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Raid Rx: Analyzing your healers Part 4

Marcie Knox
Updated ·7 min read

Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. That above is the fun product of Wordle. I creatively call it "WoW WWS Healing". Click on it to give it a spin of your own.

So, if you've just randomly stumbled upon this multi-part saga on WWS meets healing, here's a lovely link to get you caught up. For the rest of you operating with mere short term memory lapses, this link right here will transport you to the example WWS we've been mulling about. But more on that after the jump.


Today brings you the latest installment of data analysis, healorz style. Having covered total healing and class comparison tactics last time, I'd now like to turn your attention to fight analysis. This is the meat and potatoes of using WWS, the place you'll spend countless hours staring at the screen in disbelief while simultaneously pulling the last of your hair out. Also, don't forget all of the pictures in this post are links to full versions.

So class, please open your WWS to Gurtogg Bloodboil (here's the WWS link, mouse over the drop down selection next to Split) and turn to the Heals tab. On this fight we went with 8 healers. Poly, Sag, and Rain were on the 3 tanks, Ithnan, Ashra, and Cirrus. Everyone but Harma, Hwesta, and Taurus were on Fel Rage targets. Rain and Aquarius are new to the fight and are working on gear.

Before embarking on this whirlwind of data, it's important to keep in mind what you're looking for. I do this in the form of questions, to both keep me on task and to be sure I don't skip something. Here's my list:
1. Did they die? What was the cause?
2. Were they using the right heals for the assignment?
3. Did they cast enough heals in the right spell balance?
4. Did they decurse enough?
5. Were they healing the right people?

If you click on the Columns button with the gears on it, you'll see some check box options for what the Heals tab shows (pict). I normally snag Death right off the top, and DPS time if I see some suspicious looking Damage Out percentages in the % Out column. Raw Heal will give you a feel for how much they tried to heal versus how much landed.

Scanning the list, a couple of things jump out. For one, the paladins seem to be spread out. Aquarius was only present (i.e. casting) 79% of the time, mostl likely since he died. To find out why Aqu croaked, click on his name. Right above the Abilities tab you'll see "1 Death 20:29". Click on the time to see a combat log of what led up to his death. It looks like a combination of Bloodboils and a Fel Geyser finished him off. The geyser damage is the result of standing too close to the person that's targeted with Fel Rage. That being said, he took about 4.7k BB dmg with no heals. More self-healing and better positioning would have saved him, but he was new to the fight, so these things happen.

Back to the over-all fight table. Sag and Taurus are 3% apart on total effective healing, which is less than my 5% rule of thumb, so it's not a big deal. The difference really is good example of how an assignment will affect your numbers, though. Sag was on tank healing, and due to the way we do Gertie, she was standing in one place for most of the fight. Taurus, on the other hand, is on raid healing and fills in for any Blood Boil soakers, should they die. I can say from experience that Taurus spend about half the fight running in and out of BB's.

Let's look closer at one of the healers. Mist, you're it. Click on his name to bring up his data for the fight. Mysteriously at this point, Mist has become Fog. WWS is all about complete randomization, to the point they change things mid-stream. Ok, whatever. I'm calling him Mist.

Right now there is a ton of information in front of you. Let's start from the top and work down. Active Presence is basically the time from Mist's first cast after the fight started, to his last before the fight ended. We've already seen this from the other table, so keep on going.

Heals to Friends and HPS (healing per second) are in light purple. Be aware that this is the effective healing, or the healing amount that actually landed on people. This does not include overhealing. HPS is the healing per second for the time that you were healing (remember active presence from above?). It is not the HPS over the entire fight. So you could have a very high HPS by healing a ton at the beginning of a fight and then not casting a single heal once you go OOM. In the realm of importance, I only use HPS for my own improvement and generally do not pay too much attention to it for others. HPS is good to watch if you've just done some major regemming or are building a haste set.

The default when you click someone's name is the Abilities tab. Under Heals you get a list of all the heal spells that count as healing for Mist. In this example all of the spells listed were cast by Mist himself. In many cases you'll also see PoM, Healthstones, and the like listed here. The Total is the total effective healing for those spells for the Gertie fight. The percentage reflects the balance of healing between the different spells.

Looking farther to the right you have Hits and Ticks, plus their averages. For direct heals you're going to have hits, or the number of times a spell was cast. For HoTs, you're going to have the number of ticks that spell ticked for. This creates a bit of a grey area, meaning you can't really tell how many times the HoT was cast from this data alone. Thus it's a bit difficult to determine if they're using the spell enough or if ticks are getting overwritten by other heals. Things like Fel Reaver's Piston can also fall under this situation.

Mist was on raid healing, not tanks, which includes trying to keep Fel Rage people alive. Because of this, I'd expect to see more direct heals than HoT's, and we see this here. I am a bit surprised by the low-ish Lifeblooms compared to the other amount of healing. To see where the LB's are going, click on Lifebloom and then at the top select Gurtogg Bloodboil. You'll get this information. You can see Mist has about half of the ticks that Rain was rolling.

On the table at the bottom, you'll see that the tanks have the majority of the LB buff gains but there's a decent spread across some raiders. Looking into the raiders that got LB (click on Quesse and then click the Gains, Buffs, and Debuffs tab), you'll see that Mist was LB'ing people that were Fel Raged. This makes sense since you need 3 stacks of LB to be viable for healing. This is difficult to do on raid healing when the damage jumps around. So sticking it only on the Fel Rages is the best use.

Tune in next time for more analysis. We still need to chat about decursing, combat log events, and the like. See you soon!

Marcie Knox hates it when she has to heal outside her comfort zone. Burn healing on Brutallus pretty much makes or breaks you. Give me back the tank loving... And as always, send your healing-in-action screenies to marcie[dot]knox[at]weblogsinc[dot]com!