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  1. #1

    Deciding if you should 2-heal fights in 10-man

    Kind of a weird question (the title isn't that great either, couldn't think of anything better) but I'm curious of this. Just how/when do you determine if you should 2-heal fights or not? I ask because my Raid Leader basically refuses to even consider the idea of 2-healing; we 3-heal every fight in Throne of Thunder, and I'm pretty sure we've always 3-healed even as far back as Firelands. I'm not sure if this is because our healers aren't that good, or just to "play it safe", but since I always see people talk in other threads about using 2 healers it keeps me wondering if my RL is hurting the team by not using 2 healers and, if necessary, calling them out or even replacing them if they can't keep up if 2-healing is the norm. It's something that lurks in the back of my head because if we are meant to 2-heal fights, and most 10-man guilds 2-heal the fights, and we try and wipe due to not enough heals, than IMO the solution isn't to just say "Okay we 3-heal it instead" it's to find out why our two healers can't keep up, when other groups' healers can.

    Having said that are there any real guidelines for when to 2-heal versus when to 3-heal? For instance, Megaera seems like a lot of raid damage, so 3-healing that fight would make sense (to me anyways, maybe it's doable with 2 as well but just saying). But a fight like Jin-rokh or even Horridon or Tortos doesn't seem like it really requires 3 heals, and the loss of a DPS makes the fight go longer, etc. but mentioning that tends to get a "We beat it with 3, why try 2 and risk a wipe?" which I certainly understand but it seems detrimental overall.

    FWIW Our typical healing setup is a Resto Druid (Balance O/S), Disc Priest (Holy O/S) and Holy Pally (Changes his O/S all the time), with the rest of the raid looking usually like: Prot Paladin (me), Guardian Druid, the three healers above, Shadow Priest, typically a BM Hunter and then three from: Enh Shaman/BM Hunter/2x Destro Lock/2x Frost DKs depending on who we have on and available for raid.

    Also this is specifically in regards to Normal mode.

  2. #2
    Deleted
    Your post sounds really stupid to me, so let me see if I understood it correctly.

    Some guilds two-heal the content. Whereas you sometimes wipe with three healers. You are now thinking that maybe your healers suck because you wipe with 50% more heals. You think your healers are bad because others can get by with two healers. You are thinking about having some of your healers kicked.

    Is that correct?

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Blutelf View Post
    Your post sounds really stupid to me, so let me see if I understood it correctly.

    Some guilds two-heal the content. Whereas you sometimes wipe with three healers. You are now thinking that maybe your healers suck because you wipe with 50% more heals. You think your healers are bad because others can get by with two healers. You are thinking about having some of your healers kicked.

    Is that correct?
    Not quite. I'm saying some (most?) guilds two-heal the content, we always three-heal without exception (whether or not we have trouble isn't relevant). That to me says that we could (should?) two-heal, and if we wipe while two-healing it means that we should evaluate our healers instead of saying "oh well let's just three heal" like we tend to do.

  4. #4
    You 2-heal whenever your 3 healers are not over ~250k HPS combined.

    We do it the other way, we 2-heal everything, and the few fights we need a third healer our MW and disc are basically DPSing the entire fight, and healing when there's something to heal.

    Most fights have periods of "may as well grab a drink, as there's no way someone is dying here" and "OMG everyone is dying spamspamspam!". You only need 3 healers for those phases, and 2 really good ones, or 2 mediocre ones with tons of raid CDs from DPS (HotW tranq / HTT / VE / smoke bomb if stacked / etc).

    Truth be told, 3 healers is safer if you are not missing a DPS check

  5. #5
    Okay that makes sense. I'm typically of the mindset "If you should do X, and you do Y instead, then there's a flaw somewhere" and look to get as much information regarding it as possible to make an informed decision, instead of just going with the old "It works, why fix it" mentality.

  6. #6
    Deleted
    You got both shadow priest, holy paladin and enh shaman as well as health stones, you got a ton of raid healing from your dps/tanks so you really have a perfect opportunity to 2 heal some fights.

    The easy answer is, whenever you can two heal you should.

    Some fights become significantly easier when two healing
    The rest of the fights become easier if your healers can handle it
    In some rare exceptions three healing is almost always easier, for example megaera. Having the extra dps is not always helpful there. If you have to much dps on megaera you will start pushing your rampages too fast, what happens then is that your CDs dont have time to recharge between the rampages, so it becomes significantly harder if your dps is too high.

    Still, if you are three healing fights like Horridon you should try to get your raid leader to reconsider, our healers used to be bored out of there mind when two healing, I cant even imagine three healing it. As said, you even got great support healing from the rest of the raid.

    You say you are interested in normal modes, here is how I would heal the fights considering your setup aswell with the good extra hps.

    bold means probably the better choice

    Jin - 2/3
    Horridon - 2
    Council - 2/3
    Tortos - 2/3
    Megaera - 3
    Ji-Kun - 2/3
    Durumu - 2/3
    Primordius - 2/3
    Dark Animus - 2/3
    Iron Qon - 2/3
    Twins - 2/3
    LS - 2/3

  7. #7
    Deleted
    The easy answer is, whenever you can two heal you should.
    This, basically. We're 8/13 HC and have two-healed every single fight except twins (Which we honestly could probably 2-heal). Most guilds three-healed fights such as Megaera HC, but we always attempt to two-heal a new fight, before deciding whether we will need to 3-heal it.

  8. #8
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Arothand View Post
    Not quite. I'm saying some (most?) guilds two-heal the content, we always three-heal without exception (whether or not we have trouble isn't relevant). That to me says that we could (should?) two-heal, and if we wipe while two-healing it means that we should evaluate our healers instead of saying "oh well let's just three heal" like we tend to do.
    Why should you two heal? What would you gain?

    Again, what is your angle here? You are not wiping on any particular bosses. Your healers are not, according to you, absolute rubbish or anything. Your raid leader is right when he is asking you : why should you be two healing?

    Are you worried that your healers are taking it too easy? Are you worried about heroic progress with a particular healer?

    Because unless you do, I am not seeing any reason for you to go & push your opinion onto the raid when the rest of the players obviously does not see any need to do so.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Blutelf View Post
    Why should you two heal? What would you gain?

    Again, what is your angle here? You are not wiping on any particular bosses. Your healers are not, according to you, absolute rubbish or anything. Your raid leader is right when he is asking you : why should you be two healing?

    Are you worried that your healers are taking it too easy? Are you worried about heroic progress with a particular healer?

    Because unless you do, I am not seeing any reason for you to go & push your opinion onto the raid when the rest of the players obviously does not see any need to do so.
    More a curiosity of "Why can other guilds 2 -heal this and have no trouble, but we have to 3-heal". As i said before that kind of means that we are doing something wrong somewhere if others can 2-heal and yet we have problems when we try. It's not really trying to push my opinion, I'm just curious as to if we should be 2-healing fights instead of 3-healing.

  10. #10
    Two man healing is not the norm of progression. Most guilds progressing on normal start 2 healing only when they get better gear. Think of the gear + legendary gem as a slow progressive nerf to the content. There are some exceptions of course. Some guilds, while progressing, find themselves not needing the 3rd healer on a specific fight, and might benefit from a 6th DPS instead. Maegara and Horridon, for instance, aren't fit for 2 man healing if your guild is fresh into normal. But yea, this doesn't mean some exceptional healers can't do it.
    Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.

  11. #11
    Sometimes the experience of the raid group as a whole can affect wether you 2 heal or 3 heal particular fights, an experienced raid group will easily understand fights more meaning you can judge when certain abilities are inc or allot of dmg is about to be let out on the raid, if the raid group is not as experienced or only recently been put together without much experience between each raider it can become more difficult, for healers especially if you have little knowledge of a fight then 3 healers can be an advantage over 2 because of that risk factor, a fresh raid group that's just joined together may still be learning where other raiders stand what thier roles are and how they do things in a fight which can affect what you do In some cases, so if your team is a newly built team this may be a reason your RL is afraid to 2 heal, if that's the case maybe you could pull your RL and the healers aside after the raid and discuss 2 healing jut to try and my the leader feel more confident in the team and the healers especially.

  12. #12
    I am Murloc! Cairhiin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Arothand View Post
    More a curiosity of "Why can other guilds 2 -heal this and have no trouble, but we have to 3-heal". As i said before that kind of means that we are doing something wrong somewhere if others can 2-heal and yet we have problems when we try. It's not really trying to push my opinion, I'm just curious as to if we should be 2-healing fights instead of 3-healing.
    It depends on your healer, your gear, your setup, and a lot of other things. Many guilds start out with 3 healers, and then decide whether they can or need to drop one due to DPS requirements. Just because other groups do it with 2, doesn't make your healers bad if they can't. Maybe your raid has a lot of special people that stand in bad stuff, maybe your guild's dps is bad, or your tanks don't use their mitigation at the right moments.

    You shouldn't worry about it, and go with what suits you best, if that's three healers then so be it. Just be open to drop one when you start running into DPS problems. Most fights in ToT aren't any harder with 3 healers, there's only a couple where I really would suggest to drop that third healer, probably actually only Horridon. Fights like Ji-Kun and Tortos can be done with three just fine, and Ji-Kun is actually easier with three during progression, as DPS is never really an issue there.

  13. #13
    Deleted
    If you can kill every boss using 3 healers then wheres the problem? If you miss dps and hit enrage switch to 2 healers and try again. Its as simple as that.

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Haxx0rcist View Post
    If you can kill every boss using 3 healers then wheres the problem? If you miss dps and hit enrage switch to 2 healers and try again. Its as simple as that.
    2-healing also means bosses and trash dies faster, so doing it on farm content to get to progression attempts/clears faster is a pretty good strategy to maximise time.

  15. #15
    Bloodsail Admiral Seregon's Avatar
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    I've been in the same boat as your guild many times. We usually start out with a 3-heal setup and then move to 2 if we feel dps is too low or the healers feel up to it. We pretty much require our healers to have viable and decently geared off-specs or geared alts though, which helps a lot in these situations, preventing us from actually having to bench them.

  16. #16
    I have 2 healed all bosses in ToT myself with my guild. We played as Disc Resto druid and I feel that its about outgearing it(Our healers was around 520 when we started 2 heal all) and also about what tanks ure using tbh(Paladin = OP, we had one as main tank, pretty much worked as a third healer), then there is a few percentage of skills thrown in there aswell.

    It might be notable that we 2 healed Jin, Horridon and Council the first week of ToT tbh, still it was only because we didnt have any more healers in the guild.

    Anyway, Ure not loosing anything aslong as u still make progress on 3 healers. Going with 3 healers is great but sometimes, in my opinion it is abit overkill which means u can kill the boss faster by having an addional dps instead of a healer. Other than that its not really a game changing move.
    Last edited by Spoonman; 2013-07-21 at 01:27 PM.

  17. #17
    It is always a measure of healing need in our raids, though sometimes it comes down to which people are showing up for the night.

    DPS has never been a problem for our raid, so 2-healing usually isn't done to beat enrages, but rather because it can often make fights easier by brute forcing through mechanics so fast that healing requirements are reduced. The only fights that need a third healer are the ones where the mechanics of the fight mean a period of high damage unrelated to your ability to damage the boss (For example, the transition phases of lei shen and the rampage of megaera. They are gonna happen, they are going to take a set amount of time, nothing you can do to change that).

  18. #18
    The Lightbringer Aqua's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Firefly33 View Post
    You got both shadow priest, holy paladin and enh shaman as well as health stones, you got a ton of raid healing from your dps/tanks so you really have a perfect opportunity to 2 heal some fights.

    The easy answer is, whenever you can two heal you should.

    Some fights become significantly easier when two healing
    The rest of the fights become easier if your healers can handle it
    In some rare exceptions three healing is almost always easier, for example megaera. Having the extra dps is not always helpful there. If you have to much dps on megaera you will start pushing your rampages too fast, what happens then is that your CDs dont have time to recharge between the rampages, so it becomes significantly harder if your dps is too high.

    Still, if you are three healing fights like Horridon you should try to get your raid leader to reconsider, our healers used to be bored out of there mind when two healing, I cant even imagine three healing it. As said, you even got great support healing from the rest of the raid.

    You say you are interested in normal modes, here is how I would heal the fights considering your setup aswell with the good extra hps.

    bold means probably the better choice

    Jin - 2/3
    Horridon - 2
    Council - 2/3
    Tortos - 2/3
    Megaera - 3
    Ji-Kun - 2/3
    Durumu - 2/3
    Primordius - 2/3
    Dark Animus - 2/3
    Iron Qon - 2/3
    Twins - 2/3
    LS - 2/3
    ...Yeah that looks about right to me. My team often rearranges to suit 2/3 healing depending on fight.
    If you can get away with 2 healing you should, more dps is less boss time.
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  19. #19
    The Patient Azelias's Avatar
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    I find that we make our decisions to 2/3 heal based upon individual fight mechanics and also take into consideration things that are not necessarily healer related.
    For example, if your tanks and DPS are mitigating / avoiding (respectively) the damage in a particular fight, then 2 healing will become easier, while 3 will just be a complete waste instead of having an extra ## million damage on a boss.
    There is also the "reverse" where too little damage on boss or adds results in a lot of damage such as Allowing adds in Horridon to be alive too long, or not killing Sul before Sandstorm (which shouldn't be a problem these days). It doesn't mean the fight can't be done, it just makes it easier, on everyone.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Inthislzon View Post
    Most fights have periods of "may as well grab a drink, as there's no way someone is dying here" and "OMG everyone is dying spamspamspam!".
    Haha been there to many times lol

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