Duct Tape and a Prayer

Welcome to Duct Tape and a Prayer, a World of Warcraft blog largely focused on, but not limited to, healing as a Discipline priest. Please take a moment and subscribe to my RSS feed here.

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Let us assume that you are a DPS player. And let us assume that you are wondering why your health is allowed to dip so low while other people seem to be topped off all the time. (If neither of those apply to you, you’re not getting the point of “let us assume”.)

Here is the fundamental thing to understand: it is a matter of triage. Healers are pretty much constantly making decisions (consciously or, more likely in veteran healers, not) based on the basic question “what’s the best thing for me to do if I want the group to succeed in this fight?” The specifics are much more, well, specific, but that’s the underlying root of all of the decisions a good healer makes. It means that we make some choices that look odd to an observer who’s not privy to our decision-making process, too. For instance, if your raid healer sees that you are at 10% health but not taking damage, and another DPS is at 30% health but losing 10% a second, your raid healer is going to heal the second DPS and not you. It’s going to look like they’re healing someone who has higher health than you do – but all you see is their health go from 30% to 50% while you’re still down at 10%. You don’t – and, frankly, can’t be expected to – see that functionally, you’re stable and they’re crashing.

On the other hand, a popular conception of healers – and one that healers love to propagate – is that we are all-seeing, all-knowing masters of the raid’s health. According to this conception, your healer knows when you’ve been bad or good – when you’re standing in the void zones or not running out of the shadow crashes – so be good, for goodness’ sake! The truth is that that’s actually somewhat accurate – but not because we’re the Great and Powerful Oz. The fact of the matter is that if you keep standing in void zones, we’ll be able to see your health go down repeatedly, and wonder why we keep hitting you with heals. It’s an indirect sort of knowledge, as though you were an Earthlike planet around a distant sun and Grid measured your gravitational perturbation. As a rule, we don’t know why you’re losing health, or why you’re stable and the other guy’s fading fast – we just see the gravitational effect of damage and want it to stop.

Along those lines, the other secret that healers don’t want you to know is that even if you habitually stand in void zones, even if you stand in shadow crashes, even if your DPS is on par with our 45 mage who just struggled through Ulduman, even if you are totally clueless, we will do our absolute damnedest to keep you alive. Regardless of how many mistakes they make, we hate letting people die. Seeing a health bar go to zero hurts. We’ll get mad at you, we’ll complain, we’ll scream over Vent that if you stand in another god damned void zone we’re just going to let you die, but when we’re actually in combat, our best possible scenario is ending the fight with everyone alive, and we’ll include you in our normal triage because regardless of how mad we get, we still don’t want to have to rez you at the end of the fight.

(Note: this doesn’t apply if you’re a douchebag. Abuse the healers and God help you, ’cause nobody else will.)

The bottom line is this: try not to take damage. If you do, we’ll do our best to be there for you. Just don’t assume that you’ll get the first heals, and don’t assume you know why you didn’t, and don’t complain when you don’t, and we’ll get along just fine.

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