[Balance] Legion Discussion

[lappee]

@lappee balance healing in pve is shit other than Ysera's gift which is passive. HT/regrowth/rejuvenate doesn't even get close to shadowmend/healing surge. I agree losing gcd to heal is fine, but how the hell can you argue that paying twice the GCDs for less output is fine?

Because its not that bad. We will lose in healing power to Shaman and Spriest if you look at a window of 10 seconds (and even then with regrowth spam we can keep up if need be) and anything over 15 seconds or so and we'll be the grand champions regarding healing.

[Deleted]

Sorry but that is BS, regrowth is significantly less hps, I trust you can look up the sp coefs yourself (remember artifact traits) and even if that was the case, where is the trade off for leaving form? Btw when exactly did you ever stop dpsing to heal yourself for 15 sec straight? Be realistic here will you? We could spam HT the whole fight and beat them on healing, but that ain't really relevant.

[lappee]

Sorry but that is BS, regrowth is significantly less hps, I trust you can look up the sp coefs yourself (remember artifact traits) and even if that was the case, where is the trade off for leaving form? Btw when exactly did you ever stop dpsing to heal yourself for 15 sec straight? Be realistic here will you? We could spam HT the whole fight and beat them on healing, but that ain't really relevant.

Seems I totally missed the Shaman artifact which changes things around a little showing them to be most powerful up to 20 seconds or so.
No1 ever talked about healing ourselves for 15 seconds straight, it was all about off-healing which means healing others aswell. There are situations where you might have to heal or healing is the only thing you can do, sure you don't play 99% of the encounters with off-healing as a tactic.

Also most of the healing I've done in raids is just blanket rejuvs when we're on the run which is something other dps specs cant do (unless you count spriest shielding as such)

[Lucrece]

Sorry but that is BS, regrowth is significantly less hps, I trust you can look up the sp coefs yourself (remember artifact traits) and even if that was the case, where is the trade off for leaving form? Btw when exactly did you ever stop dpsing to heal yourself for 15 sec straight? Be realistic here will you? We could spam HT the whole fight and beat them on healing, but that ain't really relevant.

Since he appears to be operating fact free, here are the wowhead values:

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=8936/regrowth

214.812% of Spell power) and another [(54.6264% of Spell power) * 1] over 12 sec= 269.44%, that 54.6% HoT is also over 12 seconds and dispellable/spellstolen btw.

1.5 sec cast.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=774/rejuvenation

Rejuv, 300% spell power over 15 seconds. 60% SP per every 3 seconds, rejuv itself costs a GCD, or about the same as a regrowth/healing surge cast. Also dispellable, delayed healing.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=18562/swiftmend

Swiftmend, 30 sec cd, 700%. Costs 2 global cooldowns (requiring rejuvenation), or 3 seconds of opportunity cost.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=5185/healing-touch

Healing Touch. The most pathetic of our heals. 400% for a whopping 2.5 sec cast.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=8004/healing-surge

Healing Surge (Elemental/Resto, enhancement one heals for more).

475% SP, 1.5 sec cast. With ele artifact 45% bonus, healing surge turns into a 688.75% heal.

The closest to a heal boost balance has from artifact is a 360% SP heal on a 15% chance to proc every 20 sec on self. Ele shaman gets Shamanistic Healing at 412.5% every 30 seconds when falling below 30% health.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=186263/...-mend#comments

Shadowmend

750% SP, 1.5 sec cast. With masochism, which every shadow priest will have for healing purposes, the priest heals for 750%+375% from the dot= 1125% SP.


On others, shadowmend applies a dot that halves the value. That's still 375% SP at a 1.5 sec cast. Completely superior to Healing Touch.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=34914/v...touch#comments

Vampiric Touch heals the shadow priest for 50% damage dealt. Scaling heal.

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As soon as you started questioning his points on healing, he shifted the goalpoasts to now evaluate offhealing to blanketing on the move.

Apparently movement isn't an issue when you're DPSing and position well preemptively, but when it comes to healing movement is this gamechanger.

Ele shaman even without the artifact bonus heals for more just by using healing surge.

Bear in mind shadow priest even without masochism is significantly getting more healing done than a balance druid, especially healing that doesn't come at a DPS loss like VT and vampiric embrace maintenance healing.

A balance druid meanwhile PAYS a talent in the affinity row to heal, and doesn't even reap much reward.

If our healing values are revisted, as they should, then we might offer utility as strong offhealers, but that simply isn't the case. Rejuvenation heals for virtually nothing of an HP pool. 300% SP over 15 seconds, it's terrible. It's less healing over 15 seconds than anyone's single flash heal which takes 1.5 seconds to activate.

[Kyanion]

So when this happens:

Because its not that bad. We will lose in healing power to Shaman and Spriest if you look at a window of 10 seconds (and even then with regrowth spam we can keep up if need be) and anything over 15 seconds or so and we'll be the grand champions regarding healing.

You then say:

No1 ever talked about healing ourselves for 15 seconds straight, it was all about off-healing which means healing others aswell.

So umm yeah...

As soon as you started questioning his points on healing, he shifted the goalpoasts to now evaluate offhealing to blanketing on the move.

Which is when statements like this get used.

If you are healing for 10-15 seconds on yourself OR others we STILL lose out to other specs.

[Nythiz]

How exactly do the moon spells work? Do we just start with 3 charges then one new charge generates every 15 seconds or is it 3 charges per 15 seconds? And do they serve any purpose other than raw damage?

You get 1 charge every 15 seconds and you can have a maximum of 3 charges.
As you spend the charges you cycle through the phases (New Moon -> Half Moon -> Full Moon).

So you could for example cast one of those abilities every 15 seconds. So at t=0 you case New Moon, at t=15 you cast Half moon and at t=30 you cast Full Moon and then at t=45 you can cast new moon again.
Or you could hold on to the charges and spend them all at once. So at the start of a fight for example you'll have 3 charges, so you can use all 3 moon spells in a row, and then 15 seconds later you'll get 1 charge again.

Ideally you don't want to wait until you have 3 charges outside of the start of a fight as you'll lose recharge time. So let's say you just spend all your charges and at t=15 you'll get a new charge. You can save that one, and you can also save the charge from t=30 seconds, but you'll want to start spending them before the t=40 mark otherwise you'll cap on charges.

The purpose of these is delivering the best AsP per cast time and Full Moon also does a brickton of damage. I think all three of the spells are some of the most efficient spells we have when it comes to DPET and "APPET"

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Because its not that bad. We will lose in healing power to Shaman and Spriest if you look at a window of 10 seconds (and even then with regrowth spam we can keep up if need be) and anything over 15 seconds or so and we'll be the grand champions regarding healing.

I don't disagree with you on this, but there is hardly ever a scenario where the healing of a dps is wanted for more than 15ish seconds. In most cases it's emergency and burst healing that is wanted as a DPS spec. Once you get in that area where boomkin's sustained healing starts to outclass the healing of the other hybrids, it's hardly a benefit anymore.

In most scenario's you generally want to either top yourself or a party member up quickly. Swiftmend (+ rejuv) isn't super bad on minor damage since it's both instant casts (which is a pro over healing surge / shadow mend); but anything more than say 20% HP worth of damage we get outclassed really really hard.
In PvP it's often to assist the healer countering some kind of burst or substitute heal while he's CC'ed.
In all of these cases we're talking about < 15 seconds worth of healing, anything longer than that and you're no longer a dps that helps with some offhealing, but rather an extremely poor main healer. And in all of these cases the other hybrid healers would severely outheal us on anything other than maybe minor healing. (And even then they might, as they don't have to spend a GCD going back into form).

As for this whole topic, personally my feelings about it are as follow:

Frankly how well we offheal vs other classes is to me of much less concern than how much damage we do compared to other classes, how well our mechanics are made up, how well our survivability is (outside of the heals) and our utility. All of those are of a higher concern to me in the first place. I understand that selfhealing is a form of survivability (although I'm mostly talking about damage reduction over healing) and a form of utility; but you should catch my drift.

HOWEVER. That we invest a talent point in this so called "resto affinity" and then end up with not only a somewhat clunky mechanic of shifting out of moonkin and on top of that we still have inferior heals compared to what other hybrids seem to get passivly; I find that to leave a bit of a sour aftertaste.
I feel like this was a "nice concept" by the developers to take away some of our versatility and give it back semi-Symbiosis style, where you have to chose something; but it feels half assed, it could have been better.

[Lucrece]

The point I made with my links above is that even in sustained healing, balance druids don't win. We don't win in burst or sustained HPS. It's right there in the tooltip values I linked.

[Nythiz]

The point I made with my links above is that even in sustained healing, balance druids don't win. We don't win in burst or sustained HPS. It's right there in the tooltip values I linked.

Those tooltip values don't mention anything about sustain. Hybrids have mana, it runs out.
An elemental shaman healing is really strong, but he will be OOM in like 4 casts.

Either way, sustained healing should never even be a topic when comparing these type of heals on dps classes, as sustained healing is neither useful nor strong.
The only situation where you would want sustained healing is in a situation where you have to replace your healer (disconnect, dead, etc) and in those cases our sustain heal, healing touch, is insufficient to keep someone alive from even the most minor of damage.
Healing Touch is the shittiest heal in existence and should have been victim to pruning many many expansions ago; the only spec still using it is feral and only because it's free and instant and doesn't take them out of form (+ Bloodtalons forces it down their throat).

[Lucrece]

5 casts actually, I just checked. 7.5 secs worth of casting, which I don't even think we'll be healing for that long as DPS hybrids in most circumstances.

In which case our equivalent "flash" heal in regrowth OOM's us in the same 5 casts (checked that as well). Only HT is mana efficient, and its HPS is miserly for that very reason.

5 casts of HT in 12.5 seconds accomplish healing that's 375% SP short of what 5 healing surges accomplish in 7.5 seconds. And that's baseline healing surge, not healing surge boosted by 45% by ele artifact. With artifact bonus HT comes up short by 1443.75% SP, which would take 4 additional healing touch casts to match. That's 22.5 seconds of Healing Touch spam to do the healing 5 Healing Surge casts do in 7.5 seconds. You could try rejuv+swiftmend (3 seconds) for 1000% SP total over 15 seconds (effective heal time of rejuv to add 300% to swiftmend's 700%) and you'd still need 2 more healing touches to catch up to healing surge. That's 15.5 seconds for rejuv+swiftmend, add 5 seconds from HT and it's 20.5 seconds to land heals that will heal for what 5 healing surges did (and actually 35.5 seconds as rejuv doesn't heal that amount until then).

Either way we slice it, our heals are garbage even with resto affinity.

But, yeah, I agree with your point in general, that these fringe circumstances he's conjuring up are utterly irrelevant.

[Zakajz]

Dunno 450% SP (baseline) for a spell which supposedly should be our finisher seems low. Earth Shock, elemental finisher, hits for 800%.

Ignore the fact that the specs work differently.

Look at how pitiful is the damage of lightning bolt(130% SP) vs our weakest filler solar wrath (190% sp).

I could take the same route that you are taking and ignore the whole picture of how elemental works and say "dunno but elemental's filler damage seems low compared to balance"

[Lucrece]

Lightning Bolt is weak to begin with because you have a mastery that's around 30% chance per spell cast to repeat the damage by 84%, add to that stomkeeper giving lightning bolt a 200% damage boost, add a 15% proc chance on power of the maelstrom to guarantee an overload that can stack with an original overload and you're looking at the potential to do 696.8% spell damage with a single lightning bolt cast, and stormkeeper gives that bonus three times.

PvP people would be drowing the arena forums in outrage about getting gibbed by ele burst. Their mastery, much like ours, is their curse.

[lappee]

So when this happens:

You then say:

So umm yeah...

Which is when statements like this get used.

If you are healing for 10-15 seconds on yourself OR others we STILL lose out to other specs.

So when we're talking about

And forget what people say about offhealing, balance druids have the worst healing...

My sudden enforcement of off-healing is surprising? I never shifted anything, I'm just talking about the points you're talking about in the first case.

As soon as you started questioning his points on healing, he shifted the goalpoasts to now evaluate offhealing to blanketing on the move.

Apparently movement isn't an issue when you're DPSing and position well preemptively, but when it comes to healing movement is this gamechanger.

I never shifted anything, I'm just talking about the points you're talking about in the first case. Blanketing on the move is just a fact that needs to be valuated as we're the only one that can do it. It is a game changer of sorts unlike movement dps.

The point I made with my links above is that even in sustained healing, balance druids don't win. We don't win in burst or sustained HPS. It's right there in the tooltip values I linked.

Your links just provided plain SP values and some false information (like Swiftmend requiring rejuvenation). It doesnt take anything into consideration when it comes to gameplay, most importantly mana.
Also if you wanted to compare self healing then you should consider everything rather than just picking some of the many.



I did some napkin math regarding sustained healing which shows that we overcome Shadow Priest off-healing at around 20 seconds and Ele Shaman at around 35 seconds, both values which are a bit higher than I anticipated (mostly due to forgetting artifact traits).

I don't disagree with you on this, but there is hardly ever a scenario where the healing of a dps is wanted for more than 15ish seconds. In most cases it's emergency and burst healing that is wanted as a DPS spec. Once you get in that area where boomkin's sustained healing starts to outclass the healing of the other hybrids, it's hardly a benefit anymore.

If we want to consider todays situations then theres hardly anywhere dps healing is wanted in raids/dungeons outside of off-time running.

In most scenario's you generally want to either top yourself or a party member up quickly. Swiftmend (+ rejuv) isn't super bad on minor damage since it's both instant casts (which is a pro over healing surge / shadow mend); but anything more than say 20% HP worth of damage we get outclassed really really hard.

No denying that our burst healing outside of the first global is behind those of Spriest and Ele Shaman.

In PvP it's often to assist the healer countering some kind of burst or substitute heal while he's CC'ed.
In all of these cases we're talking about < 15 seconds worth of healing, anything longer than that and you're no longer a dps that helps with some offhealing, but rather an extremely poor main healer. And in all of these cases the other hybrid healers would severely outheal us on anything other than maybe minor healing. (And even then they might, as they don't have to spend a GCD going back into form).

And in PvP we can take the PvP talent that makes HT a very, very strong off-heal. Basically (nearly) doubles the SP coefficient and halfs the cast time while still costing very little mana. In that case we far outshine both Ele Shaman and Spriest.

[Lucrece]

Hey, at least our artifact survival boost trait gives us more armor for most of the classes (that aren't warrior or outlaw rogue) and raid damage to ignore!

[Deleted]

I hope they get the dps balance right with LEGION.It should be easier with LEGION since they can change classes without affecting PvP and vice versa. This is a huge quality of life improvement for the devs.

I am tires of seeing always mage in every single addon being the best class. the dps balance has to be better. If they don't manage it with LEGION then they are failures. Specs like arms, retribution, elemental and a few more are often left 2 die and do like 40% less damage than top mage specs.

I really hope they can change that with LEGION

[Lucrece]

I hope they get the dps balance right with LEGION.It should be easier with LEGION since they can change classes without affecting PvP and vice versa. This is a huge quality of life improvement for the devs.

I am tires of seeing always mage in every single addon being the best class. the dps balance has to be better. If they don't manage it with LEGION then they are failures. Specs like arms, retribution, elemental and a few more are often left 2 die and do like 40% less damage than top mage specs.

I really hope they can change that with LEGION

Better readjust your expectations .

[Zakajz]

Lightning Bolt is weak to begin with because you have a mastery that's around 30% chance per spell cast to repeat the damage by 84%, add to that stomkeeper giving lightning bolt a 200% damage boost, add a 15% proc chance on power of the maelstrom to guarantee an overload that can stack with an original overload and you're looking at the potential to do 696.8% spell damage with a single lightning bolt cast, and stormkeeper gives that bonus three times.

PvP people would be drowing the arena forums in outrage about getting gibbed by ele burst. Their mastery, much like ours, is their curse.

Starsurge can go up to 850% sp with power of goldrinn... and you could chain 4 of them in pvp with astral communion iirc
The grass is greener on the other side

[Jooji]

Why shouldnt a pure dps class that only does one thing be on top? Druids can perforn every role in the game. It would be a little silly if we were the best at them also.

[wing5wong]

Why shouldnt a pure dps class that only does one thing be on top? Druids can perforn every role in the game. It would be a little silly if we were the best at them also.

Hybrids are a thing of the past. We dont heal and DPS anymore, we only DPS as balance.
We heal for less than other non hybrids (war/rogue/lock)

[Lucrece]

Why shouldnt a pure dps class that only does one thing be on top? Druids can perforn every role in the game. It would be a little silly if we were the best at them also.

I didn't think that 11 years into the game we'd hear this useless argument still. When you join a raid time you don't do so as a tank+healer+DPS. You're filling one role in a raid.

[cujoe]

Hybrids are a thing of the past. We dont heal and DPS anymore, we only DPS as balance.
We heal for less than other non hybrids (war/rogue/lock)

People here seem to have very different definition of hybrid because I very often read DK and War on the list of pures. Pures are the classes that can only fulfill a single roll (tank, dps, healer) in the game. That would mean hunters, rogues, mages and warlocks.

The problem that you as a balance druid are cast as DPS only is a problem of your raid composition design. I don't see why a raid can't profit from a healer that is able to perform very well as DPS so he can switch roles for bosses that need less healing. Or a DPS that can replace a tank who has connection problems. Guilds that advertise with being top X00 somewhere in the world probably have a roaster that allows to just switch players and here people are cast for very specific roles. But for the majority of guilds a versatile class/player is a valuable asset to the raid.