Hands up if you are a healer that is drinking more than usual lately?
NO!
See that’s the problem with healers, they just don’t get it!
BOOZE, not mana food!
- If the DPS dies in the bad- HEALERS FAULT!
- If the 40k (DPS masquerading as) Tank gets 3 shot in regular UK – HEALERS FAULT!
- If the DPS die to the Whirlwind – HEALERS FAULT!
- If the dps of the DPS is too low – HEALERS FAULT!
- If their pet rabbit escapes from it’s cage, jumps on a ship to India and gets run over by a camel in downtown Delhi – HEALERS FAULT!
- If the healer is OOM on every trash pull – HEALERS FAULT!
- HEALERS FAULT!
- HEALERS FAULT!
- HEALERS FAULT!
- HEALERS FAULT!
- HEALERS FAULT!
- HEALERS FAULT!
- HEALERS FAULT!
What did I miss? Help me fill in the blanks!
Healing takes MAAANNNNAAAA!
In an ideal world, only one target takes any damage of note – THE TANK!
In an ideal world a Resto Shaman can cruise through most encounters with little more than an Earth Shield and a Riptide.
This in fact is my indicator of a reasonable group.
If my main mana cost is dropping Totems and my mana is back near 100% at the end of every fight, I know the group is good… Maybe a little OP (or skilled) – but now I can join in the DPS and make the instance go all the faster.
When the 40k tank has ES & RT, yet requires constant, spammed heals… I begin to wonder…
When I am forced to spam heals on every member of the party… I wonder.
When I have to heal myself as much as the tank… I wonder…
When I’m using 60% of my mana bar in a trash fight, every trash fight I have to wonder.
Sure the new ICC 5 mans include piles of AoE damage, or damage flying in all sorts of directions, but I still have to wonder…
When I am using 60% of my mana bar every fight I wonder why you loot and run…
Why do you loot and run even though I don’t have the mana to get you through the next trash pull?
Why don’t you wait patiently for me to mana up (a little at least) and maybe, god forbid – loot, or maybe “watch out the sky is falling” – skin? (Even Larisa regrets taking Skinning… gathering + healing do not mix)
Back to the post in 1 moment.
I just wanted to say a quick farewell to Elnia. He has left Larisa to mind the Inn by herself. Such is the life of an Innkeeper of course. The backpackers come, fill glasses for a while, then move on. Rest assured I will still be a patron, even if the lights are on less often… wait that is taking away from Elnia’s achievements… I don’t want to do that.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on on of the best WoW Blogs around, you were definitely equal to the task!
Good luck for the future… feel free to drop by any time, I’m sure I can shout you a beer.
OK, back to the post…
They say the tank dictates the speed of the run.
This is true.
- If the tank farts about remembering where their abilities are located between pulls, making a coffee, changing nappies (of the DPS), then yes it will be a slow run.
- If the tank rushes ahead without acknowledging the OOM healer, causing a wipe, it will also be a slow run.
- If the DPS don’t appreciate that they’re standing in the bad, grabbing aggro, dying etc consume healers mana demanding the healer has to mana up, it will be a slow run.
People acknowledge that low DPS will mean longer fights, allowing more damage to hit the party, meaning more heals and less mana at the end of the pull…
But do they acknowledge that they can do something about this?
Healers, here’s my mission for you…
Drink…
Sit down after every fight and drink.
Don’t be shy, just do it!
If the party rushes ahead, let them wipe the 1st time. Make sure you mention in chat that there are no heals while you mana up, that there are no heals for bad sitting whirlwind wearing whinging DPS.
Heal the ones that need it the least!
Worst case, only heal those at full health!
HUNH?
Yeah, heal the players that are helping themselves, you and the party as a whole, by playing sensibly – reward them!
- Punish the stupid – let them die!
- Punish the stupid – let them corpse run!
Macro something like this…
Sorry I can’t Rez you, I’m getting a standard Blizzard error “You cannot perform that action: You cannot heal or Rez stupid“
Have you got one of those groovy Rez messages…
The gods reach down and draw [target] back from the fiery depth of hell… Rez Inc
I recommend you add a modifier to your macro. Set your nice pleasant Rez message as the alternate message, then add the following as your standard Rez message.
[target], I don’t heal stupid, I don’t Rez stupid. Next time you corpse run while we progress, this is your final warning
But you have uber mana regen – unless you are an undergeared noobette!
This bit is inspired by Krizzlybear’s reasons for quitting healing… I’m tell you.. DRINK MORE.. I seem to remember one night recently where you were giving us your drink tally on Twitter… you weren’t fussed by the idiots that night!
Shaman have pretty good mana regen when they are geared, especially in raids with lots of sources of mana, especially in the MP5 gear, especially when mana totem is down or blessing of wisdom is on.
However with the current pull an instance at once mentality, I am favoring haste and crit.
I kind of figure it’s better to have the heal land in the “New World Instance” than to have a full mana tank and 4 corpses at my feet.
If we played the heroics like we did when we 1st got to 80, carefully, patiently, one pull at a time, I would never be out of mana.
The thing is we don’t!
We pull the whole room at once, burst the 20 mobs down and race off to pull the next room.
Just for turning up at the scene of the next fight I blow 8% of my mana in totems – if you only halt momentarily and move on, causing me to drop my totems again 5 seconds later… That’s 16% of my mana gone.
If you all stand in the bad, I am burning mana at an incredible rate – yet with the fight over in 30 seconds, I haven’t had the chance to regen any mana.
If I don’t have blessing of wisdom, or some other mana battery AND there are lots of poisons/curses/bad smells, then I’m going to drop a cleansing totem – which means I have gimped my mana regen even further… But at least now I can concentrate on spamming heals till the cows come home, the party wipes, or I go OOM.
BUT… then I will be sitting down to drink.
Oh… If you are wondering why I’m not rezzing you, enable the mana bars on your UI…
What, I have no mana?
Either I’m:
- Too lazy to Rez you
- Didn’t notice you’d died (I just thought that gray space in my healing bars meant you were AFK)
- Waiting for you to corpse run, or
- Rez’s cost mana, and I’d rather be at full mana so when you get the Rez and run immediately into the next pack of mobs, there is the slightest chance I will keep you alive.
In summary…
Tanks & DPS.
- Do everything you can to mitigate damage and we can keep moving.
- Aim to top the healing received meter and we will all go slow.
Healers
- Stupid begets death – it’s the natural order, don’t fight it, let nature prevail.
After the 1st wipe, or when someone is bitching about you being OOM, offer to leave… I know it might take 20 seconds to get a new group, but you will have to live with that.
Drink.
Drink heavily & often.
I like to work on a 1:1 mana break:beer ratio.
It helps to dull the pain. Make sure that your party knows you are doing one shot for every mana break. Explain clearly that the higher the stress/mana consumption, the lower your performance will be by the end of the instance.
When you zone in press your “I’m HEALZ” macro which simply says.
If you die during this run, it’s the HEALERS FAULT! If you take damage leading to death, it’s YOUR FAULT!
Ahh time for a beer…
Gnomer and Out, Squidly and Stout!
A couple more things…
1) I love my Pie…
ForThePie that is! This was in my email inbox this morning…
Fact of Life:
After Monday and Tuesday, even the calendar says W T F!
2) What’s your game?
One of the greatest serious of posts written, and still topical.. like it’s the only thing on peoples minds right now. Written by Arioch, she (She, Nib.. She!) captures the essence of the variety of WoW players and their motivations so well (with a couple of guest posts thrown in!)
- OK in UK
- My Name is Dark/Soth, and Apparently I Am an Elitist
- WoW: The Game (OK, so I have mentioned up to here before, but without giving Jong due credit.. ARIOCH totally ripped off Jongs sports analogy… If Krizz can call people out, (tell me you read Kriz’s post… of course you did.. I think it’s so popular it got a mention on Fox (Fucktards Of the Extreme) News…) it’s only fair I call Arioch out as well.. mmmm)
- WoW: The Community
- Another Voice
- WoW: The Expectations
- WoW: The Numbers
- WoW: The (Heroic) Solution
3) The Typhoon hits the Nether
TyphoonAndrew is on TwistedNetherBlogcast this week!
I guess it was all perfect timing… he writes in to say have awesome I was (I was you know), suggests more Aussies should be on, then Nib wonders if there are any DK bloggers out there… Doh!
Tune in live Friday (USA time), Saturday (Australian time) on the UStream page, or here as a back-up.
I’m excited for a couple of reasons… he’s nearly a neighbor… he only lives a few km away in the grooviest part of Melbourne and I’m bringing the beers…. Well he has invited me over… I’m just not sure whether I will be a bad influence or not.
What do you think, should I stay or should I go?
TGIF
OK, time for work.. then, well maybe a little WoW… I don’t know about anyone else, but I was totally deprived of two days this week.. I still have 2 more posts to put up, but not the time to schedule them!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
http://gnomeaggedon.net/2010/01/15/dear-healers-do-your-freakin-job/
One of my favorite things to tell dps is that “I don’t heal through stupid.”
I’ve had melee complain that they died during some of the pulls in HoL. I simply mention that the mobs have Whirlwind and they should stay out of it. Generally, if you’re taking a lot of damage and other people are not, you are doing something wrong or fighting a raid boss that targets you with Mark of the Champion every single fucking time because WoW gave your character shitty RNG so you never win loot rolls or get enough procs or…
Oooops. Sorry. Bit of a ramble there ^_^
But yeah, you get the idea. As a paladin, Divine Plea is amazing, especially since we stack Int more than almost anything else. 25% mana of 25k mana gives you a lot of heals, and the difference in the healing amount of 2100 +sp and 2250 just isn’t as much, especially for longer fights.
May the Gnome’s home be your home for rambles and rants…
When I heal I usually just say 2 things: I can’t heal without mana and I can’t heal one-shots- if any tank or dps have a problem with this I tell them to kick me and invite a gm to their party
Nice post. I fully understand what you’re saying as a mana user also.
Don’t start me on Gnomeaggedon… My bad in this case tho. I rock out of Wintergrasp in PvP spec and don’t realise till the 1st pull…
Respec down to 0 mana, mana up and chase the party… No /votekick yet tho…
Wow, that’s a lot of linklove – two times in the same blogpost! Cheers!
But couldn’t you have warned the world for taking skinning as a healer? You really need to spread the word!
Never too much love or links for you Larisa.
Actually I have an entire post coming up about healer looting & gathering (yes another one)
You caught me! I sneak into Jong’s brain at night and steal his thoughts.
Thanks for the compliment and compiling all the links, I was thinking about doing that to give peeps a convenient list. Now I’ll just send people here! i r lazy
Compliment deserved…
So you are snowdropping Jong’s thoughts while I snowdrop Megan’s panties… I know who gets the better deal there…
Tis a pleasure to hightlight excellence!
I’m actually putting my Resto Shaman on the Shelf. I haven’t had the guts to write the post for the blog and admit it, but it’s true.
I played the Resto Shaman when Naxx was still the only raid instance worth running and did quite well in Heroics. Then I picked her up again mid 3.2 and the Dungeon Finder has just made me realise I can’t heal.
Or perhaps you’re right and it’s the group that make me try and heal through multiple Flamestrikes in H OK (the last straw) and seem to get frustrated.
I do think that’s part of it. But I can’t take the “you’re a shit healer” & “/tank leaves party” mental abuse any longer.
I still love Squidly & healing.
I know I am good at healing (my mates tell me so and ask me to heal)
I’m not so good at healing stupid, but that’s more perssonal choice… I mean prioritization.
Neckbeards (as Krizz calls them) better have self heals.
There’s no question that a tank-healer bond is sacred. When I run with VikingMetal there is never a question about which of us screwed up… Shit just happens sometimes.
Knowing that a quick “me” will bring him coming without him thinking I’m hanging shit on him or going “Me,me,me, I’m so important”.
We all screw up… Do Ensidia one shot everything, never a death?
Would guilds be clearing raids on the night of release if they didn’t have members in PTR learning them for a month before release?
Krizz is putting his tree form away because the bastards have gotten him down… don’t let them do the same to you… Just let them go down in a sea of green.
The random BC-level dungeons I’ve healed so far haven’t been too bad, but I’m starting to not look forward to getting to level 80 and hearing this kind of abuse in heroics 😦
Hopefully there must still be some nice groups out there – all everyone does is moan about being treated badly all the time
Oh and by the way, go and meet TyphoonAndrew – meeting random people off the internet is awesome fun 😀 Make sure you tell people where you are going just in case he turns out to be an axe-murderer of course.
Actually I just completed the anti-tied post. It’s still abdraft, but might get up on Monday if I push the next couple of posts through over the weekend…
Me moved from Adelaide… I’ll look for 44 gallon drums before knocking on his door 😉
ohh but he was originally from Melbourne…
OK, so that’s a vote for screaming Gnomeenities in the background while he talks serious DK business…
Greetings and salutations!
I’m a multi-class, I have a pally and bear tank, a priest, drood, and pally healler, moonkin, blood death knight, and shadow priest dps. If you see a running theme, it’s classes that can heal themselves, particularly in my dps. I’m certainly far from the best in any of these classes and specs but I feel I do alright.
I have been seeing an increase in ‘gogogo’ instances and less ‘hey, lets go at the pace we should’ groups. If a dps starts pulling aggro, I do let them die, I do tell them to run back for being a bad dps, and spank them lightly and tell the tank to go on and pull instead of waiting, even if it means a boss or badge.
If my tank is misbehaving, if I’m ally side, just sit back shadowmeld, and laugh maniacally.
My general rule of thumb, and my macro says “if I have 60% mana, the next pull is okay, if I’m below, stop, or enjoy a lack of heals. If you pull it off the tank, you tank it without heals.”
I have a second macro that says “If you stand in the fire, you get no heals, whirlwinds do not taste of candy, you get no heals, novas are not something meant to be healled through, you get no heals. If you die due to lack of heals, you earned it.”
I have a bad habit of inspecting everyone at start while I buff, I also watch how the first few pulls go….if a dps is not pulling their weight, vote to kick goes up with the explanation ‘x is not pulling their weight, toss them out and hopefully the next one to join will.” And please don’t think I’m one of those that thinks 4k for a heroic is necessary, no, if you’re in an old heroic, and you can’t pull 1k? vote to kick! if you’re in ToC5 and you can’t pull 2k? vote to kick! if you’re in the new instances and you can’t pull 3k? vote to kick! I won’t carry you, if the vote to kick fails, I say aloud I’m not willing to carry somebody who can’t even manage to do their role, initiate the vote to kick again, and if it fails, drop group, the next healler may be nicer than me.
Moral of this comment: Lets go back to molten core days, hunters and rogues don’t get heals, they can fend for themselves. and mana breaks have to happen often or everybody loses.
Greetings and salutations!
I can handle gogogogo if it’s mixed with that bit of sense.
I can appreciate why a non-mana user might not give a stuff about buffs, about whether Mage food is offered etc.
But serious, 30 seconds at the beginning for people to zone in, buff and provide consumables… not too much to ask.
Likewise I don’t mind the gogogo attitude when obviously everyone is up to the task, and I’m not taking about carrying the just dinged 80 through HoR, rather is there a need to slow or stop momentarily…
For as long as I have played, well before instant LFD tank queues, a major portion of a tanks job is reading the party… are they ready, are they in trouble… does the healer have mana.
Right now it seems that the attitude is I will run until I die, then I will blame someone else… well that’s not tanking.. that’s stupid.
BBB has a great post explaining way some tanks should chain pull and others shouldn’t (or at least don’t need to).. that’s great to know and not commonly known.
It’s like the Healer’s bane.. Locks life tapping at the start of a pull.. or after the healer has mana’d up.
You have to understand that until recently, I was purely a Mage and well… Locks can rot in hell.
Just the other day, someone (myrx) pointed out on CriticalQQ, that Locks tap before the fight to get Spellpower…
Well why the hell didn’t you say so… tap away, heals incoming!
I understand spellpower.. I don’t understand self harm…
I hope I don’t get you in my group. While I always make sure the the healer has at least half mana before pulling I don’t think we need to stop and drink after every pull. Most geared tanks can live through one trash pull without heals if they use cooldowns. Most people like a quick run. If you, as a healer, are having a hard time keeping up, you too can be replaced. If you want to replace me, fine, it will take me all of 5 seconds to get another group.
I just want to get in, get my badges, and leave. I don’t think I would take well to a healer who holds up the run drinking in real life every mana break. Honeslty, I really don’t care about my fellow puggers. I don’t talk to them unless I need to as I have a guild for my social activites.
When I start every instance. I tell the healer that I will pull as long as you have half mana. If you are one of those healers who needs to be at full mana before every trash pull tuned for players with about 25k less health than I currently have, then I hope, after a nice 10 minute wait, your next tank is more aggreable to your playstyle.
Sounds at 1st like the feeling may be mutual… but in reality I think not.
What you suggest is more than fair.
I’m not worried if you run off and I’m at 50% mana, I know my ES will keep you going and worst case, my riptide will pull you out of the shit at the last instant.
But the fact that you look and see I am at 50% is more than many. Ive had groups running off when I am at 20% /bye
I’s rare I get to 20% in one pull.. that’s usually attrition.. 4 pulls where I drop 20% each time.
If I am fussed (and preferably if I have Mage food, but hell, what’s a couple of coppers between strangers), I will sit for 3-5 seconds… any increased mana regen is better than none.
But TBH, the main issue I have with tanks are:
They pull when there is nothing in my mana tank, or more importantly..
They aren’t protecting my butt and keeping the avoidable damage off the dps.
Obviously I’m not talking about DPS standing in the bad, I’m talking about loose mobs… One ANub, the only reason we got the boss down was I could see things were going bad. I ES the tank, riptided the DPS then died.
I would have popped and joined the fight… but I had to do that on the 1st trash fight in the room because the tank wasn’t covering them!
As for DPS.. I think Holly said it pretty well, basically if you aren’t going to give a flying toss.. then neither will I.
I had a hunter last night in ANub that stood in the green the whole time… in fact I think he went looking for patches of green.. I guess he was scared it might ruin his < tank dps.
When the fight ended, and he stayed in the green… well the fight had ended.. as had my heals
What changed in PUGs? I was always considered a bit of an oddity by my guildies as I was always happy to PUG on my healers but it’s got to the point now that I’d rather wait the extra time and take them in a DPS spec. I like a brisk pace but my heart sinks when the tank has pulled the first 2 groups of trash whilst I’m still trying to buff. I then have to go haring after them and spend the rest of the instance playing catch-up. I’m lucky if I get the chance to loot anything!
I can only think it’s because the high-geared raiders who have returned to heroics now that Frost Badges are available from the random dungeon daily.
Not sure, but I wonder if BBB’s post carries some of the answer. One kind of tank “has to” keep moving, and the other emulate it…
it’s either that or people just want maximum time:emblem ratio.
A group I just left (as in we finished the instance), the Hunter pulling 6k dps requested we just go straight to the end boss… he only wanted his emblems of Frost…
Everyone else. the whole loot bag.
It was all very civil.. but maybe we need to be setting expectations
[…] Dear Healers, Do Your Freakin Job!!! […]
While I understand pally tanks do have better mana conservation if they’re chain pulling due to divine plea being up 100% of the time, I have to call bull@#$% ont hat being a valid reason for not slowing down at all.
First thing is, paladins get a lot of mana back period. They get mana back when they judge, they get mana back when they dodge, block, or parry thanks to sanctuary, they get mana back from heals, in essence, they get a lot of friggin mana back.
The other thing is…..divine plea is on a 1 minute cooldown, 1 minute…..that means they reasonably could stop every 1 minute for a mana break for everyone else.
The last thing is there is such a thing as mana conservation, I know on my pally unless there are just some insane dps, I don’t have to hit every one of my buttons and do max tps, half the time not even needing to drop a second consecrate because holy shield and hammer have enough threat at that point to sai l through the end of the pull. Just being a little more mana conservative can help a ton if for whatever reason divine plea should *gasp* wear off because heaven forbid you let that other source of mana (your healler and their heals) have time to get off cooldown 😉
To say that a pally tank has to chain pull is like saying that a warrior or bear has to chain pull, it’s nice, but, it’s certainly not necessary.
Too true. I think we are all doing a lot of things right now that we don’t need too, but we can, so we do.
However just because we can with one group, doesn’t mean we should with all groups.
Then to get snarky when we can’t do everything in a pug is just childish…
Thanks for your great comments Holly!
Well I’m glad you enjoy my mini-rants. Hopefully they’re worth reading. I just, I’m seeing an increase in an almost FPS like attitude in an mmorpg. Instead of a more fantasy story based setting it’s getting faster and more ‘pew pew move, pew pew move, reload pew pew move’ and people feel most accomplished when they don’t have to reload.
I enjoy an fps, but I don’t want your dog food in my cat food.
Agreed. It’s like when roleplaying games (like D&D etc)… i.e. Games that can truly be RP’d change to hack & slash.
It changes from enjoying the game at a slower speed, milking the last drop of fun out of it, into hanging on every die roll.
The randomness of the die roll is the only joy left…
Once you discover the Dungeon Master has been too free with the gear and you OP the content, the only thing left is the dice roll and turning on your fellow players in boredom.
Pretty soon the die rolls are an annoyance and the only thing left is to destroy you mates…
Our RL has the great outlook on healing:
“If the tank dies, it’s the healer’s fault. If the healer dies, it’s the tank’s fault. If the DPS dies, it’s their own f**king fault.”
Words to live by.
and it’s true… to a reasonable extent after all it’s the tanks role to shield the party and the healers to keep it alive.
Where it’s really true is that stupid dps can expect to die. They shouldn’t abuse the other two roles and assume that they (individually) are the responsiblity of the tanks and healers.
Too much buck passing these days both in RL and in game