Friend says healing meter doesnt matter for disc priest

[FieryBull]

From experience, I know alot of bad players are very quick to say meters are useless. Guess what, they're not. There are many things you can know with meters, did he heal the right target? Did he use the right spells? When the tank died, when was the last direct heal on him? Which healers did most of the dispel? Etc.

Just because you personally are clueless about something doesn't make the something useless.

Also, like some other people said, if you assigned on the MT and you exclusively heal the MT, you are bad healer. The assignment is a priority thing, not an exclusivity thing.

[Deleted]

The only other thing i can think of when meters don't matter for a disc priest is when your group is substantially outgearing/outskilling an encouter. A disc priest can absorb most of the healing and other healers won't even see any or little hp drops. Same when the encouter has a slow paced phase and a dmg heavy phase, disc priest will do most healing on the slow phase with shields, also penance is very fast reactive heal. Basicly imo the less healing there is to be done, the higher a disc priest gonna shoot above other healers and it will have nothing to do with skill.

Don't get me wrong, i do think meters matter after you've taken into consideration any specific roles and assignements, sometimes also movement required during the fight or certain skills available to a class. But all in all there's a grain of truth in what everyone in this thread is saying, just add it together and you've got your answer.

[babylon]

i would say that healing meters matter a lot.

but not in a way 'druid healed more than priest so druid is good and priest is bad'.
meters are a lot more than who healed how much or hps itself.

on meters (speaking about wol) you can see exactely how much you heal with each spell and how much you overheal with which spell, including shields and da.
it shows usage of cds, mana management, all those stuff.

you can compare yourself *not with a druid from your raid with a different assignment* but with other discipline priests, who had same assignments as you.
compare in a way of efficiency of each spell, then find them on armory and compare stats. not just compare who healed more.

and 'killing a boss' doesnt always mean that everything went ok, ppl get carried on kills as well, doest mean they can play well

[muto]

I don't think healing meters matter if no one is dieing, and even then, if someone is dieing it might be their own fault. A healer has to cover for other players stupidity, and often times healers get blamed, even if the idiot was standing in fire for half the fight.

I would say the most important meter that a healer should be looking at is damage taken, aggro, dispels and interrupts. If people are still dieing and there is no funny business going on in those categories, then yes, it's probably a healing issue.

[Amiel]

People who say healing meters or WoL for healers don't matter are just as ridiculous as people who take the numbers as face value.

There have been a fair number of healers I've ran with (either 3 or 2 healing content) who I am convinced do the bare minimum or have no idea what they are doing. Be having the ability to dispel and NEVER do it, or doing literally half or less of the effective healing I'm doing while I'm struggling to keep up with damage.
But hey, as long as a boss is down people are allowed to be carried, right? You are part of a team when you heal, meters to a certain extent (WoL more so) help to show who is and isn't doing their job. Unless its an issue of gear, I really don’t see how half assing and ignoring the meters reflecting it is acceptable.

With that said, of course there are times where they don’t matter past the point of personal satisfaction or friendly competition between healers. But it’s important to keep in mind the roll of each healer (if given one) as well as their gear when doing so. I grossly heal more than our other healer on Bael simply because I’m on shards first, and on heroic Shannox the healer on the OT is typically a bit lower because the rest of the group and MT tends to be out of their range due to how the healer and rest of the group positions themselves.

Even the amount of damage going out plays a part, perhaps your pro-active healing and mitigation is covering most of the damage because you and your friend out gear the content? Even so, that doesnt mean the meters in general do not matter to a disc priest or any healer in general.

[neccowafer]

The total number isn't that important, since some things really won't show up. Spirit Link Totem for example, reduced all damage taken by everything by 10%, but that's not a shield or a heal, so it doesn't show up. Compare another healer's cooldown, like Tranquility, which does show up as healing, and you have some issues there.

Also, some healers have abilities that make OTHER healers more effective. Mana tide totem isn't going to ever show up on the heal meter, but you can bet that other healers will get to use more of their big heals because of the mana returned by that ability.

Overheal is a useful meter to see which of your heals are being used effectively and which are being wasted. I like looking at how much each spell is used and which spells make up the most of the healing for the encounter. Looking at who dispelled most on a dispelling fight is good.

I think most healers should be COMPARABLE on overall healing. At least, someone shouldn't be 50% below someone else, but if you want to see how skilled someone is, you really need to look at a lot more of the stats available on recount than just overall healing done.

Also, healers tend to nerf each other in a way. Say you're doing a 3-healer fight with your guild that you overgear and have on farm. You have two healers in almost BiS gear and you have a new guy with you who is decent and geared enough for the fight, but not OVERGEARED. The other healers will do so much healing that he will often find he doesn't have a target to heal, or that the target he's healing has a faster heal landed on it first from a healer with more haste. There's a lot of factors.

[Servasus]

I think the point you're friend is trying to make, is that disc "heals" with shields which doesn't show up on meters. If I may: Main Tank is at 100k health and takes a 20k damage hit. You then heal him for 20k and that shows up on the meters. As your friend plays, he put's a 20k damage shield on the tank, the tank get's hit and is reduced to 100k health with no more shield. Effectively, you both "healed" him the same amount, but the meters will say your friend was quite far behind on heals. Just game mechanics.

Absorbs do show up on the meters. Maybe you should've researched that, though. There used to be a time when they didn't, but that ended at the start of Cata for most recount-esque addons.

As for people saying the meters don't count for healing, they're either not healers themselves, or not good ones. The HPS may not be important, but it's damn sure a very important tool to know how well you and the other healers are performing within your given class mechanics and gear. If a Holy paladin is having large overheals, that is natural, only as long as it's coming from more uncontrollable sources such as Radiance (pre-4.3), Protector of the Innocent and Beacon of light. If a holy paladin's largest overheal is a direct heal like Divine Light or Holy Light, the only way for other people in the raid so see that is through recount or a similar addon. Furthermore, meters show other things such as mana gained from non-spirit related abilities such as Divine Please, Judgement, Rapture and Hymn. Until patch 4.3 hits, a large portion of a paladin's mana regen comes from judging as close to off CD as possible. If your holy pally is ooming too fast, he's probably neglecting judgement and cooldowns or he's overhealing with DL like crazy. Meters can tell you these things.

Is HPS not as important? No. Is healing done important? Yes it is. But on top of that, you use meters to check for friendly fire, mana gained, overhealing, dispels and much more. And finally to the person who stated as long as everyone stays alive and the boss dies, who cares what the heals did, that's like saying it's acceptable to do the minimum amount of work possible for a mediocre outcome. Don't you want to kill those bosses faster? Don't you want your heals to get better so they can heal through more mechanics that would previously oom them? As a holy pally, I beacon one tank, heal the other, and whenever a raid member takes damage, I heal them as well because it's my job to heal. None of this "I only heal the tank" bullshit. I'm always on top of the charts and I am always the last one to oom by a large margin of time. Meters can show this.

[Phillytwo]

Healing meters mean nothing, All healers have different roles and will out-put different amount of healing, I mean just because a raid healer is top on healing done does not make him/her any better at healing than the guy who's job is to keep the MT up.

This pretty much, blizzard even stated that healers shouldn't look at the HPs because if they would Balance the healing classes then all healing classes would be OP or shit.

[[-Spiritus-]]

What may be to many folks a surprise, I actually voted "wrong" on this poll.

But, before the arm flailing occurs, it isn't because I think Meters matter all that much for healing, but because I think healing meters matter just as much to disc priests as any other healing spec. The attitude of "Meters don't matter to disc as much" came from a time before absorbs were attributable to individuals via the combat log, and most mods didn't calculate absorbs at all.

Nowadays, however, with most mods combining the efforts of heals & absorbs, and the log being able to attribute absorbs [somewhat] properly, meters matter just as much to disc as any other spec. That doesn't increase or decrease their value, it just means that disc is properly represented for what it's worth.

[Deleted]

The priest is wrong. Shields and all other absorbs (except barrier) show on meters. (edit: as elaborated above)
It's true you can't compare healing by HPS like you can DPS, but it still gives an indication.
If someone is healing half of what the others are, he is doing something wrong, there is no question about that.

[Deleted]

Aslong as you use Skada, (I'm not sure is Recount factors in absorbs) then ofc it matters.

[Mongoose19]

Healing meters matter for healers. It doesn't matter for some dumbass dps or tanks who judge player only by "omg low hps". Only person who heals can read them well, other people can gtfo.

[Hoticehunter]

I think the point you're friend is trying to make, is that disc "heals" with shields which doesn't show up on meters. If I may: Main Tank is at 100k health and takes a 20k damage hit. You then heal him for 20k and that shows up on the meters. As your friend plays, he put's a 20k damage shield on the tank, the tank get's hit and is reduced to 100k health with no more shield. Effectively, you both "healed" him the same amount, but the meters will say your friend was quite far behind on heals. Just game mechanics.

Welcome to a year ago. All absorbs show up in all logs now, even in buff icons. This was true in Wrath and before, but hasn't been true for a single day of Cata.

Edit: Btw, I voted wrong mostly on semantics. To say that healing meters don't matter for disc priests is misleading. Healing meters don't matter for any healer, not on any sort of "real" metric at least, but that's a horse that's been beaten into dust.