How about some target dummies for healers?

17Bishop · January 2018

I know people like to have a concrete idea of how much healing a person should be able to put out for like a trial or something, but there's no definitive way to measure healing output. I've been hitting 25k crits pretty often with my build, but I would love for a target that would just measure healing per second instead of damage. I would like to actually test builds to compare my base heals and such, so I don't waste time using trash sets. But a PvE and PvP dummy to measure healing in both would be a nice thing to see. I know most people don't care about healers because it's almost always "our" fault if anyone dies, but maybe ZoS could show some love to the support players.

Goshua · January 2018

Bridge fight!

pauli133 · January 2018

The complexity of healing in real content means that there's a real danger of any simple, synthetic, dummy-based healing benchmark being counterproductive.

I think the best way to instrument it would be a small dedicated dungeon, with friendly NPCs representing the rest of the party. Time to complete, max/average buffs, total healing, average/low hp, deaths, etc would be useful metrics.

...but that's a lot more than I'd expect ZOS to invest in.

DemonDruaga · January 2018

If you play with people that call the " healer is at fault " thing, stop running with them, this game is so focused on damage dealing that two expirienced and good equipped DD's can handle about anything in 4 man pve content.
And yeah, a hps dummy would be a good thing to implement

lolo_01b16_ESO · January 2018

If you want to do theorycrafting just heal yourself out of comabat and use those numbers for your calculations.
I think a healing dummy would would actually increase the number of bad healers, since maxing your hps is one of the worst things you can do as healer. The main difficulty about healing is to keep your party alive with the least amount of heals wasted, so you have more time for buffs and debuffs.

17Bishop · January 2018

I've not had any real problems with my keeping people alive unless we screw up mechanics. I would just like to compare my rotations and builds to try and maximize my output. I'm comfortable enough now with my healing that I'm not truly worried about any content that isn't meant for CP 360. I would just like an easier way to test my healing capabilities than when I'm neck deep in Vet CoA 2 because activity finder hates me.

paulsimonps · January 2018

I will say this, HPS does not matter as much as a lot of people seem to think. A few base HoTs and your go to Burst and your buffs is all you need. If you care to much about HPS you will lose track of other things that might matter more, such as situational healing. That being said the amount you can heal per ability is easy enough to find out already, unless you want to start taking healing recieved and taken into effect or defile, which you wont get through dummies anyway.

17Bishop · January 2018

I know that right now with my current setup that I'm crit healing around 29k max and more frequent around 25k for one breath of life. I guess I would just like to have a way to measure my heals the same way a dps measures their damage.

zaria · January 2018

lolo_01b16_ESO wrote: »

If you want to do theorycrafting just heal yourself out of comabat and use those numbers for your calculations.
I think a healing dummy would would actually increase the number of bad healers, since maxing your hps is one of the worst things you can do as healer. The main difficulty about healing is to keep your party alive with the least amount of heals wasted, so you have more time for buffs and debuffs.

This, note rotation as in knowing who buttons to push and get an feeling for often you have to refresh passives can be dry trained, for more realism do Orcinium world boss dailies or similar.

Running normal dungeons with weak groups is even better, yes you you want low dps and fake tank in an easier normal.
no one shot mechanics but slow and group take so much damage you have to work.
If you get an fast run.
Move up to harder dungeons.

Goshua · January 2018

Pretty sure an addon like combat metrics will let you do that.

17Bishop · January 2018

Goshua wrote: »

Pretty sure an addon like combat metrics will let you do that.

I'm on Xbox NA so I can't do add-ons.

xenowarrior92eb17_ESO · January 2018

target dummies for healers? run hm vet dungeons with no tank...DLC ones ofc

17Bishop · January 2018

xenowarrior92eb17_ESO wrote: »

target dummies for healers? run hm vet dungeons with no tank...DLC ones ofc

Nah man. I've actually done that thanks to PuGs, so I'll pass on that idea.

Magdalina · January 2018

Healing numbers aren't as important as dps numbers though. And I don't mean it's not important to keep people alive, of course it is and there are (...some) mechanics that require quite active healing for that, but it's more a matter of knowing when and how to heal and less a matter of "how much" to heal. Let's take BoL, you can easily get it to crit for 40k+...but why? Average dps' health is barely 18k. If your dps is missing more than 18k health, he is already dead. If your tank is missing those 40k+ health on a regular basis, he's probably doing something wrong.

There's no benefit for overhealing(well, the SPC buff but a couple Mutagens take care of that much better than constant BoL spam), but there is no such thing as overdpsing, which is why people are so addicted to target dummies - the more the better in 99.99999% situations. With heals, it's in a way the opposite even - if you max out your heals raw numbers you'll get uselessly large, overhealing burst heals but no sustain to actually keep your group up for extended periods of time or/and debuff/dps.

There're very few things you cannot outheal with Springs spam on a buff/sustain focused toon with zero spelldamage enchants etc - and most of those things are mechanics related and shouldn't be happening first of all.

17Bishop · January 2018

I combo my cleansing ritual and healing spring for spc proc but BoL is in my rotation for someone that's out of sight that needs an emergency cast or 2. Mostly I find myself dropping blockade of ele and ele drain instead of spamming heals. 60% of the time a single healing springs on target is enough to heal them to full.

Dojohoda · January 2018

For testing heals, which might not be even remotely ideal, I have:

1. Placed a platform of some type at my Hundings house near the slaughter fish to damage myself in order to test my non-ground based heals.
2. Jumped off the roof at the house to test ground placed heals ( any heals, actually).

I usually do this at PTS after having placed several relevant mundus stones and a Transmutation station. I was able to find the possibly best weapon traits and mundus for my gear/ character combo.

AlienatedGoat · January 2018

Heals per second is absolutely useless as a benchmark. It serves no purpose. Once you heal a 17-19k DPS to full and get that SPC proc, thats as far your HPS will take you. Healing 80k HPS serves no practical purpose.

Nestor · January 2018

Healing is more than healing. It's pretty easy to keep a group alive. There are the buffs too. Probably what is more important is magic used per second. That is what you have to practice at, keeping your resource pool up so you can do the job.

Banana · January 2018

Tanks to. But the dummy hammers you.

obscure7 · January 2018

"It's not how powerful your healing staff is, it's how you use it."

WrathOfInnos · January 2018

The number would be meaningless. Overhealing does no good. Really the healers job is to maximize buff and debuff uptimes, while doing just enough healing to keep the group alive. After these things have been accomplished, the healer should do as much DPS as possible (shards, lightning wall of elements, power of the light, etc.)

HatchetHaro · January 2018

The thing about healing is that it is easy to go overboard with your heals, with those resources better spent on group utility and buffs. There's only so much healing you have to do before it becomes redundant.

The same actually applies to tanking; you don't have to stack survival stats to the max to tank effectively. Again, those resources are better spent on group utility and buffs.

The reason for this is that there is a cap to efficiency in supportive roles, where too much healing and tankiness becomes useless. There's no such thing for DDs, because DPS will always be better the more there is of it, and that is also why target dummies exist for DPS testing but not HPS testing.

KingYogi415 · January 2018

Expect it to cost 10k crowns if zos makes it happen.

jaschacasadiob16_ESO · January 2018

I always liked the idea of having some kind of Maelstrom for healers.

Then, if you think about it, what is the point of having x heal per second (HpS) ? None.
Having huge HpS means nothing if you can't sustain it. And it means nothing if you die.
On top of this, healers don't just heal. Healer buff their allies, set enemies out of balance and debuffed, and contribute to dps.

There is no real single value that represents all of this. Still, when you PUG vWGT or vCoS you feel happy when the healer is like the one mentioned above. Don't you?

Want to test yourself?

Solo heal normal trials.
PUG veteran dungeons, including DLC content. Mainly when the tank is not a tank (and you end up both healing and tanking Selene or Kena).
Heal PvP with PvE gear and skills. Enemies react in a different way than NPCs. Once they see you healing and ressing, they will go after you. A great healer can really make the difference, helping a small group taking down a zerg with fast resses, smart cleanses and huge heals. And yea, this requires a lot of sustainability.

There is no real number to define a great healer. But do not worry, if you do the above, you will get tons of whispers of people going vets interesting in having you taking good care of them.

Really, you don't need neither a number nor a title.

Sixty5 · January 2018

Thing is making target dummies for healers would be hard.

You'd have to give them a large area to run around in, as well as spawn large red circles that the dummy would dive into, plus I have no idea how you'd simulate having to yell at the dummy to pick up orbs/shards

phileunderx2 · January 2018

The arena world boss in the gold coast is a good place to practice healing.

Cryptical · January 2018

A standard healing dummy would be a figure with a health bar that takes amounts of damage equal to the average damage output of the mobs in normal non-dlc part1 dungeons, with random surges to simulate some unfortunate turn of events such as drawing all aggro or running out of food or getting stunlocked preventing dodge or this or that or done other thing.

Make a ‘sturdy’ and ‘robust’ model that cover taking damage amounts on par with dlc and part 2 and vet dungeons.

Grading is done according to how long you keep the dummy alive, keeping track of overheals for proc set purposes.

Longest amount of time wins.

MilwaukeeScott · January 2018

How about some target dummies for healers?

That's what the DPS are.

Aurielle · January 2018

Something better (and this goes for ALL roles) would be a ten minute dungeon training mode with scalable difficulty. Healers would have to keep their NPC allies alive while doing all the other things healers are expected to do (buff, debuff, help with DPS, etc). At the end of the training session, you'd get a full report relevant to the role -- total HPS, total DPS, total deaths, etc.

In fact, I think that such a system should be a mandatory requirement before being able to launch the group finder for the first time in any particular role. Someone queuing for the tank role would not be able to play as a tank without first demonstrating that they have a taunt and that they can use it on a boss. Someone queuing for the healer role would not be able to play as a healer without first demonstrating that they can heal their NPC allies. Someone queuing for the damage dealing role would not be able to play as a DDer without first demonstrating that they can do more than spam light bow attacks and snipe. Gating dungeon content in this way would go a LONG way towards solving the epidemic of fake tanks, fake healers, and above all, fake DDers who think this game is Skyrim and can't do more than 3k dps.