There is no healing spreadsheet

A rogue in my guild is work­ing on mak­ing a com­pe­tent heal­ing priest alt. He asked me where the priest spread­sheet is. Like how you actu­ally know for cer­tain, the way a rogue can just say “Well, this sword is just flat-out bet­ter than that one because I put them both in the rogue dps spread­sheet and the answer is: the new one yields +10 dps.” I answered, “Ha ha.”

Heal­ing is much harder to diag­nose than tank­ing or dps is. I mean, triv­ially the ques­tion for heal­ing is: Did we wipe? If yes, the prob­lem might be heal­ing, or it might be lack of exe­cu­tion or under­stand­ing of the event. If no, then you did fine. That’s it. Bonus points for nobody dying.

When you’re a dps’er, every choice regard­ing gear and tal­ents and so on can be boiled down to one ques­tion (two if you’re advanced):

• Sim­ple: Am I per­son­ally doing more damage?
• Advanced: Am I mak­ing the group/raid’s total dam­age out­put higher?

For each event, the raid has X time to do Y dam­age with Z con­straints, now get to it. You can run Recount or Recap or any num­ber of other tools to diag­nose dam­age. It’s triv­ial. You put on a new piece of gear, go raid, and then say,

“Well, I thought bonus crit rat­ing this would help, but my miss rate went up by 2% and I did less over­all dam­age. Guess I’m back to this weaker look­ing +hit rat­ing blue.”

As far as research, a class’s dps is bro­ken down into a for­mat sim­i­lar to this: If you are build A, stack stat/rating B until Bmax, then stack C stat/rating infi­nitely. For frost mages it’s “stack spell hit until the spell cap, then spell haste and spell dam­age infinitely”.

Tank­ing is harder than that. You’re try­ing to both keep aggro and not die. Keep­ing aggro is about gen­er­at­ing threat, which also has par­tic­u­lar gear choices, but more or less works like doing dam­age (stack hit rat­ing, exper­tise, spell hit, shield block, attack power, and shield block value in var­i­ous amounts depend­ing on which kind of tank you are). Not dying involves a few vari­ables like sta­mina and avoid­ance, as well as pre­vent­ing as much of the spike dam­age as you can. There are trade­offs to be made, but you have a max­i­mum health total that’s easy to see, an avoid­ance rate that’s easy to com­pute. You know you’re doing the right amount of threat if your raid doesn’t have to hold back on dam­age. You bal­ance accordingly.

Heal­ing? Like tank­ing, the suite of stats changes between classes–some mix of heal­ing, mp5, spirit, intel­lect, and spell crit. But the act of heal­ing depends entirely on each par­tic­u­lar event. Your tank might get crushed, get hit nor­mally, block, or dodge. Every­one in your raid might take steady, con­stant dam­age. Your tank might never drink potions or use health­stones. Your dps might get cleaved by the boss for stand­ing in the wrong place. Your job is not just to heal the tank, it’s to patch the mis­takes in mid-event.

Also, two dif­fer­ent attempts on the same boss with the same raid can go com­pletely dif­fer­ently just due to the inher­ent ran­dom­ness of some events. Think of Ilhoof in Kara. If a healer gets sac­ri­ficed, it’s extremely tough on the remain­ing heal­ers for those ten sec­onds. If not, that’s nine min­utes of (heal­ing) plea­sure! Switch­ing one piece of gear in that event, and most oth­ers… you can’t actu­ally tell if it mat­ters. You just know that a higher value in your key stats is better.

On top of all of that, in raids you also must instantly and silently adjust to the heal­ing style of the peo­ple around you so that you’re not wast­ing group efforts. That abil­ity to adjust is the whole essence of raid healing–it can’t be quan­ti­fied and it doesn’t show up on your char­ac­ter sheet. If I was going to land a slow, mana-efficient heal for 5000 and some­one else throws in a mana-inefficient 2000 heal, caus­ing me to over­heal by 2000 and waste that time and mana, who’s fault is it? (Trick ques­tion, it doesn’t mat­ter. That’s wasted mana on someone’s part, and if you don’t work it out, the raid will wipe at some point due to your col­lec­tive waste of mana.)

So given how neb­u­lous and ran­dom and instinc­tive heal­ing is, how can you tell that you’re doing bet­ter by swap­ping one item for another? You can’t tell, because you can’t run tests out­side of com­bat. Your heals might hit for a tiny bit less or more, but the actual trade off between 6 mp5 and 22 heal­ing? Can’t tell. Your playstyle influ­ences your gear selec­tion more than other roles. Dam­age deal­ers just do dam­age, and every piece of gear they have is about doing more dam­age. There’s no opin­ion as to whether 900 dam­age is more than 800 dam­age. Tanks want to sur­vive and gen­er­ate threat, that’s their balance.

A healer who loves mana regen­er­a­tion is going to cast weaker heals con­tin­u­ously, and make it work. A healer who loves larger heals is going to try to time their larger heals cor­rectly so they aren’t wast­ing mana, and make it work. The final grade is: Did we win? Yes. Great, your gear and spec is cor­rect for that event!

Most of us just learn the stats that are nec­es­sary for our build (for exam­ple, spell crit plus heal­ing plus mp5 for a holy pal­adin), and try to get decent lev­els of all of them.

So unfor­tu­nately, there is no heal­ing spread­sheet. This leads to the huge learn­ing curve in learn­ing to heal (and tank), but that’s another arti­cle.

More Words!

• How to Read PvP Gear for PvE
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Your role in a PvE raid
• Sec­ond Magister’s Ter­race run
• WoW Wrath Class Redesign and Reit­em­iza­tion Explained
• Offi­cers should all have Tanks and Healers