[Oddly]

As on most things, I agree with Aliena.

I play a Holy Priest, and although it sounds nice, and even knowing what I know I still often wish I were, being at the top of the healing chart is not my job as a healer. Either that, or I've come up with a mighty fine rationalization for generally not being at the top of the healing chart.

While it’s widely accepted that meters are one of the best tools dps players can use to analyze their performance, the usefulness of the meter for healing has always been a subject of debate. I like Recount, and believe that healing meters can be useful. But it simply isn't true -- as we sometimes have a tendency to believe -- that the chart toppers are always the better healers.

Rather, it takes time and understanding to decipher what you're seeing on the chart from a healing standpoint. It is pointless to, say, compare two healers to each other if they are on widely different assignments. Moreover, Discipline Priests simply don't meter well, tank healers in general don't meter as well as raid healers, shielding doesn't even show up on the meter at all but is part of every Priest's healing repertoire, etc.

On the other hand, Recount is a good tool for a raid leader who wants to use it to look back at a fight to see what went wrong and how assignments might be changed for the better. Or for seeing certain trends – for instance, a Holy Priest raid healing probably shouldn't be consistently at the bottom of the chart, and one who is might benefit from some suggestions on character or gear management, playing style, etc.

Here's the best and most insightful discussion I've read about the real usefulness of the healing meter:

What Can Healing Meters Tell You? | World of Matticus

[Tierax]

On top of that the holy pally is pushing 40-50% overhealing?

If I had only 40-50% overhealing, I think I'd top the meters every fight.

To the OP; meters may have their uses here and there, but really I find them just being used to flex epeens in healer chat. Or at least thats what I use them for when I get a tank-healer friendly fight .

[Duese]

If I had only 40-50% overhealing, I think I'd top the meters every fight.

I agree. If I was pushing out 1/3rd of the healing instead of 1/2, then my overhealing would be much higher. =) And we probably would have beat Mimiron Hard Mode in 10 man rather than continually dying in phase 3.

[elunesbuddy]

Source: Oddly Here's the best and most insightful discussion I've read about the real usefulness of the healing meter: What Can Healing Meters Tell You? | World of Matticus

very good reading indeed. All this pretty much makes me realize that our issues are mainly caused by immaturity from certain people who don't realize all those obvious things (team play, assignments, classes, etc) and who only look at raw numbers to satisfy their E-peen.

[Bovinity]

Yeah, the raw value of healing meters are rarely all that useful. The more in-depth data from recount can be useful, though.

Example: Doing one-tank Koralon a while back, I ended up dying at 5% on the last meteor fist. Much crying ensued and the holy paladin linked healing meters and blamed the other healer because he had something like 2x of the other healers output. People yelled at the other healer, etc etc.

But a deeper look at Recount showed that said holy paladin barely ever actually healed me, he was throwing flash of light like a madman at everyone else in the raid whose bar dipped below 99%. So it became obvious that while he had all this raw output, he wasn't healing the right things at the right time and the result was obvious.

[Maèl]

For DPS recount only makes sense when you also look at spell interrupts and such.

For healers it only makes sense when you also take a look at who got healed, how many decurses you got, how much absorb(tho that is a guesstimate) and in rare cases how much damage(not dps) you did. There is a difference between twiddeling your thumbs and wanding.

[Meeks]

Source: Bovinity Yeah, the raw value of healing meters are rarely all that useful. The more in-depth data from recount can be useful, though. Example: Doing one-tank Koralon a while back, I ended up dying at 5% on the last meteor fist. Much crying ensued and the holy paladin linked healing meters and blamed the other healer because he had something like 2x of the other healers output. People yelled at the other healer, etc etc. But a deeper look at Recount showed that said holy paladin barely ever actually healed me, he was throwing flash of light like a madman at everyone else in the raid whose bar dipped below 99%. So it became obvious that while he had all this raw output, he wasn't healing the right things at the right time and the result was obvious.

While I am never a fan of flash over holy light there is a little spell called beacon. there is not much reason to ever directly heal you if you were solo tanking it other than to get the silly flash hot.

[Satorri]

An element typically not discussed and not at all represented by the healing meters is a similar factor to tank threat.

It is more often not how much healing you do, but getting the right heal in at the right time.

This falls into Aliena's "know how to read the meters." There will often be the work-horse healers (I've seen every class/spec do it except Disc, but bubbles still don't get metered properly, even with the handy plug-ins), and there are the healers who win the game by saving people's lives. 6k heals per sec are meaningless if there's a gap and the tank dies (or dps for that matter when content is tight).

It'd be interesting to create a tool that kept track of how many times someone healed a tank for more than X% when they were under 20% of max health. Even that wouldn't capture it entirely, but it would be one indicator meters don't currently catch.

Meters can tell you things about your healers, but they can't tell you everything. There's a lot that needs to be filled in by paying attention to what they do and how they do it, then you'll be able to tell if they weren't top heals because they were careful and cast-cancelling, or if they felt their heals were unneeded so they were adding some dps and snipe healing, or if they're number one on the healing chart because they were spamming heals non-stop, needed or not, the entire time and just happen to have more heals land than the other healers.

[Roana]

There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to quantify healing, and I believe it can be done (at least in principle -- I'm not going to write the software for it).

The big problem with healing meters is that they try to quantify healing in the wrong way, by just boiling it down to a single number (amount healed, HPS). That number does happen to be correlated with some positive things (keeping people alive will require a certain amount of healing); however, it is also correlated with some negative things (heal sniping is a waste of mana and global cooldowns, for example).

A potentially interesting metric would be to quantify the heals that would actually prevent deaths: You'd start with any damage event that could potentially be fatal, then track backwards in time to see the last N heals that prevented that. Obviously, this is not a metric any sane player would try to optimize for (you'd risk losing people and having a really annoyed raid leader by delaying your heals), but it would highlight heals that were particularly important. It would potentially show a very different picture from the standard healing meters, too.

Of course, in the end, that would just be another metric and also an incomplete picture (somebody has to do the bread-and-butter healing, after all). In the end, you'd probably want a much more complete model to quantify healing effectiveness.

[Meeks]

Source: Roana A potentially interesting metric would be to quantify the heals that would actually prevent deaths: You'd start with any damage event that could potentially be fatal, then track backwards in time to see the last N heals that prevented that. Obviously, this is not a metric any sane player would try to optimize for (you'd risk losing people and having a really annoyed raid leader by delaying your heals), but it would highlight heals that were particularly important. It would potentially show a very different picture from the standard healing meters, too.

I'm all for a meter that makes paladins look good and spit in the face of druids but this would be less informative than hps meter with the added side effect of motivating people to let raid members and even the tank get close to dieing so they can get credit for saving them.

[Roana]

Source: Meeks I'm all for a meter that makes paladins look good and spit in the face of druids but this would be less informative than hps meter with the added side effect of motivating people to let raid members and even the tank get close to dieing so they can get credit for saving them.

Which I'm fully aware of. As I pointed out, I don't want everything to boil down to a single number. That's the core of the stupidity with the current meter thinking where you subject yourself to a "high score" paradigm.

This metric would be one among many, many others being used. These metrics, as an aggregate, would not be there to facilitate competition, but analysis.

[Maèl]

Source: Satorri It is more often not how much healing you do, but getting the right heal in at the right time.

True that.
Quite often I have called out on other Priests who didn't use Binding Heal. Quite often they say they haven't set it up in Cliquebot and that it is a stupid heal. Once I even had a holy priest who didn't use circle of healing. Or prayer of mending. Just Flash Heal and Renew and that's it.

Or there was this joker who thought he was entitled to use Shield because "I have the Glyph and the Body&Soul talent so I'm as entitled to use that spell as you". Me being a disc priest.

That's when healing meters are useful. But that is in depth analysis and has nothing to do with raw healing output.

[Tengenstein]

Source: WarTotem Even for Paladins a good Bacon choice can mean a lot

mmmmm sandwich heals!

in my guild a holy pally will usually top the healing meters, simply becuase he's stacked haste to the point that this FoL cast time is the GCD and he ninja's heals in faster than the priests, and druid hot ticks. and outgears pretty much everyone.like all statistics, prper interpretation is the key, and for healing thats alot more involved than DPS, interpreting it that way is like looking at damage taken and saying the MT must be crap becuase he too a shed load more damage on XT-002 than the OT

[CatabriOnEarthen]

Source: Meeks Death logs are the real healing 'meter'.

LOL, but healers can't heal stupid. Standing in fire is Stupid.

[Maèl]

Source: CatabriOnEarthen LOL, but healers can't heal stupid. Standing in fire is Stupid.

Yes, but could should be able to help with mercy kills.

[Meeks]

Source: CatabriOnEarthen LOL, but healers can't heal stupid. Standing in fire is Stupid.

And the deathlog will tell you that.

You know when it was the healer's fault, and whose fault it was and when it was someone being an idiot.

If people are dieing to unavoidable raid damage slowly you know to yell at your raid healers.

If tank died and had not received a heal in 5 seconds yell at the tank healer.

If tank died and had received a lot of heals you know tank messed up or is under geared or just got unlucky somehow.

[sangredios]

Source: Tengenstein in my guild a holy pally will usually top the healing meters, simply becuase he's stacked haste to the point that this FoL cast time is the GCD and he ninja's heals in faster than the priests, and druid hot ticks.

Paladins get good numbers when they are the only paladin in the raid, get two paladins in the raid and they do great overhealing.

[Splug the Priest]

To reconcile a Disc Priest's output on a healing meter, simply count the number of times that they've shielded (Glyph of PW:S heals is a good way of tracking it), multiply by 5-7k (closer to 7k if you feel most, if not all of your shields are being used), and see how they stack up then.

I raid lead, and rarely look at healing output other than to diagnose issues. The death log (and the input of damage/input of healing) report that Recount can generate is much more useful in trying to figure out which healer's dropping the ball, and which ones are busting their asses to keep people up.

Having massive HPS does not simply equate to being a good healer.

[Hobozach]

Im a holy priest and it is nice when DPS does their job but it makes me look bad :P i just sit there and renew the tanks, bounce PoM off them and shield them and whenever there s raid heals the druids always snipe me with their HoTs and their like "HA NOOB U SUK LERN 2 PLA" . I could just spam flash heal on the tanks but i see that as a waist of my mana if the tank is always at 90-100% health. If any DPS are reading this dont stand in the fire.. you make me look bad when you die.. lol

[orcstar]

Source: Hobozach Im a holy priest and it is nice when DPS does their job but it makes me look bad :P i just sit there and renew the tanks, bounce PoM off them and shield them and whenever there s raid heals the druids always snipe me with their HoTs and their like "HA NOOB U SUK LERN 2 PLA" . I could just spam flash heal on the tanks but i see that as a waist of my mana if the tank is always at 90-100% health. If any DPS are reading this dont stand in the fire.. you make me look bad when you die.. lol

Looks like your raid is taking too many healers.