Thursday (4 Feb) - Garbage In Garbage Out

Thursday (4 Feb) - Garbage In Garbage Out

Wild's guild isn't exactly overwhelmed with healers. While we have many who "could" heal, I count about 14 who I see actually healing in the 25 man raids. Of that number, only about 7 can be counted somewhat as regulars. The mandatory healer meeting hasn't been set up, yet, and so far only three of us have acknowledged the post on the guild website. About par for the course, unfortunately.

Still, Wild made an effort to research strats in preparation for the meeting.

Healing strategies are the worst documented strats in the game. I am convinced of that. For tanks and DPS raiders there is detailed information on positioning, spells and tactics, broken down in infinite detail. Healing? The best line I saw (and this was from one of the premier strategy sites, Elitistjerks) for the Deathbringer Saurfang fight - "there's really not a lot of damage to worry about here." That's a healing strat? On a fight with three different health draining abilities, including one that hits multiple players and does tank level damage to squishies, and mobs of adds? Oh, well, I guess we don't need much healing for that! The problem as I see it is that most strats come from hardcore raiders with super high level gear. For them, Saurfang might well be an easy fight with not much to worry about. On some of the ICC fights the strats strongly recommend that the number of healers be reduced to as low as 4, so that that they can have more DPSers and finish the fight sooner. That's a recipe for a boss that is on farm. But that doesn't help the rest of us.

Anyway, grumbling aside, I compiled what I could find, and for most of the ICC encounters it looked like we were doing pretty much what we were supposed to be doing. I have a few suggestions, but the first thing we should get an answer to is what is the problem? When healers get called out it's almost always because raiders are dying. So, who is dying first? And what is happening to them (besides not getting enough healing, obviously) that is getting them killed?

Part of our problem is that we haven't had a real healing leader in a long time. No one in our current crop of healers wants that responsibility, including Wild (I'd be bad at it and unsuited for it for a number of reasons anyway), so I'm hopeful that one of the new guildies might take up that mantle. I suspect that getting someone to step forward into that role will be a key part of the discussion. For my part I'm more than happy to help research and document healing strats, do post-ops on raid healing, etc, and even make healing assignments for raids when a strat has been decided on. It's coming up with those strats, having to adjust on the fly when things don't work, and manhandling us very independant souls into lockstep that I have no wish to volunteer for.

A case in point was the ICC10 run on Thursday night with the MM group. We had another terrible night of login problems and did not get started until nearly 7pm, and even then we had to bring two strangers off of the looking for group list. We had two of our regular healers: Wild and Sh, the shaman. A second shaman from MM also joined us to make up the third healer.

From a progression perspective there isn't much to tell. We wiped five times on the first boss, Marrowgar, and never really came close to killing him. There were a few non-healer problems, of course, but part of a healers function is to figure out how to heal through the mistakes of others (and our own mistakes, too). Wild was the raid healer, and the two shaman were both competent tank healers, yet our tanks kept dying. Even though Wild was raid healing, I spent probably 70% of my heals on the tanks, which I shouldn't have needed to do and put the raid more at risk as Wild could not pre-heal the raid as often with HoTs as I would have liked to. There may be better ways to heal the fight than the way we were doing it, but I didn't find any strats that differed much from what we were doing. Chalk it up to the two PUGs if we want, although they did a pretty decent job, or just a bad night, but if someone out there has figured out how to best heal the fight for all of us non-hardcore types, I haven't found it.

On a completely irrelevant sidebar, I also learned a new word from our mage, who self describes herself as the raid's resident "hoe." Given five straight wipes on a boss we have killed before, our raid leader could be excused for a few F bombs, not aimed at anyone in particular, but just expressing for us all our general level of frustration. The mage sweetly asked the raid leader not to use the word, as she was "droughting" and didn't want to be reminded of it. I had no idea what that meant, or even if it was a real word. I later looked it up, and found two definitions out of the Urban dictionary. The first definition is a method of sopping up the water from a bong so that you can use the particles that are left. That didn't connect with the use of the F bomb, so I turned to the second definition. "Droughting" also means "to go a long period of time without sex."

I may not know much about finding healing strategies, but when it comes to sexual references I'm all over it.