As an anecdote, last night we did Gurtogg Bloodboil, Reliquary of Souls and Mother Sharaz and it ran the whole gambit…

Gurtogg: healing, coordination
Reliquary: coordination, DPS
Sharaz: gear check, personal responsibility

I love Gurtogg because it is a healing check that has you casting virtually nonstop from start to finish. The over to Reliquary where you get to watch the DPS (especially the melee interrupters in phase two) go under the microscope. I think you have to give props to Blizzard in TBC for providing fights that emphasize different roles and generally increasing the overall level of personal responsibility.

I still like the healing checks though

Well, I’m definitely against DPS becoming more important than healing. I don’t mind them being more important than they are, but my experience with various games has remained the same – there is less stress involved playing DPS than there is with tanking and healing. Far less. In many games, not only is there less stress, but it’s less work overall and is genuinely easier. By that, I don’t think they should be as important as tanks or healers.

I think if the mechanic checks are passed, DPS shouldn’t be a huge issue. I don’t mind it being a factor, but I hate races. I think I’m just really against the notion of a “You lose” time limit. Just as above, I kinda like Gruul in the sense where DPS definitely helps, but you can technically keep going for a good bit longer than an enrage timer gives you.

Oh, and if the DPS do slack and it’s ultimately a lack of healing that kills the raid, I wouldn’t be so sure if I would call it that. After all, we can only heal up to max HP, and if you get hit for more than that…nothing we coulda done :p No purple club in WoW.

@Zackoria: I think I may have reached the point where I don’t need more regen. I’ve actually been able to hand out my Innervate lately and my mana potion consumption has drastically reduced. I think I may be regemming come Patch 2.4 to take advantage of some of those +Healing gems I’ve been hearing about. With the change to Intellect affecting Spirit regeneration, I’m sure to be over the top in terms of mana regen. On the other hand, I’m still sittin’ not exactly pretty at 1661 +Healing. Nice number, though.

@Ammeli: My favorite person to give an Innervate to is the Shadow Priest. Then it’s like giving fuel to everyone!

@Ermengol: That’s pretty amazing that you managed to 3-man Vazruden on Heroic. And here I was proud of 5-manning Heroic Black Morass a couple of nights ago!

@Kuhbi: Here, here. ZA has really made me recognize that I need better +Healing. Some of those bosses hit ridiculously hard, and I could stand to provide a bit more padding against the harder spikes. It sounds like your guild has the opposite problem than ours does. Our DPS seems to handle movement and special instructions pretty well, but when it comes time for the healers to do something other than stand there and heal, we’re kind of borked. ^_^

@Hikilune: You’re the first people I’ve heard of to try to use a CH-rotation-like strategy! I’m so glad that isn’t the standard practice in WoW.

@Doug: Seems like Resto Druids are in short supply these days. Most guilds only have one. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like they are particularly interested in picking up any more. T_T

@Nilianil: That was a pretty loose time constraint! Thank you for the summation of healing tactics from EverQuest. Admittedly, I stopped playing right after the release of the expansion that came after … the one with Tipt and Vex’d. Gates of Discord? I do remember the nerf to Complete Heal which really infuriated a lot of people. And I’d forgotten that you could actually rez party members during combat in EQ.

Are you against DPS becoming more important than healing or just more important than it once was? I’m personally happy that the responsibility isn’t only on my shoulders for our success. Of course, if DPS is slacking off, it’s still a lack of healing that will have ultimately been responsibile for the raid’s demise…

I do remember the Complete Heal chains.

/gu “Complete Heal on <<>>”
/wait 30
/gu “OtherCleric go now!”

As much as we used CH chains through Velious and Luclin, CH chains started dying out eventually – when they nerfed CH to make it 7500 instead of 10000 it didn’t help the chain, especially considering new expansions were coming out, new heals were coming out, and although the efficiency of CH couldn’t really be beat, mana pools and mana regen kept increasing, so why keep using that 10 second heal when people can spam the 3 second one for not quite as much and still be fine?

I don’t exactly remember, but I don’t think I saw many CH chains in Anguish. It may have just been because they were in a healer channel then, but I don’t remember them as being nearly as potent and required as they used to be. Other healers started doing more, namely druids and shamans. Even Paladins would throw their HoTs when possible – every bit helps, except for that accursed buff limit you ran into.

Healing in EQ was different. Aside from tank assignments, there were no default raid window UIs, so healers were pretty much responsible for their group. Get a healer in each group – and of course, we’re talking groups of 40-70 people. Because of the raid window, WoW healing is indeed different, and I find it more enjoyable overall.

Rezzing people mid combat was also important as well – EQ fights were big on healing, but dying didn’t mean you lose that person for the fight. It means you lose them for about a minute while they painstakingly load into PoK and a free cleric click-sticks em.

Although a limiting factor was heals and healers mana, this was by no means the only one. Admitidly, the DPS didn’t often have much to do, but your enchanters, bards, offtanks and tanks were pretty busy. It was the same thing the whole fight sometimes (Emperor SSRA), but you didn’t want to lose one of the mezzed adds. Didn’t want the Paladin to lose aggro on one of the 3 mobs he was tanking. There were definite mechanic checks, although I’d wager there are more in WoW from my experience. Less straight up tank fights with a few variations – there’s some interesting stuff going on, which I like.

Perhaps this is an influence from other RPGs I’ve played, specifically those of the Tales and Star Ocean series, but I like the idea of, “Do everything right and you’ll eventually win.” I don’t care for enrage timers, at least not the scale they’re at when people are downing new bosses into the enrage timer. I like the mechanics of fights, but I hate being constrained by time and losing because someone whose sole purpose is to do damage (not being concerned with any real mechanics aside from aggro) dies. I don’t mind gear checks at all – I usually prefer them in terms of damage taken by raiders, but I just don’t like it to the extent it currently is.

A problem is that it doesn’t stop people from taking 10 tanks and 15 healers, slowly killing stuff. I like the rampup system of Gruul, for instance, which eventually will kill you, but it isn’t so clear cut as a single enrage timer. I like bosses that get harder but not impossible.

As it is (and with the Int-Spirit regen change) I see healers being less and less of an issue. They’re throwing regen at us, at least. I cast Regrowth liberally by many druids’ standards, and I rarely have any mana issues. Some priests I know are complaining because they have to flash heal all the time to stay competitive – more regen encourages that. It’s going to turn to a game of how much +healing you have over anything else, because casting sure isn’t going to be an issue for any of us.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, and it may sound like I’m saying DPS should be worthless, but that’s not quite what I mean. Death is bigger in WoW due to ressurection restraints in terms of a kill. You take 8 healers, one dies, no big deal. Two die, still possible. Until you’ve killed a guy, if one DPS dies, that could very well be it depending on your guild’s makeup. I almost feel DPS is becoming more important, and that’s something I’m against.

Unfortunately, WoW is different in terms of respeccing compared to other games, but in general I do feel like the tanks and healers should have an overall more desired place in any party or raid makeup. And in general, they do. You’re giving up the damage, and often the soloing capabilities in other games, of other classes and/or jobs. Your compensation should be desirability.

Okay, I don’t really know what I just said … but I like mechanic checks. I don’t like the mechanics to be a simple enrage timer :p

My guild is currently going through a period of healer inadequacy (most likely laziness, inattention to detail, and failure to precast), which is magnified by the lack of a quality resto druid. The guild leader is the tank, negitive reinforcement is in full swing. Fun stuff.

Actually, the current problem is not the stuff (we can see for exemple that a chinese guild killed Illidan only 3 weeks after the release of Black temple, with T3 stuff and some TBC blues) it’s just a matter of getting the technique and not having a 7k hp tank

And yeah dps is much more important than it was, but on some fights like reliquary of souls (is this the correct english name? :p) DPS HAVE TO BE LEGEND -wait for it- DARY…

My guild is in SSC & TK. We are working on the final boss now. The mana is never really an issue especially when we have spriest and resto shamans. I think this is partially attributed to the fact that healers are down ranking some spells. Not really druids, but the other classes are certainly doing this, plus each healing class plays a key role in the raid. Shamans for Raid Healing (Love that golden beam), Paladins for Tank Healing (Can u say 8k heals?), Priest for Frisbees and Tank Healing, and Druids to smooth out spike damage with HoTs and instant heals. Another thing to consider, is that if your guild has the DPS then the healers are less likely to go oom. I’ve noticed this in our guild when we are beating Boss enrage timers by matters of minutes versus seconds.

Either way, this change is great for healers all around. All Boss fights do not solely depend upon the lasting power of healers and tanks ability to survive but on all aspects of the raid even more so for DPS now.
Brunnor Gorgonnash Horde

In my experience so far (Kara, ZA, SSC 6/6, TK 3/4 and working on Kael) healer Mana is rarely an issue as long as they get a SPriest (I don’t, hello MT Group!), but HPS is. Especially when starting out in Zul’Aman I noticed the strain on healers because many mobs hit so damn hard unless you’re pretty overgeared for the place. Many times it is just an issue of healing fast enough (e.g. whenever a warlock has to tank anything like Leotheras oder Caperniwhatever in the Kael’Thas fight). So the increased mana regeneration is helpful in one way: we can concentrate on other stats than manareg. The reduction of the global cooldown via spell haste is one and the other is +heal. The latter is my current objective and I’m spending way too much gold on +18heal gems.

What I have noticed is that our healers are coping with the pressure put on them much better than DPS is. Fights have started to become more complex starting in late Karazhan and there are fewer tank and spank fights. Fights when the DPS actually has to do something other than “stand there and dps without getting aggro” are the most difficult ones for us. The responsebility shifts from laying solely on the tank’s and healer’s shoulders to the DPS’, too. Many of them are not used to that and it’s a pretty slow learning process. Many wipes can be attributed to that

I tend to focus on spirit and healing bonus these days, given how MP5 seems to suffice: emergencies require bigger innervates, and once you can hold your spell rotations for long enough, you just want to increase your HPS. Too bad I won’t be able to get rid of my PvP pieces soon, given how little I can raid lately.

Last time I needed way more than a drink, however, was pretty recent.

The other day I was doing Ramparts with two hunters, a rogue and a protection paladin, all of them skilled and well-geared, but specially the paladin (the only non-guildy, but 25-man-MT-kind of “well geared”). We had just started the Vazruden/Nazan event when both hunters got disconnected at the same time (they had to be hunters). For those who have never tried to 3-man heroics I’ll tell you, fight was so ridiculously long I had to blow everything, potion, drums, innervate.. Totally out of mana. There was a point (I don’t remember exactly, the dragon probably somewhere under 20%) when I had to wait for mana to cast the next lifebloom, and it was then when I thought: crap, I wish I had more MP5.

That day I confirmed two things I’ve always believed: 1) a great tank can often make up for poor DPS and 2) even healers must carry bandages.

Anyway, I still think MP5 is not a priority.

So yes, go for +heal, and let the feral druids handling the innervates to priests