Is the HPS the only legit way to judge healers?

[Deleted]

We were offered a guild merge as both guilds have issues with people and both want mythic progress.. So we did a test run with 30 people, 7 healing it. The issue there was that after we got to Maidens, we wiped for the 1st time and the blame was immediately on my guild healers.. Theyre healers were pulling up to 50k hps, while ours were pulling 25k. The thing is, in P1 on maidens there barely anything to heal, theyre healers were oom while ours still had plenty of mana.

So is the hps really a reason to tell that healers cant play right?

P.S. We then split raids and 1 shot them..

[Jester Joe]

No, it's not, especially if they're OoM.

And I mean, it also depends on how many absorbs some of the healers have.

[Deleted]

Yea thats also my position on this, we had 2 disc priests, who had 50% and 70% respectively of theyre healing as absorbs.. Thats the only thing stopping us from the merge

[Deleted]

Without being there, or having logs to review there isn't much that can be added.

Can your and their heal leads not have a chat?

[Deleted]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...8&type=healing

heres the logs from our best pull that night, the blame is on our shaman, she has the worst hps of all healers

- - - Updated - - -

Without being there, or having logs to review there isn't much that can be added.

Can your and their heal leads not have a chat?

Yea we tried that, have not come to any conclusion

[Detritivores]

In general, HPS is a pretty dumb metric. In certain situations (think Butcher) where a fight is short with sustained heavy damage, it's easier to define hps requirements and apply them directly to the fight. Maidens is a terrible fight to do that on. If everyone does the mechanics, there's next to nothing to heal for the first 10 minutes. So either you heal your balls off for no reason and have pretty hps or you play conservatively for a while and then go ham at the end when it matters and have ugly numbers.

All that aside, your shaman does appear to be lagging behind theirs slightly, with a sample size of 2 fights I could find. If that's the only reason they don't want to merge, I'd rethink whether you really want to merge with them. They have a shaman with big numbers who could easily work with yours to help make equally big numbers if there are truly performance issues and not just meter cheesing. Maidens isn't about raw healing output, it's about doing the mechanics and organizing raid CDs during the final burn. No reason the group in that log couldn't have downed it.

[Teramelle]

HPS is heavily dependant on two things: how well the other healers are performing, and how much damage the raid takes. For the former, if - theoretically - you got four healers of the exact same class, spec, gear and skill level, you should have an equal split of HPS. Of course, this isn't necessarily the case, because there are a lot of variables in healing - who reaches a certain person first to cast the heal, which spell the healer chooses to cast, where the healer is positioned, how much damage is being taken by the raid, etc.

As for the latter, if on one try, a lot of people in the raid mess up on tactics and take a lot of otherwise avoidable damage or do not do what they can to reduce unavoidable damage, HPS (and Healing Done) will be higher than if all tactics were executed perfectly and all avoidable damage was avoided, and unavoidable mitigated.

Some might say you could judge their Healing Done by their Overhealing, but for some classes (particularly resto druids) they will always overheal to some extent and this is outwith their control; similarly, disc priests will overheal very little due to the nature of their class (i.e. absorption based and you can't over-absorb.)

You could judge by the mana they have at certain points in the fight compare to their Healing Done, but mana depends on how well they can manage it, how much damage the raid is taking, how much regen they have, or if they've used a mana pot or not - so again, this is not a good way of determining a healer's skill level.

Having multiple disc priests, too, will hinder other healing classes - if the raid is getting shields on them whenever possible, and therefore either all damage is absorbed or a good chunk of it is, then there's very little for other healers to do, and therefore their HPS will drop dramatically.

The best way to determine the skill level of a healer is to factor in absolutely all of these things - even with some form of hindrance, you know, generally, that a good healer with good gear shouldn't be doing like, 12k HPS. You also know that they shouldn't be going OOM during periods of a fight wherein there is little reason for them to spend huge amounts of mana. You know that overheal should never be so high as to suggest that the majority of the healer's healing was not effective but rather simply meter-padding and mana-wasting.

If you are aware of how certain classes work, you can analyse logs. For example, I play a resto druid - I know, when I look at logs of other resto druids, that I should be checking for stuff like Lifebloom and Harmony uptime, among other things like proper spell use and optimal timing for CDs. Those are some of the major failings of many badly-performing resto druids - and it's a way of seeing that they aren't performing well and are, generally, a bad healer.

For determining if a healer is good or bad at a glance, you look at the healing done throughout the fight - if you have one healer with exceptionally low HPS and the rest with rather high, then you know that the high HPS of some of your healers is simply due to your low HPS healer underperforming and the other healers having to make up for that with extra healing of their own. Ideally, if the healers are all of similar gear, they ought to have a fairly similar level of HPS - disc priests tend to be higher due to the nature of their healing (i.e. absorb based) - which implies each is pulling their own weight in healing; some might be ahead of others, and this can be due to differences in skill, reaction time and gear, but you shouldn't have one healer lagging behind by a wide margin because that simply puts strain on the others and their mana.

I mean, if you don't see any major issues (as in, one or two healers very obviously lagging behind the others) then the biggest deciding factor in whether or not your healing set up, or even your healers individually, are good, is if you can kill the boss without everyone dead at the end from a lack of healing.

[Gumboy]

You might be overhealing that fight with seven, all the hps is pretty low for heroic Maidens.


Going oom when no damage is really going out is a concern though, they should be conserving for times mana expenditure is needed, using small heals, holy light/healingwave/ things of that nature.

[Deleted]

In general, HPS is a pretty dumb metric. In certain situations (think Butcher) where a fight is short with sustained heavy damage, it's easier to define hps requirements and apply them directly to the fight. Maidens is a terrible fight to do that on. If everyone does the mechanics, there's next to nothing to heal for the first 10 minutes. So either you heal your balls off for no reason and have pretty hps or you play conservatively for a while and then go ham at the end when it matters and have ugly numbers.

All that aside, your shaman does appear to be lagging behind theirs slightly, with a sample size of 2 fights I could find. If that's the only reason they don't want to merge, I'd rethink whether you really want to merge with them. They have a shaman with big numbers who could easily work with yours to help make equally big numbers if there are truly performance issues and not just meter cheesing. Maidens isn't about raw healing output, it's about doing the mechanics and organizing raid CDs during the final burn. No reason the group in that log couldn't have downed it.

We are pretty desperate for a merge right now, since recruiting here is hell. And when i asked our shaman what happened there, she said there were nothing to heal. It just surprised me how hostile theyre healers were to ours, while everyone else were friendly and happy for the merge

[bmjclark]

Considering there's almost no damage going out for the first ~10 mins of iron maidens it's not really fair to just look at hps. If you look at the last 3 mins of the fight (where the real fight actually starts on heroic maidens :P) the hps of all your healers is much closer. Your shaman is actually in 3rd for hps in the last 3 minutes on your longest attempt.

[Sarcon]

HPS is just something healers with big egos use to flex their e-peen.

[Teramelle]

We are pretty desperate for a merge right now, since recruiting here is hell. And when i asked our shaman what happened there, she said there were nothing to heal. It just surprised me how hostile theyre healers were to ours, while everyone else were friendly and happy for the merge

It was Iron Maidens, yes? Well, of course there was nothing to heal. Seven healers, two of which are disc priests, and another two are resto druids, on a fight where there is very little healing for a huge majority of it, which can and will be quickly covered by other healers. As expected, their healing spiked around what I expect to be the time of the enrage phase, where there is actually stuff to heal that won't immediately be sniped by others.

If you have logs of other fights featuring that feature her, it'd be interesting to see those - I feel like this "underperformance" can largely be attributed to both the nature of the fight itself and the healing set up you have, which rewards the quickest healers to the mark, and makes the ones with slightly slower reaction times look really bad. Especially because you're comparing a healer who has - iirc - a lot of cast-time based spells, to a few healers that are instant-cast based. But, looking at it, she has fairly high overheal, which implies she was trying, but other healers were reaching the injured first.

However, looking further into the fight, if I'm correct, the "problem" shaman's healing actually increase dramatically at the time of enrage, as it is expected to. The only reason her healing seems so low is perhaps because meters are accounting for the entire fight, wherein healing is averaged out. As there is little to heal for a huge chunk of the fight, even if you do huge healing in the enrage, you're never going to catch up on the "overall" meters with the healers that were healing excessively where it wasn't necessarily needed. (Assuming you executed tactics well, that is. I'm a bit too tired to sift through the logs and check, but theoretically this statement should ring true, as it would on any fight.)

But it's hard to determine on a fight like Iron Maidens, really. At least, in my opinion.

[Detritivores]

We are pretty desperate for a merge right now, since recruiting here is hell. And when i asked our shaman what happened there, she said there were nothing to heal. It just surprised me how hostile theyre healers were to ours, while everyone else were friendly and happy for the merge

:/ I feel you on the desperation. Mergers are very tricky. I hope for your sake they can tone it down and learn to work together. I would as a rule though try to refrain from just looking at hps and pointing fingers. That's really toxic. Actually looking at how the person is playing their class is much more helpful. Can always post logs to shaman forums if none of you are comfortable analyzing them.

Edit: Agree with the above posts that maidens is a terrible fight to make any judgement on, esp with your setup. Also, looking at the healing in the last 3 minutes or so is more helpful.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

Hps without context is possibly THE worst way to judge Healers.

[Wesco]

If you wanna compare hps on maiden, look from where you hero till wipe.
pre 20% on maiden can be solo healed by 2 healer in a 30 man raid. After 20% you can pretty much look who did heal most.

Also on maiden is up to the tank who tank Marak, if he use defensive cd poorly. raid gonna take more aoe dmg.
So basicly you can blame tanks too then qq


Here is logs from 20% till wipe
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...21&end=3131286


If your officer can´t figure out who is doing best and what, better not even go mythic.

[Pascal]

First of all, watch out for that attitude if you're going to try merge with a guild. I'd call any kind of "us v. them" reaction an immediate reason to say no to the merger, stuff like that won't just fix itself, especially if it's such an immediate gut reaction. You'll be looking at that kind of attitude and reaction the entire time.

Second of all, it doesn't take a genius to realize how unreliable it is to judge healers based on their HPS alone. While DPS can hit the mobs regardless of how many other people are hitting them, if some specific healers are getting key heals in more frequently, other healers won't appear to be doing as much because you can't heal something that isn't injured.

A decent way to judge if your low HPS healers are actually bad is to sit your higher HPS healers and see how successful you are with the low HPS healers. This will show if the higher HPS healers are just wack-a-mole'ing better leaving the low HPS healers with nothing to heal, or if the low HPS healers really are holding you back. The only downside is this method requires multiple raid runs/lockouts and patience. Sounds like you basically did that, though, so yeah.

[Deleted]

It was Iron Maidens, yes? Well, of course there was nothing to heal. Seven healers, two of which are disc priests, and another two are resto druids, on a fight where there is very little healing for a huge majority of it, which can and will be quickly covered by other healers. As expected, their healing spiked around what I expect to be the time of the enrage phase, where there is actually stuff to heal that won't immediately be sniped by others.

If you have logs of other fights featuring that feature her, it'd be interesting to see those - I feel like this "underperformance" can largely be attributed to both the nature of the fight itself and the healing set up you have, which rewards the quickest healers to the mark, and makes the ones with slightly slower reaction times look really bad. She has fairly high overheal, which implies she was trying, but other healers were reaching the injured first.

Looking further into the fight, if I'm correct, the "problem" shaman's healing actually increase dramatically at the time of enrage, as it is expected to. The only reason their healing seems so low is perhaps because meters are accounting for the entire fight, wherein healing is averaged out. As there is little to heal for a huge chunk of the fight, even if you do huge healing in the enrage, you're never going to catch up with the healers that were healing excessively where it wasn't necessarily needed. (Assuming you executed tactics well, that is. I'm a bit too tired to sift through the logs and check, but... theoretically.)

But it's hard to determine on a fight like Iron Maidens, really. At least, in my opinion.

I do, its from the same night:
Darmac:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ling&source=26
Thogar:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ling&source=26
Oregorger:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ling&source=17
Gruul:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ht=7&source=17
Also found a log from where we were still progressing on h Kromog:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...4&type=healing

- - - Updated - - -

Please take into account that shes also pretty undergeared and has a 647 trinket(bad luck..)

[Deleted]

If you are consistantly wiping due to only lack of heals then you can use hps as a starting point to locating the issue, else it's a bad tool to measure things on :P

[Rusken]

HPS is probably the worst way to judge healers, just look at the kill, the blood DK topped healing meters because HPS is such a ridiculous way to look at healers. I can only comment on Shamans since that's the only healer I know.

First wipe: The higher HPS Shaman (Your bloody Russian names ) is pretty much only using Chain Heal and Healing Surge, both expensive powerful heals. He's completely ignoring Healing Wave for some reason, 42 surge casts with 5 wave casts is pathetic. The lower HPS Shaman is far more mana efficient but she's not using all her abilities, no Spirit Link usages, no Unleash Life casts, Riptide uptime is lower than it should be (72% while the other Shaman had ~95%) and Healing Rain is kiinda useless on Maidens as there's very little damage on the group while they're stacked, and when the damage is coming people are often too spread out for it to do much, that being said it's not draining mana at all but some of those casts are better used on Healing Wave or Chain Heal.

Second and third wipe: Higher HPS Shaman actually healed, looks like yours died early or just AFK'd most of the fight, didn't do much of anything besides Chain Heal. No CD usages, low Riptide uptime, neglecting Healing Wave/Surge too much.

Also looks like your Shaman doesn't have her 2set as she's not getting the extra Chain Heals, that makes a huge difference.

It's also a terrible healing comp for Shamans to do well in, 2 discs and 2 druids negate a huge amount of our heals due to our mastery making us stronger when our targets are at lower health. Their Shaman is padding a lot and has terrible spell choices, it's no wonder they're ooming early.

[Gumboy]

If you wanna compare hps on maiden, look from where you hero till wipe.
pre 20% on maiden can be solo healed by 2 healer in a 30 man raid. After 20% you can pretty much look who did heal most.

Also on maiden is up to the tank who tank Marak, if he use defensive cd poorly. raid gonna take more aoe dmg.
So basicly you can blame tanks too then qq


Here is logs from 20% till wipe
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...21&end=3131286


If your officer can´t figure out who is doing best and what, better not even go mythic.

That short of a time can be rigged by something like healing tide though :P