We still have a 2 week wait until Cataclysm goes live. And so it is time to keep up the blogging, this time we’ll talk about one of the most controversial changes implemented on this expansion: Healing.

For over two years, you could say we got spoiled with a really bad healing model. For the most part every single class depended on a couple of spells. Because mana pools and regeneration got out of control and because health pools and healing numbers just didn’t match at all.

Healing on World of Warcraft became a game of who could watch the green bars go down, and heal them the quickest. Haste got so ridiculously high that you would always use your most expensive spell, with a really short (if not instant) cast and get away with it every single time. Restoration druids became rejuvenation machines, disc priests forgot about everything but shields, and so on.

A good healer was the one who could move away from bad stuff while topping people off right away. And if you screwed up your job, people would die in a second, maybe two. Because in order to challenge the high amounts of healing going on, blizzard simply had to make us take that much damage instead. That is how we went from easy Naxxramas on 3.0, to Enraged Shamblers one shotting tanks with 90k health on heroic lich king.

However things change. And in my opinion, this time blizzard changed things for the better in regards to healing. Health pools have massively inflated. From having about 40k health average on tier 10, players have about 110k health on tier 11 gear (that’s more than 100% if you’re bad at math like I am). However the healing numbers have barely changed.

AoE healing really was nerfed hard. Those spells are now cost inefficient to spam, and if you play anything like you do right now on live, you will go out of mana within less than 30 seconds on Cataclysm.  Haste is no longer out of control, so we have a lot of long casts. And you can forget about instantly topping people off. It takes time.

It looks pretty bad doesn’t it? I have to be pretty honest… my first 2 weeks healing on beta I felt like things were out of control. Healing was dead. How could they possibly screw up healing so much? Rejuv spamming was dead, I could not even keep my party at full health during an encounter. Most of the time they were hovering in between 20 and 80% health. It felt like a very slow race against impending doom, because no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to keep people at full health. I felt like I was drowning.

But then I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. It took me a few weeks to adjust, but now Im absolutely in love with the new healing model. You have to know what spell to cast, and when to cast it. I was actually using most of the spells on my hand, I had to manage my mana really carefully, and rather than complain, it makes me sad when I play live as a healer, because all I do is spam rejuvenation and wild growth on cooldown. It feels dumb…. and boring. I do sincerely wonder how the hell we managed to not get bored after 2 years of mashing those 2 buttons every single raid.

With the new massive health pools, and the new healing coheficients, raid damage has been adjusted properly. Your raid members will not die because you casted your spell .2 seconds later. Your raid members will die because you did a poor desicion, and you used your mana efficient spell, rather than your quick inefficient spell. Your raid members might die because you spammed your quick inefficient spell the first minute of the fight and now you have no more mana, or similar reasons.

I have to be honest, it will take some time to adjust. Healing will feel much slower, because you won’t be able to fill up those green bars instantly like you have been doing the past 2 years, and you will feel severely punished because mana matters now. But if you give it some time, you will learn that a good player will always manage to adjust and learn how to take advantage of things. Mana will still be a resource you have to manage, but if you play properly, and put some thought behind your spell desicions, you should not run out of mana, at least not because you did something wrong.

Bad healers will no longer be able to hide under infinite mana pools like they have for the past 2 years. Good healers will shine more than ever… in 2 weeks. Until then, have fun with the shattering!

From time to time we hear from someone that has been recently wronged by the use of meters.  I usually assume this person to be a casual player, since I can’t imagine a more hardcore player not embracing a system of measuring improvement and success, but I suppose that any type of player could develop a dislike of meters.

Lots of people have written blog posts about how awful meters are.  “Everyone uses them incorrectly”.  “HPS != DPS”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re healing recklessly or abandoning your assignments”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re causing more overheal for other healers”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re taking another healer’s job“.  “Pushing HPS means you’re more likely to stand in fire”.  “Pushing HPS means you’re going to snipe heals from other healers to intentionally prevent their heals from registering”.  “Pushing HPS means that the communists have won, there are no more French Fries, and the world is going to end”.

A few common arguments and replies to the meter bashers.

“If the boss is dead and everyone is alive in the end then I’m doing my job”

Raid success does not indicate individual success. If you’re on a basketball team and you miss all ten of the shots you take, but your team still wins you had a bad game. Winning does not change the fact that you had a poor performance and your other team members must have had good performances, in fact they needed to have even better performances than usual to counter your poor performance.

Raid success indicates enough combined individual success to achieve a kill. Raids contain players of varying levels of skill. A raid with a rogue doing 15k dps and one doing 5k dps will fare the same as a raid with two rogues doing 10k dps. Does this mean the 5k dps rogue is doing a good job because his job is to DPS and the boss died before the enrage… no.

Measuring healers by raid success means there are two types of healers, good healers and bad healers. 1 or 0, boss is dead or boss is alive. Grading yourself on a pass/fail scale is not helpful at all. If you took a course in school where the teacher would grade all tests with a PASS or FAIL grade, without marking individual answers as right or wrong you would never be able to know which problems you needed to focus more on. You wouldn’t know whether you passed with a 60 or a 100.

“If the boss is dead then my HPS doesn’t matter.  Get off my back jack!”

Why wouldn’t you approach a healer with low HPS, even after a kill? Yes the HPS was good enough THAT time, but maybe the raid group got lucky. And it is likely that on a harder encounter that healer will hinder the group. The measure of a good raid group is the constant need to improve themselves.

After the basketball player missed all their shots in the game, even though we won, you better believe that I’m going to talk to them and maybe have them practice shooting extra for the next week. Why wouldn’t you? Escaping by the skin of your teeth is NOT the way to build a strong and capable raid group. Approaching members who are performing poorly BEFORE their performance affects the group’s performance is the smart thing to do.

If your raid group notices that X healer’s HPS is really low and the raid leadership doesn’t step in to try and help that person then when you get to a hard encounter and X healer’s HPS is STILL low you’re going to be in a world of trouble.

Healing meters (HPS) simply measure what happened in terms of raw numbers during an encounter. If one person/class out performs another on the meters it probably means they’re contributing more to the success of the raid than another player. Certainly there are exceptions (mostly raid vs tank healing), but MANY times healers are grouped into a raid healing role, especially priests/druids/shaman. If the druid is doubling the priests HPS then the raid leader has every right in the world to want more druids in the raid compared to priests. Just like if a rogue was doing 15k dps and a mage was doing 7.5k, whether it is due to the mechanics of the encounter or the players involved one person is vastly outperforming the other person. If the encounter favors rogues or druids or anything the raid leader can stack that class to increase the likelihood of success.

“Using meters to measure a healer is just as dumb as using Gear Score or Achievement Checks”

No… this is nothing like basing quality of player on gearscore and achievements. Those things you can be carried through, in fact your “I’m a good healer cause the boss is dead and everyone is alive” theory is actually what the achievement check is based on. If the person completed X encounter it must mean they’re good! WRONG. They could have been carried through the encounter. This is just like assuming that because everyone lived during one of your raids all your healers are good.

Basing invites on achievements because someone would “know” the fight more than someone who had never experienced it makes a little more sense, but it won’t tell you what kind of healer that person will be.

Gearscore and achievements are things that are independent of skill. Gear is so easy to get now. Pugs stumble upon success while carrying bad players. What matters is what HAPPENS during an encounter. Meters measure what happened. They are gearscore and achievement busters. They show you who is carrying their weight and who is struggling and being carried.

When we recruit healers we do a brief armory gear/achievement check and then go right for the persons previous WOL reports. That’s where you find out whether someone is worthy of a trial.

“Too many players are buying into the fact that HPS matters when actually healing is a unique and special animal that must be judged without the use of meters.”

High HPS is definitely important. Being able to push HPS means you’re able to push the correct buttons. You cannot achieve high HPS if you are dead, if you are overhealing too much, or if you do not know the encounter. WoW is all about jumping, dodging, avoiding, and playing the mini-games Blizzard programs into each encounter… all while pushing the theoretical maximum output your class is capable of. Pressing the correct buttons is not enough. Anyone can press rejuv or shield spam a raid. What produces high HPS is being able to continue this “best” cast order or priority, to be able to maintain this performance during the heat of the battle. Many players break down when the situation gets hectic or when they haven’t yet mastered the mechanics of an encounter, they halt their healing or their performance slips drastically. HPS measures these things. And it is important to measure for each encounter because different healers, players, and classes will have difficulty with different encounters. As a raid leader it is often your responsiblity to field the team most capable of beating an encounter.

Of course it matters what a healers role is during a fight. But the meters will often tell you which healing roles are important. If the raid healers are crushing the tank healers during an encounter then raid healing is probably the focus for the fight. You’ll always want to have 1-2 tank healers, but the majority of your healers will be raid healers most of the time. During a constant damage fight like Sindragosa or Blood Queen you need healers that can push high numbers and react quickly to changing situations.

It is near impossible to measure which healers save people from “fatal” damage. That’s a favorite argument of meter bashers. “Well while everyone focuses on meters I’m healing the people that really need it”. I guess… So while the other healers are just pussy footing around you’re the one saving everyone? That’s more primadonna than the meter watchers =P

My thinking is that it takes skill and mastery of ones class to push high HPS during encounters with many moving parts. Players able to achieve high numbers are also more likely to be players that can react quickly to saving people in dire situations. Another part of being a great healer is being able to go from “healing-machine” 100% efficiency maximum output to situational “save that guy” healing by breaking your routine AND THEN swapping right back into the healing-machine mentality without missing a beat.

“People that look at meters are selfish heartless people who should shunned from society!”

What if the people that focus on meters and measured improvement/comparison are actually people that are very pleasant? What if the only difference between the nice raiders that you enjoy the game with and these people is that these people want to be able to improve their play, not just for themselves but because they have a deep sense of responsibility and caring towards the other members of the raid.

Heck, maybe the meter bashers are the JERKS! They don’t even care about their fellow raid members enough to make a sincere effort to improve themselves. They just play for themselves and don’t care about the raid members! JERKS!

Broad character attacks based on the usage of meters are fun!

“People that push HPS are bad for the raid because their focus is on other things.  They’ll probably just die in fire”

That or they’ve elevated their game to a point where they’re able to dodge the same amount of fire as you and I, but maintain a higher HPS at the same time!  You don’t have to focus on one or the other.  In fact if they do die in fire their HPS goes to zero and that will be reflected on the meters.

In reality the meter watchers are probably some of the people with the firmest grasp of encounter mechanics.  Part of pushing their personal performance involves mastering the mechanics of the fight so that they can continue to maximize their output.  If they don’t master the mechanics they will slip on the meters, since this is their perfered form of measurement that would be unacceptable to them and they’d work to master the mechanics.

As I mentioned earlier many encounters require you to be able to alter your positioning or spell selection momentarily.  The best healers are able to do this and quickly regain their bearings, falling back into their “best” rotation.  Healers that get overwhelmed when they’re the target of Pact, Oozes, Ice Blocks or Ghosts are not going to be the same healers focusing on meters.

If you’re good at meters then you’re probably good at encounter mechanics, it just makes sense.

“Pushing meters or ‘sniping’ heals is bad for the raid group.  It means you’re lowering other people’s healing in a blatant attempt to beat them.”

There’s always a lot of talk about heal “sniping” when it comes to meters.  The argument is that meter watchers are figuring out who the other healers are about to heal and then healing that person first…  This is a stupid argument.

First this would require you to have an addon to track other healer’s targets and spell usage.  These addons exist and some people use them.

Secondly you’d have to take your queues on who to heal from this addon.  This means that rather than watching green bars and reacting to damage I’d instead be waiting for other healers to react to green bars, then watch them start a heal, react to their heal by choosing their same target and casting a heal that gets off quicker than theres. 

Most spells are instant or in the 1.5s range these days.  If it takes me 1s to realize someone needs a heal and 1.5s to heal them that’s 2.5s to swap and heal a target.  If I’m adding in a middle step, waiting for someone else to recognize a need for a heal, myself recognizing they’re about to cast a heal, and then healing the person I’m building in an extra 1s AT LEAST.  A meter watcher would get better results simply reacting faster to the GREEN BARS not the addon which shows which healers are casting what spells.

And this is exactly why people push high HPS, they react quickly to the green bars.  They have the right spells ready and apply them faster than the people who are slower to react.

This argument is also dumb because a ton of healing is preventative or pre-cast.  A druid rolling Rejuv isn’t sniping heals, they’re just casting HoTs on everyone.  Breaking their Rejuv rotation to cast a nourish on a target after reacting to another healer casting a spell would lose them HPS.

Silly.

“Healers have different assignments.  It’s impossible to compare healers like DPS”

This is only true for raid healers vs. tank healers.  If the tank healers have the tanks locked down then the raid healers are free for HPS comparison.  In 25 mans there are often 4-5 raid healers who can be compared fairly.  Maybe one class is just exceptional on an encounter, that doesn’t change the fact that their HPS is higher!  If a raid leader has the chance to pick between a resto druid and a flash of light raid healing paladin on the BQ encounter then you bet they’d pick the druid.  Same roles can be compared.  And you’re put in same roles often.

“Pushing meters means that there is less for other healers to do.  They might get bored or feel like they’re not important parts of the team”

Okay.  WoW is played by people, people are emotional.  That’s the nature of the beast.  Certain things are acceptable to get upset about.  If loot isn’t distributed fairly, if someone is being called out publically and in an inappropriate manner, if someone sits too often…  But if someone comes to me and complains that another healer in the raid is healing too much… well that’s not something I’m prepared to address.  That’s the old “He’s working too fast and making the rest of us look bad” argument which we hear about from time to time in failing businesses.

This isn’t the union.  You don’t have your allocated healing to do.  Healing is a competitive game.  This is why, for the most part, I don’t assign raid healers by group.  If someone is capable of pushing outside the bounds of their assignment I’m not going to limit them just because another healer needs something to do.

Flip it around.  How bored would the superb healers be if you forced them to heal their 1/5 of the raid group and nothing more?

“Meters are often used incorrectly.  I was on dispel duty and so my HPS was lower than X person”

If you take a ruler and measure the width of your keyboard, but read the ruler incorrectly, whose fault is it?  The ruler’s?  The keyboard’s?

No dummy, it’s your fault.  If your raid leader can’t properly read a ruler then maybe you need a new raid group.  Let me tell you, after 5 years of raid leading I can guarantee that leading a raid is harder than reading a ruler.

Meters are a tool.  It isn’t the meters fault that people can’t read them properly.