71% overheal for ICC25. As high as 75% on certain fights. Initially I was pretty bummed by this. 75% overheal means only 25% of my heals are actually effective healing, which to me meant I was only putting in 25% of the work I should be.
But then I took a look at all the 25 man logs. Since we’ve been doing ICC, my overhealing has been a consistent 70%+. My lowest overhealing was 63%. So either I’m really good at consistently sucking, or there’s more at work here.
Healing Style
You can see, at a glance, that I favor a Holy Light healing style. In almost every log I’ve examined, Holy Light and Beacon of Light account for at least half of my total healing, which is a healthy level. Holy Light, unfortunately, has two sources for overheal: Beacon of Light and Glyph of Holy Light. Neither of these abilities discriminates against a target that is at full health versus one who actually needs healing.
There’s also the fact that I was tank healing for most of the raid. And in my worst overheal fight, Gunship Battle, there isn’t much need to toss gobs of healing onto anyone but the tanks, specifically the tank jumping to the other ship. So with six healers, at least three of them are probably tossing heals onto the same tank I’m healing, and my beacon is overhealing the tank the others are healing. Maths are hard, so I’m not going to go into the statistics of that, but it’s fairly easy to see the reason behind the overheal there.
Healing Synergy
I love my guild. Really I do. But on any given Sunday (I see what you did there…) we have four holy priests. Four. One is dual-spec’d disc, but he only breaks it out for Deathbringer Saurfang. The only other healers, for the most part, are myself and a resto druid.
Assuming the druid is running foundation HoTs and the holy priests are getting spillover from AE, not to mention the priests also healing the tanks, hell yes there’s going to be overheal. I’m not entirely sure what would help that, aside from having a resto shaman and a permanent disc priest in the raid.
For my part, however, I would like to learn more about how our guild’s healers work. I can stare at logs all day, but it doesn’t really tell me much. Perhaps I’ll pass along a healing survey to get a general idea and then look at the logs with that in hand to see what I can do to improve team synergy.
Abundance of Healers
I’m noticing it’s not just me that has a fairly high amount of overhealing. Everyone is fairly high. Without considering if people are healing the right targets and using the right spells for the right situations, that tells me we may be running too many healers. Or again, too many healers of the same type doing the same thing.
I’d be curious to try it with 5 and see how it goes. I don’t see Plague happening with less than 6, but Lower Spire should be completely doable with just 5. And then I don’t get stuck in the group with the snarky warlocks, ostracized from the other healers.
In Summation… Nobody Cares
Here’s the thing about overhealing: nobody cares. Well, let me refine that a bit. Nobody cares, unless you’re running yourself out of mana or people are frequently dying while one target just keeps getting healed past full.
Fighting overheal as a paladin is a losing battle. We have excellent throughput, but very little in the way of smart healing. You can avoid some overhealing snafoos by using your spells appropriately – you probably shouldn’t be using Holy Light on a warlock that’s just Life Tapped – but in a fast-moving raid environment, you may not have the luxury of time to determine whether or not that warlock just lifetapped, or if he’s taking sustained raid damage. Waiting for him to get hit again may cause his death.
Assuming you have some sort of monitor for incoming heals (Grid, for example) and know how best to utilize your spells, you’re better off worrying about other things. We can afford to be a bit sloppy about overhealing. Hell, part of our near bottomless mana pool is caused by the overhealing of crits.
So if you’re not running out of mana and people aren’t dying: Nobody cares! And you shouldn’t either.
