can RL very well as either a tank, healer, or dps if they are used to it and a good RL. The best RL I have played for was a dps (DK) and my current one does very well as a shadow priest.

[Uriel]

Back in my activ raiding Days i led the Raid while tanking on my Paladin.. however i did lead raids with my countless toons too but got distracted if i DPS or heal. i think as a tank your job is to controll the fight.. leading a raid is controlling its direction... so you just combine those two.

Imo a Healer makes the worst leader.

[Rimshot85]

Imo a Healer makes the worst leader.

Why would they make the worst leader?

[Nymie]

I have raided since early BC, started in Kara. My raid leader until Wrath was a Holy Pally. Once I changed guilds it was a Resto Druid and Rogue. Now it is a mage; I also have 2 friends in a US top 20 guild and their leader is a Holy Pally or Resto Shaman. I have always been in end content guilds, hard mode clears, etc., and as you can see we ha different roles leading and it was always fine. I think it is totally about your comfort, not your role. That being said, walking in on a toon you have never raided with is not the most ideal raid leader if you are trying to stay competitive number wise. Talk to your guild and see what they think of your performance raid leading on your dps. Get feedback and go from there. Look at your logs and see if you were able to stay out of bad stuff like you were supposed to, if you were as comparable as your gear allows to your other dps, and what happened during times you had to be calling out a lot of directions, etc.
Best wishes.

[Levicopter]

I used to have a raidleader who was a Mage Dps leader at its finest!
Also used to raid with a group whos leader was a healer

[Kurzior]

I raid lead as a healer and don't have too many problems with it. A lot of it depends on the group and what is involved in raid leading for you. If all you need to do is let people know when to move to position X or which mob has kill priority, that shouldn't have a negative effect on your individual performance. On the other hand, if you need to constantly be calling out what DBM is telling you, maybe you need to change something.

The bottom line is that raid leaders are naturally going to have their performance suffer a bit because their focus can't be only on their own performance. That's not to say they can't perform well, but if you were to do a fight as a raid lead, then do the same fight while not leading, you're going to do better in the second scenario. That's just something you have to live with. What you should be doing is trying to narrow that performance gap as much as possible, which you can help alot by doing 2 things.

- Get very comfortable with the character you're playing and how that roll interacts with the various encounters. The less time you spend worrying about what button to push and where to stand, the more time you have to focus on raid leading.

- Communicate efficiently. The fewer words you need to get information across, the better. If all you need to say is "skull then X", to get corruptions killed on Spine of DW, that's a lot quicker than saying "kill bottom-left, then kill top-left". In that specific example, I have keybinds to put the various markers on my target which makes things very fast.


To answer your original question though, it probably is just a matter of time and practice getting used to a new role. The more time you spend on your shaman, the easier it will be to dps without paying as much attention to that, leaving you more able to focus on the raid.

[Deleted]

I, as the main tank of our 10 man guild co-lead, but the actual RL (and GM) is a Shadow priest, and he does a superb job at both (DPS and RL).
It helps of course that he's also a Gladiator so he's used to calling out stuff etc and paying attention to more than just his rotation.

[Kardone]

I've led raids as a boomchicken, Resto Druid, Resto Shaman, Elemental Shaman, Feral Bear, Blood DK, and SV Hunter.

I'd say I'm most comfortable and used to leading as a healer because I already have the awareness of tanks and overall raid health and what's going on and when bursts of damage are coming etc. But I would say I'm fine with any role as a leader; It really doesn't matter to me. The only times leading is difficult is if I assign myself to be one of the small groups that go off and do something else. Like zon'ozz black phase running off towards some eyeballs and not having an eye on everything or going up top on beth (so I pretty much always kept myself on the bottom). The most difficult time I had leading was as an ele shaman offspec on heroic rag doing dreadflame running. Gets really hard to call stuff out when you're off in BFE while the raid is dealing with roots and stuff. I would've preferred to be in the group but apparently our arcane mages couldn't grasp the concept of just running around not, cast 5 AB's then run 10 yards and cast some more.

[Shoridayo]

My previous guild was run by a shadow priest. And she did really well.

BtM is run by a shadow priest as well, although a guy. He's pretty good too, but he's a bit more angry. lol.

[Popabear]

As somebody who has lead raids from all 4 roles, I'd say.. It doesn't matter. What does matter is how comfortable you are with your chosen role/spec. If you have to put a lot of brain power into doing your job perfectly and reminding yourself of things, then your ability to watch everything else will be diminished. Some helpful tips.

- Centralize information on your screen. If you use timers for Dots and Cooldowns, put your boss mod timers near them.
- Make sure your raid frames are clearly visible, and get used to glancing over at them. Train yourself to monitor the raids health and mana even if you aren't a healer. This is very similar to checking your rear view mirror even if you aren't changing lanes.
- Practice doing your role while looking in another direction.. Spend a farm fight staring at two people not next to you. You don't need to have your eyes on the bosses ass.

[Mathyou]

I think it just takes time to settle in and get used to the multitasking. My previous Guild Leader was also the Raid Leader, and he played a Warlock (kind of an afk type dps, but meh). He was exceptionally sharp and observant regarding everyone and everything. The guild before that, it was a rogue, who lead the DPS charts and still never missed a thing. I guess some people have a talent for that sort of thing too.

[Kaizers]

It's something you'll get used to, if you recently changed mains it'll prob take you some time to get everything down.

[smegdawg]

Just designate people to do stuff.

Thats what I do. Makes things a hell of a lot more bearable. I am thinking of going tank in the expansion though. We shall see.

[Spotnick]

Raid leading will usually nerf your dps around 10%. Well that was in 25 man, my old GM bought a foot pedal to talk on vent to not nerf his dps lol.

[Dracodraco]

Lol I don't know what kind of healers you play with but a good healer needs excellent raid awareness and awareness of encounter mechanics. Much more than a dps does.

Lol maybe you read what I said:

Healers in general has a much harder time knowing what exactly is going on around them as they have to focus on their healing grids - they can't just work their "rotation" into their brain and do it flawlessly without looking. They have to know who's taking damage, impairing their visual focus on the fight.

I didn't say good healers couldn't do this, and I didn't say that you can't have a healing raid leader that does better than dps / tanks - some of the top end guilds have a healing raid leader (Halby from Scrubbusters springs to mind).

What I did say was that healers has a harder time focusing on everything else and calling stuff out, as they at the same time have to be focused on the 25 jumping bars on their grid. They will know if something goes wrong, but not from seeing a mob run towards an overeager dps, but because their healthbar-icon flares up because (s)he has aggro, and takes unnessecary damage so they have to heal that person. They can't do what they're trying to do well without looking, or by having noises shouting at you when you get a specific proc so you know now is the time to use CD number XYZ^2 to gain max DPS. They have to constantly focus on people and who takes dmg in order to heal them up.

[neccowafer]

I always preferred leadership roles as the healer. Why?

Well, if there's a debuff to manage or if anyone is in fire, I am the first to know about it because I spend a good deal of time looking at HP and looking at positioning (for AoE healing) and that stuff is already part of my role. It's already my role to know where everyone is at all times and to know when damage is coming, when phase changes are coming. I need to anticipate burst damage and such and I need to make sure my little cats are all herded into a pile to get in the Healing Rain.

Since those things are all things I am doing naturally (not just blindly staring at grid and not correlating any of it to what's actually going on) it's really not much of a step to share those things verbally.

I always know who has the scary debuff and whatnot because I'm looking right at the healing bars, and not just glancing at them while trying to manage my role at the same time, it IS my role to be looking at them most of the time. I can tell who is on fire if someone's HP shoots down all of a sudden. I can see the aggro warnings and debuff stacks, call for taunts... I typically know where everyone is standing because I want to intelligently use Chain Heal and not be that derpface who Chain Heals one person standing in the middle of nowhere. I mind positioning because I want to Healing Rain the highest # of people possible, etc.

Healing has more opportunities to not be 100% invested in a rotation than a DPS. For a DPS every split second delay is always a loss of performance because it's about always doing the most damage, all the time, but for a healer, there are times when there is not much to heal and just autopilot Riptide, HW, HW on a tank is good enough while I assess a situation. Healing is not about doing the most healing, it's about doing the most EFFECTIVE healing and doing it when it's the most needed. There are more opportunities to look around without performance suffering and you tend to be looking at the same UI elements for raid leading and for healing meaning it seems net more efficient. If a tank or dps has to spend a lot of time staring at raid frames that is separate from his role and he's effectively multitasking to a much greater degree than you are.

A good healer should not only be staring at the frames though, they should always be aware of actual spatial positioning for best use of AoE healing elements. I mean, if you don't know where everyone is, how do you pick the best target to Chain Heal, Holy Radiance, etc? If your healer is incapable of knowing where people are and what the environment looks like, they're never going to be better than mediocre. If you're a disc priest and you visually SEE that mob running towards someone who has aggro, you can pre-shield them and you have helped the raid more than someone who only reacts once their health bar goes down. You'll know who to get Effloresence under, you'll know where to put down Holy Word: Sanctuary, you'll know where to put Healing Rain, you'll know where to put down the disc Barrier thing.. etc. You're a much better healer if you are spatially aware.

You're also never going to be more than a mediocre healer if you only focus on who has taken damage. You want to know who is GOING TO take damage and when to as much of a degree as possible. You want to know when the phase switch is coming and the AoE is going to start. If you're only reacting to things that have happened, and not thinking about and being aware of what is going to happen, you're already several seconds behind a "good" healer.

But any role can lead once they get used to it enough. If one person can't keep tabs on EVERYTHING, delegate, delegate, delegate.

[Tricoxagain]

Tanks are obviously the best. Plus they always seem to be the ones who want to, in my exp.

[Nosonia]

I've played all the roles from tank to dps to heals, and have ran raids as all of them.

[sornok]

6 years as a raid leader, fire-frost-arcane mage played all specs. My dps goes down only when people fuck up.
Maybe in early progress I am a "bit" lower than others, but usually on first kills I am ok. I kinda agree that tanks
do not have much to do in a fight and they have more spare time to call/announce things. But I have an objection,
on many-many fights, tanks just cant see much around, cause of their position in the fight. As a caster/ranged dps
I can always see what others do.