Illuminated Healing -- Confused

[Jalient]

ALCON,

Another Illuminated Healing question, but this time it's actually frustrating me.

Last night in our attempts on Heroic Spirit Kings (10M) our raid leader stated that my Illuminated Healing was "cancelling" out his healing and that is why he isn't healing as much as me. He is a Resto Shammy. Typically, I do not care who is healing for more as long as the boss goes down or we're making progress, but I want to make sure I'm not causing any issues with the other healers ability to perform.

To put things into context, I typically start out the fight with 5 hp, and with a decent shield on everyone due to spamming HR and drinking until we pull. From that point, I use HS on cd (if possible) and use Crusader strike/HR to build HP to keep up EF on as many players as possible. While also rotating through CDs and using Light's Hammer at the start to assist with some of the heals on the move.

I can't post links yet (sorry! ), so if you search for zafirah (lowercase version) on WOL, you'll be able to see our attempts from last night.

I guess my question is, am I doing something wrong? I'm sure I'm doing many things wrong when it comes to the rotation, but specifically, am I doing something to indeed "cancel" the other healer's heals.

I appreciate the look.

God Bless
Jal (US - Alexstrasza)

[thegoodrogue]

Healing and numbers really don't matter as long as you kill the boss. The phenomenom your raid leader is seeing is that he for instance casts healing rain, healing rain is supposed to heal for 15k, and meters anymore really don't include overheal on the HPS section of your meter, the hit (damage)for instance is 20k and your Mastery Shield on the player is for 15k. The damage will be 20k, however your shield "cancels", or absorbs 15k of the 20k hit, he only can "heal" for 5k. If this keeps happening you will be doing 3 times his "healing" on your meters. That is why absorbs are so much more "powerful" as the damage they absorb doesn't "cut" into the players health pool.

You are not doing anything wrong, he is ~probably~ not doing anything wrong, it's just the way absorbs work, it all works out in the end for pretty comparable numbers in most situations for both players, I am not looking at logs, but I'm pretty sure you should be a bit ahead of him, but not by a lot on a long attempt. He has HoTs, you have small shields, different toolkits. The fight requires a lot of coordination from DPS and can turn from sketchy to a wipe in no time at all.

[Simulacrum]

You can't "cancel" out other people's heals in any meaningful sense, unless you're a disc priest. Even if you were somehow doing that, all it would mean is that you need to bring less healers; if you're healing something before they need to heal it, then - ipso facto - they don't need to heal it. You can 'snipe' other people's heals in some cases (they've applied a hot or started casting a slow heal, but you hit the target with a fast heal before their heal can do anything, making them waste mana, and making you look like a dick), but that's only really a problem if this results in the guy getting sniped wasting mana and people dying later in the fight because of the inefficient healing (even if it is a little in bad taste).

Unless your healing is reckless in the sense that you're healing too much at certain points in a fight, and too little in others because of your inefficiencies at other times, then it doesn't matter if you're making other healers be inefficient with their heals - and even then, that wouldn't be a problem if the other healers were aware of this and compensated for it by not healing when you heal. For example, if my raid (10) is taking a lot of damage from something, and I know my resto shaman is dropping tide, I won't go balls-to-the-wall spamming heals on the raid, because I know his tide, along with both of us just healing normally, will deal with it.

What your RL's whine breaks down to is that you're bringing 1 healer too much, and apparently he can't heal as fast as you (which is not your fault, btw, even if some apologetics will say otherwise; it's the RL's fault for deciding to 3-heal a fight that should be 2-healed).

[edit] shit, I though you mean will, for some reason, not spirit kings. Personally I would say heroic spirit kings only really needs 1 healer, but that might just be me. Anyway, yeah, resto shamans are extremely bad healers in situations where you're bringing too many healers (as is the case when 2-healing spirit kings, a fight that can be 1-healed), while holy paladins increase in relative apparent strength in that situation, as it is indeed possible to "cancel out" his heals on that fight, since nobody takes damage for long periods of time, and mostly in bursts, allowing us to stack shields on them pre-emptively, then do the same for the next one.

Anyway, I guess you can appease him by just... playing worse, so that he'll have more to heal? His poor preformance on the meters isn't really something you can do anything about.

Although at the end of the day the meters don't really matter on this fight, since it's not a fight that challenges us healers in any way, or gives any useful information about how well anyone is doing (unless you look at very short spans of time, rather than the entire fight; about the only time I'd say the healing really matters is during one or two of the transitions, and maybe during the reflect debuff if your dps is crazy). I would tell him not to worry about it.

[Kaeth]

It's typical that even the best shaman healers begin to fall behind discipline priests and holy paladins due to absorb mechanics. Where they (resto shamans) shine -- other than stacked, Dragon Soul style healing fights -- is at bringing players back quickly from the brink of death with the resto mastery. Yes, your absorbs will have a negative impact on his throughput (i.e. healing numbers) while things are going smoothly, but he has the 300k burst heals for when everything goes to crap.

Yes, absorbs skew meters. But healing meters can be misleading.

And yes, you might have too many healers healing this fight.

[Jalient]

Thanks for the input everyone.

Great points to consider. I've tried advocating for less healers, but for some reason it is just shot down each week. Also, I thought thats how the mechanic works with absorbs, so I appreciate the confirmation.

As for the meters, aye, they are poop at this point, but most that I know keep pointing to them as a means for success, which doesn't equate to success in my brain. I'll keep pressing forth and encouraging the others to do the same!

As for healing/efficiency, there are very few fights where I've been oom before the end, so I think we're good to go there. I'll be sure to watch what he does more often to ensure I'm not "sniping" his totams or other cds.

Thanks again!

[Edc]

Well obviously IH is going to push the other healers' numbers down, the damage people takes has to be healed only once and if you run high absorb shields on people that damage is going to be "healed" the moment it's taken, I suppose that can feel a bit unfair to the others but in the end the only thing that really matters is the synergy between your healers, if stuff dies your healing team is fine.

[Jalient]

Again, thanks all for the comments! Np Cattlehunter, I appreciate the thought nevertheless!

To shift the focus a little, does anyone have any firm data that shows whether or not 2 pallies IH stack? We tried running 2 pallies for a raid (got H Gara down) but everyone complained the other pally wasn't healing as much (again meter, /sigh) so she rolled back to her spriest. Is it just random which shield goes first?

[Simulacrum]

They stack, but I don't know which one goes first. I assume it's either the strongest shield first, or the one with the lowest duration left, either of those make sense to me, but I have no idea.

[Fermion]

Yeah it's kinda a "shame" situations like this exist and there's nothing you can do (bar the aforementioned "you've probably too many healers" argument). We have the same issue in our raid group (minus any whining). It would be great if rather than "fight each other" healer masteries complemented each other. That's probably not feasible but it is somewhat counter productive that as the effectiveness of our (and disc priest) mastery increases it so often "reduces" the effectiveness of a shamans mastery.

[Kurzior]

They stack, but I don't know which one goes first. I assume it's either the strongest shield first, or the one with the lowest duration left, either of those make sense to me, but I have no idea.

There's a hidden priority system for which absorb spell goes first. For example, power word: shield is always consumed before a dk's blood shield, regardless of the relative size of either one. Basically when an attack hits you, it looks to see if you have absorb shields, if you do, it will look at the list and find the spell ID with the highest priority. If that shield is fully consumed, the remaining damage goes to the next shield in the list and so on until the damage is entirely absorbed or the remaining damage is done to your health bar.


OP: It sounds harsh, but if your raid leader is complaining about you because you're playing your class well, that's his problem. He can either suck it up and deal with it or play his own class better. Yes, Illuminated healing gives us a bit of an advantage over healers that do not have absorb mechanics. Healing is basically first-come-first-serve and if you have an absorb shield already on the target .... well, you were there first. It's how holy pallies work. It's how disc priests have worked for years.

The only exception to this would be if you are neglecting your healing responsibilities in order to boost your meter numbers to the detriment of the group. Meaning if you have a specific healing assigment (such as being the primary tank healer), and you are deliberately healing other targets first to boost your numbers, then yes, you should probably not do that because eventually, someone's going to expect you to cover the damage on a specific raid member, you won't, and someone will die.

Bottom line, if you aren't already using healing assignments, maybe consider it. Personally I'm not a fan because that restricts us more than it helps in most cases. Otherwise, if you are going with the approach of "heal people who take damage", just keep doing what you're doing. Your raid leader either has to learn how to work around that or consider going to fewer healers on appropriate fights.


Edit: as a side note, shaman mastery becomes worse as shamans themselves and their healing partners gear up, particularly in the case of disc priests and holy paladins because its easier for us to keep people near full health. If he wants to counter that problem, he should adjust his gearing to be more crit/haste based than mastery so he can do more healing when players are near-full rather than relying on them to be near-dead.

[Noradin]

For example, power word: shield is always consumed before a dk's blood shield, regardless of the relative size of either one.

Untrue, blood shield is cosumed first if it is a physical hit, otherwise it is not consumed at all. Shields against specific kinds of damage are consumed before general ones.

Anyway, what was asked was not which kind of absorb is used up first, but which one of several of the same kind, where I believe it should be shortest duration first, could just be something random or even alphabetically order of the names of the caster or something, though.