Sunday, January 10, 2010

Tale Fifty Nine: Failing at Healing?

No, not quite failing. But I am beating myself over the fact that a pally is beating me at healing.

Now, I know that shammies chain heal spam and pallies Holy Light Spam.

So where does that leave me? At the bottom of the recount meters and with the most Overhealing done.

It's frustrating in the sense that this pally just started raiding with us (it's Mr. Littlebark's pally, sinking his toes into some raiding again) and he's already beating me. This also used to happen with his shammy (but then again, I can never beat shammies.)

So, it got me thinking. Am I doing something wrong? I'm rocking the Revitalize Spec (18/0/53) instead of the Living seed, since our pally tanks were having mana problems and my Living Seed ended up being an overheal anyways.

At the moment, my current stats are as follows:
Bonus Healing: 2148
Crit Rating: 17.12%

Haste Rating: 513
Mana Regen: 789


I feel like my spell power is much too low, my haste rating is still a work in progress, and for some reason my crit is really low.

Anyways, this post is more of a "speaking to myself" kind of post. I was hoping maybe putting it on paper might help me spot out the problem.

Or maybe I am over analyzing this, which wouldn't be something new.

Anyways, they say that two heads is better than one. Then I imagine that whoever sees this, and spots the problem head is better than just my head.

Thoughts and maybe suggestions are appreciated. I feel like I'm not giving 100% to my guild and I really hate that feeling.

9 comments:

  1. The way I see it... if heals are going out and people aren't dying from lack of them, the healers are doing their job. Besides, you healed my undergeared bear butt an hour after I hit 80, so you can't be horrible! ;D (and that was months and months ago when it was actually hard!)

    Sad to see ya go to alliance! They're stinky.

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  2. @Impatient: HEY! :D

    I guess I failed to look at it from that light. People aren't dying, and that's what matters.

    Hehe. Would it make you feel better if I say: I'm an Alliance with a Horde heart? I'm sure the smell has to go down some with that!

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  3. While Druids top the healing meters on quite a few fights, there are some fights that favor the other classes.

    For instance, on the first four ICC fights there is a lot of damage done to multiple tanks and not a ton of raid damage. That type of environment favors paladins.

    On the other hand there are fights in ToC and Ulduar that cause constant AoE raid damage. Those type of fights heavily favor us Druids.

    Just remember that while heal meters tell a story, you can't analyze that story in a box. You have to look at the big picture.

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  4. I think you've got a solid spec and as Impatient mentioned healing meters aren't the end all be all. That said, the soft haste cap is virtually unattainable unless you have top tier 25 man gear. My stats are pretty close, if a bit less, than what you have. The only differences are I replaced the swiftmend glyph with rapid rejuvenation and took 3 points out of celestial focus and put them in living seed. Rapid Rejuv is the bomb sauce. I never swiftmended much anyway so losing the glyph wasn't that big of a deal and there's a noticeable difference in rejuv's hps. I also found revitalize to be of little use in the group I play with so I spread those points out. At the end of the day it's all about what your group needs.

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  5. Healing meters are NOT a competition.

    Bad healer!

    Actually, no. you're obviously a good healer. But you have to change your outlook. I felt the same way back in like July last year when I was raiding still. I'd get beat by a Paladin, or some other thing, and it would really bother me.

    I stopped, looked at what was happening and saw two things. One, I was doing the healing assignment that was given to me, and Two, my targets were staying alive.

    That is the only measure of a healer that matters at all.

    Healing is not a race, it's not a Competition. Healers can only heal the damage that is there to be healed. If you are following your assignment, and your Paladin friend is healing his assignment, perhaps it's that his assignment is taking more damage than yours.

    If you're concerned about your Overhealing numbers, remember that the Ticks of our HOTs never used to count as overhealing, so it looks alot worse than it is. It took me a long time to get over those numbers.

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  6. hola!
    what Rejuvo said a lot.

    Remember that with druids using primarily hots, you WILL have a lot of overhealing. Tim is usually about 50-65% overheals.

    Part of that is class mechanics with many of our spells being HoTs.

    Part of that is going to be lag: even if you and another healer cast a heal w/ same cast time at same time on the same toon, one of them has to land "first". Also, lag will affect your response time. Unless you're preemptively casting heals on everyone, you don't know to heal until their bar drops. If someone gets that update sooner, they can get their cast off first.

    In terms of stats (are they buffed or unbuffed, btw?), I think your crit is fine. Tim only has 19%. Yes, it would be nice to see bigger hits go off more often, but Spell Power, regen and haste (and i put them in that order) are going to be more important in the short term.

    (Actually, you only have about 20 less haste than Timov. I haven't been stacking it.)

    So, follow up questions: what fights are you looking at for this comparsion, and how many healers are there?

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  7. @GnomeDruid: I often forget that the fights affects alot of the numbers.

    And the stats are unbuffed, I would think. I took them off the armory. I can't log on right now to check what they'd be buffed, but will edit that once I can.

    As for the fights, I'm looking mostly at ICC10. I do okay for the most part -its not like I'm last by alot. Just a bit. Our healing team consists of a Holy Paladin, A Resto Shaman, and myself.

    @Maer: I know, I know! I am a "bad" healer, in the sense that I depend on those recount numbers so much. But at the end of the night, everyone is going "post the dps recount" and then Im going "well, hey! what about us healers?"

    I think I'm going to try to raid without recount this week. My healing assigments don't usually die, but with a Holy Pally and Resto Shammy spamming chain heal and holy light, theres not time for my hots to land.

    Maybe I should switch to a Nourish based spec, if it becomes a problem.

    Morph: I would have to agree with you. I have all the 10 Man ToC gear (no heroic mode) and that's my haste. I've been trying to get into ToC25 but my server is Druid Friendly so I usually get told "no thanks, 3 druid healers already."

    @Rejuvo: Thank you for your PoV. You're right, of course. :)

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  8. It may be that your raid doesn't actually need 3 healers at once for many of those fights, and one of the healers can go offspec dps until you reach a boss that does need three :) (cough, putricide!!)

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  9. @Kae: Yeah, we decided to switch to 2 healers last night, with me going feral until we reach Putricide :).

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