06-03-2008, 09:25 PM
Quote:I think this is the correct strategy. Healers, if they're skilled, don't really need synergies to perform their tasks well. This is especially true since the regen buff. About the only benefit would be wrath of air and really that's much better on the casters anyway.
You get overgeared DPS (who know what they're doing) and you can completely trivialize some encounters (Kael, Kaz'rogal, Gruul, actually most encounters just because there's less time to make mistakes).
You get overgeared tanking and you can trivialize certain gib fights (Tidewalker, Prince)
You get way overgeared healers and you can trivialize nothing. Healers gear doesn't tend to make or break fights. All the healers have had MP5 buffs over when BT and Hyjal were released (especially priests and druids, but others have received buffs as well). I can't speak to Sunwell, but it just seems like healers don't need raid synergies. What synergies even exist? Shadow priests? We don't even use innervates. Wrath of air? small and not signifiacnt compared with DPS. Moonkin aura? lol.
Concentration aura is about the only buff that healers can use, and that can be accomodated rather easily since a healing pally is usually not necessary in any one group anyway.
We got our first Brutallus kill this week. He hits hard. Very very hard. If you're familiar with Gurtogg Bloodboil, imagine Fel Rage for 6 minutes straight. I'm spending at least a third of the fight spamming Greater Heal 7.
Because the DPS is stretching themselves to the limit to beat his enrage timer (we hit the enrage when he was at 2% health on our kill, and managed to finish him off before he one-shot his way through the raid), most of the healers get absolutely nothing in terms of synergy support (not even a resto druid). The end result was that the other holy priest and the main tank healing paladin were going OOM by the end of the fight (I had fewer problems only due to the Avatar 2pc bonus and the Blue Dragon card). The priest had to get an innervate, and we had to hot swap a shaman mid-fight for mana tide.
The caveat to Bolty's statement that more DPS is always better is that your healing team has to keep that DPS alive. If players die early, you've negated the benefit of sacrificing healers and healer synergies for DPS.
As for what synergies help healers: Concentration Aura in some fights. After that, its mostly mana (mana spring, mana tide, vampiric touch). Bonuses to healing from synergies are usually a pretty small proportion of the overall healing, and simply switching to a higher rank of spell is the most frequent way of increasing heal through-put.
My raid leader is usually receptive to giving healers support when they feel they need it. In return, I try not to ask for a resto shaman or shadow priest unless I think its essential.
Our DPS does like to have frequent arguments about who should go where though. One of our Shadow Priests wants to be in a group where most of the other members have Drums of Battle. We had a long discussion about the place to put the Ret Paladin for Brutallus. Does he go in the Windfury group, or does the third rogue? (The Ret Paladin lost that day).
Chris