I have thought that for a long time that if you set up a .5 to 1 second delay between caster it is the best to have a good constant heal rotation going. usually 4 healers to cover any extra that may be needed. The problems with this is you have to have enough dedicated healers to keep that going without dealing with anything else. Then you also have to have enough dedicated healers to take care of all the rest of the healing that the raid needs. I find the multibind allows all the healers to do what is needed in the rest of the raid, ie splash, IoG, ward of cert, etc when they need without a real lull in healing. My personal healing went from about 2 mil on a tank per raid healed to about 3.8 mil healed when I switched to multibind. The multibind I find to be grossly inefficient if you have a bunch of healers on one tank, but extremely efficient if you do not. I can sustain a multibind heal of graceful, current frenzy, last exp frenzy, current intervention, last exp intervention, current light for about 12 - 15 minutes using rods, QM, and VP. I am not max AA on my cleric and I only have a couple of raid pieces, as she is not my preferred char, but play when we are low on clerics. I have a healing hotkey that does 5 lights in a row with about .2 second or less cast between them that I use if we just need a tad bit more healing and I box her (I hate boxing on raids!). I also use that when boxing her in group, after keeping olsif's retort and Shinning Bastion on my sk.
Not sure if i understand this part right, but even with these box Clrs having great "timing" they would still be easily beaten by none robot healers who are using the good spells. One of the big misunderstandings with the Light spell is that many healers seem to think it has to be a good base heal amount coming with that spell...in reality the 12k is crappy compared to most other heals, afaik only Remedy is lower but that's not a problem if you need only 1/4 of the cast time. The 2nd misunderstanding is that they don't think in milliseconds, even in your example a heal landing "every second" is not really awesome. The 2.3 seconds cast time sounds good for the human brain at first, but in reality for raid main tank healing it is a freaking eternity.
I could be mistaken, but mob rounds in eq are 1.8 seconds, so as long as you have a heal going off every .5 to 1 sec you are accounting for the damage, and 12k base heal is actually around 24-30k with focus and 60k with crits. That is why you add an extra healer in there to help with any rounds that are over that or with AE damages.
Raids don't work like that usually, yes there might be melee damage rounds like that (i don't know) but what often kills the tanks is a combo of rounds like that and some kind of AE, spell damage or similar that might also come from something else, not the mob they tank. There's also the situations where healers need to move, get up from FD, get silenced or it all would be easy. The good heals (and a good heals main requirement is fast casting time, that what makes the Burst AA super i.e.) counter all this and allow you to sometimes react slower to these circumstances. Who wants to start a 2.3secs Light after getting screwed over by something in a raid, and seeing the health bars dropping?
I understand that, and thats why I use the multibind, but on some events its easy to use the other method too. on an event like Plane of Shadow where there isn't as much AE etc, you can easily do that, and for my guild PoS is an endurance fight, because we don't have the highest DPS. Some events are faster and necessitate the multibind. Also good use and timing of your burst aa's are key as well, and also ward of cert is good.
Yep but it usually all goes hand in hand Healers using Light are not used to mana dropping fast, the reactive healers use Yaulp, Rods, VP and QM early (and don't wait until being almost oom), allowing the AAs to refresh and use them again later. You can endure a 1h fight like that without giving up your fast healing, unless there are also mana drains involved but then your guild will usually try to end these phases much faster. I'm not saying you don't know all this btw, but sadly i know way too many Clerics by now who are just not trying to learn.
Yeah, I try and post some things I feel are redundant because there are new clerics that need to learn, and when I was getting mine up to speed for raids, before I had the right mana pres, regen clicks, etc I had to play differently than the clerics that did.
I think part of it is - if the guild is already winning their fights with the current healing 'strat' used, then many people don't see why they have to adjust.
The problem with Healing is you have 10-12 healers on raid all hitting the MA at some point. If you are unlucky as hitting the lotto is lucky, you could do a whole raid and get zero healing. In case I am talking about those 3 healers, will never overlap with each other. Meaning thier odds of a heal landing .1 second after a Tank was topped off and getting "Zero" on a heal parse is lower than your chance using a better weave with variable timing.
I've had more healing on a MT than the #2 & #3 clerics combined by timing out heals to land after melee rounds. Certainly not just using Vida, but still casting a lot of them. Daldaen's heal timing strat works great for next-leveling heal crews using Lights, but it doesn't work with heal crews running multibinds. Using exclusively Lights will have heals land in roughly in the same spot in the combat round each time, with a bit of drift added in to each heal. That left a lot of people drifting into dead time after heals and before combat rounds. Multibinding heals doesn't do that because the heal intervals are much faster and have a more varied time. The higher frequency of heals means you get "sniped" on those post-round heals MUCH more often than you do when dealing with a bunch of Lights. The value of trying to time my heals dropped significantly once I moved to RoI. Especially once RoF came out and the clr multibind options improved. Now days I don't find many times where I can afford to use slower heals on a tank if I'm actually needed to keep one alive. Either I'm providing extra safety for a well healed tank that's staying topped off. Or I'm 1/1 or 1/2 healers on a tank and don't want to wait 4.1s on heals more often than I have to.
Well i still don't know how that would work...the first problem is trusting they are in Sync. Then...what a mind numbing raid job. Also will other healers sit still while this happens? Nope of course not, so these 3 Clrs chance to land a zero heal will be as high as for the others as they are not in Sync with everyone outside their little chain. You could as well just have 2 Clrs on watch who only heal when they see a gap. Which might be more interesting. Also the healed amount is too weak (you don't always have AAs up to boost it) it must be a not difficult to heal boss compared to your tanks strength. In which case it would be questionable if the whole thingy is even needed. CH chains were used because CH did always heal a good chunk of the tanks HPs, today a tank in full raid buffs and boosted by many things will easily have way more HPs than Light can heal. Thinking about it, mob rounds every 1.8 seconds...how would a tank ever die i mean you get that much time to land a heal? That doesn't reflect with my experience when tanks die. Strictly talking for events where these 3 Clrs are left alone as well, and will not be interrupted. What happens if the tank changes, they start this over new? On a more general note, for MT heal spam it doesn't really matter if you land a zero heal. Another thing i don't really understand why it might bother some, what matters for me is the amount i could have healed and in what time.
No mathematically thier chance of landing a 0 heal is smaller. Let's say 10 healers on a raid. Your using variable timing. You could land a heal right after one of the other 9 healers. 3 healers timed/split (yes mindnumbing boring, more like turn on a G15 autofire keyboard) 1 of those healers could at most land a heal right after one of other 7 healers. because they would never land one right after themselves. Oh I agree. If you get great timing down on the combat round, you will destroy others. 1 person using exclusively lights will never compare to a weave timed right after combat rounds. But I was more talking about the value of a Steady Steam of Multiple Lights. IE 2-3 people who have thier timing down and so the combat round is covered every .8 seconds (3)
Multibind, or any spell rotation or any individual performance factor is going to do poorly, or at least less than optimal, if not taken into a whole raid context. As others have stated or alluded too, tanks don't die so much because the heals are not strong enough but because there is a spike and / or lull in healing. Having your heals lined up with other healers "too much" or overlapping will create lulls in healing, this is true. You want to have heals spaced out evenly, but also sufficiently to provide steady coverage, with the ability to tighten them up if needed when the tanks discs fade, or adds are on the MT, or a slow fades, or DI drops and the tank is more vulnerable, or an AoE is incoming, or a healer on the MT dies, etc. The multibind (with whatever series of spells you wish to use, though some are far more common than others) naturally has some staggering in it due to the difference in spell cast times. In addition even in full swing with the fancy keyboards you are still going to have a little added variation in timing due to normal latency between you and the game, and more importantly just the normal variation in how you play. You stop for a second to do anything that isn't a heal and isn't instant cast, that will offset your heals from someone who was continuing to heal at that time. In the days of long casting CH chains or less long, but still significant, light chains, you had to "force" staggering of heals. With modern multibind spell rotations the spells are so fast that only a very slight staggering is needed, and that will come naturally I think without being forced. One of the great things about parsing programs is that they show you not just a record of all the spells by your healing team, but also when they were cast. You can see for example that this spell was cast at 00:01, then another at 00:03, 00:04, whatever. A fellow cleric in raid and I would spend time after raids and we would look through all the casts and we'd see a natural staggering without us deliberately trying to set it up or any sort of rotation. It's a very handy feature and I do recommend that your heal team leader / coordinator look at them just to make sure, if you want, that the heals actually are staggered that way. Maybe you have too many stacked up, or you see that healers are burning discs too close together, or that too many are splashing at the same time, or that to many people are rezing and dropping heals at once, etc. Each guild, heal team, and raid is going to be different. Admittedly we are being very academic about this on the forum, but it is a very enjoyable discussion. Look at the data for your situation. Maybe your heals are really are bunched up with significant lulls. Maybe they are not. It's going to vary, but the good thing is we have the data collection tools to see what is going on in each of our situations. Look through your parse data for spell cast times and see what your guild is doing. Maybe you need to force some staggering, maybe you don't. Maybe you need more healers, maybe you don't. Or maybe you need more team work and coordination. All this being said however, yes, you could try and force it by having a string of clerics, with the same spell setup and spell casting mechanics do a rotation with a 0.5 to 1.0 second delay. I don't think it is needed, but one could certainly do it. Though you would need to have the support in place for them to do nothing but heal, and sometimes they really need the flexibility to do other tasks. I'm in the main MT heal role 99% of the time, but I still need that flexibility to stop what I am doing to do something critical to the raid, like get a divine res to an important healer, or heal myself, or heal a critical kiter whose mobs will wipe the raid when the MT tank order is deep and less risky, or I have to do just whatever it is that needs to be done, with the caveat that it isn't something I can't delegate to someone else so I can stay on task. And of course the MT is not the only one that needs to be healed. Much as I do love the rare NToV dragons that are pure "tank-n-spank" with no AoE, or adds, or mechanics of any nature, those types are mobs are rare. Lots of people are getting hit with something or another. If you stack to many healers on the MT, as others have said, yes, you will get a lot of overlap and overhealing. What is far more concerning is that there is a misappropriation of healing. Those healers who are overhealing could have been doing something else like healing OT's, splash / group healing, buffing, rezing, or getting me coffee. Or, they could have been replaced in the raid format for extra DPS, or tanks, or crowd control or whatever the raid needs.There is a lot to be done and this is where communication and team dynamics and roles come into play. You want enough heals on the MT, but not so much that you are "wasting" resources that could be directed elsewhere. You need to heal OT's, but not so much that you are "wasting" resources that could be directed elsewhere.The raid needs to be splashed / or group healed or MGB'ed, but not so much that you are "wasting" resources that could be directed elsewhere. People need to be rezed and rebuffed, but not so much that you are "wasting" resources that could be directed elsewhere. The lulls in healing come from, I feel, not overlapping heals on the MT (but again, they could be in some cases, check your log data) but because healing is off task. You didn't have enough healers on MT either cause you just don't have enough healers period, or more likely you had the right number of healers but some of them were diverted and not healing for a moment. They may have died, or busy doing something else like rezzing, buffing, splashing, group healing, healing someone else, etc. This is where role designation, calling buffs and rezs, and coordination come in mind. Are your MT healers dropping heals to do tasks that other healers in less critical groups or roles could be doing? Do you have multiple people doing the same task when fewer people could have been used? Are your MT healers getting the support they need to they can focus on their tasks but still have the flexibility to make raid critical adjustments?
Certainly true, to an extent. And while a win is a win, some wins are clean and some are frustratingly sloppy. Some wins on new events come after one or two trys, and some come after many many failures and fatigue. Some wins come with little to no deaths, some come with near wipes. Some wins can be done with a minimal amount of skilled healers, and some require a heavily healer stacked raid. Some wins are through good planning and skill and some are from luck. Some wins come even when the unexpected or unplanned for occurs, and some raids cant handle the "outside the farm status norm." A solid heal team makes all the former more likely than the later.
I don't see how you can possibly time your heals to land right after an attack round on the main tank.
What I used to do is wait for the tank to spike down from a melee round, hit my half second heal, then go into casting vida two or three times. Those will land after melee rounds, getting slightly behind with each one. Casting my 1.8s heal puts the spells back on time for another 2 casts. Then I restart from the top.
I think waiting for the tank to spike down from a melee hit is very dependent on connection speed and lag as far as when you see it happen on your screen. I play on 2 computers side by side, and the spikes down don't necessary occur at the same precise moment even then. Maybe your speed is fast enough you are able to time your heals more accurately, but many of us are not that lucky. We are more or less guessing as to when the best time is to start casting a heal, therefore, we just spam as fast as possible as our usual mode of operation.
I think anyone who feels they can time their heals to land on the tank, or any target, remember we're not just talking the MT here, to land after the melee round is going to be way off. As Dorf said you have some technical challenges before you eve get started. Add to that your own reaction time, and then consider that damage is not confined to just melee rounds but also any adds on the MT, AoEs, single target spells on the MT, damage shields, event related damage, DoTs on the MT, etc. Melee rounds on the tank are defiantly the big thing, but not the only thing. Furthermore you really need a spell set that has a consistent time and recast to do this, which leaves only the light line as your heal, as all the others have recast timers. Then of course even once you set this up, whether its timing your heals to land after melee, or having a chain of lights, how many clerics do you really want to spend on that? And don't forget we still have the other 53 people in raid to worry about. You have 3 minis in ToR for example, plus their adds, and their pets, and AoEs going off, and damage shields, and charms, some of which may be on healers. Yeah, it's harder to go all out on that raid cause of the event wide mana conservation limitation (though still doable), but going to be harder still is your trying to time heals to land after melee or have some sort of light heal chain for all three mini OT's, plus the other OT's for the adds and pets. Maximum amount of (sustainable) high quality heals per unit time is the way to go.
First (re)read my other post on page 4. I wasn't answering with theory, I was answering with my practical method of how to do it using druid spells. Having good reflexes, living in California and understanding EQ and raid mechanics answer all your reasons it shouldn't work. And I already said that heal timing like that goes to crap with the increased heal frequency due to a heal team using a quick cast multibind. Because heals are more likely to land in the widening time gap between the melee round and your timed heal. It does have some niche uses, especially since druids get stuck casting Vida a lot more than clerics get stuck casting Light. If I need to cast mostly Vida for whatever reason, I try to use that method to make them a bit more effective. Instead of spamming Vida and having them land where ever in the combat cycle
On average theres a combat round once every 1.8s Depending on Slows. And its actually easy to time out rounds if you have a good internal metronome/feel for combat rounds.
