top the healing charts?

As someone who has always enjoyed healing, particularly on my Druid, I was perplexed by this statement. During a guild "meeting" the person in charge of the healers, who is also a Druid, said that Druids are only supposed to keep people topped of with Hots, and are not supposed to top the healing charts.

Personally, I pay attention to effective healing, and don't watch the charts; However, to make a statement such as this seems ridiculous.

I'm just looking for opinions, thanks :) I'd rather not be doing something wrong when I'm "beating" the other healers.

They don't have to top the healing charts to be effective, Druids are the best at smoothing out spike damage and keeping people topped up with HoTs. Don't put too much faith in charts, as long as everyone lives to see the end of the fight the healers did their job right, they can pore over the WWS parse after to see who did the most work, but survival is the #1 priorirty, not HP/s.

It sounds like he was just making up excuses so he could be lazy though.

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Q u o t e:
They don't have to top the healing charts to be effective, Druids are the best at smoothing out spike damage and keeping people topped up with HoTs. Don't put too much faith in charts, as long as everyone lives to see the end of the fight the healers did their job right, they can pore over the WWS parse after to see who did the most work, but survival is the #1 priorirty, not HP/s.

It sounds like he was just making up excuses so he could be lazy though.

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I don't disagree with you. I do not make the charts my priority, as I react to the situation, not my need to make greater numbers. However, it's as if she was telling us we should not be doing this. Most of what she was saying went against every experience I've had as a healer.

I think you may be correct with your last sentence.

Druids/Priests chart topping is relative to the difficulty of the content.

Easier content means CoH and wild growth top off the entire raid.
Hard content means a pallies holy light will actually be more then 20-30% effective heal.

BT post 3.0 is naxx. druid+priests own.
Sunwell post 3.0 pallies could do well at 70 because it required more healing.

I think druid and priest are doing good in Naxx because there is much more AoE than TBC raid, correct me if I'm wrong.

We will often see Pally is on main tank, druid you heal the raid.
But Druid can be really good single target healers with regrowth that can easily crit 8 out of 10 times and in case of emergency got a f**** good burst of healing with regrowth, Swiftmend, Nature's Swiftness, Healing touch. Boom boom boom and boom

I think, or at least hope, the leader meant that the role druids fill best is to keep the raid and tanks at healthy levels. If you have a choice of a pally and druid to fill the roles of keeping up a main tank and topping of raid members, it would be better to have the pally focus healing the tank while the druid hots up everyone else while also tossing occasional heals at the tank.

Filling that role you're less likely to top healing charts because you'll have some overheal, some wasted healing from other healers over healing your hot, and you won't be spamming heals on the tank that is constantly dropping below 100%.

If you ran a raid with all druid healers, I don't think they'd have a particularly harder time than a raid with a mix of healers. But you'd notice the druid healing the main tank/s would be higher than the druid healing raid damage.

Our resto druid tops our healing chart on a regular basis, both before and after WotLK, whether it was in BT, Sunwell, or Naxx.

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Q u o t e:
There are plenty of druids topping healing meters.

I think where the problem comes from sometimes is that you need healers who are good at working with hots. When someone has a hot on them, you have to be able to guess if that hot will heal the dude and if it can do it fast enough. Inexperienced healers sometimes stomp on hots, wasting the druid (or priest) mana and making sure that the hot-healer appears to have not contributed much.

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hay,
make haste affect HoTs please.

THX ME LUV U LONG TIME

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Q u o t e:
There are plenty of druids topping healing meters.

I think where the problem comes from sometimes is that you need healers who are good at working with hots. When someone has a hot on them, you have to be able to guess if that hot will heal the dude and if it can do it fast enough. Inexperienced healers sometimes stomp on hots, wasting the druid (or priest) mana and making sure that the hot-healer appears to have not contributed much.

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There are not plenty of druids topping the healing charts, not sure where you got that statistic. There are plenty in the top 5 though.

When the sh*t is hitting the fan (the only time that counts), no healer has time to check whether a HoT is running on someone who has taken damage. I am not sure why any dev thinks that any healer has time to scan the buffs running on someone during an intense fight to determine whether or not a HoT is active AND to decide whether that HoT is sufficient to heal that person up.

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Q u o t e:
There are plenty of druids topping healing meters.

I think where the problem comes from sometimes is that you need healers who are good at working with hots. When someone has a hot on them, you have to be able to guess if that hot will heal the dude and if it can do it fast enough. Inexperienced healers sometimes stomp on hots, wasting the druid (or priest) mana and making sure that the hot-healer appears to have not contributed much.

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The basic UI makes it almost impossible for a healer to SEE extant hots on a player. Unless the raid is divvying up each player to a specific healer to watch over them (something I've never seen), HoT healing tends to be largely wasted through sheer information overload.

I used to see hots with my grid. It was a dot in a corner.

:)

http://wowwebstats.com/ikujtruhzdcf3

(2 Drakes Up, first night of attempts) - Top - Rejuv top heal for those too lazy to click.

http://wowwebstats.com/2vdg25p5s4zd1?s=809494-861530

Full Naxx - Top when not snoozing / dpsing out of boredom.

Druids are in a great spot atm. We have mobility. We have healing options. I think we are something Blizzard should BUFF the other suffering classes off of instead of nerfing everyone into submission.

As for UI's, if you want to heal get mods. Just the way it is unfortunately.

Healing in Raids:

Judge yourself on: Who died and why: No one? Good Job. 1-2 Situationally Awareness Impaired Idiots? Their fault. Good Job. You zoned out and let people die to basic incoming dmg - Your Fault, YOU FAIL.

To best compare yourself with others, try to compare with someone who was doing your job. I am not going to compare myself with a Pallie healing the tank. Two different jobs yeilding different healing outcomes ALWAYS.

Playing a resto druid effectively requires a certain level of perfection where one bad gcd decision will mean the majority of your hots can drop off because of the chain reaction effect. You have to constantly think of 3-4-5 gcds ahead and plan what spells you will be casting when gcd opens up. The playing style isnt for everyone and wotlk makes it harder for bad druids to adjust to regrowth/nourish while still keeping their hots up. This is why you keep getting the "lifebloom got nerfed too hard" posts because some people enjoyed facerolling on their target tank 1/2/3- lifebloom macros. They didn't have to think in bc instead they got to play like an automated bot and they would get away with an acceptable healing performance for most guilds.

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Q u o t e:

When the sh*t is hitting the fan (the only time that counts), no healer has time to check whether a HoT is running on someone who has taken damage. I am not sure why any dev thinks that any healer has time to scan the buffs running on someone during an intense fight to determine whether or not a HoT is active AND to decide whether that HoT is sufficient to heal that person up.

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Actually this is pretty much one of the first things you should learn how to do as a healer. Unfortunately you don't have enough time or mana to cast big heals on everyone in your group, and therefore you manage the rest of the groups damage with HoTs. If a HoT isn't going to be enough for a player, like maybe a high-DPS player who has a little aggro, then you try to toss them a heal also.
If I know I have a high-DPS player who is constantly taking a lot of damage I always make sure they get a HoT right after the tank. Then I make sure I scan the rest of the group to see if anyone is taking minor damage so I can HoT them.

Healing meter placements is a craptastic way for craptastic healers to measure how they do.

I would suggest a better way for a healer to measure their effectiveness would be a combination of did their assignment survive, how much overheal did they have (and even this is a bit iffy depending on the event), and did the healer themselves live. Also look at who healed who in a WWS and see if the assigned healer(s) are do most of the targets healing.

DPS performance can be more easily measured looking at a straight DPS meter, healing performance needs a lot more analysis in order to see who is effective or not, pure HPS isn't always the name of the game. I tend to find healers that care most about HPS also tend not to be very good overall healers.

I love healing as a druid even though I am still really new to it. I have yet to attend a raid where my effective heal wasn't at the top and my overheal wasn't at the bottom. It will hurt a little when Wild growth is nerfed but I am not that concerned because we have other tools.

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Q u o t e:
Healing meter placements is a craptastic way for craptastic healers to measure how they do.

I would suggest a better way for a healer to measure their effectiveness would be a combination of did their assignment survive, how much overheal did they have (and even this is a bit iffy depending on the event), and did the healer themselves live. Also look at who healed who in a WWS and see if the assigned healer(s) are do most of the targets healing.

DPS performance can be more easily measured looking at a straight DPS meter, healing performance needs a lot more analysis in order to see who is effective or not, pure HPS isn't always the name of the game. I tend to find healers that care most about HPS also tend not to be very good overall healers.

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So if you take the same class+gear level. Healer A heals for 25% more than Healer B on an AOE fight. Who would you consider the better healer?

Also, being a good healer is harder than being a good DPS.

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Q u o t e:


There are not plenty of druids topping the healing charts, not sure where you got that statistic. There are plenty in the top 5 though.

When the sh*t is hitting the fan (the only time that counts), no healer has time to check whether a HoT is running on someone who has taken damage. I am not sure why any dev thinks that any healer has time to scan the buffs running on someone during an intense fight to determine whether or not a HoT is active AND to decide whether that HoT is sufficient to heal that person up.

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I do precisely this all the time. I use HOTCandy Mod, Omen, Titan Bar and that's pretty much it. I don't even use Unit Frames. I could (and I'm sure other players could as well) do that without HOTCandy if I wanted to.