7 Ways to Improve Your Guilds Healing

"Healers, what happened?"  We've all said or heard those words before, either to ourselves, or actually to our healers.  It's a common question when something goes wrong.  One by one, little by little, your raiders are dropping.  It just seems like your healers can't keep up.  You have the proper amount of healers, they are all properly geared, specced, and enchanted.  They are all skilled players.  Your just at a loss of what to do.  How DO you improve your guilds healing?  Well, fear not citizens, for I have 7 sure fire ways to improve your guilds healing.

Thoughts on firelands

So, now that firelands has been out for a while now, it's time to sit down and do some good old ranting and raving.  Overall, I think it's a pretty good raid instance.  But, it's not without it's flaws either.  First and foremost on my bitch list, is the lack of cloth spirit gear.  The majority of my gear upgrades will come from the vendor.  And that bothers me more than just  a little.  That, and the fact I'm going to be losing a ton of spirit over the course of the patch.  I don't really need spirit on every piece, but having the option there would be nice.  It probably won't be much of an issue, as I'd probably go for some of those pieces without spirit anyways since I've reforged out of spirit on several pieces already.  I can't help but think however that this was done intentionally to nerf priests regen.  I can't honestly say that it wouldn't be eventually needed as i haven't had mana issues since early on in heroic t11, but I do wish they'd just come out and say it. 


The instance is gorgeous.  I really like it.  It just feels epic when you go in, with enemies literally everywhere, in a huge fire land.  Even the trash is fun and engaging.  Although, I wish they hadn't nerfed it so much.  It wasn't that difficult.  My favorite trash mob however, has got to be the turtles.  Even

Shannox Strategy Complete Guide

So, you've got your raid together, and are head into the Firelands, but now what?  Well, likely your first intended target will be Shannox, the simplest of the boss fights in the Firelands. You'll notice some trash as you enter, so go ahead and clear to the bottom of the path.  You'll also notice that there are several routes you can take through the instance, but Shannox will be to your right.


A standard raid setup of 2 tanks, and 6-7 healers (2-3 if 10m) should suffice.


The first thing you'll need to do is spawn Shannox, as he is not immediately available.  Start clearing some trash in the open area to your right, this is where you will fight Shannox.  Be sure to clear enough trash to give your raid plenty of room to do the encounter without pulling other groups.  Once you have cleared enough trash, Shannox will spawn and begin pathing around the area.  If you are not ready to pull just yet, just make sure you're out of aggro range when he comes by.  It takes a bit for him to path all the way back around again, which is pretty annoying, but whatever. 

Healing broke wow....and fixed it.

So, I was reading a post over on Root and Branch, entitled Enabling Failure, and it brought to mind a lot of discussions I had with other players during the beta and shortly after the launch of cataclysm.  It really is a drastic change in playstyle from 80-85.  I remember at level 80, I was a demi-god in wow.  I was nigh unstoppable.  There were very few mechanics that couldn't simply be brute force healed through.  Especially in the heroic dungeons, previous tier raids, and early bosses in icc. 


It felt great being so powerful.  A good healer could heal anyone through nearly anything.  In reality though, there was very little skill involved in this kind of healing.  It was really just a matter of having decent gear and pressing your buttons in a timely manner.  But, the near god-like status of healers had some very bad side effects on the general wow population. 


First, it took away nearly all accountability from an individual for their actions in a group, and transferred that responsibility to the healer.  Over the course of the two years of wrath the "healers that could do anything" bred a new breed of wow player.  The wrath baby.  And I mean that in the bad way, not just someone who started playing in wrath.  (I started playing in wrath btw.)  These are the guys you met up with in your randoms, that never moved from any type of damage whatsoever.  It was the mage who went entire dungeon runs  and cast only blizzard.  The guy in your icc run, who had good gear, and the appropriate achievements, but had no idea what he was doing and had no clue what the bosses did.  He just ran up to the boss and smashed his face on the keyboard until the purples dropped. 


We've all seen that guy.  We've all been in a dungeon run or raid with him.  And, I'm willing to bet, damn near every last one of us, just healed him through it.  It made us look better

Healing Shannox

Shannox is a fairly straightforward encounter as far as healing goes.  Most of the raid damage is avoidable, with the exception of Rageface.  Ideally, you will want to have at least 1 healer dedicated to each tank, and 1 to heal ragefaces target.  If running a 10 man, the healer on the offtank and Rageface's target will handle the raid healing. 




The healers should be spread out a bit, with the MT healer closer to the front of the room, OT healer closer to the back, and the Rageface healer in the middle.  The tank healers will need to be mindful of the stacks of Jagged Tear on their tank.  The more stacks they have, the higher the healing requirements will be.  Ensure you have these debuffs added to your raid frames if you use custom ones. 

So, I finally sat down and beat....

Ninja Gaiden.  The game has been sitting in my xbox inventory collecting dust for years.  I literally hadn't popped it in in well over a year.  But, I had some free time this weekend, taking some time off from wow, and sat down and finally beat it.  And, I have come to the shining conclusion, that even after all this time, that game is still fricking hard. 


I spent the better part of my weekend banging my head against one of the most difficult games in recent memory.  But, something I noticed about it, is that there were really only a couple of diffucult boss fights.  Most of the difficulties I encountered were not in the bosses themselves, but in the plethora of baddies between the bosses.  And, if I happened to die, the amount of the game I had to

Ask the devs: Healing

Q: I spend a lot of my time in raids keeping Water Shield up, which I rely on to maintain enough mana. There have been times I've neglected to heal someone because I had to refresh Water Shield. Why are shaman healers less effective compared to other healing classes? – Epistemology (NA), Ерз (EU-RU)

A: We’d like to be more consistent about what does and doesn’t trigger Water Shield. Having the shield trigger when taking direct damage, and consume an orb, is consistent with how all shaman shields work. On some encounters though, constant pulsing damage probably burns through those charges too quickly and doesn’t need to do so – that said, if you’re having to refresh Water Shield often, that also generally means that you’re getting a large amount of extra mana from all those procs that are burning through it. A situational glyph (like we have for Lightning Shield) could help with this issue, and that may be something we consider in the future.