Add-On Review: Surgeon General

One of the tasks a healing lead is responsible for in most raiding groups is to assign healers to specific jobs within the raid. While this is common in 10-man raids, it is nearly universal in 25-man groups.¹ Once I became the priest class lead, and later, guild officer and healing coordinator (being the add-on junkie I am), I began searching for a simple add-on I could use to make and announce healing assignments.

Surgeon General (SG) is what I settled on, after trying a couple others. Here is a shot of the configuration screen, courtesy of Curse.com (click to enlarge):

SG is fully LibDataBroker-compliant, and supplies a little blue “SG” button that sits in my Fortress bar. Clicking that button opens the configuration screen. From there, I can select the Instance:

and once I’ve done that, select the boss for whom I want to assign healers:

If all your healers are within range, the Auto Fill button will plug them into the slots on the configuration screen. And while the capability isn’t there yet, the developer has told me he is working on incorporating communication between SG and CTRaid/oRA2 to auto-fill the tanks as well, which will make SG even simpler. (I think he’s been waiting for this review, which I told him last month I was planning.)

Once these steps are done, it’s fairly simple to fill in the assignments. You can even do a whole wing of Naxx at a time, if you like.² Click “Save” and the assignments, although not necessarily the people assigned, are saved. You can hit “Esc” to close the window, or click the Close button. Bringing the window up again with the “SG” button will restore everything you entered for this session (unless you reload your UI).

I should point out that if you correctly spell the healer’s name, his or her class symbol will appear to the left: You can see the Priest’s staff head next to my name in the screenshot. Then, should you need or want to reorder the list, simply drag the icon!³

As we move past Patchwerk and on to Grobbulus, I would erase the Patchwerk assignments, then click the “Enable” button for the Grobbulus column. Before each subsequent boss, uncheck the boss just downed, enable the next column, and so on. On a fight such as Malygos, you may in fact want to have different assignments for each phase (especially for Phase 3). SG easily supports such a configuration.

Note the “Report” checkboxes at the bottom center: Before you pull, it might be a good idea to let everyone (especially the healers!) know the assignments. When you click the Report button, you get something like this:

The first four lines are to the raid; the last four are to the healer channel. Note the healer is listed first, then his or her assignment. Where multiple healers have the same assignment, all are listed together. So for this successful 25-man one-shot of Sartharion, three of us (Holy Priest, Shaman, Paladin, respectively) were assigned to raid heals; our Discipline Priest on the main tank, and another holy priest on the add tank.

In summary, Surgeon General is a compact, simple-to-use, highly effective tool for assigning raid healers. My guild has come to rely on it, and if I’m a little slow on getting out the word, even before we start buffing, I start getting queries in raid chat, healer chat, and whispers. (Tanks, it seems, don’t generally care who is healing them, as long as they know someone is.)

One final note: I alluded to having discussed SG with its developer, and I have. And in fact, Brimmstone has since become an active commenter here at the Aerie⁴. I’ve found him to be extremely approachable, and very eager to work with the healing community to improve SG. So thanks, Brimm, for a great tool, and I look forward to using SG for as long as you keep developing it!