WoW players will do just about anything for better parses, especially healers

World of Warcraft is predominantly a PvE game focused on Mythic+ dungeons and raiding and it can be difficult to measure your success. Precisely because of this, we have parsing, a metric system used to tell you how you performed on an encounter when compared to other players—and most guilds use this to see if you’ll be a good fit for them. But it seems players will do just about anything for better parses.

In an Aug. 10 Reddit post, one player asked the community what’s the most devious thing they’ve seen someone do in a raiding environment and most answers mentioned wicked deeds just for the sake of parsing. The biggest offenders of doing this actually turned out to be healers. 

“Had a healer who made a Weakaura to highlight other healers HoTs on himself so that he could click them off,” one player said.

This one actually made me laugh because it’s unbelievable to which lengths players will go just to see others perform worse so they look better.

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“Healer ‘sitting in fire’ (as in intentionaly eating damage from boss mechanic), spaming heals on himself and even calling Druids for Innervate,” another WoW player said.

This, naturally, sparked the discussion if parses are really that important for healers and other roles. While most agree the raw healing output shouldn’t have a major effect on how the encounter plays out and the only thing that matters is you’re doing the mechanics properly and not wiping the raid, others meticulously look at them for the sake of finding the best group.

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I’m personally divided on the issue and you might say that’s because my parses are never perfect, but I always get the job done—we survive. Parses can be just a tool for optimizing, and not the most important aspect of raiding that’s gatekeeping you from doing more demanding content.

Other honorable mentions for the most horrendous things done in raids are stacking corruption in BfA to a point where you have to have a designated healer and paying Paladins to use Blessing of Protection and Priests Life Grip on top DPS just so that they would have worse damage output.