elessar

I have a bit of a problem in my guild. Primarily it may just be me being neurotic but I don’t like healing meters being posted at all. Some people want them posted after every fight. My argument is that a focus on healing meters creates distractions from the primary objective. Which is of course killing the enemy at hand. If that raider is worried about healing meters I fear that raider is going to not focus on their healing assignment and go to the one that can get them a notch higher on that meter. I was told by those individuals that I am being too serious and that it is all just fun. One problem is that you cant really scold a person for being on the top of the healing meters as long as their target survives but I am trying to be preemptive. I have seen the tank die on gruul at grow 11 and die on mag after the 30% point. Does anyone have a suggestion on how I can get this point across more effectively? or perhaps I am being foolish. I just want to hear other people's opinions. I really only like to use healing meters for looking for consistently poor performance.

The other thing I am curious on. We had an argument on overheal. I argued that it doesn’t matter how much overheal you have as long as you have mana to spare for it. Others took the opposite approach. What is your normal overheal? Not really interested in druids since their numbers are always skewed but of paladins, priests, and shaman

 

Alonis

Overheal is largely fight dependant, Gruul and Magtheridon(boss phase) are bosses where it is natural to have a fairly high overheal for. Large amount of healers on the same target, and a real threat of a burst death to the tank.

 

• Karakas

The best way to phrase it would be that healing is not a competition, but rather a group effort.

DPS tends to lend itself to a competitive atmosphere, since more DPS only helps you kill the mob faster (ignoring the possibility of that additional DPS coming at the risk of agro, of course). However, more healing does not necessarily help you at all. What needs to be driven home is the concept of sufficient healing: your healers need to position themselves into the mindset that what's important is that they, as a GROUP, are putting out the sufficient healing necessary in terms of HPS.

Along those lines, overhealing should become a secondary concern. A healer should not be asking themselves how much effective healing they did, or how much they overhealed. At the end of an encounter, a healer should be asking themselves two questions:

1) Did my assigned healing targets survive?
2) Did I run out of mana before the encounter ended?

Any other concerns are purely superficial. Really drive in the point that it does not matter if you end the encounter at 1% mana, or 100% mana. Having the most effective healing and the lowest overheal doesn't matter if the individuals you were assigned to heal died - that means you, by definition, failed as a healer.


Have them change the metrics of success to not be the meters, but rather by the holistic questions presented above, and emphasize those two questions as the definitions of success as a healer, and you'll have them stop caring about healing meters as a competition anymore.

 

Kytrarewn

Do you let people show damagemeters in your raid? Or post them privately to other members?

Pre-TBC, healing meters proved a huge problem because of the issues of "overhealing and mana use" with healer exhaustion being a major reason that raids wiped.

Post-TBC, with some (few) exceptions, that doesn't seem to be the case, with burst damage or silences or just plain raid execution being the exception.

As long as the tank stays up for the duration of the fight, who cares?

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Sunbeams are always made on me
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Don't ever ask your kick of me.

 

Skelshy

I find in TBC, a good healer generally will keep his target up AND squeeze out extra heals on other targets. Healers need to know the damage patterns and they need to make good calls on which heal to cast and when and keep the targets they are responsible for up. Heal assignements are no excuse to let anyone die. You are responsible for the whole raid.

How is this related to healing meters? If you do this well, it will show on the healing meters. You will demonstrate your value to the raid in points healed.

On the downside, if you optimize your for topping the charts but people die, this is something you'll probably see as well. There's also limits to what you can do depending on your assignment and your class of course.

Having said that, WWS is more useful than spamming reports in raid (which we don't allow). If you need numbers, you can run your own tools. I usually have recount on and use it as a rough benchmark on how I am doing. The WWS gets me information on what type of heals someone cast, and whether or not our shammies top the chart because they spammed chain heal during trash or not etc. (not wanting to diss shamies, as long as you keep folks up, I don't mind maximizing the use of your class strength)

If somone is consistenly is below 66% of the best healer, they will usually get a notice and (if desired) mentoring. There's a lower bar where despite bad assignments, being out of range to most of the raid, gear deficits, playing group friendly rather than trying to shine individually (Spellsurge...) you still should be in the same ballpark as the other healers.

 

Brakar

This is really what it boils down to. As long you have reasonable mana at the end, overheal doesn't matter. If you're healing a tank, you will have a good portion of over healing or you don't have enough people on the tank. Almost every encounter has some non-predictable burst damage that can kill your tank super fast. If you're not spamming heals on the tank as a raid, he will die more than he should.

 

doogless

They aren't entirely bad, but looking at them in the same way as DPS meters means you really don't understand what they mean.

For example, one of our Priests was spamming Flash Heal (yes, really) this past week, and as a result her healing done was very low. Healing meters allow us to look and say "wow, the other Priest healed for 30k more than you did, what the hell are you doing wrong?" and then examine her casting style to find the problem.

At the same time, comparing a Paladin to a Druid, both of whom are both healing properly, will give much less useful information because the healing style differences between the two classes will impact both healing done and overhealing.

The main use for healing meters is identifying significant problems, and perhaps to push people to tighten up their playstyle a bit. Attempting to use healing meters in the same way you use DPS meters is foolish at best.

 

Nite_Moogle

If their overhealing is higher than about 10% over their crit rate, they probably have some efficiency work they can be doing. Most healers will have a pretty low crit rate, so anything that's above 35% is probably atypical, anything above 50% is terrible. Shamans tend to have lower overheal than other classes due to the smart bouncing that chain heal does. Paladins will typically have the highest overhealing as their job generally consists of spamming FoH on the tank over and over again, and it is so ridiculously efficient that canceling it because a part of it will overheal is not usually worth the risk of the tank dying to spike damage.

As noted by other people, winning the healing meters only matters when you're winning the fight. Healing efficiency will rarely matter more than constant throughput, but it shouldn't be neglected either.

This is a pretty poor method of healing and encouraging it will probably lead to tank deaths. You should always have a few people whose job it is to spot heal non-tanks, because FFA healing non-tanks commonly results in one person down 5k HP getting 20K worth of heals from 6 different healers while the tank gets nothing for 5 seconds. There is nothing wrong with assigning a few people to the tank and yelling at them if they deviate from that plan.

 

Mooncrow

If your healers are really "worried" about healing meters, you need to do some educating, of course. On the other hand, from what you're saying, I suspect its a similar situation to our guild; we all know that healing meters are next to worthless as a gauge of real ability, but especially after a hard fight, its kind of fun to go "holy shit, check out the top three healers all having more than 1400 hps"

Healing is a demanding, mostly thankless job. Sure, healers are supposed to be team players more focused on the win over personal preformance, but its a fine line to walk between "caring about the team preformance as a whole" vs "not giving a shit about my personal preformance". You want healers that are trying to push themselves as far as they can go, a little public epeen stroking seems a small price to pay to have satisfied, competitive healers.

That being said, posting every fight seems excessive. You either have a healing core that feels seriously unappreciated, or you have a serious rivalry going on in the ranks. If it's the first option, well a little appreciation goes a long way. Going out of the way to say "great healing that round" or the like should put the matter to rest. If it's the second option, you may have to sit some people down and explain that competition is healthy, but the raid doesnt have to hear about it.

 

Aware

If your healers are good healers, competition won't hurt. Smart healing leads to higher numbers, so those that spam spam spam and oom half way through the fight will end up losing anyway. Encouraging friendly competition between healers could lead to faster heals, more predictive raid-healing, and wiser mana-efficiency if your healers aren't retarded.

On the other hand... if they are letting people die, give people assignments and hold them responsible if their targets die in ways that they could have prevented.

 

Khaen

Just following on and agreeing with what's been said above.
Topping healing meters means very little these days. Pre-TBC, I found the meters were generally topped by Paladins. Now I tend to find CoH priests and resto shammies are the regular leaders. As has been said before, the dynamics of TBC raiding enforce rather specific roles on people.

I'll suggest that using a limited meter can actually be detrimental to your raid group's progression, as there is no real way to tell who is doing their job properly. Can a CoH priest really be satisfied with his healing if the MT died during a pull - even if he wasn't assigned to healing the tank?
I'd recommend however, that if your guild will insist on using meters, they use something like Recount that can look at various aspects of an individual player's raiding and identify areas for improvement. It will probably be a first step to moving your healers away from the "I must top meters!!" mentality.

Regarding overhealing, it's really not something we look at any more. If I'm an MT healer with my Paladin, I'd expect to be at 50% overhealing easily. The most important things are what Karakas said. Did my allocated targets survive, and was my mana pool sufficient?

Other than that, the only thing a healer would need to worry about is whether or not they're moving correctly in respect to the tactics for an encounter. For example, we had consistent problems with Bloodboil where people were simply not moving correctly to do deal with the Bloodboils and the phase transitions. In fights like this, you simply can't afford to be worrying about whether or not you're topping a meter as there's enough to be stressed over.

 

Renew

I have recently been recruiting some extra healers to the guild and while interviewing apps it seems like this mentality is the norm. The apps have all told me that they notice epeen boasting players are probably the downfall of their progression. These type of people are oblivious to the fact that the meter is not there to rank who is the best healer.

For us as a guild, since the end of tier 5 and early tier 6 we have moved more away from the free healing strat and organized healing. Delegation has made our progress speed up immensely and also has made our healer core work together really well. Everyone gets along and helps eachother out when delegation might need tweaking etc.

If healing is bad in the raid we know about it and discuss what tweaks we need to make. We know if DPS or tanks aren't doing their jobs as well. We do not blame the wrong people. If people cannot fess up to not doing their job, you will have issues. Coming clean and fixing mistakes is easily the best method.

If you have meter epeen going on, your raid leader needs to fix the problem. Meters do help though, but in most cases who #1 is / should be depends on the fight. If someone is last place by a large margin, then find out why (afk? underdelegated?).

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

Darkmgl

Delegate healers. If they act up tell them that you don't care how much they heal if they cannot follow directions and work as part of a team. Holds true for alot of things in life, you can be the best at any number of things but if you can't work together you're gonna have a hard time getting anywhere!

Healing meters can be a great tool if you are having deaths to find out where you may have a weak point. You can use them to see who/how people are healing too, which can help you find out who may not be listening, who may be playing badly, or who may have found out a better way to heal a fight and can share that knowledge.

Unfortunately the biggest drawback to a healing meter is it doesn't show the most important thing, who actually stopped a person from dying with a heal. I'd be really happy if someone was sitting at the bottom of the meter if he was the one throwing all the crucial heals that kept people alive.

Also DPS meters can be a huge problem too. People seem to forget about the limitations and additions of classes sometimes aren't always reflected in those numbers. Remind people that they shouldn't necessarily compare themselves to other classes but rather other similarly geared people who are the same class. Looking to improve is never a bad thing, take all the meters as ways to make things better and don't get negative on people unless you know they're not performing as well as they should and that they do not want to try and improve. I dunno why some people get seriously offended when someone is better then them; it just makes me wanna learn from them so I can be better too.

 

Ghando

Healing meters, like all other meters in the raid game, have their place. The problem is that they don't tell you the most relevant information. A healer's contribution to the raid is almost never accurately summarized by a single integer (effective healing), whereas in most fights a DPSer's contribution CAN be summarized by that integer. Still, for healers that single number can be valuable. If two different healers given the same assignment are putting out very different numbers at the end of the fight, why is that?

Obviously, going through WWS reports after the raid and looking at healer performance can be very valuable, but I assume we're just talking about posting meters in raid/guild chat after a given fight.

 

vorda

While I must admit its fun to top the healing meters, their main objective for me is telling me who isnt doing his job well. If we have 3 healers on the MT on morogrim and after a wipe the meters show that healer A did less than half the healing of B/C, we know what went wrong.

Watching people on the bottom of the WWS list is alot more interesting aswell. Did they use pots, did they wand, etc..

 

Tempestra

Basically echo'ing what some people have said before. I've instructed my healers to not care so much about how much they heal, but instead focus on how they get to their end number.

WWS is far more useful for this reason. If someone is flash healing, there has to be a reason for this - is his assignment off for that particular fight? Why is this trial resto shaman *not* using chain heal (he was subsequently asked to leave)? Did we stack so many healers on this one tank that the druid's HoTs were rendered ineffective? And so on and so forth.

Make sure it's clear from leadership to the raiders that the "how" is more important than the "how much." SWS is great for DPS (even then, it's sub-par to WWS), but it's pretty lame for healing.

 

elessar

Yes I am purely talking about the posting of them in raid/guild chat. It is usually the same people each time that request that they get posted. One of the individuals was a new shaman that would post them after every fight and tell everyone he did the best in the last fight. I had to explain to him (in as loving of a way as my military mentality can produce) that I dont give a shit what the meters say and you cannot postulate a ranking based off of purely healing meters. This person was also a person that was dieing on morogrim within 2 add phases each time we fought him. He was the primary reason for me making this post. I think we have others that have the same mentality but are less aggressive about it and it is more of a passing conversation in the guild.

 

Soulshade

For the most part meters are just there to boost a persons ego. I remember a priest back in my guilds naxx days that would top healing meters through landing the biggest heal he could on anyone resurrected. We also had one priest who topped healing overhealing on Four Horsemen, but we wiped after 30 seconds because he was healing himself when he thought he had the tank targetted. Did something like 30k healing on himself.

I really don't care for meters being posted, I know in Hyjal we have a few mages that spam arcane explosion nonstop, leading to their deaths, and extremely slow wave kills, because rather than decursing melee on Banshees, they are trying to pad meters.

Only advice with obsession over meters, is to tear into anyone who is fanatic about them and put them in their place. Competition is ok, but when people get to into it it starts causing wipes or deaths due to stupidity. However meters are a good thing as those people who do not need to satisfy their personal egos, can use the meters to figure out how to improve their performance to the maximum.

I would say, if you have a particular person causing problems, throwing tantrums, or belittling people, rip into them and tell them that they are part of a raid. Or remind him of how useless he is on Tidewalker with his methods and that he is harming the raid. Meters are for personal reflection or raid leader review, not for penis stroking. There is no harm in meters being posted, the harm comes from bragging.

 

vorda

The Epeen problem can be easily solved. Dont allow people to post meters during raids. And if they start bragging in your WWS topic it, take your time to point out what they did wrong. If they did nothing wrong, more power to them .

 

• Playered

Meters are only really useful for seeing things that are 'odd' as healing goes.

For example, if after a boss, on 30mins of trash, there are 4 healers at 220k, 1 at 195k, 1 at 130k and a final one at 80k. You should be able to tell from this that the last two are abnormally low, this means they are slacking, and you've caught them! time for punishments!

On bosses? well its really hard to keep everything in mind on the fights, does every healer have a SP? did any of them die? did any have to rebuff or combat res a target?
You also have their assignments to take into consideration, take Azgalor for example;
Our Doomguard healer generally has 50-100% more healing done than our other top healers (20% for us today), our MT healers (Druids, both got the first two dooms aswell) have 10% healing done, the rest of healers were raid healing or topping off the tank, and had anywhere between 7-9% healing done.

You will find meters handy on people who have a general job *raid healing* or trash, they become far more obsolete the more assigned your healers become on encounters depending on how varied the roles are.

You'll find it hard to stop some healers having competitions with each other, and no doubt if someone is quite far below where they should be without reason they will get picked on, however generally its not that bad and its something to keep the blood pumping on the easier encounters.

 

Dhotti

I completely agree, my healers had a bad habit of raid healing while assigned to the MT. I wrote a long post on our guild forums about how MT healers have to heal for the potential incoming damage on a tank. Tanks have nice high avoidance/mitigation and can go for quite some time dodging attacks and then take 10-18k damage in a few seconds. If one of the MT healers is healing someone else during that time or is on GCD from throwing a HoT elsewhere the tank dies, the raid wipes and the healer leader gets grumpy.

We have a strict "no posting" policy on meters, we're quite happy to let people run their own though. If one of my healers wants to discuss their performance I will post them parts of mine. I use Recount and have specifically told my healers that I use the meters to assess the jobs they've done coloured by the assignments I give them. On most encounters I expect those I've assigned to raid healing to be up the top and the tank healers to be somewhat lower due to the amount of overhealing or cast/cancelling they should be doing. What I find most useful about recount is the ability to see what heals people are using and who they are actually healing.

It took a while, but I think they finally understand that being top or bottom of the meters really doesn't matter if their assignment lives and the boss dies.

 

koaschten

Just wanted to emphasize this. Healing is limited by mana. So you normally dont wipe due to insufficient healing but to healers running out of mana before the boss dies.

So yes, let the dps epeen, cause it pushes them further, having the healers chug less mana pots and let the healers chuckle at it, knowing nobody would be where you are in raid progression without them. No Heal, No alive MT ... NO LOOT, which is at the end the last motivation once you cleared all the content.

 

Jayde

Healing meters really only matter for two specific things:

a) Who's working the hardest in "free for all" situations (e.g. trash, generally)
b) Seeing if someone is -severely- underperforming in their assigned role

That's about it. Position on healing meters or exact balance of +/- really is generally meaningless on a boss fight. Assignments have more to do with position than effort, and unlike DPS, healers are limited by chance as to how much or what there is to heal. You can't go "all out" on healing and hit the same point every go at a boss like you can with DPS.

The test of a healer is if they let their assigned people die or not. That's generally the only thing that matters.

For instance, even if I am on off-healing, I will get beat in effective healing done on Karathres by the healer assigned to the Priest tank and kicking Rogue. My job is considerably harder, and I have to frantically heal my ass off from bolts/multi-shots to make sure nobody dies--she generally just stands there with the occasional GH on the tank and Binding Heal the Rogue after a volley (I've done it before, and know how "easy" it is.) Does it matter? Not really. Both are important jobs. As long as nobody dies, I'm happy and the raid is happy.

I tend to pay close attention to healing meters primarily on trash, to see which healers are really slacking as the group moves along without assignments. On bosses, meters don't really have much to show--other than severe differences between two people on the same assignment, for instance.

 

◊ Quigon

I consider our healers exceptional, and I don't think any of them give 2 shits about healing meters... even in the slightest. We do specific roles like crit healing, burst healing, large healing, group healing - and in the end as long as they hold the weight together, one doing 10-15% more than another is barely much more than noise. Flexing your epeen over that is nothing more than shitting on your team.

In extreme cases healing meters are helpful - but typically only if someone is bad.

 

Maax

We have a separate channel for meters, so people who care can spam it with out annoying others. Only rule is no meters during loot distribution, since it causes lost bids. Some people stay in the meter channel all the time, others only join after boss fights.

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Druids: Then we will tank in the shade.