Monday, February 20, 2006

Raid healing

I reported below that my priest went on his first raids. Now healing in a raid is more difficult than healing in a group. You have to watch more possible targets for your healing, and there is the possibility of interference with the heals of other healers in the raid. So while I still refuse auto-healing bots, I did use CTRaidAssist.

The standard WoW interface has the option to turn off the display of your group members portraits and health / mana bars when in raid mode. So I put the much smaller display of all 15 members of the UBRS raid I was in into that corner, and could easily see with one glance who needed healing. I haven't got a clue how that is going to work with raids of 40 people, I'll have to ask the more experienced raid healers in our guild.

The other functionality of CTRaidAssist I used was the "mana conserve" options. This prevents you healing people that just got healed by somebody else. You set a time, for example half a second, and a minimum value for your large and small heals. And if at this half second before your spell would fire off your target has less missing health than the minimum values you set, your spell gets interrupted and you save the mana.

Being priest in a raid is nice, because it is a bit more egalitarian than warrior. Among the warriors there can be only one "main tank", but there is no such thing as a "main healer", although you obviously can assign different responsibilities. But I still enjoy 5-man groups more, where everybody has an important and visible role to play. In a 40-man raid you sometimes just feel like a lemming, or a very small cog in a big machine.

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