Step away from the meters
Loading ...Seriously, you’re going to hurt yourself.
I have three feeds from WOW Insider going: The Queue, The Daily Quest, and anything tagged “priest” (that last one can get really annoying when the authors/editors of, say, All The World’s A Stage decide to spam every possible tag they can on So You Want To Be A Herbalist). Today, in the Priest feed, the Forum Post of the Day came through. It was about Discipline priests in raids, and how a raid leader was singling out a Discipline priest because his healing on the meters was under par. Amanda’s final comment really rang true: “It’s not about being a star, or a prima dona [sic], raiding is about working together as a team to accomplish a common goal.”
This is going to come as news to a lot of raid leaders (go on, raise your hand if you are one), but really and truly, Ulduar is not Galaga. Galaga is about getting the highest possible score; that’s the whole point of the game. Raid leaders tend to treat raiding like it works the same way – they see the healing and DPS meters as high score charts, and penalize raiders who don’t get onto the charts. The problem with that is that unlike Galaga, World of Warcraft raiding actually has a very concrete win condition: did you defeat the boss? If you defeated the boss, the entire raid wins. If not, the entire raid fails.
If the raid isn’t failing – if you’re successfully downing the bosses you want to take down – then there’s no reason at all to single anyone out on the meters. You met the win condition! Clearly everyone is doing at least as well as they need to be, or else you wouldn’t be successful.
If the raid is failing, everybody needs to step up a little more. It’s really tempting to go through the high scores – sorry, the meters – and identify the people who aren’t scoring as high – sorry, doing as much damage or healing – and try to “fix” those people. (In the example in Amanda’s post, the RL asked the priest to go Holy to increase his HPS.) Unfortunately, that simply won’t solve the problem. Unless you’re being actively sabotaged or someone’s doing something incredibly dumb, fixing a single person isn’t going to make the raid go from not killing the boss to killing the boss. When a raid fails, nobody is exempt. If the raid isn’t doing enough DPS but the healing is okay, the healers can look at ways to keep the raid alive a little longer after the enrage timer hits, or to damage the boss between heals. If the raid is doing enough DPS but important players are dying, the DPS can work on staying out of the fire or taking the adds down a little faster. I don’t mean that the DPS is exempt from improving in the first scenario or the healers are exempt in the second; I mean that everybody shares the responsibility of a failed attempt.
(If you are being actively sabotaged or someone’s doing something incredibly dumb, the meters aren’t going to help you anyway.)
I’m not saying that meters are useless. The best – perhaps the only valid – use of meters is to check your own performance in the raid (and even then it’s not necessarily accurate, like the Discipline priest example above, which is why WOW Web Stats is handy), and to look at other raid members to see what you could be doing differently. Raid leaders, though, should be paying attention not at individual raiders – because I will guarantee that there isn’t a single player in the raid who can’t improve something – but at the statistics of the raid as a whole. It’s obvious, but damaging to the egos of the other raiders, that if you think a single person is holding you back enough that you can identify them as the cause of your wipes, it’s actually the whole rest of the raid that needs work.
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There are addons now that can estimate absorbs. There's one for recount and another separate one. Problem solved. Turns out our disc priest really WAS bad. No more excuses, haha!
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Hm, singling out a player after a wipe is basically stating:
“That itchy feeling you get in your stomach from wiping… vent it out on this player!”
Doing that is wrong. Doing that based on meters is wrong and stupid.
But ignoring the individual performance of players is a luxury an officer can not afford. The goal is to make a team, not to have 10 lice on an elephant. That means it is the individual responsibility of every player to give their best contribution to the team and it is the leader's responsibility to check if they:
1) contribute their best
2) need help improving their best
Note that this is more a coaching role, and coaching is done as much outside the raid as it is during the raid. During the raid you need to work as a team, and to single out players is to break down the team. But outside the raid, singling out is unavoidable and should not be avoided. There simply are players that can't make it on their own. Identifying them isn't an easy task and meters may not be the best indicators… but they help.
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Agree completely, EJ.
Take, for example, my rogue. When in a raid (and the tank is either a bear or a DK, which is normally the case in most raids I attend), I have a tendency to gimp my personal DPS by applying Expose Armor on the mob. That's 5 combo points I could have used for a 7.5-8k critical Eviscerate. Instead, over time, this debuff on the boss will allow everyone else that's smacking him about the head to down him that much faster. It's not about my personal damage done to the mob so much as it is about us being able to progress further in the raid.
If we win, we get purple loot. If not, we have hefty repair bills to cover. Personally, I'll set my ego aside for a chance at moving forward and not having to pay that 7-10g death bill, something too few people seem to understand.
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You can modify recount to show the damage absorbed from PW:S and Divine Aegis. Take a look at: http://www.wowhead.com/?forums&topic=68238
Just take the code in the code box and copy it into the relevant file in your latest version of Recount. Read some of the comments as well so you can marginally tweak the values so that whole numbers display, otherwise you get lot's of decimal places. This mod works for you and for you only. It presumes that you have 3/3 Divine Aegis and the Glyph of PW:S (a fair assumption for a raiding disc priest). It uses that as the basis to calculate the “healing” that PW:S and Divine Aegis does. As recount has now way of showing absorption it just lumps it in with the healing. It presumes that the entire shield is absorbed, which again is a very fair assumption if you are assigned to MT healing in which case the shields should be absorbed the whole time. The net result? We shoot up in the healing meters but only in ours….others in the raid will not see what we are seeing. It is good to link it and show them that you are actually doing your job and if absorption was counted as healing we take a massive leap up the meters. 250K extra “healing” from absorbed shields is a massive leap to take.
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That's the best attitude a raider can have, Aarens. If only every other raider wasn't too obsessed with the meters to spend 1 gcd go dispel or lay a debuff on the boss.
Just wondering, though, do you have a warrior tank in your raid? Cos if you do…
They'll hate you for preventing them from using sunder armor on the boss ><
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True, if bosses are dying and players are not, it's easy to say the entire raid is doing well and everyone is performing. But unfortunately, you cannot trust that all 25 people are performing at the best that their class and gear allows them to.
EG: If a boss requires 3k dps minimum to down him before he enrages/explodes/starts breaking wind, I can have 15 people churning out 3.1k dps and a single person doing 1.5k dps and down him easily. Sure, boss dies easily and everyone gets loot. But is the 1.5k dpser doing as well as he needs to be? I don't want to wait till we get to a boss where everyone needs to do 3k dps to win to start noticing the flawed player.
This applies to heals too. Sure, everyone lives, boss dies, but when 5 healers are working hard pressing emergency buttons every available CD because the last healer is suffering from cerebral palsy so everyone survives, I want to be able to identify that problem BEFORE the raid wipes because of it. There's no other tool that can help a raid leader in that. Used correctly, it's also all that's needed.
What I'm saying is, use meters in moderation and view the numbers from the correct perspective, taking into account class, spec and situation. If you're a healer, you should know – all fights are situational for healers. Some healers produce better numbers than others on some fights. Also, dedicated tank healers probably will display less numbers than raid healers overall. Therefore, meters cannot tell that A is better than B in healing, and never should be used that way. What I can do with the meters, however, is look at the meters, keep in mind the situation and class limitations and identify healers who are hindering the raid and causing stress for the rest.
In the hands of a raid leader who is aware of every class's ability and every fight's circumstance, meters are a good gauge of performance. Sure, it cannot show the rogue using expose armor or the ret paladin using lay on hands and bubbles to save others, but assuming they're good, their numbers still shouldn't drop to atrocious levels. Once again, I believe meters can be used within reason. No one should use it as a ranking system to determine who's a better player. But one shouldn't disregard the information it tells us too. It can save your next fight from becoming a wipe.
Incidentally, I dislike carrying under-performers in my raid ^^
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EXCELLENT post.
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