Sigh, healing assignments.
If you have done them like I have been doing them, it means you have been doing them for your guild for years. Perhaps you think about them on your way home from work, class, or before a raid– it makes you shudder.
Everyone would typically rather show up, kill the boss and have fun. Doing administrative work is no fun, right? Doing healing assignments is just like having to do the dishes, or take out the garbage as a kid– a chore.
While doing healing assignments really isn’t a lot of fun, it certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t worth while. Being tasked to do healing assignments provides the opportunity to learn a lot about your raid members. You learn their strengths and weaknesses. You learn to understand their classes a bit better. You get to really know the encounters.
An example, Patchwerk 25, I try to remember to assign a shaman to each tank so Earthshield can be placed on each of them. That is an example of knowing your classes strengths and weaknesses. Or moving a Priest into the MT group for Prayer of Healing on Loetheb.
Perhaps you have a slightly under-geared Pally in your raid group one night, putting that person alone on an assignment might not be the best idea, but putting your regen-a-holic priest alone on an assignment will be ok.
I really try to make all the healers in my guild do healing assignments at least a few times. It provides interesting insight that they might not have had before. It also provides a chance to really understand the fight. Knowing the ins and outs of a fight can easily come from doing healing assignments that night.
There are many ways to do healing assignments. You can use macros that spam chat, verbal assignments over ventrilo, or you can use mods like Getting Things Healed (which is a add on I highlighted in an earlier post.)
I strongly encourage all the healing leaders and officers out there to delegate this task to several people in your raids, give them a chance to learn more about the fight and their peers. Ultimately, they will benefit from it… just like you benefited from having to clean the dishes.
