The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Mailbag - Overhealing Advice
by Vonya
Mail Call!
Whatever I was gonna write about can wait, because the mail I got not only poses a great question, but also requires audience participation!
That’s YOU guys!
Here’s the email :
Hello There!
I love your blog, and am in need of some advice. I read your advice on overheals, but I have a more specific question. Do forgive me for rambling on please.
To set the scene: I am a resto druid in TK-doing Al’ar. My sole healing assignment was keeping a stack of lifeblooms on all 3 tanks and keep up the pally who kept Alar’s adds in check. I threw around some rejuvs/regrowths but mostly stuck to lifeblooms-we have another resto druid who was regrowthing like crazy. I had something like 5% overheals. I did 10% of healing done and was in the top 3 healers for each tank and the add tank. Which I felt pretty good about until I received this comment on my blog:
“…if I had a healer in my raid who had under 10% overhealing I might question whether or not he had participated in the raid or understood what he should be doing. I’d have to rely on a comparison to determine his performance. Mind you, overhealing is not good since every point of health healed beyond full health results in wasted mana, but it’s expected that a certain amount of overhealing will result in a successful fight.”
My heals leader actually showed me the overheals meter to tell me that I was doing a good job. I guess I have 2 questions: am I a sucky healer because I’m not overhealing like a crazy person? And, even if that is the case if my heals leader is okay (and even encourages me) with me being dead last on overheals does it even matter?
Thanks
Boudi
a.k.a The Hoofed Hybrid
Short answer
If your tanks aren’t dying, and you’re not twiddling your thumbs, then 10% overheal is AWESOME and you should pat yourself on the back.
Long Answer
The debate about how useful healing meters are is a long and sordid one. I did a quick search and found a lively and intelligent debate on the subject in the comments of one of my previous Maildump posts.
My opinion on healing meters (because, of course, that’s why you’re here) is that they CAN be very useful, but any “anomalies” in the numbers spit out by healing meters need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
In GENERAL, I would say that about 15% overheal is average. I would also say that anything above 20% overheal needs to be watched, and anything above 30% overheal needs to be acted on.
Anything below 15% should also be investigated. From what Boudi said, it WAS investigated, by both Boudi and the healing leader for their raids.
There are two ways to get a very small overheal percentage.
1) Rarely Heal
If you find yourself standing around and twiddling your thumbs instead of healing, then of course you’re going to have low overheal. You can’t OVERheal unless you start out with a heal. It’s science.
If this is happening, you have to find out whether the person is not healing because they’re a lazy slacker (in which case they need the boot…lazy healers are bad news) OR if it’s happening because you’re bringing too many healers for the content you’re handling.
I very firmly believe that Gruul can be done with five healers. I have seen people call off raids when only seven healers show up. I have DONE Gruul with six healers, and we were none of us overtaxed. When you are learning content, you need more healers than you do when that content hits farm status.
Find out if you’re taking too many healers. I’m sure you’ve got PLENTY of dpsers chomping at the bit to take that slot, and the faster things die, the LESS you need to heal. Your runs may go a lot smoother if you replace a bored healer with an eager rogue.
2) Heals that get Used
The other way you’ll get a low overheal is if your heals are being used.
From what Boudi says, they are a tank-healing, Lifebloom-managing druid. Some druids scatter HoTs throughout the raid, and some druids keep your tank from painting the floors an unpleasant color.
I would expect the raid-healing druid to have a higher overheal than other healers because once they drop a HoT, it’s not uncommon for ANOTHER raid healer to come along and heal that person to full, thus negating the HoT and forcing it to spend most of its healing power on overheal.
(Semi-tangent - I recommend using some kind of addon to tell you how many HoTs are ticking on your raid members if you’re a priest. Saves you mana and wasted efforts, and keeps your tree-friends from smothering you in the middle of the night for wasting their HoTs. I use XPerl for this and a frillion other things, but I know there are other options available.)
If, however, a druid is on a TANK, someone expected to take steady, incredible damage…well, then I’d honestly expect the overheal to be lower if that healer was skilled and confident with the tank and the content. Tanks LOVE HoTs. It’s like sipping a mint julep on a broad porch, it makes everything slow down and relax a little.
Tanks NEED heals. If Boudi’s assigned to Lifeblooming on tanks, then I’m assuming that sometimes those Lifeblooms get kicked early when the Tank takes some wicked damage. They probably get almost completely used in those situations, leaving little or no overheal.
Summary
From what I can tell, Boudi’s 10% overheal is something to be proud of, that is gained through a combination of the role being healed in (tank assignments instead of raid assignments) and skill (knowing how and when to use the abilities of a healing druid).
If I saw a 10% overheal rate, I’d investigate. In this case, it seems to be justified. Neither Boudi nor Boudi’s Healing Leader has a problem with it or thinks that the cause of the small overheal percentage is due to thumb-twiddling.
Only YOU can truly know what’s going on while you heal. Speaking from an ex-Raid-Healing-Leader, there’s only so much information that we have to go by in order to evaluate someone’s healing and offer constructive criticism.
To me, it looks like Boudi’s raid is lucky, and the overheal is nothing to worry about.
Audience Participation
Do you guys agree? Boudi’s a druid, and I still haven’t gotten a druid past level 42 (female taurens for the WIN!).
Although I’m comfortable spouting my advice off all the live long day, that doesn’t mean I’m RIGHT. Do y’all have anything to add?
July 3rd, 2008
Pah! Healing Meters! *scowl*
Sorry, but I really dislike them. Besides that, I agree with Vonya. She puts it very nicely and she’s got a point there.
If there are no healing glitches, the encounter went well, and everything seemed smooth so far, then you did a good job as a healer.
BTW: Has the issue with HoT-Ticks not showing in the combat log on fully healed targets been fixed? I did not track the issue.
If not, that could be the reason for your low overheal, too.
July 3rd, 2008
I think this advice is spot on really. Healing meters can be useful, but they’re not the end all, be all of measuring the effectiveness of a healer (much like they aren’t for DPS either - if you top the meters but are constantly either dying because you don’t follow instructions or taking a TON of healing because you don’t follow instructions… well, how useful is that?).
My only quibble (and it really is quibbling) is regarding when to investigate how much overheal is “too much” - and that’s simply because I play a raid-healing resto-shaman. My overheal usually runs around 30%, if not 35%, simply because I prefer to use chain heal 4 (even if it’s only going to hit one target) for mana efficiency - it’s the same speed as HW 8, but without healing way going (a talent I don’t have), I don’t use Healing Way unless I need to drop a max-rank bomb on someone. For normal raid healing up to about 4K damage, I use chain heal regardless - and most of the time my original hit is NOT overhealing. A good bit of the time, however, my second and third hits *are* overhealing in some fights. (We also are working on farm content most of the time, usually with one progression boss at the end of the night (either Kael or Azgalor) - too many healers at the beginning, but just enough at the end).
But then I suppose this all falls under the “if you see something weird on the meters, talk about it with the person and the other healers” thing. From what I see in our raids, the druids usually have the least overheal, with the pallys and priests in the middle, and the shamans (yay having two resto shamans!) usually have the highest percentage - but nobody’s being dead weight - or being dumb about their healing from what I can tell in the WWS.
July 3rd, 2008
Actually, the interesting thing about healing meters in the past is that they registered LB’s as healing done by the target and not the caster (which applied to PoM also) so up until very recently. When I kept an eye on the healing meter just to keep an eye on my healers, the druids were always under 10% overheal because they always stacked LBs and meters don’t account for it correctly so Boudi might have done more overhealing but no one knows about it.
I don’t know if this still happens anymore as I’ve stopped looking at meters but that’s the impression I’ve shared with other healers who were very knowledgeable about add-ons and meters.
Another reason why meters are only a guide, not fact, especially for healers due to the large variation of healing spells available among the healing classes.
July 3rd, 2008
Thanks so much for the advice! This certainly makes me feel a lot better and not a failure.
Some additional info: We did have 7 healers for Al’ar-it was our first attempt. I think we’ll be able to do it with 6 next time-our standard number.
For my raid, the pallies are usually top on over heals (we have no healy shaman-but not because we don’t want them). We did have one paladin doing over 50% of his heals with Holy Shock which was interesting. Then he asked me for an innervate. Oh, the joys of raiding
July 3rd, 2008
I haven’t played much since they reveamped the combat log system so this might not still be the case.
Back before 2.4 Druids killed on efficency because Lifebloom doesn’t count towards the healer (btw, the Frisbee has the same issues). The combat log reads something like “Lifebloom heals PlayerX for ###” A meter can’t connect that to a player. If all you do is Lifebloom that could really throw your #’s off.
If this was fixed in the patch, please ignore! As I said, I haven’t really played since the patch came out… I just still read the blogs!
July 3rd, 2008
Er Healing meters. If someone is going to look at one thing on the healing meters and make a judgment on your performance from that, then I have only 1 thing to say: “they R teh stoopid”. I’ve said several times before that I use them, I believe in them, but they are definitely not the end all, be all performance indicator for a healer. They don’t even really do that for dps’ers, although it is more clear cut in their case. Anyway…
The real question is this: “Did you win the event?” If the answer is yes, then “yay!, new content!”. If the answer is no, then you probably should look at the meters. But not to see what your over healing was. You need to look and see what your spell rotation was, what the MT (or x target) died from and how quickly. (again, Recount ftw!) Then you can determine if your spell rotation needs work, if the tank just boofed it, or if you fell asleep.
I can’t remember the last time I looked at over healing. I think it when I was actively trying to beat the shammy’s and pally’s on the over healing one night. (true story lol). Over healing is more fight specific and probably single most useless stat someone can reference these days. For instance if I remember correctly there is not much spike damage in Alar. A fight like my Brutallus (my favorite….:/ ) has nothing but spiking. It is not uncommon for me in that fight to have 60% or more over healing on it.. You simply have no choice. It really depends on the fight, and what kind of cycle/rythym you are in. Priests have an advantage in that we have so many spells to choose from, we can break a bad cycle of heals landing for 0%.
So, I guess in short - grats on 10% over healing AND winning, ignore the idiot, don’t pay much attention to it in the future unless you are running oom (does a druid ever do that?), and good luck on future content!
July 3rd, 2008
Also keep in mind that HoT’s don’t really count as overheal. The overhealing would come from Swiftmending, casting regrowth on a just flash healed target, things like that. That is generally why druids don’t have a high overheal. Especially trees (vs say, a dreamstate druid, who uses healing touch like a greater heal). Although I have to admit I have to dig in and see if the ‘bloom’ of a lifebloom counts as overheal, but I *think* (I’d have to check, I’ve just recently started raid healing in Gruul’s Lair and the now loot pinata Magtheridon) the bloom counts as the target’s heal, and not the druid’s.
July 3rd, 2008
Hey, I’ve been in a raid where my Holy priest has had like 6% overhealing and come 2nd on the meter, the person that came first had 60% overhealing and didn’t like it when we told her so. I think it came from the fact that as soon as anyone took damage the first thing she fired off was a greater heal.
if you use the appropriate heals for the moment and the amount of damage that someone is taking then you shouldn’t end up with a huge amount of overhealing. Especially if proper assignments are made and are working. People who whine about too little overhealing surely need to actually play a healer at least. If you’re good at playing the class and the raid stays alive, everyone should be happy.
July 3rd, 2008
What Ego says makes good sense to me, but WTF do I know? I heal proactively…by killing things really quickly.
July 3rd, 2008
Its been awhile but ya most meters don’t pick up overheal from Hot’s. I’ve come up number 1 healing with less over heal then the other healers (except for the priest who was 5th) but its because of the way HoT’s work. Obviously since all classes have things that don’t quite register right meters are a poor judge of performance. As above if no one dies then there was adequate healing everything else is just numbers.
July 3rd, 2008
Right on the money. The issue of over-healing has come up recently in our raid also (currently working on Solarian). I raid as a holy priest and use Recount, and find myself in the 20-25% over-healing range in 25-mans and much less if it’s ZA, but never worry about watching the meters for judging how I play unless we are having a problem with a boss due to healing issues. I totally agree with Hildi, the biggest question is: “Did the boss go down?”.
As for druids (I have a very good RL friend that heals in tree beside me for our runs), it really does depend on the fight and what you’re being asked to do. If you’re Lifebloom cycling the tanks, the majority of your heals will be useful (and God, do we love them!). If you’re asked to raid-heal and keep everyone else up, you’re going to find that you have a lot more over-healing done due to other healers tossing their heals before the HoTs tick.
In this case, I agree, 10% is right where you’re supposed to be. In the fight described, it sounds like Boudi was healing up a storm, and ended up with only 10% over-healed. Ten percent on a fight in which you use up your mana bar, innervate, and another full mana bar is a good thing for you personally. It means you’re doing your job. If the raid is still failing, it’s not because of you. Ten percent over-healed when you’re working your bark off (see what I did there?) is one thing; ten percent because you’re just standing around is another thing and is a problem.
The good thing about over-healing (what, Dan??) is that if it’s occurring, your target has full health! Good, right? On any new content, I love to see over-healing. If it’s farmed content that everyone knows, over-healing is an indication (as Vonya states) that maybe another DPS in the group is an option for faster runs.
But I agree with the other posts. Healing and over-healing meters are useless when it comes to comparing raiders, but they help in making sure that everyone’s doing their part for new content.
July 3rd, 2008
First, recount now counts lifebloom blooms as the druid’s heal, not the target. I don’t know about WWS.
The 10% overheal means one thing. Boudi’s lifebloom stacks didn’t fall off. Lifeblooms only get counted as healing when there’s damage or a bloom. Pat yourself on the back for keeping lifeblooms rolling, not for low overheal.
I’m a raiding resto. I get small overheal numbers healing tanks, big numbers if I’m raid healing. Lifeblooms get overwritten by PoM, CoH, and chain heal, and regrowth is guaranteed to crit when I didn’t need it. Pallies without an incoming heal mod are the bane of my existence becasue the 2-sec cast of regrowth usually means that I can’t see their 1.5 second flash heal land and cancel regrowth in time. At least the HoT is swiftmendable so I’ll be able to land a burst heal if the person is hit again.
I also do things like toss rejuvs on melee who are at full health if I am at full mana, and I know there is likely to be an AoE
July 3rd, 2008
If you want to get serious about the analysis have your healer or raid lead run combat logs then post the results on WWS. Marcie K is witting a few articles on wowinsider about heal analysis via the logs at the moment.
Your 10% overheal is actually pretty good but if you are spending lots of time twirling your thumbs, and the logs will show this, then work with your heal lead on ways to put that idle time to use. You can get away with a fair amount of cross healing until you hit SWP.
Logs and stats are a great way to counter those annoying comments in your blog.
Keep up the good work!
July 3rd, 2008
I play both a holy Priest and a resto Druid, so I’ve experienced two of the four major healing classes out there. I also have a level 67 Resto Shaman, but I don’t really count him because I hardly play him at all.
To my point: as a holy Priest, I am extremely conscious of overhealing. I share Vanya’s opinion on it–that it’s insanely wasteful! Priests have to give up pretty much everything else to effectively heal raids, and getting into a situation where you have to scramble to keep your tank up can really empty your mana pool quickly. When I play my priest, every heal is calculated. It has to be.
The situation on my resto Druid is completely different. Perhaps my gear isn’t terrific yet (click my name above for my Armory information), so it could be a function of my relatively low +healing, but I’ve noticed that I have to keep all of my hots active on a tank to keep him alive in places like ZG, Mag, and TK. Even doing this and helping out a little bit on raid heals, though, mana is almost never a problem. Fully buffed, I’m regenerating about 850 mana/5, so in a pinch I can innervate myself and get by without problems. But I’m certain that my overhealing is immense.
I can’t quote statistics, because I have a pretty low opinion of healing meters and so don’t use them, but my general opinion is that some classes don’t have the same problems with overhealing as others. I know that Priests agonize about overhealing, and I imagine that Shaman do, too. Conversely, Paladins and, in my experience, Druids, don’t worry about it.
July 4th, 2008
In alar, when you are healing tanks, 10% is great…
Go to illidan and any healer with only 10% should be shot as you have to constantly heal to keep the tank up and most of your heals will be sniped by <.5 of a second by another healer… That first phase, you are lucky if you do 10,000 healing… and it lasts quite a while…
I mean, your tanks will have more healing due to the Prayer of Mending and Earthsheilds lol
July 4th, 2008
Other posters have mentioned it, but I thought I’d add my 2 cents worth as well.
Lifebloom ticks do not heal the target unless the target will benefit from them. So if the tank is at full health a 3 stack of Lifebloom that is maintained will generate 0 healing and 0 overhealing.
A Lifebloom that blooms generates healing for the target, so in this case the tank.
Being the person who runs and analyses WWS logs in my guild I will quite happily confirm that overheal below 10% is quite common for a Resto druid.
July 7th, 2008
Overhealing at first glance is only an issue if you have mana problems.
As you find yourself in more situations where HPS rules and every point of healing is needed, you may want to begin evaluating who and when you’re healing, instead of how much you are overhealing, to maximize your efficiency and HPS. If that seem off-the-wall, challenge yourself. Solo heal Karazhan, or 2heal ZA. Challenging yourself in those ways really forces you to get the most out of your healing, and reevaluate high damage scenarios.
July 7th, 2008
Bah healing meters. I have a hatred for healing meters that cannot be put into words. We are not DPS, our role is not to know how much we heal but ratehr if everyone survives. That is the only feedback we need. As for over heal…I am a resto shaman, over heal is my middle name. Is this a problem…no. As long as you can handle your mana correctly you can over heal as much as you want.
Doug: Single healing kara…now that is something I should; try for atleast the first couple of bosses.
July 8th, 2008
@ Jagerbombz: You may want to be very specific on where people stand (especially ranged DPS) so that Chain Heal does its magic. Aside from that, get a well geared tank and lots of DPS (preferrably Badge/ZA/T5 equiv geared DPS), so that you dont OOM before bosses drop. It has been done successfully by Druids/Priests, but I haven’t seen anything about a Shaman doing it yet. GL!
July 8th, 2008
Thanks to everyone for weighing in!
I know meters aren’t the whole world but for me, everyone surviving doesn’t tell me if I’m improving as a healer.
If I can keep everyone alive (which of course I can’t) then I want to use my mana more efficiently. For me, a look at the meters tells me what I need to improve on. I understand that there are some things that are out of my grasp to do, but for me the more information I have, the better job I can do and the more I improve.
And what improves me improves the raid.
July 10th, 2008
I run my resto druid just through Kara content right now, the guild she is in is bringing on a bunch of new 70s so gear wise they just aren’t ready for much else.
I’m a firm believer in dps/healing meters, not because they are accurate but because they can be an early indication of a problem. I do my best to avoid telling someone how to run their alt but I have no problem asking them why they do something. Its how we all learn, either they don’t understand or you don’t understand or something goofy is going on.
Ultimately the needs of the raid outweigh individual needs, so I tend to grade every encounter by looking at the following.
1. How many people survived.
2. How hard did I have to work throughout the encounter?
Every encounter is different so things shift, but overall you can get the feel for how things are going. I tend to look at how much mana a healer has left after an encounter to get a feel for how hard they are working. Ive always felt that ideally everyone should be at about the same % since if not then either someone is working to hard, not hard enough or the healing duties need to be re-adjusted some.
Looking at the heals in our kara group would look odd, but in the end it’s because we have 2 resto druids that are geared with 2 different philosophies. I gear towards smaller heals but more mana regen, the other resto is geared towards bigger heals with less mana regen.
So talk with the other healers, get an idea of what they do and why. Healers after all are 1/2 of the raid triangle tank/dps/heal and the better we can do our job the better off everyone else is
July 22nd, 2008
So I have been healing raids as a priest for a couple months now, and I was yelled at for overhealing past 5%. I was told, although its good to keep their health up, it is a waste of mana to overheal. This becomes critical in a longer battle so I am not using 50 mana pots and don’t run oom.
I was also told, that they didn’t care about the actual amount I healed, as long as a tank didn’t die and dps didn’t die (the exception is a quick death like a clothie or a retard dps which can be common).
So I started raid healing with the notion, just make sure no1 dies, who cares about the numbers as long as it was a clean run. I have even done a bit of wand dps if i can’t heal, because it would be pointless to try and overheal and waste mana.
August 11th, 2008
Healing and how can I measure my performance and improve?…
OK, dps have dps meters, tanks have threat generation and staying alive, but how do we healers improve using meters?
I plan to write a few of these over time, so will start with
Overheal meter
This is a very clear meter that everyone could argue …
October 8th, 2008
Great thread, I wanted to put my two cents in. I have a holy priest around 2k heals unbuffed and has been raiding weekly for about 5 months now. We have recently been taking new classes/new recruits through Kara. My average overhealing in most raids sits somewhere around 10-15% (CoH spec), but when taking new individuals through who don’t know the fights and who don’t know when the spike damage occurs, my overheals also tend to spike (accounted for almost 60% of all healing…with two priests as healers with nearly 50% overhealing). We lost only two people in a full clear, and had no wipes. I ran OOM once and it was my own fault for not using my CD’s.
My point is…the overhealing/healing meter is a great tool but it changes substantially depending on the encounter, then experience of those you are running with, and your own personal build. If you have a successful encounter, your raid is happy, and you aren’t struggling for mana…then your overhealing/healing is what it should be.
Last point…priests PoM also doesn’t register on the healing/overhealing…though it is one of the best tools we have. (comparing to the lifebloom of druids)
Thanks to everyone for putting some thoughts into their responses, this thread was a great read!