Analysis of a "Good" Healer

[Dendrek]

I'm curious what others look at when deciding whether or not a healer is a good healer. What exactly is it you look for? Do you compare healers with each other? If so, what do you look at when comparing them?

I think many people tend to have a shallow view on what they would look at when deciding whether or not a healer is good: how high on recount or WWS was that healer for healing done or hps? Granted, healing done and hps are indeed important on some (perhaps many) fights, just as dps for damage dealers is often very important, but as is also true of dpsers, there's more to being a good healer than just toping the charts. This is especially true for healers, who, on difficult fights, have much more to worry about than hps.

I won't go more into my own opinions until this topic has had a few responses. I'd like to see what others have to say first.

So once again, the question is: What makes a healer good?

Please keep responses civil and intelligent.

[Paladang]

What's your rating?

[Dendrek]

I'm not sure I understand the question.

[Brasko]

Did I die?

[Barun]

I think a good healer doesn't necessarily have to top the healing meters, I think a good healer will heal at the correct time when it can save a wipe.

Wether that makes you on top of the healing meter or not. Or maybe people might think i'm talking crap really tired right now, so don't know how to elaborate on that

[rkit]

Good healer able to keep party or raid alive when bad healer fails.

[Tycho]

Well, healing meters are really, really dodgy. HoT heals can be sniped with direct heals, big slow heals can be sniped with instant AoE heals, etc.

Basically, if the healer spends a lot of time casting and wasn't OOM halfway through the fight, that's a start. Keep in mind though that being OOM can just be an indication of insufficient gear, rather than skill.

Another thing to keep an eye on is responsiveness; how long their assigned targets spend "needing" heals when the healer is able to heal them (and not incapacitated or w/e).

Do they use cancel-casting (i.e., precast a heal and sidestep just before it lands if it's not needed)? Do they understand the differences between their heals and when each is preferred over the other?

[SFJake]

Did I die?

This.

Its the same as over analyzing a DPS's damage, although its even easier, really. Does he keep people alive? If so, he's good. Who cares about rating people next to each other, this is probably the dumbest/most annoying thing in a game.

Same as DPS. Did he add his damage properly, does he target the right thing, is he simply doing his job correctly? Or "omg my dps is 100 higher than yours I'm super l33t"?

My point is, if the job is done, then he did well. No one died? He did well. But if someone dies does not make him immediately bad either.

[Cory12]

Tycho makes some good points.

I don't really pay attention to healing meters...The only time I really take it into account is when people are really really low on the meters, something is wrong. And overheal? That's stupid. I heal on a paladin, and I'm naturally going to have a 50% overheal.

I think the responsiveness is good. Situations like KT when someone gets iceblocked and they need a quick heal before they die.

Really it comes down to if you're dying or not. And not thing like stupid DPS pulling aggro and getting one shotted. But when your group's execution is good and if everyone survives, you can generally say you have good healers.

[Barun]

I agree with Tycho and Sfjake.

Especially the part of the DPS I can fully understand. It's nice to have a DPS that can do 4k+ DPS but if he gets others in trouble, or doesn't save someone when he does have an opportunity then it can make you a bad DPS.

From personal experience I have seen DPS actually make very high damage and also save other people's butt, same as for healers that can do almost the same like thing.

[Dinkz]

I agree with you that too much emphasis is on addons such as Recount, for example, a Disc Priest wouldn't ever show very high on a healing done as they prevent damage as opposed to heal it. Recount IS useful for looking at what spells a healer is using and WHO they are healing. It can be very revealing for a seemingly undergeared healer who rates high on the charts, but when you look into what abilities were used, the AE heals tend to have been spammed and they've healed themselves/the raid after a wipe and after buffs.
In my opinion a good healer is no different to a good tank or dps'er, they are aware of their abilities, have a solid spec that they can explain, they know what stats are important for their spec too. They don't just copy/paste a spec without understanding why it was created in that way and they don't stack SP over, say, MP5 or Spirit (or Crit in the case of Palas & Disc Priests) or gimp themselves in the case of beneficial socket bonuses.
Clearly the "being raid-ready" bit should be mentioned, bringing food/flasks/elixirs/potions to a raid and using them is also important, but this is a generalisation. Being able to help other healers through intelligent discussion on tactics or methods/addons and generally being approachable is also really important in my opinion. There's nothing worse than a guy (or girl ofc) who's "too leet" to have a conversation with xD.
A good healer is also somebody who does whatever it is that's asked of them. If your job is to keep your target(s) alive and you do it without going oom or without them dying (ofc xD) then you've done your job well. Being a good healer does rely a lot on reactions too Snipe that heal in when you see a fellow healer is OOM or incapacitated.
Being a good healer is also about being a good team player. But then that falls more under "What makes a good Raider?" Which in all honesty is what a lot of the above falls under anyways Being good at whatever is always made easier if you are in company of friends and you actually enjoy what you're doing. Personality in my opinion has always been more important than gear

[Dahrken]

This is basically a copy from something I posted in "plusheal"

I generally end up having to gauge raid healing in general in my role and it comes down to a few things;

Raid wise:
-Did we complete the encounter?
-Did anyone die ?
-If yes, was it avoidable? (example; dps lagging out and cross charging people on thadd is probably not totally avoidable)
-Did healers survive without using all their mana? ( I tend to mark encounters where this happen for an inspection)
-Were healers working well together? (overhealing, stepping on others targets, commuication) though sometimes unavoidable Did we take too many?

Individual:
-Did the healer stay on target and manage them effectively
-How many total Dispells were done by the healer given their classes abilities and the debuffs in the encounter (allowing for class competition)
-Did the healer have a good balance of spell use (ie not simply spamming a single spell) given some classes it's not always about using every spell but not using one spell for everything
-The lowest priority on my list is HPS and Total healing done and only as a marker if the overheal is amazingly high (for the given class) or the player is drastically under performing compared to a similarly geared healer of the same class and assignment, which can lead to looking at the 3rd point again. Healing assignments vary and in turn so will he total amount of healing they do, so that always needs to be taken in to account.
-Disc priests I check in more ways (recount mod; it's not perfect and you cut it's absorb estimations by more than 2/3rds but it gives you more to go off that guessing while in game and not looking at wws) and a lot of this can be seen live rather than in data. Eg Not pre shielding warrior tanks, a raid/player saving Pw:s or Ps at the perfect time.

A point to add is that whilst this is all useful information, it's not worth being overly critical about it and take away the information with the expectation that anything you saw this week will probably be totally different next week.

[Dendrek]

Good healer able to keep party or raid alive when bad healer fails.

The problem I have with this argument is that it's kind of circular, and ignores a lot of factors that go into whether or not the healer could have done anything to avoid the wipe (if the raid wipes) or actually did anything worthwhile to keep the party alive (if the raid succeeds). Also, how can you know how much better or worse another healer in that same position might have done to know whether your healer is a good or bad one?

Arguments like "Did I die?" go along these same lines. Are you sure it wasn't the tank's fault that you died because he didn't pick up the mob(s) in time, or perhaps your fault that you pulled agro or stood in the fire?

Going slightly off topic, I have an anecdote to share.

I once did H.AN with a pug with a feral tank, a BM hunter and 2 rogues. As any healer who has done that instance knows, there can be A LOT of party damage (especially if certain adds aren't being killed quickly enough or if poisons aren't dispelled in a timely manner). On this particular pug, the dps were horrible - only one of them was able to maintain 1.2k+ dps, and as I'm sure you can imagine, adds that should have been dying fast weren't. Nevertheless, I manage to keep the party alive for every pull but one. (We attempted the achievement on the first boss and failed horribly). On the last boss, I finally went completely OOM at the end of what ended up being a 5 minute long fight (I was spamming HoTs and dispelling poisons as fast as I could while trying to keep myself alive with mobs smacking on me). Just before the party disbanded, the tank said, "bad rogue [referring to a rogue whose dps was consistently below the tank's] and bad healer".

I was shocked. I kept the party alive through all that and he called me a bad healer? I thought I had misread what he wrote so I whispered him. And he responded: "fail healer is fail".

Though I don't know his reason for saying this, I can only assume it's because there were times in that fight when some party members were dangerously low on health and he must have thought, "A good healer would have been able to keep them all topped off the entire time."

I don't know what another tank might have said in his position, but would either have known what it actually took to keep the party alive? Simplistic observations like, "Did we die?" or "Were people dangerously close to dying?" without observing the circumstances that lead to that are probably not enough to justify saying whether or not a healer is good.

[edit] spelling

[Vel]

The post of dahrken has a deep and correct examining ;D.

The shorter one is simpler.
Most of the hard fights, i'd even say all of hard fights are made with divided heal, meaning that one healer is keeping alive his own group of players. And only when all of them are topped and surely safe can help somewhere else is he is sure about his mana (there was some fights in BC when you didn't even have mana and time for even thinking about helping anywhere).

If all of the healers duty is always alive the healer is good.

If not - you have to check whose mistake was that.
But.. there are a plenty of raids if you are in a raid guild, so you'll see the people that *can* and *will* make mistakes even which kind of mistakes they will make and when.

So the main and actually only one analysis you can make for any class is: did he completed his task ?
And the tasks in raid may defer a lot

@ Dendrek:
The most spread and short raid analysis is *did i die?*. In group there would be a lot of other moments but the main one will still be the same. You can't change it because it is true.
If the tank is doing his job - keeping all the mobs of one pack on himself - the only possibility of wipe is healers mistake or really bad gear of the group including healer and tank. Bad gear is also the mistake - you did not have pation to get it in normal or q-s.

[Mamut]

Did I die?

Yes... if you stay in aoe.

Its not always healers fail when party/raid wipe.

Good healer? He know how to use his mana pool (now its no problem with many regen buffs but I hope it will be harder in Ulduar) and he know who and when have prior for heals (I hate people screaming something like "Heal me!!!! Heal me ffs!!!" when its really not needed).
He dont need to be top in healing meter (tank healer < raid healer in healing done with many aoe dmg, tank healer = raid healer in how its important).

Thats all from me, sry for bad english.

[Forumone]

A good healer is like a buttler "you never notice him until he's off for a week and then you wipe 15 times on Patchwerk".

For myself and I organise the healing side of a successful raiding guild, the worst number to ever look at on WWS is total healed. If a pally, disc-priest or resto Druid is told to watch a tank and both them and the tank survive, that's all I'd ask. The rougher end of that job is raid healing because it deals with the nubcake factor more common to the 23-25 members of the raid.

Being able to distinguish who can perform their task in advance is hard to predict. When looking at stats I would avoid the following:
- span casting one heal, especially the fastest one, shows a lack of forethought and an inability to plan. Pallys casting flash heal and priests too are prime examples.
- poor mana efficency, this requires a bit of judgement as it's not the same across classes. It can also be quite hard to detect at the moment.

[Murre]

As both a shaman and druid healer there are some things I point out if a healer is good.

As a HoTer (druid in TBC) I got really frustrated with other healers who are topping of my targets even tho I have rejuvinated them or have any other HoT rolling that is sufficient to top them off within 5 seconds or keep them stable.

To try out new trials to our guild we often take them through a 10-man naxx with 2 healers. This way I as an officer can keep track of what our trial is doing, often puting him to the test by not doing my job properly. Is he dispelling, is he using the right spell for the situation at hand? What are his reactions, if He's assigned to Tank healing will he pop a CD or help heal up raid aswell (thank god Naxx is so easy).

I think most importantly is how aware a healer is. There are small indicators to see how aware a person is in his raiding. While rushing through trash is he ressing or running with tank if a DPS has died for some reason? When a person is back up is he buffing properly, is he buffing without us having to shout at him? All of these are indicators of awareness and are easy to check. At the same time are they very nice _indicators_ of how "good" a player is.

Bad structure in this post but I'm really tired and should go to sleep. As a small reservation, my main specc is balance DPS so don't flame me if I'm utterly stupid!

[Dendrek]

@ Dendrek:
The most spread and short raid analysis is *did i die?*. In group there would be a lot of other moments but the main one will still be the same. You can't change it because it is true.
If the tank is doing his job - keeping all the mobs of one pack on himself - the only possibility of wipe is healers mistake or really bad gear of the group including healer and tank. Bad gear is also the mistake - you did not have pation to get it in normal or q-s.

Though it's true that a good healer will usually be able to keep everyone alive in most fights (especially now that the content is so easy), even if unexpected things happen, it is definitely possible for others in the party or raid to wipe the party or raid, regardless of the healer's ability or efforts to keep them alive.

If there's an add that does a lot of aoe damage or hits the tank very hard, causing more damage than a healer can heal through and the tank/dps aren't focusing enough damage on that add to kill it fast enough, it could easily be the dpsers and/or tank's fault if the party wipes. If there's a poison cloud or fire on the ground that group members aren't moving out of, it's their fault if the healer cannot keep them alive.

Blaming healers for wipes and deaths ignores the responsibility of others in the group to keep themselves or the group alive.

I could go on, but I won't bother. My argument is this: deaths alone (without considering the circumstances that lead to those deaths) is a bad way of deciding whether or not a healer is good.

[Eis]

A good healer is like a buttler "you never notice him until he's off for a week and then you wipe 15 times on Patchwerk".

That. Your guild won't know you're good, until you miss a raid and the replacement makes the ride way more rough.
Good news is, they absolutely love you after. Many a times I've heard "Never ever leave us again! I hate repair bills!" >.>

[Ektoplasme]

A lot of people already answered the question. It's really difficult to distinguish a good healer from a bad healer in a WWS report. But you can still find some clues buried inside the WWS.

1) you can check if a healer used every Cooldown during the fight (like power infusion for priests etc.) and if he used his trinkets on CD. Bad healers usually don't bother with their long cooldowns.

2) check the dispell meter. A good healer may not always top this chart (because sometimes he was not assigned to this task) but a bad healer will always be low on this chart. So use this tool in the long run, not on 1 single specific fight.

3) Check if they used special abilities like Hand of Protection/sacrifice etc. A healer who knows how to use all the tools of the class is a godd healer.