The more I delve into healer logs, the more I realize they are a mostly-useless metric by which to gauge how good a healer is. My best logs are when I’m surrounded by terrible healers in a pug and dps are taking unnecessary damage, my worst are when I’m running with rockstar healers.
Once in a great while there will be a fight that has something in it that I can use to really assess a healer’s skill or knowledge of a fight (Fyrakk Aflame dispels comes to mind). Aside from those and looking at raw throughput, what are you all using to self-assess?
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There’s too many variables with healer parses and they can be easily manipulated.
- Bringing less healers than what is typically brought or if 1-2 die during a fight will almost guarantee you a purple or orange parse on those fights.
- Underperforming healers usually lead to the other healers overhealing less and getting better parses.
- Healers can actively coordinate with each other to give each other orange parses by just having 1-2 healers spend most of their time doing dps.
What makes an actual GOOD healer?
- Proper understanding of their specs cooldowns and healing cds and when to utilize them. This expands further into proper builds, trinkets, equipment, etc.
- Being able to work with the other healers as a combined team effort. Healing isn’t a solo focused game unless you’re pugging.
- Knowing how to manage their mana.
- Being able to do a reasonable amount of dps while still healing.
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Maybe my question should be 'what are you showing other people to showcase you know what you are doing? or probably in my case not doing?" #4 Dps is a REALLY good one, I like that, i’m miserable at SWP and HF uptime as holy and need to work on that one badly.
I’ve been guild shopping lately and had a recruiter gush over my recent 99% H Igira kill. That’s what initiated this question. A healer DCed during the pull and I’m overgeared for the fight…that doesn’t feel like an honest metric. I’d rather be bringing better data to potential recruiters but I’m at a loss of what to be showing them.
This is way in the weeds but I’m shopping for Mythic content and I really don’t want to shelling out $ to server xfer every week because I’m beneath or beyond the guilds’ expectations.
honestly, for healer logs, what matters depends on the spec. for holy, you should be looking at things like PoM/CoH casts, how you’re using things like Salvation/Hymn, GS, etc.
like, a friend of mine asked me to look at a Holy Priest his guild was looking into recruiting and despite having a high parse, i looked into his log and he was doing several things wrong. his CPM for PoM/CoH was low, he was basically sitting AFK, he was constantly healing people on 90%+ life when they could just be passively healed by HoTs, etc.
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For raiding, indeed, logs have some value but often very limited value. Your healing parse depends on a lot of things. Funny, you get pug raid leaders asking that healers have a certain HPS or they will get removed. You also get healers that know how to snipe heals from others.
In a proper raid group healer CDs ought to be properly coordinated so that they dont overlap, for one. Then the value of healers would be more easy to see. Also, the best healers are the often the ones who save others on the brink, know who to prioritize (such as other healers and tanks) and this will never show in a parse, and the healers that are just going for HPS so as to “get all the glory” are often ignoring these others in their group and just going for the parse.
I was in a guild once, and one of the healers would often stand in fire and heal himself just to juice his own numbers. Ha ha.
Also, in my experience in guilds I would rarely see healers rescuing other healers when they easily could. They would just let them die, and the raid leader would then have at the healer who died. That way, the other healers could secure better numbers, and a raid spot.
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That’s amazing in a terrible way. I don’t have time to distinguish who is what… I see health bar amounts missing, I cast the appropriate spell to fix this. End of story. I typically don’t top up and only try to snipe PWL cases. Otherwise I’m dpsing. I think my guild has pretty strong healers this season, but I’ve still been proud of my healing and dps parses (specially our Heroic Fyrakk kill). It astounds me that healers will let other healers die at the risk of gaining parses.
Grid2 can help with that. You can set up ways to quickly distinguish who is who. You can also organize your frames so that tanks are top left, healers following and then dps.
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It’s pretty easy to gage if youre a good healer. Is everyone alive? If the answer is yes then you have your answer. The logs and HPS and what not just baffle me. Seems so silly to get that in depth on it. I remember in vanilla when everyone was watching over heals and getting bent out of shape about it. Now everything is overhealing haha.
Does warcraftlogs remove overhealing or is it a 1-for-1 comparison to what you see in details?
I’ve never bothered to look at my healing parses (tank/dps main) but anytime I go holy in a pug I’ll just rip salvation right after pull so I don’t get kicked 
Oddly Details numbers are higher, at least for damage–like I dunno, but 25% higher, sometimes more. I rarely pay attention to healing numbers to be quite frank. Lol. That is because your HPS numbers in M+ really mean almost nothing. First, you do a lot of overhealing. Second, you can get high numbers when the group is bad–mostly because they are missing all the kicks, standing in fire, messing up mechanics, you name it.
As for logs, the healing numbers do not include overhealing, but you can see overhealing by clicking on, drum roll please… “Overhealing.”
Imagine that. What brilliance.
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It’s more or less a 1:1 to details.
Overhealing wise we’re doing on average about 40%.