Healing assignments for your raid

And now, back to a bit of healing discussion. As I said in an earlier post, I am now almost completely split halfway between resto and elemental. However, even when I am DPSing I have maintained my role as the healing officer for the guild. This means it is my responsibility to get healing assignments communicated to everyone for each boss fight. I used to not bother with assignments for Naxx trash, but several wipes in Ulduar taught me not to take that trash too lightly.

From a pure administration standpoint, I highly recommend you get a good mod to handle passing out assignments. I am pretty partial to surgeongeneral. It lets you easily assign healers and report it to the raid, as well as gives you support for multi-phase or complex fights. When I first took over I was using macros and paper, but an addon eases the burden considerably.

The real meat of doing proper healing assignments is to have enough information to make the appropriate choices.

1. Know the fight - You cannot assign healing unless you know what is coming. How many tanks need healed? How hard are they going to be hit? How much raid damage will be incoming? Is there a mechanic that may disable certain healers and someone will need to pickup their job? You should know the answers to these questions ahead of time if possible. If this is a new boss, you should always read up on strategy.

2. Know your personnel - You need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the players you have on your healing team. Some people shine in different situations or with different levels of responsibility. I always try and mix-and-match a weaker healer with a strong one. In general, none of our healers are "bads" as the WoW community loves to call people. But I do have a couple of stars that I trust to always keep up their assigned group or target. Rotate these people to where the real heavy healing will be in any encounter as much as possible. Certain fights that have spikey raid AOE, we will just assign general "raid" healing. But some fights the entire raid takes a huge amount of steady predictable damage, such as the frozen blows on Hodir. For a fight like this we find it useful to assign healers to keep up certain groups. This minimizes healing overlap and helps weaker healers not get as overwhelmed.

3. Know your classes - You should always know the strengths of each class and spec. In general, pallies should always be tank healing. They do not have a strong reliable form of AOE healing. I also prefer to have druids on the tanks as well, but they are now able to raid heal with the new tools they have since WotLK launched. Priests are a little different since they have 2 different healing specs. If the priest is specced discipline, you will want him on the tank. If they are holy, I tend to use them as raid healers. They are able to heal tanks just fine, but they can put out a lot of raid healing with PoH and CoH. While Shaman tank healing is much improved this expansion, I still prefer to always have them on the raid. If I have one resto shaman and we are assigning groups, I usually have them healing the melee group. Chain Heal is an excellent tool for this as melee tend to be clumped into a group and you do not have any bounce issues you may have when healing the ranged.

4. Be flexible - If you wipe, you should always take a moment to analyze what happened. Was it a tank death? If so, why did he die? Was it an avoidable mechanic, a spike that did not get handled, or was a healer dead/unable to heal? You need to understand what is happening before you can make adjustments. Don't be afraid to change healing assignments around depending on the last few attempts. We also have several DPSers with good healing sets and dual-specs, so we can flex our number of healers from 6-7 all the way up to 9-10 depending on who is in the raid. We typically run with 7 healers, but on certain fights we will go healer heavy if the enrage timer is not a problem.

These tips should get you going if you want or are asked to handle healing assignments. I'll probably be preparing a general raid healing tips for shamans next, but we will see where my whims take me.