Whether you’ve been playing healing classes since WoW began or just started you will know that there is an art to being a really good healer.  While most DPS classes can pretty much face roll their keyboard through most of the game, a healer really has to stay on their toes. 

Although mods like recount can show you your HPS (heals per second) that’s really not the best measure of how WELL you are healing.  We’ve seen 1,200 HPS guys really out-perform folk with something more like 1,800.  HPS and DPS do not carry the same weight.  Big heals at the wrong time, and not big enough heals on the right team members at critical times makes HPS a pretty worthless measure of healing skill.

Outright healing power isn’t nearly as important as good timing.  As a result there really isn’t a good single measurement of how well you are healing much like there is no single stat that can tell you how good your tanking skill may be.  It’s a very subjective world in WoW when it comes to healing performance, but we propose that there IS something all you healers will want to track that will help you perform at your best in the very highest pressure situations.

Now, when you first begin healing heroics with quest blues it’s going to be a struggle at times no matter how skilled you are.  With that being said you can hone your skill as you gear up to the point where the most difficult healing battles become much easier.  We’re going to show you the one thing you’ll really want to know about your heals.

Tracking your overhealing will help you more than any other thing when it comes to becoming a truly Dominating healer.   This is especially true for paladins, but we’ll get to that later.  How much you overheal is a pretty good indicator of whether you are using the right heals at the right time and paying close attention to your mana pool.

For those of you in power guilds like Dominate with good healers around to cover your mistakes you might think you are doing better than you really are.  If your guild or groups are having trouble with Saphirron, KT and Malygos, the answer is probably that you need to work on your heals a little more.  You can do this by tracking your overheals in every situation and working like mad to get that number lower and lower.

The reason reducing your overheals will help you is that it will lead to a much better efficiency ratio between your mana consumption and HPS.  We’ll take a lower HPS and higher efficiency through fewer overheals all day long.

If you know which heals you are using that cause overhealing then you can also know that you are probably using the heal at the wrong time.  A heal with almost no overhealing means you’re not using it enough.  An overheal means you used a heal too big at a greater mana cost when a smaller heal with a lower cost would have done just fine.

You’ll probably want to use Recount for the very best visual representation of overhealing because it can give you near information overload.  Just select overhealing in the header, click your own name and you will be able to see everything you need to know to improve your performance. 

What you are looking for is which spells you are using that cause overheals.  Next see if you are overhealing on ticks, hits or crits.  Overhealing on ticks is something you can live with, and minimize to some degree.  Overhealing on crits is also going to happen since you can never tell when those are going to proc.  But if more than 50% of your OH happens on hits, you’re doing it all wrong.  You should never use a spell that will overheal more than 5-10% on hit.  So if your OH is above 20% and your hit OH is above 50% you’ve got some work to do.

Now, keep in mind that if you go out there and try to get your overheals to zero you will most likely fail.  Particularly on certain bosses such as Maexxna under 30% and Patchwerk, you basically have to go all out to keep your tank(s) alive.  In those situations it’s better to overheal a little to esure victory.  But if you’ve been tracking and working on reducing your overheals in every OTHER situation, you will have a far greater mana efficiency during those encounters than ever before.  That means you’ll use less mana than ever and still complete the encounter with everyone smiling at you.

Now, as you work your way into T7.5 gear, it will get much easier to drop your overhealing rate as your heals and mana pool get larger.  You will not have to throw out as many heals, thus reducing the number of times an overheal can come about.  But if you are already very efficient before your gear gets OP, you should also be able to lower your OH% every time you get some decent gear upgrades.

Paladins have particular trouble with overhealing.  Pally heals can simple be huge and you will crit a LOT if you spec properly.  It’s not unusual to see a paladin who is performing the job well still have an overhealing rate of 35% or more.  Some of it just can’t be helped, but keep in mind that this almost makes it more important for a paladin to really watch this stat.

I discovered how important OH reduction was a couple of months ago.  In a heroic OS run with another guild there were two priests.  At the end of the run they both came in within 10,000 of each other in total heals and .2% HPS of each other, but the overhealing told another story.  One priest was at 27% OH, the other guy – 13%.  That’s a really big difference.  It means that although both guys looked almost identical, the 13% OH fellow was 14% more efficient.  That’s more than twice as good when it comes to efficiency. 

With a mana pool around 20k, 14% means making your mana pool play more like 23K.  3,000 mana is 8 to 10 big heals when you take into account mana regen even during a fight.  It’s like adding almost an extra 30 seconds of all out healing to your team.  If your effective heals are around 1,000,000 for a run, that would make your effective healing 1,140,000 for the run.  I mean, we all will take a piece of gear where everything else is equal (like our healers) that gave us even 3% added spell power.  That would be a significant upgrade.  So a difference of 14% in healing efficiency is a HUGE upgrade between those two guys.  They look the same, until you look at OH.  That’s when one dude really shows how much he Dominates the other guy.

Now, it’s still better to be safe than sorry, so not only can you NOT hit zero overheals, you also wouldn’t want to.  It’s more like balacing a teeter-totter than anything.  You have to strike a balance that fits your class and build.  And while we don’t have mountains of data regarding OH, we will give you some numbers to shoot for just for kicks.

Priests should probably be shooting for something under 15% overheals.  Disc builds will find this easier than holy.  Paladins might very well struggle to get under 20%, but you really need to.  It’s a crutch to spam FoL all the time because your mana pool will support it 95% of the time.  Shaman are a little hard to peg because of the mechanics of chain heal, but find your sweet spot somewhere between 15% to 20%.  Again, lower is better for the most part. 

Druids are the most difficult to peg in this discussion.  If you are rolling HOTs on the tank at the start of the pull (as you should) even perfect timing will leave you with OH above 5%.  Since almost everyone else is using direct heals, they normally will not allow your Rejuv, LB, or RG to tick them back up to 100% (especially those paladins) so other healers will usually push your number closer to 15%.  That’s right, other healers will minimize your efficiency.  There is no clean way to avoid this either, since it can be nearly impossible to teach OTHER healers to watch for YOUR hots in the buffs of every other member of a 25 man raid.  Not really gonna happen.  So although Druids could concievably have by far the lowest OH, just shoot for less than everyone else.  Try to hit 10%, but just keep in mind that it probably is never going to happen.  If you do group with another tree you’ll find that you will come in under 10% fairly easily (unless they are a druid that is trying to act like a paladin and uses HT all the time – sigh).

So keep an eye on your overheals.  It will certainly improve your mana consuption and overall performance in every situation because you will learn exactly which heals to use in a very precise way.  And don’t just track OH for a full run, check the data after every fight so you can learn to change which heals you use based on particular sitations.  Always watch, always improve, and you will always Dominate.