How to use World of Logs to review Healing

[Zaviji]

How to use World of Logs to review Healing

Healing Meters can be incredibly useful, if you know how to use them -- though they can also be misleading, if you don't.

If your only experience with the meters is from a dps perspective, then try to forget the whole competitive nature of the meters. Healing meters should never be approached with the thought of "who did the most healing" or "who won". Healing is a team sport and players with different assignments will do varying amounts of healing, depending upon the amount of incoming damage, the number of healers, etc. If there's less damage taken, then there will be less healing done -- and that's a good thing! Healing should NEVER be about topping the meters. The best gauge of your performance is whether your assignment(s) lived, or, if they died, whether there was anything you could have done to prevent it.

All of our raid logs get saved to World of Logs. Lavath put up a great post on how to use world of logs, which I suggest reading. His focus is more on dps, but his post gives a great overview of all the sorts of things you can look at with world of logs.

Healing meters are primarily useful to check your own performance: what spells are you using and whether they were effective, the uptime or proc rate on various abilities, etc. But, when used correctly, you can also compare yourself against other healers to help you improve your own performance.

Overview of Healing Done

First off, this caveat: the only time in which you should directly compare yourself to another healer is when the other healer has your same class and spec, and had the same healing assignment for the same fight. Healers with the same class and spec, filling the same healing assignment, should frequently have similar healing done, barring extreme circumstances (bad lag, dying early, being targeted much more often by boss abilities, etc).

If there's another healer of the same class and spec with the same healing assignment as you, you can legitimately and usefully compare your performances. If you're lower on the meters than they are, look at some of the following things:

* Was the other healer casting different spells?
* Were they getting their spells off faster (lower overheal), or using faster-cast spells?
* Did they manage their mana more effectively?
* Did you die?
* Was the other player more pro-active in healing, rather than reactive (which may also show up as lower overheal)?
* Was the other person healing players outside of their assignment, which could affect their effective healing? (Note that cross-healing -- healing players outside of your assignment -- can be either good or bad, depending upon the situation. If you're putting your assignment at risk by not paying enough attention, it's bad. If you're causing yourself to run out of mana by taking on too much, it's bad. Otherwise, it's all good. )
* Is the other person vastly overgeared, compared to you?
* Did they take any talents that you skipped, which may make a difference?

If they were casting different spells, why? If you're not sure, ask them. And if they were casting different spells, and are higher on the meters than you, try to copy their spell choices the next time around and see if it makes a difference.

Here's an image of the overall healing done for a particular boss fight.



The Graph

The graph is labeled "DPS", but it really is showing "HPS" -- healing per second. This graph can tell you two things:

(1) How quickly did you respond to incoming damage?
(2) When did people die, and from what?

HPS in general is fairly meaningless for healers: we can only heal when there's damage, so if there's little to no damage, or if other healers responded a little more quickly, then our HPS will be low -- regardless of what we're capable of doing.

It's very important to know how to maximize your HPS for when it's needed -- for example, when there's massive raid damage that you need to heal quickly -- and the graph can give you some indication of how quickly you responded to incoming damage. But when looking at this graph, you should only compare yourself against other healers that had the same assignment, since different assignments may need to respond differently.

By default, the graph only shows the 3 healers with the most effective healing and then the "total healing". To get the most use out of the graph, just select yourself and the other healers that shared your assignment -- or whoever you want to compare.

To see how people died, right click on one of the red vertical lines to view the death log for the player.

If someone died that you were assigned to heal, look at their death log to see what killed them. Was it their fault they died -- i.e. they didn't avoid damage that should have been avoided -- or was there something you could have done to save them? Did they receive any heals from you just before they died? If not, why not?

Sometimes people die and it's not to avoidable damage, but there's still nothing you could have done to save them: for instance, if the tank takes an unfortunate string of badly timed large hits, or if several raid members are going down at the same time and you chose to save someone else. Perfectly valid reasons for someone to die, but if possible, look at the log and see whether you can determine whether there was something else you could have done to save them.

The Healing Done Chart

This chart causes the most problems for people who are only used to looking at DPS meters, since you need to ignore the ranking: remember, healing isn't about "winning" on the charts! Different assignments will have different amounts of healing done, since their targets will take varying amounts of damage. If there's a lot of raid damage, then usually the raid healers will top the charts. If there's not as much raid damage, then usually the tank healers will top the charts. Different healing classes will also have varying amounts of healing done, depending upon the fight.

This chart also only shows effective healing, which means that it doesn't include any healing that was overheal. If someone is healing a lot, but most of their healing is overheal, then their effective healing will be low and they'll be low on the chart, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were doing bad. Sometimes it just means that they had lag, or that other healers, for whatever reason, responded more quickly. Or it could even mean that there were too many healers for the fight: perhaps one of the healers could have switched to dps, for instance.

However, all that said, as I previously mentioned: healers of the same class and spec with the same healing assignment for the same fight, should frequently be similarly placed on the meters -- especially if you compare over several fights or several raids. If you compare yourself against other healers of your class/spec and healing assignment, your healing amount should be somewhere in the same ballpark as theirs -- and if it's not, see if you can figure out why and whether it's something that needs to be addressed.

You can hover over a healer on this chart to get a short summary of what spells they were using



You can also select a player for more information. Once you select the player, click on the "Healing by Spell" tab.

Individual Player's Healing Done

Here's an example of what you may see on the "Healing by Spell" tab for a single healer.



Using this chart, you can get an overview of what spells you cast and how effective they were. This "healing done" for this chart only shows your effective healing -- not including any overheal amount -- but it also tells you how much each of your spells overhealed, and how often you cast each spell.

World of Logs also tracks damage absorbed via various spells such as Power Word: Shield or Sacred Shield. It's an estimated value, but it should be somewhere close to the actual value: World of Logs works hard to try to make that value as accurate as they can. Healing from absorption effects are shown in yellow.

Buffs Cast



Other important information about your own performance can be gleaned from the "Buffs cast" tab for a player. This shows you all of the buffs that you cast throughout the fight, including items or abilities that procced. You can use the information here to figure out whether an item or talent with a proc is worth it; how much mana you got back from various talents, abilities, enchants, or items; as well as seeing the uptime of any buffs/abilities you used during the fight.

If you ever see a buff and you're not sure what it is, you can generally search for it on wowhead.com. Frequently, unfamiliar buff-names are the procs for various abilities or items.

Overhealing

Just a note about overhealing, since it's widely discussed on various healing forums.

Different classes overheal by different amounts just as part of their nature. This is one reason why you don't want to compare yourself directly to someone of a different class: not only do they heal differently, they overheal differently and what is good for one class may be bad for another.

Overhealing by any amount isn't actually a problem, though, unless you also have mana issues. If you're having issues with mana and you have a high overheal %, then you may want to work on lowering your overheal to make your heals more efficient, which will help you conserve mana. If you're not having any problems with mana and your targets are surviving, though, then you likely don't need to worry about your overheal.

Healing Assignments

Healing assignments in raids tend to be either "heal the tank" or "heal the raid". Both are just like they sound: either you're focusing on keeping the tank alive, or you're trying to heal anyone in the raid who takes damage. If you're raid healing, your assignment includes the tank, so feel free to toss some HoTs or other healing spells on the tank as needed -- but your priority in tough situations should be on the dps and other healers, since the tank should have dedicated healers.

You can frequently tell what assignment someone had by using the combat logs. When you have a player's report up, click on the "Healing By Actor" tab. This will tell you who that person was healing: if a large % of their heals went to the tanks, then they were likely tank healing -- or helping out on the tanks during periods of less raid damage -- and if they had higher percentages spread throughout the raid then they were likely raid healing.



If you want to know who all was healing a specific target -- such as a tank -- then go to that player's details and click on this same "Healing By Actor" tab and you can see a chart called "Healing taken from" telling you who did the most healing to that target.

Other Resources

I've at least briefly touched on many the main things you can look at when examining the healing meters, but here's some links to what other people have to say about the meters.

WoW.com: How to read healing parses or meters - A great guide that walks you through reading World of Logs!
World of Matticus: What Healing Meters Tell You
World of Matticus: Reasons Healing Meters Suck
What makes a good healer in WoW (with a focus on holy paladins. Seems to have decent general info, but see Spey's post for a response to the paladin-specific parts.)
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Zaviji / Trillial / Tzyra (all retired)

[Spey]

Hey, thanks Zav.

I do want to comment on the Paladin forum thread you linked, however, some of which is conventional wisdom, some of which is not. It is pretty in depth so I moved it to the paladin thread.

Cheers!
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Spey

[Zaviji]

[Spey]

Oh - I meant my comments in response to it were in depth! I actually disagreed with a lot of what was said, which is why I moved my reply to the paladin thread so anyone who might be influenced could read another point of view!

Cheers
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Spey