Time to re-awaken the dormant blog. With MMO Champion predicting a November 2nd release date, I’m now officially excited about Cataclysm. Let’s get back in the swing of things with a nice rant.
One of my pet peeves is people who fail to interrupt spell casters in PvE. I don’t PvP very much, but I have to think that most people who play in the arenas have already mastered the art of interrupting, especially against healers. If not, they probably die a lot. Letting the other team get a huge heal off can turn the tide of the fight, and letting a caster get a long cast time spell off can do the same. So, why do people consistently fail to interrupt in PvE?
In a raid, it is far too easy to simply coast along and assume that someone else in the 25 man group will get the interrupt. Or, more likely based on what I usually see, just avoid interrupting altogether and assume the healers will heal through the resulting damage. It’s a classic case of “sorry, I didn’t have time to interrupt, I was making sure I look good on the meters.” Healers, unfortunately, are not immune to the same impulse, and we want to top our meters just as much as the DPS wants to top theirs.
I shouldn’t have to explain why interrupting is good, but there are two big reasons. First, you prevent incoming damage to the tank or the raid. Less damage means less risk of people dying, which is generally good. Second, you save healers mana from having to heal the damage that could have been prevented. This second reason directly relates to why people have learned to slack off about interrupting: healers don’t really go out of mana anymore. So, we might as well just focus on our DPS and the healers will take care of it. I have to admit, for most fights right now that strategy ends up working just fine, as long as your healers are competent.
In Cataclysm, however, mana pools are supposed to matter more. Assuming Blizzard accomplishes this goal, evaluation of healers will shift. Healers are going to care much more about the efficiency of their heals. Doing high HPS and running out of mana is going to get you benched, not praised for topping the meters. Excessive overhealing will be looked at unfavorably. DPS who take a bunch of unnecessary damage will risk slowly killing the raid as the healers go OOM. In that environment, interrupting is even more important than it is right now, but most players seem to have forgotten how.
Wrath was a lot of fun, and raiding has never been more accessible. Unfortunately, that made a lot of people really lazy; ignoring interrupts is just one sign. Once Cataclysm hits, DPS will have to relearn how to manage their aggro and use their crowd control abilities. Tanks might have to actually try to keep threat beyond the first 5 seconds of a raid boss or heroic that they outgear. Healers will need to watch their mana and use more of their spells. While I expect that most content will still be accessible to people who are not always playing their best, things are not going to be as easy as we’ve come to expect in the latter stages of this expansion.
So, if you want to be a better resto shaman, learn to use Wind Shear. Put it on an easy to access keybind, and use it often. It comes with no global cooldown, so you can stop your current cast, interrupt, and get right back to healing. As a resto shaman, you can often top the interrupt meter on a fight while still doing a lot of healing, and that’s the kind of player you want to be come Cataclysm.
Next time you raid, challenge yourself to top the interrupt meter. Look for caster mobs that do not currently have a lot of DPS attacking them, since that’s where you can most effectively interrupt as a healer. I usually cycle through targets until I see something with a mana bar, and then sit on them to interrupt. It’s asking a lot of your rogue or warrior to put a secondary target on focus and use a focus macro to interrupt their casts, but as a healer, there’s no reason you need to select the kill target. This is especially useful on the Ruby Sanctum trash, where there are 2-3 casters who need to be interrupted. Sure, sometimes your Wind Shear will miss because you don’t have any hit rating, but most of the time you’ll be contributing a clutch interrupt that someone else might have missed.
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
Yes! I could not agree more. Shamans have probably the most convenient interrupt in the whole game and there’s absolutely no reason we should only use it on Moorabi.
I like to interrupt frostbolts on Lady Deathwhisper as often as I can, and I liked faction champs for a similar reason, it’s kind of fun to be an interrupting/dispelling machine.
Speaking of dispelling, dispel capable dps classes should really get back in the habit too. I think it’s going to be important to save the healer from the extra casts in some fights.
Not only to save us casts but to save us mana. From what I understand a dispel will be a big chunk of a healer’s very limited mana while DPS won’t have nearly as much of a challenge managing their resources.
On the main topic, I automatically question any shaman that isn’t Windshearing regularly. I’m always at the top of the interrupt list even when I am healing.
Dispelling is another thing that people seem to ignore. I can forgive DPS for doing it right now on most fight, since mana isn’t a concern and healers can usually spare the GCD, while DPS is expected to max their damage output. But that may change in Cata, and many healers can do a better job of actively dispelling!
Many healers need big improvements in the dispel department, actually. I healed a 25 man ICC last week with 2 druids and two resto shamans (one was me) and a holy paladin. Of the four decurse capable healers, I was the only one removing curse of torpor. >_< Some people are going to have a real big shock if Cata is what it's predicted to be.
(To be fair, I am fast on my dispel button, and a mage was helping me, so maybe we just beat them… but I find it hard to believe we beat them every single time.)
So good to see you posting again!
Interrupting is one of the main reasons I use mouse over macros for healing-it gives me the freedom of keeping an eye on the boss. I’m a bit of a control freak (hence the reason I play a healer in my guild rather than a DPS), so I like the feeling of knowing >I< will interrupt if it looks shaky to me. Add in hanging with a large group of pvpers on a frequent basis, and I find myself cycling groups of mobs just to find the caster.
In an instance like Old Kingdom, where a shadow blast will destroy most tanks-even geared ones on occasion, being able to interrupt is a godsend.
I really feel like most healers could use a few good circuts in the PVP world. Some of the best players I've had the pleasure of playing with came from PVP(1800+) backgrounds, and the level of awareness they bring to a raid is amazing, not to mention adaptability and full use of the toon's abilities.
[...] of Flow would like to see more interrupts. I heartily [...]
[...] upcoming posts. One will definitely be about the importance of using Purge. You already know how I feel about interrupting, and Purging is no different. I’ve been able to find opportunities to Purge in most heroics [...]