Hi! Remember healing? That’s what this blog used to be about before Holidays and Achievements put together a For The Off-Topic! raid and took Healing down. It was a pretty epic battle, and Holidays and Achievements got their black war tags, but now Healing’s respawned and back in the fight.

Patch 3.3 revamped the LFG system and introduced cross-server PUGs, and thank the Light, they’ve finally got it right. PUGs are quick and painless – even when they don’t work out you tend to know in advance, like the Halls of Reflection group I had last night where the tank started out by saying “so, can anyone else tank?” – and it’s easy to rack up a few dozen emblems in an evening’s play. Even alts are getting in on the action – the gear-matching system is pretty good at ensuring that they don’t get into an instance they can’t handle.

That said, it’s not all peaches and cream – there are still a lot of things that can trip a group up. The advantage of the LFG system is that most of those stumbling blocks are player-induced, and there are things you can do to remove them. Here are some guidelines for making sure your PUGs go as smoothly as possible when you’re healing:

• Stock up on reagents before you get in the queue.

Every time. I know healers who join the queue from beside a reagent vendor so that they’ll be able to stock up again when they get out. I carry 60 Sacred Candles on me, but this weekend I decided to chain-queue from the Borean Tundra, and managed to get down to 3 candles before I gave up and went back to Dalaran. The sad truth about PUGs is that sometimes, you’re going to wipe – people don’t know the fight, don’t have the gear to complete the fight, or just plain screw up, and you want to make sure that you can keep buffing the group no matter how many times the Godfather of Souls eats yours.

• Tell the rest of the players up-front if you’ve never successfully completed the instance.

This is a matter of some debate among players – some say you should just not say anything to avoid being kicked for a more experienced healer, some say you should ask for the strategy just before the first boss because they’ll be invested in getting the boss down and won’t want to have to wait for another healer. Honestly, that just seems like dishonesty to me. It’s better to tell the group up-front that you haven’t been through the instance. You’ll sometimes get the odd jerk who kicks you from the group for being inexperienced, but I’ve found that most players are so eager to get going that they’ll gladly explain the fights to a new player, just so they don’t have to wait in the queue again. Of course, it’s easier to get them to go along with you if you’re appropriately geared (and don’t try to heal the first half of Old Kingdom in your fishing pole and hat…).

• Discuss loot rules in advance.

Nothing in World of Warcraft causes more drama and personal offense than loot. It’s far better to take fifteen seconds at the beginning of the run to figure out what everyone else thinks is fair. Remember, too, that you can’t roll Need on items of a different armor class than yours, even if you can wear them and they’re an upgrade. If you’re a druid, shaman, or paladin healer, and you know that something you want but that’s not in your armor class drops, you might also want to talk to the group and see if someone of the lower armor class would be willing to Need the item for you and then trade it to you – and if you’re a shaman, druid, or priest healer, consider offering to be the Need monkey.

Oh, and everyone Needs on Frozen Orbs unless they really don’t care to whom the Orb goes. It’s just common sense – no, you don’t need it, but “Need” doesn’t actually mean “need” here, it means “roll at the highest priority in a tiered system”.

• Talk with the tank about speed-pulling.

This is one of the drawbacks of PUGs being so quick and painless: lots of people want to get as many instances in as possible, and that means pulling as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, that also means that tanks are paying attention to their health, not your mana bar (even though they should be). At the beginning of the instance, talk to the tank and agree on a signal for her to look for that indicates that you need to wait before the next pull. Otherwise you’ll find yourself going in with 3k mana – and inevitably that’s when the unexpected patrol comes around the corner.

• Make sure the group knows what you’re capable of.

This is especially important for priests. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who still don’t know that Discipline is a viable healing spec and wonder what Guardian Spirit does. Tell the group at the beginning “I’m a Discipline priest – that means you’ll be seeing a lot of shielding and fast single-target heals, but not a whole lot of AOE healing. Don’t worry, I know you’re taking damage, but I have to prioritize, and you might get a shield where a Holy priest would just drop Circle of Healing.”

• Even though you’re playing with players from different servers, you can still get a reputation.

Sure, you’re now pulling from ten times as many players and it’s easier to disappear into the crowd – especially since the odds are that the players won’t be from your server and won’t be able to badmouth you there. The bad news is that there are only ten or so realms per battlegroup – and word spreads fast. Don’t be surprised to find someone else from that server saying “man, I heard you were a total bitch, I’m not running with you.” Be a good player and a good human being – it might not get you more groups, but it certainly will keep you from getting fewer. Besides which, it’s just good practice to be a good person.

• Know your limits.

This one should be obvious. If you’ve tried this fight three times and can’t keep everybody up, it might not just be that the DPS is standing in the fire. Maybe you’re having a bad night, or maybe you’re just not geared enough for the group. You need to be willing to say “I’m sorry, guys, I can’t heal this fight, you should find someone else.” It’ll cost you some badges and loot – but you can always go in later and do it when you’re better-geared or more confident.

This should, thankfully, be pretty rare because of the gear-matching system, but it happens sometimes and the Good Player way to handle it is to bow out gracefully and allow someone else to take your place.

• Explain the fights if you’ve been there before.

In an ideal world, anyone who’s been through a fight before could explain it. Sadly, we don’t live in the ideal world. The DPS are focusing on the boss and on moving out of poisons, and don’t really care what the healer or other DPS are doing – and are paying attention to the tank roughly enough to make sure she’s still at the top of the threat meter. The tank is mainly worried about maintaining threat and the state of her own health bar. As the healer, you’re the one who’s standing back, paying attention to positioning (so you know when people are out of range and when someone’s about to step in a puddle. More than any other role, it’s the healer who’s concerned about everybody else’s tactics, and who has a broad perspective on the fight (literally – we need to be able to see everyone to hit them with heals). So if you’ve done the fight before, offer to explain it. Give suggestions if you can, and offer unique abilities that you have that can give the group an advantage (“Everyone stay within 20 yards of the tank so I can Mass Dispel the freeze effect” on Keristrasza, for example).

• Don’t be afraid to roll Need on upgrades.

There is a feeling among some healers – myself included – that we don’t really contribute as much to fights as everybody else. The elephant in the room here is damage meters – a lot of players believe that contribution to a fight is judged based on a player’s position on the damage meter, and since healers are almost universally at the bottom of the list, there’s a certain feeling that you’re not really contributing, and therefore don’t deserve as much of the loot. This feeling is amplified among strangers, since – as above – you want to be a good person, and you don’t want to get a bad rep.

I’ll put it plainly: that feeling needs to go away. You are contributing to the fight by keeping health bars up. If you weren’t there, the DPS wouldn’t be able to bring the boss down before the boss killed them. If you weren’t there, the tank would last about five seconds. You are just as much a part of the fight as anyone else, and you’re just as entitled to the spoils.

Even if the tank insists on referring to you as “healer” throughout the run. (Seriously, not even “priest”? You can’t even be bothered to figure out what class is healing you?)

Any others I’ve missed? Leave a comment!

• Recount and other damage meters are broken. It’s easy to understand, but almost impossible to fix:
  • Damage meters use custom chat channels to communicate damage among players in the group/raid.
  • If a player can’t participate in the custom chat channel, other players’ damage meters will only record damage if they’re within 5-10 yards.
  • Custom chat channels don’t work cross-server.
  • Therefore, if you’re more than 10 yards from a player from another server, you’re not getting their damage correctly.

  Seriously, I’ve seen Recount come up more than 3,000 DPS short for some players from other servers, just because I was healing (back with the ranged DPS) and they were meleeing.

• Roll Need on Frozen Orbs unless you truly don’t care who gets it. Stop thinking about “Need” as meaning “I need this for X specific purpose”, and start thinking about it as meaning “the highest priority in this loot system”. Rolling Need is the only way to distribute that Frozen Orbs are distributed evenly among group members. If you truly don’t care who gets it, roll Greed or pass – but then you don’t get to complain when someone else rolls Need, because it doesn’t matter to you, right?
• EDIT: Reader protomech confirms that BOP items can be traded cross-server! Thank you! Can someone confirm whether BOP items can be traded to a player from another server, if they were eligible to loot the item and you’re within the two-hour trade window.? I’ve received comments going both ways and I’d like to know.

• Brewfest has been extended by two days, until 11:59 PM server time on October 5. This is not a permanent extension to the holiday, just to this year’s event.
• The preview content for patch 3.3 is Icecrown Citadel: The Frozen Halls, a new series of five-player instances that focus on Jaina Proudmoore and Sylvanas Windrunner leading players into a back entrance of Icecrown Citadel while Arthas is engaged at the main gates.

Want to really get good at healing? Find a group in their low 70s, strip naked, and heal Nexus. (Consider offering to pay their repair bills to assuage their fears and really put the pressure on you.) Oh, use your highest-ranked spells – you don’t get any benefit from downranking anymore. But other than that, don’t give yourself any buffs, don’t eat any food, don’t wear anything that gives you any primary or secondary stats. (I have a Frayed set from the human starting area, plus a white Quarterstaff from the vendor in Stormwind.)

When you’ve shown that you can heal Nexus without any benefits from gear, food, or other buffs, move up. Heal Azjol-Nerub naked. Then Old Kingdom or Drak’Tharon Keep. Continue onward. If you reach a point where you truly can’t move on, find the minimum you can do it with. If you find that you can successfully heal Utgarde Pinnacle, start over with heroic Nexus. Again, keep going until you can’t anymore.

Find your minimum for each instance. Keep figuring out new ways to lower that minimum.

If you really think you’re up to it, try healing 10-man Naxx in the buff.

Then, when you actually put all your gear back on and go heal Naxxramas or Obsidian Sanctum or Eye of Eternity, bask in the pure luxury of all that mana, all that spellpower, all that crit and haste and regeneration, and stick to the habits you’ve ingrained from instance after instance of having to be as efficient, adaptive, and free-thinking as possible.

(As a side benefit, you’ll discover that you’re more likely, when gear for you drops in a raid, to say “…do I really need to spend the DKP on that?”.)

Originally posted on Lost in Translation on 9/21/08.

Tonight we concluded our second Karazhan run. We took everyone but Shade of Aran and Prince Malchezzar in one shot, and took two tries on each of them – and then were stymied, for tactical reasons, on Nightbane.

However, Theande’s now wearing the Mender’s Heart-Ring and the Light-Collar of the Incarnate, the latter of which is her first piece of Tier 4 gear.

Who knew it was this much fun to raid?

Originally posted here on 9/12/08.

I just ran Karazhan for the first time with my Drenden guild.

Holy crap, that was fun.

And not just because I got nine Badges of Justice and the Masquerade Gown I wanted.