Re-activating your WoW account, or interested in "Trying Before You Buy"?Sharing Healing Responsibilities in Karazhan and beyond
Personally, I'm not up high enough to be doing Karazhan, but the Guild Relations Forum on the official World of Warcraft forums has some great discussions about it periodically and I thought to share.
Healing Beyond 5-man Dungeons
These days, as level 70s working together with their guildmates to progress through tough content such as Karazhan, Gruul's Lair and beyond, there's a lot of learning that every class needs to do in order to perform well enough to allow the whole team to succeed.
As healers in The Burning Crusade expansion, one of the biggest challenges is in learning how to work in conjunction with other healers in the raid so effective and efficient healing tactics are used, resulting in less overhealing and less wipes that come from two healers healing the same member while another one dies.
The Burning Crusade's Sizable Challenge
One of the biggest challenges that a lot of guilds are facing with regards to healers learning to work together is the simple fact that a lot of the level 70s that are raiding the "End Game" content right now weren't around for the "old End Game" and it is acknowledged by many that the challenge jump from Heroic 5-man content to Karazhan is way bigger than the jump from, say, Blackrock Depths (BRD) to a 10-man Lower Blackrock Spire (LBRS) run was back before the expansion came out.
Sure, in the old days there were 20 and 40-man raid dungeons such as Zul'Gurub and Molten Core and Naxxaramus, but it's widely agreed that the challenge progression and learning curve of the pre-expansion End Game was more friendly to the process of gearing and training up inexperienced recruits.
Healing Strategies and Styles Change Between 5 and 10 man
A secondary challenge that exists for healers new to the raiding game is that the strategies used when one is the only dedicated healer in the party are quite different from those used when there's two healers dedicated to the party.
For some great advice from folks with actual experience, check out this discussion thread on the Official World of Warcraft forums:
Raid Member Holding Back Raid
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Having healed in MC once, and UBRS a few times, I can say that it was definitely a different game back then...
Now I haven't done anything larger than a 5man since BC came out!!! (BGs not included) I have run an instance with another 'healer' so I just switch out of my healing duds and break out the DPS, which people are surprised that I can do...
We did a Shattered Halls run today, and I did about the same damage as the main tank (who was prot spec warrior) at just under 8% AND I had to heal... being able to do so much DPS was a testament to that tank and our CC more than anything.
One of the best changes Blizz has made to healers (in my opinion) was to be able to have HOTs stack from other players. All i had to do in the group that I was the 2nd healer was throw in my renew on the main tank on top of theirs and neither of us had to do much more healing than that! At about +500hp/tick on my renew and about the same on theirs the only time you had to throw a 'regular' heal out there was during bosses.
Having not done any Heroics or Karazhan yet I can't say that it will be anything similar in 10-25 man dungeons either. But I can imagine a few HOTs on the main tank being kept up will more than help with the 'main healer's mana pool. Looking forward to getting my Kara key once I get a few factions up, as I can still benefit tremendously from some of those upgrades.
- Yaja, level 70 troll priest.
Great blog! Meh, apologies if this is redundant, can't read the Wow forums here. Anyways, my 2 copper on the BC size limits and raid healing:
The 10-man Karazhan cap is nice because it doesn't overwhelm new players. It also allows for class and guild leaders to give more personal attention (versus having to keep track of 39 other people too). On the other hand, a 10-man cap means that 1 person is 10% of the raid...there's not a whole lot slack space when every single person counts.
For new raid healers: It's usually easiest to give them specific healing assignments or to have them specifically heal a single group, then work from there. It usually takes around a raid or two for people to get the hang of it...if they don't then it's probably a good sign that they aren't ready to raid and/or need some tutorial runs through the 5-man content.