Healing meters = better healer

[Firecrest]

You're both wrong, OP. Healing meters are not the end all of deciding who is a good Healer - however they can be a very effective tool if used properly. Unfortunately, in my experience, most people use them improperly.

Raw HPS and total healing done is a very innefective tool as it is very subjective. Fight mechanics, healing assignments and many other things skew it in unproductive ways. Holy Pallies are going to wreck meters on a fight like Patchwerk. Does that mean they're better then your other healers? Nope. It just means they have the right tools for that encounter.

On the other hand, saying things like "Welp, my assignment didn't die. I'm doing great!" is just as idiotic. You should always look for ways to improve yourself. Sure your assignment didn't die. But if you and your other healers did a better job managing mana and CDs, could you drop a healer and add additional dps? This is the kind of question you will never be able to positively answer with a "good enough" kind of approach.

This. You might be healing 12k HPS, but if you're pulling 40-50% overhealing, then you're really only pulling down about 6-7k HPS. Meters are a good indication of who is pulling their weight, but not the end-all-be-all measurement most folks think they are.

Only idiots look at total healing instead of effective healing.

[Tziva]

Did anyone die?
Did a tank die?
How was your mana?

It's not this simple, either. This is just as misleading at the OP's position that topping the meters is a sign of being better, or other people totally dismissing rankings as useless.

Having raided at various points in time with some terrible healers, I can say that no one dying or going OOM isn't necessarily a sign things are peachykeen with everyone. What could be happening -- and often does -- is that you have the rest of the healing team picking up slack for that one healer who has no idea what they're doing. Sure, you may do fine on most fights, but you're in for a world of hurt when you face really tough fights that they can't be carried through. Not to mention the harmful social aspect of your best healers stewing with wrathful resentment for having to carry SusyAFK.

---------- Post added 2011-06-01 at 10:44 AM ----------

Only idiots look at total healing instead of effective healing.

As far as I know, all the popular damage meters (Recount, Skada, as well as parsing sites like WoL) now track only effective heals in their healing totals, and have a separate tracker for overheal.

[Deleted]

Being a good healer isn't about healing people. It's about keeping them alive.

[thundercles]

Hai everyone.

Im the healer Malkatron is talking about. Now please understand this post is a kinda troll. We have been having this arguement for about a month now and I even had to write an essay on the point I was making for him to understand

Tell your dumb friend to stop trolling MMO.

Now to me recount matters because of these reasons:

I play a holy paladin.
In most fights I should be top
I judge my performance from the recount. So if lets say shammy out healed me on Magmaw HM I know I have slacked.

Being on top is very dependent on many factors including latency, the composition of your healing group, the tanks, etc. There are too many factors outside of your control for you to predetermine that you should be on top. Your total healing done is, for that reason, not a good means of determining how well you're doing.

Paladins and druids should mostly always top the meters. And they matter for me to judge my performance on that fight and to see if I had slacked.

Again, wrong. That is going to depend on so many other factors that it wouldn't be efficient to list them all here.

As most of you probably know on these forums you bring Holy paladins and Resto druids because currently they have the best output and HPS on most fights.
And you bring Resto shammys and Priests because they are better at other things.

It's not about output, it's about who needs the healing that determines what types of healers you bring.
Pallys are exceptional tank healers, with druids and shamans being close behind.
But all other healers are stronger AoE healers, and are usually best left to focus on raid healing while the paladin(s) focuses on the tank(s).

[h3lladvocate]

Healing can't be metered... if person A is a class that can easily snipe heals, they will have higher HPS. The healing raid can only heal damage that is taken, so if the raid is taking 20k DPS and healer A is doing 12k because they have instants or something, the others really can't get above 4k each. If they go up, healer A goes down, which doesn't tell you anything at all.

The only way to determine good healers is strict assignments and looking at healing done per mana spent per active time healing(I don't think any meter track that, even WoL). Basically, if you assign someone to the tank, and the tank dies, bad healer(obviously, if the fight requires 2 tank healers, don't be an ass and put one)

[Gritalian]

I wonder how many more pages of people telling this guy he's wrong there will be

[Bramickias]

Healing meters are just there to see if someone is slacking or using the wrong spells.
If you, as a pally are healing as much as the other healers, it usually doesnt mean anything.
But if you see yourself healing a LOT more then the other pally in your raid, that might be an indication that you rock, or probably more that he totally sucks. When you cast a quick heal on someone to bring him to full when he already has 2 hots on him doesnt make you a better healer.
Or if you take a long look at the meters you can see if another healer is doing something wrong.

[BurningStick]

I wonder how many more pages of people telling this guy he's wrong there will be

9 to 17 more pages is the answer

[Jaxi]

Meters alone won't give you a full indicator of a good healer. Overhealing done also helps, but really the only way to judge a good healer is to run with them several times and see how they react to changes. Good healing is about knowing what to use and when to use it, not just about getting the biggest heals.

[thundercles]

Healing: Quality > Quantity.

/thread?

[TeHypno]

Actually Healing done = better healer. Let me explain.
A player who has perfect timing and perfect choice of healing spell as well as perfect choice of who to heal first on his raid frames, will always get the best healing done results. Ez as that. There is no way a good healer can be low in healing done. Being low on meter means ur timing is too slow or you went oom too quickly. If someone dies in the raid and its not his fault , then all present healers failed no matter the metters. Thats all.

[praseodymium]

Find a good disc priest, and all your meter worries will be over. Just cede the "#1-on-the-meters" throne to him, and then you can join the other healers QQing about OP absorb heal-sniping.

Slightly more constructive: Healing meters are not the be-all-end-all of healing, but they do tend to show who's slacking when considered in conjunction with healing assignments. If healer X and Y are both assigned to raid, but X is doing 50% more than Y, then Y needs to get his act together.

[Iracor]

If at the end of the fight the only people that died were stupid people who got hit by unhealable damage and you didn't run out of mana then you can semi-judge performance based on meters. The more healing you do, the less healing someone else has to do. If one healer is pulling 6k hps, then the rest of the healers have to pull about 1-2k more hps depending on if you're in 10 or 25 and that makes those other healers more susceptible to running oom.

[resare]

I'm going to argue healing meters do matter, people don't take into consideration that if a healer is healing a ton of people, the work load on the other healers is reduced drastically. e.g. a paly is healing this crap out of a tank or x targets, then the other healers don't have to heal x and rather better heal y. If you are hindered at healing x, then people have to pick up your slack. I've seen people stack meters, I've seen people complain that they're "smart" healing like so many people talk about in this thread. My point is with all the changes Blizzard has made to the default UI, i.e. showing healing being done before it pops, if you're starting to heal a (non-tank) target who's grey meter is about to be pushed over, you're bad, it's as simple as that. If your passive aoe heals (CoH/WG/etc.) are pushing you into overheal territory, that's fine. If your non-passive aoe heals (Radiance/Eff./etc.) are pushing you into overheal territory, you're terrible.

Healing is all about reaction, anticipation, knowledge and as such is extremely stressful in new encounters. Meters do matter, both done and overhealing, and if you can't properly interpret the data (using the two) you shouldn't be using meters to begin with.

[arden714]

Healing meters are deceptive for many reasons. There are countless fights where you can, should or are not required to heal for short periods of time. Fights with heavy movement gimp some healers worse than others and naturally healing classes are better in certain situations over others (Aoe/Tank/etc) .

While there certainly are benchmarks made by how much HPS you can do, it's a far cry from gauging actual performance.

By your standards if I averaged higher threat over the course of a fight as a tank, that I'm obviously better than the other tanks in the raid. It's one important attribute of tanking, but it in no shape gauges my overall performance at that task.

[Shivaji]

As previously stated healing meters are a tool that can be used to measure performance but the highest HPS in now way indicates the best healer. Just last night we have an incident where a Paladin topped the healing meters but his assigned target was dying on every attempt? Why? because he was padding the meters by healing other targets as well and was not able to get to his main heal target in a timely manner.

[Zero infiniti]

Depends on how the meter interprets damage absorption as well

i play disc priest once in a while, and i've been in situations where i stress myself by healing too much and top the meters but i run oom in the last bit of the fight (only healed in BH). so although i'm topping meters and absorbing blows, the other healer has to pick up my slack in the last minute which isn't good. but i don't heal much this expansion as i've only had time to enjoy my pally tank and lock so my gear sucks and my play style is so so.

[Elysia]

Im the healer Malkatron is talking about. Now please understand this post is a kinda troll.

Yeah. Closed.