Why healing meters suck
by Mike Schramm 
Jan 8th 2009 at 9:00PM
Matticus also has a guest blogger on his site (I posted about Phaelia's guest blogger earlier today), and he's got a great post up too, about healing meters and why they just aren't helpful to anyone. Damage meters are well known to be disliked by many players -- while they can often show some DPSers where they fit in the general rankings, they're usually still not a great indicator of performance (and when DPS gets really involved in beating the meters, then things go bad quickly).But healing meters are even worse. Given all of the crazy mechanics in the game (from armor and self-heals to situational abilities and AoE heals), they are very rarely (if ever) a valid interpretation of who's doing the healing and whether they're doing it right or wrong. And as guest blogger Ulkesshern says, more healing doesn't make a better healer anyway -- overhealing and spamming big heals do not mean you're a good healer, though they may get you higher on the healing meters.
There is one good word for healing meters, and that's to give the healer an ego boost after you show off the DPS meters at the end of the instance (usually they're on the bottom of DPS, and so when you switch over to healing, they're happy to be back on top again). But Ulkesshern makes a good point: for anything worth tabulating or tracking, healing meters are not to be trusted or followed.
Filed under: Paladin, Priest, Shaman, Analysis / Opinion, Guilds, Raiding, Bosses, Buffs
Reader Comments (Page 4 of 4)
treason Jan 9th 2009 11:18AM
"1. It's a good indicator of who isn't pulling their weight, if a healer is very low on a fight where a lot of people need heals, that's an indication that they are being lazy or are just a bad player."
Really? No, its not.
If they have a lot of overheals, and not many heals, it means their latency is lower than other players.
If people are dying, it means people are casting the wrong spells, or there aren't enough good assignments of healers to people (or your raid is undergeared) or your raid is taking too much dmg.
Disc priests and HOT players assigned to OT's will have abysmal numbers on the meters, but they will do their job better than the higher scoring members would (shields and HOTs topping off a character are *very* good at keeping people up, very bad at showing up on meters).
"2. Whatever small ego boost healers get from the Healing meters is sometimes our only motovation."
Ahh, then you play one of the classes and constantly have the assignment that allows you to do so. Usually the looking at healing meters prevents raids from effectively assigning healers the most beneficial ways as they are aware that will "tank them on the heal meter".
THE ONLY THING a heal meter does that is is record what spells a person is casting. That is *only* good to see if a class is spamming the correct general heal (for instance, to get on a paladin case if only casting holy light).
Cody Jan 9th 2009 11:39AM
Healing meters don't suck. They're useless as a tool to monitor a healer's effectiveness, but they don't suck. They should be viewed as nothing more than an extra little tool to watch while raiding, nothing more.
I wish it could track effective heal per mana used. Now there's a stat that would provide some value.
Our COH priests CONSTANTLY top the effective heals charts, AND the overheals charts. Why? Because as soon as someone gets so much as a bruise, they spam COH. Yes, this gets them some good effective heals, but it's mostly overkill. Here's the big difference, though: they all call for innervates. Therefore, they're outhealing me (druid) by a small margin, yet it's requiring double the mana to do it.
So, someone put this stat in for me into WWS or recount, please (effective heals per mana used).
Tejiri Jan 9th 2009 11:51AM
Why is there an automatic assumption that using heal meters will encourage healers to stop being effective and start competing to be top on the heal meter? Are the people you heal with just that egotistical?
I use heal meters religiously to see where to best place my healers in assignments. If someone has low latency, I'm not assigning them MT/OT positions; they're raid healing or backup to the MT/OT (ie Patchwerk Hateful Healer). If someone has low overall healing but is glyphed and spec'd for HoTs, I communicate to the flash spamming pallys and priests to let the HoTter do his job and not override his HoTs when someone is at 80% and not taking consistent damage.
My raid leader never looks at the healing meters. He's got me to do that. My healers don't rank themselves on the HPS or the Overall; they race to see who has the most dispels or how many HoTs we can stack on someone. They take more pride in a job well done than in a chart.
Create the climate in which you want your healers to thrive, and use the meters like gardening tools. Don't discount their use just because you can't effectively use them.
Dries Jan 9th 2009 1:08PM
Also, I don't like it when people consider overhealing to be a purely bad thing. As a paladin healing the MT, you're gonna win overhealing no problem. Now, as long as you keep up the MT you do your job fine, and any overhealing is extra. A safety if you will. So long as you keep your mana and target up, overhealing's pretty irrelevant.
Obviously a class with direct heals only will have most overhealing etc. A priest with smartheal CoH wouldnt.
Linkin_QD Jan 9th 2009 12:41PM
Treason said...
Overhealing is not something to worry about.
If you're not running out of mana in fights, it doesn't matter how much overhealing you do. Period. Nada. Not a thing to worry about.
Someone with a clue! I see a lot of non-healers and a lot of clueless people here on this topic. First, recount shows effective healing and even has an over heal category if you're worried about it. Treason said it best though. Over healing doesn't mean a thing if you don't run out of mana. Anyone complaining about over healing when no healers are running out of mana should just leave the topic to people who know what they are talking about. Second, people that think a MT healer should ONLY heal the MT are retarded at best. As a Druid, if I'm assigned MT heals that means HoT up the MT and raid heal. As long as you know you have enough mana to never let the MT die it's very helpful.
Healing meters show numbers. Same as damage meters. You need to understand the numbers to make them useful. The people complaining about the healing meters are the healers with slow reflexes and those who chose poor gear itemization and can't sustain healing throughout a long fight. If you're assigned 3-5 people to heal and your sitting on 80% mana and ONLY healing those 3-5 people, don't expect to be high on the meters or even considered a good healer. YOU know your character/gear better than the person giving out healing assignments so as long as you can cover your assignment, heal as much as possible.
Kjelin Jan 9th 2009 1:49PM
Honestly I agree with none of this post. Both healing and dps meters are extremely valuable for breaking down preformance by people in raids. Learn to use them properly and for even more accuracy start logging your raids so you can create wws reports.
David Ogletree Jan 9th 2009 1:45PM
Don't listen to this person. Healing meters are useful. This person is so bad at the game they think the only reason for meters is to be on top. There is a ton of information you can get from healing meters if you know how to read them. It is very easy to tell if somebody is slacking. It is very easy to tell if somebody is healing the wrong person. It is very easy to tell if the person is using the wrong spells. It is very easy to tell if the person is eating a sandwich and not paying attention. All these things are important for a raid leader or class leader to know. If you just look at who is on top of any meter you really suck at the game.
tanknspank Jan 9th 2009 2:02PM
Healing meters are awesome if you use them right, just like damage meters. The reason I'm a huge fan of recount is because it can brake down damage and healing into percentiles, show a person's overall healing based on what heals they use and evaluate efficiencies as well as show if a person is relying too much on a single heal. Your priest doing 70% of heals through CoH? Better yell at the deeps to watch their positioning more(Or get more FR get :P). Just a raw list of top heals if horrid, but most meters offer a lot of feedback that shouldn't just be ignored because the meter itself stinks.
Jon Do Jan 9th 2009 2:02PM
The biggest problem I've had with healing meters in raiding is they can be inaccurate or situational, but they are treated as gospel.
For example, one meter credited Prayer of Mending to the person it was on instead of the priest who cast it.
Another problem is that I have been in situations where one healer's assignment took little damage while another healer's assignment took heavy damage (thus obviously impacting the meters).
The bottom line is downing the boss is the goal, not rocking the meters.
yaja Jan 9th 2009 3:25PM
I will agree that looking at a healing (and/or dps) meter and saying "you aren't top, you suck" is useless and no help at all. you do have to know how to read the data and what different classes bring to the table.
HOWEVER, I have however run with enough pugs (5 man and raids) to know that the people that complain the loudest that meters suck (be it dps, healing, whatever) are also usually the ones that are at the bottom and do not pull their weight.
Oldmanzag Jan 9th 2009 4:05PM
I have been an officer, guild leader, and overall healer in and out of all those positions. I have never found healing meters to be "suck". Most of the time the best healers have the lowest over healing, and ironically the worst healers have high over healing. That speaks for miles.
The only "healers" who have any right to complain about the meters are Discipline priests in their revolutionary struggle to become PvE useful. In my experience the best healers are easily recognizable by charts when studied over a period of time.
Goodluck to anyone else who uses some measure aside from statistics to decide who their best healers are.
npm Jan 9th 2009 5:08PM
I think healing meters can help pinpoint problems. If you have someone healing at 1/4 or less what everyone else is doing on a regular basis, then perhaps there's an issue with their UI or technique.
Extremely Poor Article Critique Jan 12th 2009 10:01AM
The "Healing" tab in Recount, if you'd pay attention when you went into the graphing of it, is EFFECTIVE healing. Meaning these are heals that actually, well, healed.
Healing meters are not as significant for RACING as DPS meters are but their data is valid for purposes of research, weeding out issues, and finding players that are flat out under preforming.
They have an extreme wealth of uses to correct poor play, and to measure skill. This doesn't have to include "topping" them, but topping effective healing, especially if by a significant margin, does often indicate some type of skill gap if it's a repeat occurrence.
To sum it up: Healing meters are significant. Period. Fact. Case closed. End of story. Anyone who says otherwise is clueless, using them for the wrong reason, or simply a mediocre healer desperately trying to cover something up.
Hugo Feb 4th 2009 3:39PM
I have to completely disagree. "damage meter" is just a tool to collect/organize data.
Without proper interpretation and context, most, if not all, information is useless (or tends to be badly used).
There's a pletora of data that you can pull out of "damage meter" addons (or WWS service), besides the infamous "damage done" tab (or healing done, in this case): mana gained, dispells, who healed who, who took damage, who damage what (for example: eggs, orbs, totens and whatnots that spawn during boss X), and the list goes on. Besides, there's your raid group formation and assignments (aka context) which gives great depth to the information collected.
If a guild only uses it to trash the "bad dpsers/healers", that's to bad (or to lick the asses of the top-31337 guys). There are others using it to fix whatever is broken in their groups and moving on the content.
To say that the only good thing about "healing meters" is to boost the healer's ego is just plain stupid, and shows that you (or whoever) can only look at the "healing done" tab of your damage meter (and care not for anything else).
You might be a Twilight Vanquisher since late November, and a Magic Seeker on your realm, but you really sound like someone on the opposite side of the spectrum.
zmzx Feb 9th 2009 1:41PM
just because you aren't good at healing you don't have to say meters suck. I look/focus mostly at overhealing done.