New Dev Watercooler: Player HealthFollow

Shades of grey...

It certainly wasn't anything like TERA where you see the BAM's eyes flash and you click your dodge or raise your shield before the hit lands (Lancer there is something I like as a good example of some nice active mitigation), but I didn't think it was all bad. Then again, I didn't play tanky stuff much this time around, so don't listen to me...

Edited, Mar 14th 2014 12:04pm by someproteinguy

You say the vast majority of the time is threatbuilding actions, but that's putting a bad label on it. Yeah, they build threat, but by that definition a DPS and a Healer are both spending the "vast majority of their time" with "threatbuilding actions." What a tank is actually doing is building resources so that they can use the defensive abilities, as the Active Mitigation model dictates. A Prot pally isn't using crusader strike for the shiggles because he has nothing better to do. A Prot pally is using crusader strike because using it allows him to take less damage by way of giving him holy power.



Crit = dodge for a monk and a monk only. The vast majority of the "take less damage on a short cooldown" abilities that the active mitigation model relies on, such as Shield of Righteousness, is pure reduced damage taken. It might be an absorption shield, it might be a flat -%damage, but the monk has a one of the only examples of using crit to dodge more. And it doesn't even make the damage more spikey, because a monk's mastery is a direct counter to spike damage. The point I am getting at is that damage now is less spikey than ever before, and with the soon to be removal of defensive stats, the whole "hit table" thing isn't going to be an issue any more. Tanks will have a very small chance to dodge, parry, or block, and outside that will have to use active mitigation and armor to reduce the damage taken.

Assuming that WoD turns out as Blizzard claims right now, then damage for a tank will be, above all, consistent. A good tank will use his abilities to take much less damage over the course of a fight, and gear will allow this more. A large reason that triage healing didn't work out before was because of how spikey tank damage was. With active mitigation and the removal of defensive stats, that problem is pretty much solved.

Honestly, I don't even know why we're arguing about this. You seem to be saying that the current tank system doesn't allow for proper scaling, but that's why they're changing it - to better allow for proper scaling on the part of the tank and on the part of the healers. They are removing all this avoidance stuff and replacing it with offensive stats, basically completing the switch from the old system to active mitigation that was only half done with Mists. What should happen in WoD is bosses' damage will increase with the tiers, and tank damage reduction will rise with it. A tank will be taking more total damage because her mitigation won't rise as quickly, yes. But ideally the tank will be taking the same amount of damage relative to her health pool across all tiers. This also allows for room for personal skill to come into play - a truly skilled tank will take less damage via the active mitigation model than a tank that doesn't know what she's doing.

The issue you have with this whole healing change seems to be that tank scaling doesn't allow it to happen, that tank scaling inevitably leads to a Lich King like scenario where you are spamming flash heals on the tank constantly or else she's dead. With the removal of avoidance stats, it becomes possible to let a tank have meaningful scaling without reaching that scenario, and thus allowing for the triage healing model to come into play.



Which is why they are changing that system! This whole argument seems to stem from the assumption that things in WoD will be exactly as they are now, just with the additional healing changes in place. Not the case. Removal of avoidance stats is huge. It's a gamechanger. It really, really is. I think that it's a large piece of what Cata was missing when they tried this healign change last.

Edited, Mar 14th 2014 4:36pm by IDrownFish

The Golden Age of my Bearcat Druid.

Sigh... good times.

And they are trying to make tanks more about scaling with the itemization changes! So what's the issue?



First off, even if "overwhelming number of defensive abilities in the game are percentages, not stat-scaling," why is that an issue at all? So the Icebound Fortitude is just as good for the fresh 100 tank in quest greens as it is for the full BiS Mythic geared tank. I don't see why that is a problem. Maybe I'm dense. So please, spell it out for me why it's bad that a spell with very minor uptime that is meant for emergencies or strategic mitigation of massive incoming damage (like a dragon breathing) has %-based mitigation that is just as effective for the fresh 100 quest geared tank as it is for the Mythic BiS tank.

Let me get this straight. The problem you have with this new healing model is that you don't believe that this new model can be pulled off with the way tanks and healers scale, right? You claim that healers scale exponentially, and tanks don't. Well healers scaling exponentially is being changed. Now the target's health is going to be scaling just as much as the healers' heals are, and the healers' heals are going to be scaling less. The ideal is that for any given tier, a spell will heal the same percentage of the target's health as it did in previous tiers of content. This lets them get away form the "heal NOW or die" issue they've hit in the past. Add in smoother tank damage and I see this new model as something that can work well. Really well, in fact.



As an aside, self healing mechanics used by tanks today are extremely valuable, and frequently used. A paladin's Word of Glory is a huge portion of their effective health, as is a DK's Death Strike and a Brewmaster's Healing Sphere and Chi talents. Self healing is already "not incredibly useless in most situations." I can link raid logs for evidence, if you would like to see it.

Effective health != survivability with regards to self-healing.

Self-healing has always logged well. Even in Wrath. Bloodworms logged as one of the most effective talents for effective health. That was far from the case.

When tanks aren't getting capped off, when self-healing isn't being translated into overhealing, it's extremely useful for effective health.

But when your tanks ARE getting capped off, when overhealing is the norm, then no. Not at all. Low-level, constant self-healing abilities CAN be useful, but in very specific circumstances. Notably when the tank gets hit with such burst that the self-heal actually does increase their health past the point where their TTD goes up by another swing period (the "active mitigation" thingy). But you really shouldn't be riding so close to a wipe, and if you are, for the love of god use your CDs.

The other case scenario is when you've taken enough damage to be low enough the healers' next heals don't overheal, so you actually see a return on it. But that's also such an uncommon scenario (or, again, "was") that I'm still willing to call passive, low self-healing numbers as relatively useless. I've always heavily preferred systems that give more firm mitigation/avoidance.

It's absolutely possible that's the case nowadays in MoP raiding. I'm GUESSING it isn't, because that's triage healing. And why are we having a discussion about the implementation of triage healing if triage healing is already in the game.