After healing a VoA 10 on my disc priest – I realized that there are some things we as tanks don’t see from the healing perspective [or even the dps perspective]. We succeeded marvelously with a pug group. The tanks – a paladin and a dk – who reminded me so much of my husband and I, it wasn’t funny.
1. Fire is bad – whether it’s blue, red, orange, pink, or polka dotted. Fire is bad. Healers can on occasion heal someone through it, but seriously, don’t count on it. It makes healers mad and mad healers = no more heals for you!
2. Healers are human [even if they’re another race :P]. We screw up. We heal a second early or a second late on occasion. It’s an art form – much like knowing how to pop cooldowns in your tanking and it requires a certain combination of experience, knowledge, skill and some luck. It requires anticipating damage – for example a paladin will take steady damage where a death knight is more bursty in what they get.
3. All healers heal differently. Druids are all about the hots. Disc priests are about bubbles and preventing damage. If your group is succeeding, don’t fuss because the disc priest is low on the meters – or know enough about them to know it’s normal [as the RL did in this case]. I have seen so many disc priests lately saying they keep getting kicked from groups for being low on the meters and they’re considering respeccing as a result. To them I say, if you want to be disc – BE DISC. Don’t let some jerks who don’t want to even gain a basic understanding of other classes and specs push you out of your favorite spec! The healing lead in our guild atm would KILL for a raiding disc priest simply because of the flat 3% damage reduction you bring!
4. As a tank – if I die and I can’t immediately figure out what happened, I will ask my healer [and consult my combat log]- “What happened?”. Sometimes stuff happens – seriously. I get out of range and they get punted the other direction. Just ask. Sometimes it’s you, sometimes it’s them, sometimes it’s just plain bad luck. The point is NOT to blame the healer or anyone else but to find out the problem, correct it and move on. I’ve gotten the response from my healer in a whisper “I screwed up, I’m sorry.” Okay, thats good, let’s move on and get it done! We’re all in it together and hey, it really is a game. Deaths I don’t mind on occasion. What I hate is repeated stupid deaths making the same mistakes.
I may to have more to add later, but eh, this is what I had on my mind. Feel free to respond and add to it if you’re a healer!
You Yank It, You Tank it: Blog of a Tanking Death Knight Lady 
I hate healing meters period, hell i hate DPS meters. As a Paladin healer we often top the over healing charts because we have to spam our heals due to slow cast times. I’ve recently been trying to be more efficient. This has had the side effect of me being lower on overall healing charts but people don’t die on my watch.
So go by the meters and boot me. See if I care. The people that know me know there is always a good reason when someone dies on me and rarely is it ever because I suck.
As a disc priest, I approve of this post. 🙂
The only other thing that I would add is an issue that I’ve come up with periodically on my server. We seem to have quite a few disc priests around of late, and I’ve ended up with another disc priest in a 10-man raid several times. If I see another priest, I know to ask them what spec they are, but most non-healers don’t. And this has caused problems when we’ve ended up in VoA 10-man, for example, with 2 disc priests and no other healers. I ended up having to drop the raid so that they could get a druid or raid healer in the group.
The problem isn’t that disc priests are bad healers – we are second to none (in my opinion) at keeping the tanks up and stopping most damage before it happens. But raid leaders who are putting PUGs together need to educate themselves about the different types of healers and build their raids accordingly. Healers really aren’t cookie cutters, and just as you would want an equal balance of melee and ranged dps, you really should have an equal balance of raid and tank healing if at all possible.
All of my additional advice could be summed up as: FFS, DON’T RUN AWAY FROM YOUR HEALERS.
Fantastic post 🙂
I really hate players who are simply too lazy to move out of death; honest mistakes I can handle but there seems to be a certain type of player who believes it is the healer’s duty to heal them through crap.
I PUGed heroic Gundrak yesterday … and grr … the group drove me mad. As we took the first boss, I did my usual “remember to run away from the poison nova” and did they? Did they bollocks. Afterwards, I said “for future references, please try to move out of the poison nova, it does a lot of damage.” And somebody piped up with: “yeah, but you healed through it.” Grrr! Not the point.
Also I have been massively attracted to disc for, well, ages and I keep getting temped to respec but I’ll miss the flexibility of holy.
And words cannot express how much I hate healing metres. Grr!
Amen!
When I first started playing the game, I loved my dps meters. I felt accomplished when I was doing x amount of dmg, etc.
Once I shifted to raid tanking, I abhorred dps meters and people constantly asking for the meters to be posted. Though I would have WWS at the end of the night for raid analysis of everything, not just the damage.
Now I semi-raid heal, nothing major mostly 10 man pugs for OS or VoA, I’m amazed at the number of healers that have been asking for healing meters. If half the raid died but the boss still was downed, then honestly that’s not too bad for a pug.
It’s all about getting the kill, not stroking your ego with topping charts.
As a resto shaman I really don’t want to see the meters, especially overhealing. They just make a me cry a little. But I keep people alive, I provide my totems, bloodlust, and lots of physical damage reduction from my crits.
Stop asking for meters, just play the game, stay out of the freaking fire already, and get that next boss down.
A very nice post 🙂 It’s not so bad for me now, but when WOTLK first came out there were plenty of people who didn’t understand disc or that it would be low on meters. Even now when people say about being top on meters it is a little bit depressing as a disc priest because I know I’ll never be up there. However, our guild tanks do love me for my cds and damage reduction 🙂
I just wanted to also say thanks for highlighting the need for tanks and their healers to communicate. It’s something that is very important especially when you start doing hardmodes. It takes a combination of healers, dps and tanks talking to find the right way to down a boss. A lot of wow players seem to forget that.
It’s hard not to get depressed when I see where I am on the healing meters sometimes. I see shammies and priests over me and go “Why can’t I be that leet?” but I try (really hard!) not to get to worked up about meters. So long as people are not dying, bosses are dying and loot is being gotten, I can’t complain too much.
But one piece of advice. Line of sight. Do not get out of it. Stairs present problems, very often. Like in VH or ICC even. Tanks (and DPS) sometimes don’t seem to be aware of their positioning when it comes to being not only in range, but in line of sight.
Wait for mana, don’t just gogogogogogo. I may have alot of mana, but it does run low sometimes.
It’s already been said, but do not stand in the fire. Fire in this case means poison, goo, bombs, void zones, or…actual fire. It’s tough to heal through, sometimes impossible. Please move. Please.