Overhealing
I got an interesting question from a reader who asked about Overhealing. Lets take a look at overhealing, whether it's good or bad and what you can do about it.
Question: Overhealing - When is too much? For the last few weeks now as my gear has gotten better I have watched my overhealing skyrocket. I am constantly in the 75-80% range. In a typical ICC25 run (normal mode) I run between 50 and 60M Overheals with 17-20% effective healing. Oom is not really a concern as I have always managed my mana well. We run 5 healer, myself, a tree, 2 priests and a shaman. I am not a big believer of the FoL build myself, I have been a pally healer since Vanilla and Holy light, even in BC was my goto spell. I also follow the ABC's of pally healing and sanding around waiting for that big drop in health to land a HL bomb is something i cant do. It just bothers me that my OH is so high and there doesnt seem to be a lot that I can do to prevent it short of reworking my healing style or just standing around waiting, in which case i feel that I am letting the team down. My total through put is generally 2x+ the next closest healer. I am wondering if maybe we should just drop and run 4 healers not 5 and see how that goes. thoughts?
Response: When is overhealing too much?
Unfortunately the question isn’t really important. Don’t get me wrong, it’s something that you should pay attention to, but for different reasons.
To work out your healing output you add your effecting heals and your over healing together.
How is this going to help? For most situations it won’t, but it does give you an idea of your healing output cap.
So is there a time that I should worry about overhealing?
In a way yes. If you run out of mana then reducing your overhealing may be a way to help reduce your mana usage. I believe that if you’re running out of mana often, in most situations you’re better off working on your mana management than your overhealing.
For Holy Paladins overhealing is often a function of how much damage is floating around and how spread out that damage is. What I mean by that… Lets say there’s 50k of damage concentrated on a few people, you’re going to be able to use a Holy Light and heal the majority of that damage in one heal. If there’s 50k of damage spread between 25 raiders, then your healing is going to use fairly useless.
When you’re doing easy encounters, this is going to be fairly common. When you get to either hard mode stuff or the cutting edge encounters you’ll find that there’s going to be bucket loads of extra damage floating around to heal. The more damage concentrated on a few raiders, the lower your overheals will be… so in a way, your overhealing depends on the encounter and the difficulty of the content.
I’m a big fan on dropping a healer or two for extra DPS. You’re going to have to ensure that all the roles are still covered so you’re not going to be able to do it for every encounter, but it’s a good option.
The benefits of dropping a healer can also include faster encounters.
In my books I like dropping a healer for another reason. I like a challenge. When encounters stop being cutting edge, they get boring. Dropping a healer can help increase the difficulty level.
The issue is that some encounters don’t let you run with less healers. If you normally run with 5 healers and you want to try running with 4, I’d suggest bringing one of the healers who have a DPS off spec. At least that way if you run into an encounter where you need the full 5, you can get that raider to switch back to their healing spec. This happens often in 10 mans, where you often need 2 healers, but occasionally need 3.
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