Healing in Raids

[Bolty]

Since I have to ninja-heal my own group so frequently lately just to be able to do something, it's become more of a contest just to see if I can actually get in heals before a bored priest does it for me so lots of mana is wasted or else I'm bored to tears and stop caring about healing at all.[right][snapback]83476[/snapback][/right]

And I can't help but wonder if this is a side effect of CombatStats. Good ol' ranking the healers based on amount of health healed, and people actually thinking that matters for something. Be #1 on the healing chart by healing the whole raid! Who cares if it's mana inefficient and may lead to a wipe?

I doubt this applies to Lurker groups, but one never knows. I would suspect, however, that if this occurs in pubbie groups it's because the healer(s) want to top the healing charts and think of themselves as the "best" healer in the group. You would be SHOCKED to hear of how some players think that their CombatStats directly shows that they are better or worse than other players. I play a lot of pubbie groups because I find them interesting in a masochistic kind of way, and I've seen it quite a bit.

Running the Scarlet Monastery last weekend with my level 40 Frost Mage, we were happily slamming things about with a group of 2 Druids and 2 Hunters. One of them put up a CombatStats report in partychat that showed I was the runaway leader in damage dealt (duh, I'm a Mage, pure DPS Monkey), and one of the Hunters got really, really mad about it - and a mini-fight broke out where he was accusing me of "running up my score" by not bothering to sheep anything.

This was extremely hilarious on my end because I gave up sheeping a while back after my first TWELVE attempts in fights to remove adds via sheep were all broken by the other players (common in pick-up groups). But the point was that this Hunter's ego was actually hurt because he wasn't #1 in CombatStats. Some people in pickup groups take that VERY seriously!

For Lurker groups, it was probably the situation that there were simply more healers than were necessary, so the healers get bored, so they wind up healing outside their group just to have something to do. When this situation is encountered, some communication should be given and some of the healers can turn over to DPS mode. When you think about it, it's also just as inefficient to have extra healers around doing nothing as it is to overheal/doubleheal party members. Any Priests that are shadow-speced and Druids can then turn into damage dealers and help drive through the content faster - if Things Go Wrong™, they can always switch out of damage dealing mid-fight and step up for some healing love.

In Lurker groups, I would assume that people would know better than to use CombatStats to evaluate the "effectiveness" of healers, and base it more on the value added to the party - do the heals come when they're actually needed? Does the healer keep the party alive and get them out of nasty jams? Does the healer do his/her best to not become a liability to the party by staying low in the aggro list? Etc.

-Bolty