Compared to tank healing on Ickus

I was running a +12 PF. It might be a druid thing… and I’m not trying to say I’m great and nothing was my fault…

But the group clearly got it in their heads I wasn’t healing enough.

On the first prideful (with 1 or 2 trash, I think) I healed about 6k hps until a spiteful kept us in combat for a long time, so my final hps on that pull was 4.5k.

After Ickus, on the stairway down to the pools before the spider boss, the tank ran down and out of los… but he came back up and we killed whatever all was in that group (honestly, I thought it was just a tentacle…). Having died in this area before by going off path, I did not want to run through the spiteful so I stayed with a shadow priest and finished off our trash. But the tank had already pulled the big guy in the middle - without one of his dps, and without the healer. We wiped… then multiple people in the group pst’d me to tell me that my healing was trash because the tank outhealed me on Ickus. The mage (who healed himself for 4k during Ickus) blamed me for only healing 70% of the healing, while he healed himself for 30%… which is a lie - because most of his heals were his absorbs, which I can’t outheal.

So my question is this: Have you ever been blamed for being a bad healer by being compared to a statistic that is totally wrong.

Also, I guess I’m wondering, I mean, I get it, that I should try to stay with the tank… but when he’s leaving a lot of his dps behind, and doing the pull instead of yelling at me… is the wipe my fault? I understand that they could blame me for not timing the key and leave… but to do the pull and wipe us.

/frustrated…

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this sort of thing happens to all healers from time to time (although, at higher levels, the respect for healers is a lot higher in my experience…so hopefully you get into higher keys soon and maybe you’ll see a shift in attitudes)

remember though - great players understand that their personal performance has a huge impact on how well a healer does - especially during difficult affixes like grievous or spiteful… (using interrupts, having spatial awareness like being in los of healers, using potions/cooldowns/defensives, not taking unnecessary dmg etc.). when this happens, healers have much more to offer like globals on dps spells and stuff, which leads to a smoother key!

my take is that typically - bad performing players will sometimes blame healing first before looking at themselves. mistakes happen from healers (me included), but i’d say far often less than the other roles. you can’t fail at anything as a healer…but groups often make it extremely difficult to perform sometimes. Some of these players measure your “skill” how well you can carry them through this adversity…rather than how well you can do when everyone is doing their job.

just brush it off, practice makes perfect sister :nerd_face:

(btw to answer your question…it’s hard to say without recording your gameplay to see what really happened…it’s a good habit if you have the software to do so…then you can sometimes review dungeons you struggled on to see when and where you could have performed better, or if the issues were something else, etc.) i started doing that when i was new to m+ in bfa, and i noticed a huge difference in my performance after that, because i learned how to manage cooldowns better.

anyway gl :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the reply, Saithis!

My feeling was - after we wiped right at the beginning because the tank pulled the hornet from the left along with the big guy, followed by him outranging me on the small slimes before Globgrob (and pulling one of the bigger guys), both causing wipes (and I think maybe another wipe to trash in between because the tank jumped ahead and didn’t pull back to me)… the shadow priest said something like “you need to heal, it’s the only reason you’re here” - which I can only assume is because I hit roots or similar… and I was thinking … wait… (I don’t think I complained about anything before that).

But then having my healing compared to the tank on Ickus - where I’ve seen good groups have the tank outheal the healer on Ickus by a fair amount…

I was trying to figure out “what do I learn from this”. Brush it off is probably the best. But I might also have found a nugget of value - probably I need to help the tank push a little harder - i.e. get around my spiteful and get to tank asap… (I could clone it, I think.)

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hi! no problem! you know, from what you’re describing, it sounds like the tank was not clear on the plan before the dungeon…is that true? there needs to be some real chemistry between the tank and healer on affixes like fortified imo…he shouldn’t just be running off out of LoS like that, especially on big pulls like that giant - and you both should be in close proximity most of the time…

and regarding heal quantity…i never track my HPS - so i couldn’t even tell you if the numbers were good or bad (since i don’t even know mine). i only track dps, that’s typically what players will eventually start using to gauge your skill as a healer.

some fights, you aren’t going to heal much at all…some players don’t understand that you should be using a LOT of dps globals on boss fights, and players should mostly take care of themselves…(well not on bosses like the lich in ToP, but you know, things that have avoidable damage). I don’t really heal much during ickus personally, so my guess is that if you were having to, people weren’t really being safe :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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It wasn’t so much LOS as range. He’d just totally take off while me and a dps were trying to deal with spiteful. Usually it wasn’t just me held up by a spiteful if I was hanging back. He would go off in the distance, pull 2 or 3 groups… not bring them back… and get close to death before I could get to him.

I have this problem a lot with spiteful if I try to drink. Because I can’t drink till the spitefuls are down. But this was just a whole other level.

I think the tank and 2 of the dps were on disc, but I wasn’t. And one of them told me after that “we usually run this comp with a friend, and he heals way better than you”… to which I replied “is he in your disc so he can hear the plan?”. I think I was the one that didn’t have the plan. But the dps was periodically getting popped by spiteful, so I try to help them… however at least one time I had a spiteful right in front of me… which I guess I should have cloned. But the tank was already long gone.

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You ran with an incompetent tank and boy are there plenty of those around. Tanking is about more than being just a meatshield, especially in M+.

Good tanks control their pull sizes and speed based on factors the group’s overall DPS and healer’s ability to keep up. Awful tanks pull like they think they’re MDI heroes and blame the rest of the team for their failings.

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I used to track hps just to make sure I wasn’t sleeping on the healing and if there were times I could improve, but eventually learned if you’re competent and use all abilities correctly hps doesn’t matter. It’ll go up in high damage situation, it’ll be down in low damage situations. Competent groups with good chemistry won’t require hps meter breaks whatsoever.

On top of what everybody else said, I highly recommend downloading elitismhelper, turning it off, and installing the details plug in to track avoidable damage. It’s the only meter I run now. It’s useful in many ways.

  1. Lets me see where I mess up and how to improve on mechanics.
  2. Lets me see which mechanics have been doing the most damage and how relate this to the group.
  3. Lets me see who the weakest links are who will need extra spot healing.
    but most importantly
  4. Lets me see who is underperforming and be ready to check them if they start with toxic bs.

I was in an HoA run that didn’t go well because someone kept pulling mobs with his pet, kept standing in bad, and was blaming me for all the wipes.
https://i.imgur.com/rXeBNWn.png could you guess who it was??

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Bingo. If I’m pulling 5k on my low-geared shaman in a +8 or whatever and we still wipe, the problem isn’t “healer sucks, should have been pulling 7k”, the problem is “people need to interrupt and stop eating swirls/cones/spitefuls”. Conversely if I’m only doing 2k on a pull because that’s all that’s needed and I’m spending >50% of my globals dpsing, that’s not lazy healing, that’s a good group.

Just stick with the tank. And ignore the haters.

Don’t ever play the blame game. Just ask “What could I have done better?” because you can’t control what others do and move on.

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As painful, bitter, and confusing as the situation and evaluation of my healing capabilities, this is close to the nugget I got out this. It’s an entirely different prioritization that I usually do. But the next time I’m in a group where the tank pushes the pacing faster than I think is appropriate… I probably have to just figure out how to stay with the tank.

I could have pushed the problem on the dps to keep up (and not die when I don’t have range or LOS to heal them) instead of on the tank to slow down.

I think there’s one added bit of difficulty here that has me mildly confused. I think in order to stay with the tank I kinda need to know exactly what the tank is pulling. If I run in an area and he doesn’t have the mobs gathered yet and might be running down a narrow path vs. pulling a side group, I need to know because it impacts how I position relative to volcanos/etc. I.e. I need to know my first and second fallback positions.

Getting back to one of my first lines in my post. It might also be a druid thing. I find that on other healing classes I can save the tank from 40 yds away within 3 seconds when I get there. Pally sac, monk cocoon, priest miracle (and pull), I don’t shaman, but I think they have something too. My druid takes at least 6-9 seconds to “fix” a problem. If the tank has no hots when I get to the pull I can’t even swiftmend anymore. I can heal about 4k/s max on someone but I need a windup. I need multiple hots, and LB on them. I can’t pump big heals and interventions on C/D like with other classes. I have to use gcds to cast HOTs that don’t do a lot quickly, but build up to sustained throughput that can be very high.

So my other lesson learned is that if they aren’t going to tell me what’s going on, aren’t going to try to work together on pacing, and aren’t going to let me in disc, then I may have to just write it off and let it go.

It sounds like the people you were grouped with were kind of jerks. I won’t try to excuse that, but on this issue, I agree with the tank. When the mobs die, you CC the ghosts and move on. They’ll expire on their own. There are a few exceptions (the labyrinth in Mists, platforms in ToP, etc.), but in general, taking the time to DPS them down is just killing the timer. As a Druid, you can spec for Mass Entanglement, which makes Spiteful super easy. When the last mobs die, you Entangle the ghosts, and everyone moves on.

Stop focusing on HPS. In the best case scenario, you’ll have minimal hps. Your goal isn’t to outheal the tank. Tanks have their heals built into their mitigation. Think DK. They take 3-4x the damage of other tanks and heal themselves, if you’re spamming them constantly, you’re wasting group resources.

Imo, track personal defensives through omnicd or the WeakAura. If someone dies without using something like alter time, it’s not your fault. I’ve been tanking for a long time, the pressure to perform is often pretty high, but anyone who points to the hps meter isn’t worth arguing with.

(unless it’s like 300 hps and you forgot to repair your gear :stuck_out_tongue:)

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I agree you cc the ghosts. But I also agree “everyone moves on”. I warcraftlogged the run and have been reviewing some of the wipes… see below.

I’ve been reviewing the run.

3 wipes I’ve looked at a fair amount. There are others, at least one makes me look worse, I think. Anyways:

First pull - especially without being told the plan we’re running, these can scare the crap out of me. PF12 - the tank pulled the hornets along with the big guy, and the fungal pack indicated on MDT. Nobody knew what to hit… wipe.

Then… tank rez’s and literally runs directly to the first pull again and pulls it. One dps and I arrive 6 seconds later. The other two dps weren’t even there. There were things to interrupt, stun, etc… he didn’t care. There are adds you don’t want to build up. He died at the 7.7 second mark after the fight started. I had 1.7s to deal with what he was doing. He took off on the whole group. Nobody was there to help mitigate incoming dps… but it was my fault. This wipe, and the next, the tank took about 85k damage (after mitigation) in the 7-9 seconds he lived. Assuming he healed all but his own health (I don’t put it past him to have pulled at 50% health, but I don’t think he did)… I still would have had to heal 60k in 9 seconds to keep up with him, which I can’t do. If I had been right on him the whole time, I could probably have healed 50-60% of that.

(Edit: just a clarification - if I was there the whole time, all I needed to heal was 3k hps to keep him at 27k health at the point the tank died. But with other people also late, his incoming damage (that I would need to heal) would still be in the 6-8k/s range. So the dps would have 9 seconds to get some stuff under control - which is doable, I suppose.)

Third pull that I analyzed - the one where I got stuck behind a spiteful. Note I did root, but I would have had to go right through the guy to get down the stairs without pulling something… I actually needed to clone my spiteful.

On this third pull, the tank pulls and one dps is with him casting into the group (the mage). The monk and the shadowpriest are not at the pull, I’m not at the pull. Now don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fine to pull, but this tank almost always pulls and sits in the mobs the whole time. On this particular pull, however, you can’t move the group (the one on the island with the mobs like 1/2 dead already). So it’s one of like 2 or 3 pulls in the instance where you should make sure everyone’s ready to go.

On this pull, the 2nd dps gets to the fight about 5 seconds after the pull. 8.2 seconds into the pull the tank is dead. Again, about 85k damage, with the incoming rate about 6-7k. I don’t think I was in range until a few seconds after the tank died.

I understand keeping the run going, continuing to pull as much as you can. But I really don’t understand not grouping up for key pulls - either for interrupts or stuns, or those pulls you can’t kite to buy more time. And I don’t understand having literally only one person in the run being held responsible for maintaining awareness on the flow.

Tank does what he wants. Dps play catchup… healer better be there to keep the tank from dying on pulls that should have had one or two adds go down or be slowed, something… but that wouldn’t have happened because the dps wasn’t there yet. Still, it’s the healer’s fault.

Some people will always blame others and they’ll never leave the 12s until they’re carried out of it.

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If you keep doing PuGs, you will have to develop a thick skin with regards to this sort of thing. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is. I wouldn’t worry about it. :slight_smile:

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your DPS died in a spot where he can release and be back in action before you can cast a 10 second rez… why wait? you can mount in that dungeon.

the lack of detail on the ickus fight bother me quite a lot… did you dispell the tank? the DoT is not meant to be healed. Did you CC the purple slime out of the group? who got hit by ickus green cross?

I don’t even expect to need healing in a +12 so… like every other forum story, this need more detail.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/Ad2nyaCjF49HTWZK

On average, the debuff was on the tank for 6 seconds each time. I could try to do that faster, but I don’t think I was terrible on it.

The big annoyance, in my opinion, is that on a Fortified week, when we 1-shot Ickus easily, why was the tank almost outhealing me on Ickus used as the metric to blame me for being a terrible healer. “Oh look, Yash is a terrible healer - the tank almost outhealed Yash on Ickus.” It was also pointed out that the mage did “a third of their own healing” on Ickus. Which you can see is almost all absorb (which I can’t heal…), and the mage took at least 50% more damage than necessary. Once corrected for absorbs, it would have been about 12% self healing, totaling 10k, which I would most likely have eventually healed if he didn’t gift of the naaru himself.

I’ve personally run my mage on Ickus on +10 Tyrannical and had the healer only have to put 3k of heals on me for the whole fight, mostly from long runs through the muck, I think.

Edit: There’s 1 other problem I sometimes have in PF. I can’t remember exactly what does it, but there’s a disease I can’t remove as a druid. I’ve been called out for not dispelling it before. But I can’t. Sometimes I warn groups that there are some things I can’t dispell. I didn’t do it this time.

Edit 2: On Globgrob, his knockback applies a disease I can’t dispell. I wonder if they were annoyed at me about this. The monk dispelled himself twice, but the priest didn’t dispell himself or anyone else. He did do a mass dispell one other time, though, but it appears to have been offensive.

I’m not saying you did anything wrong, or that you’re absolved of fault, but from reading your post and checking your armory, a couple things stand out that you could maybe try doing… up to you though :slight_smile:

  • I wish more tanks were aware of their group before pulling the next group… unfortunately, most just go go go and expect everybody else to keep up. This can be tough on spiteful especially. You have mass roots (or even just regular roots) though, so using those on spitefuls to get around can help a ton! You might also consider switching Renewal for Wild Charge. A lot of dungeons let you use travel form and that jump forward helps you move fast, or avoid hazards. You’re also running Balance Affinity, so you have access to Typhoon. This can push spitefuls out of the way so you can’t get by.
  • Your legendary is perfectly fine for M+, most people high up on the IO leaderboards run exactly that. You might try switching to Dark Titan’s Lesson and using the Photosynthesis talent. I was skeptical at first, but it’s been a very good fit for me healing through KSM.
  • Regardless of your legendary, Germination is not a good talent for M+. It’s a bummer, it was my favorite talent to use in BfA, but it’s just not good this season. Either use photo if you’re running DTL as mentioned above, or Flourish if you aren’t.
  • Convoke is a much more effective M+ heal than Tranq. I can’t see it being worth while taking Inner Peace, especially over Spring Blossoms. It adds an extra heal to Efflo, which also adds more procs when using Photosynthesis :slight_smile: If people don’t stand in your healy mushroom, that’s their fault!
  • You might consider switching to Soul of the Forest over Tree of Life. Tree is good for high burst, but SotF can also fill that niche with a clutch SM/NS/Regrowth. The pally tank I run with likes to call it the Druid Lay on Hands :wink: The SotF proc is much better served though buffing WG for both M+ and Raid healing.
  • For M+, your stat balance looks a bit off. You’re high haste and high vers, but low mastery. Mastery is a good payoff in M+ so you might consider prioritizing Mastery, then Haste. This takes time to change over, just something to consider.
  • I checked your traits on Raider.IO. You might consider running Empowered Chrysalis. You specifically mentioned that you lost some of your healing to overheal… it’s not a huge difference, but it can help there.

Anyway, take all of those with a grain of salt. Work it into your own gameplay as desired. Just remember that some groups are a good fit and some aren’t. As long as you’re doing your best, having a bad group that doesn’t jive with your gameplay is just part of the WoW experience :wink:

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Holy crap, I didn’t realize exactly what SotF could do in an emergency along with NS. - this is night and day… thank you! ToL gives higher throughput and movement throughout. But SM/NS/Regrowth would be looking at a total of about 33k healing in about 2 seconds. Yeah, that’s better than ToL… I hadn’t really thought about what it could do for a spot heal. I usually mash Ironbark along with SM since neither triggers GCD. I changed my ToL bind to /cast Ironbark; /cast Swiftmend; /cast Nature’s Swiftness. … they all go simultaneously, with NS triggerring GCD.

The run I am annoyed by is primarily due to how hard it is to get useful information out of what went wrong. I mean, I know I did things wrong, so I’m looking at that (I can certainly fix things better now if I only have a few seconds to do it…). I do believe I need to try to keep up with the tank… but spitefuls are super dangerous and I feel like there should be some allowance there.

That being said, I appreciate the comments. I respec each week, and sometimes per dungeon, and definitely for raid since I can keep up with max heals on the right raid spec, and run about 60% heals on bad raid specs. Last week (19) I assumed the key issues would be spot healing or recovering spiteful damage, and reducing issues with volcanoes. Also spiteful totally messes up my mana recovery, based on a lot of prior experience.

I’ll look into DTL. I know I’ve wanted it but was on the fence about going balance with my next leggo.

I guess I don’t want to run down each item in too much detail, but I’ll review some of the key items and adjust. The main thing is that my thrust for week 19 was based on fixing problems/unavoidable things, rather than pumping max heals on multiple people like in bursting or grievous.

Edit: My stats are off because I still have a couple pvp items I’m trying to swap out. I quit pvp till I don’t have to heal people who are getting killed in 2 GCDs from a single opponent.

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When it’s nebulous like that, don’t worry too much about trying to find what you did wrong. You have an opportunity to consider a bunch of things that you may, or may want to correct, but focusing too hard on one run probably will just make you a bit batty :wink:

It’s not about the single data point, but about the trend.

Yea I figured, I just pointed it out anyway to bring it to your attention just in case. I said a bunch of things that I thought might be helpful there. Do with the information what you will!