HPS – Meter Obsessions

Now that foundry has been out for about three months and a lot of guilds/players have portions of it on farm, I’m seeing a startling increase in how skewed healing meters look (in favor of one particular class. I’ll give you a cookie if you can guess which one.). I’m also seeing a disappointing amount of people who vastly overvalue that information.

A lot of this comes in the pugs I’ve been venturing into, but sadly, I’m seeing some of it in our progression team as well. Now, don’t get me wrong, a little friendly competition on farm content is all good, but it concerns Neph and I when it seems apparent that one ore more players (on and off the actual healing team), seem to misinterpret the meters, or use them to make assumptions or berate others about their “performance.”

I’m hoping to dispel some of that misinformation here.

Warlords – Promises Made

With the announcement of warlords came specific information on how Blizzard wanted to change how healing worked. They saw how, in the last few weeks/months of Siege of Orgrimmar, the only healers that really “mattered” on farm content were disc priests and holy paladins, simply due to the inevitable sniping that comes from boredom and being overgeared on farm content. Shields were just so much more immensely powerful than actual healing, and geared healers could top people off so quickly that hot-based specs like resto druid and holy priests just looked like a waste of a raid spot.

Blizzard proclaimed that they would “fix” this in Warlords. In their own words:

“One of our goals for healing in Warlords of Draenor is to tone down the raw throughput of healers relative to the size of player health pools. Currently, as healers and their allies acquire better and better gear, the percentage of a player’s health that any given heal restores increases significantly. As a result, healers are able to refill health bars so fast that we have to make damage more and more “bursty” in order to challenge them. Ideally, we want players to spend some time below full health without having healers feel like the players they’re responsible for are in danger of dying at any moment. We also think that healer gameplay would be more varied, interesting, and skillful if your allies spent more time between 0% and 100%, rather than just getting damaged quickly to low health, forcing the healer to then scramble to get them back to 100% as quickly as possible. […] All of these changes apply to damage-absorption shields as well. Additionally, we're toning down the power of absorbs in general. When they get too strong, absorption effects are often used in place of direct healing instead of as a way to supplement it. We will, of course, take these changes into account when tuning specializations that rely heavily on absorbs, such as Discipline Priests.”

~http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/13183878/dev-watercooler-building-healthy-gameplay-3-7-2014

So in theory, shield classes would stop nullifying actual throughput (healing) classes, and players would spend more time around 80% health, allowing hot-based classes to increase in value.

As the end of the first tier draws near, the general consensus from the healing community?

“Nice try, Blizz.”

Warlords – Reality

So as it stands now, despite blizzard’s attempts, healing is similar to how it was in Siege, with hot/throughput classes being undervalued, and shielding classes being overvalued. Blizzard did nerf both shielding classes: holy paladin mastery took such a heavy hit that it went from our best stat in MoP to our worst in WoD. Disc pw:s took at 15% nerf in 6.1 that helped, but didn’t solve, the problem of disc. In progression content, hot-based classes can keep up with shielding classes for certain fights, but on farm content, as always, one bored disc priest can make the rest of the healing team look rather unnecessary.

Here are some interesting images to drive this point home, from our most recent raid day where we got our first Mythic Beastlord kill (yay!). Here is the overall healing done throughout the day on various pulls.

Now, warcraftlogs has this nifty thing called “Raw Healing,” where it measures how much healing each healer actually did in the final column. In other words, if shielding classes weren’t sniping, and forcibly converting people’s heals to overheals. Behold.

Amazing, isn’t it? I’m not saying this is the shielding classes’ fault. It’s just how they work right now.

Here is another pair to compare, from our most recently done fight (a wipe on M Beast this Thursday).

Healing:

Raw Healing:

Healing Per Second

Pardon the crude picture, but I think it just sums this up too perfectly. It is stolen from holybouch’s

blog, which I highly recommend for any healer, but especially holy paladins.

Check out his post on this topic here:

http://holybouch.com/2014/12/17/my-hps-is-bigger-than-yours-why-hps-isnt-everything/

His home page:

http://holybouch.com

The general consensus on various healing blogs can be summed up as follows.

Yes, healing meters matter.

They should look like this.

• Healers

• Blood DKs

• All other tanks

• DPS

Articles for Further Reading

In addition to the holybouch article linked above, I’d highly recommend…

“The Right and the Wrong Way to Read Healing Meters”

By Olivia Grace, previously of Wowhead, currently of Blizzard

http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/20/the-right-and-the-wrong-ways-to-use-healing-meters/

Healing Podcast Discussions (multiple)

By Hamlet of Icyveins and Dayani of Healiocentric/Wowhead

http://iam.yellingontheinternet.com/tag/podcast/

The second one is actually not an article but a link to a series of healer podcasts, for those so inclined.

Conclusions

Please don’t misunderstand me and think I’m calling you a bad healer if you’re the guy at the top of the meters, because that would be ridiculous. Good healing is good healing, and we’re proud of you!

But if you’re not at the top of the meters, and you’re not a disc priest, that’s just kind of by design at the moment, so don’t get disheartened! Learn to check out “raw healing” on warcraftlogs and use that to measure and seek improvement.

Conversely, if you are a disc priest, go easy on the heckling of your co-healers in your group/pug. You may be a great player, but topping the meters doesn’t prove you’re the only great player present. Please have some understanding about the state of the game right now, and turn off your healing meter if it’s stressing you out or making you feel disappointed.