The usual way of doing things in a 25 man raid where there are two Holy Pallys is that healer 1 heals tank 1 and beacons tank 2, and vis versa.
I have a real problem with this however. (If you are looking for one of my usual rants that is rarely about healing, and very rarely indeed about the specifics of Pally healing in a raid environment, now is about the time you may want to stop before your eyes glaze over).
As a Pally healer, especially one with the standard Int-stacking HL build, the usual role is to keep a tank up. In certain circumstances you may be keeping two tanks up courtesy of Beacon, but the single tank (even if that tank is switching as debuffs are applied) is still the bread and butter of most Holy Pally healing in a raid.
Due to the various fight mechanics, this often leads to periods of time where you are casting Flash on random raid members to keep the tank topped off. Given a chance I will *always* beacon 'my' tank, as this gives me the ability to help raid heal and still keep my tank up.
Yes, I know that this crosses into the grey area of heal-sniping and cross assignment healing, but I don't raid in a hardcore environment, I raid in a smallish guild and in PuG runs. By and large in those raids, there is one and one only measure of success: Did the boss go down, End of Story. Noone is going to micro analyse the raids, the logs and anything else and yell at me because I sniped the tree a couple of HoTs, they are going to ask whether the job was done.
With this in mind, if I can help heal a raid member when it isn't my assignment, without my tank dying, then I will do it. I will actively do it to help the other healers. If I can cleanse, if I can heal, and that makes another healers job easier, awesome. I am not worried about healing meters as long as everyone is pulling their weight to the best of their gear and ability. If a Druid has a few spare GCDs and HoTs up my tank, I will thank them fervently.
Of course there are times when tanks get huge damage, when they need full and total concentration from a dedicated healer and the damage to the raid is something I can do nothing about, but when they don't, particularly when there is a lot of damage going around, why should I stand there tossing the occasional FoL onto a tank rather than dropping HL bombs onto raid members? If I don't go OOM and the tank lives, WHO CARES?
This means that for me, I would rather beacon my own tank. I will heal the second tank, the raid or whoever if I can, with the end aim of keeping my tank up, but if my tank is beaconed, I know they get the full benefit of any heal cast on the raid. I don;t have to worry about healing ONLY my tank. So please, kind RL's, let me Beacon the heck who I want. I do know what I'm doing. Really.
lol, I face the exact same issue, Saunder. I usually end up beaconing whoever I want anyway and just making sure both tanks stay up at all times. I don't really understand why people assign Beacon like that. It really doesn't matter if both tanks Beacon the same person, they'll both still get the exact same number of heals assuming neither paladin is raid healing. Maybe they have us Beacon different targets so that we can both raid heal without neglecting one of the tanks.
ReplyDeleteThe better question to me though is who is going to Sacred Shield each tank? I've seen plenty of times where multiple Holy Paladins are using Sacred Shield on the same person and that's just a waste of both the shield and all of our HoTs.
I completely agree here. 110%. Unfortunately, to produce a conducive raid enviroment and to not grind everyones gears, if I get told to beacon one tank and raid heal, I do it.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I'm usually the only Holy Pally in the group, until just recently when one of the older members came off the inactive list and joined back into raids. How it's been working is our healing lead will give us our Beacon target, as well as our healing target. I throw my Beacon on who I'm told, and I'll usually just heal whoever has aggro at that point in time. But if my Beacon target is the one with Aggro, I'm all over raid heals. Was I told to do this? No. Does anyone care? So long as the tanks are up, nope. You're quite right, we're amazing tank healers, and that's where we should be. But, the nature of the beast makes us decent raid healers in a pinch. I know when the stuff hits the fan, I can throw out 5-7k FoL's almost every second to people who need it, all while healing my tank.
All in all, so long as you're being told to Beacon a tank, there shouldn't be anything to worry about.
-Sady
I agree, I've been assigned a healing responsibility and then told, offhandedly, to Beacon someone else. I was like whatever, so I did, but later switched to just beaconing him because it just works better. I think I can be the judge of how to optimize my own heals, but hey.
ReplyDeleteI'd add the only downside I've noticed with this otherwise much more intuitive approach is the occasional case of HLing a dps only to have him go out of range unexpectedly (maybe he's running away because he has some nasty aoe debugg) and then being left hanging with no heals on the tank.
We had some drama within our guild a couple of weeks ago when another holy paladin told me what to do with my Beacon. In response I told him what he could do with his...
ReplyDeleteAnyways, long story short, it's far better to Beacon as you have - per encounter, per raid composition, etc. We used to use the old method, I'm assigned to tank A and must Beacon tank B. It's limiting and frustrating, and I'm so glad we broke free from that model. When I'm allowed to Beacon as I please, I am given the flexibility to offer a lot more to my raid than just Holy Light.
Thanks for posting!