Don't forget the tried and true - healing during initial discs when no damage is being taken. Every raid (though it's gotten better) I've seen upwards of 60 casts done (between all the clerics only) with the tank not taking any damage so no heal hit for anything. - That's a good example of why just using # of casts (or what was cast) at face value as well, as those can be artificially raised.
Whulfgar - this is where you are approaching judging a heal parse in all the ways that were mentioned by tour and crystilla and others that are linear and do not give one a true picture of the productivity of your priests. Healing is a team sport and a game of chess and a really boring VCR instruction manual in japanese all in one.
No one was attacking you or said you sucked, we just said there are better ways to do things other than the strategy you offered. I'm not sure why you consider it "being attacked". You could be the best cleric in the world for all I know but that doesn't change the fact that the one particular post I responded to had bad info.
Seems like most understand the lacking of a heal parse due the remaining health of the tank, so I had always tried to make sure people understood in the days of spam healing (do rotations still exist?) your heal may or may not have been needed. Usually the best information about tank survival was from the tanking graph when parsed by the tank themselves, showing the healing vs damage. This would tell the story of how long the tank was at 100%, and more importantly how long they were at low HP waiting for a heal to land, which is the danger zone for killing tanks. Beyond that, the best way to determine if a healer is doing well, generally is analysing the spell cast information. The main healing processes I watched that seemed to work well (I haven't tanked in raids for about 2 years now ...) were as follows: One person boxing two clerics, so set up mini rotation, meaning consistently landing heals instead of lots together and then a long pause. The healers that tried to time the mobs attacks, so the heals landed when needed, instead of just before the heals. Maybe I was naive, but they seemed to cast less but heal a lot of damage, so I trusted them. The healers that knew spamming and one-man rotations were in place, so worried more about just-in-case healing, so were getting less casts than others, but often pretty decent heal parse because of timing. Simply spamming heals with occasions split heals as noticed as needed Of course, you have people that slack or just do badly, but knowing what is needed, and what that looks like on the casting parse means you can then see where the challenges are. If you don't understand the details, and rely on just the healing parse, then you will get a skewed picture, that may just upset people due to going off with insufficient knowledge about the situation.
I play a cleric on raids. I don't parse myself. I talk to everyone in my group, ask them questions, make sure we know our jobs, where we will be standing. I learn buff preferences and who is better at holding agro or self healing ( if SK or Pal) .. after you work with a person you get to know things without having to write it down and quantify it. Which of your off tanks is the fastest and picking up a loose mob when the main tank goes down, which tank tends to steal a mob from another, which tends to hang out in the back. Its the same with healers. Everyone on the raid just knows which is the weak healer and which are the strong. Give your tanks the choice who they want in their group and you will find out quickly. This is how I can tell I am doing a good job. I talk to my tanks and ask them. I just learned something last night which I expect to improve my performance. Never stop trying to learn, keep an open mind, keep an open dialogue to everyone in your group (and raid and guild). Build up a relationship and that will help both you and your tank get better as you build a bond of trust. Parses are a tool and just like a hammer or a gun, you have to look at the who, how and when behind it.
I'm not defending myself per se, but the OP asked for a good starting point, and # of casts will give sufficient data to start, since he doesn't want to bother his tanks for a heal parse. But yes, it has been summed up well in the thread, and it sounds stupid when you say what we all just spent 3 pages discovering: With all the data (heal parse from tank, # of casts, what was cast, when it was cast, etc) you can see who performs and who does not.
Public Service Announcement Clerics that whine about heal parses hurt guilds. Anyone who interprets heal parses like DPS parses is doing it wrong. A heal parse won't tell you who 'wins,' but a properly interpreted heal parse (ie taking factors like group setup, tank assignment, emotes, rez/buff casts, deaths into consideration) combined with a casting parse will tell you who isn't doing their job. In every guild there's a try hard that tries to 'win' the heal parse at the expense of rezzes etc and that makes some skilled clerics mad and they whine. The problem is, being anti-heal parse allows crappy clerics to fly under the radar. It also allows people that use outdated methods to stick to their guns without consequences. Most importantly, volume is the cure to parse variability. The higher the volume, the better you can see how people do overtime. The more clerics whine, the fewer parses will be shared, thus the picture shown by parses will be less accurate. ---- Lets say you're a cleric that's skilled and don't like heal parses. You find value in rezzing/buffing/shining/DI/cure/etc and get mad that the guy that just spam heals beats you in the parse. I can understand why a list of number that puts the spammer ahead will frustrate you, and possibility encourage others to become spammers. But this is where the volume and casting parse comes in, if you add up 10 casting parses and see barely any rez or buff casts, and you can call out the spam healer(s.) Most importantly, your anti parse mentality will let the crappy cleric fly under the radar. I can guarantee you that every guild with an anti parse movement has a cleric or 2 that would have been booted if they known how bad he/she/they are, as a tank that knows how to interpret heal parses, I can tell you this. The other problem, being anti parse encourages people to over rez, buff, cure, etc. At the end of the day, the tank still needs a large volume of heals with few gaps. I don't need 3 rez boxes. You need to assume the people you play with are smart enough to take factors into consideration, and let a high volume of parses paint a highly flawed but relevant picture.
Yeah to Roxxanna's point, some of us healers are really good at reading the heal spam (if you're in a guild that asks your healers to use hotkeys) to see where those gaps are and help fill in during them. So waiting a moment instead of spamming can be the key between large gaps/dead tank and a live tank. For example, when the tank first engages and is under his no damage disc, I have a mental timer in my head that tells me when to start healing so that he's getting a heal the instant the disc drops. While as I said above, other clerics are just happily spamming away with no result. Mobs that have AoE's (a semi-recent one with Shard's Landing), you can time when that AoE is going to hit based on the emote you get and if you're a smart healer, you can have your group heal land instantly after it goes off so everyone's full health again. (I've been doing that since MPG trials and on several events in between.)
I definatly agree on cleric ( and healers in general) getting favorable treatement cause they are soo rare and valuable to the guild... but sorry, you can be a healer and suck.
A easy way to spot out the bad cleric are the one who use their ''light'' line of spells... then you can move on to the clerics who don't understand that, in TDS raiding, a tank can drop from 100 to 0 within a second or two; a constant stream of quick heal is the way to go... pro-active healing, not reactive healing.
The difference between now and a year ago is last year clerics that used light didn't know better...now they know better but are too lazy/crappy to change, but they know they will get mocked if they do so they stay quiet
Tanks drop from 100 to zero in a second or two in CotF also, especially when a couple of spam healers are on there longer casting heal, this is why I sometimes become a "utility cleric" in certain situations. I will keep AI up on the tank, proc my twin cast, and hover over my multibind key, which both quick remedies and 15th on it, I have had a great deal of success with this setup.
Even if people disagree or have differing points of view on how to get things done, they are still at least having the discussion over how to improve individual or collective performance. But a lot of clerics* aren't even sitting at the proverbial table to have these discussions.They don't so much as disagree with how to improve individual or collective performance, but that it has to be done at all in the first place. Much more difficult to start a dialog and see improvements in those situations. In the end those tend to be the healers your guild replaces. To varying degrees it certainly fits all the clerics I asked our GL to demote since RoF. *you can also substitute 'cleric" with, well, most anything in game or out
A lot of that is because throughout EQ clerics have had this weird combination of being quite undesirable for the majority to play yet extremely necesary to raiding and until the advent of mercenaries, grouping. So because they got groups and into guilds no matter what, there was no need to ever try to improve.
I'm top 3 combined every night I raid. Every night. I would love a healer to say something about my DPS just so I can link exactly what I did and break it down to them if need be. Also, you say hypothetical healer, I was giving you real #'s, it wasn't a hypothetical situation. Porterz do you raid? If things aren't being handled and you don't want to bail on your guild because you've got friends and time put into it, you might be trying to find alternative ways to breach a subject and fix it as well, while trying not to offend anyone. Someone mentioned using a bridge of sorts, someone who is close to them to speak with them, I went with that and it looks to be solving the problem slowly. Also for healers who hate parses, you can't say that the information on them isn't worth looking at because it is, it's like a puzzle, with parsing and cast amount along with looking at which spells are casted you can gather a ton of information and see that there is a problem, or maybe there isn't. I feel some of you just don't like a light shined on you, because are slacking, or aren't doing the best you can be. To Roxx, I didn't mean to offend you when I said what I did, if I did I apologize. I still stand by looking at casts amount, in the example I was giving though. =P Long are the days past where you didn't need kid gloves on when talking to people =/.
Apology accepted , and i look a cast # first as well when seeing how I rank with other clerics, I just meant follow it up by look at what was cast.
Don't forget about those who don't understand Heal-Nukes and mezzable content in raids! Heal parsing is like Enchanter parsing IMO (although the latter you could still factor in a DPS parse). You really have to look at what the person was assigned to do and what they were casting to do it. There is one raid in particular I can think of where I may easily wind up 100 casts higher than others yet those players were still maximizing their particular role. If you don't look at the "what" you're just going to have drama. I'm fairly certain parsing fell into favor once instancing began and the death of server forums occurred, in order to maintain a substantial level of drama for certain people Seriously though, some people need a finger or 10 pointed at them if they're in a situation that has *some* type of minimal expectation of performance(raiding generally).
Welcome to my life Trying to help people improve is really challenging... I'm not sure if there's a really successful way to do it. I've found guides don't help that much, but personally, posting cast counts along with casts (I put them into google spreadsheets, broken down by class) has been the most successful thing. It's by no means perfect, but there is definitely a correlation as far as healers go.
I wouldn't even bring it up if someone is only 100 casts off as a healer, specially on a ton of time ( my example had 4,000 seconds ). Heal parsing is great if you understand what you're looking at and you don't just take the parse at face value and dig deeper. As for parsing chanters, I have a friend who made top 10 on our burn mobs( cotf ) , sustained over 100k for like 70 seconds!
