Ghostz

Overhealing isn't really something that you should be looking at unless they go OOM and stop healing, leading to a wipe. I had something like 75% overhealing last night on Gruul and I didn't run out of mana and nobody died. Most of the healers were up in the 60-70% range because we didn't want to risk an unlucky spike death on the tank. I'd much rather have a full max rank gheal go to waste if I have enough mana to queue up another one rather than risk the tank take a spike with 14+ debuffs on gruul right after I cancel my heal and having to wait another 2.5s to get a heal from me.

Even effective healing isn't that great of a tool. Using Gruul as an example, some of the less geared healers tend to take it easy at the start of the fight (up until maybe 6+ debuffs) since the pallies spamming FoL can easily keep the tank up with their mana pools barely going down. So even though the priest may have done a lot more healing when it mattered, they'll probably end up low in effective healing because they spent the first 2 minutes topping dps off and keeping a renew on the tank or something.

As for normal OH rates, our priests are usually between 20-35%, pallies are between 30-45%.

 

Liryn

I am extremely in love with Clique too :-) It seems SO much more efficient than having to click on someone and then press another button to heal them. And as a new healer, I am learning some good stuff from this thread.

 

Dralmoo

Any tips for healing a fight like Maulgaur or even Romulo when the incoming damage on the tank is extremely high and spikey? Especially for people who never did Naxx?

I'm pretty consistently getting more or less insta-gibbed by these two even with 17k HP and a Stoneshield up - I think people are so worried about overhealing they aren't willing to keep me fully topped off, maybe?

 

Ghostz

I think your guess is probably a good one. Having someone top you off from 16k to 17k even if its a little bit of overhealing is the difference between life and death a lot of the time with the burst some of these mobs do. Thats usually where pallies come in, FoLs are there to top the tank off and sneak in the middle of a burst to prevent you from dying and give the druids/priests the chance to land their big heals.

HoTs are pretty underrated for spike damage fights too, if you have 2-3 people keeping renews/rejuvs on you, its pretty likely that at least one or two of them will tick while you're taking a spike and that 1000 healing may be enough to keep you alive and again let the big heals land.

 

◊ Praetorian

That shouldn't be happening.

How many healers do you have on you on Maulgar? I find 3 to be the comfortable standard where tank death stops being a problem. (PS: Try using a feral druid to tank him instead of you, if you have one with the gear -- Maulgar's spike damage is all from specials that can't crit/crush, making a bear tank optimal.)

On Maulgar I will cast nothing but my largest heal, and will cancel at ~0.5sec before completion if the tank is at 100% or close to 100% (since if he's close to 100%, HoTs will soon put him at literally 100%). I find it helpful to have a target frame that shows target events (AGUF does this), so I can see when the tank is dodging, parrying, getting missed, etc. You get into a bit of a rhythm where you know when the next attack is going to land, and you want to have a heal pre-queued for it.

 

Coriolis

Rofl, now that was pretty damn funny.

On to the topic, since I'm a bit stuck in the position of trying to teach people how to heal without playing a pure healer (although I will probably be respeccing soon), my thoughs on this are somewhat similiar to alot of people but my emphasis is really the mechanical parts of healing. I'm a scientist, not an artist, so shoot me. When I look at my healing meter and I see people with huge overhealing rates, spamming ineffcicient heals, and (since my sct tells me who heals me when) I see them being the third person healing me after a cleave when I'm already near to full and have 2 hots on me I'm not happy. In particular it seems that all new priests I've ever had to play with do these mistakes:

1) Use flash heal only. "Because it heals for more and I had to keep up with the damage". No, gheal outputs more healing, you just have to time it. "But he took damage so suddenly". There is nothing unexpected about an MT taking tons of damage - you start your heal when he's at full and you cancel it if it's not needed. The time you flash is when your resident "I like to take a dirt nap" mage decides he's had it and pulls aggro.
2) Overheal for tons - this in my mind comes from 3 things:
a) using too high a rank of spell for your "spam" healing. I.e. I don't cast and cancel a max rank gheal when the tank is sitting at 100%, and no concentraion proc/inner focus. You uprank when there is a jump in damage and you need to catch up or free mana procs.
b) Lazyness - don't like to cancel - too busy watching TV
c) Horribly laggy connection or fear that they'll mess up and let a tank die so they let heals through that should be canceled. Can't do much about the connection but for the fear of loosing a tank, a bad raid leader screaming too much can be an issue. Initially while learning a fight it's natural to just let heals through so you can survive long enough to learn it, but for fights where mana efficiency is an issue you need to give your healers breathing room to figure out how to be efficient even if it kills your tank a few times.

I.e. on Maulgar we started out with 3 healers (shammy+2 priests) all spamming max rank 2.5 sec heals with little to no cancelling. Then once the tank stops dying that way, downrank 2 ranks. Now start cancelling more of your heals. In the end, hopefully the tank stays alive and the healers still have mana. Saying "keep the tank alive I don't care if you burn all your mana" is a really stupid thing in my mind once you get over the first hump of learning the encounter - it just makes you die to healers going OOM rather then spikes.

As for how to fix these issues in healing - I look at meters, try to point out to people when they are using bad spells or overhealing too much, assign specific healing assignments (and bitch at people if they don't follow them - use swstats) but apart from that I don't think there is much you can do. Once you understand the mechanics the things that help are fast reflexes and paying attention, both of which are rather hard to get people to do on a personal level. Of course if they don't understand the mechanics, you need to tell them that.

 

Saigone

unfortunately, if you really have a go at people for having 15% overheal you will cause them to underheal too much though. Knowing the flow of the fight is great and really helps (it also goes some way to making healing farm content spectacularly dull) but people (and especially brand new out of the box lvl 70 healers) will have a lot to concentrate on, and Id really rather not have them concentrate on getting 0 overheal. Reducing your overheal from say 15% to 10% is not really that necessary when you are new to the class and focusing on doing so while standing in a blizzard is evern less neccesary.

The other aspect of this which is more important in TBC is that whilst tanks can still be crit immune, they seem to have sneaked in a few bosses with a very fast attack speed that mean that even with good shield block timing bosses can still crush tanks. This means that having a bit of overheal is even more useful.

 

◊ Praetorian

Overhealing obviously depends on the fight. I know that our "good" healers tend to hover around 20% OH in most all-purpose situations (i.e., averaged out over a long clear). I consider that mark more than reasonable, especially when you consider that if a tank is at 9k/13k and you cast a 4k heal that crits for 6k, oh no, you "overhealed" 33%! Whatever.

Those same healers were close to 50% on our Gruul kill. They weren't playing poorly; they were adapting to the situation.

 

Ghostz

Being crit immune doesn't eliminate spikes on the tank. There a lot of bosses that can unload a ton of damage on to your tank with a little bit of bad luck. Prince with a few sunders, a string of low avoidance and a crushing is fatal and if you're concentrating on eliminating overheal, you probably won't be prepared for it.

 

Dralmoo

I probably need better gear too, unfortunately I logged out without my tank gear on so the profile isn't useful right now. but I will talk to the healers as well.

 

Ghostz

Yeah, getting into a rhythm of expecting attacks helps a lot. The first few tries I was off and it felt like the tank would get hit as soon as I cancelled it and I'd have a hard time getting another heal off if it was an arcing smash + regular hit combo. For Maulgar specifically I did this by watching his swing animation, it's nice that its in line with his actual hits. :P

 

Saigone

hehe indeed, Im agreeing with you here.

Im actually have another interesting healing problem in that I live in Australia, but raid with a European guild. During raid hours my ping is 700+, so you need to decide who is going to get hit hald a second before they git hit. This also buggers my overhealing to a fair degree. Fastcast used to help a lot, but unfortunately the useful functionality of that got broken with TBC. Although these days, Im actually raiding as a shadowpriest, so this is all a largely moot point


Just quickly I'd like to echo what someone said earlier: Its important that the guys who are healing do actively enjoy it. Our guild has pretty much kept its entire healer corps from WoW 1.0 because by the end of it the people playing as healers really enjoying it and wished to continue doing so. From a personal perspective, I prefer healing to DPSing by a long way, but as it currently stand priests are very useful to the raid as shadow, in addition to the fact that our guild has some awesome paladins.

 

Introvert

This is great advice for the Maulgar fight especially.

I rather like healing over DPSing, due to the mindless nature of it. I can just sit there on automatic mode, healbotting the raid. In TBC especially there are a number of fights with spell reflect, target priorities and such, and in most cases as a healer, I can ignore the tactics as all I have to do is assigned heals.

 

drowsy

A difficulty with healing is that you have to balance your throughput with your efficiency, and every single fight has a different pace to it. Sometimes it is necessary to overheal a good deal to reduce the risk of death, other times it's more about timing your heal to line up with a known spike, or cancelling more often and accepting the risk when mana is a large issue. Some healing-intensive fights you will wipe until the combination is found, which is why it can be frustrating to hear critiques of the meters from people that don't understand the give and take. Maulgar is like that, healers that did not raid extensively pre-expansion will probably take a while adjusting to him. For Romulo, it's more likely a dispel/spellsteal issue: he's a wuss without that buff.

For flash spammers, have them solo heal a few non-heroic 5 mans with flash heal (or equivalent) taken off their bar for practice using their other spells, because they will need to able to use all of them to make effective raid adjustments.

 

◊ Oggie

I take absolutely no offense by this, and I love the metaphor- I will be stealing it in my healing 101 spiel the next time I have to give it.

The tone of my post (and quite a few others) focusing on overheal is because it's just one of the single biggest problems for new healers. Does that mean you should keep yourself up at night with overheal? Of course not, but that's one reason I adore SCT showing overheal rather than a meter is becuase it makes you concious of it without slapping you in the face- pretty much every healer has trumpeted it in this thread so I'm sure any aspiring healers will be using it.

Another interesting combo that's probably not been talked about if you're someone (like me) who doesn't enjoy using Clique as a primary heal system, is using Perfect Raid or Grid (I find that perfectraid works best) and this macro:
Bind that to an easily accessable key and then mouseover the unitframes and press it to heal. It sounds wierd/silly, but it's a devistating combo. I'm not sure if anyone else has discovered it, but I simply loved it with Chain Heal, inversed PerfectRaid bars- phenominally powerful.

Edit:
I'd also like to say, and this may get me some ill will from some healers, that with the amount of +healing, stamina, and boss dps, it's simply rarely a good idea to use the lower hp/sec fast heals. I'd go so far as to say the times where you're going to use flash heal are few and far between- and I think that usually if you have to cast 2 in a row on the same target you chose the wrong spell.

 

• Playered

Also "/cast [target=targettarget] <spell of choice>" is quite handy on some fights, and to the above [target=mouseover] is useful for dispelling too.

 

drowsy

I like /cast [help] <spell of choice>; [target=targettarget] <spell of choice>

 

Drelegon

I think the #1 most important thing for a healer is a good interface that allows them to pay attention to what is going on around them. Here is my healing interface and some info I posted about it on our guild forum....This came from a discussion of APM and how optimizing your interface can improve your individual APM allowing you to potentially help mitigate APM spikes required by other members of the group.

Big picture: http://www.sublimeofsenjin.com/image..._interface.jpg

I also have the SCT+Overheal enabled. This helps a ton too as you'll get to know your group because the rogue with you may have the talent to boost healing, warlocks get extra healing so even knowing how much your heals do normally won't allow you to be as efficient as possible on all the members of your group.

For learning to be a better healer, PUG, PUG, and when you're done PUG more. Once you can keep a group of 4 other people alive that may or may not have any idea what they're doing the easier it will be when you get groups that do. I'll sometimes go out of my way to group with the tank that somebody else just said 'That guy couldn't tank a rock.' about if I feel like I've had too many good groups lately to make sure I'm on my game still.

 

Dazwin

Am I reading this correctly in that you don't have a forward movement key? Do you just use L+R mouse buttons for it?

Also, can anyone recommend a good read about downranking? I'm working on my first healer now, and I had assumed that downranking was dead after they nerfed it a while back.

 

Amera

Yeah, I've found overhealing is actually exaggerated as a negative. Oh the heal meters for our gruul kill, I overhealed well over 30%. But a lot of that is from a high crit rate, so they were free heals anyway, and also as an adaptation to try to counter the crazy burst damage.

As a general rule, overhealing only matters if you are running out of mana and then people die. If you aren't, then it generally doesn't matter.

 

CheshireCat

I think there's a difference between systemic and incidental overhealing. Playing well as a healer involves a certain amount of incidental overhealing, and that amount varies from encounter to encounter.

It is possible, though, for a healer to have a set of habits that results consistently in overhealing-- if you have a slow trigger finger but still try to top off the DPS after the pallies have already noticed and started flashing, for example. (That was my major culprit when I started raid healing.)

Some heals are overheal because your healing strategy allows (demands, really) that you a certain percentage of your heals are going to overshoot. In those cases, even a full overheal is a good heal to have cast. Some heals were bad heals to have cast.

Basically, it's not something you read off the meter at the end of the night, except as a very general indicator. It's something you learn on a heal-by-heal basis. The best possible tool for this, (in my experience, anyway) is the instant feedback of SCT. This gives any healer who's willing to pay attention the tools to say, for example "Man, everytime I try a low rank GHeal on a rogue after a cleave, it ends up as overhealing," or, "Okay, that was 2 thousand points of overhealing on the tank, but that's okay."

 

◊ Oggie

Since it's somewhat relivant and I just got this link pointed out to me:
Theorycraft!
http://www-en.curse-gaming.com/files...theorycraft-2/
Theorycraft is....unreal for healing. Showing Hp/sec, hp/mana, the average amount a spell heals for, the crit chance (and the average takes that into account).

There's really not a whole lot to 'read' about downranking, other than to pull out spells that heal for various amounts (and TC helpfully gives you tooltips that list that, including whatever else you want on them). For a beginer I strongly recomend finding some nice round number heals (1.5k, 2k, 2.5k) and using those because people tend to be able to count in round numbers very, very quickly.

Even post the downranking nerf you can downrank sometimes suprisingly well, but watch those hp/sec and hp/mana ratios, they take a pretty quick turn south after a couple downranks.

Edit:
And this is actually the TBC version, whereas the version I spoke of was previous, but the comments seem to indicate identical functionality.

 

Drelegon

I rarely walk straight forward so no I don't have anything other than the arrow key that collects dust bound to forward movement. Being able to backup though is important sometimes as you don't want to get dazed but you want to get further away from something in front of you (yes I know most of the time you can strafe instead of backpeddling which I do but some mobs seem to daze me if I turn at all). To go 'forward' I turn with mouse and strafe or I'll use autorun which is bound to 'f'. Most of the time I'm strafing around though as I can generally maintain better camera angles than if I put my head down and run. It also allows you to turn much quicker since you're already on the mouse ready to spin if needed.

As far as downranking you'll need to figure this out based on class and gear. For priests GH1 and GH3 are the 2 best HPM GH, H4 is about equal to GH1 before you get into some of the better bonus talents for GH (clearcasting, 35+ in Holy tree, etc). Renew isn't any better HPM than GH3 unless you throw a really low rank one like R4-6 and then its only better if your target is getting all of the healing of the renew.

Its pretty easy to figure out how effective downranking is as you can stand in Shatt and cast all of your heals on yourself to quickly fill up a spreadsheet to calculate HPM and HPS. One thing to consider on the HPM though is if you're throwing a more efficient heal that does 1500 health you'll have to cast it 3x as often as one that heals for 4500 so you'll get less 'not-casting' MP/5 regen.

 

• Bad Luck

Learning to heal with an off-spec is also an interesting practice as well. Not sure about the other classes but healing as a Feral Druid gives you a lot less "oh-shit" abilities for you to rely on (Nature's Swiftness, Swiftmend). It teaches you to anticipate damage better.

And UI is important as stated. Target of Target windows are useful, knowing when to use Focus and that Target of Target, MT windows, Castbar, all important when anticipating damage or target switches.

 

Arche

One thing that I've seen mentioned peripherally in this thread but would like to emphasize: the best healers know what the mobs/bosses they're fighting do and react accordingly. Know who cleaves, who casts a magic debuff or disease, who hits like a truck and who hits like a girl. Know who drops aggro and when and know what they do when it happens. If the information is out there, read it. If it's not, get in there, experience it and use your tools and snap reaction skills to overcome it. Regardless, remember what you've learned and apply that knowledge in the future. You'll be a more valuable team member for it.

There are a couple of ways you can evaluate what someone knows and/or how quickly they can learn: 1) Take them somewhere they're familiar with and deliberately screw up some pulls, and, 2) take them somewhere they don't know and see how quickly they pick up on mob abilities and adapt.

The tools and skills mentioned previously in this thread are the foundation. Gaining and then applying your knowledge of encounters is the next step.