Raid Rx: How to read healing parses (or meters)
by Matt Low 
Jun 18th 2009 at 1:00PM
"Are healing meters supposed to measure your ability or their inability (to stand in fires)?"
That's a great quote I saw on the Plus Heal forums. I wish I bookmarked the thread. I can't remember who said it.
Reading meters is not for the faint hearted. There is often an overwhelming amount of information that needs to be dissected. Unlike damage meters, healing meters are extremely subjective to various fights.
Things you need to know first
In order to critique a player's performance, there are a number of things that you have to be aware of.
- Boss mechanics. A huge no brainer. Know what the boss does. Know the abilities. Know the damage output of all of them. Know the gimmicks. Know what can trip up, kill, or neutralize healers. Every parse is going to be subjective.
- Classes. Know the classes that comprise your healing team. Have an intimate understanding of their spells and capabilities.
- Assignments. Who is healing who? What type of damage is their healing assignment expected to take? Have an extremely clear idea of which healer is doing what at any given moment.
- Cause of death. When troubleshooting deaths, you must know what effect killed them. I rely on Recount or Expiration to echo the last few seconds in a player's life span. Using that information, I can then figure out what went wrong and what can be done to resolve it. More on this later.
- DPS. Damage per second.
- HPS. The opposite of the above which is heals per second.
World of Logs
Let's check out World of Logs. Out of the various parsing sites and tools in existence, this one is by far my personal favourite. Be sure to create an account with them first. If you're interested, you can even create a guild with them as well (but remember to generate a beta key).
By raid
Here's the dashboard. This is where you go for typical "at-a-glance" type information. When you're checking out healers, the graph you want to key in on is the one on the right side. This shows how much damage the entire raid has taken throughout the night followed by how much effective healing was done. The line below it shows overall raw healing (including overhealing). Basically, the closer your healing done is to damage taken, the effective your healing corps is. You want the green line to sort of overlap the red as much as possible. It's going to be difficult to do especially on progression nights but it's a great overall thermometer for the raid.
Mousing over the Dashboard above expands the parser into other details. Of particular note here is the ones that lead to Healing Done and Deaths Overview.
Let's start with Healing Done and check out the entire raid.
This section shows every player and every ability that a player used to heal. It will include attacks and abilities like a Ret Paladins Judgment of Light or a Death Knights Death Strike. This section will largely be dominated by your healers (as should be the case).
The graph
Here you can see a visual representation of healing done by players. Mouse over at various points at the graph, and it will list significant events throughout the parse (represented by different colored lines). The large spikes were heals done during bosses or boss attempts. You can tell a break was called at the 19:30 mark due to the lack of activity by everyone involved.
Check boxes on the side of player names below the graph allow you to see who you examine. The columns are self explanatory. The amounts show the overall healing done and the percentages represent how much healing that player contributed to the entire raid. Yes it says DPS on the side. That actually means HPS (Heals per second).
Remember the HPS takes into account everything done throughout the night.
Let's take a micro look at a player. I'll use mine.
By player
Clicking the player shows all the individual particulars. At the top, you'll see some tabs like graphs, damage, healing and so forth. Healing by spell is the one you want to look at it. So on the left, you'll see the break down of spells. Healing done is how much your spells healed (or prevented in the case of Power Word: Shield). Hits is the number of spells that connect, the average they healed for followed by the effective total. Crits and Direct Heals are self explanatory.
Yeah, that's an obscene number of shields.
On the next page, I'll highlight the process that I run through when doing a comparison between two players of the same class and use myself as a guinea pig.
Filed under: Raiding, Raid Rx (Raid Healing)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Gorelord Jun 18th 2009 1:04PM
"Unlike damage meters, healing meters are extremely subjective to various fights."
not correct...damage meters are subject to many fights also....
danny.stout723 Jun 18th 2009 1:13PM
But to a much lesser degree. Those situations are all based on gimmicks specific to an encounter. Even when doing Patchwerk, the most DPS neutral boss in end game, the healing meters are still subject to many other variables.
Terethall Jun 18th 2009 1:15PM
But generally, it is much easier to read damage meters and understand them. For instance, damage meters for Loatheb are skewed in favor of classes that benefit from crits. But that's relatively easy to figure out as opposed to the complexities of Disc priests vs. Resto druids and the complexities and disparities of the amount of healing that's going to be done by MT heals and raid heals.
Candina@WH Jun 18th 2009 1:17PM
/agree
Example:
Thaddius is not a mearsure of your ability, it is a measure of the encounter.
It CAN be a measure of your relative ability, but the RNG of polarity shift effects different classes differently. (I.e. Hunter who has to get out of a certain zone before resuming DPS, vs. a melee class that can do DPS while running through(with shorter transit time), vs. a ranged DPS with lots of instants). And the RNG factor itself comes into play. My hunter on thad changed polarity EVERY time one fight. Guess who's DPS sucked?
Gorelord Jun 18th 2009 1:23PM
I agree that heal meters are more difficult to draw conclusions from in general, but my point is that damage meters are also 'extremely subjective to various fights', depending on what responsibility is given to each class/player.
t0xic Jun 18th 2009 1:21PM
Matticus mentioned "effective" healing. I get this line from other (non-paladin) healers all the time. I over-heal a ton between glyph of holy light and other healers with various AoE heals topping my tanks off. I have no HoT. My heal lands for 17k and if the tank only needs 5k, I overheal. My understanding is that a HoT will stop ticking when the player is topped off. Zero overheal. It seems unfair to look at healing performance (at least with respect to paladin healing) when talking about "effective" healing. I judge my performance by whether the tanks are still standing and the boss is down. I always top the meters on over-healing, but I have enormous amounts of mana left at the end of the fight. I only see over-healing as a problem (especially on progression fights) when you go OOM. That's my opinion, but it isn't always shared by others.
Clevins Jun 18th 2009 1:28PM
/agree
And this is where a RL needs to know other classes. You can't judge a pally same as a priest. I think meters are more important where the boss *isn't* dying, i.e. where you're at the edge of what the raid can do. Using them to stroke oneself or berate others on encounters where the boss died is asinine.
Terethall Jun 18th 2009 1:31PM
Absolutely. I never look down on a raider in my guild for overhealing unless there's an issue with mana. Frankly, I don't care if you overheal for 16,999 on those 17k crits until you go oom and the tank goes down. Unless, of course, you're on the raid as a whole in addition to the tank. If that's the case, you gotta make sure no one in the raid is suffering.
nbcaffeine Jun 18th 2009 1:36PM
If I understand correctly, and I hope I do as a resto druid, that a hot that ticks while the target is full on health will be complete overheal, but those complete overheals are not recorded. With the number of targets I cast hots on, I know my overheal % is higher than what recount reports, but I have no idea how to figure out what it is.
I think the best thing for super picky RLs to evaluate performance would be the ability to do demo type recording (like in the quake2 days) and be able to replay at any speed from any point of view. Doubt something like that would be in the cards though.
Blacksword Jun 18th 2009 2:09PM
Well my guild doesn't really care about overhealing unless there is a major mana problem in a fight, which as a Holy Paly, I almost never have. in KT for example, even with being hit with three mana detonations, i still out lasted the tree druid and holy priest.
mindflayer Jun 18th 2009 1:23PM
http://hordedefenseleague.org/blog/2009/02/09/how-to-read-raid-meters-part-1/
http://hordedefenseleague.org/blog/2009/02/09/how-to-read-raid-meters-part-2/
For the DPS side of the equation.
Janaa Jun 18th 2009 5:26PM
One of the biggest frustrations I'm having as a Paladin with heal meters is my heals being stomped. Constantly. While this may not be as big an issue in srs-bsns guilds where people trust the MT healer to know what he's doing, in all of my guild runs and pugs, the other healers are simply blindly clicking whatever grid frame needs heals.
On any serious fight where the tank is taking a lot of damage, I'm spamming holy light the whole time. Now if any of the other healing classes (which all have shorter heal casts) clicks the MT grid frame, their heal is going off before mine - voila, 90% of that holy light is overheal. Okay, hit Holy Light again, tank takes damage, priest heals, HoL goes off - 95% overheal.
Why can't they just HoT and be done with it? They don't think my heal is coming? All I'm doing is healing the tank. I have 89% mana. It's coming. This leads to a situation where the only heals of mine that don't appear as overheal are Holy Shocks.. so then it looks like all the healing you're doing is Holy Shock'ing, and you're screamed down for your uber-nubness. (Tank takes a heavy hit, Holy Shock to restore half their health - 0% overheal, start casting Holy Light, the priest/druid/shamans/off-heal pally heal goes off restoring tank to full health, half a second later Holy Light finishes casting - 100% overheal. GG)
I'm all for FoL spamming, and on fights where the tank only takes moderate damage and I'll I have to do is FoL spam, then with the short heal time, meters actually show the pally doing something useful. However, as long as other classes can stomp all over Holy Light (the big heal that takes care of the big damage that pallys are famous for) and this can't be reflected in meters - I'll have trouble getting represented.
At least you priests have mods which record mitigation/bubbles so you can spew out "but I mitigated 600,000 damage on that fight" and everyone just nods their head dumbly "oh yeah ok". But give me a mod where I can show "but the scrub priest kept throwing short-cast heals on the tank before my Holy Lights went off." HoTs are fine. Anything else, up against a pally, is rude.
Disclaimer: As I said initially, I don't expect this is a problem in serious guilds. I never had this trouble in my srs BC-endgame guild. Since dropping the hardcore guild (due to personal commitments) and going with newbies and pugs a lot more, heal-stomping has become a massive problem for my pally, esp. with the lack of HoTs.
Addendum:
I should clarify, my point in this is not that pally heals should be changed, or anything like that. I'm just saying that frequently meters, and WWS, are completely useless in reflection of Paladin healing and while they're great for measuring the ability of a player to liberally apply HoTs and bubbles, they provide very little reflection of the "ability" of a Paladin healer, since their ability is rarely ever being tested.
Many Paladins will be able to attest to the fact that, with the number of HoTs, group-heals and grid-clickers flying around, we can easily go a 25-man boss with our sole job being targetting the tank and filling up the OverHeals meter.
Unfortunately, the solution for Paladins isn't simply to include OverHeals as their heals, or we'd just sit their overhealing intentionally - wasting mana. I don't really know what the solution is. Any ideas?
In b4 "l2p nub".
t0xic Jun 19th 2009 11:11AM
I have very similar experiences in the guild I'm in. I usually run with a druid/druid or druid/shammy. The RL recognizes pallies for superior MT/OT heals, and that's where I am generally assigned. The second the tank pulls the healing assignments go out the window. Druid is spamming everything he has on the entire raid, and generally I have overheal as high as 70% on some fights.
I agree that it's frustrating topping out the overheal meters. My numbers would be a lot better if I didn't have other people sniping heals on the tanks. The sad truth is if they want to do that, they can. The only real way I can get any "effective" heals in is to use FOL on the raid. Sometimes I beat the druid, but most of the time I don't.
I actually considered not healing at all to see if the druid would even notice. Maybe he just needs a mana nerf to keep him on his assignment =)
I've considered talking to the GM about the issue. If this druid can heal the entire raid all by himself they should just have me switch to my offspec and dps.
Monkey Jun 19th 2009 2:37PM
Disclaimer: I'm in a mostly casual raiding guild -- we expect progression but don't have the attitudes of most of the serious raiding guilds. This is how I like it, so most of what I'm saying is from that perspective.
As a former holy paladin that rerolled to a resto shaman, I understand your pain. However, not all other healers are healing the tank out from under you on purpose. As an example, our guild is pretty heavy on melee right now. This leaves me throwing a lot of chain heals near the tank and chain heal automatically targets the nearest people that need the most healing. It's going to hit the tank and there's nothing I can do about it. I can't stop healing the melee when I'm assigned to the group. On the other hand, we never hold overhealing against anyone unless they've got mana problems, and even then it's a question of how we can help them rather than displeasure or the like. While healing meters can be a great way for individuals to see what other people are doing and adjust where they are and the strategies they use, our ultimate tests are 1) "Did the boss die?" and 2) "Did the raid die?" If we down a boss with minimal deaths (minimal is usually dependent on whether something's progression or farm content) then everyone is probably doing their jobs and we're happy.
I don't generally PUG and I try to avoid it for raids whenever possible. I don't trust total strangers to stick to healing assignments or heal effectively unless I can see them doing it first. That's probably a lot of what you're running in to when you're in the PUGs.
On a happier note, they're actually making Beacon of Light count overhealing now, so this should at least be generally less frustrating for you. It's almost enough to get me to try healing on my paladin again. Almost. But having *my* holy lights stomped all of the time got me moved from the main tank to group because I wasn't performing well, which then tanked my performance farther because all I could do was play whack-a-mole against smart heals, which made it tank even more... I'm much happier on the shaman now. (Our healing lead also has a much better idea of paladin healing mechanics now and is much less likely to stick a pally on group healing, but I still like the shaman more.)
t0xic Jun 19th 2009 4:52PM
I understand that other healers will inevitably hit the tanks with AoE heals. Even the ret pallies heal the tanks to some extent. I'm speaking more about direct healing. When you have recount up and you're hovering over "healing taken" on the main tank and the pally has ~50% and the druid has ~45% you have to scratch your head about whether he's following his "raid healing" assignment. The same recount had me at 72% overheal.
Alderkin Jun 19th 2009 10:28AM
"Why can't they just HoT and be done with it? They don't think my heal is coming? All I'm doing is healing the tank."
"I'm all for FoL spamming, and on fights where the tank only takes moderate damage and I'll I have to do is FoL spam, then with the short heal time, meters actually show the pally doing something useful."
"Since dropping the hardcore guild (due to personal commitments) and going with newbies and pugs a lot more, heal-stomping has become a massive problem for my pally, esp. with the lack of HoTs."
Expecting strict adherence to healing assignments might be a little too much to ask from your average PUG. As a healer I've often needed to adapt my style to mesh with the group I raid with, either in-guild or PUGged. If the tank can stay up with an assigned MT healer dropping big heals on them, that's fine. If the tank can stay up with all of the healers splitting their quicker heals between the tank and the rest of the raid, that's also fine. Typically the less organized the raid is, the more likely you'll see the latter situation with the healers.
It shouldn't be that much of a problem, really. The newbs are usually too busy gloating over their damage meters to look at the healing ones. And even if they do, you still shouldn't be hearing any complaints. If they aren't dead, they have no reason to complain. If they are dead, they have no ability to complain. :)