An open letter to illiterate Tanks from a healer.
Dear Tank,
- I realize some of you were at the back of the line when the gods were handing out Intellect.
- I understand that some of you were bending over to tie your plate shoe laces (that can be hard, can’t it), and your brains got stuffed in the wrong end.
- I know this letter will be wasted, after all, you are illiterate, but maybe one of your mates will read it out to you.
That all said, I’m sure you understand the term mitigation. You know, like damage mitigation and wipe mitigation.
The 1st one you can look after yourself. A bit of armor here, dodge there, throw in a bit of parry and maybe a bubble or two and you ate all good.
In fact you don’t really have to try that hard, blizzard gives you blue and purple shinnies with it, buttons to press and even stuff in your trees (No! Not the one you are cutting down, your talent trees!).
Wipe mitigation will take a little bit more thought on your part, but don’t worry, I’m hear to help.
You see we are a team. Actually we are more than that, we are a partnership. You come 1st on my heals list, most of the time, no need to worry about that.
The one time you drop to 2nd on my priority list is when I need a heal. If I am healing myself, I am not healing you. If I am dead, I am healing no one.
Here’s a couple of tips for you one wipe mitigation:
If I make a request, consider it an order.
If I go to the trouble of making a request of you, then heed it. I understand your repair bills can be expensive, don’t increase your costs in 10% increments.
Mana makes the heals go round.
I need mana to heal you. Many things consume mana, mostly they are heals and chain heals cost more than the others.
If you charge off to the next lot of mobs when I am low on mana or am drinking, then I hope you can self heal. I will tell you what level of mana I want, as a general rule, but it never hurts to ask me if I am ready. Just type:
/w squidly r?
In future you can just press Enter and up arrow to repeat the question.
Comfort Zone
Usually after the 1st couple of pulls I can tell you whether to pick up the pace, or take smaller chunks of mobs.
If I tell you to pull less, it’s not because I am lazy, but just that I can’t sustain the heals over that period of time.
Totems are expensive
I drop sticks in the ground that help keep the party alive and doing more damage, they help a lot, I mean a truckload.
The trade off for that is they cost a fair bit of mana… About 20% of my mana will go in buffs.
So we have 2 options:
- We all move, I drop new totems and you wait till I am ready, or
- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: if I already have a perfectly good set of totems, how about you pull the mobs back. Then we will have less downtime.
More Mobs, Less Mana= Bad
I know you are tough and I am an excellent healer, but there are limits. When you body pull there is a good change you will get more than one group of mobs.
Also the reason I pointed out there was a pat was so you could work around it, not invite it to the wipe.
If I have to tell you more than twice not to pull more mobs, the next thing you will read is Squidly has left the party.
Me!
When I tell you there are mobs on me, your No.1 job is to fix that.
You come before the DPS for me…
Make sure I come before the DPS for you.
If they pull aggro while you are prancing around the room picking up those casters that are busting my butt, well, hopefully I can heal them through… assuming I am not getting hit any more. The melee mobs are already chewing on your butt, they will follow you where ever you go.. so go get those casters that care more for me than for you.
If I get a melee mob on me, I will bring it to you, but please take out the casters, the only party member with aggro on them is me, and my aggro is skyrocketing.
Boredom = Bad
Sometimes you aren’t pulling enough. Never fear I will tell you.
If I don’t, feel free to ask.
You see I (and nearly every other healer I expect) am so good at my job that often I am falling asleep at the keyboard while throwing the odd heal.
My experiences in healing so far have shown two distinct periods of healing in instances, plus a third which I prefer.
The catatonic phase: not enough mobs or damage to warrant my presence. I may DPS, but being conscientious I would rather hang onto the mana for the other period.
The OMFG phase: all he’ll breaks loose, I am throwing heals around like chimps throw poo at the zoo. Often with as much effectiveness. If this follows the catatonic phase there is a chance I might be, well, catatonic. Thus someone might die before I wake up.
Cruising phase: There is a 3rd period of healing I like. Constant flows of heals. I stay on my toes, don’t run out of mana and I am warmed up for the OMFG phase.
Once again, I will tell you when I would like you to relieve my boredom. No need to do any extra pulls before I do so.
Aggro Magnet
One of the great things about being a healer is I don’t need to hit mobs, just you. This means that you can invite me to instances I have no right to be in.
The only problem is that I am an aggro magnet. If I have to run up to you, there is a good chance I will pull the other mobs in the room… Probably the next room too.
Unfortunately when they come they will come hit me, not you. Which means no heals for you.
So pull them back away from their mates, back towards me so I can heal you without drawing extra attention.
Best part is I am probably standing near my totems, which means we can keep pulling in small chunks.
/ignore list
I have one and I know how to use it.
If you don’t listen I will make sure I can’t hear your whispers to group up.
Yes I know tanks are in short supply, but so are healers. Just as your friends list is probably filled with healers, mine is filled with tanks. I’ll find another one.
As it is I get a whisper every ten minutes when I am not already in an instance or BG asking me to join a group. Even when I am busy I have people queuing up to use my services.
You aren’t that special, especially if you don’t listen to me.
/kick or quit
If I’m the party leader and you repeatedly ignore my requests, I will /kick you.
If I am not the party leader, I will clearly state to the party that I can’t work with you and promptly drop group. The group can then decide if they want to kick you and get me back, or suffer on through your stupidity.
If you are the party leader… Later… NOT!
Brought to you by the letter S and the stupid noobcake of an illiterate tank in Stratholme on Friday.
Gnomer and Out, Squidly and Stout!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
http://gnomeaggedon.net/2009/09/21/
wipe-mitigation/
If they’re illiterate they won’t be able to read this
Yeah as mentioned.. this guys couldn’t read… which was pointed out to him by another party member (that I had never met) about 10 seconds before the tank quit the group
How do you keep finding these old world pugs?!
I have been in exactly one low level instance since I leveled Rhii, and it was the tanking-WC run I blogged about not long back. My pally is now 57 and she would -love- to spec holy and start learning to heal, but there’s never anything happening to heal for.
It started with one…
Those in the group that were good got added to friends list.
Every time I was on and they were on, I would whisper them so they knew I was still alive.. nothing more, just a Hi…
Of course it’s so much easier if you advertise as Resto in LFG… Someone will drop you a line.. maybe not for the instance you really want, but sometimes you don’t know what you want until you get it.
meanwhile you start building up that worthwhile pugger list.
“I realize some of you were at the back of the line when the gods were handing out Intellect.”
“I’m hear to help.”
“I’m hear….”
“…hear….”
Good to see you put your first five talent points in Entitlement. It’s a must for any good healing spec.
Seriously, bad tank equals healer nightmare; being selective is the way to go. When leveling solo I tend to put the acceptable tanks on my friends list and then stick with them as much as possible. (And really, just a few minutes of conversation is enough to weed out the real mouthbreathers.) Otherwise, solo questing is good enough.
lol… you wont believe me, but I did spell check and fix that… Well, in hindsight I probably did that on the iPhone while I was quickly typing this morning…
I have noticed that I sometimes make the same error twice (all thumbs here) and it will predicatively give me the wrong word.
I wont correct my error though… it would put your comment out of context…
Re: Tank List… I have been doing that.
Admittedly this time around I saw a request in trade for a healer for Strath, which was beyond me, but knowing I was healing thought I could give it a go.
We would have been fine if the tank pulled back, and didn’t wait for pats to be between groups so that they would just chain… why stop at 2 groups with a pat, we can get 3 or 4… hell the whole room…
That 1st room is dodgy even with a good group (or it was back in the day), so no one was surprised we were wiping… we just couldn’t work out why the tank was ignoring everything we said…
“Wait mana”… OK we are going…
“Rezzing Fred”… Ohh in combat…
“Pull left”… OK we are going right…
“WAIT PAT!”… you get the picture
I was rezzing the tank last so everyone else would be ready.. but I would literally top off his health, sit to drink and he would pull…
I have been enjoying the battlegrounds so much… I got 3 levels on Friday night in the time I would get 1 questing & instancing. At least in battlegrounds you know you are possibly dealing with 9/14/39 (if you get a full BG) mouthbreathers, so expectations aren’t too high, and death is a minor inconvenience.. or a welcome mana up
I’m no grammar nazi, I just love irony.
The thing is, now that I have a tank I’ve begun to understand why they pull so fast sometimes. Yeah, for most it’s because they are impatient, but sometimes it’s just to beat out the dps.
Let me explain: Certainly the dps won’t be pulling, but if you pull before the dps is ready you can buy yourself a second or two of aggro gain before thy start AoEing the hell out of everything. As a warrior those few seconds can be the difference between a smooth pull and some dead dps. ( I have some major paladin envy in aoe heavy five mans.) In fact, I’ve found myself doing some of those very things that annoy me so much as a healer: I’ve pulled too fast. I’ve pulled out of LoS. I’ve moved around constantly. (Suck it rogues!)
And sometimes it’s to beat out the healer. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve needed to ask a druid or paladin to not heal before I thunderclap unless I’m Going To Die. Sometimes it takes time to round everything up, you know? Thunderclap has a cooldown. Often leading with a Touch or Holy Light instead of a HoT or Flash would make everything so much easier.
And that’s my tanking QQ of the day.
That I could understand.. but everyone was good in this party apart from the tank.
Although I am relatively new to the whole healing thing (or coming back after a long absence), I know I need to watch those early heals. I was letting him take the hits and starting with single target heals once he got to 50% – I knew I could keep him up.
But as I say, he was body pulling the other side of the room, while pats were between groups. I would have to come forward for range and I was just that little bit low level (probably only one level), thus could body pull the room from 1/2 way across.
Still.. if I was a tank, I wouldn’t move if the healer had only 10% mana, and was using 100% mana and relying on mp5 for odd LHWs at the end of each fight.
He just wasn’t thinking… He could at least have done LoS pulls between the bookshelves…
As a priest I can only say “Amen”
lol… very appropriate
Roflmao.
I was a tank for two years and while dps could sometimes be expendable, healers never were. I am trying it from the dps side of the aisle and getting used to coming last in the healing order.
At least I know to bring any aggro to the tank instead of running in the other direction. That made me crazy as a tank.
And you’re right, pull toward the damn totems. We drop them near you; don’t run off somewhere else. *sigh*
Thanks for the laugh.
I have always assumed that I was coming last for the heals, particularly because by the time the heal was wound up I would already be dead… I just learned not to pull aggro and say out of the green goo.
I also had the philosophy that I would take a bullet for my healer.
When that was a Pally healer, we had it worked out, he would stun it, I would get its attention and kite it back to the tank with a frost nova to keep it there.
Pally kept healing, and occasionally had time to top me off as well.
Yep.. run to the tank.. not so hard to understand…
I find myself doing that now, even though I know that’s delaying the next heal by a few seconds… at least when I start to cast I wont be interrupted.
I am wondering whether the WoLK AoE has spoiled people… it’s a rare day you have to pull back these days, just round the all up and take them down.
The tank in question didn’t do one ranged pull, no LoS.. just body pull… the room.
Word.
Well lots of words. And I agree with all of them.
Yep lots of words…
Probably doesn’t help that I am standing in the middle of the room in my sissy robes.. can’t wait till outland where I can pick up some nice mail cocktail dresses.
Poor gnomer. Failpugs are a fact of life. They just exist. Like Oculus.
I have had a good success rate lately… but yeah there’s always one…
Occulus… not just a fail pug, but a fail instance…
there is a reason rule #1 on my hunter is ‘keep an eye on the healer’. if i take care of them, they take care of me. ‘s why i now have a couple good healer friends.
For what it was worth, the hunter and lock pets were trying to save my butt. Unfortunately there was only so much the AI could do against the AI.
In reality all they were doing was delaying the inevitable… the wipe was on the board as soon as the tank ran to the mobs.
Moar anger pl0x.
My priest definitely has a sense of entitlement. Do your job or I will find someone else that will. I do not have to hold your hand and cover for your shortcomings. Get it together or I leave, simple as that.
I’ve even stopped healing stupid DPS during fights. I’m trying to get them “young” in levels so we can weed out undesirable behavior by the time they are at end game. Healers that compensate for stupid shit are enabling poor performance later on.
I was going to walk… but being a relatively patient guy, and knowing I was under-leveled, I was giving the guy the benefit of the doubt…
While I was running back from the GY on the last wipe of the night, I was whispering the tank to say:
“I have asked you don’t pull when I have no mana, I have asked you to pull back. The next time you pull while those two conditions are met, I will let you die, call a wipe and head for the door. Next time I will just hearth”
But as I was typing the tank announced he was leaving… followed by a string of comments by the other party members wondering why he didn’t “listen”
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