1. Why comparing within your own raid helps
Global rankings compare me with raids that have different tanks, different tactics and different groups. Within my own raid the conditions are the same: the same bosses, the same damage on the group, the same downtime. If two priests in the same fight overheal very differently with the same spell, it is rarely luck – it is usually rank choice, target choice or timing.
2. Spell ranks and downranking in Classic
In Classic every healing spell comes in several ranks. Higher ranks heal more but cost a lot more mana. Downranking means deliberately casting a lower rank when the full rank would mostly overheal anyway. Your mana lasts longer – in long Naxxramas fights that is often the difference between healing until the end and drinking in the last phase.
In Classic Era, +healing from gear applies fully to lower ranks as well; only spells learned below level 20 are reduced. So downranking costs very little, as long as the lower rank still tops the target up in time.
The log analysis shows, for every spell and rank, how many heals each healer landed with it (uses; every Renew tick and every Prayer of Healing target counts) and how much of it was overheal. You can see right away who prefers which rank.
3. Overheal by rank and boss
Overheal is the part of a heal that goes beyond full health. Some of it is normal: I pre-heal when damage is certain, and sometimes another healer is faster. It gets interesting in comparison: same spell, same boss, but clearly more overheal than the others – then the rank is too high, the target was wrong, or the cast could have been cancelled.
At the top of the analysis I choose the fight scope: entire raid, all boss fights, trash or single bosses. That shows on which boss my overheal stands out. The log analysis does not split phases within a boss fight; for bosses with very different phases such as Kel’Thuzad I check the phase afterwards on the Warcraft Logs timeline.
4. Active time (activity)
Activity is the share of fight time someone spends casting. Low activity can mean wasted time – wrong position, out of range, late reactions. It can also be intentional: in Classic, mana from Spirit only regenerates properly once you have not spent mana for five seconds.
So I always read activity together with healing and overheal. If I am clearly less active than the other priests with the same job and had no mana problems, I left healing on the table. If I am much more active but heal no more, I am probably casting on full targets too often. The analysis shows activity per player in the Performance tab and flags players below 80 % in the overview.
5. Reading an example
The table shows three of the six priests from the same raid. This is what I read from it:
- Flash Heal rank 5 vs. rank 3: Kalla mostly uses rank 5 (621 uses, 57 % overheal), Falko and Edda mostly use rank 3 (631 and 322 uses, 59 % and 58 %). Overheal is almost the same, but the lower rank costs less mana. For Kalla, trying rank 3 in the same situations would be the first step – as long as targets still get topped up in time.
- Greater Heal rank 1: Edda overheals 66 % with it (249 uses), Kalla and Falko about 40 % (39 % and 42 %). So Edda often lands it on targets that are already almost full. The usual fix: cancel the cast just before it finishes if the target is already full – a cancelled cast costs no mana.
- Renew: all three are at 61 to 69 % overheal. For a heal over time that is not unusual, especially on tanks who receive plenty of healing anyway. Since all three are similar, there is no outlier here – rather a question for the healing assignments: do we need that many Renews on the same targets?
- Prayer of Healing rank 2 as a mana saver: besides rank 5 (46 % overheal), Edda also uses rank 2 (145 uses, 45 %). Overheal is practically the same, but rank 2 costs a lot less mana. When the group is only slightly damaged, the small rank is enough.
Percentages alone are not a verdict. I mainly compare healers with similar assignments: tank healers overheal differently from group healers, and a raid with many healers overheals more overall.
6. Try it yourself
- Before the pull, turn on the combat log in game with
/combatlog, then upload the raid with the Warcraft Logs uploader. Keep the report public. - Paste the report link (…warcraftlogs.com/reports/…) into the log analysis and press “Analyze”. The first analysis takes one to three minutes.
- Open RPB → Abilities → your class. Pick single bosses in the fight scope at the top.
No report? The in-browser combat log reader reads the combat log file straight from your WoW folder, without uploading it.