I joined a progression guild a few weeks back and they were impressed with me even though I had low gear and was still pretty new to progression raiding, however since then I've upgraded my gear alot and learned the fights a bit better...yet my healing is still pretty low...As embarrassing as it is to admit, I was out healed by a blood DK a few times.
I've come here asking for help because I honestly don't know what I'm doing wrong and have been trying everything I can think of to push out more HPS. However, the strangest thing is, on some fights I get up to 3rd place on heals...while others..as I mentioned before are terrible. I'm not sure what i'm doing right on those few attempts but I haven't really done anything different between each of the attempts, either.
In short, I was hoping someone, anyone would be willing to help me out since my raid position is on the line here.
All I can think of, looking at your Zon'ozz log for example, where you did indeed heal for only about 13k or so, is that you are not using your CDs often enough. In an almost 6 minute long fight, you used Avenging Wrath and Divine Favor only once and Aura Mastery only twice. Comparing you to the other paladin however, it just seems like they just cast a lot more spells than you did. Are you always casting?
Hopefully some of the paladins here can give you some great advice, but I wanted to mention a couple of general things:
1. It's great that you are reaching out for advice / help. Make sure you also utilize your guild members as well. We have issues with an under-performing healer who refuses to take any advice or try to get better. Just knowing that you are making an effort might go a long way. Otherwise, there may be resentment growing when the top healers look at the logs each time.
2. Jasyla at Cannotbetamed.com has a great writeup on reviewing healers with logs (http://www.cannotbetamed.com/resources/evaluating-raiders-with-world-of-logs/#holypally). It gives you a lot of great things to look for in your own logs and things to be mindful of to improve your healing output. It doesn't have the exact answer to great healing, but it helps enable you to review your own logs and find things that might make a difference.
3. Compare your spell selections to the other paladin in your group or to other logs. I do this all the time. If I see someone else of the same class putting out great HPS during a critical time of a fight, I'll dig into their logs and see exactly what they are doing and then try some new things out to see if they help.
A simple trick is to look at the Healing done chart and select yourself and the other pally only to compare the output at different times. selected a period of time that interests you by dragging the mouse on the graph to highlight just that time. Right click and select "Set Page to Selection". Now you can easily see your spell choices compared to theirs for just that time period.
Take my .02 with a grain of salt, cause im no paladin.
But looking at your gear compared with the other pally and although it's not as good, it's not significantly worse to the point where it should hold you back this much.
However looking at the logs here's what I notice.
Hagara Kill
Holy Radiance - Kantha = 359 hits | You = 261
Light of Dawn - Kantha = 114 hits | You = 38
Divine Light - Kantha = 20 hits | You = 42
Beacon of Light - Kantha = 202 hits | You = 70
Holy Power Gained - Kantha = 100 | You = 67
@Poly
Hmm, Well I have been having problems managing my CD's but would that really make -that- much of a difference?
As for him casting more spells, I dunno it feels like I'm just about always casting, more or less to conserve mana during light phases. I was even running out of mana towards the end from casting too much.
@Daffnae
1. I'm not really happy with how poorly I'm doing either so I want to improve for myself as well.
2. I'll read this over and see what I can learn for it, any resource is helpful.
3. As for comparing myself to the other paladin..I've talked to him and even tried to mimic him a bit but there seems to be something more that I'm missing.
Either way, thank you very much, I'll try looking over the logs again.
@Leare
Well my gear isn't -that- far behind, I know he's about a tier ahead of me but I'm doing horribly compared to my own gear, so its a bit of a problem and my raid leader says I should be doing about double the HPS that I am.
There's two key differences between you and Kantha in terms of healing in the Zon'ozz fight. He/she uses Holy Shock a whole lot more (had 38 to your 17) and actually uses Holy Light a lot when you don't (had 38 casts to your 0). Both spells are extremely cheap to use, Holy Shock should be used almost on CD, and Holy Light whenever there's no heavy healing (though not having done the heroic yet I'm not sure if there's ever such a moment. Kanthia seems to find the time). So basically if nothing else is going on you should probably be casting HL on someone, it's essentially mana neutral. As far as mana is concerned. I watch for the CD and internal CD of procs like Power Torrent, and try to Divine Plea when that's up for the extra mana that would give. Other than that, Kantha and you had very similar mana sources. It comes down to spell choice I think.
@Oleander: I think you are looking at overall active time, he wasn't healing on all the fights (e.g. he wasn't healing on Ultraxion, nor on Yor'sahj). His uptime on the Zon'ozz kill was 95%, which is less than the other healers still, but not that bad. But it does seem to disagree with the number of casts involved.
But yeah Tyken, use CDs more (and perhaps at better times, I didn't look at when you used them) and "Always Be Casting", your efficient heals if noone's hurting, your stronger heals otherwise. I think on 25mans, a lot has to do with healing assignments also. Depending on who you were assigned to, and how much damage they were taking, would make a difference.
One other difference I'm noticing, though admittedly it's minor, is who you each have beaconed. I didn't know that Zon'ozz needed 2 tanks on heroic, but that's what it seems like, and I would venture to guess that your beacon target was the off-tank and was taking a bit less damage. Couple that with not using many holy lights/holy shocks, which would all have transfered to that beacon, and you get the picture.
A lot will also depend on how your raid is doing the fight. In general for healers it's extremely important to basically know exactly when damage is coming, who will need healing and so on. But really, at least for Zon'ozz, it boils down to you having cast a lot less than the other pally. You had a few more Holy Radiances, to the order of 6-8 more, while he had 12 more DLs (30% more), 21 more (about double) HSs, and on top of that 38 HLs. He also had a lot more WoGs and LoDs (Which partly comes from more HSs, and partly not).
@Oleander: I think you are looking at overall active time, he wasn't healing on all the fights (e.g. he wasn't healing on Ultraxion, nor on Yor'sahj). His uptime on the Zon'ozz kill was 95%, which is less than the other healers still, but not that bad. But it does seem to disagree with the number of casts involved.
That was from Hagara, which admittedly is a fight that tries to make you stop casting a lot. Still, the other healers managed much better activity time for whatever reason.
