AFKing for epics in raids

[Ingmar]

A 50% overhealing rate means that for every heal that is completely applied, one is completely wasted.

Or it means that a glyphed holy light spell hit someone wounded and then 5 people around the wounded guy who weren't hurt for 10% each. Or the paladin has beacon of light up on someone, heals a hurt guy while the beacon target is unwounded. I think those two abilities by themselves generate a very large amount of overheal.

If you haven't healed before, the first thing you're going to learn is that in raids you can't reactively heal tanks. If you wait for the tank to get hurt before you start casting, you will cause some wipes. That's where a lot of the rest of the overheal comes from on paladins; they don't have any 'buffer' abilities except sacred shield, and so instead of being able to have a lifebloom stack or renew or earth shield/riptide going to fill in the gaps, they just have to chain their heals on the tank. That automatically is going to generate overheal, there's just no way around it.

Also note that your overhealing meters are probably not counting missed ticks of, say, the druid's HoTs that happen when the target is at full HP. The "real" overheal of a druid healer is usually far far higher than what the meters show.

EDIT: I decided to look up our paladin healer on patchwerk last night, which was a great, clean kill. She overhealed 67% or so. The breakdown on the WWS:

31% overheal on Holy Light, the part of that which is from crits is outside her control
87.4% overheal on Beacon of Light (outside her control)
75.4% overheal on Glyph of Holy Light (outside her control)
37.3% overheal on Flash of Light (see Holy Light)

So as you can see paladins have some mechanics that automatically cause a LOT of overheal that is out of their control.

[Vash]

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.

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.

Even if you know exactly how to read them they can still be very misleading.  Unless you have a mod that will do a Grim Reaper style combat breakdown for an entire fight instead of just the last 10 seconds before death, and you have the patience to go through it, you will never get the full story from a healing meter.

The only 2 significant pieces of information a meter can provide in relation to healing is showing spell usage patterns and cleanse/dispell counts.  Plus with everyone using meters now and managing mana being a thing of the past, most healers now are competing heavily with each other.  This has basically lead healing to (d)evolve to a place where spam healing with your quickest most mana innefficent heals or spaming any sort of group heal along with throwing hots and instants out at every opportunity is the norm.  Overhealing be damned, if your not gonna run youself out of mana why wouldn't you just spam like crazy and boost your meter e-peen.

Gone are the days when healers actually had to use their long cast high efficiency heals, set up healer rotations, cancel casts, pay attention to the 5 sec rule, and watch their threat.  That was when %overhealing actually mattered because a healer with significant overhealing was likely to be the one with significant mana problems and because in those days threat from overhealing was significant enough pull aggro off a tank if you were careless.  All %overhealing tells you now is which healer was slightly slow or had their timiing slightly off and had most of their spam healing sniped by another healer who was slightly faster or had better timing with their spam heals.

It just really sounds too high to be anything but poor playing.

Under the current circumstances any healer who doesn't have 20% or more overhealing probably isn't healing to their full potential and is finishing fights at half mana or more, which is just as wasteful as a healer with 60% overhealing imo.

Once people are in full epics heroic Naxx can be done with 3-4 healers, if you have more in your raid they will just canabalize each other's healing to the point where some of the healers will just get the short end of the stick and end up with either very low effective healing or very high overhealing.

I heard a story the other day about how a resto druid in a decently progressed 25 man guild basically went afk for an entire Naxx 25 clear and nobody noticed unti he said something later that week. 

When mana is essentially unlimited, as a guild gears up less healing is needed and each healer can do more healing to the point where a lot of healers can quickly realzie their contribution isn't needed as much, but most guilds don't usually park some core healers who helped them progress on the bench and bring more dps they just keep the same lineup.

[Azuredream]

Under the current circumstances any healer who doesn't have 20% or more overhealing probably isn't healing to their full potential and is finishing fights at half mana or more, which is just as wasteful as a healer with 60% overhealing imo.

Once people are in full epics heroic Naxx can be done with 3-4 healers, if you have more in your raid they will just canabalize each other's healing to the point where some of the healers will just get the short end of the stick and end up with either very low effective healing or very high overhealing.

I heard a story the other day about how a resto druid in a decently progressed 25 man guild basically went afk for an entire Naxx 25 clear and nobody noticed unti he said something later that week. 

When mana is essentially unlimited, as a guild gears up less healing is needed and each healer can do more healing to the point where a lot of healers can quickly realzie their contribution isn't needed as much, but most guilds don't usually park some core healers who helped them progress on the bench and bring more dps they just keep the same lineup.

3.1 is slated to have a whole host of nerfs changes to the mana regeneration model to make healers diversify their casting a bit more. How effective they'll be is yet to be seen.

[Sjofn]

A 50% overhealing rate means that for every heal that is completely applied, one is completely wasted.

Or it means that a glyphed holy light spell hit someone wounded and then 5 people around the wounded guy who weren't hurt for 10% each. Or the paladin has beacon of light up on someone, heals a hurt guy while the beacon target is unwounded. I think those two abilities by themselves generate a very large amount of overheal.

If you haven't healed before, the first thing you're going to learn is that in raids you can't reactively heal tanks. If you wait for the tank to get hurt before you start casting, you will cause some wipes. That's where a lot of the rest of the overheal comes from on paladins; they don't have any 'buffer' abilities except sacred shield, and so instead of being able to have a lifebloom stack or renew or earth shield/riptide going to fill in the gaps, they just have to chain their heals on the tank. That automatically is going to generate overheal, there's just no way around it.

Also note that your overhealing meters are probably not counting missed ticks of, say, the druid's HoTs that happen when the target is at full HP. The "real" overheal of a druid healer is usually far far higher than what the meters show.

EDIT: I decided to look up our paladin healer on patchwerk last night, which was a great, clean kill. She overhealed 67% or so. The breakdown on the WWS:

31% overheal on Holy Light, the part of that which is from crits is outside her control
87.4% overheal on Beacon of Light (outside her control)
75.4% overheal on Glyph of Holy Light (outside her control)
37.3% overheal on Flash of Light (see Holy Light)

So as you can see paladins have some mechanics that automatically cause a LOT of overheal that is out of their control.

And with some of the current changes on the PTR to some of holy's shit, that overheal is going to get EVEN MORE OVERHEALIER.

[Ingmar]

I don't understand and kind of hate the sacred shield nerf (only on one target at a time.) What, were paladins not bad enough in the Malygos vortex?

[Sjofn]

The other nerf, the one where instead of lowering holy light's cast time it makes holy light CRIT MOAR is the one that really gets up my snoot for some reason. But yeah, both those changes are aggravating. I'm getting a little tired of them panicking that paladins are TOO GOOD OH GOD TOO GOOD in the situations where they're good, but keeping them sucking super hard in situations where they are not good. Nerf my awesomeness, fine, but at least let me have something to do other than holy shock, bubble ONE person, and weep during shit like the vortex.

[Soulflame]

Only one Sacred Shield and instead of faster HLs the talent will now iincreases crit? 

I am a very sad paladin.

I expect PW:S to get similar treatment!  Stat!  (So that others can feel my pain.  Also, assuming it works that way.)

[Sjofn]

PW:S works differently, it just absorbs damage (I don't know how it compares, I haven't healed with either class in ages), it has a short cooldown, but puts a debuff on the person you cast it on so no one else can cast it on that person if the shield gets eaten through before it wears off or whatever. It has had various nerfs through the years itself.

Still, priests were never ever told THAT was their version of group healing. 

[Vash]

Most of these recent Paladin changes are aimed at nerfing them in PvP (especially holy) from what I can see and what I've heard, although the consequences for PvE are 

[Dren]

Most of these recent Paladin changes are aimed at nerfing them in PvP (especially holy) from what I can see and what I've heard, although the consequences for PvE are 

That's a new one to me.  I hadn't heard Holy Paly's are da bomb in PvP.  Really?

One sacred shield isn't a very big deal to me.  I don't use it on anyone but the tank except during those few boss fights where healing is restricted due to some aura or special event, etc.  I certainly can see it being useful in PvP, but even then it will only block 500 hps once every 6 seconds.  If you are a target of multiple pvp'ers, they'll eat through that in no time.

Making HL longer, but crit more?  Yeah, that made it even more useless.  I got my power, crit, and haste jacked up really high now and just use Flash all the time.  Whenever I use HL, it is usually too late and crits for way way too much (read 15-17k.)  Critting like that sure looks good from the outside, but it is pretty hard to be a consistent healer with these kinds of tools.  Now we'll have just even more of the same.

[Gobbeldygook]

That's a new one to me.  I hadn't heard Holy Paly's are da bomb in PvP.  Really?

Holy paladins are more dominant in arena than resto druids were.  The reasons vary from metagame changes to holy shock being buffed to ret and prot buffs landing in their lap.  Paladins are almost 1/4 of all 2k+ players in all three brackets and the majority of those are holy.  People bitched about them on beta, but no-one listened.  An overpowered PVP healer makes life miserable in organized pvp situations.  An overpowered PVP DPSer makes life miserable for everyone everywhere.  No healadin ever corpse camped someone in the middle of their dailies or 100-0 stunlocked a fine young gentleman in AB.

[Vash]

I think it's gonna be interesting to see how they try and balance Ret paladins now though.  Their burst is still quite high on live and they will add Exorcism to their pvp repertoire in 3.1, then you hear reports from the PTR that their dps isn't quite keeping pace in Ulduar and so they might get even more dps buffs.

Somehow Blizzard always ends up chasing its own tail when it comes to balancing classes and specs.  Pvp nerfs aimed at Holy that look to unbalance them in PvE right alongside PvE buffs for Ret that have a solid possibility of unbalancing them in PvP.  At least if it goes live like that all the Holy paladins can make their new 2nd spec Ret 

[Soulflame]

As a holy paladin, I have totally corpse camped people.  Generally jackasses who were trying to kill me while I was doing my dailies.   

[Dren]

If things get too bad, I'll go ret/tank when dual spec comes in.  I'm already collecting all the epics for both those suits now since our main tanks and plate dps pass on the lewtz these days.  I remember I could heal pretty damn well as ret when levelling so that is still an option anyway (mix and match spell power pieces with ret pieces.)

[Sheepherder]

No healadin ever corpse camped someone in the middle of their dailies or 100-0 stunlocked a fine young gentleman in AB.

When my brother is holy he likes to bomb Horde with Judgement of Justice -> Divine Favor -> Holy Shock as they ride past.

[Xanthippe]

Pallies are the biggest dicks in Wrath.  Worse than rogues were in TBC.

In fact, I think rogues rerolled and became pallies.

[Vash]

Pallies are the biggest dicks in Wrath.  Worse than rogues were in TBC.

In fact, I think rogues rerolled and became pallies.

Hammer of Justice is the new omg wtf stunlock haxxor. 

I don't play on a PvP server anymore but I can just imagine how much of a pain it would be in Wrath with a bunch of DK's and Retadins running around everywhere trying to stir up trouble or be complete jerks.

[Chimpy]

Pallies will always shine in the early seasons of Arena because of their survivability. Especially when the game is melee-craft as it is now. Once you get season 3 or 4 relative resilience levels again, a priest or a druid will pull ahead again because they can survive.

Plate armor + shield on a healing class is such a balance.

[Vash]

Pallies will always shine in the early seasons of Arena because of their survivability. Especially when the game is melee-craft as it is now. Once you get season 3 or 4 relative resilience levels again, a priest or a druid will pull ahead again because they can survive.

Plate armor + shield on a healing class is such a balance.

It's not even the plate armor and shield to be perfectly honest, most casters can lock down a pally and kill them in a few seconds just like any other class in the game and mele don't struggle a ton with them with the proper use of interupts.  It's the bubble that makes them amazing in the current state of PvP.  With the current level of burst damage versus health pools most healers under any kind of focus fire can expect to survive for 5-6 seconds at best if they can get some emergency heals off on themselves.  The bubble gives holy paladins 12 seconds of focus fire/crowd control  immunity and uninterupted healing. 

When your the only healer that can consistently survive long enough to be useful against double and triple dps teams your the go to option for any team that wants a healer.

Holy Pally + X is doing so well right now that Disc. priests are starting to gain some momentum since they are the only realistic counter to the bubble with mass dispel.  Should be interesting to see what happens in 3.1 with warriors getting the new Shattering throw.

[kildorn]

Man, did I miss the overheal conversation completely?

Overheal used to be bad, and partly out of control. Ever wonder why healers that weren't pallies didn't like crit? Because we heal people based on the average amount we'd heal for, crits are good for Inspiration type effects, but generally a high crit rate = high overheal % unless you're waiting for the tank to hit 30%. This was even worse after downranking got mauled and we HAD to use heals that would result in 2-4k overheal on a crit.

As for people with lower overheal, it either means they're not healing much, using smaller heals (LHW spam doesn't generate much overheal) or using smart heals (Chain Heal doesn't count if it doesn't jump!)

Anywho, if your total heal is low, and your overheal is high, you're probably healing strange. But if you're not permanently OOM and the raid ain't dying, it's really, REALLY hard to judge healing by a meter.

[Dren]

Man, did I miss the overheal conversation completely?

Overheal used to be bad, and partly out of control. Ever wonder why healers that weren't pallies didn't like crit? Because we heal people based on the average amount we'd heal for, crits are good for Inspiration type effects, but generally a high crit rate = high overheal % unless you're waiting for the tank to hit 30%. This was even worse after downranking got mauled and we HAD to use heals that would result in 2-4k overheal on a crit.

As for people with lower overheal, it either means they're not healing much, using smaller heals (LHW spam doesn't generate much overheal) or using smart heals (Chain Heal doesn't count if it doesn't jump!)

Anywho, if your total heal is low, and your overheal is high, you're probably healing strange. But if you're not permanently OOM and the raid ain't dying, it's really, REALLY hard to judge healing by a meter.

I kept my /recount going last night while main healing our Naxx 25 run.  I was consistently in the top 1 or 2 spots for total healing and the top 3 positions were very close overall.  However, for overhealing, I was at a whopping 45% of something like that and everyone else was well under 10%.  I always knew Holy Paladins had an overheal issue, but that just shoved it right into my face.

[bhodi]

If you are honestly curious, browse random people and see what their overheal and healing breakdowns are. That gives you a good idea if you're in "the norm" or not.

[Soulflame]

I'm not terribly concerned with overhealing.  I chainheal the tank, sometimes the tank doesn't take damage in between hits, resulting in 100% overheal.  Sometimes I touch up the raid, and I'll heal someone who's down 1k health, just because, which can result in 80% or more overheal.  Sometimes my heals get sniped, although if I'm really concerned about that, I'll use HS.  Plus, once again, my concern is that everyone's health bar is full, with emphasis on the MT.

Unless blizzard gives me the tools to heal the amount I actually need to heal, I won't care about overhealing, and mine sometimes hits 50%.

Regardless, as a holy paladin, my healing makes the raid holy priest I run with weep.  I solo healed the last patch 10, at least according to him.  Of course, as he observed, we're at the point where we only need 1.5 healers for much of Naxx 10.

[Selby]

I'm not terribly concerned with overhealing.

Neither am I.  Same with hitting some magical DPS number.  Main\off tank didn't die, boss died before any enrage timers or in a decent amount of time?  Call it good.

[Ingmar]

The magical dps numbers matter mostly for just a couple fights, and are mostly raid-wide magic numbers; you do 12,000 raid dps to Patchwerk-10, or the raid dies. When there are more tightly tuned enrage timers in Ulduar or whatever, you don't really want to be the guy that everyone rolls their eyes about and complains about picking up slack for, or you might find yourself sitting most weeks.

Overheal is in another category of 'who cares' right now, but the magic dps numbers really do matter to a certain extent.

[bhodi]

Remember; while damagemeters on bosses make DPS's e-peen grow, once you've got a dungeon on farm status what REALLY matters for the evening is trash.

Look for people who afk or don't bother trying with trash. Smack them into shape. Trying on trash gets you faster full clears. And we're not talking minutes faster, we're talking 30m to an hour faster. Chain pull. Don't take it slow, especially with a 'powerhouse' group where everyone is overgeared and done it a million times. Get in, get out.

[Dren]

Yes, don't get me wrong.  I do not change my practices based off the overheal numbers either.  Our 25man run did very well.  We went back to Patchwerk after ignoring him for 2 weeks and one shot him easily.  We are getting to a point of basically being able to do everything in there once we get past the learning curves. 

I only brought it up because it seems like a ton of wasted healing points.  I mean each time I see somebody down 1k and I blast them with a 6k flash crit.....  I don't know, just seems like something is wrong.  I find most of my clean up healing gets done with Judgement of Light.  I keep that up as much as possible on the MT's target and there is always a nice blanket of HP's all around.  Yet, again a huge source of overhealing, but it sure makes things go smoothly.

I do have to say that my efficiency was at its very highest on Patchwerk.  I was assigned the MT and got to use my HL to its fullest glory.  14-16k crits sure come in handy on that one. 

[skolor]

I find most of my clean up healing gets done with Judgement of Light.  I keep that up as much as possible on the MT's target and there is always a nice blanket of HP's all around.  Yet, again a huge source of overhealing, but it sure makes things go smoothly.

If available, a Ret Paladin should be doing the Judge of Light. Due to the way Judgement effects scale (Can't find the exact numbers, but I believe its some place in the 2AP:3SP range), the usual priority on judgements is Ret>Prot>Holy, meaning you'll usually end up with a Ret Paladin judging Light, the Prot Paladin judging Wisdom, and the Holy Judging that other one if they're bored.

Since the judgements overwrite each other, try to keep the paladins with highest combined ap+sp doing light and wisdom, with the others doing the third one no one talks about (and I can't remember the name of right now).

[Ingmar]

Holy paladins should probably be judging *something* since they have that it-gives-you-haste talent.

[K9]

Yes, don't get me wrong.  I do not change my practices based off the overheal numbers either.  Our 25man run did very well.  We went back to Patchwerk after ignoring him for 2 weeks and one shot him easily.  We are getting to a point of basically being able to do everything in there once we get past the learning curves. 

I only brought it up because it seems like a ton of wasted healing points.  I mean each time I see somebody down 1k and I blast them with a 6k flash crit.....  I don't know, just seems like something is wrong.  I find most of my clean up healing gets done with Judgement of Light.  I keep that up as much as possible on the MT's target and there is always a nice blanket of HP's all around.  Yet, again a huge source of overhealing, but it sure makes things go smoothly.

I do have to say that my efficiency was at its very highest on Patchwerk.  I was assigned the MT and got to use my HL to its fullest glory.  14-16k crits sure come in handy on that one. 

We used to be able to downrank, but apparently that wasn't cool.

[Vash]

We used to be able to downrank, but apparently that wasn't cool.

Once they decided to go all out with +dmg or +heal  (now spell power) on caster gear after release, healers down ranking spells became a way for them to gain infinite mana without losing much in the way of healing effectiveness.  As we know all to well now, infinite healer mana allows content to be trivialized and makes it harder to balance bosses.  Thus the developers have been at war with downranking, nerfing the spell power coefficients of lower ranked spells in TBC, and outright making it impossible to downrank in Wrath. 

However, thanks to replenishment and the rediculous amount of stats gear has at 80 they are pretty much back to square one with infinite healer mana, thus the overhaul to mana regen mechanics in 3.1.

[K9]

I would have happily traded in infinite mana for the ability to downrank, it made healing more engaging for me. You're right as to why they did it; however I (and many others) didn't see that this was the only or best solution to the problem though.

Likewise, the new changes to regen miss the point that replenishment is the loose cog in the mana regen machinery, not oo5sr regen...

[Vash]

From what I understand, OO5sr was a problem for certain fights, basically any fight with some sort of scripted movement/transition, I think Saphiron was an example given.  When Saph goes into the air and healers run to an Ice block or just moving out of a blizzard, they can get a few seconds of OO5sr with ease.

With current stat levels and regen equations healers that value spirit can have well over 500 mp5 ooc even in entry level gear, I'd imagine that in best in slot gear with raid buffs this value can come close to 1k mp5.  This trivializes fights like Saph in the sense that the AoE dmg should give healers mana trouble at lower gear levels and push people to use resist gear.  With the current OO5sr regen though they can spam heal through it then use the air phase or moving out of a blizzard to regen a ton of mana and continue healing through without issue.

I agree that replenishment is a major issue but they have their head in the sand in regards to it, mostly because they're using it as a band-aid on underrepresented dps specs instead of just giving them more competitive dps. 

They seem to be ignorant however of the fact that whichever class/spec brings the best dps while providing replenishment will be the go to replenishment slot for bleeding edge min/max types and the other specs will continue to be underrepresented.

[Gobbeldygook]

They seem to be ignorant however of the fact that whichever class/spec brings the best dps while providing replenishment will be the go to replenishment slot for bleeding edge min/max types and the other specs will continue to be underrepresented.

If every replenishment spec was identical save for damage done, yes, that would be true.  Since they aren't, it's false.  Each one brings a different set of raid buffs/debuffs and some of them are pretty hard to bring to the party.  Even if Survival hunters did the most DPS of all the replenishers, they wouldn't necessarily be the choice above retadins because retadins bring a lot more raid buffs to the party than the hunter, some of which are pretty difficult to get and involve a heavier opportunity cost for the alternative spec.

[K9]

Yes, but the specs getting replenishment in 3.1 are frost mages and destro locks. Neither of these specs brings anything to the raid that a higher-DPS spec can't as far as I know.