I'm out of a job, but I gots this barrel!

Today is rant day! I’m curious what the perspective of fellow healing priests (and other healers) are on this touchy question:

“Who gets to heal?”

Johannah’s guild, Momentum, is over-flowing with healers. As the only healer that has healed and remained healing for the guild since it’s formation back in the Karahzan days of Burning Crusade, I can safely say that I have seen more drama over who gets to heal than any other kind of drama you can dig up for an inspiring update to Officer Chat.

And how we determine who gets to heal on which day has a stringent set of rules that are adhered to about as often as visitors adhere to the “don’t feed the animals!” signs at zoos.

One of the things that I find causes the most problems is healing yourself out of a job. What I mean by that is, right now, many guilds are using three healers for ICC-10; once ICC-10 has fully released and everyone has geared themselves to the brim, it will likely reduce to two healers. There are fights right now where we are already dwindling to two healers. Healers get better at the fights, get the gear they need, and heal themselves right into an alternate position.

The three healers then enter a knife fight in which the most passive aggressive person is at the top and the most non-confrontational person is at the bottom, with the person in the middle trembling in verbal fear. Never mind when, like this last Friday, four out of the ten people that can go all play a main spec healing role.

How does one expertly handle healing yourself out of job, or having too many healers available?

Through competition?

WoW.com asked the question once, “Is healing competitive?” You better believe it. One of the biggest reasons I heal Holy spec despite my revelation on the benefits of Discipline in 3.3–beyond the fact I think Holy is a more enjoyable experience–is that Holy simply pulls more on the charts. Immature players like to measure themselves through the numbers provided on these charts with no adherence to the Discipline absorption rule, and I got sick of the underhanded opinions derived from this method of thinking. (For the unfamiliar, this rule is that the Discipline priest is generally going to be 10% under the other healers due to bubble love.)

I have also noticed an amazing phenomena about two like-classes healing together. A Restoration druid by itself does not perform nearly as well as, say, two Restoration druid head-to-head for the trophy I-Am-Mother-Earth-Hear-Me-Rawr. A Holy priest in a VoA-25 did me the courtesy of molesting my Discipline heals, as I divulged in my last post, “Playing nice with other priests.” Strutting your muscles next to fellow kin is a popular practice for many players.

The biggest problem with gauging a healer’s effectiveness through competition is that it is not always an accurate ruler for skill. For instance, if you have one healer that does 4k HPS and stands in fire, and another healer that does 3.5k HPS and moves when they are in scary stuff, who do you think is the better player?

Through power?

In Raid Rx, writer Marcie Knox quotes, “This is where I control your raiding life. Those cookies better be in the mail!” Should officers get dibs on healing over the players beneath them? We all want to say “no” because of the conscientious angel inside our minds, but you know the power trip happens. You know people exercise their rank in their favor. My fear of this is so grand that I find myself DPSing more than any other healer (except maybe our recent Restoration shaman) in our guild. I just don’t like the idea of “guild-master’s-girlfriend-always-gets-to-heal” drama.

Sometimes that power needs to be exercised though. There is no justification for not making it through a progression raid simply because healer XYZ refuses to learn how to DPS and thus thinks it is okay to occupy the healing spot when they are breaking a fundamental rule, such as: not healing as much as healer ABC; or playing a class that fills the other healing role and negating the benefits of multiple healing classes/specs working together. Stubborn people weigh everyone down and “you’re exercising your power over me!” is a lame cop out.

Through taking turns?

This method, I thought, sounded the most amicable. If healer XYZ heals one week while healer ABC DPS’s, then the following week, healer XYZ should DPS and ABC should heal. An elitist guild would say “whichever healer is the most effective should heal all the time,” but that might really piss XYZ off and casual guilds aren’t about making members mad. Taking turns is the communal, non-conflict way of handling it.

Provided, of course, both XYZ and ABC can heal through the bosses without getting the raid spanked.

Be kind to your fellow healers and respect some of the critical rules of raiding.

In short, follow some rules of kindness with your healers and the raid:

• Don’t double class. If you are a priest, and there is another priest already healing (especially if that priest is your spec!), maybe you should let the other class heal. Variety is the spice of life. The same applies to two druid combos, two paladin combos, and two shaman combos.
• If you know one of the healers you’re fighting for a healing spot with DPS’s all the time, let them heal. It’s ridiculous to think you’re entitled to making their life hell.
• Get some DPS gear. There really is no excuse with the availability of tier 9 via running random heroics.
• Treat others the way you’d like them to treat you. If you expect your fellow healers to be semi-decent at DPSing, you should also be semi-decent at it. If you expect healers to share the healing role with you, you should share it with them.

Good luck playing your main spec role!