So, you've entered the firelands, you're buffed up, feasted up, and read up. Now what? How do you assign the healers? Are healing assignments necessary? Depending on the gear level and skill of your raid, and whether it's 10 or 25 man, normal or heroic, the answer will change. But most likely you will want at least some sort of general assignments going out to ensure that all the relevant people are getting healed in an efficient and timely manner.
So, how do you do this? Firstly, if you're the one in charge of setting the assignments, you must familiarize yourself with both the strengths and weaknesses of the different healing classes, and the strengths and weaknesses of your individual healers. When doling out assignments, do your best to assign people to areas that maximize their strengths, and minimize their weaknesses. You likely would not want to put a paladin on aoe heal duty with the holy priest healing the tanks. Sure, it can be done, but it would be far more effective if it was the other way around.
Now that you've done this, you need to familiarize yourself with the types of damage to expect. And how much of it is going out and how often. If raid damage is light, but tank damage is consistently high, you may want to assign more healers to the tanks for instance. Or, if an extra healers isn't needed, i.e. your current tank healers has it under control, you may consider dropping a healer for another dps. Good dps means a shorter boss fight, which in turn leads to less healing. And the best type of mana regen, is good dps.
Now that you know what kind of damage to expect, start thinking of the best ways to deal with it. Paladins excel at healing large bursts of single target damage, and are weak at healing bursts of aoe damage. This is why they are generally assigned to tank healing. But a paladin can also be assigned to deal with mechanics where random individuals take large amounts of damage, and with beacon, they can still heal the tank as well. Shaman are good all around healers with lots of utility. They excel when large groups are clumped in the same spot, and with their mastery, when there are periods when these clumped people are all at low health. Shaman are also decent tank healers and can do a decent amount of aoe healing at the same time with healing rain and chain healing through the tank. Priests are the most versatile healing class, excelling in healing large bursts of aoe damage. Discipline priests have the ability to absorb large amounts of incoming damage, and also have competitive single target throughput. They are a good tank support healer, and very good at dealing with large bursts of predictable aoe damage. And finally, druids are the heal over time masters. They are the ultimate raid toppers. During periods of aoe damage, they don't get the healing done as quickly as other classes, but usually by the end, they have done as much, if not more overall healing than the other classes. They are also strong tank healers when geared and specced properly.
Use priests and shaman to deal with aoe burst, and druids to keep a constant stream of strong heal over time spells on the raid to stabilize health, and paladins to deal with bursts of single target damage. Shaman are generally better to assign to melee targets due to the radius of healing rain and chain heal, but if ranged are clumped up, they can be effective there as well. Priests and druids generally do better on the ranged targets since they tend to be more spread out. With priest raid healers, make sure to set up the groups so that as many people in a single group as possible are in the same general area, as prayer of healing is only group wide with the range coming from the person it is casted on. Get the most out of it.
Now that you know all this, you are ready to make your healing assignments. Depending on the difficulty of the fight, and how many healers you are taking, you may use a general healing assignment, or a more rigid one. General healing assignments are good for fights you have on farm, are not particulary difficult, or you have plenty of healers for the fight. More rigid healing assignments are good for fights where you don't take a lot of healers. When you don't have many healers, efficiency and coordination are key. Overhealing and healing overlap suddenly become a larger issue. The best way to deal with this, is to assign your raid healers to certain groups of people.
An example of more rigid healing assignments, for our heroic cho'gall kill, we took only 5 healers. If you're familiar with the fight, you know that the healing demands for this fight are very rigorous. We took 2 holy paladins, 1 resto shaman, 1 holy priest, and 1 disc priest. The two paladins were assigned to the tanks. The shaman was responsible for the melee group (groups 1-2) killing the adds. And the holy priest was assigned to heal the ranged groups, 3-5. And the disc priest was responsible for our 3 fully corrupted mages, tank support, and single target healing low health individuals. In phase 2, he assisted the shaman and holy priest with general raid healing through pws spam and prayer of healing. Each healer was assigned a group to dispel the corruption debuff.
For more general healing assignments, you can simply assign the appropriate number of healers to certain tanks, and assign the rest of the healers to general raid duty. This method tends to create a lot of overlapping healing and a lot of overhealing. So, generally, it is more inefficient, and can lead to mana problems as well. The major flaw with this setup is that it tricks you into thinking you don't have enough healers at times. People are dying because the healers are oom, so that means you need more healers to deal with the damage right? Well, not necessarily. Check your overhealing for the fight. If overhealing in general is over about 25-30%, it means your healers are healing more than is needed. If you coordinate your heals better, and reduce those overhealing numbers by eliminating cross healing, you're healers will have more mana at the end.
Anyhow, this post is long enough, I hope you found it helpful.
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