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Tanks, please be patient between fights for mana regen
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Post by
candylandish
Hi, I'm your friendly neighborhood level 48 heal priest.
Something I've started noticing, over the last ten levels or so of playing through dungeons with pug groups, is that in between combats I've come to dread sitting there drinking water, watching my mana bar slowly fill up and wondering whether the tank will let me mostly fill up or will decide that I've had enough at half full and charge into the next fight. Of course once they attack, they're going to start taking damage, and often I won't even be in healing range. Now I'm in a situation where I'm sipping my water and trying to judge when I need to stop drinking in order to join the fight and provide heals. In my experience as a casual leveler who likes grinding dungeons for exp,
very
frequently I don't have time to fully regenerate my mana before I have to give up and start healing. I'd say that with many tanks this tail part of my mana bar that I don't get a chance to fill is wasted firepower and it makes no sense to leave it so often empty. It cripples my ability to heal in an emergency. Please, tanks, try not let this happen! I understand how it can make sense to attack a bit early while the casters finish drinking, using up easily-replaced health while healers finish drinking and ensuring you have solid aggro while the caster DPS finish drinking, but, please, if you go so early that healers are consistently unable to finish regenerating mana and have to abort early to keep you alive, you're overdoing it!
From the healer's perspective, whatever you do when the tank runs out too early, he's created out of whole cloth two brand new outcomes to the fight that both make you look like an ass:
1.
You take too long
regenerating mana and someone dies because they were taking damage and you didn't get there in time to deliver sufficient heals to save them. They're annoyed because you sat there sipping water when you were supposed to be healing them.
2.
You don't take long enough
regenerating mana and someone dies because you OOM during the fight. They're annoyed because they were counting on you to keep them alive and you messed it up.
What makes this really annoying is that it can put the healer in an unfair position when they're there, sipping their water, watching the combat closely, trying to gauge when they should stop drinking and start healing. As a healer you expect to let the tank's health drop to some extent but, because all priest healing spells take time to cast, and the incoming damage from a crowd of enemies is fundamentally unpredictable, you can't sip your water too long and let their health get too low before you start to cast a heal. On the other hand, we've all seen an extra two or three heals worth of mana in an tough spot save the whole group from a wipe, so you want to wait as long as you can in order to regen as much mana as possible before entering combat and you're no longer able to use water.
So it's a judgment call depending on the situation, but always you can't allow the tank's HP to get dangerously low, below some margin of safety, in order to regen additional mana for future healing. This sense of a margin of safety isn't ironclad; you could imagine in most cases a clump of 5 or 6 creatures randomly using attacks and abilities of varying effectiveness and overall producing little damage, but if by chance they buffed each other and debuffed their target and then repeatedly used only their most powerful attack, they would suddenly output a completely overwhelming amount of damage. So we have to be content with setting the margin of safety based on a fuzzy idea of the approximate risk of unexpectedly high damage bursting down the tank before you have time to run over and fully cast a heal spell.
If he only did this once you'd be able to still mostly do your job of using your heals to protect the party from the risk of a wipe, but because the habitually-rushing tank is
repeatedly
forcing you to make this calculated gamble with the party's lives, the risk with our initial one-off margin of safety increases exponentially. By way of example, if in a single one-off instance you were comfortable with letting his HP get low enough that there was a 90% chance of him surviving the mobs' damage output, and you wanted to maintain the same level of acceptable risk to the party over an entire instance of him forcing you to make this gamble 30 separate times, you'd need to keep his HP high enough, every single time, to be 99.9999999999999999999999999999% sure that he would survive anything the mobs could throw at him. Obviously in-game you don't have a preference for a specific survival probability number but the relative scale of the compounded risk should be clear. At the same time that the repeat nature of the behavior reduces the amount of HP you can permit the tank to lose before you should run out to be ready with heals, the very fact that you're running out so early leaves less and less spare mana to spend on healing throughout the battle. Your party is not likely to survive the fight without heals, so we also need a safety margin for minimum mana we'll accept before entering combat. But this is impossible to satisfy simultaneously with the requirement to get out there sufficiently quickly.
In plain language, I'm arguing that when the tank is taking enough damage, and charging into combat early enough in your mana regen, no matter when you decide to stand up and start healing, you can't possibly deliver both prompt enough heals and sufficient enough mana. It's just intractable in this situation - you have two mutually incompatible minimum requirements and literally anything you do is equally bad. That moment is very frustrating!
I get the sense that the archetype for this type of tank is a more experienced wow player on their second or third character, who has done all the instance's quests before on another character, who wants to move through the instance quickly, and is confident enough not to play it safe in parts that aren't supposed to be hard. Because they're in the tank role, they're uniquely able to lead the way through the dungeon and initiate fights on their own, with no need to maneuver a non-leader tank into position first. My advice if this sounds like you is to consider the people you're grouping with when you find some random people and their friends in trade chat or LFG to knock out a dungeon. We're not necessarily very familiar with the instance, we're probably not as practiced at doing the optimal things in combat, we're not all likely to have access to high-level enchantments or consumables or expensive equips. When someone makes a mistake and things go south unexpectedly in the middle of a fight -
and they probably will
- we might be able to deal with it, but it's a lot easier if everyone started out fully prepared. It doesn't make sense to prioritize saving seconds at a time by ignoring casters who need opportunities to top up their mana when the almost inevitable wipe will cost us 20 minutes to walk all the way back and restart the same fight.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Post by
Maelchav
I just want to thank you for the image of a priest sitting there
sipping
water while a warrior is fighting a gang of mobs, kinda watching out of the corner of their eye, then tossing aside the half-full (or half-empty) cup and running to get in range and start saving people from dying. I always pictured casters chugging their drinks, but to think of them sitting there... sipping... that just strikes me as funny.
But on the topic, yeah, I'd say that if the person who magically keeps you from dying is thirsty... you let that person finish their drink.
Post by
Draconek
If the tank is taking so much damage that you have to drink to full every pull, that's a tank problem. But honestly, at that level you should be able to heal a fury warrior with a shield as shadow spec and literally never drink. Just wand the whole dungeon, if the tank starts taking steady damage, start casting an under ranked gheal. If it's going to go off and over heal, jump before the cast goes off and start the cast again just don't let the cast go off with over healing. You should be able to heal like that and rarely need to drink all the way up to the 55+ dungeons. Make sure you have plenty of spirit on your gear and read up on the 5 second rule.
Post by
ghostintheruins
Thank you for posting this. I am both a tank and a healer. I no longer group up with people, but the pressure to go go go when I was in both roles was unbearable.
As a healer, when I would tank, I would always wait for my healers to do whatever they needed to get ready for the next pull, and I'd get a lot of attitude from impatient dps who just didn't want to wait.
It was very frustrating.
Post by
Anidmountd
I've noticed the best thing for me to do is sometimes run ahead to next pack and drink before the pull and if you need throw out an instant cast to save them or plan around that type of plan. The issue is most lower level players are trying to kill as much as they can as fast as they can for the most xp/hr.
Post by
Khayos
Just drink. If they pull and die, then just remind them that "if everyone is dead, nobody is getting any xp."
It's a really simple concept. Healers are important, because slow xp/hr is better than no xp/hr.
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