• Cryect

Was this person healing the MT? On the MT its not too hard to get into the rhythm of the PW's hits and acheive really high healing with very low overhealing but also depends on who else is healing with them on a target (example when I get matched up with just average healers my overhealing normally goes down while my effective healing increases as expected but if I'm matched up with really good healers my overhealing goes up due to our heals often landing at the exact same times with the beats of the blows so it often ends up swapping back and forth who's heals go off at the right time but it ends up being you just learn to back off and change your phase to land at another blow).

To me I would always aim for ~20% overhealing I could if I really wanted to get sub 10% but if I was getting sub 10% overhealing the tank on a lot of fights would prolly die from trying to out guess is a blow about to land or did it just get dodged instead. On fights with a lot of spike damage its often important to yell at healers for being too low on overhealing and example of that is hydross where resist checks and avoidance checks might often be really nice but sometimes you get a bad streak on both where its really bursty damage and its just better if your healers overheal a lot.


Now to show what I mean on Hydross a little better.

http://acm.jhu.edu/~cryect/HydrossKill_/

Here you can see on our first Hydross kill all of our healers were 35%-38% overhealing (well except one priest at almost 50%). On a lot of our early attempts we had issues with tanks just dieing due to healers trying to overconserve mana and when we checked the overhealing meters we noticed that all of our healers were at around 10%. We yelled at the healers to stop trying to cancel heals and stop using small heals and we went from wiping to tanks dieing to having to tweak our strategy to get the DPS on Hydross we needed to kill him before the enrage (basically our Paladins and Shamans had to learn Flash of Light and Lesser Healing Wave were almost worthless in comparison to their stronger heals).

Its also a trend that we've noticed in our new recruits having to yell at them this isn't WoW 1.0 anymore and every fight ends up being PW burst style healing.

Edit: I should say of course thats not completely true but its normally better to exagerate and then let them learn on their own where the more appropriate places to use their smaller heals are though its basically never on your tanks anymore.

 

◊ Praetorian

This was on OT2 on Patchwerk, as I recall. You could definitely predict well by watching what was happening to OT1, but that level of overhealing sustained over a full kill was impressive.

And yes, Horde shamans realized that LHW was worthless long ago. If a tank's health is low enough that he might die before I land my 2.5sec heal, then real raid mobs hit hard enough that even if I do land a heal for 2k after 1.5sec, the tank's still probably on the verge of death. Better to land a solid 4.5k+ heal 2.5sec later in almost every case (LHW and such is still great on warlocks and mutilate rogues due to their heal multipliers -- critting a 1.5sec cast heal for over 4k is just silly).

But yes, absolutely, overhealing is really more a matter of heal refinement than something a new healer or one with a lot of improvement left should worry about.

The way I see if, on any fight where deaths due to spike damage are a real possibility, if I am ending the fight with anything more than a tiny amount of mana left over, then I was being too conservative. Mana's there to be used -- there's no prize for having 4500 mana left when Gruul dies.

 

Ragnor

Example: You're healing tank x, you expect the mob to hit the tank for 3000ish damage you're precasting a rank of your 2.5sec speed heal that normally heals for that much so it will land quickly. Your heal crits for 4500. You're a paladin so that heal cost 0 mana.

Oh noes high overhealz % because you have a 25% crit rate on holy light.

You have to look at these things in context because as mentioned Overheal is largely irrelevant unless you are running our of mana, people are getting their timing wrong and spike damage is killing tanks.

Often there's just a case where 3 people healing a tank eg: patchwerk OT accidentally get in sync. Instead of healer 1's heal landing, then healer 2's heal landing, then healer 3's heal landing. They all landed at the same time. It just happens. It's why it was good to mix and match classes healing an OT on patchwerk eg: 1 druid, 1 priest, 1 pally/shaman.

The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.

www.retpaladin.com

 

Drekor

I'm an MT healer, basically I do nothing but heal the MT in the vast majority of encounters, and I've found something that is rather interesting actually. I've been anywhere from about 10% to 50% overheal on fights and typically I've seen a direct relationship with the my overheal and the amount of "oh shit" moments for the tank.

It could be blind luck, I'll admit that much, however basically with 10% overheal I see a significant amount of "oh shit" moments for the tank and typically and the end he's blown last stand, life giving gem, healthstone and a pot and maybe a nightmare seed to and had to use commanding shout to heal or something stupid like that. I also found I'm typically low on mana because I've had to recover from those low HP moments with ineffecient means(to the point I've actually blown a LoH at 80% mana still).

While say at 50% overheal there are virtually no oh shit moments and I end with a big chunk of mana left, I've simply found it safer and more effective to just keep the tank at full HP as much as humanly possible and it's near impossible it seems to keep a tank at 100% without significant overheal.

 

Myul

As a MT Healer your main job is to never ever let him die at any costs, regardingless of mana costs and overhealing. We allways tried to put our better player (but maybe worse geared) on the mt and if there was 4 people called mt healer and all got 40% to 50% overheal, because there was no problem to get one healer more for campheal and drop one dps instead (big raidpool).
Well, if they would be able to reduce their overhealing factor a bit we could remove one of them and add more dps or push campheal, but the priority was allways on our tanks. Dps dead? no problem, combatress and continue. Healer dead? Get your heal two ranks higher, innervate cd will be up in 2 minutes. Even if the boss wasnt hitting so hard we allways tried to have enough (mt)healpower to outlast every non enrage boss.
For our camp healer, we work totally different:
- trying to reduce overheal to 15% and less. The more you play in a small raid, the more you know who will heal this guy here or that one next to you. No addons is needed for this, just the knowledge about the reaction of your cohealer.
- let our druids and priests try gaining mana back as much as possible out of 5 second rule when there is burst from random aoe, and get everyone an exact work to do on a more difficult encounter (eg you heal group 1, you heal all the melee at the front, you may have a look for the mt healer etc), and if possible change jobs while fighting (eg from healing ot to stay around looking for a cleaved melee) until their mana is back to a better level
- not trying to heal every raidmember lost 500 hp with a big flashheal (how much i loved 600 hp r1 fh pre 1.1x ;/ ) or spamming a 2k hp hot for 370 mana on allmost everyone. For that work, the paladin was intended pre tbc. Perfect designed for little aids at an allmost endless mana pool.

Well now, with mana batteries aka shadow priests for castergroups and more regular mana regen with resto shamans in the healer groups we have minimal problems with our healmana while using manapots when cd is ready to push the effective mp5 of everyone by around 100-140 (alchemist stone anyone?).
So mobs hitting like a truck (or even two), we can still manage with a full load of healpower. The most important thing for us is to learn the encounter very well, and with further progress and healers knowing all the tricks we can drop some for the dps required (a lot of our dps got a twink who's able to heal so they won't lose attendance). This is because we dislike using mass off consumeables on regular tries and try to reduce it on finally execution we may only pop cheaper stuff. What is saving more time/gold/nerves, ... well there is another thread about it you might have read sooner.

If tank & heal works well, dps should never be a problem in an experienced raiding guild.

OT
Especially on PW we tried to split our different sort of healers.

MT with 3 Palas spamming FoL all the time and won't stop till that big ugly thingy lays on the ground. 1 Druid for HoT(s) and intervene with Instantheal at critical times, precasting for bigger spikes when he was able to.
OT1 4 Priests tossing all 2k heals at the same time on their target to bring him up to full so he wont die by 1 sleeping other OT healers. Also fine, inspiration was almost up all the time (he received more damage then our mt did).
OT2&3 we tried to bring all healer to the same casting time, well ended up due to player avaible with mixed groups of 1 shadowpriest (pre patch) with 3s GH, 2 druids 3s HT and 1 paladin per ot using 2 fol (hpm was more important then hps for us for those healbots) in this duration.
We tried to chainqueue ot1 ot2 ot1 ot3 ot1 ot2 and it worked well.
/OT

It might be usefull to split them, but you have to think off different specialities like inspiration, ancestral healing and eg the 6 pieces bonus of tier 3 pala/sham or 8 pieces transcendence bonus.
Its much more easier to compare players, if they are in one class then to compare a holy pala with a resto druid, a resto shaman and a holy priest on different fight lengths (in theocrafty way its allmost easy, crush the number and the longer the fight occurs, the much more a paladin will heal than the others and a spirit based druid/priest will outheal shaman).

It was useful to put different classes at a tank when hots wasnt stackable and is still today, when remove curse, dispell magic, cure poison or disease is needed and you don't want du assign a dps class to do this job (if possible).

 

Linnet

I found it was useful to look at the overhealing when we had new guys in who were learning how to raid heal, because being able to pick the right heal to use without wasting mana is a part of that. So if people were really focussed and didn't have too much lag on their systems, I'd expect them to be able to keep it to under 20% even on a boss that does some spike damage.

But by forcing them to do that, they might be concentrating more on not overhealing than on the rest of the fight. So as long as the raid isn't failing to kill a boss due to healers going out of mana, I wouldn't stress it. Also, overhealing on trash is really easy to do unless you are pretty uptight about healing assignments on trash. It just means a paladin landed a fast heal on someone before your slow heal landed.

 

mostdeadlygeist

Pre-BC, I always had ~15-20% overheal, because I actually react and pay attention constantly to my heals. I would usually be top 3 at least in healing, with half the overheal as the next guys. This was in the days of 40 man raids when overhealing was very easy to do with all the other healers landing heals at once.

Post-BC, since you are in 5 man groups to maybe 25 (not many people are actually doing 25 mans yet so it doesn't matter as much right now), you should really have less than 20% overheal. I am always ~10% overhealing now, and depending on some big hitting mobs that are in the game now, it can be up to 20% to keep tanks up.

A really nice way to know your overheals at all times is to get MSBT or SCT (not sure if the default ui has that functionality) which shows how much you are overhealing per heal. Healing Estimator mod is also nice, as it records your total overheals. Damage meters are nice to see how you rate to your group. If you see that you are overhealing too often, tone down the heals or time them better.

 

• RK

Actually, it sounds like healers spamming their inefficient heals, not just overheal. In my experience, early OOM says "flash heal/LHW/regrowth abuser" more than anything. I've seen perfectly experienced raid healers from 1.x have given in to panic in TBC when there's big damage spikes on the tank or lots of incidental raid damage (e.g. Moroes' garrotte).

 

Joy

On our last Gruul kill my overhealing was nearly 50% but we healed through 18 growths with 6 healers for the last 60%. So... shrug

On a side note accurate cast canceling is really rough with oceanic latency, even with 400ms I need to cancel a gheal 1.8s into the cast to reliably have the spell cancel.

 

Chardonnay

I noticed the same when I installed MendWatch. I removed it instantly and SCT was suddenly fixed :O If you have MendWatch installed, consider turning it off to check... It's probably not an SCT issue.

On topic: I agree that overhealing only matters if healers run out or tanks die. I second that about 15-20% overheal seems good in Karazhan.

In 5mans you can pretty much safely avoid overhealing. At heal intensive places like Tempest Keep, I tend to produce 9-12%, but in lower instances I'm around 2-7%, mostly due to PoH and crits. It's really easy to keep it that low. Someone doing 20%+ overheal in a normal 5man while solo healing is probably doing something wrong. Very few 5man encounters prefer overhealing, a few come to my mind, like Aeonus (BM endboss) with the time stop, or SP 2nd boss with the stupid bleed debuff but that is really manageable with 5-10% overheal aswell.

In heroics, your tank is always at risk if not topped, thus 20-30% is pretty much acceptable there. I've seen a tank die from Furnace very first single trashmob in a blink of an eye... 3 3500+ HITS at the very same time killed the tank. It never happened again, it was bad luck - but things like that can happen anytime in heroics.

That's my 2cents about acceptable overheal numbers.

 

• aya

Overhealing is also somewhat largely tied to encounter and class at hand.

Prayers of Healing for example can result in quite gross overheals, while still retaining very nice HPS and HPM numbers. Same deal with Circle of Healing ofcourse, not that anyone really uses it much (?).
Going along the same lines, Paladins topping out people can reach somewhat high overheals while topping targets with FoL-spam, without really exhausting their manapool at all. Especially true if they're somewhat focused on spellcrits, as pallies these days tend to be.

Going to rarer things, there's always the little freak occurances such as priests using an Inner Focus Gheal on a paladin to restore their mana - purely overhealing - and so on.

This is ofcourse a worthy discussion, but as has been noted before, it's very hard to put anything regarding healing to a single 2d -chart.

 

Coriolis

Frankly to me the attitude that "overhealing doesn't matter" is indicative of being sloppy. We just downed maulgar for our first time ever recently without a flask on the maulgar tank (he is decently geared but we haven't cleared kara yet so not too much), and the reason was at least to my mind that this time all 3 of the healers that were on him had about a 25-30% overheal while not letting him die (resto druid out of tree, holy priest and myself, resto shaman). On our previous attempts we always had overheals neighbouring in the 40-50% and the tank would die because of OOM issues before more healers freed up after killing adds to help.

A good, focused healer (that doesn't lag much) can almost always cancel his heals safely without letting anyone die - even on very spiky fights (I haven't seen anything spikier then maulgar myself, twin emps was easier then this in my opinion). The problem is that frankly finding healers who can really do this and do it well is very hard - and since healers are in high demand and their performance harder to quantify it is in general harder to force them to play well (hence the other thread on public forums and my headaches being the person in charge of healing for my guild).

Of course one can be stupid and look at overheal numbers out of context and make the wrong conclusions - overhealing alot on fights with aoe healing is perfectly acceptable. In general fights with spiky damage result in more overhealing - it's neccesary to keep the tank topped off even if half your heal will be wasted, whereas on a less spiky fight you'd cancel and recast. Also apparently hots don't get factored for overhealing so a druid with low overheal for example can still be a bad healer (or not - it may be other healers using direct heals to heal up random damage the druid was assigned to heal with hots). In general, if you have not setup explicit assignments for healing (and make sure people trust each other and follow them), that will result in far more overhealing then there would be otherwise. Finally it's unrealistic to expect overheal %'s much less then 10% or so, simply crit healing plus extremely minor overheals will result in that much (I think the best I've done is about 5% on some 5 mans with a good tank which I can trust to not die too suddenly).

With all those caveats in mind I'd say that 30% is about as much as you should tolerate on a fight without extreme spikiness or aoe healing (pretty much all of kara that I've seen, up to and including curator). 20% or less probably signifies a good healer who's focusing. Less then 10% might mean that the person is so freaked out about overhealing that they aren't healing enough at all - or using smaller, innefficient spells, i.e. flash instead of gheal. Which is just as bad really. Make sure however that you are reseting your healing meters for bosses - healing on trash is irrelevant and it takes a pretty obsessive kind of person to be caring about OH on those.

If you're having issues with overhealing make sure you have a "healing leader" type person who is good and knows what is reasonable for each situation - healers (should) respond better to a healer telling them how to play. Until recently I was enh spec and it really was alot harder for me to gauge if the healers are screwing up or not (even after playing priest for a while before). Having some random dps or tank class as your raid leader screaming things like "keep me up I don't care how much mana you use" is very stupid in the long run. However, it is true that while learning an encounter very high overhealing is fine and expected - the idea is to last long enough to learn what's going on.

 

Kass

Coriolis said it pretty well. I think that there are two types of comparisons that someone looking at healing can and should make. The first is among same class type and the second is among same healing assignment.

Same Class Type:
Every class has a fairly distinct healing style from the other healing classes. When looking at a healer's effectiveness, you first have to look at those other players of the same class - the ones you consider to be doing a good job as compared to the ones that seem to be unable to hold their own.

Example:
There really isn't a fight much like this I've yet to encounter in TBC, but take Sapphiron for example. For many guilds, Priests were in charge of keeping their parties alive. We've all pretty much agreed that on POH, a Priest can start to rack up the OH numbers. The thing is, when one Priest starts to lose his party at 20% because of mana issues, you need to look at what that person is doing differently from his fellow Priests.
Step 1: Gear Check
Is this person's gear significantly lower quality than his counterparts?
What items did that person choose to utilize, which set bonuses, what enchants, etc.?
Step 2: Healing Meter Check
Look at Effective Healing and Overhealing. Many times for people running OOM, their effective healing is lower than their counterparts, and often times their overhealing is higher.
Step 3: Healing Method Check
What is that person's heal choices?
Back to Sapphiron - One Priest using POH3 and Renew10, versus POH5 and Renew4 showed pretty different results in terms of encounter longevity and party survivability. Sometimes, one healer might find something that works out really well, yet someone else may not have figured it out yet.

Same Healing Assignment:
You cannot fairly compare two people of the same class with different healing assignments. Different healing assignments require different healing methods. Additionally, different healing assignments allow for different levels of risk or timing of heals.

Examples:
Take for example Gruul, and two Priests - one on the Main Tank and one on the Hurtful Strike Tank. The MT healer is going to have to worry about keeping his tank topped off pretty quickly without a lot of room for risk. The HST healer has a set amount of time (that he should know about) in which to heal up his assignment. That second Priest has plenty of time to cast a long big heal and make a choice on which heal and rank to use instead of just spamming one heal or two types of heals to keep the MT up.

One thing I've found very important though is when specific healing assignments are given out, you will see a lot lower overhealing numbers than when it's just a free for all. Additionally, the longer your healer group has played together, and come to trust each other, the lower the overhealing. Take care when you have a new healer join the unit, because a lot of times, that person just doesn't know what all the other healers have come to just assume is implied.

Communication, Trust, and Experience are irreplaceable for an effective healing unit.

 

• Harmonics

True that. There's no mana bank to keep tha mana in, you aren't earning god damn intrest on it. Thats something that has annoyed me about healers since I started playing. Especially for timed fights where you can figure out excatly how many times you can cast what rank.

*murloc sounds*

.

 

◊ Shalas

While that's true, you also want enough mana to kill the boss even if all of the dps spontaneously dies at 2% (which could theoretically happen in the case of Gruul). The problem I ran into with trying to have my mana run out at the same time as the fight ended (by letting more heals land, bumping up ranks, etc.) was that when something goes wrong and suddenly the fight is lasting 2 more minutes instead of 30 seconds, I'd have no mana for it. Outside of fights with hard enrages I don't want to be at 50% mana when the boss dies, but I also don't want to be at 0%.