Developing A Healing Strategy

It's process time again! We do so love our organized processes. Perhaps you've always wondered how a healer should approach a new encounter and put together a coherent framework of action (doesn't that sound professional, like some business world/World of Warcraft hybrid?). Perhaps not. Actually, probably not. I'm going to tell you how, though.

Healing, in my view, can be distilled to this: matching patterns of incoming damage with patterns of healing. In dungeons, things can be a little random (what with tanks of varying skill, DPS of varying desire to pull extra packs, etc) but in raid encounters, things tend to settle into fairly understandable and predictable patterns.

Consistent tank damage is one pattern of incoming damage. Spiky, inconsistent tank damage is another. Consistent damage to the raid (like a persistent damage aura) is yet another. Bursts of single-target damage to random raid members is even still another. I could go on like this for days, but you get the idea. Damage has a shape, a profile...it affects life bars in different ways.

Those differing profiles or patterns are what make healing dynamic. If damage only had one profile (say, evenly distributed damage across everyone in the raid), it would strip the dynamicism from healing the encounter. Ultraxion is a lot like that and it's not exactly the most thrilling fight to heal (though sometimes it's fun to have a fight where your job is simply to pump out the biggest sustained numbers you can).

So you could enter a raid encounter with little preparation, beyond knowing what you need to avoid standing in, and see how the life bars change and cast an appropriate spell. Even for reactive healing specs, though, that's not a good idea, as you'll always be a step behind. The "step behind" is not that you're casting the spell after the damage happens...other than discipline priests, that's how healing specs work. Where you'll be a step behind is needing to recognize the incoming damage profile and choose the correct spell to counteract it before you can cast. That's a significant delay that adds up over the course of the encounter, leading to less useful healing than you'd otherwise be capable of.


Study The Game Film Between Games


Read about the encounter...the mechanics you'll be seeing, the damage they do and the recommended strategy. Now, the recommended strategy may not be what your raid team does, but it's valuable just to get a general understanding of what types of tasks your DPS and tanks will be carrying out and what they'll be subjected to.

Watch a video, too, if you can. Patterns can often make more sense when you see them play out.

Based on this research, start to build a plan for what spells you're going to want to use and when. When you're going to need to go all out, guns blazing, and when you'll have some respite to perhaps pop mana cooldowns or generally recover a little (or, at least, ease off your most expensive spells). Especially as you do heroic encounters, you'll pretty much need to be casting something at all times...taking time to decide what it is you need to cast will slow you down. You want to have a sense for what you're going to be casting when ahead of time.


The Scientific Method


Healers are nothing if not scientists. So you have your hypothesis about what patterns of casting will see your group through, but hypotheses need to be tested. Every attempt on an encounter is a nice controlled experiment in the lab. Start off by sticking to the plan you crafted beforehand.

Things are going to fall apart the first time, if it's a difficult encounter. That's part of the fun--data collection! So keep a sense for when things seemed to fall apart (generally it'll be memorable as the point in time when you throw your mouse through the drywall) and, after you've thrown your mouse, try to stay clinical. What happened? What went wrong? Did everyone else stick to the plan? If they did and the damage still got out of hand, then perhaps you didn't have the right spells planned for that part or maybe you miscalculated what the damage profile would even look like. Sometimes, the intersection of several mechanics can be hard to predict, a priori, in terms of how they will combine to hurt the raid.

But that's cool, you're still in good shape. Repair up and adjust your strategy a bit. Ask yourself a few questions: Did I seem to be healing the wrong people at times? Did I use spells that were too weak when bigger spells were needed? How much will patching up that drywall cost anyway? Subtly, but crucially, could you have used different spells at earlier times in the fight that might have helped the situation when things fell apart?

That last one, I feel, is easy to overlook. Generally, and understandably, people gloss over the points in the fight that seemed stable as "fine" and examine only the points in the fight where the deaths began to pile up.

Obviously, the failure point probably has most of the important post-mortem information. Failed raid encounters often boil down to certain critical junctures and once you have those sorted, you have the fight down.

However, as the ripples of anger and fear in Alberta can eventually culminate in a stock collapse in London* so too can decisions early in the fight lead to consequences later in the fight.

*Theoretically. It's probably never actually happened.

As an example from my experience as a discipline priest, perhaps you could have cast a bunch of shields while things still felt stable in preparation for the period of time that even casting all your fast, expensive spells was not sufficient. Perhaps if you had focused on keeping the tank higher in health at a different point, she wouldn't have used a defensive cooldown and she'd have had that cooldown available at a more critical juncture. Perhaps if you had matched the right spells to the situation earlier in the fight, you'd have more mana to blow at a big and important healing moment.

Figure out not only what went wrong at the time when things went wrong, but also what decisions earlier in the decision tree might have averted the crisis. Each encounter is a bunch of new data...use it to refine your hypothesis.


Insert Cooldown Here


I think it's important to first figure out your general plan of action, which is why I haven't mentioned cooldowns to this point. Sometimes it'll be obvious just reading about the encounter when cooldowns will be important and sometimes the raid leader will assign your cooldowns to certain places in the fight. That's fine.

But it's not always clear when cooldowns should be used. Not every fight has an "unusually massive blast of damage now" moment and each raid group does an encounter slightly differently (or a lot differently). In those cases, you'll have to figure out when a cooldown will do the most good by seeing where your raid team has the most trouble and mentally marking those times as the points at which to insert your cooldowns into the fight.

But remember: when in doubt, use the cooldown at the earliest moment that it'll be useful. Cooldowns are powerful abilities that Blizzard doesn't want you to be able to use too often. The less you use your powerful abilities, the longer the cooldown time you are adding to it. After seeing the fight enough times, you may gladly trade using it less for clutch usage to get you through moments you couldn't survive otherwise.


Talk To Other People (Your Fellow Healers Are People, Too)


"Talk to them" is not necessarily literal. I'm also including reading the thoughts of other people on the internet, even if you don't interact back. So many people are doing all of these same encounters that you'll see a lot of opinions. As per Minstrel's Law of Everything: 90-95% of everything (stand-up comedy, music, opinion) is crap. Especially when it comes to the Internet. But that other 5-10% can be pure gold.* If you spend time reading over what other people say, you may come away with one or two solid ideas you didn't think of to make the encounter easier.

*My blog: 90-95% crap, 5-10% gold. This is intentional; I encourage you to figure out what is what, it builds character.

Your healers are particularly worth studying as specimens, as they get to experience the same situations as you, unlike healers in other raid groups. See what they're thinking, what they're feeling, what cultural backgrounds are prejudicing their healing.* It's not impossible that a little communication can cause a revelation that will change how you address a pattern of incoming damage.

*"I'd expect you to feel entitled to our feral druid's Innervate. Everything's just come so easy for you ever since daddy got you a job as a vice president, hasn't it, Spoiled Bobby?"


The Main Point


The main point here is that your job as a healer is to identify the shape of incoming damage over time and use the right spells to match that pattern. You should have an approximate idea of what that pattern will look like in your head going in, so that you have a testable plan. Being approximate, however, means that there will be certain crucial inaccuracies, so you'll use the wipes to analyze and refine both the picture of the damage over time that you had going in and your plan to address it.

Have one part of your mind dedicated to being an impartial observer that doesn't care if you win or lose, it just wants to know what happened. Leave the fiery passions to the DPS...your job is to stay analytical at all times. The more you observe and understand, the stronger the refinements to your plan.

The most important piece of gear for you as a healer is your brain. (Seriously, guys, I just came up with that. I'm always coming up with stuff like that off the top of my head at parties.)

Dr. Strangebubble (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Spam The Shields)

"Shield spam" has become a term of ill-repute in the discipline priest community. It's spoken of either in whispers about the "bad old days" or else in the sharp, mocking tones of what not to do. Only the most degenerate discipline priests would encourage shield spam. It speaks to loose healing morals and, yes, even a bit of healing perversion. Shields are to be enjoyed in small quantities, not to gluttonous excess.

That is why I'm here to tell you to reject those stereotypes. Even good-hearted people can blast out bubbles. It's not the evil that you've all heard it is. It can--nay, should--be done. Don't listen to your neighborhood priest telling you that it's sinful.

That said, we should probably define what we mean by "shield spam" because multiple behaviors have been lumped into that one term and they are not all the same.

Let's start by examining where the term really sprang into prominence and trace our story from there. This, it turns out, may run a bit long but I promise there's a point at the end. And a pizza party. Pertinent point and pizza. And cold beer.

Come with me, then, back to those heady days of Wrath...


Spammy Shield Spam


Welcome to Dalaran! Do you have any emblems of frost to turn in? And how about those vrykul, eh?

I hope I've adequately set the mood. Back in this era of World of Warcraft, discipline priests were slowly but surely rising in the world of healing. In prior eras, discipline was really more of the PvP spec and holy was the healing spec for priests. However, the tree was revamped in Wrath and PvE discipline priests were becoming more and more populous.

Oh, sure, there was still residual persecution that they faced. They were regarded with suspicion, not being holy. Absorbs were a bit of a new mechanic to much of the playerbase and no one really paid attention to absorb values, which made discipline priests appear to be rather ineffectual, what with Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis being completely ignored by almost all healing meters.

However, as raiders were graduating from Trial of the Crusader to the final raiding tier of the expansion, Icecrown Citadel, people were understanding the power of the absorb. High-level players had understood it long before, but it gained popular acceptance. Now, discipline priests were not just being accepted but often actively recruited as they carved out their own niche. Discipline priests weren't healers, they were shielders! You could almost think of them as a huge damage debuff on each and every boss.

This was a double-edged sword. It made discipline priests a rather necessary part of any raiding team capable of picking and choosing their raid compositions, as much so as getting a shaman in for Bloodlust or having a druid who could Rebirth. Having such a valuable niche in raid teams is obviously a nice thing...damned are the poor souls who play class-specs marginalized by current raid design.

On the other hand, it was a terribly boring playstyle, especially in 25 man raids. In 25 man raids, very literally a discipline priest's job during an encounter was to do nothing but blanket the raid in shields. And then do it again. And again. Until the boss was dead. Other healers were there to do the actual healing, after all. In 10 man raids, it was a little better, purely because there weren't enough people to shield before the Weakened Soul debuff prevented you from casting more shields. At that point, it was reasonable to cast an actual healing spell.

So discipline priests were in a bit of a bind...the niche that gave them ready access to raid spots also trapped them into a rather unenjoyable style of playing. (This wasn't purely confined to discipline priests, as I know there are restoration druids out there who have nightmare stories of being Rejuvenation bots. But I think it was most pronounced for discipline priests.)


Our Story Runs Into A Twist


Blizzard agreed that it was a trap. Their design philosophy had been slowly attempting to weed out repetitive, or One-Button, play. Discipline priests sometimes using nothing but one spell in raids didn't escape their notice. So they changed it. So mighty was their change to the discipline priest spec that they named an entire expansion for it: The Cataclysm.

Perhaps you heard about it? The change resulted in many fires around the world.

What they did was make Power Word: Shield really weak. It was brilliant. Why would you spam a spell that wasn't very strong? You wouldn't. That Blizzard, always thinking.

Well, as it happened, trying to reduce a spec's dependence upon their best and most iconic spell by making it terrible didn't do wonders for balance, that nasty issue that boils down to "Do you get to raid or not?" Discipline priests were pariahs again. Go holy or go home. The chants were hurtful.

So Blizzard did what any wise design team would do. Turn the dial the other direction as far as it would go. Suddenly, Power Word: Shield was really strong. Discipline priests were great again...in fact, they were recording by far the best parses overnight. No other class could compete.

"Hmm," said Blizzard. "That was unexpected." Also, there was this issue of discipline priests spamming their newly god-mode spell on everyone again. Also unexpected.

So now Blizzard needed a solution that did not involve turning that dial at all. Turning the dial on Power Word: Shield, you see, revealed a problem inherent in WoW balance. A spell you can use whenever you want will either be strong enough that you will use it first, last and always or else so weak that you will never use it. For if it is the strongest spell right now, it will probably be your strongest spell a moment from now. And if it is not your strongest spell right now, it probably won't be your strongest spell a moment from now.

The answer resided in the other dial that Blizzard had ignored in Wrath (which caused that previous logic about "strongest spell now->strongest spell always" to be binding in nearly every case) but used with abandon in Cataclysm...the mana cost dial. True to the Cataclysm healing model, which held that you don't simply min/max based on power of spell but min/max such that you don't go out of mana in the first minute, they increased the mana cost of Power Word: Shield greatly.

That changed the game significantly for discipline priests. The shield was still really strong, and it gave mana back every 12 seconds, so it was still useable...but "shield spam was dead for good" (I place that in quotation marks because it was probably the most common quote of the past year, it even featured on the cover of a Time magazine).

This was driven home with a peculiar sternness on forums and guides for discipline priests. Perhaps the people saying it felt it was necessary to say it with passion to break the dirty habits people had built up, but a great deal of scorn and derision was heaped upon the concept of shield spam (in my experience, at least). Not that it really required stern insistence...any discipline priest that tried to spam shields during a raid encounter, Wrath-style, would find themselves as merely a decorative prop pretty quickly, completely out of mana (OOM) and therefore unable to help much. This was a lesson as subtle as a jackhammer to the head.

And lo...it is still impossible. Unlike the latter stages of Wrath, where no spell could really run you out of mana, casting shields non-stop on a raid group, even in 10 man, will solidly OOM you.


So What's All This Talk Of Shield Spam, Then?


The problem is, "shield spam," which was originally applied to casting shields on each raid member robotically, over and over, is now being applied to any behavior involving using lots of shields.

The fact of the matter is that absorption is still the healing space of discipline priests. That is where you can add the most value while still allowing all other healers to do what they do best. While holy paladins have entered the space to some extent (to say nothing of the abominations known as blood death knights), it's still an important niche that discipline priests largely dominate. Damage prevented or mitigated is more valuable than damage taken and then healed up (the easiest way to see this is to compare the value of absorbing a 30k hit to a player with 24k health remaining, versus attempting to heal it up after).

While Divine Aegis does yeoman's work in terms of absorption, there's no faster way to get on-demand absorption out on the raid than what you might call "spamming" shields.

The key here, of course, is that you must choose when it makes sense to spam those shields. Your mana won't support doing it all the time. And the mechanics of bosses (along with a duration lowering change that I neglected to mention earlier) are such that ill-timed shield spam will come at great mana cost for no benefit as the shields mostly drop off due to expired duration without absorbing any damage at all.

So you absolutely have to pick your spots intelligently. However, if you do, there's a world of benefit to be mined from strategic shield spamming. Getting ten shields out ahead of a big raid-wide damage spike can effectively increase your raid team's "clutch heals per second (HPS)" by which I mean that if you're using GCDs during a low-stress period to put up shields that will be eaten by a high-stress period, it frees you up to cast other spells during that high-stress period. You're borrowing time from a low-stress period to lessen the difficulty of a high-stress period, in a way other healers largely can't. Absorption shields are about the only "preventative healing" (though HoTs can be used in a somewhat similar way, though less efficiently for the same purpose).

You won't be able to shield to the exclusion of all else, even if you pick your spots. There are times, especially in 10 man raiding environments, where helping your fellow healers move life bars will be necessary. However, the more you bias your casting patterns in favor of Power Word: Shield, the more you can help your raid team even out the spikiness of the overall incoming damage of the encounter. It also has the benefit of clarifying your stat choices for gemming, enchanting and reforging. If you know you will be using as much of your mana as possible (over the entire encounter) on Power Word: Shield, then you know mastery is your best bet.

This is Smart Shield Spam(tm). This is good. This is a perfectly responsible way to play discipline priest. There are other perfectly responsible ways to play a discipline priest, but don't let others lazily say "Shield spam is bad, mmmkay?" Make sure they define what they mean by shield spam...if they're talking about Wrath-style bubble botting, nod at the obviousness of their observation. Yes, you can't do something that you don't have the mana for. However, if they're advocating shielding as little as possible (some even claim you should largely only be shielding the tanks or only shielding to proc Rapture) then reject that supposed truism. Intelligently spamming shields at the right times can be an extremely powerful way to play (I would argue the most powerful way to play)...you should experiment and see how far you can stretch Power Word: Shield, especially as you push into progression fights that stretch you to your very limits.

How To Win Raiding

Those of us who enjoy the raiding aspect of the game are always seeking to raise our games, step up our efforts and engage in other sports/corporate cliches. In short, we want to be the best raiders possible. However, raiding guides usually deal in rather obvious tips like "Stay out of fire" and "Always have a food/flask buff." Those might help, but if you really want to become a truly pro raider, you need the advanced secrets of raiding.

That's what this piece is about. How to squeeze out the extra throughput that average raiders simply don't attain. Read on.


Select The Right Music


The right music in the background will make or break you as a raider. Average raiders listen to the default encounter music within World of Warcraft or to nothing at all. The finest raiders in world ranked guilds select the proper pop/rock/hip-hop/electronica/R&B/soul music to push them to higher levels.

So what is the proper music? That's a trickier question, as it doesn't follow simple rules. This isn't something basic like gear itemization; this is complicated. It has to be a playlist that energizes you at the right times but provides some chill cooldown when you need to recover your intensity. Ultimately, this is a difficult one to spreadsheet, though I'm working on it*.

*Preliminary research is revealing that balearic dance-pop is likely the "primary sound" that will be the baseline against which all other genres will be weighted, for all classes


When Forced To Move, Jump While Moving


You move faster when jumping. This has been empirically proven*. Further, jumping when casting an instant spell supercharges it slightly (though it's a non-stacking buff, so don't jump multiple times before casting it). I think Elitist Jerks had a thread on this at some point. In any case, I've never seen anyone specifically deny this. If you have to get out of poison, jump while moving to your new position.

*"Empirically proven" means "it feels true."

I shouldn't need to explain this...the faster you move, the sooner you can start DPSing or healing again. And stronger spells are always nice*.

*There is a reason restoration druids always top the healing meters.


Mentally Tack On A "Loot Phase" To Every Boss


Beth'tilac has three phases. The phase which she spends her time atop her web, the phase in which she descends to attack the raid directly and the phase in which you collect the loot she drops. Rhyolith also has three phases. Etcetera. When discussing boss strategy, it's important to know that this is the phase you need to reach*.

*This also makes explaining the fight to new recruits much easier--just get to phase 3 (or whichever phase is the loot phase for a particular boss)


Bonus Patch 4.3 Exclusive Tip: Dress For Success


This is really not a tip you can put into effect right now, but it's worth discussing since you'll soon be able to address this issue. Currently, Blizzard has introduced an RNG obstacle in raiding--the negative effect of ugly raid gear. Some tiers the gear is decent in appearance, some tiers the gear looks designed by a bored monkey. You have no control over this and Blizzard intends for this to be an RNG effect...it's filed under "demoralization effect" (distinct from disorientation, fear and stun effects).

However, patch 4.3 will introduce transmogrification...an ability meant for prepared raiders to remove this randomness from encounters, much as tanks push crushing blows off the table. You'll be able to modify the look of any visible piece of equipment you wear to any other similarly-slotted piece of equipment that you own, with a few restrictions. This means that it is incumbent upon you to create a fashion style that will remove the demoralization effect any time that your raid gear looks terrible. If you don't do this, you cannot honestly claim to be giving your raid your best effort.

Priest Shield Slam

Protection warriors have long been familiar with shield slamming. It's a key weapon in their arsenal when bugbears are trying to chew their faces off from the inside. However, it's also a key weapon in the arsenals of discipline priests who are healing tanks that have bugbears trying to chew the tank's face off from the inside.

One small difference: protection warriors target enemies with their shield slam, while discipline priests target tanks (possibly DPS, but DPS is really only there to shorten the fight so you can go watch TV).

It's really not a new technique (in fact, it might be a stretch to call it a technique) but I'm likely the first person to give it a name. And I'm without doubt the first person to apply for copyright on that name...the law offices I contacted about it confirmed that (or so I interpreted their "You want to do what? Who would be silly enough to do something like that?").


Shield Slam


Priests have a somewhat obscure ability known as Power Word: Shield. Discipline priests tend to use it quite a bit, though. In the latter stages of the previous expansion, they often tried to put it on as many targets as possible. It was the measure of first resort. Escalating mana costs (relative to mana pool) and a lowering of its duration effectively killed that strategy, but it's still something most discipline priests endeavor to cast on their target of main focus (like a tank) as often as they can (while, talented, it doesn't have a cooldown, it has an effective cooldown on a particular target due to Weakened Soul).

However, there are times when it's a better idea not to use it whenever you can on your main target. This has costs:

• Power Word: Shield is a pretty strong throughput spell (30-40k effective HPS on a target taking continuous damage with an instant cast, and up to 60k with the glyph)
• The Weakened Soul debuff it applies boosts healing from the priest due to talent
• A further talent, Rapture, provides major mana returns when the shield is broken (subject to an internal cooldown on the talent)

(The last can be mitigated by using a Power Word: Shield on another target instead, if there's another target taking continuous damage. An unpopped shield provides no mana returns.)

So when and why should you bypass these benefits? When you can expect a moment in time when any other spells (even Flash Heal) might be too slow or even impossible to cast and you can't count on other healers, you need to have Power Word: Shield in your back pocket, to slam the door on damage for a short time until you can restore stability.

Before I provide some examples, let me point out what I am definitely not saying: You should not normally treat Power Word: Shield as an emergency cooldown. Most of the time, you want to be using it as much as you can if you're tank healing. The improved throughput and mana efficiency (due to Rapture) usually make it an important ability to use as much as possible on your primary focus. Usually.


But This Is Not "Usually"


The first example I'll offer is being one of the two healers in the Alysrazor fight. I won't go through the entire encounter, as many, many...many guides exist for that. I'll briefly explain, though, the task of tank healing in phase one such that the reason to "shield slam" becomes evident.

In phase one, each of the two tanks is holding a Voracious Hatchling. Healing through the hatchling's normal melee is largely uneventful. However, they have two mechanics that can quickly make matters tricky. The first mechanic is Tantrum. The second mechanic is Gushing Wound. These two mechanics occur independently, which means they can (and often do) overlap. Or they can follow one another with no gap between them.

So you often have a case where you're letting your tank's health drop under 50% and then dealing with an enrage, essentially. The hatchlings hit rather hard and rather fast at that point, so if the tank's health is under 50%, there is the risk of losing the tank.

This is a good time to shield slam. Let the tank's health drop below 50%, causing the debuff to drop off, and then instantly drop a shield on the tank, shutting off the Tantrum damage for a precious few seconds. Your tank's buffer is not really his/her health. It's the time left before the tank dies. The sub-50% health is part of it and time provided by stopping the damage is the other part, which is why mitigation and absorption are so valuable. You're essentially increasing his/her effective health, which is crucial in a dicey situation like that.

Shutting off the damage gives you time to catch up, after artificially being forced to fall behind. There are other ways you could handle this (for example, not letting the tank drop below 50% and healing through both Gushing Wound and Tantrum until Tantrum ends) but that's less mana efficient and waiting for Gushing Wound to drop allows you to quickly throw a heal on someone else if necessary. And if the Tantrum follows directly after a Gushing Wound, even that is not an option.

Moving on to another example, let's examine how my guild does Baleroc. What I've heard is that the Shards of Torment are supposed to spawn in melee, but that's not what we were seeing. They appeared to spawn on random players, whether they were in melee or at range. Ultimately, we dealt with that by having two stack-up spots...we all--tanks excepted--started on one on those spots, when a new shard of torment had been announced and was soon to spawn, we all moved en masse to the other stack-up spot except the next DPS in rotation to soak the shard. Each subsequent shard, we repeated the maneuver, moving back and forth between stack-up spots.

We may have missed something crucial, but this is the behavior we were seeing for shard spawns, so we adapted that strategy to deal with it and it's worked for us. It did, however, have one important consequence: healer movement.

On every shard spawn, every healer was in motion. This was a problem when the tank taking the Decimation Blade strikes had just been...struck. Suddenly the tank is around 10% health and has to be pushed back up to about 100% health before the next strike arrives, and all the healers are moving.

This is an ideal time to use what I've dubbed "shield slam." You may have noticed that the tooltip for Decimation Blade said that it ignores mitigation effects. Mitigation refers to effects like "take 10% less damage." It doesn't apply to good old absorption, and Power Word: Shields will absorb Decimation Blade damage. With a large Vital Flame buff, those shields can absorb a great deal of the Decimation Blade. Therefore, dropping it on the tank just before you move, ahead of the strike, means that you (and your fellow healers) arrive at the destination with significantly less damage to heal up (which is good, since the movement also means you have less time).


Slamming The Door (On This Article)


I've gone through a couple of examples of when you want to limit using Power Word: Shield so that you can use it at crucial moments. The specific examples may not apply to you, depending on how you do those fights or whether you're doing those fights at all, but the concept is still worthwhile.

Often times, maximizing the uptime of powerful abilities is most valuable. They have cooldowns (of one type or another) for a reason: the more often you can use them, the more powerful you are and therefore Blizzard doesn't want you using them too often. However, maximizing uptime is not always ideal. Sometimes, you want to maximize the leverage of something...that is, maximize the value by using them at the specific times when they'll count the most.

To use a baseball analogy (skip down to the next paragraph if baseball, analogies or baseball analogies bore you), it's the difference between maximizing a pitcher by getting the greatest number of innings out of him or by maximizing the leverage of the innings he does pitch. Starting pitchers are an example of the first...they throw as many quality innings as they're capable of and maximize their value that way. Relief aces are an example of the second; they throw many fewer innings but they come into the situations that you know have a major bearing on who will win the game (close game, near the end) which reduces the frequency of "wasted good innings" like a shutout third inning of a 13-2 game.

Most of the time, you want to maximize uptime of Power Word: Shield. But be alert for those times when you'd rather maximize the leverage of it. Shield slam to victory, the priest way.

Ragnaros Wants You To Try Harder

I haven't posted in a while. Did you miss me? No? Well, straight to the text then.

Recently, I feel that I've fallen into a common pitfall...common in World of Warcraft and common in the Real World. Reaching a point of comfortably adequate performance and settling into cruise control. I think I'm a competent healer. Better than competent; a good healer. It's notoriously difficult to rate healing proficiency and notoriously difficult to self-evaluate (what with competing dynamics of seeing yourself in a sympathetic light--after all, you know what you meant--and wanting to be tough on yourself), so I couldn't say with great certainty how successful a healer I am, but I'm secure that I'm somewhere in the top half and not the bottom half. Hopefully, anyway.

The main thing, though, is I feel relatively sure that I'm not holding my raid team back. If we struggle on a boss, it's probably not due to me. Now, I mean this in general...on any specific wipe, it could certainly have been due to me. I'm far from mistake-free. But if we're hitting a temporary wall on a boss, I am probably not the bottleneck. Hopefully, anyway.

I think this has led me to (at a subconscious level) feel comfortable doing what I do, as far as decision-making and awareness. That's a big mistake, but an easy one to make. I think most people are prone to end the evaluation at "Am I playing well enough to help my team? Am I a problem or an asset?" If the answer is "asset," all is well.

All is not well, though. Playing well enough to help the team or playing well enough not to be the reason for team failure isn't the correct goal and, put explicitly in that fashion, I think most people would agree. But at a subconscious level, "I do enough" is a tempting evaluation cul-de-sac.

The aim should be to find ways to be more of an asset. You may not be the reason for failure (whenever failure crops up) but perhaps you could be the factor that averts some failure. Maybe you can do your job and help with another job. Or, find a job that isn't being done but would be useful and do it. Often, the "job" can be something as vague as "knowing mechanics that you, specifically, aren't responsible for carrying out and making sure they're not being lost in the shuffle."


An Example...My Kingdom For An Example


Let's take the Shannox fight. Let's take my role in the Shannox fight. I, as long-time readers will remember, am a discipline priest in terms of my main character. My explicit role in the Shannox fight changes over the encounter; I start out healing the Face Rage targets of Rageface (instant shields are a nice quick buffer). When Rageface dies (as we choose to focus him down right away), I become the tank healer for the Riplimb tank. When Riplimb dies, I join my fellow healers in keeping the Shannox tank, and the raid in general, alive until loot time.

I make mistakes (especially at first, before I made sure Grid was showing the Face Rage target /facepalm), but by and large I think I do a good job keeping the people alive that I'm responsible for. I mostly do a good job of avoiding traps (except for a night last week where I got hit by two of them, after never having been hit before... /facepalm). That's essentially the extent of what I'm supposed to do. Keep my targets alive, don't die or get entombed. And if I do those things, I'm an asset, clearly.

But could I be more of one? There are always more things to do. When healing the Riplimb tank, it's not that stressful...there are times when the dog is playing fetch with a spear and I have time to do something else. One thing I could do is obvious: heal someone else. And if someone else is in range and below maximum health, I do that. A less obvious thing I could do is remember that if Riplimb is pulled too far away from Shannox, they enrage--an eventuality to be avoided.

So tonight when we were doing the encounter, even though it's a farm encounter, I decided to expand my role a little. The tanks have their own things to keep track of; in particular, the Riplimb tank is generally looking for crystal traps to freeze the dog, which can take away his attention. So I watched where Shannox was being pulled and tried to suggest to the tank when he may want to move the dog a little closer.

Of course, the first time I did this, my warning came a few seconds before they enraged. The second time, mindful of what happened the time before, the tank was already moving the dog. So all in all, I don't think I added value in that way. But I could have, had I been a little quicker to decide I was going to try to help. The important thing was not really whether I successfully averted something that time but rather that I was making the effort to push beyond the bounds of my role that I had become comfortable in.


Examples Aren't Sufficient


So what is it we should be doing, more generally? I think this is what we should be striving for: keep track of as many things about the current fight that you can before it starts degrading your performance on your main tasks. It doesn't matter what value you add at the margins if you're failing to do what you're paid for--whether that's keeping people alive, keeping the boss faced the right way as it pounds your face or putting magical bullets in the boss. Nothing matters until you have that locked down.

However, once you realize that you're doing your job and starting to put it in cruise, it's time to add more to your plate. Think like a raid leader...orchestrate the fight in your head and watch what's happening. If you see something headed in the wrong direction, be prepared to either warn the person who can act on the warning or else take steps yourself that will avert the crisis before it happens (while not lapsing on your assignment).

To some extent, this advice is dependent on how your guild operates raids. If there's a clear cut raid leader who is the only one allowed to call things out or issue warnings, then that option is off the table for you. Despite that, if you act as raid leader in your mind, you will undoubtedly see opportunities to add a little bonus value.

Whether your official role is healer, tank or DPS, we all unofficially have the same role: find the gaps in the clean route from pull to kill and fill them.

Discipline Priest Raid Healing

So my guild was working on Beth'tilac tonight (I'll end the suspense: we won) and while I was healing, my thoughts began to wander as they are wont to do (what else would I be doing while healing a raid encounter? Paying attention? Not likely!).

I began to think to myself, "Self, is this what it's come to, a discipline priest healing the raid?"

You see, our healer make-up was a discipline priest (your selfless protagonist), a restoration druid and a holy paladin. I prefer tank healing. But I feel that our holy paladin is best utilized tank healing and we only needed one dedicated tank healer...the healer that went up-web to heal the tank and DPS that broached the mighty spider in her lair.

So that left me and the druid earthbound, keeping everyone else alive. Sure, we have a tank too, but it felt like both of us needed to be covering the raid. Which left me in the position of needing to heal a lot of people.

Now, philosophically, this isn't something that bothers me. I tend to draw tank healing assignments these days, but in a previous guild (during Wrath), our healing team adopted a "see damage, heal damage" attitude. Not generally recommended, but we had a pretty strong rapport and didn't tend to overheal certain targets while failing to cover others. It seemed to work, at that time and place. In any case, the upshot is we were all raid and tank healers, so I've been quite used to watching everyone's health and responding.

However, I felt like perhaps I wasn't equipped for it. I do have a holy spec, and I picked it up for these eventualities, but I've encountered an obstacle in actually putting it to use. Raid damage is so fast and furious that you have to be fairly instinctive and I'm not instinctive in holy. I've never played it enough, since I've always loved the discipline style. And it's hard, I find, to practice. I could run five-mans, but what I've found is that it's nigh impossible to heal current heroics in holy's sanctuary (AoE) chakra stance. The tank damage is far too intensive (especially since crowd control has flickered back out of style) for AoE healing to keep the tank alive. You pretty much have to be in the serenity (single target) chakra stance. At least, that's how it feels for me, the inexperienced holy priest. And using serenity stance doesn't learn me up for raid healing in holy. If I were going to single target heal, I wouldn't use holy. I'd use discipline. But the chakra stance I'd want to use in raids doesn't feel viable in five-mans. Impasse.

Which brings us back to tonight and my thoughts. How to adapt discipline's tools to healing lots of people? I found a balance that worked for me, which I thought I'd lay out for those rare discipline priests pressed into raid healing.


Prayer Of Healing Heals A Lot Of People


I know, right? It's true: prayer of healing heals many (defined as five) people. This is where you start, when multiple (defined as three or more) people have taken 10-20% of their health in damage. The caveat, of course, is that they must all be in the same party.

Two things to note about this:

• Have the Glyph of Prayer of Healing ready for an encounter where you'll be raid healing. And the Dust of Disappearance to switch it in. An extra 20% of the healing done as a HoT, on each person (even if the heal was overheal), is a pretty solid boon to getting people back up quickly.
• Prayer of Healing automatically procs Divine Aegis on every person it hits, critical strike or not (and, again, overheal or not). If you crit, the Divine Aegis bubble is even larger. If damage is hitting the raid fairly continuously, that's just extra, free effective healing.

If you're reasonably well-geared for the current tier of raiding (~359 ilevel) with a good, solid amount of spirit, Prayer of Healing really won't strain your mana very much. It's not mana neutral, your mana will deplete...but quite slowly. As long as the damage coming in is only mild to moderate, this is your go-to heal. Insightful, I know; "Use your main AoE heal when...AoE healing."

I have more, though! Wait til the end of this post before you feel disappointed. Then you may feel as disappointed as you like.


Remember Whack-A-Mole? It's back! In POG form


That adapted Simpsons quote would have been so much cleverer if "POG" were an acronym for a key priest spell. Instead, it's just a reference shoe-horned in for the sake of a section title.

Still, the old healer favourite game of whack-a-mole is pretty apropos here. If people are taking more than 20% of their health in damage, it's time to abandon AoE heals for a whole new paradigm. That paradigm is called: You Have Ten Tanks So Go To Work, Tank Healer.

You could also call it "This is how you heal low level dungeons with tanks who can't hold aggro."

You pick the lowest health person and cast Greater Heal. Then you pick the new lowest health person and cast Greater Heal. You intersperse Penance whenever it's off cooldown (especially if you have the four-piece t11 bonus, which gives you a large spirit infusion whenever you cast Penance). You just keep rotating Greater Heals and Penances on whomever is closest to dying. Again, it's surprisingly mana efficient. You can pump out a lot of healing to a lot of people without endangering your mana too much.

You can, of course, add in some Flash Heals. Unlike at the start of Cataclysm, the world will not end if you cast that spell. If someone, especially someone important, is right...on...the verge...of dying, then throw them a lifeline with Flash Heal. Just make sure you don't fall into the temptation of casting it over and over. That will run you out of mana in a couple of minutes and very few raid boss encounters are that short. But as I've said before...it's better to use up all your mana and feel embarrassed about being out of mana than to wipe with mana left in the tank.


That Said...


Binding Heal is still your friend. Talk to it. Get to know it over a nice dinner. Keep it close to your heart, because it's the sweetest little heal in your arsenal when used properly.

It costs the same as Flash Heal...but it heals for almost twice as much. It's almost (but not quite) like casting a Flash Heal on yourself and another person...for the cost of a Flash Heal. And at the speed of casting one Flash Heal.

This is still going to run your mana down faster than Greater Heal or Penance, but its throughput cannot be matched. It's a Flash Heal that got an 80% output boost and 100% haste boost. That means it's essentially 3.6 times better throughput...at the same cost as Flash Heal.

The downside, obviously, is that you cannot choose the entire target of the healing. Half the healing goes on a target of your choice, half goes on you. But you can choose when to use it. If you're hurt, this is a great spell to lean on. The throughput is off the charts and the cost isn't terrible for what you get. It's a key weapon in the arsenal for healing multiple people. You're a person. You need healing. Remember that.


For The Love Of God, Don't Use Holy Nova

It's A Trap!

But if you do, make sure you jump around while spamming it.

Wisdom Of The Ancients


Let me close with something my mother once told me, many years ago: Never, ever forget your big cooldowns. (Sure, it may seem like obvious advice now, but think of how ahead of its time it was in the 1980s.)

Pick the bleakest moment, the moment where everything seems to be about to fall apart (but hasn't yet) and use Divine Hymn. It's one get-of-jail-free card, so use it once every encounter.

Pick any moment where a good number of people are stacked up and most of those people are taking damage and put up a Power Word: Barrier. Then, do it again when it's off cooldown. Try to use it the first time as early as possible (in a situation that makes sense), so you can get it into the encounter as many times as possible (read: up to three times).

Don't hoard cooldowns just in case you need them later. Later never comes to a raid that wipes early. Use them any time things seem at all dicey. It is better by far to err on the side of profligate cooldown usage rather than on the side of miserly cooldown usage. You don't want to wipe with any arrows left in the quiver.

So to sum up:

• Prayer of Healing, a priest's main AoE heal, should be used in AoE healing situations
• Greater Heal and Penance are AoE healing tools if you're quick enough
• Binding Heal heals two people which makes it an AoE heal
• Holy Nova, which is an AoE heal is, just....no.
• AoE cooldowns should be used. Even when tank healing

I think we've done some good work here.

Have a great night!

Building Your Skills From Basics To Fine Polish

So, Khizzara, of [Blog of the Treant] wrote a very cool post building upon some things I wrote about earlier. Now, like the blog equivalent of a Prayer of Mending bouncing back and forth, I'm going to write a post inspired by what she wrote.

I very much enjoyed her recounting experiences as a vocalist and how practicing that can be applied to practicing healing. She then provided an excellent list of tips on how to proceed...and that list inspired me to try to formalize an approach to first reducing your toolkit to a manageable, but still usable, level and then adding layers of sophistication.

To some extent, this is for those who would like to start healing...but I think formalizing things can provide benefits even to those who are veterans. I am reasonably veteran as a healer, but I found this a useful exercise and it paid dividends when trying to raid at a high level with an alt healer of a new class.

Edit: Let me make a clarification at the outset, based on some feedback that I've received. This is not meant as a priority guide. The steps of this guide are not meant to display the order of your most important spells, nor your most used spells. That isn't the mapping I am aiming for. The idea was to create clusters of logically connected spells (in my opinion, of course) that don't create an overload of concepts at any one time but hang together reasonably successfully. Once you understand your entire toolbox, you should be discovering for yourself which spells are most effective for you to use most often and when to employ them. This guide is meant to ease you into your toolbox in what I view as the simplest way while still getting you into your entire toolbox.


Reduce Your Toolkit To Only The Needful


Forget your longer cooldowns. Go on, just forget them. They don't exist. They're gone. (By "longer cooldowns," I mean anything longer with a cooldown that is more than around 30 seconds.)

Cooldowns will be important, but they're an added level of complexity that you don't need to start with.

Of your remaining spells, focus on three as your core:

1. Your slow, cheap, weak heal. This is Heal for priests, Holy Light for paladins, Healing Wave for shamans and Nourish for druids.

2. Your slow, expensive, big heal. This is Greater Heal for priests, Divine Light for paladins, Greater Healing Wave for shamans and Healing Touch for druids.

3. Your fast, expensive, moderately large heal. This is Flash Heal for priests, Flash of Light for paladins, Healing Surge for shamans and Regrowth for druids.

With just these spells, you can conceivably heal a Cataclysm dungeon on normal mode. And if you're just starting out, you should start in a normal, no matter your gear level, just to get acquainted with your spells. It's not optimal to just use these three spells, but they are robust enough to get the job done in a normal dungeon. In a heroic, it would be very difficult to use just these spells...but even then, it's possible if the tank marks kill order, CC is applied and everyone does their job. So, on second thought, no, it's impossible.

These three spells, though, can be practiced outside a group setting, sitting in Orgrimmar or Stormwind. Get thee to the training dummies, injure yourself (hop on your flying mount, fly up a little and dismount) and attack a dummy to ensure you're using combat mana regen and not out-of-combat regen. The main thing is to get a sense for how fast the spells "feel" (numbers are numbers, but as I said in a previous post, you need to develop a feel), their effect on your health and their effect on your mana pool. Experiment and get a sense for how much each can be "spammed" and effective mixes of each spell that allow you to maintain your mana pool for different lengths of time.


Adding A Layer Of Complexity: Flavor


So you understand your core, the spells you can always fall back on. However, the real power of healers comes with the spells that they can sprinkle in around the core. Spells that are meant to be used regularly but aren't meant to be spammed nonstop. I call the the "flavor spells." These spells give each healing class their unique flavor.

Let's look at the most commonly used flavor spells.

Priests have two specs, discipline and holy. Discipline is going to be making heavy use of Power Word: Shield and Penance, while Holy is going to be making heavy use of Renew and Circle of Healing. Both specs should be utilizing Prayer of Mending whenever possible.

Druids have a few spells that could fit into this category, but I'm going to suggest focusing on three of them to start with: Wild Growth, Lifebloom and Swiftmend (be sure to notice the Efflorescence effect from your talents).

Paladins have Holy Shock, Word of Glory and Beacon of Light as key flavor spells.

And finally, our shaman wolves have Chain Heal, Riptide and Earth Shield.

Let me take a moment here to clarify something: This is not a "how to heal as a paladin/druid/shaman/priest" or even a "how to heal" piece. I certainly have my opinions on that, and there is a ton of content on the internetz on those topics. My aim here is to help you narrow your focus at first and then gradual widen your scope as a healer, as it regards your toolbox. So I won't be going through how precisely to use each of those abilities. I've simply highlighted the spells that, in my opinion, you should be focusing on as your "next layer" after mastering your three core heals.

So really study the tooltips on those spells for your class and glance through your talents for any additional effects that your talents might provide for any of those spells (I gave an example of one for the druidic arts). Get a solid sense of what each of those spells and think about when each spell would be most useful and when it would be least useful. For example, Chain Heal: this is clearly maximized when four injured targets are within the spell's jump range of each other. This spell is minimized when just one person is hurt (leaving out the trivial case, in almost every spell's case, of no one at all being hurt).

That's an easy and obvious example, but going through each spell and really understanding when it's maximized and minimized builds structure in your mind that you can apply to novel situations. If one or two people are hurt, that's too close to the minimization scenario of chain heal, so you don't need to spend time calculating the healing you'll do versus the mana and time you'll spend...you can guess immediately that it's not the best spell and not use it. Five people are hurt? Well, that's very close to the maximization scenario, so fire it off and see where you are after that. You don't want to get stuck, as I've explained in a previous post, cogitating on what spell to cast next, weighing the pros and cons and mathing it out. You have to have a "feel" for what comes next. Forcing yourself to identify simple characteristics of each spell you have, like maximization and minimization scenarios, helps you develop that feel.

Weave these spells in around your core heals. Always fall back on your core heals when you're unsure of what to do but you know you must do something. Stay on the look out for good opportunities to use your flavor spells. Your core heals are trusty vanilla...your flavor spells add the sparkling sprinkles whenever the situation calls for more than vanilla. Swirl them into the cool delicious....mmmm, ice cream.... what were were talking about again?

You now have six spells in your arsenal, acquired through two steps. Neither step involved learning a large contingent of spells. Further, you now have enough in your active toolbox to heal a heroic. It will be hard, especially at first, but you have the tools to get it done. You aren't maximizing the potential of your class yet, of course, and the result is that some people will die that wouldn't have if you had mastery of every spell...but trying to jump in and effectively use ten spells that are new to you, in the fast-paced environment of heroic dungeon healing, will likely lead to more deaths and potentially some trauma for you. A lot of people try to pick up a new role and, not being sure of what to focus on, use everything badly, feel like a failure and quit. Don't let that happen to you!


The Filler Spells


I feel bad. I've given some very great and noble spells a pretty lousy name. "Filler"...as if they were the pork anuses and chicken snouts that fill in your hotdog. I couldn't think of a more dreamy name for them that was usefully descriptive, though. These are the spells that you should be turning to when you've internalized the above six spells and can use those six spells quickly without having to think much. They should bore you, like a teenager who can parallel park and and drive from stoplight to stoplight without incident. "Give me more, man!" you should be thinking. "Let me open this thing up on the open road and slice through the wind like a...wind-slicing...thing. That goes fast." That is what you should be thinking if you're moving on to the next step.

So get a load of these spells, spells that fill in the gaps around your core heals and flavor spells. They occupy niches and are unlikely to be spells you want to use constantly, usually for mana reasons. But not always.

Priests should be eying Prayer of Healing and Binding Heal.

Paladins should study Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn.

Shamans should research Healing Rain and Unleash Elements.

Druids should scope out Rejuvenation and, um...that's all. Hey, what can I say...some classes have slightly smaller toolboxes than others.

Some of these spells are used more often, some are used less often. Mana cost, length of cooldown and effectiveness will dictate to you how often you use them, but none are essential to making it all the way through a dungeon. All of them are essential to maximizing your healing potential, which will keep deaths to a minimum in a dungeon setting and will matter a great deal whenever you decide to hit the raiding circuit. So once you're very comfortable with your Core Heals and Flavor Spells, start mixing in some Filler Spells. Every great chef will tell you that the best dishes require some filler.*

*May not be true of many, or any, great chefs.


Hey, Cool Down, We're Not Done Here


Remember those long cooldowns I told you to forget? Something about them being gone? Well, they're back. In pog form.

Cooldowns are the final frontier of the healing game. It's where good healers become elite and elite healers discover they can do more with their lives than wasting it playing World of Warcraft. Cooldowns, to put it another way needlessly, are where you take it to another level.

This is not for beginners. These spells take uncommon flair, brilliance and subtlety of mind. The uninitiated, the unready, can have their minds warped just as surely as gazing unprepared upon the home world of Cthulu*. Needless to say, we're getting into serious juju here.

*Cthulu is my neighbor's dog. My neighbor's apartment is positively filthy. I shudder to even think about it.

Holy priests need to figure out Chakra and what it converts your Holy Word spell into.. Discipline priests need to wrap their minds around Power Word: Barrier. Both species of priests need to master the fine art of singing away the hurt: Divine Hymn and Hymn of Hope.

Paladins, well, you have about a thousand types of Hand spells and Protection spells. Often they're named the same with little accent marks differentiating them. Learn them, live them, employ them. And don't forget Lay on Hands. Or Avenging Wrath. Or Guardian of Ancient Kings. Or Divine Plea. So, basically, paladins don't heal, they merely cooldown. Or something.

Druids have Tranquility and Tree of Life. And, technically, Rebirth. They also have Nature's Swiftness if they choose (so do shamans...Blizzard's design team sometimes needs an afternoon off, after all).

Shamans, in addition to having the aforementioned druid cooldown if they choose to take that talent, have Spiritwalker's Grace. (I'm not going to get into the non-healing-related cooldowns, so Tremor Totem and Bloodlust will not be mentioned. At all. Besides, if I mentioned Bloodlust, then I'd have to field complaints from weirdos who call it "Heroism." Best not to rile those people.)


Okay, We're Done Here (i.e. The Big Finish)


I have not hit on every single spell a healer might employ. This isn't meant to be a complete compendium of healer spells for each class. I've largely included the ones that feature the most, but you should dig around in your spellbook and look at talents and figure out other creative applications of spells. I haven't even gone into Atonement healing for discipline priests (smite your friends to better health)  or Telluric Currents mana regeneration for shamans (lightning bolts are weaponized mana).

The main idea here is to start small and build larger and larger towers of healing expertise. I tried to lay out a logical plan for where to start and how to grow. This may work for you or it may not. The general concept is paring down to essentials and building from there, ensuring that you always have enough tools to survive but not more than you absolutely need at each phase of development.

However, you may be the type that likes to put everything in your spellbook on your bars, queue up and see what happens. If that is you, I salute you. We can't all drink Mountain Dew, though.

What Can Healers Learn From Great Athletes?

It's quite a conceptual twist to compare healers in World of Warcraft to elite athletes. After all, the image of healers is that of somewhat effete, scholarly individuals in robes (bafflingly, even mail- and plate-wearing healers often get robe-like garments) who worry over injuries. The clinical term for this image is "sissies." But, in fact, healers perform the most like elite athletes and, hey, it's a good self-image to foster, so let's go with it.

Since WoW is not a physical game (outside of dextrous fingers, perhaps), it is really the mental side of things that I'm discussing. I'm a fairly big fan of watching great athletes perform and one trait has become clear to me as common among all top athletes and that trait is crucial for top healers. That trait is how to think in the heat of the moment.


Thinking Is Bad


I know, I know. You've always been told that it's good to think. When it comes to the mental side of life, you won't find many people who are anti-thinking (opportunity for political joke purposely passed up). But honestly, where has it gotten you? If you're an athlete or healer, the answer is "Not far." At least, not while you're in the midst (opportunity for sexual joke purposely passed up).

You see, athletes struggle when they fall into the thinking trap. Professional sports moves at far too quick a pace to be pondering your next move. If you get the ball, turn to face the defense and think about what you're going to do next...chances are, by the time you decide, the ball has already been taken from you and scored on the other end. That's too slow. The state you have to be in is having encoded a high level pattern-matching into your neural pathways such that you can see the defense and instantly transform what you see into an action. We could call that instinct, but that connotes a born-in nature that is not necessarily the case. You can acquire some or all of this from massive amounts of practice and experience. In some sense, you're completely bypassing the conscious thought center of the brain and operating on a subconscious level. This level is woefully inadequate to handle life in general, but can possess specialized synapses for transforming a scene in front of you, in a specialized situation (like a basketball game), into a series of commands to your muscles. By the time your conscious mind catches up, it's only to realize what you've already done...the play is over.

That kind of read-and-react magic is instrumental for healing in a raid, for anyone who's not a dedicated tank healer. A dedicated tank healer is much like a DPS...they don't have to process as quickly (though, quicker processing is always helpful) because they tend to fall into a more reptitive rhythm with much tighter constraints. DPS, these days, is no longer the purely reptitive "rotation," but even with a priority-and-proc based system, the range of possible situations is quite a bit lower than is faced by healers. This is in no way meant to diminish the difficulty of DPS...great DPS is just as difficult as healing, but in a different way. A way that I'm not concerning myself with here (but, if I were to use a metaphor for it, I'd use a great musician, not an athlete).

As a healer who has multiple people to keep alive, you simply cannot be operating at the relatively slow speed of: "Okay, what heal should I cast now? Let's see, four people are hurt, but they're not all in the same party...further, one is especially hurt...but a different person is more important to keep alive...maybe I should cast..." Even at the speed that the mind can go through all those conditions (much faster than it took to write or read those words), it is still too slow. You can't consciously be breaking down the situation every GCD in order to make a decision. Damage goes out far too quickly for that, especially in certain stages of the fight.

No, you have to be Michael Jordan or Gale Sayer or Barry Sanders (yes, that was an awfully American-centric list of great athletes; I'm American, that's how it goes. Okay, okay, I'll throw in Pelé for the international crowd). You have to be moving before your conscious brain has processed what you're doing. It has to be pure pattern-matching automatic reaction. Developed instinct.

How do you develop that instinct? Lots and lots and lots of practice. You have to heal a massive amount of fights. And the fights that will help you the most are the hard ones...the ones that make you think healing is a shitty, thankless job of keeping stupid people alive despite all their stupid mistakes. The more damage that is happening, the more you have to do in every moment, the more you're burning in patterns by a very natural and biological process of automatically connecting actions with results. In this situation you cast a Prayer of Healing and it did a laughably bad job of saving anyone. In this situation you used a Greater Healing Wave followed by a Riptide followed by a Chain Heal and kept everyone alive when you thought they'd die. The process of successes and failure creates patterns of neural activity that are then better equipped to match an action to the next scene of healing it sees...which reinforces and refines those patterns of neural activity that are then better equipped to match an action to...well, rinse and repeat. It's the feedback loop of learning. But it takes a lot of exposure to what you're learning.

The more you refine those neural patterns, though, the less your conscious mind will interfere with your ability to "feel" the situation and fire out the right action, moment by moment. Just like Jordan attacking three defenders near the basket, or Barry Sanders encircled by five defenders all intent on doing him harm. They don't "know" how they get through those defenders...they just do get through the defenders and they do it automatically. Later, maybe they or an outside analyst could break down what they did...but it was all by the magic of pattern matching at the time. They saw the defenders, their neural circuits transformed the vision into actions and their muscles carried it out. That is how you heal Magmaw or Chimaeron or Lady Sinestra. See the damage in your Grid, see the fail spot that may be under your feet and let your neural circuits transform it into actions.


Thinking Is Good


Wait, but isn't thinking bad? Didn't I just write an obscene amount about that very topic? Yes, yes I did. But I changed my mind and didn't want to delete everything I just wrote.

Well, not really. There are different levels of thinking. There's the short-term "What do I do next?" thinking and then there's the long-term big picture thinking. This second sort of thinking goes more like: "Where are we in this fight? How should we be deploying our resources for the next phase of the fight? Why were we put here on this Earth? What does it all mean?"

Those last two questions are beyond the scope of this piece. But, hopefully, you get the idea. Not having to consciously think about what you are doing moment to moment does not mean you should zone out and dream about winning the lottery. You could do that, but what a waste...what, then, would you think about when zoning out in work meetings? No, what freeing up your conscious mind does for you is allow you to monitor the fight overall, figure out how it's going and start determining your personal strategy for later on in the fight.

After all, there are cooldowns to be employed and possibly large scale positioning changes to be made and maybe you'll want to hand off a healing target to another healer, or take on theirs, for one reason or another. All these things are good things to be pondering while your fingers are busy doing what they do (opportunity for masturbation joke bypassed). Your subconscious mind is hard at work pattern-matching while your conscious mind is hard at work monitoring and strategizing. You see, contrary to popular legend, we use all of our brains...we're just consciously aware of only a part of it.


I Think I'm Done Here (The Big Finish)


Healing and DPS are as different, as I alluded to before, as being a great athlete is from being a great musician. They are both exceedingly difficult, but in different ways. For DPS, it's about muscle memory and establishing a dynamic rhythm. For healers, though, it's about creating specialized patterns of neurons that have "learned" what patterns of damage visible in your raid frames result in what actions. There are an infinite amount of patterns of damage, so these neurons don't work like a list of damage->action rule pairs. They see the damage as overlapping courses of action, with one of those courses of actions winning out at any given time.

So be like Mike, as our corporate overlords urge. Develop these instincts and free your conscious mind for wondering why you're even in that raid, healing a bunch of losers who stand in fire. It's a much better question to be pondering than what healing spell to cast next.

Playing Multiple Healers

This is not a post about dual-boxing to fill out your raid, I'm afraid. I know I just lost the huge dual-boxing audience, but I will never lie to you to generate more readers. That's just not how I roll.

This post regards having several characters who heal that you play semi-often. It can be a tricky situation because most healers build up instinct and muscle memory to deal with both having large and diverse toolboxes and yet having to make decisions constantly in a split-second. Oddly, you can't think as you heal...that's too slow.* You need to work instinctively.

*Let me re-phrase that: you can't think in a micro manner, spending time deciding on your next heal. You should be thinking in a macro manner...big picture thoughts about how the fight is going, when you'll need to employ cooldowns, possible strategic changes, etc. Maybe I'll write an actual post about thinking while healing.

So how do you handle switching classes as a healer when instinct and muscle memory are so important? Let's talk about that!

Fundamentally, healing really is the same, no matter what class you are using (outside of blood death knights...they're a freak of their own category). Blizzard has done a good job of making healing classes feel unique (in my opinion, there are definitely those who would argue otherwise) but we can break healing down into certain categories to establish a pattern that we can employ no matter what class we are on.


Core Heals


One major change Blizzard instituted going into Cataclysm was the creation of a set of core heals that, with occasional tiny differences, were constant between all classes. Every class has:

The slow, small, efficient heal: This is Heal for priests, Holy Light for paladins, Healing Wave for shamans and Nourish for druids.

The slow, big, mildly efficient heal: This is Greater Heal for priests, Divine Light for paladins, Greater Healing Wave for shamans and Healing Touch for druids.

The fast, somewhat big, not at all efficient heal: This is Flash Heal for priests, Flash of Light for paladins, Healing Surge for shamans and Regrowth for druids.

This is where you should start, where you should ground yourself, as a healer. Get completely familiar and comfortable with these three heals. Try healing a dungeon using only those heals. Everything else you do should work as an outgrowth from these three heals.

I think this is key whether you have one healer or four different healers, but really making these three heals instinct will make healing over multiple classes much easier. Even if you have just one healer and wish to master it, these three heals are the essence of "triage"--doing only what is necessary (keeping everyone alive), not what would be nice (keeping everyone at full health). Having an automatic feel for when you have to use each heal will simply make you a stronger healer.

Returning, though, to playing multiple healers; consider reserving the same buttons on your mouse (if you are a click-healer as I think most healers are) or reserving the same keybinds (if you use your keyboard to cast healing spells) for these three types of heals. For example, I bind the efficient heal to my middle mouse button, the big, less efficient heal to shift-middle mouse button and the fast, inefficient heal to control-middle mouse button. Whether I am on my priest, paladin, druid or shaman, that's the layout for the core heals. I'm not suggesting you use the same buttons I do, but consider using the same ones between classes for those three heals.


Use On Cooldown


Every healing class has certain spells, usually instants, that are supposed to be "used on cooldown," meaning use it every time it's available. (This is only meant to be literal in raids, when there's always some damage, or difficult situations in dungeons...don't cast them when everyone's at 100% and killing critters while the tank is AFK!)

As a priest, for example, we have two of these spells: prayer of mending and either penance (if the priest is discipline) or circle of healing (if the priest is holy). A druid has switfmend and wild growth. Etcetera, etcetera. While the "use every single time it is up" is extreme in order to make a point (use it a lot!), I'm not arguing usage patterns here...sometimes you may want to hold back a swiftmend for a burst of damage you know is coming, for example. What I'm saying is that every healing class has a couple of spells meant to be used about as much as possible. Unlike the core heals, they are largely without drawback (they tend to instant, pretty efficient and make a difference) and so you use them guilt-free and with abandon. Identify these spells for your class and bind them to the same (hopefully the easiest to hit) buttons.


Special Attacks


Every video game has special attacks and WoW is no exceptions. For healers, these special attacks tend to heal people and be rather different. Holy Radiance is fairly different from Power Word: Shield is fairly different from Chain Heal. There is not a lot pulling these things together, in terms of a unifying logic...they are simply the extra moves you can and should use. Ideally, bind them to mouse buttons by binding the most used ability to the easiest-to-hit remaining button, etc.


Binding It All Together (i.e The Big Finish)


The idea that I'm putting forth in this post is to create a "healing logic." Rather than thinking in terms of actual spells, think in terms of a logic or concepts: "Time for my slower, efficient spell. Now my direct heal cooldown. Now my fast, inefficient heal." If you do that, and you bind concepts to buttons, it doesn't matter what healer you're using, outside of the special attacks. Your slow, big heal is always in the same place. Your Always-Use A ability and Always-Use B ability are always in the same place. Suddenly, you can port the same instincts over from healer to healer.

You do still need to change mindsets a little, so you don't Power Word: Shield the rogue (who currently has no aggro) when you were thinking of Chain Heal. But a lot of what you do simply transfers.

I mean, in the end, we're all just tapping into the Great Healing Delicious. We call those methods of tapping it different things and argue over who's Great Healing Delicious is the true Great Healing Delicious...but we're really all seeking the same truth. So bind accordingly!

A Healer's Primer For Heroic PUGs

Healers have been put into a tough spot in Cataclysm. While tanks have an equally stressful job, they are also usually invested with the implicit leadership that allows them to dictate how pulls should be done to maximize their comfort. Healers have a stressful, difficult job and basically have to go along with how the group chooses to proceed. Unless you're a confrontational, take-charge kind of punk...but if you were, you'd have rolled a tank.

So how to handle running dungeons with four strangers who's lives are in your hands? Here are a set of tenets that will hopefully ease your struggle just a bit.


Stack Spirit


Most groups want to move quickly. Cataclysm was supposed to change people's perceptions of the expected pacing of dungeons because they are, you know, significantly harder than the ones people became used to in Wrath of the Lich King (especially in the final couple of tiers of the expansion, when most people hugely overgeared them).

It hasn't, by and large. Unless you explicitly stop the group, tanks keep moving. Many people are already viewing heroics as the quick, boring and easy task they were back when people were looking for their daily frost. They're not happy with stoppages, even though many pulls can be really brutal on the healer's mana. (This is not to paint everyone with the same brush...there are plenty of sensible, reasonable people...but you don't need these tips when you're lucky enough to group with such people.)

You can always ramp up throughput at need by leaning more heavily on your less mana efficient spells. But for your best PUG heroic results, protect your mana pool. Eat spirit buff food, try to have spirit on all your gear (reforge something to spirit on those pieces that don't) and use spirit enchants/gems. Until mana feels like it's always high, spirit is your best stat (this will change for raids, but we're talking about making heroics easier).


Prepare For The Worst


Define in your mind the worst thing the group can do that you'll tolerate, some combination of not marking pulls, not CC'ing, overpulling, etc. It's a good idea to have in your mind some sense of what the worst you'll put up with is. Once you have that, assume that that is what is going to unfold and be ready to handle it. If the group goes beyond that, drop party. It's as simple as that.

Mind you, I would never advocate dropping party on a group that is honestly striving and has some idea of how to play in instances. Sometimes group composition is not ideal or gear is not high or people are just struggling with a specific mechanic despite generally being decent players. You should try your best to help them succeed.

I'm talking about groups where people really aren't trying very hard and want you to enable their bad play. There is no duty upon you to do so. As a courtesy, you may want to voice your concerns and see if they respond by doing the right things from then on. But dropping party is a perfectly valid response to groups intent on making a mess. It doesn't require being a hardcore player to understand the mechanics of fights, to CC and attack a pull efficiently. It doesn't involve elitism to drop people who aren't interested in putting out that minimal effort when doing heroics.

The main thing is that you have to understand that the responsibility for a successful run does not lie entirely upon your shoulders. In fact, there may be nothing you can do to make a group successful. For your own sanity and enjoyment of the game, develop a sense for those times and cut your losses. 


It's Okay If People Die


People die. It's the way of things, in game and out of game. In game, though, the consequences are pretty minimal. Try to save people, but if a DPS has to die, so be it. Don't place the pressure on yourself that deaths represent failures. Success is killing every mob in the pull or killing the boss. Nothing else. If a mage and a rogue die, but the boss dies as well, you were successful. As a group and as a healer. The mage and rogue may or may not berate you, but that's because no one enjoys dying, not because you actually failed (regardless of what they say).

Sometimes you have to make cold, rational decisions and let someone die. Either because there's a more pressing target to heal (the tank, yourself, the one DPS carrying the load in getting the boss down) or because you're low on mana and keeping that person alive is not going to be worth the mana it will take. Steel yourself to make those calls and then make them decisively. Don't waste mana on someone you're going to end up letting die (or who's going to die regardless of what you do).


Don't Be Afraid Of Your Expensive Spells 


Blizzard has tried to deincentivize you from using your quick and/or powerful healing spells, because if you used them all the time, healing would be easy. But you are still supposed to use them. I know I told you to protect your mana pool earlier, but a wipe slows the group down more than drinking. Sometimes, you need a burst of healing to save the tank or to stabilize a disaster situation. If things turn grim, pull out the big guns and blaze away. Try to turn them off at the earliest moment you can, though, because you also don't want to run totally dry on mana.

Conserving mana is not an important goal in and of itself. You conserve mana in order to have enough of it when you need to go big. When that times comes, don't hesitate to use whatever you have to.


Remember Your Cooldowns


An easy trap to fall into is to think about your cooldowns as emergency buttons to be saved until you really, really, really need them. The end result, though, is that you'll almost never use them and they'll be wasted. Except in a very few cases, the situation can always plausibly get worse. Maybe a mob will unleash a massive area of effect spell in a few seconds and then you'll really wish you still had that cooldown, right? That sort of thinking is a mistake and paralyzes you from using some of your most powerful spells.

Use your cooldowns at almost any time that you're pretty sure they won't get wasted unless you have an encounter planned out. If there's a specific phase where a cooldown will be maximized, by all means save it for then. But if you're doing a trash pull and lots of damage is happening...start burning those two- and three-minute cooldowns (and fire off 30-second cooldowns essentially any time you can). They'll be back up soon...by sometime in the next pull or even later in that fight if you're attacking a boss. You'll maximize your performance by using those cooldowns as much as you can; waiting for the "perfect time" (again, unless you're scripting an encounter with discrete and predictable phases) will almost always lead to sub-optimal cooldown usage.

Cooldowns are there to be used, not to be saved. They aren't panic buttons, they are powerful spells that Blizzard doesn't want you using too much. Don't increase their cooldowns by using them infrequently.


Take Responsibility For Your Errors


You are as likely to make a mistake as anyone else. It happens. There are a lot of mechanics being thrown around most heroic dungeons, sometimes you'll move the wrong way and bang. Dead healer. Or dead tank. If you know you made a mistake, consider tossing a "My mistake, I missed X" into party chat while running back. It amps down any possible tension, people are generally a little more willing to forgive someone who admits they messed up and it gives you credibility. Credibility is important, for those times when you get blamed and it wasn't clearly your fault. If you've already created a track history of admitting an error, you have a much stronger stand from which to disclaim responsibility when you don't believe it was your fault.

Of course, sometimes you'll have jerks in the group who aren't fair-minded or reasonable and they'll abuse you no matter what you say. In that case, don't bother even getting into it with them. Ignore them for as long as you can, leave the party if it becomes too much to be worth it.


In the end, heroics were designed to be stressful. The LFD tool is there for anyone who wants to quickly find people to run with, but it's not there with the intent of guaranteeing an enjoyable run. For that, you'll need to round up some of your friends. These tips aren't meant to min-max your performance, just to make your heroic runs with strangers slightly less painful. Even the tips aimed at performance (stacking spirit, using your expensive spells, using cooldowns) are offered to reduce the pressure, whether social pressure or decision-making pressure.

Healing is fun, but strangers often aren't. This guide is simply aimed at trying to reduce the potential negative effects of strangers and push dungeon experiences more toward the fun of healing.