Tizzlewump

When my pre-BC toon was still into the Raid Progression Game, I took at as my personal goal to espouse the philosophy that "we're trying to kill a boss in raid, and if you're not helping we still love you but you can't come." I first took this position when our real raid leaders started cracking down on consumables usage in raid, but as more alts and undergeared friends and family started sneaking into /g it became more and more used.

Your seven-year-old daughter may very much want to help daddy work on his latest submission to a professional journal and you may love her very much but that doesn't mean there's anything to be gained by spending your working hours listening to her suggestions. No one wants to hear, "Go away, the Big Kids are busy doing Important Things," but that doesn't mean we can't be grown-up enough to say "I understand, call me when you have a spot for a farming run." People who want to be a part of new raid content should understand why progression is important to their teammates.

I recognize two obvious flaws in what I'm saying. First, there's no reason to believe your fellow WoW players will be mature about anything, especially raid invites. Second, I'm talking about a guild culture that I took months to build up. But I think putting barriers between your status as a raider and your status as a guildie is key especially in a guild where you can't say, "you /fail, we /gkick."

 

Soralin

This is a subject that I'm sure plagues all semi-casual guilds.

Let me reiterate what many people have said:

Healing Meters are not an effective measure of how "good" a healer is. They are useful for finding out what people are doing, who they are healing, and theorycrafting - but at the end of the day, if a healer comes last on healing meters by a significant margin and their healing target lives, they have done their job.

My former guild had a lot of problem with what one person this thread called "legacy raiders". Those who have become almost a fixture in the guild but contribute almost nothing but wipes to the raid. Whether this is because somebody is too focussed on topping meters (and ignoring FF targets as a result) or because somebody just doesn't get it, is largely irrelevant.

The bottom line is unless you are in the top 2-3 on your server you will always have these people in your guild. My former guild was an Australian guild on an American server which led to recruitment issues - in order to remove the "dead weight" and seriously push forward into MH/BT (at the time of me leaving they were 5/6 | 3/4) it would have meant removing half of the raid - and the other half probably would have left simply because of all the drama associated with it.

What do you do if the "legacy raiders" are also "legacy officers"? (somewhat of a rhetorical question)

 

DJNW

True, in a general sense - although I'm noticing on my druid that my position on the healing meter is often an indication of someone else is doing something they shouldn't be - healbot by default (as far as I'm aware - I'm sold on grid) doesn't show that someone has lifebloom on them. Consequently, between updates on the tank, I splat the odd single lifebloom across the raid for people who're down 1-2k. And Lo! it gets sniped by someone with a 1.5s heal, and I'm left exactly where I was on the effective meter, and up 1.5k or so on overheal.

To cut a long ramble short - the amount of information available to someone who's healing can drastically change their location on the meters - someone could be getting an earbashing for being low down the meters when the golden boy is actually causing them to be down there. Sure, good enough is, well... good enough, but there's no point in burning mana when you don't need to, and as others have mentioned, there's battle-ressed played who'll need completely healing up and Yet Another Boss AoE/Random 2nd Target Ability that I'd rather keep my mana for.

 

Emily

Unless you are in a position where you can recruit people better than the deadweight dragging you down, you have no options. You can't threaten to remove people from raids with no-one to replace them, nor even be selective about who you invite at raid start, so a culture develops where slacking is acceptable.

Over-recruit, particularly in weaker areas of the raidforce, and you'll be able to turn your words into deeds.

 

Sepulture

I am not trying to get into an argument here, but if you say that healing meters are not an effective way to measure your healers' performance, you haven't spent enough time reviewing WWS functionality.

A healing assignment for a boss when compared to "who heals whom" is an extremely powerful indicator of who is doing their job well.

The main issue with effective healing meters is that healers know the meters exist.

 

DJNW

At the end of the day, they are a panacea, and a poison. We exchange one set of behaviour (obvious slacking) for another (e-peening snipers).
Personally, I only turn recount on if I'm playing with randoms. We can dig through WWS after a raid is over.

 

◊ Bekah

Most folks saying that are pointing towards the bare bar graph of who's healed the most. Of course a smart guild/raid leader or the healer themselves can determine what's going right or wrong by parsing WWS individually. Thankfully, that's becoming more common. that said- an earlier poster mentioned that it's hard to make full value judgments without knowing the class well enough to recognize subtle errors. Same reason you want a really good mage to look at the WWS parse for a bafflingly low dps mage. Oh, well here you see they're not activating combustion more than once a fight and only use their trinkets twice on the entire clear. Here's a couple of macros suggestions to offer the to get those cooldowns always used etc etc.

It was easy for me to look through a parse and identify where I could make more regen happen- it's harder to look through the parse and see where I could have made more healing happen- unless my target is dead. And... if my target isn't dead but I was keeping strictly to it- is it a fault with my performance that I wasn't used to my maximum efficiency- or a fault in the assignments... or both?

 

Kozik

Healing is solely based on an encounter. Fights like archimonde and Illidan are strictly single target healing encounters, which play toward certain classes. Other encounters, like bloodboil, are a shaman's dream fight.

As for dps, WWS is the best help. If a player is playing utility, they may not do better at individual dps, but aid the overall dps. I.e: keeping a scorch debuff, lock curses, etc.

Basically, as long as encounters are being completed successfully, or progress is being made, there is no reason to fret over 2 or 3%. Obvious issues like overall focus can be addressed, but make sure someone doesn't feel like they are always being chastised.

 

Ciske

When we were learning Vashj, a fight where one person's mistake really does mean the difference between a wipe and a kill, our RL had a habit of posting the Recount of the events leading up to the death of the first person we had lost. It wasn't so much a Name & Shame exercise but more an awareness thing, to make everyone realise that, actually, staying alive wasn't just solely the healers' responsibility, but everyone's.

Obviously on some occasions it showed clear healing failure, like the MT dying due to no heals for 7-10 seconds, which was sign that us healers weren't cooperating well enough and had to reassign our targets. On DPS deaths, it would show that yes, the rogue/hunter/mage spent 5-7 seconds without a heal while their closest healer was tossing cores, but they also hadn't bandaged/potted/HS-ed during that time. It was a great way to make people aware of what they can do, personally, to make the fight easier. 'I didn't get a heal' is no longer a good excuse for our DPS-ers when asked why they died.

My point is that you can't really make people take personal accountability, but what you can do, as RL, is provide them with the information they need to understand their own performance. And, if they really are nice people, then they shouldn't want to be the one to let the raid down and cause wipes, and they will learn and improve. If that mindset doesn't exist, you have every right to remove them from your raid.

 

◊ Kyth

And what you need to realize is that not everyone is motivated by public listings of who is the worst player after every raid. I'm not saying you shouldn't post WWS's -- I think that's often a good thing to do.

e.g., a stereotype of women in (and the person you were responding to was talking about a female player) is that they will improve their performance far better via constructive discussions than they will via public shamings. It's not gender-guaranteed, but there's definitely a stereotype that can be accurate. It's not that they're weak, emo, poor players, or whatever, it's just that motivations vary person by person.

There are plenty of men who are the same way. (and plenty of women who work fine with more public corrections. So don't derail this with anecdotes-as-data nonsense, just take my general point and move on.)

To be an effective guild/raid leader you need to understand that each person is motivated differently and, as much as possible, if you are getting involved in them improving, figure out how *they* want to receive the feedback, not how you want to give it.


For some, public humilation, rather than challenging them to do better next time, actually creates severe performance anxiety and can make them do worse, not better (a friend of mine has this problem right now on a specific T6 boss.)

If you're in a very top guild then yes you can probably afford to just offend everyone who isn't exactly like you because there's always more good players out there who want to be in your guild. But this threat was about the other 99% of guilds, right?

 

Loragan

The general consensus appears to be that Healing Meters are not an efficient gauge of healing performance, and there is a lot of truth to that statement. Obviously, raw numeric measurements of healing will benefit those who playing the class/role which suffers the least from overhealing and "lack" of low-health targets to heal. As a Restoration Shaman normally assigned to raid healing, I'm obviously going to be in the top of the meters most of the time, regardless of my actual performance. The design of my main Healing spell combined with a flexible set of tasks allows me to quickly gather a large amount of points of actual healing. Naturally, this means it would be silly to compare me with a Paladin assigned to healing the Main Tank in a numerical manner. Apples and oranges. However, I would stress that this does not mean cross-assignment comparisons cannot be made.

Whether this kind of comparison is useful or not is not neccesarily black and white. If you gather data for a long series of raids and find that one invidual is constantly outputting a low amount of healing, yet has a similar variety of tasks as his peers (in terms of class/gear) you obviously have a problem. This seems logical enough, but it is important to keep in mind that even though the actual numbers might be less important than their DPS equivalents you will always have individuals who are more or less effective at what they do than your average member, and that these numbers might be useful in detecting these people. Hence, claims like "I hit 1500 HPS!" might have little meaning or value, but the statement "I have 500 more HPS than those assigned to the same task" would be relevant.

There appears to be a stigma associated with healing outside of your assignments in many guilds. Now, I obviously don't know enough about how any of you operate to make accurate conclusions, but intuitively this looks like a dangerous policy. I've personally observed critical members (usually main tanks) being inches from dying but being saved by healers assigned to something completely different, and the implication that they were doing something wrong seems silly. Obviously there needs to be a balance, you can't have healers risking everything in order to shine numerically, but you also don't want to opposite scenario where people perform what is expected of them and no more. You don't want people to turn into machines, because as soon as somebody enters the 'autoplay' state-of-mind their performance will go down drastically. If your main tank survives a fight this does not mean that each and every single healer assigned to him/her did well, it simply means that most of them did, or that somebody unrelated to the task filled the blanks.

Summary:
Numerical healing measurements should not be used make generic analyses, but they are a powerful tool when it comes to analyzing specific situations. Thus, do not be afraid to use them to make cross-task comparisons as long as these make sense and are somewhat objective. Similarly, try to find a balance between forcing people to stick to assignments and letting them take unnecessary risks. Discourage irrelevant comparisons of performance ("Epeening") but do not let genuine underperformers hide behind their assignments or classes. Most importantly, do not assume, that just because you cannot use Healing data the same way that you can use DPS data, that it is not useful. They serve different purposes, but ignoring the former based on the general notion that it is inherently subjective (which admittedly it is) is ignorant.

 

Distomos

I very much agree. They're fabulous tools to discover if a particular person is "doing their job" but, then again, it is assumed that they should be. It's much easier to question a DPS class in terms of meters in comparison to a healer, but I do think it's important not to dismiss the detailed reports that WWS in particular has to offer.

 

Evilm

WWS has been a god send for our guild as we become more progression minded as it raises awareness of group performance. We are at the point now (5/6 SSC, 3/4 TK) where we really can't have any dead weight in the raid and expect to succeed.

A general rule of thumb for us has been: If you're direct, and simply say, "We need you to improve your dps/healing/survivability etc. by doing x, then x, then x." those that are worth the effort will respond positively. No one likes sucking at a game. For those who aren't theorycrafters, a simple list of suggestions can be enough to see significant improvement.

Another key aspect, is rewarding progress. If you know a player is really trying to improve an aspect of their play, make the effort to comment when they do it right. It's very easy to be overly negative when you're facing difficult boss fights.

 

Shagraas

As raid leader in a social guild on a slow-progressing server, I frequently have to make the distinction between players that are at the top of game and those that have raid spots for social or historical reasons. We started posting our WWS info for the raid to view, and it's been a godsend- suddenly certain people were asking "Why am I so far behind X? How can I fix that?" If seeing themselves falling behind badly doesn't light a fire under someone's keister, we have an easier time giving their raid slot to someone who will push harder for it.

When we see a large disparity between players of similar roles, one of the things we've found effective is having the stronger player act as a coach to the weaker one. We have them run something that is easily farmed (in our case Karazhan), and have the stronger player keep an eye on the "project." The coach may then be able to pick up on things that may be missing. Obviously this is easier for some classes/roles than others, but doing it in easy content gives some flex room.

I agree that healing meters (Recount/SWStats, etc, not the detailed WWS parse) are very easy to misinterpret. The numbers only have meaning when matched with the specifics of the situation. We don't post meters in-raid at all as it rarely leads to anything other than Epeenery.

 

Boneitis

Healing meters are useless. A decent resto shaman will dominate them. A good paladin can do the same thing on non aoe fights.

Like what every other healer has said - give your healers specific roles, if their people are still alive at the end of the fight then they did the job regardless of how low you think they are on the meter. That's healing. Why are we still debating this? Healer A isn't better because they have they spammed FoL and landed it the second the tank gets hit and Healer B comes in .5 seconds later on their rotation. And CoH or Chain Heal will always dominate the meters.

Meters have only ever been good for spotting problems, never for measuring quality. If you're so anal that you actually care that one rogue did 12k less damage over the course of a 10 minute fight, well I can't relate to you. That's just not worth worrying about imo.

 

Bunni

Thank you, I've been trying to figure out a way to make this post for days now without coming off sounding like a jerk. There is an annoying trend in the healing community that seems to say we should practically feel bad for doing well on the meters and that people putting out less healing are in fact playing "smarter not harder". While occasionally true it's mostly just an excuse for not having to push themselves. I know, I've had off nights where I end up in the middle/end of the healing meter pack and it has absolutely nothing to do with playing smarter. It's just flat out that other people did the heavy lifting that night.

Healers that routinely end up on the bottom of the meters are no different than any other class that "does their job" but doesn't seem to care about improving their own performance beyond that. They do fine most of the time but if you get too many of them in one raid you start running into those annoying "just a bad night" problems. A few too many people die each pull, crowd control isn't quite fast enough, decursing seems slow etc...

In short, exactly what this thread is about addressing I think.

Edit: I just want to point out that I in no way think that #1 healing meter slot is any better than #5. I'm talking about people that no matter the situation seem to always end up underperforming and there is no obvious reason why they should (had some distant and restrictive assignment, had to decurse/interrupt etc...). People who set the bar of success at "the job got done" might not wipe your raid, but they rarely save it from disaster either.

 

Alvira

Our raid leader has a simple way of handling this. He is absolutely fair and WILL chew out people no matter how long in the guild or how popular if they make mistakes. And if they are the ones dying and causing everyone to wipe that time, its kinda hard (almost impossible) to defend ourself when you are so clearly the one that wiped the raid and he pointed out that you did.

After a while, you improved your play and upped it till you stopped wiping the raid, or you stop signing up to raid. Because how many people like to be chewed out every single raid?

It wasn't pleasant certainly, but it worked. And he has my deep respect for it. We have gotten through the biggest guild busters of Kael and Vashj and recently killed Archimonde as well and are deep into BT. And ... we did it without vent, playing mostly from computers in Asia (we are an Asian guild) so most of us are playing with latency of at least 200 to 500.

Its not an easy or pleasent job, but someone (aka the raid leader) has to do it. If you are a famous guild, or have recruits galore such that you are free to replace anyone and everyone. You probably won't have issues. But few guilds have that kind of luxury. Then its up to the raid leaders to strive and get across the message of "shape up or ship out"

Online respect is earned, just as online obedience is as well. If our raid leader asked us all to strip naked and do zero DPS on archimonde unil the raid wiped to practise not dying, we would probably have done it (luckily he didn't). But he has been able to obtain that level of respect and obedience because he is just as hard on himself as with everyone else.

Everyone is held accountable to his or her mistakes (no exceptions), including himself. And he doesn't play favourites. You don't get that just be shouting, or being mean. You have to show that you are being absolutely fair and the person really did wipe the raid. Once you can, even if that person is the most popular person in the guild, his friends will be hard pressed to defend him.

Thus, if you are unable to be so direct, then don't be a raid leader, class leader, etc. I am just an unimportant cheer leader for the guild because I recognise my own limitations that I am unable to be so direct in criticism even when it is required. Our guild has raided under his leadership since MC/AQ days and we wil be killing Illidan under his leadership. There might be other raid leaders that prefer "softer" approaches, but I don't know of any cos I am not raiding with them. Ours have brought us this far, so it is one style of raid leadership that I know of that does work.

Even old timers, popular people, girls, etc all ot it if they made valid mistakes that wiped the raid, then they would get chewed out. And it did have results in that the people either shaped up, or stop raiding. Barring those that had to leave the raiding scene because of other personal reasons through no fault of their own, the remaining lot are mostly a bunch of motivated, and relatively skilled (there's always room for improvement!) bunch of raiders!

A salute out to Narco, Merv's raid leader! ^_^ The road hasn't been easy, but we are with you all the way to the end!!!!

 

rayijin

This is a good summary of my philosophy/approach to raid leading. I may be harsh, but I am accurate. Things I am prone to do are post a recount, and painstakingly go through to figure out and question why someone died: "You got feared into a doomfire on the first fear? Ok. You had a trinket equipped and are undead, did you use wotf or trinket? No. Ok. Did you pop fire shield, a healthstone, a potion after this? No? Alright. Completely unacceptable. You have been added to the wall of shame for failing in every possible way there is to fail. In addition, you just wiped the raid and wasted our time."

There may be some bitching/complaining/"it's not my fault" at first, but eventually, the whiners will fall silent, because when done fairly and honestly and openly, there is no way to argue against it. Truth has that quality. However, you may lose people who refus to accept the facts. There was one incident where after several wipes due to a healer not being able to keep up his target, then when given very specific instructions (spam rank X heal on target until you run out of mana) failed to do so resulting in another wipe, and another call out, quit the game entirely and was never heard from again.

The final key point from the above poster is that a good raid leader will be harsher on himself than on others. Another example: I was tanking Archimonde, and a warlock ran on top of me and got an airburst, throwing me into the air. I could have intercepted but panicked, clicked my tears too early and fell to my death, wiping the raid. I put myself on the wall of shame first, then the warlock. The bottom line is, if there was any possible way to survive/do your job, it is your responsibility to do it regardless of what mistakes others make.

A good leader or leadership core that is accountable and respected for being fair and accurate goes a long ways towards helping people accept accountability for themselves.

 

AcAc

As a healer, I sometimes try to be #1 on the healing meters to prove to myself that I can, but usually I try to be on the bottom. I try to end fights with lots of mana left -- this means that when things go bad, I've got resources to recover. If a Druid HoTs somebody who's not likely to be damaged again soon, I can 'steal' their heal and raid myself on the healing meter, but it's probably better not to.

However, in the old days, I would die a lot. I was doing well healing-wise, but hurting the raid due my own deaths. Everyone in the guild made fun of me. The mockery hurt my feelings, but it motivated me to figure out why I was dieing and fix the problem. I would suggest that "friendly teasing" is probably the best way to deal with the situation. Look at the damage meters every fight, and point out that yet-again the named person is at the bottom. You can't avoid hurting their feelings, so do it in the most friendly way possible. There is no reason to 'punish' underperformers, but there is every reason to keep letting them know that you believe they are underperforming.

By the way, I don't know why you'd be upset over a measly 1% difference in performance.

 

Masterdragon

As others said, on a healing standpoint, Meters are a lot harder to compare Joe Healer A to Jack Healer B then Joe DPS A and Jack DPS B. First of, I have to say, and I stand by this point, Effective Infight Healing is a BAD meter to base healing off of. On the flip side, Total Healing is a BAD meter to base healing off as well due to someone "Padding" their hps in between pulls. However, Assessment (Ace2 Addon) and others, you can set Total INFIGHT Healing. What this does is gives the Total Healing BUT only when fighting so really you cant pad the meters. And most leaders will see when someone is essentially purposely burning all thier mana for no reason while in fights. The thing I've like about Assement is that you can customize the window to show each individual part of healing AND have it to show Current Fights or a History of fights.

Mine is set up like this.
All Healing Values are INFIGHT only. I could care less what healing takes place out of combat.

Actual Healing Total (Acutal Healing DPS) :: Overhealing Total (% of Healing Overhealed) :: Total Healing Value (Total Healing per second.)
Player Bars are colored based on class and Actual Healing is in 100% opacity and Overhealing is at 35% Opacity. So i can see the bars of both.

Screenshot

Sure its a lot of information but since healing isnt so cut and dry like dps is, its a much much harder tool to use.

Other things which affect healing is dispels and Protection buffs. (A priest thats on dispel duty will have a much lower hps then normal. Then there the fact that healers often have different roles in any given fight. Is the person a raid healer, that person normally will have a much higher Actual HPS and Total HPS. Is that person a MT healer with 3 other people, then that person will naturally have a much higher Overhealing Total.

The main reason i hate Effective Healing is because its like playing the lottery. Did your heal land when the tank took the damage or did the tank get damage after your heal thus making your's overhealing and someone elses effective. In most fights you cannot just wait till the tank takes damage before starting a heal. That would lead to a dead tank since damage output is very large on some bosses and can shread a MT from 20k life to 0 in less then 2 seconds. Healers have to continual healing as a precautionary so that if the tank does take damage, his healing is right behind it. Some healers are good at canceling at the last minute but again that is a difficult skill to master and can still be dangerous to use. Since sometimes the damage is delayed, you wont notice the damage that WOULD have healed the tank but because to you, the tank was a full life and you canceled it.

So healing meters alone cannot measure the strenght of a healer alone as so many other factors influence it unlike DPS meters where its Pew Pew dont stop (in most cases) and thats pretty cut and dry.

After several raids with a person, you get a feel about what kind of healing output one can do. Mainly the leader has to go ask, did the tanks live. If yes then all the healers are good. If no then theres a problem somewhere with either the tank or more often then not, the ENTIRE healing crew.