Originally Posted by
harky
Recently there has been a large push from healers to ignore healing meters. The thought is that because encounters and damage taken is dynamic it's a better measure of skill to be able to save a life than it is to top a meter. This ideal is pushed along by several scenarios in which specific healers can directly prevent a death. A Holy Priest with Body and Soul can give a speed boost to players and allow them to escape otherwise inescapable damage. A Discipline Priest on the other hand can apply Power Word: Shield in anticipation of damage and reduce spikes that would be fatal otherwise. However, these individual scenarios do not typically outweigh the overall nature of a fight. Ultimately promoting the idea that meters aren't of consequence hurts the healing community and can lead to dangerous situations for your raids.
The kind of thinking that encourages the ignorance to meters and other parsing sources has come up frequently in the past since the first damage meters began to pop up. At some point most of you have been involved in some form of drama regarding meters for DPS. Some guilds even forbid the posting of meters. The main objection is that the meters themselves cause drama, but this is completely counter productive. The solution to these types of disputes should never be to limit information, either by dismissing meters, or disallowing them entirely. They should always be resolved by expanding the information so that the situation can be fully understood.
In the cast of damage meters the best way to do this would be an analysis of raid composition and role assignment. If people are missing key raid buffs, or they've been assigned to do something their class doesn't perform optimally then to some extent user error can be ruled out. Furthermore a subject may actually be doing very well in the overall encounter despite showing up low on meters. A prime example of this is Anub'arak. During phase two your DPS time is highly variable due to being focused, or being able to reach scarabs. So while you may show as being last on DPS you may in fact by near the top on the portions of the fight that do matter. The same concept can be applied to healers, but only if we accept that meters do matter.
The 'saving lives' argument is flawed. When determining at what healer legitimately saved the most lives the answer is simple. Look at the incoming heals on the tanks and find who healed them the most. Those individuals are the healers who saved the most lives in almost all encounters. Take the tank in questions health and divide the incoming heals from a particular healer by that amount, then multiply by 10, or 25 depending on raid size. They most likely saved that many lives over the course of a fight, because if that tank died then the raid would have wiped entirely. You can subtract 10/25 for each Rebirth, any Soul Stones and any procs from Guardian Spirit, but the limited nature compared to the overwhelming healing won't make a large difference.
Now compare to raid healers who can be determined in a similar way by looking at individual lives saved by healing. Looking at the players healed individually and assigning value to their life may seem odd, but it's also quite realistic. If an encounter requires your current healer count then each healer is worth 10/25. If and only if you're hitting enrage timers, or other DPS race situations then you can assign DPS value at 10/25 as well. Ultimately what this all implies is that healing meters give a larger overall picture than those wishing to ignore meters understand, or admit.
Furthermore the promoting of the mentality that meters don't matter misses the mark even more when individual stats are looked into. Most modern meters show not only how much you healed, but how much you overhealed, who you healed, what you healed them with, what incoming damage they took, how players died and so on. Encouraging healers to ignore meters, rather than to fully analyze them is going to hurt new players and hurt raid progress. Being very high, or very low on meters is a good litmus test for who is doing well, or doing poorly.
Some of the debate stems from the belief that some heals are more important than others. For instance a healer may be high on a meter, but ignored something like Frozen Blows, or didn't heal a Legion Flame target. Those allow a healer who didn't properly know the encounter to slip through. However this can easily be seen when looking at who healed the Legion Flame target, or who healed the PC target, or what group died during Frozen Blows. This does not mean that meters don't matter. Most meters can show deaths now, which can be used to show those priority targets deaths and see who was healing them and compare to who was supposed to be healing them.
The other argument revolves around removing raid stress. The idea is that somethings is less 'scary' when done a certain way. The flaw here is that something being scary doesn't imply that it's actually harder. There are cases where some utility can be used to prevent unhealable situations. Body and Soul is one of the prime examples, particularly on Anub'arak hard mode. What should be kept in mind however is how many lives are saved by such action. While preventing someone from taking a flame patch on beasts might be nice, it's also not an important event. There are a lot of situations like this where you reduce incoming damage instead of healing, but this must be considered along with the impact healing would have had. Use the flame patch example and look at how much damage was prevented by pre-shielding, or other intervention. Now check the throughput of your raid healers and look at the actual impact of trying to avoid damage in those cases. Often times the easier solution is going to be to heal through the damage rather than to avoid it.
That leads back to the initial point: What healers need to do is not ignore meters, but to accept them. Accept that raw healing is in fact both a measure of power and skill. Those on the top of meters in general are the best healers at reacting to and dealing with incoming damage. Instead of foolishly denying this in arguments you should provide further information. If a healer does not perform their job, or you are performing better than meters imply then supply adequate defense. Denying evidence is going to hurt you and your raid. Instead give context to that information, or provide additional evidence. Meters provide much more analysis and data than simply who healed the most and if you're trying to convince someone of your worth compared to someone who is healing for much more then you should use that evidence yourself. Ignorance is never the proper solution to these types of problems.
Healing meters are not something that can be stacked and someone who produced a massive amount of healing most likely is very skilled. Ignoring that is disrespectful to your fellow healers and will ultimately cause damage to any argument you attempt to make. If you are faced with an argument involving meters and you disagree with what they may imply then you need to find evidence that supports it. If a healer producing double your healing was also not healing the right targets, or standing in flames, then find that information. Find who they healed to produce those numbers, find their damage taken, or find something else that proves the point. Dismissing meters is nothing short of ignorance and that has been the case since meters first came out. Leaders and other players who do understand their merit will take the dismissal of those meters as covering for incompetence, or lack of knowledge. Meters do matter, they're just not all that matters.