Dakous

These comments aren't directed to me, as they have nothing to do with what I said beyond the initial "I have no problem with accountability." which is fine, if you're accepting the premise, but then I didn't say anything to "you" then anyway (however, a few people didn't accept it - to them, I respond).

By the way, the problem in this thread is the intangibles of healing, but your example case is directly measureable in healing meters. Also, berserker stance is pretty easy to catch without the use of any additional addons. In addition to the unusual whooping the tank is taking, when he set himself berserker there's an angry face that appears over his head instead of a shield. The two hander should also be a little evident and not require use of an addon to parse.

Forecast and that other addon previously linked are helpful for the "hadn't cast anything for X" problem, although that begins the intangibles - did that healer enter a med state where the other 4 should have been handling it?

Not to repeat anything that has already been said in thread, or anything.

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

thejdawg

Thing is, even if a healer hasn't cast anything for X amount of time, it doesn't necessarily mean they are AFK/not trying to do their job.

As a druid, I've got the slowest high use heal. My options for quick healing are NS+HT, usable once every 3 minutes, and Rejuv+Swiftmend, effectively 1.5 sec casting (~1.8 hi2u lag) every 15 seconds, or instant if a rejuv/regrowth is already on there. Often times, especially on trash, it's: Target player X. Cast HT, interrupt because a priest/shaman already hit them, or cast rejuv, have 1 tick hit, then have the rest be wasted because again, a priest or shaman already hit them.

That's my biggest beef for healing as a druid in a raid setting. Half the time, your heals are too slow to be as effective as other healers. Or, you can spend that half the time throwing HoTs on 12 different people and watch each of them tick once before being wasted on overheal.

 

Shocktar

140 Mana/Tick while casting? That's something I'd like to see. Granted, you probably have near around 60/tick while casting, so you'd get the mana back from heal R1 shortly after the heal is cast, but you're not gaining mana while casting.
The point is that overheal makes one's heals valueless. In fact, that's why I've had to switch back to flash heal, because my heals won't hit if I use 2.5sec heals, and that's just unfortunate. Does anyone else have this issue, where if they use slow heals, it turns into overheal, because people heal your target before you do? If so, what do you do about it?

Gear is how hard you hit. Skill is how often you hit.
http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...tealth5325.png

 

◊ Praetorian

For starters, I bet your MTs know who your best healers are, if they have healer notification turned on. They quickly get a sense of whose heals always seem to land right after big spikes, and whose heals seem to land 0.5 sec after others have topped them off. And, of course, who never seems to heal at all.

Personally, with the advent of accurate "effective healing" tracking, I'd encourage healers to take that particular stat very seriously. Before healmeters used to be about who could spam PoH or whatever, but on most fights today, being #1 on effective healing really means something. It means you repaired more damage done than anyone else, and that is almost always a good thing (with certain exceptions of course -- someone who tops meters by healing rogues on Gluth is not a shining star).

I'd emphasize trash healing meters in particular. Ideally you want them to be pretty much even across the raid. But they won't be. Recognize the people who top them, and ask the people who are at the bottom to pay more attention and figure out what they're doing wrong. If they have 60% overhealing, tell them to be smarter with their healing strategy and not just heal the #1 guy on EM. If they are low on raw healing, then they need to just plain cast more unless they're DPSing or something. Trash is a great gauge for this, because it isn't as gear-dependent. On Patchwerk, Player A who outhealed Player B may not be a better healer -- he may just have better gear that lets him rank up heals or spam a bit more to achieve a greater raw output, where Player B would go OOM if he tried that. But very few trash pulls are going to run healers completely OOM, and there's usually time to drink while the next pull is incoming. So performance becomes much more about player skill and less about gear. The best stretches of trash for this, in my view, are BWL lab packs and post-Emps slayer packs.

 

impossible!

Towards the end of my time as a priest in my old guild, this is how it became for me. Personal ethics prevent me from using anything like auto-heal cancels and like, so it became increasingly difficult to keep up with all the kids that taped down their '1' key and assigned it to a macro.

A lot raid situations are a poor indicator of the quality of a healer, in my opinion. When you have 12-15 people tossing heals onto 1-3 concentrated targets, the "best" healer is the one with good latency and who lucked into good timing at the start of the encounter. Watch the tank, spot heal non-tanks and go double-time when predictable spikes are incoming. You're contributing to the raid just as much as anyone else by being there, and, at the very least, trying to heal your targets.

Seriously, as long as you're doing your job, and doing it well, why worry about anything?

edit: I forgot to say that I haven't played healer in a raid beyond Satura (when she was on the PTR), so I can't really say how things have changed since then. However, I still maintain that it's very difficult to gauge the effectiveness of your healers using just the numbers. It's when, who and how your heals hit that matter.

 

◊ Praetorian

If your heals are consistently overhealing there are two possibilities:
1) Your raid has too much healing for the encounter, so DPS or something. If everyone is at 100% health and no one is dying at all, and you keep overhealing when you try to heal, then stop.
2) More likely, you need to change up your healing strategy. If LHW/Flash spammers keep beating you to the punch, then stop healing the most injured guy with a 2.5sec heal. Find people who are missing 1000hp and toss a low-rank heal at them. Focus on the mobs and anticipate who is going to take damage next, so you have a heal going.

 

impossible!

This is exactly where I went with it as the encounters became more dynamic post-MC, rather than get worked up over my heals not hitting consistently on normal cycles. Funnily enough, even though my numbers on the meter were below most people, I received more praise than most for keeping non-tanks alive, landing major heals on spikes and having a low overheal percentage. Then again, it wasn't hard to look good amidst a group of lazy healers spamming a macro on a single target. :V:

 

Dakous

Which is the premise of the problem for this thread - mana regen cycles aren't directly clocked by the effective healing meter.

Or become psychic and premature ehealuate all over them. Not as hard as it sounds, although I'll admit I've yet to firmly grasp it (and they, too, can play the psychic - curse those nasty priestses, they takes our precious healss)

Then, to stay on topic of tracking raid effectivity (as opposed to the strife of healing as a druid, period), you track effective healing by class, just like you track effective damage. If a rogue placed #12 on the damage meters, that's a red flag... unless rogues make up slots 11-16 on your DM. If a druid placed 7th on effective healing meters, that's not a red flag if he's around the same percentage healing as other druids.

(in another post...)
And this ties in to the above survey-metric, "Ask people to group with their healer of choice..." which is an answer to the thread problem statement and apparently gets the impossible! seal of approval.

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

thejdawg

Any particular reason you have a stick up your ass and decided to take it out on my post?

The OP was about measuring the quality of healers. One might assume, but looking at healing meters, or only looking at how people do on trash that the druids in their guild are subpar because they are ineffective, relatively speaking compared to priests or shamans when it comes to trash healing. I addressed that point. Because my posts are in conflict with your godlike abilities or what you want to talk about does not mean I'm whining, or that my psychic powers are not up to snuff. It's another perspective from another person, which is exactly what the OP asked for.


You don't like it? Cry me a river, build me a bridge, and get over it. This forum isn't just for you.

 

Rogar

For those of us without clairvoyant abilities, there are mods like Healer's Assist and Simply Magical Healer (SMH) that use sync channels to update emergency monitor targets to include incoming heals. Obviously, the more healers in your raid that use them, the more effective they become.

I'm a fan of SMH because it deals with the math for every heal (+heal gear, +heal buffs like Power Infusion, ZHC, Hib. Crystal and Blessing of Light, debuffs like Mortal Strike or Veil of Shadows, etc), which results in using the most efficient rank of the heal type chosen, in terms of minimzing mana costs and overheals. It's priority system is highly configurable and is what won me over from Healer's Assist.

 

Ashuko

Excuse my ignorance, but which mods are best for this? Or settings within mods.

http://ctprofiles.net/69539

 

Pater

The thing is that all of this discussion about "best healers" puts the emphasis in the wrong place. What's necessary is "best leaders" or "best healing strategy."

Someone could put himself at the top of the "effective healing" meter every night if he just dropped small heals on the random people around the raid in the -700 hp region, and never heal the tanks once.

If you're having problems with healing, my guess is that you don't have any healing assignments. Healers are left to guess and go by intuition, which won't work on the most difficult fights.

 

Rogar

Scrolling Combat Text will display the name of the healer that healed you next to the numerical value of the heal. Example output would look like "1337 (Rogar)".

 

Jedah

Ugh, I personally kicked EM to the curb a month ago and its been amazing to see how you can, I think, adapt much better to situations by thinking pre-emptively (God bless the F key) rather than racing to land a regrowth on that priest the felguard just slapped upside the head.