Can clerics please regain the title of top healers?

Discussion in 'Priests' started by Kialya, Oct 22, 2019.

  1. Kialya Keeping your butt alive since 2002

    Don't get me wrong. I love clerics. Been playing one for well over 20 years now. Hell, even played a cleric during the few years I gave WOW a go. I love healing. But being a pure healer comes with knowing you will suck at DPS or other useful utilities that other classes bring. I was totally ok with that knowing that no one could out heal me.

    Until lately.

    Shamans now regularly out heal clerics in raids. Really? I would prefer to be the best healer in the game, but if you want to level out the classes so everyone gets a trophy-kinda thing, then give clerics self/group invis AA and more DPS and more utility for the other classes = just something to make up for the fact that we are no longer boss on healing.

    But then I guess you could then call clerics glorified druids (with druids being better all around) so then whats the point?
    Cazmac and Metanis like this.
  2. Belkar_OotS Augur

    Clerics are the best healers in game and have the best emergency tools by far.

    Incidental AE heals from the shaman swell line is great but it also massively inflates their numbers with small bits of healing that were going to get healed anyway. If you were super concerned about their inflated numbers versus your own, you can always use your free target splash heal and twin heals too.

    That said... It would not hurt my feelings for clerics and druids to both get a rain heal (maybe even a pbae heal hah).

    Druids have much more significant issues so using them as a standard is not very useful in my opinion. Druids need a lot of help in the healing department and while their dps is good for burst dot.damage it is not a sustainable option.
  3. kiwi New Member

    i play a shm since 1999 and good at it , and yes i can top parse heal here and there.

    the other 2 shm in our guild are usually much lower in heal parse, and usually always behind clerics . ( some of them ) , same apply with good vs average tanks or dps, some play their toons much better than other ones.

    action , reaction , # of casts { mine are usually much higher than the 2 other shm in guild ) .

    on our parses we can see top cleric total casts at 600 ( as an example ) while other cleric cast half of that { without dying } . why? some are better than other one .

    without good info :
    what you cast ,.. # of cast ,.. order you cast your heals ect, it is hard to see and compare.
    and yes hitting pets and summoned pets help to get higher heals numbers.
  4. p2aa Augur

    Nothing changed, shamans are not out healing clerics in raid. The only thing that changed is the healing information gameparse displays in game.
    Actual Heal, which is the only column that can be linked in game from gameparse, is showing now all the heals done to everyone in raid. It's inflated a lot by AE healing. This is why you see shamans in the first spots usually.
    When before you were seing in game only the heal done on a specific healee.
    Look at the "most healed person" column to see that clerics are still largely first on tank heal parses, then on later version of gameparse, the healing tab shows you even better the heals distribution between players. You can still see that clerics are still largely the best single target healers.
    If people in your guild don't go further the first Actual Heal tab to see the contributions of your healers, then they need to get better at analysing stuff.
    Overall, the healing information displayed by gameparse is much better now, as you can see everything now, single target healing and AE healing.
    Rolaque likes this.
  5. Bigstomp Augur

    Nobody out heals clerics.
    You're reading too much into a summary of a parse vs actually understanding what it's saying.
  6. Sirene_Fippy Okayest Bard

    I'm confused, let's say I am a cleric.
    If I read a heal parse, that has a shaman on top, followed by a warrior, in what way am I the best healer?
    If I am a wizard and I am not top DPS for a parse, do I just chalk it up to RNG and claim I'm the best anyway?
    Metanis likes this.
  7. Bigstomp Augur

    Who healed the tank(s) you were watching the most?

    Gamparse's new heal parse summary (like any other parse) tells an incomplete story.
    The current heal parse summary is especially misleading (probably entirely accurate, but misleading)


    Want to rank higher? TB celestial regen a bit before raid starts. Click TB again. When celestial drops, hit your group heal over time. When celestial comes back, hit MGB and celestial.

    Even then a shammy may beat you depending on event.

    Realistically, you should dig more into the numbers and understand that the summary does not tell the whole story.

    Edit: I raid with a cleric alt. Shammys beat me most of the time in the new gamparse heal overview. I'm not threatened by this, because I know I heal decent. And I know the parse numbers favor their rain heals since almost all events have some sorta ae so they're healing 54 people for minor amounts of damage over and over.

    But they can't keep a tank up on content that isn't trivial.
    Waring_McMarrin likes this.
  8. Szilent Augur

    If you are a wizard, or a berserker or a rogue or a whatever and you are not top DPS on a parse, you observe that it's because Enc and Shd ran away with 300 of the 400 mephit banes it took to manage the event mechanics, then you compare only the non-bane damage on the boss since having the raid not lose to the event timer was your role.

    In parallel fashion, as a cle one's role is to keep the raid from losing to boss damage. Clerics are unparalleled at combating boss damage. At the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry Potter didn't K.O. the most Death Eaters - just wasn't his job. Molly Weasely and the DA handled that stuff, Harry's job was to keep the boss from ending the battle. No one else could do it.

    Shm & War (presumably the tank, wearing a priest Alliance) "topping the heal parse" is just GamParse's way of describing them handling an event mechanic (AE rampage melee, or some dot), just like "topping the dps parse" describes who got the banes versus the Mephits. Raids taking AE damage is more common than mephit banes, but the heal parse isn't an apples-to-apples healing capability comparison.
    Bigstomp and Tucoh like this.
  9. Metanis Bad Company

    blah blah blah parses blah blah blah

    Clerics are the most one-dimensional classes in game and our primary role has been largely supplanted by another class. Sure, we understand how rains add up to huge (but largely inconsequential) parses.

    But if your role can never be measured objectively would you be happy?

    They need to fix that.
  10. Tucoh Augur

    I only box a cleric but my opinion is that if in 2019 warriors can deal respectable DPS with a little bit of ADPS help, clerics should be able to as well. Increasing the damage they can perform would go a long way in increasing their desirability without having to nerf shamans.
  11. Kialya Keeping your butt alive since 2002

    Thank you all for your replies. While I agree with a lot of what you all had to say, it still boils down to looking at parse and feeling deflated (regardless of the *why* behind it, because I do understand what the story is those numbers are telling). I am NOT suggesting nerfing Shaman! I like the idea of giving clerics a rain of some sort though. I also put a little more thought into it and I am actually retracting my first post a bit. I would not really want any invis or more DPS. I want more of what I am good at. Pure healing - be it aoe or single target.
    Lannin and Metanis like this.
  12. ptah Augur

    I off night raid with a shaman or clr. 100% based on what PUG wants.
    General I can adjust my style on shaman, but with clr im 100% heal only focus. Short of cure duty if the event calls that.
    I don't mean come off negative or under a personal attack. Just going ask a few questions.
    Why is last you reviewed you own heal setup? Do use a heal channel? Is there a mentor clr that parse better than you? Guide. Sometime I fall into a never adjusting, then all of sudden im like wow.. why do this thing.
    I personal enjoy healing on clr better, More situational tools to up the healing, more faster options; Less debuff/rebuff duty. I just power heal the targets I get assign to label on extended window.

    Now one of my duties on shaman is allaince.. where we rarely use clr alliance.. way more shamans doing that job. (range)

    Talk to your tanks and fellow healers.. if are doing them right.. they love you. If your winning events and playing your part, why do sound not happy? Is this a focus item or AA issue.. I don't think so.. but maybe.

    Ie.. how many DD heals are in mash bind? how often does heal team ask you mbg heal? AE heal? Do your team ask clrs to rez.. or is that sally job?

    Goal on my post is gather more information and figure if adjustments are needed? if they work with your team? Heal attempts is a thing. More data please.

    We love clr players and we try to improve.. that is the goal.
    Rile likes this.
  13. Beimeith Lord of the Game

    There's some bad info here so let me clear it up:

    1) GamParse currently excludes heals against swarm pets.

    I will make this a setting that can be changed, but for now it is hardcoded to ignore them. Swarm pets are anything that ends with "`s pet" so named pet heals are still counted.

    I can, and will, add additional options to exclude heals against pets, as well as to exclude AE heals, but these will not be default settings as AE and pet heals are both relevant information while swarm pet heals generally aren't.

    2) The "Most Healed Player" column does NOT show who is first on healing.

    That column shows who the HEALER healed the most. It means nothing whatsoever with regard to how much they healed that player relative to others.

    Example: If I heal the tank for 10 HP, and heal no one else, the tank will be my most healed player, even if every other person on the raid healed the tank for 10 million.

    3) The Overview/Summary is not "misleading."

    The Healing overview counts every heal you cast (aside from heals on swarm pets as mentioned). This includes self heals, single target heals, group heals, AE heals, etc.

    Healing is not the same as doing damage. Damage is a Many-To-One event (many players doing damage to one target) while healing is a Many-To-Many event (many players healing many targets).

    A Healer that keeps one player alive while letting five others die is not as good as a healer that keeps them all alive. Focusing only on how much a healer heals a single player (aka the Tank) and ignoring whether they heal (or don't heal) anyone else is a surefire way to get a raid full of awful healers.

    To put it another way if a Cleric does X amount of healing to a single target, and a Shaman can do 75% of X to 54 targets at once, the Shaman is hands down contributing way more to the raid than the Cleric is. It's not even close.


    Now, that said, the Healing Overview is just that, an overview. The breakdown tabs are there to provide more detailed information. Currently there is only the Healer breakdown but the next update will include the Healee Breakdown which allows you to see how much each player was healed by everyone else. It's the same information as the Healer Breakdown, but organized from the Healees' point of view.
    Waring_McMarrin and Petalonyx like this.
  14. Zalamyr Augur

    I feel like people are really downplaying how useful all that AE healing actually is and also downplaying just how good shaman single target healing is as well.

    Clerics really have one area of dominance and that's emergency heal buttons.
    Metanis and Petalonyx like this.
  15. Mehdisin Mahn Augur


    TL;DR: comparing shamans to clerics is an apples to oranges comparison... we have different healing roles on the raid so we should care more about different things.

    In the end, anyone charged with keeping the MTO alive specifically should care about the individual amounts healed *on their tanks* more than the 'actual heals' on the overview.... and the clerics assigned to a specific tank will most likely have that tank as their 'most healed'; splashers should care more about the 'actual heals' and how well their group stayed alive. secondary would be heals on the MTO or other key personnel that they might hit single target; and if you're just supposed to be healing your (non-MTO) group... well why are you looking at the parse anyways? you are unlikely to top it no matter how it gets sorted... judge your performance by how well your group survives in that case, the numbers really mean nothing.

    in short, to address sirene's comment.... there's more than 1 way to analyze the data, the default sort isn't always the best sort to get the comparison you're looking for.

    of course this is correct, but you can infer some things from the data on the overview tab... that is, you can use it to say definitively that you healed more on your 'most healed' target than anyone lower on the 'most healed' value list than you.... and you can say definitively that you healed for less on your target than anyone higher than you who has the same 'most healed' person..... so its' useful in analyzing your performance relative to your peers in that regard.

    what you cannot say definitively is if someone who was higher than you on the 'most healed' value but with a different 'most healed' target healed for more or less than you on your target. However, you can make a fairly logical assumption that if you're in the top few that it's unlikely someone healed multiple tanks for enough to be in the top few 'most healed value' on more than 1 or 2 of them... beimeith's changes will be $$$ for that analysis though..
  16. Beimeith Lord of the Game

  17. Beimeith Lord of the Game

    [IMG]

    Here's the Healee Breakdown. Not finished yet, though it is functional. Still need to add buttons, settings, and finish with the UI, but I thought I'd give you a preview.
    Bigstomp and Kialya like this.
  18. p2aa Augur

    It looks great, especially if we can also send the data in EQ as people swear a lot to linking data in game...
  19. Bigstomp Augur

    Looks good so far. Any ETA on when it will be included somewhere we can download it?
  20. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    Something else to look at on your raids is look at who healed the main tank the most and it will most certainly be the cleric lineup that is assigned to them. As it is clerics have the power to keep the tank up druids and shaman can keep the rest of it up because there is less healing needed on the other players than the tank.