So, my fellow healers, do you run with Recount (or Skada) or not? What do you use it for? I know there are healers who just don’t bother installing a recount-type addon, and I think that’s a mistake since it gathers good data for us. On the other hand, I’ve run with healers who look at their heals-per-second minute as thought it actually means something, or worse, as though “winning” that category in a raid means that they are the best healer.
First Things First: Your heals per second number means basically nothing. Ignore it. It’s a trap. In fact, in many cases the healer doing, say, 11k heals per second is objectively a worse healer than the one doing 7k. Why? Because often the big, heal-meter-padding skills are going to run you out of mana. Cataclysm healing is a marathon, not a sprint. Looking at heals per second is akin to saying “This guy averaged 8 miles per hour, and this guy averaged 5, so the first one wins” in a marathon – without realizing that the first guy dropped out at mile 5 and the second one went on to finish the race. Heals per second only counts the time you actually spend healing. So if you do, say, 100k heals in 10 seconds and go OOM, you just did 10k HPS. But the healer next to you who does 200k over the entire minute-long fight just did about 3.5k HPS. Now, maybe you blew all your mana saving a tank from some unexpected thing, and that saved the day. But it’s more likely that you just blew all your mana and then stood around looking pretty for the rest of the fight.
All right, that’s done. So let’s talk about what you can get out of a healing meter.
First, there’s the DPS/damage done tab. I prefer the “Damage Done” tab in recount to the DPS tab. The damage done will show me the course of the whole fight, not just the average. I can easily see that Mr. Rogue has great dps but poor overall damage because he’s slow getting into fights or dies a lot. The most useful part of this tab is knowing who to battle rez, blow a cooldown for, or give some specific damage-boosting cooldown. In a raid, this will often be called for you but if it’s up to your discretion, this part of the meter can help you out a lot.
Second, there’s the informative tabs – Dispells, Interrupts, Crowd Control, CC Breakers, etc. Now more than ever it’s good to know who is dispelling things, interrupting, or breaking crowd control – and Recount keeps track of all these things. If you’ve never flipped through the tabs, do it now. You might be surprised that Mage 1 does 95% of the decursing while Mage 2 never bothers. Or remind the Enhancement shaman to use his interrupts.
Third, there’s the healing meter tab. I just said that HPS weren’t useful, but the breakdowns can be. You can see what spells you or the other healers are using, and spot problems in rotations (assuming you know rotations well enough). I like to glance at it and make sure that I’m using a fairly balanced mix of spells, with Lifebloom counting for a lot of my heals. If you think someone is underperforming, this tab can help you figure out where and why.
Fourth, the overhealing tab. Ahhh…. now this one is key. In Wrath I’d often see huge overheal numbers, as a druid. I’m working hard to get those down. A little overheal is not a problem; things like Wild Growth can overheal, as can Lifebloom or Efflorescence or…. but keep an eye on your percentages and try not to have much there. I’m trying to get my overheals below 10%.
Note: Paladins are likely to have a good bit of overhealing due to Beacon of Light and Tower of Radiance, but if you look at their parse and see a lot of other overhealing, you might ask why that is.
And most importantly, to me, the death reports tab. I’ve just started really using this one, but man does it have a lot of information. You can get a tick-by-tick rundown of the last seconds of a fight, showing incoming damage and heals by name. There’s even a way to see it in graph form. So you can see who was healing the tank just before he dropped, and who wasn’t. I’m not saying this so you can call people out better, but for learning. It’s also a good way to confirm what killed someone: “Yup, you stood in the whirlwind”, or “Yeah, the boss was beating on you for a good ten seconds there”.
So if you’re not using it, download Recount or Skada and give it a whirl. If you are using one, explore a bit and see what other tabs you have never really looked at. Right now we need all the analysis tools we can get our hands on as we learn strategies and encounters without the safety margin of inflated gear.
If you are a disc priest… both meters now contain an absorb tracker. However, Skada’s doesn’t translate to HPS values. I use a plugin to present the data in a better format.
Skada Heal Absorbs: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/skadahealabsorbs.aspx
Thanks so much for that information – I’m happy using Recount for now but I’ve barely started working on my serious Disc Priest heals and I may find it inadequate, I’m not sure.
The other way HPS does not tell you the whole story is because of triage. Healer A that is good at filling people way up but sometimes lets people die is NOT at all better than Healer B that leaves the whole party low on health but keeps them alive. Healer B might get lower HPS. Healer B might even get a LOT less over all Healing done. But healer B is still doing a better job. But the meter will not show it.
It is sort of like a tank that is really good at using cooldowns to save his own life but has not yet figured out how to use them to save OTHER people.
We have to stand back and look at the second order effects to really see if we did a good job.
One of the biggest challenges in Cata is actually diagnosing what went wrong and learning from it.
Short sighted players are still blaming everything on the healer OOM. The good ones are already getting great with CC and getting out of the fire. The really good ones are starting to get better with interrupting casts, stun locking targets, and popping their own cooldowns instead of waiting on heals.
I would do a whole post just on interrupts if I could think of anything to say other than “Do them all the freaking time”.
As a tank…I know at one point, back in early BC on Magtheradon, I was being called squishy–while having the same stats as the MT, and the same mitigation numbers to within a tenth of a percent.
After much log spelunking we determined that the MT was getting about 28% overheal and I was only 18%.
So I think aiming for a 10% overheal makes me, a tank, very nervous.
I could say something about interrupts. And silences, and any other forms of CC.
Take a look at your talent spec, DPSers especially. If there is anything in there that has to do with improving your utility (i.e. interrupt/dispel/CC capabilities) by all means, TAKE IT!
I just respecced my spriest yesterday, from his level 80 raiding spec. I dropped a couple of extra dps things (that can be picked up later as I gain talent points) and got silence, paralysis, and psychic horror. Interrupts, fears and stuns are excellent tools for reducing the damage taken by the party. Make sure to glyph your psychic scream so that mobs won’t run around and pull adds though, please.
My mage has both the talent that increases his damage when he successfully interrupts a spell, and also has improved counterspell that silences the target. Now if they would just reduce the cooldown on that sucker … 24s is an eternity compared to pummel/rebuke/mind freeze/kick. *sigh*
CC what’s that? i kid i kid, dont hurt me!
Overhealing yes, that is a pain in the cata era – I have been trying to stop it but lowest so far in a raid setting has been 20% (but no mana issues) The mana regen for Holy Priests is insane, I think nerf bat is incoming.
I new trick I’ve been using is a distracting shot and then popping deterance to “tank” for a few sec. I use this on both bosses and trash if I see the tank going down and the heals is having trouble catching up. Its best to let your tank know you’re doing this to avoid an immediate taunt back. It can give your healer a few sec to fill up the tank and/or gives the tank extra time for a CD to come up.
It takes some fight knowledge and common sense to make this a helpful strat for your party. You down want to taunt a cleaving or frontal coning boss into a party memeber standing next to you or swing the boss to tail swipe the melee.
This is esp nice if you’re right at the enrage and the boss still has a 1 or 2% life left. Also the Halfus fight in Bastion of Twilight can have a very unfortunate MS effect, that stacks and lasts 30 sec!, from one of the possbile drakes. Having a ranged taunt then run for a few gives your tanks extra time to handle the debuff.
Another one I have been messing with on my newly 85 warrior is to use Heroic leap to jump away from a boss and then run away for a few seconds. It saved my life and the party from a wipe in H-Lost City a couple days ago. It is basically like having a few second long infinite damage absorb tanking cooldown.
There are SO many tricks that can be used to cut down on damage. It is up to ever class to figure out what they can do and use it.
Priest ‘life grip’ does the same. Gets the damage off you for a few seconds. Analogue has been messing with that on her priest if she goes OOM.
I’d say Analogue has Life Grip figured properly … nothing beats seeing a bladestorming gnome go flying past me nowhere near any mobs to actually bladestorm.
grrrr
Only issue with Life grip is to watch for the bosses mechanics….if it has a cleave etc, the priest will want to watch out for it. Other then that it is an awesome breather maker
Cleave grip ftw!
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait…so priests are supposed to heal not just stand around looking pretty and providing Aura of Grand Moustache?
Well, this is for holy and disc priests. Shadow priests may do as they please. But we can’t see the moustaches in shadow form anyway so I guess you’d better just heal.
I just seriously wish I could provide an Aura of Grand Moustache.
Flying, bladestorming gnomes… If I could see that, I’d call my game experience complete!