WWS – Healpriest – raids

In the previous post, I told you to use a 5-man instance to do your analysis because it was “simpler.” (As Miraye noted in the comment, “simpler” is relative. Stats, being measures of quantity, have to be filtered and considered to extract the quality issues that help healers improve. But I digress.) This post is going to look at using WWS as the healpriest – actually, part of the healteam – in a raid.
OK, first digression. I won’t be doing this for the shadowpriest. I wouldn’t do “raid” for any dps’er. That’s because at the stat level dps 5-man and dps raid are essentially the same: maximum dps while keeping up special abilities (buffs, cc, etc.) Umm… I’ll note here that if WWS allowed you to extract which person was working on which target then it WOULD have usefulness in that area. But if you are the only hunter, then all “snake trap” numbers are yours, and if you’re NOT the only hunter then knowing which of you is being more efficient with your traps is as difficult as knowing which priest is doing better while using Improved Death. And fwiw, I wish the WWS developer would add a ‘threat generated’ value before he works on individual target identification. Quite simply, that value would be of more use to the whole party-raid. As I said, however, I’ve digressed. This post is supposed to be using WWS as a healteam member.

You still need your notes from the situation. But we’re only going to add one more item to the previous list. That is task assignment. Was there none? Was XX given tanks and YY given raidheal? Was it a ‘your group plus one’ assignment? This is what you want to note. That’s because your new analysis is: Are healers remaining on task?

Open your WWS report, tab to the “who heals whom” page, and take a look. Surprisingly, most of what you need to evaluate GROUP healing is right here, assuming you have your notes. Ready?

On the first chart you can see what targets the healers were healing. Are they healing outside their assignments? If so, you know you’re going to be asking why in a bit, but let’s look a little further. Look at the second chart (read across), at the targets who were ‘out of zone’ heals — what does their overheal look like?

This is probably the single largest problem for team healers – a tendency to see a teammate a bit lower than they’re comfortable with sending a quick heal thataway, making the designated healer’s spell a waste of mana. Now we don’t KNOW this is happening yet, but it’s possible. There are a few other possibilities. For example, if you’ve got a shadowpriest, there will be inevitable overheals. Likewise, if someone is designated to toss HoTs, they’re going to cause some overages. Finally, there are times the overheals are intentional – such as when all healers are giving at least a little love to a tank who’s facing a Big Boss. The biggest way to identify this – besides crawling through the event log to see who was doing what when – is to look at more battles. If this is a habit, you need to talk to your (fellow) healers. If it’s not a habit, or only comes on certain bosses, it may not be a bad thing. But the first look at the two charts will tell you if you MIGHT have a problem with one healer wasting the effort of the rest of the team.

Second task comes from looking on the second chart, this time intentionally looking at the players who got multiple heals. Is one healer consistently doing more heals? (remember this is showing what percentage of heals received came from which healing source.) If so, is this in line with assignments and abilities? (If I’ve got a healer with twice the +heal bonus as another, I’d expect to see higher proportion of heal from that player when he’s sharing duties.)

Note that I’ve not given any absolutes. What’s true for one healer is moreso for a group – how much is done depends on what everyone else is doing. Remember that what you’re trying to do is see places where the healers AS A TEAM can improve so that they are more efficient and effective so as to avoid being the anchor in further advancement. If you see a potential problem – a healer that may not be pulling weight – then you can dig deeper. This is one of the ways WWS can tell you if, and where, to dig.

~ by Kirk on November 1, 2007.