The other night I healed regular underbog, which was the most difficult healing I’ve done. The party makeup was: holy paladin tank, rogue, mage, DPS warrior, and Ep the resto shaman. The tank had some problems keeping agro (holy spec and all), but did well over all. The DPS folks seemed to madly apply DPS before the tank had a lot of threat. I think that’s probably typical. On my hunter, I have to practice restraint. It’s hard to wait a few seconds when the tank is taking hits, so I can’t fault the DPS much. We had no wipes, but we did have some serious adds at times. I don’t know who agro’d them, but I learned some tricks because of it. First off, coming up off the ramp into the naga area, we ended up pulling 2 groups of mobs somehow. I just spammed chain heal and kept earth shield on the tank. One of the DPS died. I tried out Earth Elemental at that point (with a yell in the same macro). All of the mobs headed straight for it and the tank had time to collect all of the mobs and restore order. No one complained, and we avoided a wipe. I used up my fire elemental in a similar manner, but it is more of a DPS tool then an emergency tank. The Black Stalker (last boss in UB) randomly lifts people in the air and suspends them for a few seconds. That seemed to happen to me just before a chain heal would go off, and by the time I got to the ground, folks were at pretty low health. Toward the end of the battle, we were down 2 people. I used my nature’s swiftness/healing wave macro to get the tank back in shape, and wished at that point that I had a NS/chain heal macro. We finished off the boss soon after that, and everyone was happy. Things I learned:
- healbot is a great addon.
- I need more macros.
- I need more +healing. I never had a mana issue, but I did have a problem with the strength of my heals at +1300.
- Healing with a shaman is a lot more fun then it sounds. I have a pretty big bag o tricks to help avoid wipes.
- The healer and tank probably both need to ask the DPS to back off until the tank has solid agro. I know my job was made harder when everyone pew-pewed thither and yon without regard to anything, drawing hate and damage from anything within range.
- I need to drop my totems closer to where the tank pulls the mobs. This should be a simple matter of asking where the tank will drag the mobs.