Letters From Azeroth

In a five-man group, it’s easy to tell if everyone’s doing their job: the tank soaks up the beating, the healer keeps him alive and the DPS do all the actual killing. As long as the boss goes down before the healer runs out of mana, everyone is happy. In Wrath Of The Lich King, the threat generation of all the tanking classes was substantially boosted and it’s pretty rare now for DPS to pull aggro off the tank unless the boss has some gimmicky threat-wiping ability. This means that the measure of a good DPS player is entirely focussed on his damage output. If you top the damage meters, then you are the best player – end of.

Five-man groups normally only have one healer so there is no competition, but in a raid – particularly a 25-man raid – the rules change. There might be eight healers and all of them want to prove themselves the most useful to the raid. But you can’t measure healing the way you measure damage. Why? Because healing is reactive. You can’t heal damage that isn’t there. Once the raid has enough healing to beat a boss, the only way for healers to improve their standing in the healing meters is to compete for a larger slice of the finite amount of damage dished out by the boss. This leads to healers sniping each other’s heals. Slow heals get interrupted by fast heals, heal-over-time spells never have a chance to tick out because the target is topped up by faster heals from another player. The result is that the healers are playing against the healing meter, not the boss.

And if you really want to top meters, there are even more counterproductive tricks – such as using Power Word: Death to damage yourself, just so you can heal yourself back up. Or refusing to resurrect players so that you have enough mana to quickly heal them back up when someone else does it for you. Meanwhile, the player assigned to heal the main tank is left with very little damage to offset and ends up looking like the worst healer, even though he is the only one actually contributing to the success of the fight.
Ironically, the better a raid gets, the worse this problem becomes. Higher DPS means that the boss goes down faster so he has less time to do damage so there is less to heal. It gets harder and harder to distinguish a good healer from a bad one using the meters.

So ignore the healing meters. A good healer keeps herself alive, then her assigned targets, then the rest of the raid. Any healer still standing at the end of a fight is good enough. The really good ones are the ones that can rescue the warlock that gets stuck in the fire, or protect the mage during AoE, or battle rez the tank to prevent a wipe. In other words, a great healer doesn’t treat the raid like a number but like 24 fallible human players that need her constant attention.

By Luis Villizon: Total PC Gaming Magazine