Sando

This is completely true, i used to get so angry at people asking for heals that the next trash pull they would mysteriously die, and they'd keep dying until they shut up. I mean seriously, calling for a heal at 1000 health? If that heal isn't already being cast i can pretty much guarantee you're going to die.

Healing meters are a useful tool when used correctly, and just posting them in raid chat or even healing chat after every boss is not correctly using them. Analysing your overheal can make you a better healer, some of it is justified and only you can really answer that for yourself, and if you're honest with yourself you might realise you're overhealing a little too much.

There is too much going on for a healer for healing meters to be worthwhile on a one off basis, i remember back when doing Shazz, i went from top healer to bottom because i was dispeller, post the healing meters afterwards and it looks like i'm terrible, however i knew that i was just doing my job. Same thing happened in BWL, AQ and Naxx, but more so on a class by class basis (why did all the priests suck at healing on Nef? Cause we got 3-4 calls to everyone elses 1). There is also tank gear to consider, back when i first joined the 'hard-core' raiding guild i was in till BC, my roommate was one of their offtanks, and had terrible gear compared to the other tanks, but they wanted to test him so they got him to OT. Well the healers on him were healing alot more than the ones on the MT, does that mean the MT healers are worse players?

Healing meters are also pretty redundant if you have assignments, someone dies, look to who was assigned to them then look for any anomolies, either something unexpected happened or the healers screwed up. You tend not to have DPS assignments, and if you do they're fairly broad, so when a boss doesn't die, you have to look at all the DPS for an explanation.

 

Bloodwood

I somewhat disagree.

On a fight where everyone is designated a tank (Morogrim, Magtheridon) I think it's fair to analyse the respective tanks healer, after all, the effective healer they are getting in represents how quickly they are getting their tanks health back up. Isn't that kind of the point of healing? I see a lot of healers that have full mana bars at the end of the fight because they're spent so much time out of the FSR (what good are these people again?)

Some fights are kind of biased though, the fact that I'm able to counter-act spike damage the best on Gruul, while keeping the raid alive (how aren't dpsers important in a enrage timer fight again) and end up 10-15% higher then every other healer probably says more about knowing how to take advantage of my class then anything else.

 

Starfire

One could argue that using healing meters is still flawed. Things like "final lifebloom" "prayer of mending" "power word shield" don't really show up that well. And there certainly is an appropriate time to use each of those mentioned.

 

Rainydays

Reading this thread made me finally register after months of reading.

I have been having the same issues in my guild lately. I absolutely hate heal meter spam and the 'epeen' that generally follows. In TBC, with healers being more specialized than ever, many fights will skew any healing meter. A few people in the guild have stated that this is purely for fun, however, I cannot imagine it being fun for the tree that constantly gets overhealed, or the priest that gets put on assignment 50 yards from everyone else, with a tank that takes very little damage.

As I tried to tell my guild, I look at healing meters over time. A week's worth, a month's worth, and look for trends. Is the tree always overheled no matter the situation, is the paladin consistantly low, does the shaman have trouble with raid healing? I think of them more like climate reports~~you have to look at many to predict future trends. One encounter, looking solely at healing meters is a deceptive view on the 'best healers'.

I whole-heartedly believe in assignments, and healing almost entirely those assignments. Of course there are exceptions when a priest can toss a CoH while healing his target, or a shaman chain heal and his, but like was said before, if you expect healers to help out with raid healing, you get on person healed for 20k in 2 seconds, while a tank dies. The most I ever realisticaly expect is a healer toss a HoT, and move back to assignments. There are encounters where the damage is predictably cyclic, and therefore a healer can drop a few heal in the off-time, but beyond that endangers your tank.

As far as overheal percentage, I think that's all relative aswell. On a fight where burst damage is a big possiblity, I expect more overheal. Also, sometimes a healer just gets into a bad cast cycle. I think it should be taken the same way as a heal meter, if they are consistantly high on overheal, then there may be something wrong. What I have also found, is that if you have one of the epeen healers healing everyting they can touch, then other healers may have a high overheal, and wasting alot of mana.

The best healer is one that works well with his entire team, making a really efficent healing core, not the one sitting at the top of the meter.

 

sulliwan

I don't know what you all are raiding, but very rarely in TBC encounters have I seen anyone die due to a healer failure.
There's possibilities for extreme burst damage that no healer can ever react to and there's situations where healers are simply incapable of reacting. Most of the deaths I've seen in raids are either where the fight gets slightly out of control and someone dies because they were not fast enough to react themselves or when the stars align just right and a tank takes ~30k damage in about 1 second. For some reason I often see players that don't play a healer themselves all assume that healers are all 1000 apm korean gaming gods with no global cooldown or casttime on any spells.

In no way is "are all your assigned targets alive?" a better criterion for measuring healer performance than healing meters are. Generally the ones on top of healing from their respective class are actually the ones that played the fight best, managed their mana usage well, managed their cooldowns well, kept their targets alive and made accurate judgements when it's safe to heal outside their assignments.

Obviously comparing effective healing between different classes is meaningless, because there is simply no way a non-CoH priest or a paladin can keep up with a shaman or a druid assuming equal gear and skill. But within one class, when you keep in mind the assignments the players had, I find it to be quite a good indicator of who played well and who can improve in some aspect.

Also, even between different assignments, if you see someone doing much less healing than their class and spec would allow them to do, then you can simply slightly expand their healing assignment so their healing potential is not wasted sitting around doing nothing.

 

Jebraltar

Your tree Druid and your flash-spam Paladin will win every time if you're doing it that way, while the nuke heals your other healers were dropping may have saved the tank considerably more. Then again, they may not have.

The big problem with analyzing healing is that it's something that is a steady stream of reactions, rather than something where "If you heal like this, you will heal for this much and the tank will not die." If you want to analyze it, you have to basically examine the combat log to find nasty spikes and see who's healing the tank through those. Even healing proactively is done specifically because healing mechanics make it impossible at times to respond to damage taken quickly enough to heal through it.

Healing meters are good for telling that someone can heal a lot without running out of mana and great for finding trash AFKers. I'm thoroughly unconvinced that they have substantial value for anything else.

 

Rainydays

You say
but talk about the top of the respective class. The poor thing about that is there are 6 major accepted healing specs (DS priest, CoH priest, paladin, shaman, dreamstate druid, tree druid). This means you may have 1 or 2 duplicate classes in a raid (I really don't count DS and CoH priests, or the druids the same class in this perspective), so you have little to no solid comparassions based strictly on the meter. I think this is what everyone was trying to say anyway, and why the meters are skewed.

 

• Karakas

This is just something I disagree with. Typically, if a healer is in a healing role that does not permit them to match everyone else on the effective healing meter, it means that something other than just directly spamming their heal button is heavily involved in their performance. They might be in charge of dispell duty (something you don't want your normally assigned healers to do because it takes up a GCD), or they might be healing someone who can take heavy, immediate bursts of damage, and using your GCDs to toss heals on other people could result in you not being quick enough to respond and heal your tank.

Now obviously, if a healer is in a "heal-limited assignment", and they know and understand the damage sources incoming in the fight and can reasonably predict when and how the damage will come in, it becomes easier to expand yourself out of that role. However, in that case I would argue that expanding that person's spot on the healing meters isn't actually indicative of the RAID doing anything better, since healing is a zero-sum game. Any heals that the healer lands outside of their assigned targets typically (in a controlled environment, obviously some raids have moments where things are more out of control) are at the expense of another healer's position on the effective healing meter. So even if you directly expand their healing assignment, you are at the same time shrinking another healer(s)'s role, and you still end up with healers in "heal-limited" assignments.

 

cheebamonkey

You can use healing meters to gauge how well a healer is doing just like you can do it for dps. In both cases you have to consider the nature of the fight and the jobs that had to be performed. The problem with healers is just that they can cancel out each others performance which can't be said with dps. In every raid and every boss fight people have jobs that they are assigned to do such as healing the tank or sheeping or whatever and everyone has a secondary job such as dps'ing the boss or being ready to tank if the MT dies or making sure the raid stays up. Most healers who QQ about the healing meter not being a good representation of how well they are doing their job are the players who when you tell them to do something do it and completely ignore their secondary job.

For example on magtheridon back in the day locks banished the infernals and feared them but once that was handled they of course could toss up some dots and whatnot. We had a lock who never did any damage during this phase while the other locks did and when we would ask him why he would just say he was doing his job. Well fine do your job but don't be limited by that, if you can do more. Of course we had another lock who did the opposite which is even worse but the same carries through with healers. You have a job to do, do that, but also pay attention to what else is happening and if you can help, help. So use your healing meters, use your dps meters. They aren't the be all end all for performance but they are one tool to gauge performance. And healers, don't think you are the only people who have to deal with you primary job making your look bad on the meters because it just isn't true.

 

Beardstorm

Saw this point mentioned a few times and I guess I'm just sticking my nose in here to say I agree that healing meters are good for pointing out obvious slackers on boss fights / severe overhealers / poor healer assignment.

Although I imagine it's really easy to heal to top the meters in a way thats harmful to overall raid efficiency, the main example being paladins flashing minor damage that is already being healed up by lifebloom (yeah I have a resto druid :p ) which will heal that DPS class upto 100% anyways in a few more seconds. Of course this will make the paladin look like golden boys and tree druids look like a mana wasting compost heap.

Another thing that slightly bugs me when playing my lock is that I'll lifetap once (to about 85-90%) so that the siphon life effect isnt wasted only to get hit by about 4-5 heals for a total of about 15000 for maybe 1.7k of damage (along with HoTs which are great for lifetapping since I can convert 100% of that heal into mana if needed). Maybe this is just because I'm a bit of an efficiency freak but I'm quite sure this kind of thing has caused at least a few deaths.

I guess for me they are nice but certainly aren't the be all and end all of healing performance.

 

Jebraltar

What's the secondary job of a healer? Either healing assignments have been correctly set up so that each healer is taking care of particular aspects of healing or there's something wrong with your organization. Having your MT healers flashing up the raid may seem like a great way to spread out the load, but it just makes raid healing more wasteful and MT healing more dangeorus. Healing is a full-time job. Your example of banishing/fearing on Magtheridon is not an example of a full-time job. Casting two spells once every thirty seconds, with a 4-5 second window to recover from early CC breaks, etc, is not something where each GCD can be a problem. Healing the MT is.

To be perfectly honest, even as a Paladin, I can do stupid things like spam-heal the entire raid up, especially if I'm given a Shadow Priest, every time that my assigned tank hits full life. Doing so does not make me a better healer - but it would make me look better on the meters. There used to be an extremely amusing guide on the WoW forums about how to up your effective healing with low overhealing percentages. Wherever it is now, it's still relevant.

Now, you might say that you can spot these cheats. Certainly you can! You can't spot them by looking at the healing meters by themselves, though. You're never going to spot them with a healing meter linked in raid chat, and this topic is about the value of linking healing figures for healer evaluation.

 

Bloodwood

In my experience, casting those "larger" heals is more often then not the cause of wipes. For example, the early Maulgar attempts we had, we were told to use our "biggest heals". Most of them were overheals and if not in proper sync could leave the tank vulnerable for a second or so. With smaller, more constant heals your ensuring a health buffer for a tank, it's not very often that a tank will be hit for 13k, then 13k, but more like 13k, then 4-5k (or vice versa). Lifebloom stacking/Swiftmend/FoL/FH in my experience, stops this from happening. The more effective heal your getting on the healing chart is representative of how quick you're getting your tanks health back. I could see a point in having a priest use larger heals, but this is just my opinion anyway, feel free to criticise.

 

Kryos

Alright, so I've read countless threads discussing the importance and place of healing meters. There is a general consensus that meters themselves do not dictate the merit of the healer necessarily, however, I feel that even on fights stacked towards or against certain classes of healers, meters can be big indicators of who is putting in everything they can into a fight.

Take for example, Illidari Council. On this fight we had a Paladin, Druid, and Shaman assigned to the Ret Pally tank. The Shaman was primarily chain healing DPS off the tank as he was assigned. During the first few learning attempts, our tank would die, and we couldn't figure out why dealing with the burst was so difficult. It turned out the paladin was doing over 70% of the healing on the tank, so when the paladin had to move the other healers weren't prepared for the damage without the paladin healing. Now, this was an issue very easy to resolve and just took a glance at the meters to discover.

Or take a fight like Bloodboil. Shamans and priests generally dominate in effective healing on this fight from the sheer amount of aoe damage consistantly spread over the raid. As a Paladin, I'm main tank healing, and topping the raid during transitions when things get particularly frantic. However, despite the balance of the fight, I aim to be as close to the Shamans and Priests as possible.

I also feel that in fights that aren't balanced towards a specific type of healer, meters can mean a lot more. Kael is the only example that comes to mind, excluding the warlock tank healer. In this fight, position and awareness of your surroundings and the damage patterns is the only thing that restricts you as a healer.

If you do see a certain healer or even class consistently at the bottom of your meters, there is something wrong. As it has been stated numerous times, certain fights cater to certain healers and if you haven't seen a particular healer excel or push to the top of the meter at some point through the available content, you probably have a problem on your hands.

This being said, I always have meters running for trash and boss fights. I generally use Recount, and sometimes I also run SWS (I like the way SWS shows certain healing breakdowns better than I've discovered to do on Recount). I feel that seeing the meters and being aware of them pushes me as a healer and causes me to work more efficiently.

 

funny

sometimes the "healing to target" function can be helpful to see if assigned healers did their job instead of crosshealing or sleeping.

posting healing-meters all the time is nothing but an ego function and you see different people requesting it after different fights.

i like the suggestion with the extra channel though.

 

Lushy

Pretty much all the reasons as to why healer meters are bad are mentioned above, and generally I find that with competent healers the position on them is based by which class/assignment has the advantage on that fight. There are some fights that I'm never gonna outheal a lifebloom druid who knows what they're doing - and that's great, I've got competent teammates!

Healing meters can show who is a bad healer very easily though. It should make you stop and think when a healer who takes 0 mana pots does 2-4 times less healing than other people of his class assigned to the same targets.

 

Jebraltar

I've seen vice versa. Three healers on a tank on Maulgar, tank dies. Why? Because they were spamming flash while the tank got hit for 4k 5k 4k while we were undergeared and they didn't respond fast enough. Flash-spam bitches are certainly useful, but they shouldn't be your only healers - pre-casted heals are going to get your tank up faster after spikes most of the time. (And as for "Well, cast a big heal when the tank drops farther," that's where "damn it, my heal was 0.2 seconds away!" comes in, especially for Paladins.)

 

Thelyna

Obviously you're not going to be able to sustain GH7 for the duration of a Maulgar kill, but really it's only for the start of the pull (once the adds start dropping and everyone starts healing the MT, you can drop back a bit) - and if you're running flash spam, you're going to run oom faster with less healing done. In an ideal world you heal proactively (cast/cancel), not reactively.

For paladins it's kinda the other way around, FoL is insanely efficient, Holy Light drains mana faster (but with DI/Light's Grace, they're the best oh-sh*t healers - excepting possibly a tree druid with swiftmend/NS regrowth). I agree that tree druids are frankly pretty awesome for MT healing, it baffles me when people put them on raid healing.

There's the incidental factor of latency, if you don't use stopcast macros (if you're casting twice as much, latency becomes twice as big of a problem - not such a factor for druids since LB is instant).

DeeNogger: "No dot timer? Get your belt off, its spanking time."

 

Sando

I haven't raided in TBC much, just going off my pre-BC, and my Kara/Gruul experience, but i don't see why things would have changed, correct me if i'm wrong.

There are certain fights where you simply cannot just look at how much people healed and expect that to give you an even vaguely good estimation of how people performed. A part of being a healer is that there are some fights where you work your butt off, some fights where you end up doing SFA, and alot of it is down to luck, and the rest to assignment.

I remember on Patchwerk, we had 3-4 assigned healers to each tank taking the strike, i would often be nearly double the healing of the other healers assigned to the same tank. This wasn't because i was better, it wasn't because the other guys were slacking, it was because my gear setup and talents allowed me to go with a higher rank and as a spirit heavy priest i'd get the innervate(s). The only thing that told me who was doing better out of the healers was watching my targets health and the cast bars of my helping healers to see who was hitting with their heals when, there was nothing that a heal meter could tell me.

That's just one example where the meters tell me nothing. That doesn't include luck, where i could be the healer on one of the tanks who happens to just have a dream run and take very little damage. I've seen the opposite, where for some reason a tank will take extreme dmg for no apparent reason. Our best geared OT was taking nearly double the dmg that the OT we swapped in after a few deaths took on Emps one time, complete luck.

Meters are a useful tool, but if you just post them after every fight and expect to get much out of them then i don't think they'll serve a useful purpose. At that point the healers start to feel they need to be at the top of that meter so they do silly things to stats pad, resulting in worse overall healing. As soon as the healing meter becomes about epeen then i think it's doing more harm than good. I don't think meters are a good way to identify a problem, people dying does that, i think meters can be useful to identify why that problem is occuring.

 

Nightingale

I agree and disagree with the use of heal meters.

Healing meters in conjunction with swstats is really decent, especially if you can do a brief rundown of healing done, and then break it down into what exactly that person is doing.

As an example, on a Mag run due to CH I had the highest done healing, of course with a huge % of that CH. I was however, 3rd on overheal. We broke it down and found that the two priests who were directly below me and were beating even the paladins (who generally win the meters) were doing about 80% of their healing from fheals, meaning that while people were definitely getting the heals they needed, they were quick small heals, thus causing my smart targeting CH to end up overhealing on some targets. Which is better? We didn't care because it's possible the CH wouldn't have hit fast enough; and as long as they weren't running out of mana...

We also analyze the Mag fights, where I heal perhaps 100-200 less than the top two people, but I am also earth shocking and interrupting heals, as well as raid healing.

I don't obviously think you should spam them after every fight, but looking at the heal meters, being able to use them properly, and knowing certain things (IE overheal isn't necessarily bad as long as you aren't starved for mana and people are surviving because of it) then they are generally very useful.

I will continue to use them; as a healer myself they are generally rather good for telling me when I am perhaps watching too much tv. My efficiency and healing done tanks completely, and once I realize it, I can adjust.

Also, the meters don't show pure healing done, so as long as you are reseting after boss fights, trash etc, it does usually show you who is johnny on the spot for doing heals. Does that mean they're neglecting their main target? Not necessarily, but like every other tool, it's used for clarification and a support; not in and of itself an answer.

Summary: Encourage the use of the healing meters as a personal and even competitive measure of value, but discourage the constant spamming, the over simplification of what it means, and the increased value of topping them as a way to shirk your duties and simply spam to achieve top slot.

Healing meters does do what the damage meters do on raids; shows you your weaknesses, albeit vaguely, and from fight to fight, if you know last week you did this much healing and this week you are only doing this much healing, and there is nothing impeding you, then you know you need to step it up.

The problem I really think comes from non-healers who try to interpret what those meters mean. You will know if you're dispelling, if you're interrupting, if you're on MT/OT, if you're floating etc. Most likely, others will not.

For me, damage and heal meters have always been an "in house" thing, except for when I was a hunter and we spent eons analyzing shot rotations, buffs, gear, bows, consumables and pets just so we could beat the rogues every fight. But largely, we used it as a measure of what we needed to become, or an indication of what we needed to stop doing as it hindered us.

People spamming heal meters is no different than dps classes spamming the dmg meters; it always happens, and in both cases issues will arrive that may show you to be less efficient. Instead of completely going off the hinge about the use of them, explain the intricacies of the tool.

It's still incredibly useful.

Edit: Also I do think perhaps the OP is slightly not fully interpreting things; achieving top slot on healing may be cool, but neglecting your job to get there is dishonorable, and is akin to ambushing a level 1 critter for extra dmg on the meters. If the person legitimately needs a heal, and they can squeeze it in, great. But I have yet to really see someone who is completely ignoring their targeting just to get higher. If you're having trouble with bosses you've had on farm or are ceasing to progress, then toy with it and see if that's the cause, but most likely as your guildies are leveling it is getting easier to do their own duties as well as extra things and they are reaping the rewards (and recognition) for it.

 

Chardonnay

Sorry, which game are you talking about?
MT healers in 25 mans SHOULD overheal around 50% at least, if their overheal is low, it means they heal reactively which is no longer viable on burst damage raid encounters of BC.
I stopped racing for lowest overheal spots when my assigned tanks died at the stewards in Moroes' room... Yes, that is Kara, you don't even have to go to 25mans to find places where reactive healing wipes raids.

 

vorda

50% overhealing means you'r overhealing with you max ranks, which is neither good nor sustainable. Overhealing is defenitly needed on almost every encounter, but a 3k heal is usually fine if you'r overhealing on purpose.

 

Shakkha

I think there is some confusion here over two different things.

The OP talked about pasting the Healing ranks after a fight. That just shows ranks and healing done without any further information.

This is very different from dissecting WWS stats peacefully after a raid.

I think that pasting Healing Meters is idiotic. It serves no purpose at all and i hardly find any reason why it'd be 'fun'.
I had run in the past with some idiots asking X class why they didn't healed as much as Y class and some examples of what hasty conclusions can be taken on just looking at healing ranks.
My guess is that people asking for those to be pasted are the one who are topping them.
Looking at their own stats on their UI isn't enough, and they want to shout to the world how great they are. Most likely inferiority conflex issues that they're facing, those players may turn dangerous for the guild at some point as huge egos tend to become problematic when there are too much of them clashing about.


Another side is the WWS stats and what you can draw out of it. Personally i think the rank page is useless. However looking at individual sheets can provide unvaluable information in term of what that person did during the fight, and a lot of things can be learnt from his playstyle and possible mistake to change.
You can also compare it to the individual data sheet of the same class who had a similar assignement to see what one did worse than the other.

It is fundamental to realise however than there is not one way of healing. There are different preference and techniques that can be used, and what counts is the end can be sum up by three points:
1/ Did your assignement live?
2/ Did you live?
3/ Did you had enough mana?

If you reply Yes to these three points, the rest is just epeen.

 

• Karakas

There's plenty of fights where you'll have a 50% overhealing figure even with drastic amounts of downranking. These are mostly fights where all the heals you land will either be for 0% overheal, or 100% overheal, since they involve large amounts of random spike damage that is essentially unpredictable and un-reactable to, thus requiring healers to "spam" heals (downranked or not) and really limiting their ability to heal-cancel proactive heals.

Mother Shahraz is definitely one of the greatest examples of this when you're assigned to main tank healing. Azgalor is much in the same way, in that all the damage comes in large chunks that, on a tank with a decent amount of avoidance, is essentially unpredictable, especially if you are also having to deal with the silence and facing the prospect of the tank not being topped off going into a silence.

Later on, on farm content especially, I'll have high %s of overheal because I will outgear the encounter, and it's just better to be safe with 60% overheal and keep on spamming the tank rather than trying to play conservatively and risk wiping on farm content and wasting everyone's time.

 

Deris

The only thing I use healing meters (Recount!!!) for is to figure out if everyone is following assignements, and if maybe we're overstaffing at some assignments, thus can afford to shift healers around a different way. Or if some healers aren't needing to pot at all, but others are oom'ing and potting every CD - then maybe that assignment needs a little more help.

That and monitoring my own progress in regards to gear choices I've made, how well my meta(s) is/are performing, etc. On "easy" farm content espescially i've shifted to using the half cast meta for a little more output to make things a little smoother.

 

Mynxy

Healing meters have their place, but I think too many people analyze it the same way they analyze the dps meters. It simply is not enough information in the healing done to really have it be of value.

Look for example at a clear to Void Reaver (since my guild does not do any other tK bosses at this time). I usually end up spamming Lifebloom on the 3 tanks tanking the humaniods and a rejuv out on raid members that need it. I have high HPS because of this, and I rely on the rest of the healers in the group to keep the raid topped off. Usually by the time we get to VR I am well at the top of the healing meters. This however is not indicative that I am a more valuable healer than the paladin saving the warlock from agro, or the shaman chain healing melee who got stuck in a cleave. This just means that my raid understands what I am good at and the targets that I always heal.

In any raid, the healing group I find needs to be the most in synch. They need to understand that the warlock who just lifetapped and got a rejuv from me will not need a FoL to top him off, or that while I am assigned to the MT I will rarely heal anyone else unless their assigned healer is dead or silenced or something. You need to understand and predict the way your other healers operate, as well as know and be able to semi-predict the fight itself.

The healing meters merely show who put out the most healing, not necessarily who did the "best job" at healing. They are more of an afk check than anything. SWS at least allows you to look through and see whats being cast and on who, as well as a more extensive look at combat logs. This is also not perfect. Anything that quantifies your worth by the sheer numbers you can do is just an epeen contest.