raid leading advice about priests

[Grinthe]

Hey everyone, I'm seeking some advice here about discipline. As a raid leader when I run with discipline priests I find myself not sure of how to judge wether they are doing their job or not. I understand that healing meters are not a good way to judge discipline priests especially, and that guessed absorb meters are sketchy at best.
If you, my dear priests, have any tips for myself and perhaps other raid leaders reading this, I would greatly appreciate them.

[Pitpat]

Essentially the best way to measure a disc priests effectiveness is whether or not their healing target it dying consistently. If not they win.

[Zeuq]

A tool like world of logs is helpful to give you more accurate numbers in relation to other healers, but still it's not the best way to judge a healer. Instead, judging healers is a bit more tricky because they work as a unit. Evaluate each encounter knowing the assignments and the specifics of how a Discipline Priest especially plays into the fight. If it's a fight with loads of tank damage, look to see how many casts of PWS and Penace are going on the tank. If the PWS casts are close to 15s apart on the tank, they're probably doing that part right; if they're FH spamming and not keeping Weakened Soul on the tank, they're doing it wrong. In raid heavy fights, look and see how many shields they're getting on the raid, see if people are sitting low for a while and if they got shields and such.

But really, I think Discipline Priests are best judged by the other healers because they're awesome at managing burst damage on the tank and predictable damage on the raid. If your other tank healer isn't feeling the help when the tank takes spikes, they're probably doing something wrong. If your raid healing Holy Priests and Druids are finding it difficult to get to low health targets before they die becaues they're not getting emergency shields, then they're probably doing something wrong.

Other than that, you're stuck with the more typical "Did their assignment die?" question that you have to ask of every healer. Either way, chances are your healers can tell you where a weakness is and then you can figure out if it's a healer's fault, insufficient healers, or the raid or tank messing up.

[Thetruth1400]

Essentially the best way to measure a disc priests effectiveness is whether or not their healing target it dying consistently. If not they win.

This is pretty much the only way. Give your priest something important to heal. If it stays alive, the priest is doing its job just fine. That goes for every player though. If things are dying, mobs aren't getting loose, and people are staying alive, the players are doing what they're supposed to be doing.

If you're worried someone is being carried and slacking off, you can look for a few things; At the end of a fight, are all your healers really low on mana except your one disc priest? Are people dying unnecessarily while the disc priest was supposed to be healing them? Is your disc priests effective healing extremely lower then the other healers, while also having a similar amount of over-healing done?

If you answer yes to any of those, you might have a problem.

[ohlins]

Hey everyone, I'm seeking some advice here about discipline. As a raid leader when I run with discipline priests I find myself not sure of how to judge wether they are doing their job or not. I understand that healing meters are not a good way to judge discipline priests especially, and that guessed absorb meters are sketchy at best.
If you, my dear priests, have any tips for myself and perhaps other raid leaders reading this, I would greatly appreciate them.

Healing meters are never a good way to judge someone's healing....

[Ynna]

Healing meters are never a good way to judge someone's healing....

They can be if you look at more than healing done.

[Pheromone]

Zeuq handled it really well and here is a bit more to add.

Look at what your discipline priest used to healed a large amount of damage. If a tank died because while a predictive amount of damage came in the disc priest didn't shield or wind up a heal he probably has bad reaction times or is unaware of what he should be doing in that situation. An example would be something like fusion punch getting ready to land on a tank and a disc priest putting up a renew instead of PWS.

[Helly21]

They can be if you look at more than healing done.

Exactly, I've used healing done to spot several healers who could do a better job by just looking at what spells they used the most as their effective healing. I mean, sure everyone might play differently, but there are some situations where you can spot the ones who could do a better job.

For example; I'm a resto druid, I know hotting up as many players as you can during twins is a good idea if you're supposed to raid heal. I've seen druids spam nourish to raid heal at twins.

I also had a resto druid in the guild who did most effective healing with lifebloom and then regrowth shortly after, we didnt have assigned targets but looking at who he healed the most - he was raid healing alot. Using lifebloom alot for raid healing is quite bad healing/mana, and it's a short hot aswell. If the target isnt going to take any more damage than that for the next 10+ seconds it would be far more wise to either slap in a nourish if the health lost isnt too high, otherwise you're better off with a reju. Since the reju will heal about 12k or more (depending on gear ofcourse). And a 12k heal for ~1 sec gcd while still being quite cheap is a good deal. One lifebloom would not heal that much and it's not as mana efficient, plus, if the target is going to take more damage you have a hot up for swiftmend aswell. (He didnt have glyphed regrowth either, otherwise with massive ammounts of haste I guess regrowth for raid healing with really nice spirit gear Could work, but I wouldnt want to heal with him anyways)

This is information available from healing meters. You could also look at overhealing as someone already mentioned. Overhealing with the wrong spells is a sign of a bad healer aswell.

But I wont complain on anyone in the raid as long as we down the bosses with no deaths that should have been easily avoided. But I will continue to evaluate each healer after every guild raid. So I know who I'd want to bring to progress raids. Healing meters are great for this over a long period of time.

Sorry for all the druid off topic in a priest forum, just trying to show that healing meters do matter if you look at more than the hps done.

TL;DR, Healing meters are good if you know how each class/spec Should heal for their assigned job. Which I think a raid leader should know (I know this is why you are here, so nice to see some raid leaders are trying to improve at their job)

[ohlins]

They can be if you look at more than healing done.

Indeed, they can if u know how to analize the data well.

[Grinthe]

Thank you for all of the excellent suggestions! I do in fact use healing meters to see what spells are being used according to what job the healers are doing, disc priest bubbles and such don't show up on them in particular is one of the reasons why I came asking for advice. I always try to know as much as I can about other classes so I can give intelligent assignments, or advice if someone is struggling, that is just the way I play.
This was very informative for me, thanks again everybody!

[Deleted]

Go to World of logs providing you upload your raid data. Check for buffs like renewed hope, weakened soul. if renewed hope hasnt got a 100% uptime then something is wrong. Check borrowed time effects. Check PI casts and PS casts.

[llDemonll]

run world of logs. depending how good your other healers are, disc priests should be within 5% of their healing (usually lower).

WoL shows only effective healing, it will let you know overhealing %, but wont include any value into the healing numbers. granted this isnt the only way to let you know, and disc priests can pad greatly by just spamming shield, however it will give you a general idea.

also the target assigned not dying is a good indicator.

[Worshaka]

Hey everyone, I'm seeking some advice here about discipline. As a raid leader when I run with discipline priests I find myself not sure of how to judge wether they are doing their job or not. I understand that healing meters are not a good way to judge discipline priests especially, and that guessed absorb meters are sketchy at best.
If you, my dear priests, have any tips for myself and perhaps other raid leaders reading this, I would greatly appreciate them.

It really depends on what role they are playing... most people pigeon hole them as tank healers however a lot of guilds use them as utility healers that help on tanks but do a fair amount of raid damage prevention as well, keep in mind that PW:S has no CD for a disc priest and they have the abiilty to spam it on everyone. Not to mention when they do they keep a 25% spell haste bonus which can be used in conjuction with PoH for decent raid healing utility.

I agree it's probably difficult to measure their performance but there are some addons and logs that will attempt to guestimate their absorptions and give you a true HPS figure. However you need to be careful because these are just estimates and are not necessarily accurate.

Personally you need to evaluate if your raids are being stopped due to poor healing performance or is it something else? Sometimes DPS don't help healers out terribly well by taking avoidable damage and thereby steal GCD's from healers that could be used on tanks. Do you gear your tanks first in your raids or are you always trying to do content where your tanks don't quite have the gear? Evaluating death logs and seeing what heals are landing near death is another way to understand if healers are burning through their mana like their should or are they being too conservative. In this day & age there is little excuse for not spamming heals like no tomorrow, the ability to go oom is almost non existent.

So I wouldn't think of evaluating just your disc priest, you evaluate sections of your raid and if you deem the healers not up to par you need to look at the healing group before you start singling out specific people. Afterall its not just your disc priest healing.

[harky]

The best way, in general, is to look at the balance of their cast heals. Look for how often they're using Penance (should be almost on cooldown every time), if they use Renew (bad), if they use Prayer of Healing (good on bursty AOE fights, bad otherwise), are they using shields frequently (should be minimum one every 6-8 seconds)... etc. Look up their armory and look at their haste and their build. Do they have <400 haste? Look at a parse for Greater Heal. If they cast it they may not know what they're doing. Do they have 600+ haste? Again look for Greater Heal. If they aren't using it, they may not be performing well. Do they have Divine Fury? Etc.

Look at their gems, etc. It's difficult to evaluate raid performance, but you can do the little things. If they understand the class, they're much more likely to be doing well than if they don't understand Disc. Check who they cast Power Infusion on. If it's a healing intense fight it should be on Paladins and absolutely not on themselves. Is it a DPS race? PI should be on a Mage. Are they using Pain Suppression when called on?

It's a finesse job and the biggest advise in judging it is... use finesse. You'll need to look at little things rather than big ones. That said, do not ever discount meters entirely. They say a lot about what's going on.

[Headpriest]

Hey there,

There are some addon's wich track the absorb ingame:

RecountGuessedAbsorb --> that will add an extra tab in ur recount to see Guessed absorb (not 100% relyable)

My personly favor:

Skada, u can select a tab with Absorb + healing also known as Effective healing done

This will give u a quicker way to look what 'they' are doing, instead of after the raid look on WoL

Greetings Headpriest

[Danner]

Headpriest: ...which would be fine if HPS actually meant anything. If you propose that HPS is the decisive thing that measure healer qualities, you need to reroll a druid, along with everyone else.

It's all about diversity and complementing the other healers. You cannot measure synergy.

[cruxxy]

Meters can identify bad healers. But topping the meter does not make you the best healer.

Honestly, if you are testing a healer recruit, a better assessment may be having him 2heal ToGC or maybe take him to HHoR with a group of overgeared, semi-intoxicated DPS.

[buddytonto]

Check and see how many weakened soul debuffs were up during the course of a fight. Check Inspiration/Ancestral Fortitude uptime on tanks.

These 2 things don't directly relate to them being an amazing Disc Priest, but if Inspiration/Ancestral Fort are up the majority to always on the tanks, and large amounts of Weakened soul debuffs are applied, they are probably doing OK.