Hybrid heal/dps mixed teams...

[Janus]

So I have been experimenting with this for a little bit of time now. (thanks smith for the tip!)

My mixed team has a holy priest as the main healer and really no other heals except those panic heals from my druid in really tight fights. Given the changes to smite and penance in the disc tree and having a fairly good resto tree for the shaman now, I decided to give the hybrid heal/dps formula a go.

Right of the box, it worked. shielding the tank through 2 strong mechanics with earth shield and pow:shield is really great. It helps mitigate a lot of damage, when fighting trash. I took the team last night into normal halls of origination and was pleasantly surprised. The smiting and penance combos for the disc priest offers damage but also heals to members of the party. So far so good. I kept plowing through the trash and started noticing something missing.

The first thing is that my team's burst damage was gone. The spikes of 38k that i used to enjoy with my shammy being purely elemental and my holy priest is nowhere to be found anymore. instead with both my priest and shammy dpsing, the dmg was a flat line hovering around 25k. Obviously this translated into longer fights. Fighting normal mobs and having a good system to keep my tank topped off passively through the priest and shammy's damage-mitigation mechanics did not bother me much.... until I came across the first boss

I needed BIG heals and this is where i think the biggest problem with this combo is. If I wanted those big heals that meant that my priest and shammy needed to stop dpsing and focus on healing the tank. Big drop in DPS output. Not only that, i did not know how to coordinate my button clicks so that at least my druid/mage would keep dpsing when shammy priest where healing. I figured that I could assign a key binding for the heals to trigger dps on the boomkin/mage. That was nice... until I needed aoe heals. Usually I rely on a cast sequence from my holy priest to do circle of healing, prayer of healing. Obviously that was not an option. Plus, when I click the AOE heal button, it doesn't always cast the spell because I would be mashing the dps button as well, which means my priest/shammy will be dpsing too. needless to say not a good thing....

So what can be done about this. Smashing different buttons to do the same thing (button for the heals, while dps is dpsing, button for all toon dps, etc... ) is tedious and not practical. Is there to control this with macros? like can we alternate heals and dps and aoe heals on the fly with macros? i am not aware we can, but no harm in asking...

If that problem could be solved, i would be willing to live with the loss in burst dps

[Ualaa]

You have identified several scenarios.
a) Everyone mostly DPS's, with minimal healing needed.
b) Moderate healing, passive heals should work.
c) Intense healing needed at times, still mostly on the tank.
d) AoE heals are needed across the team.

Tim has promised the equivalent of toggles in the upcoming Pwnboxer update, once those are implemented I would go with those.
Basically have your default spam key, which does one thing by default as far as the healers are concerned.
But if you push your toggle (turn a mode on), it disables the normal (DPS) they would be doing and instead puts them into another mode.

In the meantime, you could go with four different buttons depending on which "mode" you want.

[Janus]

I was able to incorporate most of what I wanted to achieve with the following:

- I created "dummy" buttons in bartender with the various abilities of the slaves that I thought I would use more often. This is something that I always struggled with. There are too many abilities that are so important (but situational) that I don't use on my slave toons, because there isn't just enough key binds for all of them and it can get messy and out of control really easy. So I put those dummy buttons and with HKN's MouseIsOverWindowRect function, whenever I click that area on my master, it sends the key to the slave window that I wanted it to. I found myself doing a whole lot of things I wasn't doing before like cast Healing Rain from my shammy, divine hymn (when I needed it, not just having it bound to the druid's innervate and the mage's evocation)

- With the same principle I created a "heal" button and "aoe heal" that when pressed will send healing/aoe healing to my shammy/priest while sending my dps rotation to the pally/mage/boomkin. So, instead of having to mash 4 different situational butons i just click an icon on my master's screen. That was a game changer.

I steam-rolled through halls of origination. I am getting to like this hybrid dps/heals model. I need more DPS still though, as the fights are really taking longer than before but with constant heals on the tank and passive heals on the party, as long as there is no enrage on the bosses (i don't know how it is in heroics yet), it should be good