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

[Drefan]

3 Healers allows more raid misstakes
2 Healers are better if your raid can avoid standing in fire and interupting adds when its needed, highly reccomended to have atleast one Disc Priest or a Holy Paladin preferably both :P

My list
Jin - 2
Horridon - 2
Council - 2
Tortos - 2
Megaera - 2
Ji-Kun - 1 or 2
Durumu - 2
Primordius - 2
Dark Animus - 2 or 3 depends on tactic
Iron Qon - 3 is much safer but doable with 2
Twins - 2 with a dps drawing
LS - 2

[cyqu]

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

Can 2 heal meg, and raden is 2 heal

[Deleted]

Can 2 heal meg, and raden is 2 heal

Just see no benefit in 2 healing meg, it can be done, yes. But why would you do it on your first kill?

[braeldiil]

We generally start out 3-healing each fight while we learn, as it's easier to learn the mechanics with lots of healing. Once we start making real attempts, we'll switch to 2-heals if it seems like more dps will push us through the fight. Say, council on ToT - adding another dps let us kill Sul before empower and we got the easy kill. Other times (Horridon) the extra heals (really dispels/cures) were essential, and we stayed at three. Sometimes (Durumu, Magaera) we try dropping to 2 and decide it didn't help so we go back to 3.

tl;dr - start at 3, but keep dropping to 2 as an option in your tool bag.

[kilj]

You can 2 heal everything on normal with skilled healers, in fact 2 healing makes things easier with more dps...

Take heroic jin'rokh three heal... You will prob hit 3 storms, where if you 2 heal it's one less storm and easier to deal with.

[Moshots]

Just see no benefit in 2 healing meg, it can be done, yes. But why would you do it on your first kill?

you do it once you have 540+ilvl on every raider. We get 1-1-1-1-1-0-1 breath's. Its really insane on our healers not letting cd's get up but assuming you have 2 healers capable of pulling close to 300k hps together usually Our disc does like 160 our holy paly 140. last week our disc did 190 our druid 90 when our paly was missing. and maybe a monk tank with chi torpedo ours does like 9 mil healing. Its been a 1 shot every week and really fast cause how do you fail with only 1 breath.

[Deleted]

you do it once you have 540+ilvl on every raider. We get 1-1-1-1-1-0-1 breath's. Its really insane on our healers not letting cd's get up but assuming you have 2 healers capable of pulling close to 300k hps together usually Our disc does like 160 our holy paly 140. last week our disc did 190 our druid 90 when our paly was missing. and maybe a monk tank with chi torpedo ours does like 9 mil healing. Its been a 1 shot every week and really fast cause how do you fail with only 1 breath.

Well, we need to take the OPs situation in consideration, first off they are still in normals / early heroics, and they certainly dont have 540+ ilvl.

Saying "Well we do it like this" does not really help the OP if that is completely unrealistic for any guild currently progressing.

[Deja Thoris]

You should 2 heal fights unless the HPS requirement is too high for your healers at their current gear or skill level.

In my opinion 2 healing achieves a few things that I consider important:
1) It allows your healers to be pushed a bit and improve. Imagine how boring it is for them idling at 2/3 capacity where they could be 2 healing and learning the in's and out's of their roles that can get you out of sticky situations
2) It lets the rest of the raiders improve because standing in bad in now glaringly obvious. The rest of the team can also now make a difference with timing offheals etc well. shamans / priests / druids even warriors have exceptionally good mitigation CD's for the raid. They probably don't even matter when you 3 heal.
3) Some fights get easier when 2 healed (Horridon) You are doing your dps a disservice when you 3 heal them. Dps have to work their nuts off while healers idle :P

I think 3 healing as a rule encourages mediocrity. no one is forced to get the best out of their class because there is so much overcapacity to heal.

[felcommander]

It really depends on the fight. For example reg jinrokh is easily a 2 heal especially with a disc priest to pre spirit shell the raid and the raid will be stacked, there's no reason to 3 heal it.
Horridon is a 2 heal, not because the healing is easy, but because having an extra dps for the adds will by the end of the fight reduce more damage than the 3rd healer would have healed.
Megeara is a good example of one where both are justifiable, with wg/effo/mushrooms for every rampage and a pre spirit shell from the priest you should have no issues 2 healing it, tranq/barrier for the last 2. Its especially important to 2 heal if using the extra dps will reduce the amounts of breaths your tanks are taking.

Honestly my guild is 8/13 heroic, we 2 heal any fight we don't do on heroic now, but basically what you need to consider when looking to 2 heal or 3 heal is
1) Will an extra dps reduce the damage the raid takes?
2) Is the damage steady or do we need the 3rd healer for spikes in raid damage? If its for raid damage spikes can we have enough dps spec into raid cds to not need the 3rd healer?
3) Always try to 2 heal first, when your healers go "There's no freaking way" then its time to bring in a 3rd healer.

[Razecog]

Step 1: Aquire Enhancement Shaman.
Step 2: 2 heal fights because Healing Rain is retarded.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit.

On a more serious note, I wouldn't recommend 2 healing Megaera, Iron Qon or Ra-den.

[Deleted]

We always start with 3 healing, and only reduce to 2 if we get into trouble.

In normal modes ToT the first kills we got 2healing were
Durumu. (we realised the only really time healing was needed badly was during the beam phase, and with more dps that beam phase is a lot shorter too.)
Lei Shen. (we realised that we didnt have the dps to prevent dinging the last conduit before the 2nd transition too much)

First kill on Megaera we actually 4 healed. I think we did that 2 weeks, and then dropped to 3.

[Kroni]

For progression it is sometimes just safer to go with 3 healers instead of 2, but at farm it can be boring and you want to push your healers so they can get better and stay on top of their skill.

Progression we had (all HC):

Jin - 3
Horridon - 2
Council - 3
Tortos - 2
Magaera - 3
JiKun - 3
Durumu - 2
Primordius - 3
Animus - 2, 3 Tanks
Quon - 3
Twins - 3
Lei Shen - 3
Ra-Den - 2

Farm we are at:

Jin - 2
Horridon - 2
Council - 2
Tortos - 2
Magaera - 2
JiKun - 2
Durumu - 2
Primordius - 3
Animus - 2, 3 Tanks
Quon - 2
Twins - 3
Lei Shen - 3
Ra-Den - 2

Greetings

[wrynil]

if your dps is great 2 healing megaera is actually easier in my opinion. Last head died 3-4 seconds after the rampage had ended. If not all but that boss would be easily 2 healed. The disc + an extra dps can add alot of extra dps really.

While two healing megaera (disc and resto shammy) we had 1 off heal (htt from enhancement). wasnt hard pushing rampages too fast as we would have 1-2 less green aoe thingies which are harder dealt with as a resto shammy as the raid wont be stacked in ya healing rain. Tactics, strenghts of the classes and the players will always matter. You should draw your conclusions on that and not what others are doing (mostly), while still finding inspiration in others work.

[Temp name]

Also this is specifically in regards to Normal mode.

This is just what I've found, other people find different things easier.

Jin'rokh, easy
Horridon, 3 heal hurts you more than it helps you.
Council, easy
Tortos, easy
Megaera, harder and more fun (Your healers and dps need to be really good
Ji-kun, doable, but you need a decent healer on the platform
Durumu, easy
Prim, 3 heal to be safe, 2heal if your healers are stupidly good
Dark Animus, More of a dps race than anything, you shouldn't have a lot of time with Jolts which is what hurts
Qon, easy
Twins, easy
Lei Shen, you need different positioning in transitions but besides that you can easily do it.


But as a general rule, if your healers have more than no mana when the boss dies and stand around doing nothing for some of the fight, drop one. If you die to enrage, drop one as well.

[pimpeddakota]

Wow to just read the first couple post just made me stop reading... Like people have said this group is afraid of wiping with 2 healers..so guess what..keep your 3 healers... I mean come on what is the issue? You are looking for 80K more dps so it goes a little faster? Stop trying to be like other guilds because guess what YOU"RE NOT.

[Sonnillon]

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.

This is the most simplest way to put your choice in choosing healers.

Stop trying to be like other guilds because guess what YOU"RE NOT.

This might come of as rude at first, but I can say this from my RL experience, that being like the rest doesn't always work. Lets say you don't have any priests/paladins or anything that can dispel disease on HC Horridon, then you cannot be like the rest. If you have the DPS to kill things on fights with tight enrage, you don't have to be like the rest and 2 heal the fights.

If you have had no problems killing things on HC with 3 healers, go for it. If you bump into enrage, you can ask your DPS to do more DPS or just scrap a healer.

[kitaria]

Sonn I totally agree with you, if the OP, is in any way part of the leadership the biggest thing is to realize no guild is going to be exactly like another. If your group is comfortable with 3 and your not hitting anything obscenely difficult on dps checks, then leave it be. If your healers are complaining about it being boring, then maybe start backing down to two heals on some fights. It comes down to listening to your raid group and be aware of what they are capable of and are asking for.

[Nobleshield]

See and that's what I was looking for. I'm usually of the mindset that if everyone else does a specific thing, there's a good reason for it so if you choose not to, the onus is on YOU to have a valid reason why (probably comes from the fact I am a software developer in real life, so I deal a lot with people doing things for stupid reasons when everyone else, usually better than them, say to do it another way).

We haven't run into any 3-healing issues yet that I can see beyond typical people derping when they shouldn't (e.g. being late with a heal on me when Horridon gets the damage buff, resulting in my dying).

[Deleted]

If you have had no problems killing things on HC with 3 healers, go for it. If you bump into enrage, you can ask your DPS to do more DPS or just scrap a healer.

I would say that it is not always that simple. Just because you have enough dps to beat the enrage timer does not mean that extra dps wont help you. Extra dps is (in 99% of the cases) always good. If you can kill tortos in 4 or 6 minutes is a pretty huge difference for your raid, especially when progressing. Dropping a healer can actually make it easier for your healers sometimes. That extra dps can make so you get 1 less of a specific phase, 1 less add, 1 less cast of a dangerous ability or whatever.

To take a perfect example, remember Cho'gall in 10 man during T11? The enrage was not even an issue, what happened is that you would die in the last phase because your healers got overwhelmed when you used 3 healers. People simply died due to lack of heals because the healers could not keep up. It was not bursty damage, rather the opposite very consistant damage, just that the healers could not keep up with the throughput.
So how did you fix that? You did not add a 4th healer, you removed a healer. Going 2 healers made the last phase so much easier. It was easier to heal the last phase with 2 healers for 45 seconds than it was to heal it for 55 seconds with 3 healers. Healers could just focus their cds and spam their mana more when the phase lasted shorter.

Not to mention that the extra dps often meant one less adherant, if you could kill the boss with 3 instead of 4 adherents meant that you had to deal with one less phase of the blood of the old gods which got harder and harder every time, people would enter the last phase with less corruption and healers had more mana left since the part before the burn phase lasted shorter.

Now, this is of course an extreme example, since Cho'Gall was a fight where pretty much all stars aligned to make 2 healing that much more effective than 3 healing, but the same can be said for almost every fight. Having an extra dps means that the healers CDs becomes more focused and that they can spend their mana less conservatively since the fight lasts shorter. Dropping a healer does not always make healing harder, and having a fight last 5 or 6 minutes during progress makes a huge difference. The longer the fight lasts the longer time people can mess up, so having that extra dps even though you dont hit enrage is really really helpful for progression.

[Tziva]

It's really not a big deal to use three healers, especially if you're not having DPS problems as a result.

Three was pretty standard in ten originally, unless you were 25man geared raiders running 10man too. Most recently it's been tuned for one of the healers to be a flex DPS (or I guess one of the DPS to be a flex healer) so you can alternate between two and three heals on a per-fight basis depending on whether you needed more healers or more DPS. Throne of Thunder seems really flexible - just about every fight can be done with two or three healers; whatever your raid prefers.

For years I have raided with healers who prefer to heal (this time around I'm one of them) and we have ultimately ended up three healing anything that didn't absolutely require two to beat the berserk/DPS check mechanic. I'm sure there are plenty of fights we could handle with two healers (and we do if one healer is absent), but since things go fine with three and none of us particularly want to flip to DPSing, we usually don't. Sometimes it's dull because a lot of fights don't need three, some times it isn't necessary but is "safer" (Megaera) or easier (DA for room coverage), but for most fights it works out. The only real downside is that the run goes slightly slower.