The Beast called WWS - Healing

In the first part of these series I explained the general parts of WWS, and I'm pretty sure that most of you can find how much damage in total or how much healing in total you did. However, WWS can offer much more. It can answer many questions players ask themselves.

How was my mana regen? Which abilities did I use the most? And consequently, should I adjust my talents because of the abilities I used?

In this part of the series I will go into how a user can get all the information needed out of WWS to analyze their performance.

Heals

Let me start by saying that the tab heals is definitely not the most important statistic to look at for a healer. It gives only a raw indication of how much healing has been done, but in the end it says nothing about for example how often you died, let your targets die, how much damage you prevented, how you spread out the healing, etc

The other negative aspect of looking only at the raw healing numbers is that several spells are still counted towards the person who got healed instead of the person who threw out the spell; prayer of mending is an excellent example of this.

It is definitely still worth mention however, because it does give that raw indication. After a while you'll learn to recognize your numbers and already by looking at these numbers you'll be able give a general estimate on how you did.

click on the image for a larger view

You can see in the above screenshot that Mist and Terpsichore were the two healers of this 10man, and at first view you would also say that Mist did better since there is a lot more raw healing.

Another thing to point out in this view are the numbers for overheal. You can see here that Mist did only 28% overheal, and Terpischore 42%. One thing to keep in mind here is that hot overheal is not logged as overheal, hence the overheal numbers for druids are generally pretty low.

Then in the last column you can see dispels. In this view it doesn't differentiate between magic, poison, curse, or disease dispell, they all go into the same bucket.

Up Close & Personal

WWS can help when you are unsure about where you have to stick your talent points. Of course there are cookie cutter build out there for every class, but every person heals in a slightly different way, and to make sure that your talent points fit with your healing style you can take a closer look at the abilities you use during raid.

As explained already in the first part to go to a player's specific abilities you can click on the name, or find that player through Browse > Raid & Mobs.

The view you get now already gives a lot more information on what this player has been doing during the raid.

The part that we will look at here is the middle section; Heals.

click on the image for a larger view

Notice how it says Terpischore & Morris at the top, this data is for the priest and the shadowfriend.

You get a view here of how much total healing each ability has done, what % that ability was off all abilities used, what the average healing output was of this ability, the average crit%, the biggest heal done with this ability and how much overheal.

Of the abilities used you can already see that we're following the priest. Another thing you can quickly see here is that this is a discipline priest since the 4th biggest heal is penance, which is a deep discipline talent.

What you can see straight away (if you know how holy nova works) is that this priest probably was in a pretty melee heavy raid since holy nova is the 4th biggest heal.

With this information you would think that this priest's biggest heal is Flash Heal, it actually isn't. And here we go a bit deeper into how to extract information out of WWS.

This priest was a discipline priest, so the PWS was most likely buffed through talents. Unfortunately the logs aren't recording absorbtion talents yet, so to see how much 'healing' this priest did with the PWS the only guidance we have is the healing from the Glyph of Power Word: Shield.

This glyph gives 10% of the damage absorbed as healing. Absorption never crits, healing does. So you need to take away the crit from the healing the glyph did and then you can calculate back to how much absorbtion the PWS has done.

In this case:
394.500 (total healing by glyph) / 109 (9% crit) * 100 = healing the glyph did without crit (10% of all damage absorbed) = 361.927 * 10 = total damage absorbed = 3.619.270

So the PWS absorbed more damage than the Flash Heal healed.

So from this information can find that this player should start by taking any talent that increases the absorbtion done by PWS and the healing from Flash Heal.

I can of course go through every ability like this, but I think you get the point of looking closely at which abilities you use.

Gear

Without leaving this view I would like to point out the healing done through Forethought Talisman. There aren't many items in the game that give you such direct indication of how useful they are, but WWS can still give you an indication which stats you should improve.

Crit is an excellent example. At a certain point it simply isn't useful anymore to stack crit, since it will give you a diminishing return. When you reach that point you have to maintain your crit, but stack spellpower perhaps, or mana if you end up oom often.

There are mathematical equation that show where this tipping point lies, and I won't go into those here, but WWS shows you if you have reached that tipping point.

Who heals whom?

As a healing lead I love this page. It shows me exactly if people followed the assignments I gave, or if their heals went all over the place. The information can help when you're trying to find out why some people keep dying, if your healers are bored, if you can actually trust people to follow what you told them to do, etc.

The only problem I have at the moment is that all the logs available to me currently are from Naxx, and yes we got bored. We also only had 2 healers so it's always a bit harder to see who healed whom specifically since those 2 healers simply have to heal everybody. I will give it my best shot, and if anybody has any questions feel free to just ask them in the comments.

Click on the image for a larger view

Focus is the first number you look at. The larger the focus, the more different people have been healed by this healer. So if you have a MT healer with a high focus, you know this person hasn't been MT healing only.

There may be many good reasons that this healer wasn't MT healing even though he/she was assigned to do so, so I do advise to not just take the number and start shouting at this player. However once again it is an indication of what the players have been doing during raid.

For personal use, you can take a look at what your healing assignment was and if you succeeded in following it. If you were meant to raid heal, but your healing focus is still around 1, you need to ask yourself why this was. The other way around as well, if you were supposed to heal the tank, but you find yourself with a healing focus of 7, you need to wonder why you were healing so many different people.

The bottom part of this screen is also rather interesting as it tells you how much healing everybody received. Tanks should normally be on top, and dps should be below there. If dps shows up on top you need to ask yourself if there was a good reason for this. If specific dps players always show on top you might just need to have a word with these players.

Afterthought.

I cannot repeat this enough. WWS is not meant to burn others down, or pat yourself on the shoulder. It should be used as a tool to work on yourself. Yes, you have to compare. Why? Simply because there is no other way to see how others do things, and you might learn from them.

I have tried caution in my explanations of things, but if I did accidentally step on some toes, then please accept my apologies. If you feel that I have missed stuff, or if you would simply see more explanation of one or the other thing, let me know.

I theorycraft my class as much as I can, but I too take stupid deaths that could have been prevented by me stepping out of the fire.

Use it as a tool to improve and to help each other improve.