Healing Meters, Decoded

A lot of people put far too much emphasis on healing meters. Typically, I'd say those people tend to be DPS meter-whores who are attempting to bring that inside competition over to healing. Before long, everyone else is jumping on board, and you've now got healers casting randomly, sniping, overhealing, and wasting mana.


So you're sitting there, asking yourself ... "Self, why do we have healing meters if they're so evil?"

Meters can be good for some things, when used correctly. Most often, I'll look at it when I'm standing there picking my nose with nothing to heal. When I start to wonder what's going on, look at the meter, and see the lowest amount of overheal by any healer is over 50%, it's an indicator that there are too many healers.


The question I hear the most is: "Why am I always lower than [insert class here] on the meter?"

The answer is not simple. It depends on a lot of different things. In a lot of cases, you're going to be compairing apples to oranges. The only way a close comparison can be made is if you were at the exact same gear level, you had the exact same assignments on the exact same encounter, with latency exactly the same, response time (how quickly can you click you mouse?) exactly the same... and that's not even taking into consideration things like luck, crit, trinket procs, etc.

In reality, there are just far too many things to consider to make a direct comparison.


But, in a hypothetical perfect world, where should shamans sit on the meter compared to other healers?

I'll go back to this shaman definition -- jack of all trades, master of none. We are support healers. And given that, all things being equal, in most cases shamans will not find themselves at the top of the meters. We are not as good at single-target healing as paladins. We are not as good at raid healing as priests. We are not as good at mobility healing as druids. Where we do shine is heal sniping. ;-)