tyme

After watching various healing classes over the past few weeks, it seems that over healing has a rather large impact on raid effectiveness. Does the percentage of overhealing done during a boss fight really matter? If it does matter what percentage is acceptable? As a healer should we strive for 20-30% overhealing? Is 40-50% to high? What if healers routinely average around 55% or higher overhealing?

 

• CheshireCat

The amount of acceptable overheal depends entirely on the encounter. (And in general, overheal has no effect on raid effectiveness, except in cases where your healers become mana-limited. That's actually a very small portion of encounters. On trash, for example, there's basically no point in being overheal-conscious.)

On anything where the tank is in danger from spikes, throw your overheal meter out the window. 40%+ is perfectly acceptable, even expected.

On anything where your priests are hitting PoH, throw it out the window again, so that it will land on top in the crater it left when you threw it out last time. PoH can overheal for 40% and still be more efficient than a fully effective GHeal.

In the case of encounters where (a) your healers are becoming mana-limited but (b) people are not dying to spike damage, (How many encounters does this cover? Curator sans shadowpriest, maybe.) go downstairs and dig the overheal meter out of the crater. Take a look to see if anyone is particularly egregious in their overhealing, that could be a result of poor healing habits rather than smartly playing with a safety margin.

In general, and I touched on this in the "Teaching Healers How to Heal" thread that you might want to check out, it's way more important for individual healers to evaluate their heals on a case-by-case basis using an instant feedback tool like SCT than it is to look at the general statistics for an entire raid.

 

Zantigra

If you ask me, I think that keeping it closer to 20-30% is more acceptible, especially during a boss fight, for the simple fact that the tanks are getting spam healed, and if the healer were overly concerned about overhealing, they might cancel their heal and the tank will pretty much die.

I play a priest to which I have raid healed with, and if you're talking for a full-raid overhealing %, I think 20-30% is an acceptible range. Anything greater than 40%, imo, then the healer needs to adjust how they're playing. They're effectively wasting half their mana by overhealing the raid.

Take that with a grain of salt though, because sometimes you just *have* to spam heal, and you will always get a lot of overhealing from it.

Please consider my point of view, as I'm primarily a mage, but I do have a priest to which I have experience on, just not as much as everyone else.


EDIT: (I agree with what CheshireCat says) Pretty much says everything I did, with a better explanation to it. =P

 

• Erongg

Overheal in and of itself is not a bad thing; going out of mana because you were sloppy with your healing is. If nobody's going out of mana and nobody's dying, don't worry about overhealing. If people are going out of mana and that results in tank deaths, check if too much overhealing is happening.

Healing meters are not a particularly good tool for measuring healing skill. Damage meters directly correlate to performance, but that frequently isn't true for healing. Thus I occasionally look at healing meters for fun or for analysis if things are going badly, but I generally ignore them completely. Don't get bent out of shape about overhealing unless it's causing deaths via OOM healers.

 

Kharlis

Overheal as posted above isnt necessarily a bad thing.

Healing isn't as easily measurable as dps as even the lowest metered healer could in fact be the most important one.
If you insist on trying to measure your healers performance your going to run into the same problems you have with dps trying to win the damage meters race.. there no longer playing for the team , and are in fact trying to "beat" their guild mates in what has then become a solo competition.
Yes, bit of competition is good, but if your entire set of healers are trying to win the lowest overheal percent race then your going to be getting alot of cancelled heals which just puts your tanks and your raid in general in pointless danger. Likewise with the most healed race you have people wasting mana to try and get a heal in before others.

Bottom line if your raid is alive at the end of an encounter your healers are doing their job.

 

tyme

This I can agree with. However if a healer is averaging 50%+ overhealing and is going out of mana about half way into most boss fights in kara (dreamless sleep pots ftw) is this something to be concerned about, even if we do win?

 

SindirHH

Exactly. The only time you should worry about overheal is if your healers are running out of mana and people are dying because your healers are running out of mana. As Kharlis said, if the boss drops and you win, then healers are doing their job.

 

• Michad

You have to take into account mana issues in combo with overhealing to get a true prespective. If a healer is constantly running OOM with a 50% or so overheal then they may need to change tactics or ranks of heals in conjunction with that specific encounter.

 

zeidrich

One thing that I don't think is mentioned is that overhealing can be indicitive of other problems, such as poor communication between the healers.

For instance, if the healers are all spam healing the first person who takes a dip in their health bar, they're going to be overhealing, if mana is not a problem, this isn't an issue. BUT, if you've got all your healers channeling a heal on one guy, and another person starts taking damage, this means that unless someone cancels their heal on the first target, the second target will not get a heal until the first heals finish, and the healers complete a cast on him.

I think that sort of behavior is where overhealing becomes dangerous, it was far more common in the days of emergency monitor healing, but still exists. If you notice that this is the reason that your healers are overhealing too much, you should consider setting out some more defined healing assignments.

But I agree with the above posters in that there's no magic % of overhealing that's good or bad, it all depends on the fight and the situation.

 

Ochiba

That's what you need to be concerned about.

 

Kharlis

Overheals don't show HOT ticks that aren't "consumed" .. so someone could be burning mana by hotting everyone when they dont need it..

Going OOM half way through a fight suggests that you either dont have enough healers (and these people are compensating for the fact and ending up oom) , that the person doing so isn't using their mana as effectively as they could be, or that they are undergeared for the fight (though if they have invested heavilly in spirit and regen talents this could actually be part of their healing strat.. i've seen people do this before).

Best thing you can do is to get your healers to talk amougst themselves and organise how they want to keep the raid alive between them as a team. If their organised properly it'll eliminate the possibliity of external factors(other people healing their targets before them) affecting their performance too much.

Alternatively as suggested in the "teaching healers to heal" thread.. send them to heroics/5mans/ whatever different situations to test their mettle and to get a better idea of how they cope in various situations.

 

• CheshireCat

That does sound like there's some room for improvement. Like I said, going OOM before you have to is a real problem, where overhealing by itself is not.

Healing meters are a blunt instrument for improving performance, though. I'm not sure how much you're going to accomplish by saying, for example, "Hey, try bringing your overheal down to about 30% for this fight." Like someone said earlier, this can lead to being too cancel-happy, particularly for someone inexperienced, who can't really calibrate their cast times with their overheal percentage accurately.

I'd suggest approaching them, or, even better, having a healing leader approach them, about their mana problems. This shouldn't be too sticky a wicket-- no healer should be really proud of running dry early. Ask them if they're canceling heals, or using lower ranks.

My tool of choice for increasing a person's awareness of which heals are worth casting is SCT, not a meter. You improve by learning, heal by heal, which ones landed and which didn't. Instant, per-heal feedback was absolutely invaluable to me, and I'm sure it would be for any healer looking to improve their timing.

 

• Erongg

When I upgraded to the newest SCT it stopped showing my 100% overheals (only my partial overheals show) despite having the "show overheals" button checked. Is there something I can do to fix this? Do I just need to roll back to an older version because of this new "feature"?

 

• CheshireCat

I noticed that, too, and I don't like it. Would be very interested in a solution.

 

Yonder

Could be that you have a healing threshold activated so very low numbers aren't shown to prevent flooding numbers. A complete overheal equals healing = 0, so it might be filtered by SCT.

 

• Erongg

Yes, that has to be the answer. Thanks =)

 

berg

As long as the healer maintains enough mana to never interfere with their healing, overhealing is a victimless crime.

Overhealing % for the most part is just not meaningful data. If a healer strives to keep it low that is fine but in the end I do not feel that it reflects strongly on the healer in any way.

 

• Chicken

I think the best way to put it is this: There's probably more ways of wiping because someone tries to avoid overhealing too much, than there are ways to wipe because someone doesn't.

While less overhealing is generally good, it's something that's very dangerous to get obsessed with.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

tyme

Part of my concern is if a 50% overhealing rate is common among most raiders or are people usually higher than that, say 60% or much lower perhaps 30%? A 50% over heal rate means that at least half a players mana/ heals is being wasted and so the healer will go oom during the last 40% or so of a boss fight even when inervated. Do most guilds use a dreamless sleep-pot rotation to counter this oom issue like we do? (When fighting bosses like the prince this can be an issue depending on when the raid has to move.) Usually we take 4 healers to most kara raids, so the number of healers is not the issue for most fights, the rate of mana usage is and finding ways to counter it.

 

• CheshireCat

Not that I know how every guild in the world is doing it, but bringing 4 healers and still needing Dreamless Sleep rotations (with Innervates!) does sound like there's a lot of wasted mana. Like, a lot. More than 50%. Maybe 80%.

Just as an example, we usually run three healers, and I only have to hit a mana pot in very heal-intensive fights-- Prince, maybe. Curator, if I don't have my shadow priest. Red Riding Hood, if our kiters have needed flash heal spam. I'd say I end the night with 35-40% overheal, usually. The other two healers are usually close to that. I'm not that saying that our guild is a healing paragon or anything-- you seem to want examples, and that's how we roll.

If we're running 3 healers with 60% effective healing, and you're running 4 healers with 50% effective healing, you should still have more healing available to you. (Assuming every healer is equal, or rather assuming that there's no difference between our average healers.)

Therefore, while toning down overhealing might be helpful, it also sounds like you're straining under a much higher volume of healing *needed* than we are. Make sure your tank's gear is up to snuff. Make sure your DPS isn't taking more damage than they need to, and that they're pulling their weight in ending fights as soon as possible.

Also, perhaps counterintuitively, try bringing less healing. If you bring less healing, you bring more DPS, which means you need less healing because the fights are shorter, which means your mana demands are lighter.

Tweaking down overhealing could solve your mana problems, but it sounds as if your mana problems are on a scale much bigger than overhealing alone.

 

• Erongg

Bringing less healing also means your healers are naturally overhealing less. As for an end-of-raid benchmark, I'd say 30% sounds about right.

 

◊ Praetorian

The very best healers do, however, tend not to overheal too much. I recall a time in Naxx one priest had 12% OH as a Patchwerk healer while also topping effective healing, which is just disgustingly pro. When I'm being a bit sloppy/spammy on trash clearing, I'll probably end up at 30% or a bit higher. When I'm really focused, watching Grid for other incoming heals, etc., that drops to 20%.

If you're #1 in effective healing, I care much less about your overheal % (provided that we didn't just wipe because you went OOM). If you are #6 in effective healing with 40% OH, behind five people who cast fewer heals but got more mileage out of them, then I'd begin to worry.

 

• CheshireCat

Good point. One of the great satisfactions of playing a healer is landing that heal that fits perfectly in your target's health bar-- I think it's the healer equivalent of a big crit.

SCT: Maintank 3998(2).
Me: *glee*

But, at least in my personal experience of learning to raid heal, I started out terrified of over healing, and found myself at #6/7 on the effective meters with <20% overhealing. Moving up my effective healing meant relaxing about overhealing. I'm sure everyone learns raid healing a little differently, though, and if you start out *not* caring about overhealing, it could definitely be important to start caring a little more.

 

◊ Bekah

Basically, overheal meters are excellent for identifying the problem with a particular healer- which can be hard. Suzie doesn't ever seem able to keep up her tank... why? Oh! She has 80% overheal and is running out of mana 20 seconds into the fight.... Then you can take Suzie aside and say- hey, have you considered looking into a mod like SWStats, it can really help give feedback on healing performance. See if you can get your overheal down to about 50% and we'll see what happens from there.

Same deal as the actual healing meters. No tank wants Suzie even though she only has 15% overheal and is ending the fight with mana to spare.... she's low on effective healing, but that doesn't make sense... why? Oh, it's because she's only doing 1/4 of the actual healing as anyone else- so 85% of heals landing is crap.

Effective gives a nice overall picture but I consider it more of a way to identify people that you *don't* need to help (No idea how he's managing top effective with 80% overheal and still keeping enough mana... but if that makes him happy... etc) than a diagnostic tool for the people who do need help.

Through Naxx I usually hovered right at 30% overheal at the end of a night- but I rarely actively tried to lower it (as I had no real mana problems)

 

• Apate

I keep seeing the 30% number pop up in this thread. Long ago, I was looking at overheal percents, and out highest effective healers almost always hovered right at that amount. Certain classes tended to have more overheal than others, but in general, 30% seemed to be what got the job done. Some healers who focussed more on minimizing overheal could still easily be withing the top 3-5 healers with 10% or less overheal, but they never healed quite as much as those who overheals more.

So, nothing incredibly new to add here, but it's interesting how that 30% keeps popping up, be it MC, BWL, Naxx, or Karazhan.

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