AFKing for epics in raids

[K9]

ugh, this demented mangling of semantics is fucking stupid.

[Khaldun]

Right. What we're really talking about are different cultural and personal orientations to play. None of those are objectionable in and of themselves, but it's when you get two or more fundamentally different assumptions about play that the problems really begin.

[Nevermore]

Wait.  If someone doesn't want to play with me because I didn't choose to use the exact spec they want me to have, I'm being elitist?  Wha?

You hold the belief that you can sacrifice the group in favour of the self. That's elitism. Wanting to exclude yourself from the company of gents like that is also elitism.

Your definition of 'elitism' is incorrect.

e⋅lit⋅ism
   /ɪˈlitɪzəm, eɪˈli-/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [i-lee-tiz-uhm, ey-lee-]
–noun
1.    practice of or belief in rule by an elite.
2.    consciousness of or pride in belonging to a select or favored group.

e·lit·ism or é·lit·ism      (ĭ-lē'tĭz'əm, ā-lē'-)
n. 

   1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.
   2.
         1. The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class.
         2. Control, rule, or domination by such a group or class.

e·lit'ist adj. & n.

elitist

noun
someone who believes in rule by an elite group [ant: egalitarian]

[Paelos]

In effort to rerail this topic, here's a current situation I'm dealing with.

I have a healing paladin who used to be one of the best healers we had back in the pre-TBC days. He went away for a while during TBC, had a kid, did the family duty thing for a couple years, and now he's back. The problem is that he's the worst healer we have, and he's geared. Worst as in dead last in healing, and highest in overhealing. Now, I realize a part of that comes from player skill, and some of that comes from paladins having major issues healing well in the current iteration. However, what percentage do yall believe is skill and what is circumstance.

Also, are there any tips from pallys that actually heal what you should be doing in raids to heal. Having only healed on a priest, I have no idea on the mechanics of the healing paladin or any tips/tricks of the trade I can give this guy to get him back into shape.

[Soulflame]

I'd have to see a recount or a WWS to give you some idea of what's going wrong.  Also - link to char.

At a guess, he's emphasizing spellpower in gemming, which is leading him to two problems - mana shortage and overhealing.  I would also guess (no slam here) there's not clear healing assignments, which leads to him getting sniped a lot in heals.

Also, anyone who says paladins have trouble healing in the current iteration... is dead wrong.  Sacred shield is a wonderful tool, beacon is nothing short of amazing, and if gemmed for int (not spellpower dammit!) we have the mana to heal like mad.

Also - Holy Shock (with crit!) plus instant FoL or hastened HL is absolutely amazing.  I've pretty much instantly healed a tank for 12k with that, which really really nice if the tank gets spiked and needs heals right now.

Hm... tips.
- Sacred shield the tank.  Not only does it reduce damage, but it increases your crit on flash of light.  (You may not get to use that in some fights, but hey.)
- Judge wis on a target.  Returns mana to people who hit the target, but more importantly, gives you 15% haste for a minute.
- Beacon the right target.  Most of the time it's the tank.  If it's a fight where everyone takes damage, the beacon target is probably the healer.
- Don't be afraid to have your mana at 0 at the end of the fight.  (Still something I'm working on.)  Use your cooldowns wisely, i.e. if you must use divine plea while healing like mad, use avenging wrath to bolster your healing a bit.  Otherwise, try to use divine plea during a slack time, or ask for help covering heals while regenning.
- Have the paladin heal the tank.  That's what they are best at, that's what he should be doing.

[K9]

If his total healing (effective+overheal) is high, then that at least indicates that he's trying to do something; he's just doing it badly. The quality of all healers (as solely recorded by meters) varies hugely from fight to fight and from 5mans to 25mans too.

My guess would be that his reactions are just slower than your other healers, leading to his heals getting sniped, or he's trying to use Holy Light inappropriately. I'd ask him politely what add-ons he is using, is he using Grid? If he is using grid, does he have it set up to show incoming heals so that he's not wasting heals on someone else's target. Look at his recount, on a fight-by-fight basis how much healing is being done by FoL, Holy Light and Holy shock, Beacon and glyphs? Use recount to look at who he is healing, if he's a paladin trying to raid-heal exclusively in 25-mans then he'll end up with a very low effective heal as CH, CoH and WG will top off 95% of targets before he lands a heal. He should be focusing on a few number of targets and punching big heals into them to match big incoming damage. WWS reports have a breakdown of healers that lets you know if they favour a single target or multiple targets. How does his effective heal vary between fights like Patchwerk/Anub/Gluth/Raz and Sapphiron/Thaddius/Sarth? Then look at other activity, is he dispelling? Check dispel-heavy fights like Noth (cripple), Heigan (Disease),l Heigan Trash (Disease), Maexxena (Poison), see who's doing the dispel work on those fights.

Once you've looked at all this, and can't see a way to improve, then I'd label him as bad. However healer performance is so hard to measure.

EDIT: A WWS report would be useful, yes.

[bhodi]

Try putting him on the main tanks. That's pretty much what holy pallies do best anyway. They aren't nearly as good at raid heals. It's easy, effective, and frees up your more versatile healers for raid duty. He can pretty much stand in one place and spam holy light or whatever that pally spell is and still be very valuable.

[Paelos]

I'll post the recount on him after tonight's run if he is on it. I've already isolated one of the parts, he has shitty/missing enchants on most of his gear.

[bhodi]

Run your entire guild through http://be.imba.hu/ if you want a brief overview. Ignore what it says about 'not optimal' shit, and use it for to-hit and a sanity check on enchants and gems. Be aware it doesn't take into account misery or other raid-hit buffs or food (snapper x-treme) that some people may be using to be over the hit cap.

[Paelos]

Run your entire guild through http://be.imba.hu/ if you want a brief overview. Ignore what it says about 'not optimal' shit, and use it for to-hit and a sanity check on enchants and gems.

I already do that when i have questions. Agreed on the "not optimal" and "proper enchants" stuff. Some of the enchants are like a +9 AP buff, but they would cost 1000g more than the lower version. I can't understand the point of that, and I certainly won't pay that much for that little bang for the buck.

[Lantyssa]

You hold the belief that you can sacrifice the group in favour of the self. That's elitism. Wanting to exclude yourself from the company of gents like that is also elitism.

Ha.  You're just messing with me.  You had me going there.

Well played, Sir.  Well played.

[Ingmar]

not having all of your talents optimized to the last 0.1% mandatory is going to make it a waste of time,

You said .5 the first time. 25 members rocking that way, raid output is down 12.5%. That's a sizeable ammount.

This is bad math. If all 25 players in a raid are 99.5% efficient, that does not make the raid 87.5% efficient, it makes it... 99.5% efficient. Whatever that measurement even means. You only get to add those numbers together if you're talking about, say, raw dps or some other number like that, not when talking about percentages.

[Merusk]

Raw DPS matters.

Raid design is unfair to some.

[Vash]

With the current healing situation in the game (mana being almost no issue, esp. with replenishment), the amount of overhealing a healer does means almost nothing.  This is even more true for Holy paladins who, even with the 3.0.9 nerf to divine plea, can still afford to bomb Holy lights and use divine plea every cd.

The problem with holy paladins (as far as racking up big numbers on a healing meter, which is a really crappy tool for judging healers, but that's another discussion in itself) is their only raid heal is the holy light glyph and they are also the most vulnerable to getting their heals sniped by other healers.

Only tips I can think for you to offer your pally is to:

1. Use and abuse Beacon of Light, paladins have great single target throughput and using this spell in optimal situations essentially doubles it.  Using this spell to it's full potential is probably the only way a holy pally will come close to the other healers on the meters in the current unlimited mana healing environment.

2. Use Holy Shock religiously, every cd if possible and where applicable.  This is a holy paladin's best tool to fight against their healing being sniped by other healers and with holy talents will benefit them in other ways too.  Since you say he stopped playing for quite some time this could be part of his problem.  Holy shock used to be a very lackluster spell, especially for PvE raid healing.  In Wrath it has become a core healing spell even in a raid environment, but he may still be viewing it with a stigma from when he last played.

[Sjofn]

With the current healing situation in the game (mana being almost no issue, esp. with replenishment), the amount of overhealing a healer does means almost nothing.  This is even more true for Holy paladins who, even with the 3.0.9 nerf to divine plea, can still afford to bomb Holy lights and use divine plea every cd.

ha ha ha ha ha

I should explain. We have a paladin in our guild that runs out of power like clockwork, and I really can't figure out what she is doing to make this so. It's made it so I'm tempted to level MY paladin to heal with, just so I can see how paladin healing is shaking out this time around (my prediction: I will still hate it for being more annoying than it needs to be). I don't even want to give her advice, I just want to know for my own peace of mind.

[Fordel]

Lack of Int is my guess.

[Sjofn]

I read that as "lack of hit" at first. It made me laugh. The end!

EDIT: Ooh, I think she doesn't have nearly enough crit is the problem. Hm!

[Vash]

Lack of Int is my guess.

Most likely, Int is the new mana regen stat thanks to how replenishment works, plus holy pallies get a % of Int converted to spell power and up until 3.0.8 I think, divine plea was based on your total mana not base mana, so it regenerated more mana per use with more Int.

Just like mages with mana gems, using divine plea early and often is the key for not running out of mana.  They can pop wings which essentially turns it into only a 20% healing reduction and in a real emergency can set up a macro to remove divine plea to get full healing potential back.

That isn't really necessary most of the time though because turning 15k+ holy light bombs into 7.5+ just reduces the amount of overhealing being done. 

[Lightstalker]

How many healers are you running with?

Our best Druid healer decided to AFK through a 25-Naxx clear because he could.  No one noticed until he said something about it a week after the raid.  At 5 healers we were bringing too many; which caused them to cut out each other's healing performance and makes the WWS look very strange / not reflect capabilities.  It is difficult for many to maintain focus when it is obvious (to them) that their performance/excellence is irrelevant.  Pretty damning when 30% of your raid healing goes missing for a few fights and no one notices. 

Not suggesting that's the root cause here, but a Holy Paladin can single heal Patchwerk and should be dropping Glyphed Holy Light as often as possible, keeping holy shock, plea, and sacred shield in cooldown as appropriate.  Stacking Crit then Haste, cause the Int will come naturally and you don't really need 30k mana anyway (it takes two pieces of food to fill the tank even at 23k mana - already annoying).  And Bacon, esp on a fight like Patch.  Shaman can put out about 5k hps while Paladins will put out 15k per second.  If there is a role in the raid for them that other bored healers aren't filling, even bad Paladins can look amazing.  Paladin have a cast time on their effective heals, so if you've got 6 healers the Paladin will have no chance to get in for full effect - especially if they aren't top shelf.

There is also the possibility he's playing with baby-in-lap, that tends to negatively impact reaction time.

[Hindenburg]

Your definition of 'elitism' is incorrect.

2.    consciousness of or pride in belonging to a select or favored group. I.e. being of the non min/maxer group.

e·lit·ism or é·lit·ism      (ĭ-lē'tĭz'əm, ā-lē'-)
n. 

   1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.

Nu-uh.
I shall bend interpretations until the day you rue feeding me.

Lantyssa: took your sweet time, eh?

Ingmar: raw dps + raw healing, although healing would only partially be affected.

[Lantyssa]

Lantyssa: took your sweet time, eh?

I forgot you're a lawyer and thus love mind and word games.

I'm prepared now.  You shan't fool me again!  For at least a few days...

[Hindenburg]

I'm prepared now.

 

You are not prepared.

[skolor]

To the healing discussion:

Overhealing certainly does have a place in context of healer skill. While there is relatively little need to have all that great of healers right now, I can only assume it will be getting more difficult in Ulduar, and healing already becomes hard in Sarth+x when you have healers with significant overheals. I don't mean "OMG! You have 2% more overheals than the other healer, you suck!" I'm talking about the paladins and priests we get doing 50% over heals in our raids. As long as over healing is <30% they should be fine, but anything above that means they're wasting quite a bit of mana, and more importantly are probably not healing someone else who could use it. If anyone is overhealing >30% and people die during the fight (with exceptions, like people dying because they stand in the wrong place and instantly die). If there is raid damage going on, there's always someone else that could use a heal.

And as far as the speccing issue:

There is quite a bit of give and take in the "Optimal" specs. Most of them have some options built in which don't change the dps by much, and give you more control over it. Fairly often this comes in the form of 3-4 talent points that can be spent as you want, with only a 1-2% chance in dps. That, generally isn't a problem. What is a problem are the people with specs that deal significantly less damage, that aren't even in the same area as optimal. If 25 people in a raid are all doing 4% less dps than they could, its the same as bringing one less person to the raid (Well, not exactly, since you usually only bring 16 dps, its more like if everyone does 6% less dps than they could, but you get the point).

I have very rarely heard of people saying you need to spec a certain way because it will improve your DPS by 1%. That much isn't very noticable (~20dps for most players). On the other hand, there are talents that can increase your DPS by 10%+ for a few points. Not taking them is very noticable, and saying you need to take those talents if you want to raid with a group is not being elitist in the slightest. Its saying "Carry your weight." If at any time a tank is out-DPSing you, you have some definite improvement needed (caveat: I tend to do quite a bit of DPS as a tank. However, anyone at a similar gear level (all iLevel 200+) tends to do at least 30-40% more damage, as long as they're a decent player. Those that are and entire tier behind should be doing around the same numbers the tank does).

I tend to enjoy stacking spirit on my priest. It means he can solo with very little downtime. Being told to put on gear that favors DPS stats more if I go to a raid is not any different than being told I can't come in a smite-spec.

[bhodi]

Paladins are made to overheal. Priests that are 50%+ overhealing more than their counterparts need to stop using greater heal as much.

[K9]

Priests that are 50%+ overhealing more than their counterparts need to stop using greater heal at all.

Fixed.

The only fights in current content where GHeal makes sense are Patchwerk and Sarth+. For everything else Flash is a better stock heal.

[bhodi]

Generally true. I still use it on clearcast, sometimes.

Also, make sure those healers are at ~10% haste.

[skolor]

Paladins are made to overheal. Priests that are 50%+ overhealing more than their counterparts need to stop using greater heal as much.

This makes very little sense to me, at least from watching paladins (I have never healed on one). It seems the ones doing the most overheals are the ones who are least effective as a healer. They tend to be the ones who throw their Beacon on the tank, then go about throwing their heals at everyone else. The problem is, if they're overhealing on the raid, they're not healing the tank for as much. It seems to me that if the tank could use 100% of a heal, but the most a raid member could use is 50%, it would make more sense to throw the heal at the tank, wait for the raid person to drop a little more, and then throw the heal at the raid person when they can get more of the effect.

[bhodi]

It depends on healing assignments. Generally, paladins should NOT be on general raid heals. That's for priests, druids (somewhat, best on melee w/ aoe damage), and especially shamans.

Most people put paladins on your tanks for consistent HPS and only have them raid heal emergency stuff like kel's ice block and other big single-target damage spikes. Add the fact that a decently geared pally is almost completely mana stable as long as someone has replenishment, and everything is just fine - most of those overheals are going to be on the main tank and as such aren't a barometer for bad healing technique.

[Soulflame]

Using meters on healing is ridiculous.  There's one measure of a healer's performance - do the targets the healer is assigned to heal live... or not.  If the answer is "not", then you need to figure out why the healer's charges are dying, and correct that if possible.

[skolor]

It depends on healing assignments. Generally, paladins should NOT be on general raid heals. That's for priests, druids (somewhat, best on melee w/ aoe damage), and especially shamans.

Most people put paladins on your tanks for consistent HPS and only have them raid heal emergency stuff like kel's ice block and other big single-target damage spikes. Add the fact that a decently geared pally is almost completely mana stable as long as someone has replenishment, and everything is just fine - most of those overheals are going to be on the main tank and as such aren't a barometer for bad healing technique.

I'm missing something then. How does this equate to paladins doing more overheals? Unless they're consistently doing 20k+ I don't see any reason half of it should be going to waste every time.

[bhodi]

I'm missing something then. How does this equate to paladins doing more overheals? Unless they're consistently doing 20k+ I don't see any reason half of it should be going to waste every time.

Always Be Casting. On the main tank. Whether he's taken damage or not. A lot of it ends up as overhealing. All I'm saying is that paladins are generally at the top of the overhealing meters when compared directly to other classes, so you simply cannot use overheal % on recount to declare them poor healers.

And soulflame is flat out wrong. Healing meters ARE useful for performance indications as long as you know how to read them. If one person is wildly different from another - same class, same talents, same gear - there's something going on. The meters can tell you that SOMETHING is awry and can give you indications to dig deeper. All your targets living could mean that one of your healers is picking up the slack for another. Get the one who's lagging a bit on the same level as the rest and you can progress to the next level - one less healer and one more dps. Shoot for 4 healers on naxx 25 and 2 on naxx 10.

[skolor]

Always Be Casting. On the main tank. Whether he's taken damage or not. A lot of it ends up as overhealing.

It still seems to me that 50% seems ridiculously high. If they're doing that much overhealing, they could be casting half the time and doing.... Something else.

[bhodi]

It still seems to me that 50% seems ridiculously high. If they're doing that much overhealing, they could be casting half the time and doing.... Something else.

Maybe. Or, that could mean that your tank takes some damage and gets topped off during every heal but some of that healing goes to waste, or that every third heal hits the tank just after they get topped off by someone else, or the tank takes damage right after the heal lands and it all goes to overhealing instead. 50% overheal isn't ridiculously high. Normal healers can use a stopcasting mod or cancel their heal, tank healers generally do not, they'll just let the heal fly on the bet that the tank will simply take more damage before their GCD+heal will land.

Most likely, it's from a combination of the above plus the big one, crit overhealing. Even if the paladin IS doing some raid healing in addition to MT heals, your overheal can still get up in that area. It's really not uncommon. Ad-hoc healing assignments can exacerbate the problem since healers tend to heal on top of each other given the chance. Every healer including your MT-healing pally is going to hit that mage who took aggro for a split second and spiked down to 20% life in one hit. Because the mage has low health and only need 8k healing, more than half those flash of lights / flash heals are going to be wasted and go into overheal.

In addition, raid healers simply heal on top of each other and every single priest in your raid is going to heal on top of the tank healer because a tank is always the target of the first prayer of mending bounce. If prayer of mending crits (and sometimes if it doesn't) the next tank heal is going straight into overheal.

Edit: Holy light glyph I forgot about too, thanks. I don't actually play a paladin :)

[Ingmar]

Always Be Casting. On the main tank. Whether he's taken damage or not. A lot of it ends up as overhealing.

It still seems to me that 50% seems ridiculously high. If they're doing that much overhealing, they could be casting half the time and doing.... Something else.

50% is not ridiculous for a paladin at all - keep in mind that the paladin is probably using glyph of holy light, which heals everyone within 8 yards of the holy light target for 10% of the value of holy light, something like that - that means on every cast that is hitting probably at least all the melee dps around the tank, and a lot of them are going to be unwounded in a lot of situations. A LOT of that extra splash healing will be overheal.

[skolor]

I understand some amount of over heals. Our better priests/shaman/druid will usually do in the 10-20% range over the course of any given wing of Naxx. Most of that is from the 1-2 heals they throw a minute that are completely wasted. On the other hand, I've never seen a paladin under around 40%, with most of them in the mid 50's. A 50% overhealing rate means that for every heal that is completely applied, one is completely wasted.

I guess next time we have 2 tanks on I'll just have to go respec and give a try healing. It just really sounds too high to be anything but poor playing.