/FacepalmFollow

It is a good thing you scrapped SP in the last expansion then, isn't it? It isn't as if they could just change a co-efficient.




The thing is that fresh at lvl 85 or 391 gear they haven't made healing require "skill". Spam your aoe heals and clump up, use your mana returns when possible and win. If anything homogenization has made things even more generic and skilless, they added the number of heals I have but have pigeonholed me into a situation where the majority of them aren't worth casting.

I don't really know much about healing right now, but I have been trying to get into it on my priest. These constant changes and negitive feeback about them are not helping me feel confident about trying it though. It takes enough of my time to focus on doing my best to master one class and role, much less trying to work my way into another class and role that they are constantly changing.

They really killed druid healing for me this Xpac :(




I really don't know what to say to Bodhi's op. I've always bee a healer/tank person. But those are the roles the seem to mess with the most. I refuse to do pugs as a heals/tank because they can totally ruin your day. I really miss BC/Wolk druid healing. Back then it was fun. Now when I heal on my druid I just want to drink ... a lot.... just to numb the pain.

No one wants to feel mana starved. No one wants to feel like healers did gearing up at 85, it didn't require skill and it was not enjoyable. The negative feedback on healing was overwhelming and thankfully Blizzard made some corrections for Fireland both in actual balance and also by fleshing out stats on the gear.


They also need to admit that half the problem is Easy/HM gear and balance for each of those types of raid. They pump out stats greater than needed for the content, out gearing the content while it is still current in ways that we never saw in TBC.

Exactly. While it is always dangerous to judge before you have seen it live, Cataclysm illustrated to the player base that Blizzard might not actually have a firm grasp on the balance of their own game. The rebalance to healing needed to happen, however its implementation over beta and then live was painful and definitely a stumble.


Just because they access to mountains of data does not mean that they are capable of using that data to implement something that works. Masteries that did not work, broken healing and classes, stuff that was apparent early on in the Beta which a lot of top end theory crafters broke down in detail on the o-boards were ignored in a myopic quest for what Blizz thought healing should be.


Did the dumbing down of stats fix the problem? No, it created even more while it raped the game of depth of gameplay. Yet here we are again going down that same path by reducing and changing stats again, reducing talent trees to make their job of balancing easier and really just continuing the same silly game plan that didn't work last time.

/facepalm




Edited, Nov 13th 2011 9:18am by bodhisattva

And that is where the paradigm change from fast cheap small heal, to slow cheap heal really changed healing in a way most people don't think about.


In TBC if someone was at 60% health I had to make a decision, do I have time to spam FoL and top them off cheaply or am I going to have to drop a big bomb heal and take a hit on my mana. In Cata that choice is gone because they both have the same cast time so that decision making is reduced to simply "what can I afford"in relation to time available and more important that even that it is "do I have to top this person up asap" which in a raid setting is "yes", you simply don't have the time to cast 3 HL to do what one DL will do.


Edit - in TBC you had a set up where at multiple time in a fight you had to choose between FoL x 2 or 1 Holy Light. If you always chose FoL you would lose people and eventually you would have too many dead to kill a boss. If you always chose HL you wouldn't have mana at the end of the fight. I liked that, though I would have appreciated having more than 2 heals to chose from.

Edited, Nov 13th 2011 10:03am by bodhisattva

In regulars mechanics really are forgiving right now and I can't think of anything other than gross negligence and noobery which would 1-2 shot someone. The WotLK & Cata design mechanic tends to be lots of **** damage with random spike damage that is avoidable but if hit will take you to 20-30% health. Which means if you get clipped and take and are not topped off before hand and take some **** damage then you are done.


Also that just ding'ed 85, doing 5 man heroics constantly behind the ball & struggling with mana feeling which is the only triage we felt this expansion was not enjoyable which is something blizzard has talked about. They should give up on triage altogether.


/random aside, The real shame is that they changed Cleanse (in a negative way in my opinion) and then there isn't a single fight other than Argolath that requires cleansing in a serious way (maybe Double Dragon?). Mainly because cleanse fights tend to mess up pugs pretty hard.

You bring up some good points Bodhi,

I really, really, and I mean really hate the slow cheap heal on my pally. Granted 80% of the time I heal in Bg's so it''s worthless to cast a weak slow heal when everyone and their grandma has a interupt. But I've done enough instances to find it not fun and frustrating.
I admit that I enjoy pally healing more now then I did in wolk, but I'm not to happy with the changes next patch is offering. As a pvp healer/ guild tank I'm downright POED at the holy radiance change. Also I think the whole cleanse thing came back and bit them. Do you spend multiple gcd's cleansing a bunch of mouth breathers in a pug and risk your tank dying, or to you keep the tank alive with your slow cheap heals?

If you think healing is frustrating for you now how do you think a fresh 85 is going to feel stepping into a Pug?

It sucks as a Prot/Ret, but surely your Holy Paladin must be giggling like a school girl. New Holy Radiance is like a spammable Wild Growth. It's funny, because ours is getting nerfed by 20% output and 25% cooldown.

Balancing game is hard, square no fit in triangle.

I see the post got nuked, but we had a one post wonder linking to "youtu.be". Be careful.

Noob! Buttons are for turning. If I mouse turn, I can't click on Mortal Strike.

Two words ... track ball!