Ways to keep your healer happy

This is a response to Sun's post from the other week. It's a short list of tips designed to foster a more harmonious relationship between warlocks and their beloved healers, because heaven knows Blizzard has provided us with a lot of ways of making them very very cross.

1. Don't use Hellfire

Hellfire is one of our 4 AoEs, (the other three being Rain of Fire, Shadowfury and the awesome Seed of Corruption).

I would like to qualify this somewhat. I would not necessarily suggest banning the spell from the castbar, but opening up with the full 15secs of this spell in front of an unprepared healer is likely to result in your death and a bemused and befuddled healer. Anything that causes you to suffer extra damage beyond that which is flying around the dungeon already as part of the programmed encounter is unlikely to endear you to the healer. The healer's priorities are to keep the tank(s) alive and to mitigate the unavoidable damage that exists as part of the mechanics of a group encounter, be it in a dungeon or raid. Healers are not there to pour their mana into replacing your health just so you can make the floor glow orangey-red while harming yourself.

Having said that, if you do feel you need to use the spell for whatever reason, let your healer know in advance m'kay? And when you discreetly whisper: 'Oh great and benevolent one, is it ok if I use Hellfire in the next encounter?' - do check that they actually know what the spell is and what it's going to do. There are a lot of spells out there. This one is a little bit special/sadistic, and if one considers the mana cost to the healer as well as yourself, in my opinion it isn't worth it.

(My only thoughts on when it might be useful are in those odd situations where a warlock tank is required and the warlock needs to establish threat not only on the special boss/mob, but also on any adds he/she may have. The fact that this spell ticks every one second, has a large radius and that you are likely to have a dedicated healer, means that it could be a very useful tool for quickly establishing and building threat on more than one foe.

2. Don't be a Life Tap idiot.

Life Tap is wonderful. It is even more wonderful with Glyph of Life Tap especially now that the duration of the buff effect has been increased to 40secs from 20.

It is again though, something which lowers our health pool and is a very good way of pissing healers off. Warlocks who go oom and then Life Tap to gain a full mana pool back are inconsiderate idiots. A healer's mana pool is not there to compensate for your own. If the healer has to waste mana healing you to full health because you've tapped your health down to near nothing, then all you are doing is passing the mana deficit on to your long suffering healer.

However, we do need to use Life Tap to gain mana, it's one of our class defining attributes that we do in effect have two mana bars, a green one and a blue one. Even more so now with the glyph of Life Tap providing that rather lovely buff, Life Tap is not so much a utility mechanic as part of our rotation. My best advice for maintaining cordial healer relations is to try to only tap when you're at full health, and when you're not nearly oom (or if you're Affliction specced, anticipating when Haunt is going to return to you, and getting a tap or two in before it does). Tapping when you're down to about half mana has the advantage that should something go wrong, you can Drain Life to gain the health back.

Also, if after a wipe you re buff, get your pet out and then Life Tap to full mana while waiting for the healer to heal you back to full health, rather than eating/drinking/bandaging/using a lightwell - you are an inconsiderate idiot and should go and buy 2 stacks of Honeymint Tea, one for you, and one for your long-suffering healer, to symbolise all the drinks they've had to chug down because you haven't bothered using your own.

3. Situational Awareness

Short Notes:
Fire = Ouch! Burny! Don't stand in it
Dragon = At the front -> Ouch! Burny! At the back -> Ouch! Swipey!
Strange moving objects in boss fights = Ouch!

Some damage, such as Loken's aura, is unavoidable. That is the the sort of damage your healer is there to heal you through. Some damage however, is avoidable, and a lot of boss fights have some elements which will require you to move, even if it means your perfect rotation (and thus your super l33t awesome-to-the-face dps) will be ruined. That's fine. Live with it. Everyone else will have to move too. The point I italicised just then, is that moving out of the damage is something you can LIVE with. Staying in the poison cloud, or the fire will probably kill you, and you can't do any dps if you're dead.

Of course, no one is perfect; sometimes you will stand in bad stuff. Sometimes you won't notice the giant green poision cloud in the new 5-man Argent Tournament dungeon (hint: turn spell detail up a fraction), that's ok, most healers will forgive occasional stupidity. However, if they see you time and again in fire and void-zones, and you're not RP-ing a masochist on an RP server, they're going to think you're lazy very quickly, and might not bother wasting mana healing you through gargantuan amounts of damage.

Remember, if your excuse is always that "you didn't notice", you may find yourself dead, with the healer's only response being that "they didn't notice" you were dying.

4. If you're an affliction warlock, use Corruption

Affliction warlocks get Siphon Life available to them at level 30. If there's a lot of damage flying around, bung it on a mob. Every little helps.

5. Be nice (this is for everyone)

If you're taking damage, or the group is wiping a lot don't just blame the healer. If you're personally taking a lot of damage, look to see if you're standing in bad stuff, and consider using potions/health stones until you can politely ask the healer if you're doing something wrong. If the group is wiping, ask in party chat if anyone has any suggestions or strategies to improve the whole group's performance. Being rude to the healer, especially unjustifiably so, is likely to leave you with no healer to be rude to at all.

If all of that fails, buy your healer kittens, a flower, or maybe a stack of mp5 food, trust me, you'll be covered in HoTs and able to Life Tap to your heart's desire if you do that!