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Added Responsibility, Guild Strength, and New Earrings!
Published on April 21, 2008 by Phaelia 
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Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been sort of quiet the past couple of weeks. While I’ve worked hard to keep up with comments and e-mails, between projects at work and a three-day vacation in Las Vegas where I forgot to bring blogging materials, I haven’t had much time to devote to the blog. I’m hoping things will settle down soon, though, as I have a lot of things I am looking forward to sharing with you, including some great community-based submissions, mailbag responses, and — of course — some math and analysis. But first, I’d like to update you all on some exciting news (both for me and my guild)!
Recently, I was offered the newly-created position of Healer officer for my guild, Aegis Hestia. Rather than class officers (which have always seemed too cumbersome and inefficient for those classes with diverse specs), our guild has added role officers for Healing, Ranged DPS, Melee DPS, and Tanking. I had previously been convinced that I wouldn’t like to be an officer because I feel that officers should be able to lead raids. However, this role-specific position is one that I feel well-suited to handle, so I decided to accept. Although it was only officially announced tonight, I’ve been serving in this capacity for the past week, sort of getting my feet wet and making sure it’s something I enjoy. It’s been a challenge, particularly setting up healing assignments for encounters new to our guild. (The addon HealOrganizer has been indispensable in this regard.) And while learning about all these new fights for the purposes of setting up healing assignments is providing me invaluable post-fodder, it’s also caused my healing output during trash to suffer. Then again, trash is really just Chain Heal fodder, right? 
Aegis Hestia also just welcomed a group of well-equipped, experienced level 70s from another guild who recently folded up shop. They’re great people, including a really nice Resto Druid (/wave Hadon), and we’re very fortunate to have picked them up. Their guild was at around the same place progression-wise as Aegis but a little further. Since adding them, we’ve killed Fathom-Lord Karathress and High Astromancer Solarian for the first time. I know, I know. We’d be uber … if this were last year. 
All this new-found raiding success has brought with it the spoils of war, and I’ve been the lucky recipient of several amazing new upgrades which I won’t list here, mostly because I know I skip those sorts of posts. I was particularly excited about one particular item, though. I finally picked up a [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon] earlier this month and, from my work with the Mana Regeneration Calculator, swapped it in to replace my well-used [Bangle of Endless Blessings]. NOM NOM NOM MANA NOM NOM. (“NOM” is ostensibly the sound an animal — generally one considered to be cute or even cutely ferocious — makes when it’s eating something with great vigor.)
On a real life but still Druid-related note, I found a pair of kickass gold leaf earrings at the mall this weekend. And by “gold leaf” I mean “leaves of metal that is gold in color but not molecular substance which I cannot afford” not “covered in a fine foil of gold.” I think they’re +12 Spirit or something. Some Priest next to me made to nab them before I could, but I pointed out that they were clearly class-specific. Then I cast Moonfire on her. =)
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Hadon’s going to be pissed that you spelled his name wrong.
Congrats on the promotion!
I’ve been serving as a healing officer from Karazhan up to Black Temple and did a decent job at it (or so I’ve been told
). Be prepared for some tough discussions 
Phae, congrats on the healing officer promotion. I was pretty scared about being put in the same role for my guild. When a bunch of friends and I transferred to Alleria and set up shop with our own new guild, there were only two healers : Myself and a priest (bless her because she has a 70 resto druid too =) ). Now that we’re in 25 mans I was kind of defaulted the job of doing healing assignments and looking after the other healers. It can be quite a task but if you ever need any help I can always offer some overall general advice that tends to make things easier =). Go you!
Congrats on the promotion Phae! And its great to see a few new posts up here. I was starting to have Resto Withdrawal! GL with your raiding!
Fikkle
Phae! It’s about time I left a comment on here after months of reading. Grats on the promotion. I’m sure you’ll do great. Grats on the Kills, too. My guild now has all SSC and TK down except Vashj and Kael, although we’ve only killed Al’ar and Solarian once so far. Karathress is one of my favorite fights now that we are so coordinated. Last week we got him down in less than 6 minutes! We even got to go into Black Temple and took some shots at Naj’entus. Now thats a fun fight. Lots of raid damage there so a shaman actually did more healing than me! About those earrings… They are just perfect for you!!! Very Tree of Life-like. Good luck with your raids and I hope you continue to knock the big bad guys out.
I’m looking forward to reading about your experiences as a healing lead. In particular, what to do when it isn’t working. I am hoping that you have some insight into figuring out the source of problems when the healing isn’t working.
Congrats on the promotion!
First of all (while I may have said this already), congratulations on your promotion. I think, ultimately, it’ll lead to less frustration on your part despite the coordination headaches. At least if you’re calling the shots on assignments, you’ll be more able to accurately assess where holes in strategy and ability lie. I am assuming, however, that you won’t have to be setting buffs with PallyPower, but you might want to make sure someone has that covered.
Anyhoo, the issue of how to appropriately chant or gem weapons has been something that’s recently come up in Singularity as well. Initially, most folks just auto-opted for the +81 healing and went their merry ways; now, +81 heal is a veritable drop in the bucket when folks are pushing the 2k +heal boundary. In terms of overall raid efficiency, it has actually been beneficial for all our healers having two or more weapons: one with +81 healing, one with Spellsurge, and one with Major Spirit (and SPI gems). Many of the healers have thus been utilizing a weapon swap mod (whose name I’ll have to get back to you on) that literally switches all three weapons in and out when appropriate (Spellsurge proc, Innervate active, Regen necessary) and avoids the GCD so you’re not boned on a big heal. It’s a little unwieldy, but you’re absolutely maximizing the manner in which you serve your raid. No one is currently using the +30 INT to weapon, so I’m not sure how that’d factor in (unless you want to use that to start an encounter rather than the +81 heal).
CasterWeaponSwapper, I believe. If I was still healing, there’d be no way I wouldn’t utilize this. You’ve probably already heard about it, but I’d strongly recommend whipping out an old weapon so that you can rock out with all three cooldowns. I honestly don’t know why our healer core wasn’t doing this in the first place.
@Everyone: Thanks for the well wishes. So far, so good, though I had a little difficulty remembering we had to kill Morogrim before we killed Karathress last night. THAT lead to some confusion on healing assignments. Luckily, I noticed before we engaged. =D
@Kuhbi: When you say “discussions” do you mean decisions about who to sit and who to bring? Or discussions of healing strategy? I’m lucky in that the guild’s assistant GM is also an experienced healer and doesn’t hesitate to talk things over with me.
@Andurial: I’m glad to hear that you too were unsure of taking over a similar role and that things sound like they worked out for the best. I definitely wouldn’t mind having someone to ask for advice. But you didn’t include an e-mail address! ^_^
@Fikkle: Awww, you and me both! Busy, busy!
@Primevalus: Wow, I look forward to having Karathress on farm. Right now we’re still in the “We killed him once; was it a fluke?” phase. LOL. Good luck to you, as well, and thanks for commenting!
@Zute: Learning more about these fights so I’d be a better informed blog writer was one reason I decided to accept the position. I hope I can provide some insight into determining what’s wrong (beyond the 6th shot of vodka being downed by the Priest, of course
).
@Runycat: Thankfully, no, I’m not having to coordinate Paladin or Priest buffs. That would be just too much for one person to handle, I think, and could well make their players feel like their toes (plated and wrapped) were being stepped on. I’ve heard of CasterWeaponSwapper from another reader. It’s something I meant to look into when I finally replaced my Shard of the Virtuous (ew), but I guess it slipped my mind. I’ll have to check it out again. Thanks!!
@Phae
Apparently I fail. Lol. You can send me an email at my school email which is rceids01@louisville.edu or you can look me up on Alleria server or both. Feel free any time =). By the way, I’ve been reading your blog for quite a while and absolutely love it. I just finally decided to post a comment =) woot!
On “discussions”:
I can only speak for what I’ve experienced in my guild so it doesn’t necessarily have to be the same in yours.
As a healing officers I had to choose which healers to take which sparked endless discussions of “oh but I wanted this item”, “why didn’t you chose me”, “i want to the in the shadow priest’s group!” (everyone _needs_ their personal shadow priest or they will be unable to raid at all, even rogues
) and on and on and on. This was not limited to the healers, but as a healing officer I had to take both their bitching and that of the rest of the guild.
In Black Temple the discussion on how many healers we should bring to a specific fight started as you really really want 9 healers in some fights (Bloodboil) and really really don’t want more than 7 in others (ROS). Of course the fights are doable with any number in between these, but it makes the fight siginificantly harder.
It honestly wasn’t that bad as it may sound, but the discussions just wouldn’t end.
Another thing is that you will be the one that the other officers look at when the Kodo droppings hit the fan. A good expample was one of our Teron Gorefiend tries:
Everyone has to run aprox. 60m until they are in position, the tank has to run 40m only, so he will be hit by Teron for a second before the healers are in position. Now in one try the tank went up to the boss, everyone was running and he took a series of hits in two to three seconds time that reduced his HP from 20.000 to zero without any heal. Last time that happened was on our second Lurker Try ages ago
Now I had to explain to the other officers why the tank wasn’t receiving any heals. Countering such massive damage right at the start of the fights screams “healing aggro” in my ear and I’ve had several raid bosses hit me once because of HoTs I put on the tank before the pull. They wouldn’t understand that if we had put HoTs or direct heals on him (while running!) we would surely have pulled aggro resulting in at least one dead healer and possibly a raid wipe. Next try we put two tripple lifeblooms, 2 rejuv, 2 regrowth, PoM, 3x Renew on the tank and he survived until we were in place. “See, you can heal him and not pull aggro!” Thing is, he dodged most of the incoming attacks this time and took maye 2000dmg -.-’
We were arguing about this in the officer’s channel for over an hour after the event >.>
Thanks to the good atmosphere in our healer’s channel (if you don’t have one yet, make one!) we all got along quite well anyways. I tried to give both directions to them, as well as encouraging them to be open about any critique that would help us as a healing-team(!) do better. That worked very well for us
Hey
I was wondering if an updated spreadsheet had been posted post 2.4
I still use the Resto_Druid_Calc 2.3 spreadsheet but its currently a bit inaccurate and just curious if I missed an updated version.
Thanks
~Gala
Ante Meridiem, Stormrage
@Andurial: Thank you, sir! I appreciate it! =)
@Kuhbi: I can’t imagine having to scale back and increase the number of healers needed for individual fights throughout the night. That must be really annoying. My guild is through most of SSC (I doubt we’ll be making any serious attempts at Vashj for some time), and, while I know that sometimes it would be nice to swap in more healing, we’re lucky enough to have a number of hybrids willing to switch roles if neeeded (and at this level of play, their off spec role is generally sufficient). It must be really difficult to balance who gets to come for what drops. Do you typically base some of that decision-making on DKP levels? Like if two people are interested in something but you can only take one, would you generally take the person who has the higher DKP total?
And yeah … I’m concerned that, as much responsibility as an individual healer feels for the success or failure of a given attempt, it’s only going to be moreso when I’m organizing healing assignments. It’s been really good for me to learn more about the fights we do, though. Half this stuff I would have just blown off before and just healed rather than understanding what was going on. Seriously, I have realized how *oblivious* I’ve been on some encounters (and our guild always struggles with fights where healers have to actually MOVE or something silly like that – it takes a while to master that muscle memory and still keep people alive).
We do have a healer channel, but unfortunately it’s really quiet most of the time (which worries me – I hate to think people might be brooding over their healing targets). Maybe I should start posting haikus or something. ^_^ I’ll try taking your advice about making it obvious I’m open to critique and suggestion.
@Galarathor: The author of Healer LFG has updated the spreadsheet for 2.4. It’s available at her blog: http://www.healerlfg.com/index.php/restocalc/
When we were learning new fights I would usually write the healing assignemnts out in the healer’s channel (VERY important, that way no one can say “But I didn’t hear that!” or “I though you wanted me to stand there and pick my nose!”, just scroll up and there it is
) and after doing so I’d usually write “Keep your eyes open and if anything goes wrong, tell me about it after this try”. That worked pretty good and I’d usually be able to work out better strategies by listening to what my fellow healers have to say. This way you can also get a conversation going and make the channel more active.
I encourage you to know the details of the fight before you even get there, as it really helps. We had a guy in our raid that knew BT and MH from one of his other characters and could give very good advice (we owe him a lot, because of him we rushed through MH and BT like nothing
). Unfortunately this caused me to get lazy and not prepare much in terms of tactics. I’d usually divide the healers as usual and trust in their ability to see problems and react to them. And it worked very well, by the second try we usually would make slight adjustmends but that’s it. Encouraging them to think all through T5 really payed off. (although we do have some amazing healers in our team) I’ve also been trying to have other healers do the healing assignments now and then so that they get used to doing that. This helps keeping them on their toes and able to get the job done when you can’t make it to a raid.
We’ve found that throughout TK and SSC all you really need are 7 healers and you’ll be fine. But in Black Temple some fights seem insanely hard with just that, so for really intensive fights like Bloodboil we’d take 9.
We usually try to do fights that require a similar setup on the same raid-day so that we spare us the trouble of redoing the raid every second boss. Now I’ve been trying to choose my healers first by class needed (2 of every kind if at all possible) and then inside the class spots I’d go by the number they rolled in our DKP System. It seemed the most fair decision to me (and I wouldn’t have to explain to several people why it is “always them that have to sit out”. Using the dice method you’ll acchieve some balance over a long period of time without having to worry too much.
Now we would never, ever go by “DKP” or need on items when choosing a person for a raid. We did for a short time and people started asking to be subbed in for boss X so they could get item Y. That’s a huge was of time for everyone involved, so we’d just go by dice and class/role required. Whenever we’d have to sub in a healer or DPS for a fight we’d have 2 or 3 people on standby (playing an alt or something) that we’d invite into the raid. As for healers, it greatly depends on what we need. If, say, there’s a Paladin and a Priest online and we’re going to Bloodboil, then we’d usually take the Priest as he’d be able to help out with his group heals. Otherwise we’d take the paladin or whoever answered first.
I suppose this is only nessary at low gear levels and will not be needed once you’ve got the place on farm status.
Ahhh, healing officer. First grats on obtaining the Healing Lead position. My guild doesn’t have an official ‘healing officer’. Our one pally officer just grumbles in the healing channel and posts positions every 3 or 5 bosses and when he doesn’t feel like doing it I do. This depends of course on how much direction your healing group needs as a whole. Our healers usually don’t need to be told where to go except for those few couple of fights. When you raid with the same healers over and over you really get a feel for who goes where and what. Again this depends on how much you have to direct the other healers and how much you switch healers in for raids. From what I understand from Velenna’s blog you had a very liberal raid invite system until recently. Your unspoken synergy goes up quite a bit when you have the same healers for every raid.
On discussions, i will say as Kuhbi did that you must be prepared to make quick decisions that are beneficial for the raid as a whole. Being an official officer over anything in raid or guild is very stressful yet fulfilling when everything goes well. As a Heal Lead you of course need to know the fights well before you get there as Kuhbi said.
Also the first attempt on any boss it is good to keep an eye out raid healing wide and make an assessment after the attempt as the Lead. Of course that is just what we do. I’m a hands on-visual learner, and keeping in mind that each person learns differently helps. As you said, making sure that everyone knows that you are open to suggestions on any given fight is important. Healing is a team effort. Most of the times I feel like the healers are a team within a team. It’s very much like a council where the Lead is just a higher position among equals. (and as i type this, Connected by Hoobastank comes on from Media Player! 0.0) We healers are connected! We walk together forever down that road! ^_^
Keeping communication up is key, with your fellow healers and with the raid leader and other assistants/Leads in the raid (sounds like you guys are taking allot more shared approach to raid duties than we do). Sometimes healing channel will be quiet the whole night and sometimes the questions “So what’s the weather like?” and a pally will respond “It’s raining men!”. You never can quite tell. Other than knowing the other class’s heals well and there specialties in every given situation that is all I can think of at the moment.
@Kuhbi I don’t really know about pulling in 9 healers for a fight, though my guild just got Gorefiend down last week. I always found that swapping out people like that makes it that much more difficult to get those 25 people in synch with the fight and with the raid as a whole. We run with 7-8 healers depending on that one rogue healer that just can’t make it for a night.
I have actually found BT/HJ in some ways much easier than TK and SSC (BT trash is incredibly easy). I will have to wait to see Bloodboil himself before I fully decide on anything though since he is the first real technical fight in there. We could never field 9 healers though.
BTW those earrings are perfect for you! Silly priests are always getting in the way of the loots. Pushing the green tree down. Rise up!
Thanks!