being official

The last couple of weeks have been strange ones. In WoW, the healing officer in our guild quit the game for some real-life complications, and nominated me to replace him. So, I'm the healing officer of Colorful Metaphor.

I've already failed:

We were short one of my core healers the other night when we were trying to do Valithria 25. I could feel the difference through the first wing, but when we got to Valithria I realized we only had two players who knew how to do the orbs. I asked a shaman to do the orbs (he'd taken a long break and had never been past the first wing. Also, he was a DPS with a healing offset that is healing to fill in the gap of our leaving tree), but I neglected to mention ANY of the important information on how to do the fight. The ready check came up, people stamped their feet and I hastily whispered the shaman to take a portal and do his best! Needless to say, he didn't know he had to go into every portal each time, and I never even made it clear that Valithria was his healing assignment.

Anyways, despite my spectacular fail leadership we still made it through the encounter. We talked about it in vent and I apologized. I made it clear that it was my organizational ineptitude. I'm going to ask that the shaman go up again next week (hopefully he'll watch the video, and I'll make the time to give him better explanations!). We could probably do it with three healers, but I'd prefer that we get more players who know how to do it. I guess I should be thinking of these kinds of things, now.

Raid Healing Vs. Tank Healing

Doing assignments for the guild hasn't changed, because our RL has a beautifully simple mantra for our raid compositions. "Do what you did last week." When a fight is on farm, I don't fuss on assignments. We do what we always do. I'm not interested in "changing anything up" because they way we are doing things works (when we have the A Team, of course. We're suffering from the last-tier problem of full attendance for farm content and calling the raids for attendance problems the other nights).

Although, in all honesty, I have given a little bit of thought in diversifying but not because we need change. The incident with Valithria made me realize just how difficult a fight can potentially be when the one person who performs a specialized role is gone. I've debated switching up assignments this week in the first wing - having more healers experiencing different aspects of a fight.

We did have a problem with Festergut a few weeks ago with the DPS on the outside dying more frequently than they should have. I realized the crux of the issue when I did ICC10 as my resto druid - many aoe heals land localized in the group stacked up on the boss - Wild Growth, Chain Heal, and Circle of Healing, all smart target the player who needs the heal. None of these splash heals make it out to the ranged on the outside (who are spread out 12+ yards to avoid sharing the puke). The ranged DPS on the outside need direct heals or targeted hots/shields, and more of them to compensate for not getting splashed.

I would have never thought of this myself had I only played my paladin. I had to bring a different character/perspective to the fight to understand it. If we run into problems again with Festergut, I have a better idea of what's happening, and what I can do to help.