Plankeye
New Member
First off, what is overhealing? It is any healing that is lost once your target is at full health. For instance your full health target takes 1,000 damage. You flash heal for 1400. You have over healed 400 points of damage.
Is overhealing bad? To a point the answer is no. Many encounters in raids require healers to be proactive with their heals and not reactive. So all healers will have some amount of overhealing. The point it becomes a problem is that overhealing will lower your Heal per Mana and your effective healing numbers. Wasting mana on long boss encounters can become a big issue.
I am going to show an example of a recent Mount Hyjal raid to show the impact of overhealing. Now Mount Hyjal is unique in that the trash and the boss tends to generate a lot of raid damage where the tanks are not the only ones receiving damage. So there tends to be a lot of overhealing across the board with the healers. Most encounters you probably want to aim for under 30% of your healing to be over heals. That means you are typically using the closest healing spell for the damage being done.
First up is the overhealing done:
I have blurred out the names to protect the innocent. What you will notice looking at the numbers is the pally in slot 1 and the priest in slot 5 had a high amount of overhealing compared to the others. Druids will typically be the lowest followed by Priests as HOTs do not tick once a target is at full health. Otherwise both would be a lot higher on Recount. Don't mistake that though. Both classes can still waste mana on HOTS that provide no effective healing. The priest in this case gets off the hook as that is the Shadowpriest overhealing from Vampiric Embrace.
Now lets look at the Healing Done report:
What is significant is that the Paladin in slot 7 of the healing done is the paladin identified in slot 1 of the overhealing meter. If you look at the numbers, that pally generated 1,606,282 total points of healing. Generating 300,000 points more healing then what I would consider the most effective pally who was in slot 1 on healing and slot 6 on overhealing and generating 1,293,992 total points of healing. You can quickly see that the pally in slot 1 had almost double the effective healing of the pally in slot 7 yet healed 300,000 points less.
Lets analyze one additional thing and wrap up with some suggestions for combatting overhealing.
This is the recount breakdown of spells used by the overhealing pally. What I see is a heavy use of Holy Light, most likely max rank, on targets that didn't need it. Some things this pally should look at is making sure Light's grace is always active by using down ranked Holy Lights. The purpose is taking that .5 seconds off the cast time means you have a better chance of getting a max ranked Holy Light off before other healers get their slow cast heals off. I would suggest that this pally cancel more of their heals. I personally look for any opportunity to cancel max rank spells if the target no longer needs the health because someone beat me to it. More use of Flash of Light to limit the impact of overhealing and save the mana and the big heals for the uh oh times.
Hopefully we can get some more ideas from a couple of the other seasoned healers in here on how to combat overhealing and maybe some insight on the challenges the non pally healers face with overhealing.
Is overhealing bad? To a point the answer is no. Many encounters in raids require healers to be proactive with their heals and not reactive. So all healers will have some amount of overhealing. The point it becomes a problem is that overhealing will lower your Heal per Mana and your effective healing numbers. Wasting mana on long boss encounters can become a big issue.
I am going to show an example of a recent Mount Hyjal raid to show the impact of overhealing. Now Mount Hyjal is unique in that the trash and the boss tends to generate a lot of raid damage where the tanks are not the only ones receiving damage. So there tends to be a lot of overhealing across the board with the healers. Most encounters you probably want to aim for under 30% of your healing to be over heals. That means you are typically using the closest healing spell for the damage being done.
First up is the overhealing done:
I have blurred out the names to protect the innocent. What you will notice looking at the numbers is the pally in slot 1 and the priest in slot 5 had a high amount of overhealing compared to the others. Druids will typically be the lowest followed by Priests as HOTs do not tick once a target is at full health. Otherwise both would be a lot higher on Recount. Don't mistake that though. Both classes can still waste mana on HOTS that provide no effective healing. The priest in this case gets off the hook as that is the Shadowpriest overhealing from Vampiric Embrace.
Now lets look at the Healing Done report:
What is significant is that the Paladin in slot 7 of the healing done is the paladin identified in slot 1 of the overhealing meter. If you look at the numbers, that pally generated 1,606,282 total points of healing. Generating 300,000 points more healing then what I would consider the most effective pally who was in slot 1 on healing and slot 6 on overhealing and generating 1,293,992 total points of healing. You can quickly see that the pally in slot 1 had almost double the effective healing of the pally in slot 7 yet healed 300,000 points less.
Lets analyze one additional thing and wrap up with some suggestions for combatting overhealing.
This is the recount breakdown of spells used by the overhealing pally. What I see is a heavy use of Holy Light, most likely max rank, on targets that didn't need it. Some things this pally should look at is making sure Light's grace is always active by using down ranked Holy Lights. The purpose is taking that .5 seconds off the cast time means you have a better chance of getting a max ranked Holy Light off before other healers get their slow cast heals off. I would suggest that this pally cancel more of their heals. I personally look for any opportunity to cancel max rank spells if the target no longer needs the health because someone beat me to it. More use of Flash of Light to limit the impact of overhealing and save the mana and the big heals for the uh oh times.
Hopefully we can get some more ideas from a couple of the other seasoned healers in here on how to combat overhealing and maybe some insight on the challenges the non pally healers face with overhealing.