[00:01] easily the most misunderstood metric in all of World of Warcraft. Healing per second. Now, when it comes to doing big numbers, big healing, and big damage, yeah, it's very fun, right? So is getting a lot of DPS, looking at damage
[00:14] parses and how people did more damage. That's all really good for you as a player to learn from, and it's of course good for doing dungeons faster, killing bosses quicker. It's all good stuff. HPS doesn't tell us how good a healer is,
[00:27] good information and we need to talk about why that is. This is easily, like parts of WoW. And so, I think it's really important to dive into it for a whole video. So, hey, my name is Vaz the healer. And if you like this kind of
[00:41] content, hit subscribe. It mean a lot to me. Hit the thumbs up if you want more job, and the support has been incredible. Thank you all so, so much. Let's dive in. Okay, so for the completely uninitiated, when we refer to
[00:55] parsing, what we're talking about is a Warcraft log. You see, your game is a combat log. You can turn on advanced logging and then upload the files that you get from playing the game over to something like this, Warcraftlogs.com.
[01:08] And when you do this kind of thing, you can get a whole bunch of data on certain dungeons and boss fights, how everyone did in terms of damage, what was the damage that they did in that run. And you can even click in and get all sorts
[01:21] of useful information as to how many times a move was pressed, how many times uh a proc went off, where the damage incoming was, why did your tank die. There's a million pieces of information that you can get from logs. Now, when it
[01:33] comes to damage parsing, this is actually incredibly useful information as if you were trying to understand better about what you could do on a boss fight or in a dungeon. If you were an elemental shaman or even a frost DK in
[01:46] this case, you could come over to these logs on this web page and you could doing, the build they used, their stats, all that good stuff. The DPS tells you second, and kind of what that looked like in the dungeon. There's even a
[02:01] of the dungeon if you want to go and watch exactly how they pulled and how they played step by step, pull by pole. It's incredibly useful information. And trying to help improve your damage or even your tanking. If you're trying to
[02:17] learn more about healing, though, you can learn quite a lot about healing in logs. The problem is healing per second doesn't really show you that information. Now, what makes heal parsing bad compared to damage parsing?
[02:30] damage versus healing is done. You see, when you do damage, there's always a isn't a health bar to hit, there's probably going to be one. Whether you're pack or you're fighting a boss that maybe left the arena for a moment,
[02:44] boss has to die and the mobs have to die in order for you to advance. There's a and a certain amount of health in a boss fight, right? depending on your key level and your difficulty, the amount of players in it. If it's not mythic,
[02:58] in a dungeon. So, it's about how fast you can do that dungeon. There's only so much boss health. So, how much of that boss's health bar can you do? When it comes to healing, you require people to take damage. And that's kind of the
[03:11] problem in a nutshell. Players have to take damage. This means that this is an incredibly variable number. If we only take the damage that we absolutely must take, we're left with one number. If players are mitigating and self-healing
[03:25] different number. If players are messing up mechanics or people are slow to the punch, you might have significantly more damage. So, that means that more healing per second means that more damage was dealt or one person was doing all the
[03:39] healing. And you can see how messy this gets. Furthermore, there are guilds out before, where they ask you to heal snipe your fellow healers or HPS fight for a spot on the team or for a spot on a fight, and it's really biased and really
[03:54] bad data because some healers in a small burst window will absolutely wipe the floor with other healers. It's not helpful to have four healers try to gun the most healing when typically speaking, you'll be out gearing the
[04:07] fight at one point, and you won't [music] need that much healing at one moment. Healers are best when they work together, spread out their cooldowns, and cover each other on mechanics. Healers also heal differently. So, you
[04:19] actually might get a situation where you want certain healers doing certain objectives because they're better suited for working with each other and maybe send the cooldown of a different healer who's really good at healing that style
[04:32] of damage. maybe a big burst of damage or large amounts of rotting damage or a send like two cool downs to stabilize everyone so that they can just focus on doing the rest of the mechanics until the damage is over. The list goes on.
[04:47] Now, I don't want to sound too negative here. Heal parsing is really fun and there's nothing wrong with heal parsing, especially if your whole team is in on it. I know plenty of people that they're in guilds, they're incredibly strong
[04:59] guilds, and they don't need four healers. So, for this fight for reclair, we'll bring two extra DPS and we'll have two healers. They're overgeeared. They're able to pump their hearts out and do as much healing as possible. And
[05:11] that is incredibly fun. And if you ever get the chance to do it, I think it is such a great time. But when you're working with a team and like your raid mythic plus and players are taking extra damage, HPS isn't necessarily the
[05:25] solution. Sometimes it needs to be smarter heals. It needs to be more intentional ramps. It needs to be a better conservation of resources for situations that you know you can cover better and you can let your team handle
[05:37] previously spending cooldowns on that maybe can be divvied up by a couple of healers. That's going to get you a lot more mileage more often than not. And remember, more damage is more stress on a healer in most typical scenarios. So,
[05:51] I was in a Dawn Breaker the other day on my Havoc Demon Hunter and we're about to get hit with I think it's called acid spray from Rashin and I hit a blade pop blur to make sure I don't take any extra damage. Bada bing, bada boom. The
[06:05] take much damage and that means my healer is free. They can just heal the three people that are hurt rather than four or five people that are hurt if the tank got blasted. That means less healing they need to do, better mana
[06:19] efficiency out of them, and now they can return to doing damage or to doing mechanics, which is great. We kind of want our healer to be free of the a group is playing perfectly, the healers are going to do damage. Now, if
[06:33] sound like a lot. You don't need to be heal parsing. You don't need to be looking through logs, and you don't need to over worry about your damage when you're learning. This is a slow process that you'll get a feel for as you go.
[06:46] And looking at logs can be a great way to see how people are healing. Maybe realize were so useful and you can put them to work yourself. But cross them to work yourself. But cross comparing HPS is a kind of an ugly
[06:59] situation and it can turn really really downhill. On that topic when it comes to that sort of healing, we had a situation in our guild during Cauldron of Chaos and this is a pretty important one. Welcome to Cauldron of Chaos. I'm so
[07:13] this fight right now. Um, so you get to see the Warcraft logs. This was a season 2 fight in the War Within where one side of the arena is fighting Florendo, which is a giant T-Rex, and the other side's fighting Torque, which is a giant
[07:26] split up your damage, and then eventually these two bosses will slam into each other in the middle, and the group swap sides. It's a very fun mechanic, and honestly, it's a pretty enjoyable fight. That being said, when
[07:38] we were running this in my guild, the preservation evoker and the holy priest mistw weaver, and the resto shaman were on the left side. Left side of this fight typically is dealing with more damage. Florendo does a lot of damage to
[07:51] the whole raid, but a majority of it is on the players over on that side. So, abilities and get the most amount of healing possible, you'd want to do it on the left side. It's also important to note that restoan mistweaver on the left
[08:05] side while overgeeared was kind of overkill. I love working with Ben and we there hit a point where we had to stop sending cool downs cuz we realized we enough healing to heal up the mechanic every single time. So, we did. On the
[08:19] right side, there's a lot more spot healing as people get hit. And of mechanics correctly. If they take avoidable damage over there, the healers will have to fix it. Having the holy priest and the preservation evoker on
[08:31] the right side wasn't a bad thing, but given that players were taking avoidable damage over there, and of course it was two spot healers with a good amount of burst healing on the pres, but that ultimately kind of fizzles out as they
[08:44] run out of burst. There were gaps where there wasn't a lot of healing. And it's we kind of needed to flip-flop where the healers were to get a better, more even we did have some discourse involving this, and by the way, to anyone
[08:59] empowered furry, zero hard feelings. This is just such a critical example, I figured it was worth bringing up for YouTube. But players were thinking, "Oh no, our preservation evoker isn't playing well. Their HPS is low. How do
[09:12] we fix this?" And so then they went and compared the HPS of a preservation evoker healing on the right side to wins here. A preservation evoker who's two healing this fight, playing on the left side. And back when I originally found
[09:27] this data, this was the number one preservation parse. And WS, who's an absolutely incredible player, killed it in this fight. But Wins was on the left side where there was more damage. And W's team, they too healed it. Meaning
[09:42] [music] there weren't two healers, right? So all of the healing had to be done by two different players. That means that more HPS [music] was on each individual player. So, the comparison here is unbelievably unfair
[09:56] and didn't tell you the whole story. In fact, the extra damage being taken was almost enough to clear the fight as people stopped taking the extra damage ourselves to kill the boss quicker. But changing the healing composition also
[10:09] would have really helped there. And I think that's why this HPS thing is so important. A lot of players think that all there is to healing really is how much healing per second can you pump out. Clutch healing is a skill that's
[10:21] somebody holds on to a fight and keeps people up alive longer than you would fight or you see a disaster brewing and you're able to fix it before it happens the moment it happens because you anticipated it or used the cooldown in a
[10:38] playing your triage intelligently and saving the day. That is a skill that is very hard to measure, that isn't measured in HPS, and you kind of have to learn how healing works to really spot
[10:51] when somebody actually saves the day. Okay, so you might be wondering, what are some good metrics that you can look for healers to see how they're doing? Okay, well, the bad news is that that's kind of hard to do. HPS isn't very good,
[11:06] tend to cling to as another good stat to look at, isn't very useful. You're just you're going to overheal as a healer. it happens. What's more important for raid is to look for healing overlaps, right? Are they using their cooldowns on top of
[11:21] cooldowns at the same time, not only you going to have nothing for later, but all that healing was wasted. Some healers are better for sending their cooldowns healers are really good at catching the raid if they fall. So, you might be
[11:35] going on in the fight. Also, you're looking for healers that work well together. If healers know their method of healing, I for one, as a mistw weaver likely to snipe the people who are low on health. So, I'll use my big spot
[11:49] heals here and there on players that are really low. But, I'll ultimately focus on ramping more and rod healing more outside of my windows because I know I up. If there's a lot of burst damage, I know that I don't have to immediately
[12:02] reach for a move like revival because if my preservation evoker is ready to heal it and my breastto shaman is ready to slam some fat chain heals, I know that healing on top of whatever I'm doing will back them up. And when it's my turn
[12:16] to spend cooldowns, they can trust me to slowly pick up the whole raid's health bar and do that necessary extra healing in the background to top people off that I might not have immediate access to. Smart healing is really good at backing
[12:28] up the rot healing. Spot healing is great for fixing kind of the computercont controlled error of smart healing. And what you end up getting is this harmonious amount of healing. And it's very fun to play with when it comes
[12:40] to raid and dungeons. But this advice is mostly aimed at the dungeon players. How to be the best healer. Again, this takes time. So for beginners, don't overstress this. The more dungeons you play, the more this will make sense. But try to
[12:52] understand all of the interactions in your kit. You can play more efficiently by using every aspect and element of your kit. Some things are going to be more mana expensive or cooldown expensive. Some things are going to be
[13:04] less expensive or help you regenerate your mana or stay more mana positive. It's good to know how those tools work. Like if a resto druid player hits they're going to lose out on one of the best cooldowns in the game because
[13:17] intervate prevents you from using mana for I think it's 10 seconds or eight seconds. So, if you can press that right before a large ramp, you'll be mana positive for your entire ramp window and then you're ramped, which means you're
[13:29] being really efficient with your heals. So, a good intervate will do [music] way more than a bad innervate. I just like looking through my talent pages every season or so. I like to read all of the talents to make sure there aren't any
[13:41] talents that I might have glossed over that might actually serve a good purpose. When it comes to mana, mana isn't used the same across the healers. evokers, especially with energy loop, just never really run out of mana. Holy
[13:56] whole fight, and that's kind of the plan. Every single healer manages their But just knowing how to get your mana back does wonders for letting you heal even more. When you're playing in a key, like a really highle key, you tend to
[14:11] cooldowns. Like, I'm going to use this cooldown during this boss fight. I'm going to save this for an emergency in case we lost a defensive and a player of what you're going to use and when you use it. However, when you're in the more
[14:23] pug friendly side of dungeons, you typically want to hold some resources to taking extra damage or they're really bad about interrupting, that might let someone drop below before you heal them, and that'll change what resources
[14:38] you spend. I think a great example is once again preservation evoker. I see a little scared to use their spirit bloom, which is their big AoE heal, and we are losing it next expansion. However, what's so important about it is that if
[14:51] you have nothing going on, using it to heal a massive amount of AOE damage is a going to use it for a mechanic, then you tools. But if you don't have any plans for your spirit bloom, using it first
[15:05] to heal is an excellent and very manaefficient way to play. It's just a spirit bloom, when do I set up a big spirit bloom, when do I hold it is kind healing as a whole. Learning where your
[15:20] for a rainy day and what you should absolutely send on cooldown because you sorry for anyone who came here though and was like, "Oh boy, I can't wait to complicated. Healing's complicated." Before we go, I do just want to note HPS
[15:37] have an HPS meter in my dungeons, as you're probably seeing in the footage on it is that it gives me a sense of how much healing I'm doing. It's good to know how much I can do in a pinch. It's good to know how much a more relaxed
[15:51] situation looked like because the numbers ground you. What is 2 million healing per second mean to you? Well, depending on when it happened or what doing enough or it could mean you absolutely cranked in a moment's notice.
[16:04] If you were only healing the tank and were at 2 million healing per second and you were in last season, that's too much healing. That's way too much healing for one person. And these numbers change every season. So, I like to keep the HPS
[16:16] an idea of what the tank's doing, what you're doing, and what other players are doing. However, if you over rely on an HPS meter, you're simply not getting the data you need to know about a healer. All right, that's it. Thank you so much
[16:30] in a situation where you get to heal parse, gloat. Tell me about it. No, I'm how well you did. Tell me, "Hey, Bowser, I was heal parsing a fight and I hit mostly that I don't want to hear that you were heal parsing intentionally. And
[16:46] "Oh my god, Bowser, I hit a 5 million HPS overall. I'm going to ask you if you you're okay. How's your mental health That means the bugs were taking more damage. But that's it. Thank you all so
[16:59] much for watching. I'll see you all in the next one.