As a tank or healer, how do I know I'm playing well?

If you consistently double the enemy’s healing, that is definitely a good signal you’re doing things right, though still a bit problematic as some heroes like Uther or Tyrande will rarely match numbers put out by Aoe healers.

An Uther who did 60k could have been far more valuable than a Lucio or BW who did 90k. It depends on the outcome of the match.

Auriel will also have catastrophic heal numbers compared to the enemy healer, if she has no good battery source (mostly only gaining energy from sweeps and aa’s) for her trait.

Honestly with how healers are almost never a healbot and often have CC or a gimmick in thier kits, it’s generally impossible to tell with numbers. You yourself will have to infer what that healer wants to do and accomplish it.

For example, malfurion has a very potent root and can give out mana; are you putting the root down in good places to chain CC? Are you giving mana out to help CDR some important spells or just help a mage continue? What does that mage want to do?

Often it’s rather easy to tell the goal of a healer in a draft or pick. Kharazim gives mobility and can even give spellpower or block, dives with ease and can help secure a kill on a squishy target, but if none of those things are happening, you’re either not playing kharazim correctly; not able to perform optimally; or you’re getting countered.

That’s another thing you need to be aware of, sometimes you can do the healer you’re playing a service by playing them well, othertimes you could simply be shut out of the game and that’s not always your fault. For example alexstraza struggles against mages that punish grouping, you can counter by trying to put the heals further back but that in of itself might compromise the win condition your team sets out; like taking a fort early or diving said mages.

Just look at what you need to do as a healer, set out to accomplish it, be aware of counters and remember you can’t heal stupid. If someone dies you are not to blame or times than naught if they outpace your heals.

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That is the best and most simplistic answer. That is usually the end result of a tank’s job when it is done properly.

By the way, here is a tank guide:

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As a healer, it can be hard to tell jus how well you are doing. The healing number on the tab chart. Some healers can out put absolutley enormous number like whitemane, alexstraza, or lucio and some healers are uther.
That being said (and this goes for all roles) i find assists to be a good metric for how well your doing. The closer it is to the teams total kills the better.
Also for both tanks amd healers, the way you play well and the way you get mvp dont necessarily overlap.

Generally, as a healer you wanna come at it with almost an mmo mindset. You wanna be as efficient as possible which means overhealing is mana wasted and your aoe heals should hit as many people as possible. Also healer damage is not worthless you wanna be dealing damage at every time it’s safe to do so just like any other role would.
Tracking how well your doing on a healer is pretty different for each healer tho. Which ones do you play?

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Here’s what I would do:

At the end of each fight,

  1. Ask yourself how many of your teammates died that fight
  2. Ask yourself how many you could have saved if you played a bit differently
  3. Look at your health and ask if you could have absorbed more damage for the team
  4. Ask yourself if you could have healed more efficiently

It’s kind of numbers, but I know it’s not the stats you’re really expecting. Some of the healers you’re playing seem to be more focused on mixing tanking with healing though.

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I don’t think judging by how much you have healed is a good way to find out whether you are useful or not. The main thing is not how much you healed - I effectively distributed the heal during the battles? And the answer to this question will be - victory or defeat in the team fight. It is better to save (prioritize) your corr hero who does damage and stay with small numbers, than chasing a skyscraper and heal a tank that takes damage for no reason.

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Not really. Even something like clutch heals can be meaningless because it won’t tell you if those “clutch” situations were your fault or not in the first place (example, it wouldn’t tell you that you had so many clutch heals because you kept healing your team super late as stukov or something).That brings me to my main point which is that how well you did with a hero imo can be “calculated” by how well you used your kit to fulfill your role.

If you play Morales, did you constantly use grenades to interrupt enemy channels, stop enemies from comboing abilities, nerfing their healing, blow up their shields (if you went EMP grenade), etc? Did you use your ult effectively and within the proper timeframes? Did you heal the right targets and apply armor to heroes who actually needed it AND at the right time? Are you pinging Stimdrone so that people know you are about to use it and thus, they can make use of it?

If you play ETC, are you using your W to actually peel when necessary and saving his Slide for situations where it gets real benefit (like stunning an enemy to start a CC chain, interrupting an enemy diver, setting up for Mosh Pit, etc). Are you just using his ults whenever you feel like it or are you saving them properly for situations where you can get guaranteed or near-guaranteed value? Are you coordinating with your team via voice chat/text chat/pings to let them know when you want to do something like gank or set up Mosh Pit?

Using that kind criteria instead of raw stats imo is a MUCH faster and better way to get better at the game as good habits will eventually lead to good results. It helps even more if you look at replays and criticize mistakes like “why did I just use ETC’s W for negligible damage when I could have saved it to peel for when the enemy Diablo was ready to dive”?. This is also just a good general strategy for getting good at tons of competitive games.

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More importantly, Clutch Healer is a “secondary price” for healers, awarded when they neither healed the most or healed the best during teamfights. So you get it as a “consolidation price” which is kind of why Clutch Healer is not the best thing to receive. Even though technically it could be more impressive given the correct context. In general awards just aren’t really portraying the reality.

Unless you are grossly miss placed or at the very top of the master league, your win rate will always be within 2% of 50%, so win rate is a very poor indicator for performance at bronze level, unless it is bellow 30% or above 80%.

For healers:the raw healing numbers are a good indicator. Clutch healers are also good indicator (probably better than the raw healing number).

For tanks: Tank downs (kills+assists) and MVP awards like guardian, CC time.

Ofc, in both cases the MVP award is also a good indicator as a collection of stats, and it is much harder for tanks and healers to get it, so getting it means good.

At the end of the game you also get a message like “you died 20 times, 3 times less than the average at your level”. that means also good. But take these with a grain of salt, since the game will always find something good to say about you, even if you played worse than the beginner bot.

I meant hero win ratio in this case; Many people have up to 60-70% on an individual hero they are very good at (but an overall win rate over 50% or less). Most people writing hero guides here seem to be 60+ on their mains.

There is a Medivh main with an ingame Medivh win rate of 75%+ over hundreds of ranked matches, not sure if we’re allowed to name people here, but you could say he’s doing something right with that hero.