(Related post: Max level does not mean Skilled.)

There’s a class of player who feels that their status in the raiding game means that they’re Right. They label other people noobs, and the silly thing is that people believe them. “I have this awesome item, you don’t, therefore I know what I’m talking about and you don’t.” This frustrates me a great deal.

My guild recently brought in a new recruit. Her main is a holy priest, just like me! I’ll call her Mary. She was very personable, online a lot. She had raided a lot in the original WoW, all the way through AQ40, which I’ve never seen. She had taken over a year off from the game, and in her return was looking for a more relaxed playtime requirement while still playing at a high level. A perfect fit!

One of our top dps’ers had levelled a priest to maximum level and was looking for a rundown of how to heal as a holy priest. (He wanted to be able to fill out a heroic instance or raid in the case that we were short healing) He posted in our guild forums, asking how to manage mana, which spells were good where, the differences between instancing and raiding, and so on. The other primary holy priest in the guild and I posted a decent overview of general strategy and how to use the various tools in the priest’s toolbox.

Mary, still in her first week, posted a lengthy and emotional rebuttal to what we wrote. Her entire priest healing strategy is: Flash Heal. As far as she’s concerned, it is the only spell anyone needs as a holy priest. Her defenses were long, full of passionate and anecdotal evidence, and even had bad math to back her up. (I love bad math of all kinds) She was fully entrenched, she downright took offense to the thought of using other spells, and basically framed her argument such that to disagree with her was to start a fight. (I’m not going to go into details about why she’s wrong, just take my word for it.)

Needless to say, she didn’t stay long.

We chuckled about it, but I didn’t understand how she was going to find what she wanted. How was she going to even pass the application to a mid-tier raiding guild?

The answer: Mary could succeed in raiding, because her other healers could heal around her. I remember this in painful detail from the 40-man days. But there’s no reason that it couldn’t continue in 25-man or even 10-man raids. So Mary moved right up to a SSC mid-tier guild, where she’s no doubt the 25th person in some raid. They’re probably progressing, too. She’ll get overgeared and then be back to her elite flash healing self, and looking down at everyone who isn’t geared like she is.

The funniest part of this is that Mary could only ever find success in large raids. Not smaller group play, not ever small raids. And yet, raiding is supposedly a prestige environment. Raiders are serious business. They’re seen as elite players. I mean, these people have zomgepics that are simply inaccessible to most. They have to know the game, right?

Ah well.

Now don’t get me wrong–there is a tier of players who by definition of where they are must know what they’re doing. They’re the ones pushing new content as it’s released, who write the wowwiki articles, and write and tune the spreadsheets. The rest of us are, for lack of a better term, scrubs who execute well-defined strategies. I’m not saying that raiders don’t know what they’re doing, I’m just saying that their position in raiding guilds doesn’t mean that they do. They’re hit and miss, like everyone else.

(The title of this article really should have been “Mid-tier raiding and below does not necessarily mean Skilled”, but it wasn’t catchy.)

(Related post: Take the Group Role)

The following statements are all true for raiding guilds:

• The health of a PvE guild is dictated by its ability to progress through the game’s content at the guild’s expected rate.
• Groups and raids live or die based on being able to assemble, launch, and progress. A successful raid has all three roles (tank, heal, damage) filled to sufficient levels.
• The ratio of tanks/healers/damage in a typical successful raid is something like 2/3/5.
• The ratio of tanks/healers/damage in total available, raid-ready players on my server (and I have no reason to think this is unique) is along the lines of 2/3/25. I just made these numbers up, but this is what I’ve seen. You can always, always find another damage-person to come along.
• Officers are invested in their guild’s continued existence and success.

The logical sum of these points is that officers of PvE raid guilds, even casual ones, should take up the roles that are most needed to keep their guild raiding, namely tanks and healers. Even if the character is not their main, they should have an alt ready to step into one of these needed roles should someone decide to retire from the game, lather up with crazy sauce, or just hit the next stop on the progression train.

Your ability to raid, your entire health as a guild, can be brought to a screeching halt if a couple key tank/healer roles leave the guild. I’ve seen this happen and have dealt with keeping the crippled guild afloat after that. It’s ugly, and amazing to see how quickly you can go from healthy and winning to despondent and bleeding members.

“We haven’t raided in forever (one week)!” “What about my zomgepics!” “I don’t wanna run the previous endgame just to gear the new tank up, I wanna raid just like we were again! AND I WANT IT NOW!” (It’s really funny to hear grownups speak in these tones. That’s the only upside to guild discomfort.)

Anyone can do damage. Extra tanks can do damage, extra healers can do damage. Maybe not progression-content-role damage, but enough to get the group through farm content. Conversely, extra damage dealers can only rarely heal, and nearly never tank… at least without a unwanted respec.

Officers: roll a healer or tank.

I’m a healer. I have other toons: a raid-ready tank that I love to play, a couple of decent dps toons. But in my heart, I love being a healer.

I’ve recently realized that people who are annoying tend to die more often in raids where I’m healing.

For example, my guild’s current offtank is as annoying as hell. He’s the living example of the Dunning-Kruger effect… I could go into great depth, and I very well might in a future piece, but suffice to say that there is often an undercurrent of private tells deriding him during every raid he participates in. However, our guild is like a family, and he’s the weird cousin who makes it to every cookout. His availability is decent, he’s not completely terrible at his class/role, and he tries to be friendly even if he lacks the social skills to pull it off. But there are all-too-frequent occasions where I wish I had a button I could push that gives him an anonymous electrical jolt in his real-life chair.

Actually, as it turns out, there’s a little button that I don’t push that does the same thing. It’s actually a series of buttons, each of them bound to healing spells. He dies more than average.

I only realized this pattern of behavior a couple of weeks ago when, over guild chat, this fellow was instructing new raiders to make sure they do their dailies every day in case of high repair bills, and also how elixirs are a waste of time–just get flasks, even for farm content. I was ready to type out a reply saying that we only die often enough to matter in progression runs, then thought… hmm. He does die pretty often, but the new raiders won’t. And I somehow know this ahead of time.

It’s funny how you can suddenly realize that your behavior is completely counter what you thought your goal was.

I don’t seek out the opportunity to let him die, and I don’t try to manufacture events where it will be possible. Because he’s an offtank, there are many events where we simply don’t need his offtanking. In the remaining events, you only need offtanks up to a certain point. Outside of that? Opportunities. And I occasionally partake.

It’s not just me. I mean, we often have two or three healers on our 10-man runs, so someone could bail him out. But it just doesn’t happen. Consistently.

This behavior isn’t limited to just this person, or just raids. In one of my early Magister’s Terrace runs, I ran with an annoying shadow priest who told us all how ineffective all healers are without a shadow priest in their group. He died a few additional times. Not a word was spoken. The other three members of the group knew exactly what was happening.

The same thing happens when a dps class pulls too much aggro or breaks crowd control too often. In the past, I’ve advocated letting those people die, because they’re hurting the group/raid from a tactical sense and need feedback. However, I guess that via my example I extend that behavior for other reasons too. I know that my healer friends all do the same thing, even though we rarely speak about it.

Is this counter to the group’s goal? Sadly, yes. We want smooth and speedy progress. Is this counter to my goal? No. My goal is to have fun. Is this part of why I love being a healer? I’d like to say “No!” but I strongly suspect that the answer is “Yes.”

I’m not proud, but I am smiling.

(Previous article)

While it’s a bad idea to link your damage meters over a common chat channel, it’s a very bad idea to link your damage report if you’re a damage dealer and you’re that one dps’er who consistently does less damage than the tank. What you’re trying to say is that you outperform the healer at doing damage, but what you’re really saying is:

“The healer’s good enough to keep everyone alive and also do 30% of the damage that I’m doing.”

The healer’s damage is basically like the rock bottom of damage performance in a raid. Healing does zero damage. You are also saying that you don’t understand groups enough to know what the different roles do, but you aren’t going to let that slow your spamming down. This is a chain of thought that will immediately lead others to group with you less, because veterans will sense that this is probably the tip of the iceberg:

• you roll for gear that doesn’t apply to you and then throw a fit when someone tries to tell you how your character works
• you don’t understand or don’t care about crowd control
• you cry and blame someone every time you die
• you go afk without warning
• you complain about repair costs
• you never have elixirs/poisons/food buffs
• you use curse words in a way that’s not interesting, relevant, or funny

Not everyone is all of these, but usually these character flaws don’t come in single servings. Most people went to the all you can eat Buffet of Broken.

And yes, this was all that a single damage meter post said. And incidentally, this person lived up to many of the above-listed predictions.

If you like to group in these big social MMORPG games, then choose the hard but essential role, whatever that role may be.

In World of Warcraft, my primary character is a healing priest. My close runner-up is a protection warrior. Say what you want about inability to solo, but every single time I log on, I’m asked to group. Every single time.

My dps friends tell me how hard it is to get a group, or how many groups get four players but never get that last person because they need either a tank or a healer and never end up finding one. I can imagine how they feel, but I do not understand these people. Once you have seen that groups always stall on tanks and healers, then why not just solve the problem? That’s how I started tanking, and I grew to enjoy it nearly as much as healing, and certainly more than dps’ing. Instancing is one of the most fun parts of the game, and when you’re a needed role, you have the ability to write your own ticket for grouping and raiding forevermore. But more than that, I enjoy the fact that I make groups any time I want.

Let me try an analogy. If you’re of legal age of consent and enjoy having sex, then when you go to an engineering college (typically around 6:1 male-to-female ratio), would you rather be a guy or a girl?

This analogy didn’t really pan out like I hoped. Let me try again.

Picture a loosely-organized football league where there are fifteen teams and only five quarterbacks. How do you think those five quarterbacks are treated when they show up at the field? That’s right, they get to have hot engineer sex as often as they want and they get to be choosy about what jersey they wear.

Just like tanks and healers do. This is your guild and your server.

The downside is that you solo at 30-80% the speed of a pure dps class. This isn’t as bad as you’ve heard, unless you’re absolutely in love with grinding. Even on my little protection warrior who’s dual-wielding, I can go fast enough if not fast. Just be sure that in all those instances you’re running that you grab unwanted dps gear that’s appropriate for your character. And honestly, if you’re not a complete social misfit, you’ll probably have game friends who will group with you for dailies or other solo content because you group with them. If you do love grinding (or you are a social misfit), then just have a dps alt. Who doesn’t have a hunter in their pocket nowadays?

I’m not saying that dps isn’t fun. It is, and it’s very relaxing as well. I have a hunter who I battleground with, and it’s a great time. But if grouping is what you like best, then why would you want to compete with the millions of other hunters/rogues/warlocks/mages/hybrid-dps spec people for the large number of damage spots in a raid/instance, when you can just walk into the big-leagues by being a role where demand is far greater than supply? My guild is perpetually short on tanks, we’ll take anyone with 9k base life and the ability to fog a mirror. I’m exaggerating, but dip into the Guild Recruitment channel and you’ll see this message in the first ten minutes:

X of Y is raiding Z content and is looking for a offtank/maintank/healer to join and “raid casually”/”raid five nights a week”/”oh god please join us, I don’t care if you’re an alt of another toon in another guild, just give some backup to drop cross-eyed-Joey the holy pally alt who still looks for his Mend Pet button”.

Heck, even my dps wife loves that I’m a tank/healer combo, because our group is already half-made whenever we want to run together. Her primary alt is a druid healer. And while she’s still warming up to healing, she loves the ease at which she can find a group.

So make your next alt project a tank or a healer, and get to the hot engineer sex.

A rogue in my guild is working on making a competent healing priest alt. He asked me where the priest spreadsheet is. Like how you actually know for certain, the way a rogue can just say “Well, this sword is just flat-out better than that one because I put them both in the rogue dps spreadsheet and the answer is: the new one yields +10 dps.” I answered, “Ha ha.”

Healing is much harder to diagnose than tanking or dps is. I mean, trivially the question for healing is: Did we wipe? If yes, the problem might be healing, or it might be lack of execution or understanding of the event. If no, then you did fine. That’s it. Bonus points for nobody dying.

When you’re a dps’er, every choice regarding gear and talents and so on can be boiled down to one question (two if you’re advanced):

• Simple: Am I personally doing more damage?
• Advanced: Am I making the group/raid’s total damage output higher?

For each event, the raid has X time to do Y damage with Z constraints, now get to it. You can run Recount or Recap or any number of other tools to diagnose damage. It’s trivial. You put on a new piece of gear, go raid, and then say,

“Well, I thought bonus crit rating this would help, but my miss rate went up by 2% and I did less overall damage. Guess I’m back to this weaker looking +hit rating blue.”

As far as research, a class’s dps is broken down into a format similar to this: If you are build A, stack stat/rating B until Bmax, then stack C stat/rating infinitely. For frost mages it’s “stack spell hit until the spell cap, then spell haste and spell damage infinitely”.

Tanking is harder than that. You’re trying to both keep aggro and not die. Keeping aggro is about generating threat, which also has particular gear choices, but more or less works like doing damage (stack hit rating, expertise, spell hit, shield block, attack power, and shield block value in various amounts depending on which kind of tank you are). Not dying involves a few variables like stamina and avoidance, as well as preventing as much of the spike damage as you can. There are tradeoffs to be made, but you have a maximum health total that’s easy to see, an avoidance rate that’s easy to compute. You know you’re doing the right amount of threat if your raid doesn’t have to hold back on damage. You balance accordingly.

Healing? Like tanking, the suite of stats changes between classes–some mix of healing, mp5, spirit, intellect, and spell crit. But the act of healing depends entirely on each particular event. Your tank might get crushed, get hit normally, block, or dodge. Everyone in your raid might take steady, constant damage. Your tank might never drink potions or use healthstones. Your dps might get cleaved by the boss for standing in the wrong place. Your job is not just to heal the tank, it’s to patch the mistakes in mid-event.

Also, two different attempts on the same boss with the same raid can go completely differently just due to the inherent randomness of some events. Think of Ilhoof in Kara. If a healer gets sacrificed, it’s extremely tough on the remaining healers for those ten seconds. If not, that’s nine minutes of (healing) pleasure! Switching one piece of gear in that event, and most others… you can’t actually tell if it matters. You just know that a higher value in your key stats is better.

On top of all of that, in raids you also must instantly and silently adjust to the healing style of the people around you so that you’re not wasting group efforts. That ability to adjust is the whole essence of raid healing–it can’t be quantified and it doesn’t show up on your character sheet. If I was going to land a slow, mana-efficient heal for 5000 and someone else throws in a mana-inefficient 2000 heal, causing me to overheal by 2000 and waste that time and mana, who’s fault is it? (Trick question, it doesn’t matter. That’s wasted mana on someone’s part, and if you don’t work it out, the raid will wipe at some point due to your collective waste of mana.)

So given how nebulous and random and instinctive healing is, how can you tell that you’re doing better by swapping one item for another? You can’t tell, because you can’t run tests outside of combat. Your heals might hit for a tiny bit less or more, but the actual trade off between 6 mp5 and 22 healing? Can’t tell. Your playstyle influences your gear selection more than other roles. Damage dealers just do damage, and every piece of gear they have is about doing more damage. There’s no opinion as to whether 900 damage is more than 800 damage. Tanks want to survive and generate threat, that’s their balance.

A healer who loves mana regeneration is going to cast weaker heals continuously, and make it work. A healer who loves larger heals is going to try to time their larger heals correctly so they aren’t wasting mana, and make it work. The final grade is: Did we win? Yes. Great, your gear and spec is correct for that event!

Most of us just learn the stats that are necessary for our build (for example, spell crit plus healing plus mp5 for a holy paladin), and try to get decent levels of all of them.

So unfortunately, there is no healing spreadsheet. This leads to the huge learning curve in learning to heal (and tank), but that’s another article.

Ran it for the second time with my guild, again on my healing priest. This time I better appreciated its virtues, I think. It’s a fun, interesting, and relaxing instance, perfect in length. It runs like a greatest-hits version of Burning Crusade boss-fight design.

Of course, both times I’ve healed it have been with a very talented protection paladin doing the tanking. Protection pally tanking everything is easy-mode for everything but boss fights. I haven’t had to heal the group with a protection warrior yet, which I’m guessing would be (cough) a bit harder due to the aoe encounters. The sad state of warrior tanking is well known. We had a mage, rogue, and hunter, which gave us ample crowd control. The hunter was one of those lovely people who like to put an ice trap in front of me instead of him. Just a nice run from start to finish, and the reason I like the game. Group up with guildies, laugh through an enjoyable instance together, where effective teamwork matters.

I forgot that someone gets a zomgepic just for completing normal mode. Last night that someone was me, when I lucked into [Kharmaa's Ring of Fate] off Kael’thas Sunstrider. The socket (on a ring, whee!) goes perfectly with the quest reward gem ([Teardrop Crimson Spinel]). I’m not sold on priest healing with spell haste yet because priest healing is a mix of instant/non-instant spells, but I’ll experiment to see if it’s better than my [Band of Halos]. Not that you can actually tell most of the time. More on that later.

An interesting healing note is that in both wins on the Kael’thas, two dps’ers died. It actually got much easier after that, when you have only three people to keep alive instead of five. Most of the time when someone dies, that means that the full damage of that part of the encounter then turns to someone else. This event has constant global damage, so the group takes 100% damage with five people, 80% damage with four, and an easy-to-heal-through 60% with three. I’ll shoot for four teammates alive at the end of the next run.

This is a very fun instance. I’m looking forward to trying this on heroic.