Raid Healing Assignments Question. (a lackluster TotGC experience)

[marsdruid]

I recently attempted Trial of the Grand Crusader 10 man. We were trying to down Jaraxxus. There were three healers, me (a Druid), a Shaman and a Paladin. After a certain amount of attempts the raid was called and was mostly pinned on 'insufficient healing'. This always leaves me with a poor taste in my mouth but I couldn't openly argue it due to confusing Recount information. Now that I am thinking about the reason for poor healing, I wanted to ask you Druids... What is your preferred healing assignments? Or should I say... What is the best healing assignment for a druid and what (if any) healing assignment is very unsuitable for a Druid?

In my experience I always find I get the most HPS when I am main healing the main tank, off healing the off tank. In this situation the raid leader had a boner for me being assigned to raid heals. Assigned the Shaman to one tank and the Paladin to the other. My (actually all of the healers) HPS was ridiculously low (I did ~1.8k... yet I have broken 4K lots of times) and I feel like it is because I would start hotting the raid and then -blamo- massive Pally or Shaman heal comes and completely gets rid of the usefulness of my hot. I think perhaps three healers is too much for 10 mans, even Heroic, unless the healers all know each other maybe. But then when I think that three heals was too much I wonder why we messed up on Incinerate Flesh a couple times... but I feel it all comes back to assignments. First few attempts we cleared all incinerate flesh until later the raid leader assigned me to solo heal it, with other healers 'keeping their eye on it'. That could even be another discussion, the best way as a Druid to get rid of Incinerate Flesh. Part of me feels like as a Resto Druid being assigned to be raid healer and Incinerate Flesh healer is one of the silliest assignments I can get! But like I said, I just feel incredibally confused by all this, and am just looking for some info on Optimal Healing assignments as a Druid Healer.

(FYI as for the Incinerate Flesh discussion, on regular ToC 10 & 25 I normally can clear it most of the time alone if I throw a Rejuv and SM and then Nourish until it's gone, but it gets tight sometimes if I don't crit enough. It was a lot harder to clear alone on Heroic. What do you do if you solo that spell?)

I talk about I.F. a lot but really, I am mostly curious about The Optimal Druid Healing Assignment. (all capped because it's special)

[Melonberry]

The optimal druid healing assignment is being a raid healer and hotting everything.

Your raid leader is stupid to have people try and solo heal something as important as incinerate flesh, as its a good chance of losing someone if not wiping if it isn't cleared.

I'm surprized you were able to minimize adds with 3 healers, most guilds run healer light on that fight because of the burst requirement.

[sfbr]

Hello DK Tank here,

I feel that healing Assignments r a waste of time i normally dont have my healers be Assigned to anything, they know what they r best at and that is what they should do (yes i make sure i have Diff. types of healers to make sure everything is taken care of)

For Lord J. we downed him finally after trying a few strats out and the one that worked best was

-Resto Druid
-Holy Pally
-Resto Shammy
-Ranged dps x 4
-1 melee (someone that can kill the fel balls if your tank cant)

when someone got the flesh we had him go near the tank so ALL heals could hit him then the 3 healers just healed him when they had the time to

used that strat and one shot him this week.
sorry i couldnt help with the healing thing but i hope my strat helps you out

[Degrador]

We just cleared 10 H Lord Jaraxxus with a similar healing makeup - druid (me), shammy, priest. To begin with I put myself on the OT and the shammy on the raid heals (priest on MT) but the shammy wasn't clearing the Incinerate Flesh quick enough (tbh, I suspect he just wasn't very good at getting onto it). So we switched and put the shammy on OT with me clearing the IF. To do it I'd usually cast Regrowth then spam Nourish, and most of the time I'd clear it about half way through its duration. If I was out of range (perhaps due to them running with fire earlier) or if I was busy healing someone else to start with then it might be close, and by using Regrowth first I'd be able to use SM just before IF expires to pretty much guarantee it'd be gone.

Watching recount for your HPS is actually quite stupid for this fight. It doesn't record your healing for IF, yet this is one of the most important parts of the fight. Turn it off if you have to, but one way or another you should completely ignore it. It also seems to me that you're competing too much against the other healers. Work in unison - don't try to get the best numbers or try to show you're a better healer, just do your job (that is, healing people with fires or IF) and as long as the other healers do the same and the DPS doesn't fail on the portals / volcanos then the boss will die.

[kliffharry]

Did him yesteday in one attempt with me as resto and a disc priest. We stood at each our side of the room making sure that everyone was in range. I was healing raid while the disc priest was on the MT and helped with Incinerate flesh. With two healers you'll get more dps on portals and volcanos and there's not really heavy raid or tank damage in that fight as long as the nether power gets interrupted. We did beasts with 3 healers, jaraxxus and faction champs with 2, twins with 3 and anub with 2. Came to anub with 49 attempts left then we mega failed :P

[Deleted]

Druids are best at raid healing, because we can do things other can't : massive HOTing on the whole raid (if 10 man) + WG so that damage gets healed premptively. Of course, if you are waiting for damage to come to put your hots on the guys, you have a high chance to get stomped, but if your hots are already there you will get a few ticks before the others can react (assuming group damage). Remember, your aim is not necessarily to keep everyone at full life (depending on situation) but to provide a massive buffer to anyone whom the others can't reach in time. It so happens that in most 10 mans there isn't enough raid damage so you should actually keep people up doing a bit more then Rejuv spam, but the philosophy i still there : it's better to have hots on everyone and several people at 50% (they'll be coming back up before the next damage source) than 1-2 at 100% and the rest at 10% or less.
That being said, we can be good at tank healing too (i've had to do it a lot in 10-man Ulduar or VoA), but others will be as good or better than us in that role (especially paladins). If you have the impression that you are better in that role just because of hps numbers, then forget those and look at mecanics of healing and the different spells all healers have. We are clearly better raid healers than tank healers. (also go in a fight like Twin Valkyrs and rock the meters with nothing but Rejuv and WG if numbers are the only thing you care about)

Concerning that specific fight, the attribution they did seems fine to me (in terms of first priority), the problem lies rather in how you were all accomplishing your roles and wether you were able to help out each other when nothing was happening on your main targets.
The healing requirements aren't really high as long as the dps is good enough to control the number of adds that pop (and if they don't (for example getting 2 mistresses) it's their fault, not the healers). Having only one person on IF duty is somewhat bad i think, since none of the other healers should be pressured that much (and the OT healer has straight nothing else to do half the time)
Concerning IF, i just rejuv (for the Nourish bonus + SM possibility more than the heal) and then spam Nourrish. Having the debuff appear on your raid frames helps to react faster but it isn't really problematic in my experience.

[sicness]

Hello DK Tank here,

I feel that healing Assignments r a waste of time i normally dont have my healers be Assigned to anything, they know what they r best at and that is what they should do (yes i make sure i have Diff. types of healers to make sure everything is taken care of)

For Lord J. we downed him finally after trying a few strats out and the one that worked best was

-Resto Druid
-Holy Pally
-Resto Shammy
-Ranged dps x 4
-1 melee (someone that can kill the fel balls if your tank cant)

when someone got the flesh we had him go near the tank so ALL heals could hit him then the 3 healers just healed him when they had the time to

used that strat and one shot him this week.
sorry i couldnt help with the healing thing but i hope my strat helps you out

I gotta completely disagree. You really need to have assignments, especially on tanks. It not only makes the healing more efficient it also gives you a better sign of who is underperforming in raids. Healers have to rely upon each other and not try to do too much, otherwise they'll screw up by running out of mana or not healing their original assignment, especially when you get to the hard mode content.

Overall it's pretty generic how you setup heals anyways, paladins/disc priests are your best tank healers while druids and holy priests are the better raid healers. So your typical setup will rarely ever change and when it does it's typically having a raid healer help heal a tank.

[tremors]

Next time tell your pally healer to learn to heal =)
He should be able to easly keep the tank and OT alive with beacon. Of coarse with a few hots from you here and there wouldnt be bad but that will leave the other two healers (you and mr shammy) to heal the raid and who ever has debuff. Bam pro =)

[marsdruid]

Thanks for some very good replies. About the healing meters, I feel good that you guys say they should mostly be ignored, not because I have some personal lust for what they say but because I have ran with many different raid leaders that do.

Of course, if you are waiting for damage to come to put your hots on the guys, you have a high chance to get stomped, but if your hots are already there you will get a few ticks before the others can react (assuming group damage). Remember, your aim is not necessarily to keep everyone at full life (depending on situation) but to provide a massive buffer to anyone whom the others can't reach in time.

This really helps me out, saying that makes me feel like a nub, but I have not been a progression-type raid healer since TBC. I just got back into it after being a Moonkin about two months ago. I'm not too worried about my skill as a healer or anything, I know I have the ability as a player to heal heroic raids etc... but for some reason this raid-healing scenario was not apparent to me. I guess I was concerned rolling hots on people before damage was too anticipatory and would cause mana issues. (Though I admit as a Druid my mana issues have been very rare, so why I worried too much about that I am not sure)

Having the debuff appear on your raid frames helps to react faster but it isn't really problematic in my experience.

I recently installed Stuf Unit Frames, and am really liking it for unit and raid frames... but I haven't figured out how to get only specific debuffs to show up, (and didn't know how to do that with grid when I used that too) Is there a recommended addon that anyone knows about where I can do things like selectively pick buffs and debuffs to show up on raid frames? I.F. wasn't a big problem with this addon though because Stuf does have an option to show raid icons, and DBM automatically make people skull. But still, this peaked my curiosity.

[Momof267]

we usually roll with 2 druids and a shammy a weird make up i know and someitmes we will havr our pally healer but he currently has RL things going on We havent attempted TOC really yet cause we are still working on Ulduar BUT we dont really have any assignments either regrowth and HoTs always go on the tanks no matter what and then we all raid heal...i could easily spec for MT heals if i wanted too but i am happy with being a raid healer and our runs are very smooth the way we are currently running them i hope one day we can get into TOC but I would rather continue to focus on Ulduar and then go into ICC when it comes out

[vasyl83]

I recently installed Stuf Unit Frames, and am really liking it for unit and raid frames... but I haven't figured out how to get only specific debuffs to show up, (and didn't know how to do that with grid when I used that too) Is there a recommended addon that anyone knows about where I can do things like selectively pick buffs and debuffs to show up on raid frames? I.F. wasn't a big problem with this addon though because Stuf does have an option to show raid icons, and DBM automatically make people skull. But still, this peaked my curiosity.

There is an AddOn for Grid called GridRaidStatusDebuff that will add all the debuff auras into grid for you as center Icon
or
You can add every debuff individually (In auras I can add a new debuff then simply activate it in raid icon or any corner (if you need more info on that PM me and I will get you the info when I get home))

[Seiryuu]

In our 10 mans we usually have the pally on incinerate flesh while I just rejuv + SM and maybe a nourish to help. And if they're out of range the pally says it in vent and the remaining two 2 healers cover it. I also keep hots on the tank at all times. BTW, Meters don't matter if you're not healing the right things, I'd rather get a low hps and down a boss than get a high score on the epeen meter and wipe, though doing both at once is awesome.

[sicness]

Thanks for some very good replies. About the healing meters, I feel good that you guys say they should mostly be ignored, not because I have some personal lust for what they say but because I have ran with many different raid leaders that do.

Healing meters you can never trust. Paly healers purposely overheal, while druids and priests will top meters due to raid healing and poor resto shaman probably still need to be buffed. The only way to really test healers is give them assignments and see where heals are lacking.

[doomchken]

Lord Jarraxxus is not a healing intensive fight if done right assuming it was the same healers who did northrend beasts your healing is fine. Basically with each add that leaves the portal the fight becomes exponetially harder in general 2mistresses(except at the end) = wipe 3 infernals you better be on your toes. Basically your dps should be bursting down the portals better call tehm out on recount when you see that only 1 of your dps did significant damage on said portal. BTW resto shamans are OP atm someone said they are still weak and really all healers are 100% acceptable in ToGC 10 at least.

[nexttosmelly]

boomkin here. weve downed lord 10 man for several weeks now we had an issue to start off with so we popped bl on the first portal just to get past it and practice the fight more. i then instructed them to not do it and we got 1 misstress and around 2 inferals for the rest of the fight.
set up was
- resto druid
-holy priest
- resto shammy
-boomkin
-hunter
-dk tank
- warrior tank
-retri paladin
- warlock
- feral dps druid

as you can see not the best setup for this kind of fight but we managed it if your healers are failing that because the dps is not dpsing the portals quick enough resulting in more adds and more raid damage. also is sumone spellsteeling or tranq shotting the bosses debuff if not then he will hit harder. another thing as a raid leader i dont look at the healing meters imo there stupid if everyone stays alive they have done there job. i dont look at the meters because some healers who are assigned to different jobs have advantages over others such as tank healing or we had a disp priest mass dispelling in faction champions.
as for incenerate fless all your heallers should spam heal the target and call out the target on vent to make it clear. also call out when the misstress is throwing somone as they may land in fire and need to be healed. call out legion flames and get people to run in a U shape when they have it behind them and then back to there place.
assign places for people the 3 healers in a triangle and then ranged dps fill in the gaps. they means that fel lighting wont hit more than 1 person unless its in melee also people are in a better position to deal with the portal.

[Aerius]

I'm afraid I can't comment on H Jaraxxus, but can relate what I've seen in 10-man.

Firstly, low HPS is not unusual. I usually pull 5k on a fight like 25-man Emalon, but I still end up with around 2k on Jaraxxus. This is due to low damage in many instances and high prevention being required, meaning movement, meaning less heals.

I've always found it most effective to have a Holy Paladin (myself) healing the Main Tank, so with Beacon of Light they can also heal the Incinerate Flesh'd player, and the off-tank. The role of the druid can be anything from my experience, but if you are working with a Holy Paladin it would probably be better to have you on the OT rather than the Shaman, because as you say our Beacon healing will likely mean we override your HoTs.

[Nørf]

Dont assign the healing, leave it open for all 3 healers and avoid tunnel vision.
Im sure that will give you the kill.

[SBS]

We use 2 healers in our 10 man groups on this fight (only use 3 on twins, although it's possible to duo that as well) and we don't assign anything. The only thing people with incinerate flesh has to do is to make sure they are in range of at least one healer, optimally both. An announcement is made on vent about who has incinerate, just to be sure, and there are no problems. The same can be said about legion flames, people who run far away from healers with legion flames is just fail.

So... have your ranged be in range of healers when they have incinerate flesh (move to the tank if that makes it easier) and you should down it easily.

[Psychedelicious]

It's not good to heal only what you're assigned to and it's not good thing to heal too much what you're not assigned to either. As a druid you usually are on raid, but you should also keep hot's on tank(s). What I mean with the latter case is a problem new healers face, which is panically healing other healers' assigned targets like crazy. It's a lot about improvisation, which you learn quickly. Trusting the other healers is above all else.

[doomchken]

On most harder fights healing assignments aren't very good with the exception of in 25 man's designating 1 or 2 full time tank healers(who should still raid heal when possible) don't worry about healing assignments unless it is part of a fight like assigning 1 healer to the boss on anub phase 3 or something like that.