by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Are you stuck with a DPS that thinks they’re a tank and is constantly initiating pulls, or a healer or tank that thinks that doing damage is their first priority? If you’ve played Warcraft for any longer than a week, of course you have! Our next few installments of Dungeon Professionals will be focusing on each of the three major roles in dungeons and what’s expected of them.

Healers

Much like how fights would last forever without competent DPS, healers are also necessary to keep the dungeon moving at a steady pace. Even if the DPS and the Tank can mitigate and put out enough damage to survive an encounter, without a healer they’ll be waiting for quite awhile between in each pull. Additionally, while bosses can be killed without the other 2 rolls if necessary as long as skill and gear are up to par, there is very little chance of surviving larger encounters without someone to replenish those health pools. Healing is sometimes a thankless job, but it has to be done so here’s some tips on how to be a proficient and group-friendly healer.

Follow the Leader

As was mentioned a few weeks ago, the tank will generally be the leader of a dungeon group. Since the healer has very little in terms of offensive capabilities, they should always try to stick with the group even more so than the other roles, so that means often sticking near the tank. With that said, the tank won’t always be the leader of the party; they might wander off or get turned around, so the healer should always try to attach themselves to whoever is actually making progress. If people in the party split off for some reasons and start encounters far from one another, the healer has to pick which group to keep alive; they should always pick the group that actually knows what they’re doing. If the healer is also inexperienced and doesn’t know which group to follow, sticking with the tank is usually the safest option. Just be ready to adapt if the DPS are nowhere to be found because the tank went down a wrong path.

Situational Awareness

Everyone in a dungeon needs to be aware of what’s going on in terms of enemy placement, abilities, and obstacles to avoid. Healers, however, need to not only keep their eyes on these things but also the health bars of their party members. It’s often too common for healers to focus on one and not the other, but a good healer needs to be able to balance their attention more than the other roles. They also need to have more knowledge of abilities than some of their counterparts; everyone might know what a debuff causes, but a healer needs to also know what type of debuff it is so they can heal it. This might require some additional preparation before entering a new dungeon or add-ons that might help visually distinguish different maladies.

Tough Love

Once a healer gets a handle on keeping tabs on everything that’s happening in a fight, they’ll often find themselves as a necessary commentator on how those fights are progressing. Just about anyone can explain a fight to people who might not know it but when someone makes mistakes during the fight, there needs to be someone able and willing to point that out and advise them on how to correctly approach the encounter. The healer is  best suited for this role because they tend to stand farther back from the fight and also see what’s going on with everyone’s status. They’ll be the first to know if someone didn’t dodge an attack or is standing in the wrong place, so they need to be the first to point out these flaws. More diplomatically-minded players are often perfect for this role since they’ll often be the one that needs to force a player to own up to the fact that they’re doing something wrong.