The Light and How to Swing It: Healing is a zero-sum game
by Chase Christian 
Aug 28th 2011 at 6:00PM
Have you ever cut a cake at a party? Dividing a cake into portions is an example of what economists call a zero-sum game. The total amount of cake is fixed, and you can slice it how you see fit. There's only so much cake to go around, so giving someone a bigger portion means that there's less for everyone else. You can't take half of the cake for yourself without reducing the size of the other pieces. In a zero-sum game, you're sharing a limited resource with your fellow players, and one person's gain is another's loss.
Healing is a zero-sum game. Over the course of any given encounter, your raiders are only going to take so much damage. If one healer is handling 75% of the incoming damage, then there's only 25% of the incoming damage for the other healers to handle. The more HPS a healer does, the less their teammates are capable of. DPS classes work in the opposite way, where the more DPS one class does, the more DPS everyone does. Because of this unique zero-sum game that healers compete in, judging a healer's performance can be difficult.
HPS is a liar
If your raid could complete an encounter without taking any damage, you wouldn't need healers. The only reason that holy paladins and the other healers even get raid spots is that bosses happen to deal damage. All of the healing we do is a direct reaction to the damage that our raid takes. Are we fighting a boss that just smashes our tank? If so, we need to focus on single-target throughput. Are we fighting a boss that deals a ton of raid damage? If so, we need to use our AOE heals to ensure that the entire raid stays healthy. Our every cast is predicated by the boss' dealing damage in some way.
Bosses can only deal so much damage. If a particular encounter involves an entire raid being hit for 1,000 damage every second, then a 10-man group will need their healers to dole out 10,000 healing per second to counter that damage. Over the course of the fight, if there's no other incoming damage, it's impossible for our average HPS to be over 10,000. We can't heal damage that doesn't exist yet. Absorption bubbles need to be broken in order to be counted on the healing meters.
In our example fight, the raid's healers are tasked with handing out 10,000 healing per second. If we try to split that healing between three healers, we see that an even split would be 3,333 healing per second per healer. Unfortunately for us, due to differences between classes and specs, there's no way for everyone to perform the same in every situation. If you have a resto druid using their amazing AOE healing capabilities to output 7,000 healing per second, the other two healers are left to fight over the remaining 3,000 healing per second. Looking at a raid parse and seeing that a holy paladin only delivered 2,500 HPS might make it seem as if you're working with an awful paladin, but it could also be the druid's fault for being too awesome.
We're tossed into raids with other healers, and we're all competing over the same finite resource. When you're healing, you want to be as selfish as possible with HPS. We should take every possible step to take the biggest possible slice of the HPS cake.
You might think that it's counterproductive to fight over who is doing the most healing, but it's an important exercise. If every single healer is scrapping to heal up the one player who just took damage, then you're going to be giving your raid the best healing experience possible. Our goal should be to handle as much of the incoming damage as we can by ourselves and then to let the other healers pick up our leftovers. If every healer in your raid follows the same mentality, then you know that your healing roster is running at optimum efficiency.
A holy paladin who focuses on healing as much as they possibly can will be more prepared when they're faced with more difficult encounters, especially when guilds tend to favor bringing fewer healers and more DPSers to some of the game's hardest fights. We should be reacting to every type of incoming damage, whether it comes in the form of tank damage or a random raider getting blasted. We should be watching our raid frames vigilantly, ready to Holy Shock the first health bar to dip.
Depending on the encounter, you might be assigned to handle a specific task, like healing a tank. While you want to focus on doing your job, there's nothing wrong with helping other people handle their healing assignments too. If you get too focused on a specific assignment, you become inflexible. Your assignment obviously takes the priority, but there's no excuse for letting someone sit at 80% life just because someone else is assigned to heal them. Snipe that HPS for yourself with a quick heal! Beacon of Light was designed for heal sniping, and we'd be amiss if we weren't using it as such.
Proactive healing
The easiest way to sneak a piece of the HPS cake is to precast heals onto your tanks. You should be casting and cancelling heals on your tanks at all times. You start casting the heal, wait to see if they take damage, and then cancel it if they don't take any damage. If they do take damage, you're already halfway into the cast, so you simply let it finish. You just dropped a powerful Divine Light bomb onto your tank and filled their life back up before any other healer could even start their cast. If all of your healers are cast-cancelling, your tanks will never see their life dip low. Imagine how many tank deaths could be prevented if every healer were racing to get their heal in first!
Unfortunately for holy paladins, there are heals that can reach our targets before any of our spells have a chance to land. HOTs can be precast on targets before any incoming damage arrives, and they go to work healing the raid instantly. Restoration druids can monopolize such a huge chunk of the HPS cake due to their incredibly powerful HOTs, as the incoming damage is healed before we even have a shot at healing it.
AOE Healing: Naturally high HPS
Every class's AOE healing spells are designed to unleash a ton of HPS, and they're key to reaching the top of the healing meters. Holy Radiance favors fights where your raid can stack up neatly, which happens occasionally. Prayer of Healing, the priest's ultimate AOE heal, favors encounters where the incoming AOE damage comes in large bursts. Efflorescence and Healing Rain are the two best spells for handling low but steady doses of damage.
Meters aren't everything
You don't want to reach the top of the HPS meters to prove that you're better than the other healers in your raid. You want to reach the top of the HPS meters to keep yourself on your toes, as it means that you're focusing on being quick to react and that you're accurately predicting incoming damage. Being at the top of your raid's HPS meter is meaningless if the other healers aren't competing against you. Your job should be to do the most HPS you can do while also fulfilling your other assignments.
In fact, as your guild gets better at an encounter and everyone starts standing in the fire less, your HPS will actually go down. You deal the most HPS when people are taking the most damage, which means the HPS cake gets smaller as your raid group improves. For example, when comparing my guild's first Shannox kill with our most recent, we took twice as much damage on day one. Healers are needed the most when guilds are learning encounters, not once they've mastered them. If you look at a new encounter as an opportunity to challenge yourself and others to deal the most HPS you can, then you know that you're giving your all to the cause.
Healers need to be healing competitively in order to get the most out of their class. If you're just healing the bare minimum necessary to keep your assigned target alive, then you're going to be woefully underprepared when you're challenged by a difficult boss.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy helps holy paladins become the powerful healers we're destined to be. Find out just how masterful mastery healing can be, gear up with the latest gear, and learn how to PVP as a holy paladin.
Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Arrohon Aug 28th 2011 6:23PM
Incredible article as always. Another article to put on the stack of articles that are relevant for other classes/specs.
Sharlatan Aug 28th 2011 7:24PM
Tbh, I cant work out if he's trolling with this article or being serious. I really hope its trolling.
"If every single healer is scrapping to heal up the one player who just took damage, then you're going to be giving your raid the best healing experience possible."
Is probably the most BS statement I've ever read on wowinsider. when I read it I had to take a look at my calender to check I had not way overslept to April 1st. you do not want healers competing, its wasteful. you want assignments, and cooperation. yes there will be overlap, but whats the point of three healers going for the same heal and 2 being wasted. yeah sure you can cancle cast, but with latency thats not reliable. its totally counter productive.
All right, alot of this is correct, HPS is bollox, and zero-sum, usually biasses towards either tank or raid healers depending on the fight. But seriously, how can you down anything with that attitude to healing? healers need to work as a team, you are not dps, you dont need to epeen over numbers. Only one number counts, the amount of dead players at the end of the fight, the lower the better.
Diatenium Aug 28th 2011 7:47PM
What you fail to realize is that most healers, most GOOD healers when left to their wits will know how much to invest in healing knowing very well what your other healers will do to fill the gap, and that strict healing assignments are archaic and indicative of the belief that a healer is inflexible in their role.
Being a greedy healer, in the context of this article, doesn't mean spamming flash of light on whoever so much as stubs their toe, that's just being an idiot, it's never holding back.
Arrohon Aug 28th 2011 9:26PM
If you're healing the tank(s) and a dps is about to bite the dust and you can save him without maiming your performance then do you say "My job is to heal the tank not the raid. If he dies it's not my fault" or do you say "Oh God he's about to die! Holy Light! There you go!" If all the dps died resulting in a 5% wipe and you could've saved enough to kill the boss WITHOUT it meaning that the tank would die then that wipe was your fault too. Even if none of your assigned targets died before everyone else, if you could've saved enough of those that aren't your assigned targets to kill the boss without letting your targets die then the wipe is YOUR fault for zealously following your assignment. That's what he's trying to say!
Minstrel Aug 28th 2011 9:35PM
I have to agree with Sharlatan. Competing to "heal snipe" is recipe for healers potentially all overhealing a lot during low intensity stages and then not having that mana available for high intensity stages.
I think you want to be competitive with yourself and challenge your mana pool...try to wring every bit you can out of your ability and mana. That's quite different, though, than competing with your fellow healers. If several people are at 90-95% and you know your druid just cast a Wild Growth which will top them up, throwing out a Holy Radiance or Prayer of Healing just to try to "beat them to the topping off" isn't productive and amounts to little more than pushing the Wild Growth into overhealing and wasting that druid's mana for the sake of the meters.
I think the writer has the right idea in pointing out that healing is zero-sum and that the healing meters aren't necessarily a good indicator of what's going on...but his continuation that the answer is to try to muddy the waters further by gaming the meters isn't good advice. In my opinion.
Minstrel Aug 28th 2011 9:43PM
I should add that I think Chase Christian's advice would have made a lot of sense in the second half of 2010, during Wrath, when mana was effectively infinite and healers could spam any of their spells without concern of going out of mana. In such an environment, there's no downside to overhealing, so everyone throwing heals at the same target (as long as the tank isn't being neglected) is not only fine...it's optimal.
However, as far as I can tell, that's not the situation *most* healers are in right now. Maybe that will be the case in T13.
Diatenium Aug 28th 2011 10:03PM
Yeah, I'll have to Back Arrohon here, explaining the difference between an ambitious healer and snipe healing requires a fair bit more attention though.
Let's take a keen understanding of how much your core heals actually heal for, Even a Divine light Crit with a guardian equating to 100k total healing can fail to overheal a dps if he's low enough, so while you can overheal the only real way is through "overkilling" it--say, casting divine light on a target at 90% health.
And that "overkill" is snipe healing, Using abilities like divine light or flash of light to heal targets inappropriately. That healer will fail because he's wasting his mana and the mana of his peers.
An ambitious healer, however, understands how powerful his heals are, at what health to use them, and who to apply them to at what time, He's going to quickly use holy shock or a low-grade WoG to heal a target at 90%, as quickly as he possibly can, even if other healers waste mana by accidentally healing them too then it'll unlikely be much because they would have used a cheap heal themselves as well.
Say we have a dps at 20%, divine light'll bring him up to around 40-50%, now a foolish healer doesn't take into account that his compatriots are using their powerful heals on them as well, so he might chain-cast divine light until they're at full, but a skilled healer never spams unless things are desperate, they always take each cast into consideration--they may cast a second divine light, prepared to cancel the cast if the healers can fill the gap, and if they do then they'll just follow up with cheaper, smaller heals instead.
Literaltruth Aug 28th 2011 11:29PM
Completely disagree with the OP. This is a horrible, horrible article.
It points out the fallacy of HPS in a more concise and understandable way than I have seen before. However, it then goes on to recommend a style of play that encourages snipe healing and gaming that same HPS number. It seems to be complaining about people using HPS as a guide to choosing which is the best healer - but then positively encourages people to artifically bump up their HPS so that their RLs will choose them to come to harder encounters (thus tacitly approving of the notion that RLs should use HPS as a method to determine which healers they bring).
Not only that, but the playstyle it recommends completely discourages healers from dispelling or using any other utility spell that won't artifically inflate their numbers.
Yes, if other healers are struggling, getting interrupted, CC'd, or lumbered with a bad group that can't stay out of the fire then certainly help them out when you can. But the aggressive, competitive and wasteful style of play recommended here would potentially get you removed from my raid. I have no interest in playing with players that are only out for themselves and getting to the top of meters - especially healers. I would rather take someone who had lower HPS but knew how to play cohesively with my team than someone playing with the style recommended here.
Arrohon Aug 29th 2011 5:46AM
The agressive approach isn't simply just so you have a higher HPS. The goal is to make everyone agressive so that people are getting healed instead of someone saying, "he's not my job." There's nothing wrong with a raid healer throwing a heal at the tank if there's no overhealing and none of the raid. Everyone needs to compete for their HPS so they get as much cake as they can or they'll leave leftovers. If your 3 healers all go for only 33% and won't go above that you'll be in trouble when one only can take 23% and the other two don't pick up the extra 10%. Or when two people are about to die and you can only save one, the other healers should be trying to save the 2nd person unless their assignment will die because of it. This next paragraph nicely tells us why we should get the most HPS while it's not to be the "best" healer.
"You don't want to reach the top of the HPS meters to prove that you're better than the other healers in your raid. You want to reach the top of the HPS meters to keep yourself on your toes, as it means that you're focusing on being quick to react and that you're accurately predicting incoming damage. Being at the top of your raid's HPS meter is meaningless if the other healers aren't competing against you. Your job should be to do the most HPS you can do while also fulfilling your other assignments."
"Your job should be to do the most HPS you can do while also fulfilling your other assignments." You mean the healers' job is to do as much HPS while still doing other things like dispells? Amazing!
Sharlatan Aug 29th 2011 6:02AM
Please read the bit where I say:
"yes there will be overlap".
I agree that strict assignments is not productive, but a free for all is equally silly.
Mana efficiency matters, the less mana you waste on overlap between healers, the more productive healing you can do with larger less efficient spells. If you are 'assigned' tank healing but you have spare capacity, AND ITS REQUIRED, then help out the raid. Don't start dropping superfluous heals if your raid healers have it covered, you may need that mana you are wasting if someone screws up in a min or two.
The worst healing team is one that competes with itself, the best is where you all work together, cycle cooldowns and act almost synergistically. If I though my fellow healers were 'competing' for hps, they'd be benched right away. That kind of self important, epeen, has no place in a healing team, leave that for the dps.
Didax Aug 29th 2011 11:18AM
Sniping heals on other than your assigned targets is great if and only if it doesn't contribute to overhealing. If two healers use quick instant cast abilities to heal someone from 90% to 100%, it's inevitable that there will be overhealing and therefore wasted mana.
I give my raid healing team specific assignments but I take care to say "Healer A, you are *primarily* on the boss tank." "Healer B, you are *primarily* on the add tank", etc.
I encourage all healers to intelligently use their mana and heals; to help out other healers when possible and if necessary. Generally, healing someone else's target that's below 50% with a quick small heal is good, their primary healer is likely casting a slow big heal (a la Healing Touch). Healing someone else's target that's at 90% with a quick small heal is bad, as their primary healer is likely already in the middle of their own cast.
As a raid leader, wiping due to healer OOM combined with too much overhealing really frustrates me.
Tigris Aug 28th 2011 6:25PM
This is all true, but of course, you don't want your healers wasting mana either. =]
jdfrost21 Aug 28th 2011 6:37PM
great article
LeftVentricle Aug 28th 2011 6:39PM
And yet, people still act like being a meter-whore while healing is a good thing. That whole dps to heal mentality is kinda what burned me out of healing in wrath. My heal team was for the most part immovable, none of them wanted to cooperate, work with their heal assignments or help their fellow raider, they were just there to show off their healing e-peen. There were two others willing to work with me, but in the end the meter padding fools won out. We lost our LK kill before the 10% buff and the guild died.
Our raid's loot was based off of performance (via meters) so the council would literally give loot to the person with the highest healing done, and almost every single fight that was a class with an aoe heal, being the only holy paladin in the raid, my heals were always scrutinized save for a few isolated fights. It's not like they judged me in relation to another holy paladin, or even another raider who was exclusively single target healing. We ended up having our best geared healer being the gms gf (holy priest), then one of our resto druids (guild officer), then our resto shaman (also guild officer), then the rest of the aoe healers, and then finally me (the holy paladin). People really need to get it out of their thick skulls that meters are everything. Shit, they aren't even everything for dps.
I'm not saying this as a butthurt person who never tops meters.
kef_kfb Aug 28th 2011 6:46PM
im sorry but that sounds like a crappy guild bro
DonNochay Aug 28th 2011 7:59PM
Do you like subjecting yourself to idiocy and frustration? This is a continuing trend in WoW: My guild blows, and I hate it, and they have ridiculously backwards rules, but hey, I need dem shiny purps so bad, I'm gonna stick it out.....til the end of time...
But I'll also make sure to publicly bring it up on gaming blog sites......
Russell Aug 28th 2011 8:03PM
It sounds like you were in my guild. Our healers were fucking vicious. They would constantly snipe each others heals to inflate their own numbers. I'm convinced to this day that there was an active conspiracy to make our holy paladin look bad.
WoWie Zowie Aug 28th 2011 10:31PM
that's the most self-serving loot ideology I've ever heard. whoever does the most heals gets the loot? really? in what universe is that fair? taken to the full extent this means that whoever was tops in one night will get the gear and then will have a huge advantage to be tops again the following night.
Sharlatan Aug 29th 2011 6:10AM
leave now. they are retards.
Back in WotLK, I could get 60-70% of the healing back then in a 10man, purely because mana did not matter, I had silly amounts of haste and could spam huge heals practially on the GCD. But you know what? it silly did not make me better or more important than any other healer on the team. That other 30-40% still kills people, even if a healer does only 5% of the effective healing, if it was in the right place, and saved lives, its a good job. And could just mean that another healer is sniping heals.
Killik Aug 29th 2011 6:16AM
That guild died? Sounds like it did you a favour!