How do you objectively measure performance for Healers/Tanks ?

[Halicia]

At the HEROIC Raid level, what quantifiable standards do you expect from a Healer or Tank to define that they're "doing a good job".

Like, you could have two healers with the same exact gear/party... one would be clearing level 10 keystones, the other having issues with the same dungeon at level 4. What elements can you use to place certain standards ?

Or as a Raidleader/Guildleader, do you look more towards a binary "They are acceptable/unacceptable" when it comes to guild & raid invitations ?

[Onikaroshi]

Did raid die? No - Healer did good job. Yes - Healer no did good job

Did tank die? No - Healer and Tank did good job. Yes - Someone dun messed up.

But seriously, its hard to quantify healer and tank roles. Only when there's problems is it even brought up. One healer being 100k below the rest and putting stress on them. One tank who keeps dying every time a particular mechanic comes up.

What you WANT to see is all the healers close to each other in HPS but this is skewed by class of the healer. Little to no deaths in the raid. And a dead boss.

Tanks... i mean you can look at heals required per second but that's REALLY class based, some tanks require more throughput then others. So it really comes down to if they had good uptime on AM and hit it at the right times.

So really... boss dead? good, boss no dead? no good

[MajorTom]

A good measurement for a healer is to check their Average HPS, as well as how much Overhealing they are doing. If someone is only doing like 150k hps, sometimes the problem is that they are putting their HoTs onto, or healing, people who are already topped off. As a healer you should also be checking your active time (I.E. how much time you actually spent using abilities).

As a tank, what I like to do is go onto warcraftlogs.com and check the average damage taken from my specific class on a certain encounter. For example, if I was a paladin tank, I would want to check the average damage taken for around my ilvl on a fight like ursoc, and then compare it to how much damage I took on that fight as well. If I took a lot more damage than the average, I would take a look and see if there were places I could improve my Cooldown usage or my active mit.

[Deleted]

tanks: have a good tank check his logs. do m+ with different tanks. and what oni said...
healers: check how they handle stress and progress logs obviously. posting logs on competitve wow helped us alot.

[Larynx]

Healing is less strict than DPS, but HPS parses are still a good indicator of performance when averaged out. Outside some specific examples, if there's a large difference in ilvl weighted percentile between your healers, you probably have a skill gap between those healers. It's pretty hard to tell if a healer is bad based on only one fight though. If every healer gets 50th percentile, does that mean every healer is bad? No, because healing is zero-sum and damage taken is dynamic. If your raid doesn't take much damage or has too many healers or has one incredibly great healer, HPS numbers will suffer. That doesn't excuse consistent bad performance across a tier, though. If someone averages 90 and someone averages 50, you can pretty definitively say that the former is a better healer.

You can look at specifics within the log itself, but unless you know how to use the tool and know what to look for it's not very useful.

[God Save The King]

Healers have a maximum amount of damage they can heal. Healing faster/more doesn't help the raid once no one dies due to lack of healing. DPS on the other hand, while having a maximum amount of damage they can deal, the speed at which they do so also lowers the fight's length, making it easier.

so, my general rule of thumb, have all healers within about 20-30% hps, decent overhealing numbers for their class based on the fight, and no one dying.

Healer ranks are also hard because of strategy differences. I.e., my guild's first Ursoc kill was 5 healers, vs most other guilds used 4, so our rankings were much lower. Same with Nythendra. Ilgynoth we also 5 healed, but we pop the first 10 bloods in each phase all at once and use CDs, and then do a mini 6 blood pop with two tranq's and a spirit link later in each phase. This artificially inflated our HPS numbers dramatically, in that each healer placed 90+

[dmfg]

Did they fail mechanics? Die to shit? Mistime tank swaps? Fail to use a particular CD when it was agreed? Fail to use an unreserved CD when it would have saved a death? Did they dispel when needed?

I don't think HPS is useful at all. I've never met a healer who did all the above right but didn't do good HPS, and even if that happened, it wouldn't stop you killing HC bosses.

Also don't underestimate the usefulness of subjective data. If there's a healer/tank where people go "dammit, not that guy" when he joins, there's something wrong even if the numbers look good.

[Deleted]

HPS is worst indicator by itself. You have to consider lots of other parameters when looking at HPS. Like how much damage tanks/raid take, is it consistent or spiky, is healer himself standing in shit and mostly healing himself, is healer using his big heals only during bloodlust, maybe there isn't nothing to heal at all (too many healers), some haste oriented healer (looking at druids) can just top HP faster. Some classes can blanket Hot, and others are good at stacked healing. Sometimes healer can't heal, needs to run away from raid with debuff or is stunned/silenced, when he should do big heals (lets take like elerethe, if you need to run with poison or them windstuffs it's considerable hps loss).
I have seen weird situations between healers, like 2 can work better than 3rd and push it last but when one of first 2 is missing the 3rd is 1st and with huge margin.
HPS isn't DPS.

[Kirbypro]

Do healers properly use raid CDs even on farm or easy content?

I swear yesterday as the first time I saw a resto shaman use spirit link in a mythic+ during a sketchy add pack. He was way lower ilvl than me but he's a boss in m ybook.

[ComputerNerd]

There are no simple ways of doing that for ANY role, not just for tanks or healers.
Sims for damage dealers often make assumptions, and there are cases where a player may able to pad to produce a good performance by the oversimplified metric of dps.

It is down to interpretation by players who look beyond the simple and quick judgments of numbers alone.

[Narabug]

At the HEROIC Raid level, what quantifiable standards do you expect from a Healer or Tank to define that they're "doing a good job".

Or as a Raidleader/Guildleader, do you look more towards a binary "They are acceptable/unacceptable" when it comes to guild & raid invitations ?

While it is much more difficult the quantify healers and tanks than it is to quantify DPS, there are still some easy ways to judge performance.

First and foremost is warcraftlogs. If you want to build a successful group, you should be using this tool. Item level means almost nothing at this point, since a skilled player at 865 could out-perform an unskilled player at 885. Second, I will check wowprogress. You're looking for their Mythic+ Dungeon results here to see if they are pushing themselves and capable of performing their role without the crutch of a raid to carry them.

When selecting a tank, I generally look at two metrics:

• Damage Dealt - Tank Damage Matters. Most tanks can deal over 150k single-target damage.

• External Healing Required - This is how much stress the tank puts on your raid in required healing.

While looking at these metrics, I also keep in mind that the shorter the fight, the more skewed those numbers are.

Selecting a healer is much more difficult - as their raid gets better, their effective HPS goes down. For these examples, I try to see how they handle that by analyzing logs. I see where their HPS is at and also compare that to their DPS to see if they are contributing as much as they can or they get lazy and rely on their raid to carry them.

[BrioWoW]

As a healer I rather dps as much as possible. Only fight where I am not 90%+ ranking on dps on our first kill is ilgynoth where I actually have to focus on healing more. Lot more to healers than simply hps.

[MoanaLisa]

I don't think there's really an objective way to do it. Fights are different, cc requirements change, positioning can matter more or less for different fights. Play with someone in your group for a while and you'll know if they are doing a good job or not. Someone might be really strong on one kind of fight and have problems on others and vice versa.

I do know one thing: HPS is about the worst objective measurement you can make. It's also one of the easiest but it doesn't tell you very much about what separates an average healer from a really good one.

[Stormspellz]

healers- what was their priority? did those peeple die? if so why?

tanks - did they hit their mitigation buttons when they supposed to and be at the spot they are supposed to be?

[Vellithe]

Healers are about quick good reactions, but that's really hard to check up on, though faster healers will usually end up sniping slower healers, and quick healer who make bad decisions will OOM often. There are also spec-specific ways of checking whether they're playing effectively, i.e. tracking Holy Shock usage on Holy Pallies, are they losing casts over the course of the fight? are they holy shocking the wrong targets? what are they doing with their beacons? how good is their light of the dawn usage? etc

Mana efficiency is also a big one. If a healer is ending the fight with too much mana, that means they don't know how to push it, particularly if people are still dropping sometimes (a lot of mana + people dropping = cheap healer!). However, if healers are going OOM in the middle of the fight, it means they push it too much and need to learn how to be more efficient. I personally have problems pushing it, even though not all fights require mana to last forever, it's like I have a mental block that says wasting mana is bad, even if I don't actually need that mana.

If you want to test your healers (plus give them something fun to do), Heroic raiding is very flexible in that you can just decide to go with a few healers less than you should for your group size. This will really push your healers to their limits, even on easier content, and show you how good they are with all the previous points (there are few healers, so they can't count on other healer's reactions to cover for theirs, there are not enough healers, so they MUST save their mana or they'll OOM, there are few healers so not doing something you should be doing will cost you HARD, etc). Plus it gives them really nice parses that will make them very proud, even if parses like that are pretty much "cheating".


I think WarcraftLogs has some tools to check up on how good a tank's usage of mitigation is, but I'm not certain they still have it up, probably tough to code it. Other than that you should check on how fast they react to things like switches and grabbing adds, how good their movement is, etc. For instance, if a tank has to dance around too much on Ursoc, they're being a bad tank (more movement = less DPS), even if the fight gets done just fine. If they have attention problems and take too long to switch, that might cost you dearly, etc.

[Deleted]

For tanks - check their communication (do they ask for externals?). Do they use their cooldowns correctly on hard hitting abilities or just rely on healers to heal them through it? <---- Bad. How is their active mitigation uptime closer to 100% the better but that depends on the class. Are they on the ball with picking up adds quickly. Do they dodge avoidable damage. How much damage do they do? Damage is still important because after a certain point you just wont die as a tank once you do the other things correctly so the only thing left to improve is damage done.

Healers - Mana useage, do they sit at 50% mana all fight or do they use up all of their mana + a mana potion and are oom just as the fight ends. This is so they do all the potential healing they can actually do since mana at the end of the fight is potential healing wasted. Ofc on some fights where there isnt much damage its harder to oom yourself while not overhealing most of the time.

Do they stay alive well? Dodging mechanics rather than healing themselves through the damage. A dead healer is useless.

Tank healing? While they dont have to be spamming the tanks 24/7 but if every healer helps a little it lessens the burden.

Overhealing? Overhealing to a certain degree is kinda unavoidable. If they are overhealing like 30/40% on everything you could probably just drop a healer. But in some cases other healers will snipe the healing so hots/slow heals might just land slower and on a 100% target. Healing is largerly based on the encounter and the actual players in the raid.

Uptimes? Things like lifebloom uptime, healing rain uptime etc.

WHEN they heal and WHO? Just spamming AoE heals can give you alot of hps sure. But if you dont heal people when they need it then what is the point? For example on ilgynoth when people get spew corruption do they swap to ST heal that person? On dragons do they heal people soaking the plants and with volatile infection properly?

Healing CDs? In some raids healing cds will be assigned in places. Do they use it correctly and when asked? Do they avoid sniping other healing cds? Do they communicate well with other healers in the team ie. Dispels or when they cant reach someone who is out of range.

Dps? Imo people dont take this as seriously as they should i think. You can only do so much healing in a fight. No point just spamming out heals if A) people are topped off B) There is no danger of dying. In these times its when they should be dpsing and helping to kill the boss faster. That damage they provide could be the difference needed between a kill and a 2% wipe.

[ifrah]

healers- what was their priority? did those peeple die? if so why?

tanks - did they hit their mitigation buttons when they supposed to and be at the spot they are supposed to be?

This pretty much on the experience I have from the past expansions, as healer and dps. Worth noting that for dps classes the damage meters don't always tell the whole story unless you're raiding patchwerk all night.