Is the game outgrowing 25-man raids? Are two different raid sizes just not worth keeping around anymore?A followup to her previous discussion of how post-Ulduar raiding hasn’t been as much fun for many people, with one possible cause being the normal/achievement/heroic triple kill need.
I’ll give you a hint.
It’s not HPS. You can’t spam Recount and say, “I am a good healer”. All that says on its own is “I know how to pad meters.”
This is not to say that logs aren’t useful in evaluating a healer’s performance, but it shouldn’t be a sole source of information. I’ve always felt that the best way to get a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of a new healer is to heal alongside them. But not everyone has that capability, and how are you to evaluate yourself that way? I’ve outlined a couple of tools and numbers that I reference to improve my own healing and appraise others.
Some things to note:
- I use World of Logs parses to evaluate numbers; the screen grabs are from our last Staghelm kill.
- If your raid lives, you’re probably doing fine. These are what I look at when I feel like I’m carrying someone, or we’re wiping a lot.
In Everett, Washington! I used to live there. :o
Dealing with snipers
Heal sniping is a big issue that cannot be tolerated in Cataclysm-style raids, particularly in heroics. Having a healer stray off their assigned targets can easily lead to a snowball of effects. It causes them to expend more mana than they need to be, it wastes another healer’s mana, and it puts the assigned group’s health at risk. Fingering snipers is very tricky to do, but others within your healing squad will quickly be able to point out when it happens.
In this case, you can find yourself in an awkward position, particularly if people aren’t actually dying. Wait, people aren’t dying and there’s a problem? Yes. Even if people manage to stay alive, that doesn’t make the matter of one healer’s sniping the heals of another. Even if you always continue to make progress, you are sitting on a ticking time bomb. All it takes is a single encounter that pressures healers to cause a breakdown, a single change to healing design to break all the dominoes. Not just that, it often causes frustration within the healing team that can cause drama or collapse the healing team as a whole.
There are no solutions to this behavior because it is simply inexcusable. Testing for it is rather simple, the best being to assign the suspect to tank healing then see how many non-tank targets they heal. Dealing with it can be tricky. These healers generally won’t back down because the evidence is on their side — their healing output is spectacular, better than all the other healers — yet that is the exact same thing which damns them. Healers should all be within the same average, assuming that everyone is pulling equal weight. If one healer is super-high, others low but the low ones have high overhealing, you have a sniper.
All you can do is straight-up tell your sniper to quit it or get out. Healers must work as a team; this type of behavior is not supportive of that team.
Absorbs are heals, too
Even since discipline became a real healing spec in Wrath, the issue of absorbs has become something of a touchy subject for healers. Originally, absorbs couldn’t be tracked by any of the methods that we use to track healer data because the game itself didn’t capture the information. We see this with a few other healing effects as well, even today, but most of these invisible problems have been corrected.
Both damage healed and damage absorbed is tracked by parsing tools, and they will paint the entire picture for you. Don’t let someone use this dead trick on you. Their ability is being properly tracked; the numbers don’t lie, and even if they did, deaths don’t.
In its beta, at a glance, it looks like a somewhat detailed guide for classes/specs. It has a clean, easy to read layout. It relies on “contribution” which is something I like:
Q: What is ‘Contributing’ all about?
A: Noxxic.com is focused on being a reliable resource for class information regarding end-game. World of Warcraft is an ever-changing game that is complex in class mechanics. It takes theorycrafting and testing to come up with top solutions and options for end-game raiding, a global effort. Rather than the approach being “These are the best options,” it’s more effective to display the most accurate options/information possible and then allow contributed information. Basically, anybody who feels something isn’t right or should be added, can say so using the Contribute button. This way great players can help improve and better the information on these guides. Contributing players are the core to Noxxic.com and anybody who successfully contributes to any page is listed here.
I have used this for two classes and specs I was unfamiliar with: my Frost Death Knight and my Shadow Priest. With my Death Knight, I used this more so, I saw a great increase in DPS. But I have to keep in mind that I had nothing to base my numbers on. I’m still mauling over my Shadow Priest, I get mixed results in dps when it comes to her. So I’ve been swapping between Noxxic and a ShadowPriest thread I found. Perhaps its too early to write a “review,” considering I found this last Wednesday. But I’d love to hear opinions on it; take a glance at this site, tell me what you think. Is it comparable to sites like Elitist Jerks or WoW Insider?
For a friend… Not sure how good this site is, just putting the link up for reference.
Veritas Crafts on Etsy makes super awesome WoW-themed jewelry, and I know a lot of my followers are classy ladies who might enjoy this (or guys with a classy lady). They also make True Blood trinkets if that’s your thing.
I really love the Tot4W ones :3
Oooh. Shinies…
I’ve been pvping since i was a baby hunter, I don’t consider myself great but definitely decent. I am a wrath baby, I made my way to 80 on my hunter from 70 from merely doing Alterac Valley (this was pre-nerf, so I was given a ton of experience for every cap and win, took me three days from 70 to 80), and ran a Protection Warrior in both BGs and World PvP between raiding and school. When Cataclysm hit, I dabbled in Arena but not much. I’ve ran a few bgs here and there. I’ve always ran alliance, I’ll be honest, and we’ve always gotten that reputation of sucking. I always sigh and want to blame it on the “Oh, Blizzard favors Horde” or that “We’re not as organized as the Horde.” They may or may not be as organized, I wouldn’t know; though my experiences on my baby goblin rogue could probably prove that as false (but New players are involved, thus not something to go by.) Though after two weeks of straight battleground hopping with various toons, likely obvious to the experienced, I began to pick up on these tiny rules, that funny enough, seem to work.
Fight on base/flag. I, as well as many (more than I) experienced PvPers, cannot stress this enough. Fighting on flag can help you steal or defend this base/flag. Especially if there’s a meter involved. I believe the longer and more players of a faction involved, will push that meter into your favor.
You cap it, you defend it. I picked up this quote from a random Battleground Player, its simple and straight to the point. Defended flags/bases tend to go into your Faction’s favor. Granted, one can’t defend all by themselves against a flux of attackers… which brings me to my next rule!
Less than three. Majority of battlegrounds run between 10 and 15, you see less than three defending a flag by all means join in. I’m aiming this more towards Arathi Basin and Battle for Glineas.
More than four. This is to counter the previously mentioned rule, I feel that more than four guarding is overkill. Make sure you have at least one healer at base or flag. If not and you are a healer, politely ask if a dps/meat should would join a different group in attacking or defending to help improve the game.
Don’t leave a lone healer to defend. I’m sure healers would more than love to heal you! Its what they’re there for, they’ll heal you when you take on that group of attackers. If they’re all by themselves, they can only last so long healing themselves when getting beaten on. :(
Resilience. Everyone has to start somewhere, right? More resilience the better, this shouldn’t stop you from doing them but refraining from capturing that flag when you have less than 2000 resilience and there’s a fully decked healer or meat shield works wonders. Yes, you’re probably the fastest class but there’s always that stopping point where the opposite faction has you in a corner. Squishy is bad… ><
For now, that’s all that I can think of/remember, I’m likely to update this as I continue on PvPing. If I happen to miss, or just plainly wrong about, something. Let me know! :D
Either I’m just not looking closely, or some of the blogs don’t end up on my dashboard. ><
