To balance out my other post, heal parses do still have uses, and do help round out information provided by logs, subjective feedback, etc: You'd expect the healers in that individual's group to be very high on the parse, near always taking all the top spots. If someone outside that group is out healing them, or coming close, this MIGHT be an issue. If that group with the outside healer in it is getting lots of deaths (or near deaths), or they say they aren't getting buffs, cures, whatever, then that could be because that healer is neglecting their group in favor of healing the MT. Now sometimes that has to be done. Triage is a complicated topic beyond the scope of this post. But if you see this trend over and over, then even though they are high on that parse, it's actually a bad sign, mixed in with data that their group was in trouble. In an opposite example of sorts, if a healer is free and outside the group, and their group is good, I expect that they should be high on the MT parse (and ETW looks stable, rezs done, etc). If not, then that can be a concern. Using a recent example, I was paired with another cleric in a raid in which I was not in the MT group but had several off tanks. The other cleric and I split up targets in group so we are not over-healing one target unnecessarily when those resources could be better directed elsewhere. If my tank needs heals, I heal them. If her tank needed heals, she healed them. If a tank looked so bad that they need double coverage, then we both healed, and if both were tanking then we made sure to cover each without both accidentally being on the same and neglecting the other. As it turned out my tank ended up doing a bulk of the off tanking for the group, and didn't need any more healing then what I provided. The other tank needed only a touch up here and there. Consequently I expected, and saw, that my co-healer was third on the MT parse, which again is what one would hope for and expect given that her group was stable. And it's good for seeing who is on that tank in general. I remember a Neriak 1 raid where the RL asked for certain clerics to be on one tank on one named, and the other clerics on the other tank on the other named. Event starts, tank number one goes down in under a minute. I look at the data provided by that tank, and I only see half the clerics that were assigned on that tank. The other half who should have been on them were instead on the other tanks parse. That's something that would NOT be captured on a cast log, and its cases like these where I think heal parses work best. It's also good when you want to redistribute healers in groups. Some names and trash hit harder for others, and getting an idea of how many healers you need really to keep them up, and free up others to help other targets, is helpful. And as I said previously, we still have our rare tank-n-spank mobs, like arx one off number 2. The in-group healers will still come out ahead, but you'd look to make sure everyone else (not healing RT, wild ramp, healing people who miss emotes...) wouldn't be as far behind as other far more complicated raids. And also after you make changes, or you're helping someone make changes, to play better, it's not a bad tool to see you/them move up in the heal parse. You'd see this reflected in the cast logs too near certainly, but a second conformity source of data is nice.
See this is what i'm talking about when I say healers are babied. I'm now a Johnny Jerk face, because I'm trying to find a civil way to speak to someone regarding their cast amount? And to say that 200-300 casts compared to 900+ is them being reactive, man..That's pretty dumb. If those healers are casting 200 casts to another healers 900+, you would call them a "good healer"? Why? You can tell a lot from data and you'd rather neglect it all, sad.
I think in this situation cast counts speak more then what they are casting, if you're casting 1300 times and someone else is casting 300 times there is a problem and it's not your spell lineup. You could cast your slowest heal spell ( that's current ) against your counter part who's using the fastest, and I bet you still wouldn't come up with such a huge difference in casts. I don't tank, so I don't look at the heal parse, meaning heals per second, or total amount healed on a night. I ONLY care about casts compared to their counter parts..100-200 cast difference is fine depending on their role, but when I see such a drastic difference, you're telling me that's normal? I just don't see that being true, or close to true.
A very common theme on trying to get healers to play better is pages and pages of excuses about why parses, numbers, and anything that isn't asking healer if they feel that they're doing well is completely useless because healers are such special snowflakes who always make correct choices. It's very much about egos, and providing feedback to those types of people needs to be done in a way that allows them to preserve their ego or they'll wall up and ignore any feedback. Sometimes the "Here's what I do" style explanations by the people with 4x as many casts can work if presented along with some reasons of why that method is better, without any direct "you suck" comparisons. Another good tactic is to use a person they trust/respect as a bridge. It might be a class leader, officer, or just someone they've been friends with 10 years. But ideas coming from a trusted source will be valued very differently than ones coming from someone they don't like. A same/similar class can use "Dude, have you tried this? It's awesome!" to introduce things like multibinding. But at some level, the player needs to have desire to change or improve. There's going to be a subset of people who will simply refuse to do anything different. How they're dealt with is up to your guild's officers/leaders.
As mentioned, context and what those spells are that make those numbers up are important. But again, that difference is so staggering that it's hard to find a context to put them in where they would then be okay. Bringing up player performance issues is....difficult. And by no means unique to healers, though we tend to get extra scrutiny given the importance of the role - to which I agree. Tanks and warriors specifically could fall into that group too. The most helpful thing is getting support from your GL. Having a GL who is pushing for change, accountability, high standards and expectations, high recruitment expectations, is going to make those conversations with individual healers far easier. And those individuals need to feel that you're trying to help them be better, not that you are telling them they suck. Just because you're offering constructive feedback doesn't mean you are disparaging them. Takes a lot of time, hard work, and you may in the end need to remove people who are still under performing if given ample time and hands on help but without showing improvement, as well as bring in new members. And many will be resistant to change. Some will be really angry. Like I said, difficult. But can be done.
Because there are times when I know other clerics are spamming quick heals non stop, and I will just sit with my finger on the button waiting for the bar to drop so I can twincast my quickest heal at that moment, so what happens is the other clerics have cast 10 heals, and I only cast 1 or 2, I only do this when I know mana is gonna be an issue, and I need to save my QM for others. I'm not saying this is what's going on, but before you go upsetting people, you should gather info. And I'm not saying that's "normal" you may be completely right and they are slacking.
This is almost always an inferior way to do things. What are you raiding and what kind of gear are you in that you are so worried about mana?
Furthermore if you were also spamming heals then maybe it would have never gotten to the bar dropping point
I was curious of this as well, I looked up guild progression and her guild isn't even beating tds 1 raid. I'm not going to discount her information just because of that but it does make me hesitant.
1. I don't have mana issues, I'm just cautious. 2. This is not my normal way of healing, it's situational. 3. I'm not sure how I became the target here, I was just offering possibilities. 4. There is more to it than just clicking on the turbo button for your multibind.
I never said neglect data, I said leave it in the hands of Leadership to deal with. I can't accurately comment on your hypothetical healer with low cast count, maybe they where killed a few times or where out of range for your parse or where assigned to some specific task that did not involve a key bind spam, or possibly they are the worst healer to ever play EQ... I'm wondering how you react to a random healer questioning you about your poor DPS performance on a random event. I'll say it again if your not leadship do your job. I can assure you if your guild is clearing all the current raids you don't have many slacker healers and the leadership prob know what they are doing.
1. Our guild doesn't raid....at all, nor will it ever. 2. I guest raid in other guilds, where I'm sure if I sucked, I wouldn't be asked back. 3. Take my info or don't, I was only offering a fresh perspective. 4. Once again, I'm not sure why I'm being attacked over this, but hey, whatevs
Auto-fire on a multibind key would be an improvement for ~80% of the healer population. Multibind spamming isn't 100% optimal, but for the effort involved, it's pretty close. There's been all of one person who's been able to give me a good case that they're doing something better than multibinding.
This thread has turned into a lol fest. All parses are subject to interpretation and should only be done by those that have the majority of the data and the knowledge of what to do with it. Even those strait forward dp parses are subject.
Ok, willing to put my feet into this. To the OP, the last year I've been in a similar situation with my guild. Our heal lead (who announces the MGB CR rotations) wasn't so into the improvement aspect of the class (aka helping folks pick AA's, gear, etc. - that was usually me) and then he quit. We don't have an actual lead but do have 2 folks who do the MGB CR rotations based on whose on. Again improvement stuff is overlooked. So throughout my time with my guild, I've left (hopefully) helpful posts on the forums. Folks who know me will recognize all the guides from eqclerics.org that I've done so trying to be helpful is in my nature. Some examples. Dec 2010 - I left one about uses for extended target. Worded that "Something reminded me of a PM I'd given an ex guildie of mine who wondered how other clerics were using the extended target window, so thought I'd share it here." - Had some comments and folks took away some new info. June 2013 - I created that "Healing, be all that you can be" thread over on EQclerics.org and linked that for discussion in the healer forum. - Had some good conversation about it. May 2014 - I started a "Healer Tips and Tricks" thread with things I've learned on these forums. - One response with a question. May 2014 - I started a thread that showed all of our key activated AA usage (no names except I did list the top 2 people who used them) with "It should be no secret that off and on this year multiple times the tanks (knights and warriors both) have been asking if the heal crew is giving everything they can. I was curious myself, so I took a look at logs from January 1 to March 23 (38 raid days) to see which activated AA's we have been using, which we're really good at using and which ones it may be good to get a refresher on so that we can start using these effective activated AA's much more often than we have been doing. With some of the challenges we have had in the last few months on farm events (keeping tanks up specifically), I went and did some digging to see how often we use our activated healing AA's. This thread is not to be taken as a slam on anyone, but hopefully to show that there is a variance in use and to possibly learn more about those AA's so they can be used more in the future." - No one commented at all. However I did have some conversations when a couple people had questions. June 2014 - I created a thread that showed what AA's and heals to hit when you need (highest) maximum healing power. - No one commented at all. July 2014 - I linked the Max Healing thread from these priest forums. - No one commented at all. September 2014 - I did another Activated AA healing thread and this time didn't hold back any names at all. I said "NOTE: This time I am going to list all the names and not just the top two like I did last time. This isn't to be used as punishment or for harrassment, but so that everyone has accurate sense of where they are compared to other clerics. When reviewing, please keep in mind that raid attendance fluctuates wildly among the clerics." - Again, I got no comments on the forums. But I had noticed on this parse, that some clerics must have read the May thread and started using some more because their usage had picked up quite a bit (so there was passive improvement). September 2014 - I did a healing thread similar to the AA and listed the top main direct heals (not all). Names were given along with the percentage casts of each of the heals. At the bottom of the thread, I listed some information from the max healing thread which referenced which heals are better suited for speed (fastest to slowest) or heals for most (to least) for average heal amount. - I did get several positive comments from this, one from a cleric who helped improve their lineup after this. December 2014 - I did the same spell cast thread listing ALL our heals this time. - No comments at all. ~~ On top of posting helpful information, I did do some tells to clerics and asked "if they ever considered this?" and then asked about their thought process, and if they were aware of "this" and "that". It helped with some clerics; not all (as stated above, some are unwilling to adapt and still even prefer light). Ultimately for me, all the posts I did didn't seem to provide the most improvements. Those came from the people I was able to talk to one-on-one and not push an agenda, but discuss tactics.
Oops, got so caught up with history I forgot the other main point I was trying to make. (FYI, I'm not a class lead, nor do I want to be based on how the guild defines that - so I'm just one player trying to improve others.) Never ever use just one data point to make decisions about something. In this case, don't just use a tank parse, or a type of heals cast parse, you have to look at both as well as the group that person was in, did they die, do they have certain AA's, are they distracted at home (kids are up, etc.), don't just take 1 raid or night's raids to make the decision someone needs training/talking to and so on. One time I saw one of my clerics with low # of casts. Turned out he was using the right spells according to the "guide" but as he was newer to the class, he hadn't yet gotten the cast time reduction on fraught/fervent/fervid renewal line. So he was trying to do his best but without those AA's 30 second casts his cast times were low. I do agree that there's something worth investigating but would suggest you carry it further.
Thanks Crystilla. I do the same as far as our forums go. I even provide GINA triggers to help keep track of buffs, auras, other triggers to look for. We've got a great group of clerics in my guild that I've been guilded with for ages. I myself have been playing a cleric as a main since Kunark released. But your right when it comes down to it, sometimes it takes one on one discussion to show people how to better themselves playing their character. My intention for the post wasn't to critique any of my own guild healers, but to show that we lack the ability to parse healing of others like we have the ability to parse dps of others.
Yup. Can't believe in all of that I forgot the new post I made in January called "VG Raid Cleric'ing" where I listed all the good cleric, raid general (aka not specific to any event) triggers, summarizing AA usage, spells, linking to those key threads to read and so on. It took about 4 months after the Max Healing thread came out where I was willing to even try it. And while I don't use it exclusively, I use some of the principles in it. And it took me that long to "convert". I wish we had better abilities to parse (or combine healing parses if you split your raid logs up by days, etc.) for the parsing I did. But I think what we do get gives us the answers we really need.
From all that I've seen thee smartest way to do it would be watch the overall total healing on said tank for a given period of time (while tanking), and combine that with not "cast counts" but with "whats cast" by each an every individual healer. As a tank, in most guilds (Minus Inverse logic) people really wanted to know what their heal parses were. Yes, healing parses are not the whole story, however if you have 1 healer (not in your grp) that is pushing 2.5 million heals all the way up to 3.5 million healing .. in the same span as some one who is pushing 1.2 million heals , (and are in your grp) you can bet your @$$ , that in grp healer is not doing their job .. no matter how you slice the parse .. heals landed, Total casts, Which spells casted .. Its not rocket science, when 1 or 2 healers consistantly out heal the combined effort of the next 5 healers on your parse, as to heals landed .. overall healing on the Raid Tank.
