overhealing
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Does overhealing matter?
An interesting question came up in the WoW LiveJournal community early today: what does overhealing mean? At first I was a little surprised at the question, but then I realized they meant it not as "what is overhealing?" (to which the answer is that overhealing is the portion of your heals that would push the target past max health, and thus is in a sense "wasted"), but rather as "what does overhealing say about your healers?" As a raid healer, my perspective agrees with most of the LiveJournal commenters: if your healer isn't having mana issues, don't worry too much about overhealing. It's going to be a natural consequence of proactive healing spells (Prayer of Mending, all HoTs, Earth Shield). In addition, most classes' big heals are too big to be used to their full extent all the time - to take an example from one of the comments, if I wait until targets are 10k in the hole before hitting them with something, we'll have a lot more deaths. Finally, sometimes overhealing can be actively helpful, as in the case of talents like Serendipity. I'd rather overheal by 1k than fill the hole exactly, because then I get a chunk of mana back. However, if a healer is massively overhealing (the precise amounts to look for depend on the class), and is having mana issues, it can be a useful indicator that something is wrong with their playstyle - or they have a lot of latency. So, in summary: don't worry about it unless they're going OOM. Healing meters still suck, even the overhealing meters.
Latest Beta build kills spell downranking [UPDATED]
A new build has hit the Wrath Beta server tonight, and while it's minor enough that it doesn't even fix quite a few bugs from last build, it does have a doozy of a change: Blizzard appears to have killed downranking, the practice of using a lower rank spell (usually, but not always, a healing spell) to save mana, prevent overhealing, or apply an attached buff or effect. They've done this by making all lower levels of a spell cost one high mana cost, sometimes more than 100 mana higher than the highest rank. Right now, it's looking like all these spells are now a percentage of base mana.
Raid Rx: Overhealing ftw?
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. Zomg, my banner has already been replaced by the Sunwell! /cry If you missed it, I give you an uber Raid Rx picture of the same theme. Who says healers aren't tough? Waaay back when dinos first started populating Un'goro Crater, raid healers had many methods of seeing whose liquid excrement would travel farther. Amongst these, the universal and most prized of those contests was Overhealing (OH). The less you overhealed, the less mana you were wasting and the supposedly better you were at healing. If you recall my Mana Conserve reference last week (how could you not?), people devoted time creating addons to eliminate wasted heals and these mods quickly became required by guilds everywhere.
