Healing rotations

[Waldonnis]

I managed to coax, con, and club (not necessarily in that order) Kytae, Amahli, and Vendes up to Winterspring to learn and practice healing rotations....and they did FANTASTIC! We started off with one slayer and quickly moved to two at a time...given how often those guys mortal strike, it was quite an experience from my perspective as well as theirs, I'm sure. At one point, I had two smacking my bear body around for 7 minutes straight and we still were barely stressing their combined healing capability using the rotations, never once using a mana potion or innervate. For the final exercise, I took on three slayers at once, which I must admit was nerve racking for me a bit (hehehe, hard watching your health yoyo that much). After a 9.5 minute fight with no potion or innervate use, we emerged victorious and could've realistically kept it going for another 9 minutes if needed, I'm sure.

For those uninitiated in what healing rotations are or do, let me explain it. Basically, the goal is to have continuous, organised healing for extended periods of time, primarily for tanks, but it can be scaled/assigned to cover entire raids. With proper rotations set up and working, innervate use is predictable, pre-assigned, and sparse (barring emergencies), as is potion use. What this means to the rest of us is that we would end up with spare innervates rather than hoping for one, no double- or triple-healing of the same people at once, and more HPM efficiency overall.

How it works:

Basically, it requires a bit of set-up and planning. Ideally, whomever is in charge of organising the healers knows what each healer has for mp/5 and spirit (which in turn lets them know who regens fastest and who benefits most from innervates). Assuming three healers (we'll go with two priests and a druid), what I'm used to is the following order (more on this in a sec):

1. Median regen (preferably has the most spirit, but can vary)

2. Highest regen

3. Lowest regen

Healer 1 heals exclusively until their mana reaches roughly 30% (some go as high as 50% depending on how low the median regen is or how efficient the healer is mana-wise). At this point, Healer 2 steps in and heals exclusively until they are out of mana, while Healer 1 regens and Healer 3 rests at full. Once Healer 2 is out of mana, Healer 3 takes over (often the druid, in my experience, given the above scenario) and the other two rest. By this point, Healer 1 should be nearing 75-85% and Healer 2 should be the around the same. Healer 3 can do one of two things: blow all of their mana (usually done if the fight won't last much longer) or heals until roughly 40% mana. Once that point hits, the rotation starts again with Healer 1, and so forth. In the event of massive healing needs or rotations being limited to two healers instead of three, an innervate can be introduced and targetted specifically for the person who has the highest spirit. I *never* did an innervate on anyone that was currently casting, personally, since it was never needed, but also because it was more efficient to have them regen'ing already post-5-sec-rule. In a simple scenario, where one rotation heals one tank, this system really allows for near-endless fights even without an innervate or potions. Also, think about this from an aggro-management point of view...rather than spreading aggro around to many, it's concentrated on one at a time, but there are lapses in aggro building from a healer's perspective

Two things are key to setting this up:

* Informing your class/healing leads of your +spirit and +mp/5

* Communicating frequently within the rotation

Beneficial times for healing rotations:

* Bosses that limit healing and casting (there's one in Naxx that's particularly nasty)

* Boss fights that are VERY long or multi-phased (new raids at Nef, for instance...or new MC raiders at Magmadar)

* Chain-pulling trash mobs, allowing for very little healer downtime, if any, and thus greater time efficiency

One other thing to note is, while not necessary, I always found it helpful to have the druid assigned to the healing rotation be the sole innervate source for that rotation to eliminate confusion or double-innervates. In emergencies (druid dies or has to shift for some reason), another druid is pre-assigned by name and given a specific person to innervate when called upon. It's more done for organisation than anything else and helps get innervates to those that benefit from it the most in a timely fashion.

If there are questions or comments about healing rotations, I'd be happy to answer them...I've done it a bunch personally and am confident that Kytae, Amahli, and Vendes have had enough practice and experience to be able to add more tips to what I've explained here. I would really like to see this started in MC tomorrow if possible and think it'll help immensely even in that raid. It's almost essential for our raid in BWL, in my opinion, so use MC as a training ground when possible...and I'll make myself available for more practice runs in Winterspring if the healers think it's valuable practice time

Thanks again to Kytae, Amahli, and Vendes for joining me today and healing me while I very slowly killed elites...it was a fun time and I hope everyone not only had fun but came away with something they considered good All three of you did wonderfully and took to this very quickly (better than most of the people that I used to run around with ages ago), so be very proud!

[Jadeynn]

Thanks for the lesson V! I agree, I think if we can get this system down we can conserve a lot of mana usage, can't wait to see this implemented in the core just to see what kind of impact it has.

*cheers to Vendes and Amahli (although Amahli did starfire me while I was MC'ed dah meanie! )

*cheers* to Hoofie fo da awesome bear tankage!

Since I am around almost .. well.. all the time. If the healer's that run in the core would like to message me with their + spirit and mp5. I'll make the notes and pass it along to Molox/Guilo.

Edited November 29, 2006 by Jadeynn

[Vendes]

Yay for healing!

[Rhoach]

Triple nipple!

[Martok]

Where's Ug's cliff notes?

[Hubba]

Rotations are a great idea. I have a macro that reports your % of mana remaining from my days of raiding with Advent. When you use it the heal "leader" will be able to instantly see how much mana you have remaining. If you don't already have one let me know and i'll pass it on.

[Jadeynn]

Where's Ug's cliff notes?

Ug's cliff notes - wait your turn to heal

Rhoach... you're such a post ho!

Edited November 29, 2006 by Jadeynn

[lefou]

Healing rotations are situational to the extreme. Every fight needs a different kind of rotation. This requires a lot of direction and learning for leaders and healers. Since there's a learning curve, we'll have to introduce it gradually so it doesn't interfere with the raiding.

While the rotation you outlined may be nearly optimal for that one situation, I consider it to be too complicated.

A simple plan would be: split the healers into two groups, when one is nearly out of mana, switch. This would be an improvement in many parts of Molten Core, so that our healers aren't overhealing nor are they running out of mana. I am not saying we should do it that way, just that we should keep it simple.

If the plan requires someone to be trained to recognize abilities for a group of 10 healers and call out who should be healing at any time, then the raid would become dependent on the leader. We need a plan simple enough that anyone can do it. For example, we could do away with the leader completely and have the groups switch whenever any healer is about to run out of mana -- they could just call out on TS or in chat that the other group should take over.

Having someone yelling every 2 minutes to switch would be an amusing cadence for our raids. A bit like the "Change Places!" call in the tea party scene from Alice in Wonderland or "Spaaawwn..."

Often times healers will be disabled in a fight, and in my experience a complex rotation never recovers from this. Someone is always left wondering if they should be healing or not. Redundancy is important, so that the healing rotation itself doesn't become a problem when healers die.

--Lefou

[Amahli]

(although Amahli did starfire me while I was MC'ed dah meanie! )

*shifty eyes* I have no clue what you're talking about.. *dashes off*

Other than that, I totally recommend coming out and having a ball with us in practice.

[Chocoa]

Ahh the end of the overhealing message.

You have healed X for 327 (1200)!

However, while in a purely economical view this is very efficient and will make the raid that much more effective, there is a social cost. Namely, stress. The pressure most healers are under on a 40-man raid is immense, even when they know there 8-9 other healers who can pick up the slack if they miss a beat. With a healing rotation theres less margin of error, which introduces a higher degree of stress on the healers.

I agree with Lefou on the "situational" aspect. If you want to introduce it slowly and on a limited amount of circumstances, awesome. But, if its being implemented to finished MC in record time, in my opinion, you are gonna be getting a bunch of frazzled healers which will burn out a lot faster. Just playing devil's advocate here, I am still a firm believer in the healing efficiency healing rotation can produce.

My work will be leveling off in a few weeks so I'll be back in the core soon. Ill bring the healing goodness along too.

- Cho/Evangelina

[Waldonnis]

Actually, if we were staying in MC and never planning to move on to other places, then I wouldn't care at all about doing this. Time savings is only one of the end benefits and isn't necessarily why we need to do this. Simply put, there are fights that we *will* face where our current "system"...to be honest...will absolutely never work. As a raid leader, it's my responsibility to ensure that we improve as a whole, or at least introduce some other methods of doing things that may work better than what we're doing now.

Bluntly, we lose tanks every week in MC...often repeatedly...while I get healed for up to 8000 all at once by four different people (and only have 2900 health). If that isn't a big, glaring sign that our "healing system" has problems and needs some/more organisation, I don't know what else to call it. Note that this isn't a personal attack or accusation against the healers at all...just an observation that what we're doing could be improved and that raid leaders (myself included) need to provide the framework by which to accomplish that. In exchange, I ask for cooperation and to at least give it a fair shot...or figure out something better on your own collectively because what we have is NOT working well. Most of this is our (raid leaders) fault for not instituting stuff like this before. I can only speak for myself here, but I do accept that blame for the past, but I need the healers to work with me and together on this or it's all for naught.

As for the sacrifice of the social element, I do monitor the healer channel and, from what I can tell, there's more chatter on the hunter channel comparatively (and we only really use the channel for assignments)....so, what social sacrifice? I've had a few people tell me that priests really don't talk much at all with each other, so unless my information and observations are totally off-base, I'm really not seeing much impact there. Also, calling out when to rotate or making assignments periodically is hardly a sacrifice of time or communications...actually quite the opposite since more cooperation and communication will need to happen.

What I expect: Nobody's expecting a big-bang here, as implementing a rotation takes practice and instruction for those who are totally unfamiliar (and very helpful even to those who've done it before with others). The goal isn't to finish in record time...the goal is to stop the anarchy of healing that we have going on currently and should end up reducing healer stress rather than increasing it (since you won't always have to look at 40 sets of bars and will end up with clear assignments). Of course *how* rotations are set up is situational, but I don't feel that rotations themselves are, especially in instances above MC. Barring a single-healer scenario, I can't think of a single instance that couldn't be better-handled if some semblance of a rotation was set up. It needs to be tried and practiced, and I don't see any disagreement from anyone, so I'm going to post some "practice time" signups for the coming weeks and will expect every healer to attend at least one. Practice time is not optional in my eyes from a BWL perspective, so plan on attending one if you raid BWL (instances are not exactly great times to start learning stuff like this). If there are scheduling conflicts, please let me know so we can work something out.

Heh, and if you think healing in a 40-man raid is stressful, try leading it...

Oh, and for those uninformed, I did play a holy paladin (or as I liked to put it "I can't kill anything, but hardly anything can kill me"), so this isn't some non-healer telling you how to play. Just trying to improve what appears to be a lack of organisation so we can all relax a bit more and have more predictable and reliable runs. I'm sure everyone is tired of hearing "healing was a little off" or "not enough healing tonight"...let's fix that so it never gets said again

[Maube]

Heh, and if you think healing in a 40-man raid is stressful, try leading it...

Why do you think I dont bring Tazzak =p I cant do both without losing my mind

[Baracko]

ahhh... so thats the defining factor...

no wonder I felt all whoozy last night...

*Baracko's brain falls out on the table and walks out of the room in disgust*

[Chocoa]

what i meant by social element was just the fact that MC can be stressful on the healers. i happen to chat a great deal in MC, while spam healing the emergency bar (god i hope they implement a new one soon).

[lefou]

We lost smedders a lot when he was maintanking last time.. most often I think because healers weren't ready for him. That could be solved by telling the healers when a pull is about to happen, which wasn't there in some cases he died -- using XRaidStatus and not allowing a pull before healers are at some percent of mana would be a good rule, so long as the healers know they're about to be needed. It could also be solved with a healing rotation, because then there are always healers ready, ideally.

Yeah I agree with a previous poster that we need better organization for the healing. One of the dangers of the rotation is thinking everything can be solved by one. (Once you find a hammer, everything looks like a nail.) I think just doing any sort of healing assignments on the molten giants would be an improvement. Someone could say.. "Toramall on Smedlock, Vendes on Relikk" before the pull, by picking the healers with the most mana. This way the rest of the raid can float but early heals are guaranteed.

[Baracko]

Ill be honest. Most of our problems Wednesday night were my fault. The healers did a great job, especially when we were trying to implement a new healing scheme, and Smeddy had the unfortunate task of being the MT with a rookie 40 man raid leader. V and Scryll did their best to catch things I was missing.

Backstory: Originally, I was going to lead the raid this coming week, and use this week's run to get a better idea for the little things Maube does to help the raid along (ex: Knowing what needs targetted in a lava pack). Computer issues prevented that from happening, and we had to deal with it.

I have a newfound respect for what Maube and Verissi do on a regular basis, now. Leading ZG is cake compated to this. You want to talk about information overload? MC has got you covered. You have 4-5 people whispering to you at any given time. You have targets to set and classes to evaluate for the best scenario. You have to monitor whats going on with the current fight while looking ahead to see what the next pull is and to make sure that you arent anywhere close to pulling something else during the fight (which I failed at). Couple that with being the master looter, being short on priests/mages/druids, and doing dkp manually. That plus trying to heal left me a little frazzled.

Although Ive been in this raid almost since inception, leading and just going are two different things. I am not going to apologize for anything that happened Wednesday. Frankly, with all things considered, we did pretty damn good. We werent that far off the pace considering the wipe and near misses we had, and the vast majority of the loot went to someone instead of being DE'd, which is a major goal these days. We killed everything but the last boss on an off day with uneven numbers, which is no small feat. I learned a ton this week, and will not make the same mistakes twice.

Moral of the story: Do not take your raid leaders for granted, especially the 40 man ones.

I WILL do a better job of watching the raid as a whole next week, especially mana. WE WILL defeat Ragnaros next week, patch gods and CTraid gods willing.

Sign up, and be prepared to keep the pace, or I will rip your skull off, drink the blood from your skull-cavity, digest it, and deposit whats left of the fluid in the PeeTub for Vrugz usage at the next Council of Honor.

[Amahli]

Someone could say.. "Toramall on Smedlock, Vendes on Relikk" before the pull, by picking the healers with the most mana. This way the rest of the raid can float but early heals are guaranteed.

Why would you pick the healers with the most mana? I mean, I've a little over 6500 raid buffed , but I know that Vendes has more +healing gear than I do (and more mana regen, huh? )

One of the dangers of the rotation is thinking everything can be solved by one.

I don't think that anyone thinks that everything can be solved by one. And from what I understood, we were only going to implement it in MC during boss fights, to practice for the bigger fights in situations like further on in BWL and Naxx.

[revile]

Have a couple of shamans heal, we gonna have some nice buffs from the 41 point talent resto tree.

[lefou]

Why would you pick the healers with the most mana? I mean, I've a little over 6500 raid buffed , but I know that Vendes has more +healing gear than I do (and more mana regen, huh? )

I mean percentage-wise.. If Vendes is at 50% and Amahli is at 90%, pick Amahli for early heals.

I don't think that anyone thinks that everything can be solved by one. And from what I understood, we were only going to implement it in MC during boss fights, to practice for the bigger fights in situations like further on in BWL and Naxx.

The point being that rotations are just one tool in the toolbox. We also have healing assignments such as the one above.

[Amahli]

I mean percentage-wise.. If Vendes is at 50% and Amahli is at 90%, pick Amahli for early heals.

Thankee for clarifying, I did get the wrong message there

The point being that rotations are just one tool in the toolbox. We also have healing assignments such as the one above.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't saying that there aren't more tools. But from what I hear there are some fights where rotations are the best tool to use. And for other fights, I'm sure other methods work better.

Have a couple of shamans heal, we gonna have some nice buffs from the 41 point talent resto tree.

Hehe, someone showed me those talents the other day. Must admit I'm gettin some healer's envy