Raid Role Conversion – Fundamentals

Raid role conversion is the process of having certain roles help with responsibilities normally delegated to other roles. Even though healers’ normal job is to heal and ensure the raid survives, they still have ways to do DPS. Similarly, damage dealers are regularly there to – well – do DPS, but have ways of either healing or increasing survivability. Occasionally, it may be beneficial for your healers to help with DPS, or vice versa. This is a form of optimization, and when used correctly, should yield an improvement on your raid’s overall performance. It is very important to note that, as one might expect, healers are the best at healing, and damage dealers are the best at DPS. Thus, if you have your raid members stepping out of their role too often, or have two-way conversions, it will have a negative impact on your raid.

So when can you use this conversion? Well, have you ever hit a certain phase of a fight and realized that the damage going out on the raid is just too much to handle? The first response most people have is to save cooldowns for it, but what if cooldowns are still not enough? Conversely, I’m sure many raiders have encountered not meeting a tight DPS requirement on a boss’ Berserk. A typical response would be to drop a healer for another DPS, but what if you don’t have that option? Not everyone wants to simply succumb to the DPS check and wait for more gear. There has to be another way!

Each fight has its own healing and DPS checks. Note: Healing, in the context of this article is inclusive of both healing and survivability. Take Jin’rokh for example. There’s barely any healing to do in the normal phase, to the extent where one healer suffices. However, come Lightning Storm, the healing check is quickly raised to require two, maybe even three healers. Should your raid bring two healers and be strained on Storm healing, or bring three and have massive periods of healing downtime outside Storm? This is where raid role conversion comes in. Instead of bringing three healers, bring two and have the raid help compensate that bit of extra healing required. Pretend that you are converting damage dealers into healers for Storm to make up the amount lacking.

I must stress here that it’s very important to only convert when one side is in excess and the other is lacking. For example, you may run into the situation where you’re barely meeting the healing check but aren’t meeting the DPS check. In this case, one side is even and the other is lacking. Converting healing into DPS wouldn’t help you here, as your healing is not in excess. Furthermore, if neither side is lacking, then you should stay away from conversions, and let each role do what they are good at. Excess healing can be stored in form of mana for emergency situations. Excess DPS kills the boss faster, and gives you less time for things to go wrong.

The concept may be easier to understand in the form of an analogy. Imagine that you’re the principal of an understaffed middle school. You have 5 English teachers (healers) and 5 Math teachers (DPS). The amount of classes in session concurrently represents the healing and DPS checks.

Day 1

You have 7 English and 3 Math classes that need teachers. Is it better to have two English classes go without teachers while two Math teachers have nothing to do, or, however sub-optimally, have the Math teachers teach English?

Day 2

There are 5 English and 6 Math classes. Does it really make sense to have one of the English teachers teach the 6^th math class?

Here’s a quick flowchart to further clarify:

Ultimately, it’s better to not implement conversion if you’re ever uncertain if it’s a benefit. In a future post, I’ll discuss the viable ways you can have said conversions, who excels at it, and the practicality of such conversions in the current tier.