New Dev Watercooler: Player HealthFollow

Source to lengthy article

Somehow this sounds alot like the plans they had for Cataclysm. Bigger health pools, no need to immediatly top players up, etc. Not sure how I feel about this since it did not work out that great almost two expansions ago.

*Absorb effects need to be nerfed hard. Lots of complaining by Disc Priests about that right now, however disc priest play style is ridiculously easy and based entirely about smart use of SS prior to major raid wide damage spikes. Very simple play style, very big numbers. Also as a Holy Paladin having 40-45% of my healing done be my mastery is kind of lame. So it is good to see that it is taking a hit, as it has been clear that it has been a problem since Cata.

*Addressing mana regen and how it ramps from 5 man dungeons to heroic end game raiding is a positive sign, as it was something they got right.

*Removing instant casts and putting cast times on a lot of spells is definitely dangerous. It also hints at their push in Cataclysm to slow cast time to compliment their desire for triage. If you go back to my posts at the beginning of Cata you can find how strongly I felt about creating artificial choke points through increased cast time.

*Changing mana cost or total healing of aoes to steer players towards targeted thoughtful healing makes me happy as a paladin. Spamming Holy Radiance and overhealing players currently blows single targeted healing out of the water. This also needs to be tempered with the fact that my absorb will be nerfed as well as the fact that triage healing always favours hots.

This is so true. Even I am halfway competent as a Disc although I don't have the slightest idea how to heal. Just do lots of damage, let it be converted into healing and drop Spirit Shell just before the boss does its big dangerous attack.


On another change to priests, I'd hate it if the level 90 talents would get a cast-time for Shadow as well. It's not like we're swimming in viable on-the-run abilities. The execute phase is all right but the first 80% of the bosses health just say '***** you' whenever I have to change position.

Also these new cast time spells seems to penalize hybrids unfairly. I can understand having the cast time in a PvP environment, but a large part of my utility as a high end Heroic raiding shadow priest comes from my ability to passively heal the raid via instant cast abilities. Divine Star, Prayer of Mending, etc. By throwing a cast time on those, you massively hurt my utility and make it much less likely that I would even bother to cast those to begin with.

As a primarily PvE player, I feel unfairly nerfed for PvP reasons.

Removing some (most?) of the instant cast heals is a mistake, in my opinion. It feels like a PvP change, and I am of the opinion that PvP has ruined enough **** in this game already. Do not want.

I'd be fine with triage if they managed to actually implement it. The uphill whack-a-mole style of early Cataclysm was painful, though.

Thing is, they didn't even actually implement this in Cata.

They sorta started to implement it, but then late in the beta they cranked incoming damage up from a 7 to an 11, and then they didn't even remotely balance healers at all for launch.

So they now had a game with incoming damage variables that were WAY higher than they designed the healing system around, and a set of healers with power levels all over the map. It's no surprise it took them so long to get healing somewhere manageable.

Hopefully they don't do something so freaking stupid this time around as crank up mob damage in the final leg of beta.

Healers need to be engaged all the time, but they can't be engaged in emergency healing all the time. That's NOT fun. People don't like to feel like they're one step away from a wipe every single moment of a fight. It's just not fun.

But it's also not fun to just be spamming your most efficient heal until you HAVE to switch to a less efficient one.

And because healing is more dynamic than anything else (shields, HoTs, health caps, uptime, AoE vs. ST, etc.), that's really, really hard to balance. It HAS to be a cohesive approach in the core design for the actual, base systems of the expansion. It's just not going to work otherwise. When you have a 2 year expansion cycle, you can't be spending 16 months to get healing to a good place.

It means that every single encounter needs a solid combination of avoidable damage and unavoidable damage, that the passive levels need to be high enough that healers can't realistically cap people off, but low enough that one mistake won't cost someone their life from the avoidable stuff. The boss needs to have low enough damage that the healer isn't just focusing on the tank, but high enough damage that they can't leave the tank unattended, either.

And then we get the real kicker - WoW's crazy gear scaling. This is always going to be a severe balance issue, because they let stats have such a wild impact on performance. That is always going to make encounter balancing much, much harder.

The thing to remember is that the DR on tank stats is generally much higher, so the return on stats is lower for tanks. You DO see higher avoidance rates and such as the expansion goes on, but they don't change as wildly as the output of healers and DPS do.

So what ends up happening is that encounters need to be increasingly designed around healer throughput, without tank stats to balance them, with each encounter. So every raid gets closer and closer to the "HEAL SO YOU DON'T WIPE" design aesthetic.

If tank stats scaled closer to healer stats, they could more easily manage this.

But that's the catch.

Buffing avoidance doesn't work, because then you end up with the problem of inconsistent burst. You need to keep increasing boss damage around the idea that tanks are getting hit less, so strings of failed dodges really punishes them. And then different tanks have different dependencies on avoidance vs. mitigation, so just tuning one or the other doesn't work. You need a cohesive approach that considers each stat.

But you can't just buff mitigation, because the burst aspect of potentially failed avoidance checks is important to ensuring healers don't utilize rotations and rely on smart healing. Realistically, they need to stop inflating healer stats like they do DPS stats (and, frankly, I'm on board for ALL the ridiculous stat inflation to stop, but that's me).

I just don't think that implementing this sort of scenario is possible, at all, unless they do.

windlashed.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/reinventing-healer-gameplay/

Nethaera linked this in a blue post as a defense of the WoD changes.

I have a hard time not swearing at people who cannot make a distinction between content being poorly tuned & content being hard. Cata 5 mans and 1st tier were not hard. They were poorly tuned. This was clear 4 months before it went live and was not a resolved until Firelands came out.

It also does not address how changes in cast time in Cata, which were made to promote Triage healing, really hurt healing and killed clutch game play. Something that is important to the discussion of the removal of instant cast spells.

Yeah, you can't have a system that relies on party crafting when party crafting isn't part of the system.

That said, it's possible that tactics like off-tanking would have been more advantageous if the system had been tuned in the first place. Healers were in a crappy place with ideal party setups, so it's obvious they'd be in a really bad place with the worse ones.

If the scaling was more normalized, it wouldn't be such an issue.

But I don't have any ideas how to normalize tank inflation to healers to dps.

Tank stats just function too differently.

A geared tank makes everyone's life easier. A geared healer makes everyone's life easy as hell. A geared DPS makes less-geared tanks and healers cry.

Yeah, they just don't work the same way.

For one, all tank stats are reactive. Your dps and healers gear in ways that make their actual performance better on an ability-by-ability basis. The heal heals more, they get to cast more heals, they heal faster.

But overwhelmingly, tanks spend most of their time doing things that are unrelated to their gearing - building threat. And the rest of the time is spent using abilities that don't scale with gear (almost all defensive abilities). Hell, plenty of defensive abilities actually scale inversely with gear, due to the hit table. Armor buffs, for instance, become less effective as your tank gets hit less and less in the window they are effective.

WoW doesn't give you much proactive tanking potential in terms of gear. Knowing when to pop your CDs is huge, regardless of gearing, and not knowing when to pop them is really, really bad, regardless of gearing.

If they were to make avoidance and mitigation more active endeavors of a tank, and move away from RNG-based defensive gearing, it might even out. That's a massive design change, though, and the chances we'll see it are next to nothing.

Active mitigation and mana pool normalization were probably necessary steps in the right direction. Item level squish won't hurt either (they're still going ahead with that right?) for keeping things off the scary logarithmic end of the scale. It still feels like they're not really going far enough, but a gradual change over a couple of expansions is probably easier to swallow (and balance) than a quick jarring one.

Meh we'll see. I'm still a pessimist about it all.