[PVE] Healers should have raid cd's. DPS Should be there to DPS

[Affiniti]

TLDR Right at the top: Healers are there to manage raid HP. Healers should have the raid cooldowns. DPS should be there for a singular purpose, to DPS. Tanks can have raid CD’s, but most cooldowns should be on healers only. Each healer should have an equivalent cooldown (a throughput CD does not equal a damage reduction CD).

I want to note that this is a PVE Mythic standpoint, and is not factoring in PVP oriented balance. The topic here is PVE, keep that in mind.

Healers are there to micro-manage HP of raid members, and should be the single focus of raid cooldowns. Some healing classes are devalued due to the lack of a mitigation CD, as damage mitigation CD’s are significantly more powerful than throughput cooldowns. Paladin, Shaman, Disc Priest all have mitigation cd’s, while Resto Druid, Mistweaver Monk, and Holy Priest (lolholy) only have throughput CD’s. The idea here isn’t to ADD additional cooldowns to the game, but to give the mitigation and throughput cd’s to the classes that are there to keep the raid alive. Shuffle the cd’s around (with renaming, things of that nature) to the healers, and maybe tanks if deemed viable, and make the cooldown portion of healers more fair and balanced. Healer balance will always be troublesome simply due to mechanics, absorbs being OP, etc but the gap between healing comp viability can be bridged by giving each healer an equivalent cooldown.

As of now, Mythic raids will be hard pressed to consider a throughput oriented healer in a 4 or 5 heal setup as damage mitigation CD’s become more valuable the fewer healers you have (unless monk are 5.0 status doing a large portion of healing over the other healers). Without somewhat sizable changes to existing healer balance, monks and resto druids likely will not be as feasible as a Paladin, Shaman, or Disc Priest is. If you give each healer ONE raid mitigation CD and ONE throughput CD (or just one mitigation cd, no throughput) this can help bridge the gap and level the playing field for healer class balance. This also directly impacts your dps raid comp as you are able to bring DPS for their viability in specific mechanic situations (adds, no adds, multi target dotting, single target patchwork fights, so forth) rather than picking a rogue over a mage due to the raid mitigation cooldown they provide to the raid on a boss such as Thok.

Just my thoughts, but I feel Blizzard should seriously consider removing raid cd’s from DPS classes, and focusing balancing healer cooldowns so everyone is on a level playing field. Throughput CD’s unfortunately do not match up to that of a raid mitigation CD, they never have and likely never will. There are advantages and disadvantages here, but I feel overall healer balance would be improved by reallocating raid CD’s around to just the healers (or healers and tanks). This is purely from my standpoint, and my opinions may differ from others. Curious to see what the rest of the community has to say in regards to this.

[even]

I do not agree.

As of now, Mythic raids will be hard pressed to consider a throughput oriented healer in a 4 or 5 heal setup as damage mitigation CD’s become more valuable the fewer healers you have [...]
Just my thoughts, but I feel Blizzard should seriously consider removing raid cd’s from DPS classes, and focusing balancing healer cooldowns so everyone is on a level playing field.

This runs under the presumption that there won't be any damage mitigation CD's on dps at hand. And even then I would not consider it true at all times, since there are situations (i.e. the to-mitigate-spell does not kill the raid) in which throughput can compensate, for example due to shamans' mastery or druids' usage of mushroom.

I think the emphasize should simply be on "balancing healer cooldowns" (i.e. fix monk), but this can be achieved without thinking about DPS defensive raid CDs.

[Annarion]

I'll have to say, it frequently makes me nervous using my raid cooldowns in random content, because I don't communicate with the healers usually, and I'm not watching the bars that closely, I usually just pop something during a high raid damage phase, like empowered whirl. It makes much more sense that the healers are there to heal, but having support abilities is what defines specs like shadow. Similarily, abilities like Stormlash Totem feel weird as resto, but I usually know when to pop them, BL, burst phase, etc. Cross-role support abilities is one of the things that separate skilled from average, but I feel like they're going to be the first buttons to go in the button squish.

[kenn9530]

this would just dumb the game down even more, it's good to have most classes with external raid cooldowns to help in certain situations and adds a complexity on certain encounters which help keep the raid alive a little longer. What your asking is just give the healers all the cds which is boring as healers already have plenty of cds at their disposal, currently all healers in equal gear and pretty balanced with each other and with the squish it WOD it should be even easier to manage balance.

Plus in PvP situations healers having the cooldowns removed from dps raid cooldowns would be even more overpowered, currently more classes have some sort of raid cooldown, which is good as it spreads out the classes and allows more versatility in raids setups, in some situations some cooldowns are very strong but for the most part they are even spread and each healer has strengths and weaknesses.

[TheWindWalker]

I think the emphasize should simply be on "balancing healer cooldowns" (i.e. fix monk), but this can be achieved without thinking about DPS defensive raid CDs.

What's there to fix with Monks in a "overpowered" sense? (Assuming that's what you meant.) They have as single raid-wide CD that is on a 3 minute cooldown that is mass dispel and healing. The healing has been dropped lower than chi burst, it just has a 100 yard range.

You know who needs fixing (and will be getting it do to smart healing being dropped)? Druids. Permanent 50k+ ticking efflo anywhere they want it and can move it for a GCD while blanketing a raid in HoTs and throwing out Iron Bark once a minute. They're silly OP. Like, almost Wrath DK OP in the raid healing department.

[PrairieChicken]

I think raid CDs should all be eliminated together, or become really long cooldown skills (8min+) for oh shit situation.

It is meaningless button bloat that doesn't really have meaning anyways, and just cause more class imbalance

[Ryuda]

I agree and disagree with you. (mostly agree)

As a monk healer main, I totally, 310% agree that CDs need to be more evenly redistributed among Healers, while also preferably removed from DPS, and the "1 healing output/1 damage reduction" solution sounds perfect, for PvE, at least on paper. (I would argue things like Vamp. Embrace or Ancestral Guidance could probably stay, as they add something to break the monotony of spamming a DPS rotation, I concede that those are arbitrary spells to keep, but they often don't feel as strong as say Rallying Cry/Demo Banner/Smoke Bomb).

That said, as a DPS, I don't think stripping all raid utility from DPS is any better of a response. It encourages stacking whatever class is currently the highest DPS, as outside of making sure all buffs are covered, DPS would be the only thing they would bring. (shifts the problem of stacking Discs/Pallys/Shammys from healers to stacking "x" DPS class on "y" fight. A problem which already exists now, but would likely be magnified if DPS "were only there to DPS")

That all being said, they did say that with the advent of Mythic, we would see more class-specific mechanics, à la Maulgar or Razuvious, so if that pans out, maybe it'll be enough to prevent excessive class stacking at all for DPS or healers.

I guess the basic summary would be: I totally agree that raid CDs need to be more evenly spread out amongst healers, I don't think stripping raid utility as a whole from DPS is the right answer, they should have *something* else to worry about rather than pounding out a rotation, although I admit, class specific mechanics in Mythic may address that problem on its own.

[Kalorna]

What's there to fix with Monks in a "overpowered" sense? (Assuming that's what you meant.) They have as single raid-wide CD that is on a 3 minute cooldown that is mass dispel and healing. The healing has been dropped lower than chi burst, it just has a 100 yard range.

I think the problem is Revival is absolutely terrible in 25mans (no clue about 10's) and regularly heals for about the same as my divine star. At the moment there is essentially no reason to bring a mistweaver for HPS/Raidcd reasons on the fights you run 4/5 healers on and they effectively don't have a raid cooldown.

I'd personally love less raid cooldowns all round and I don't really find the "throw cooldowns at whatever the boss does" a particularly engaging way of doing fights. I do agree though that if mitigation and throughput cooldowns are spread between classes then the mitigation cooldowns are always going to be a lot stronger than the output ones. I'd personally love to play holy rather than discipline but on pretty much every encounter barrier/pain sup will beat out divine hymn/guardian spirit for usefulness, and thats ignoring the mitigation from shields vs holys higher raw output.

With healer and dps spots shrinking from 25 to 20man raiding I worry that if something isn't done to balance both healers and certain dps classes raid cooldowns that the classes/specs that do not have strong cooldowns will find themselves lacking a raidspot in WoD.

[Posiden126]

Completely agree. Although instead of removing them all together, maybe the healer versions of the CDs could be more powerful? Retribution devotion aura reduces magic damage taken by 10% and Prot/Holy reduces magic damage taken by 20%. Either way I also thing the CDs are a bit to strong, need to reduce their effectiveness by lowering healing/mitigation or increasing the cooldown. However, I wouldn't be shocked if they took out DPS raid CDs when they are looking at which abilities to remove for ability bloat.

Remove DPS raid CD's and fix CDs for monks. Make Zen Mediation: "Reduces all damage taken by X% and redirects to you up to X% of damage against party and raid members within 40 yards." Basically a raid wide Hand of Sacrifice.

[Therougetitan]

Agree in that
- Too many raid CDs, healer ones feel less useful and that less can be brought in for certain fights where dps needs to be pushed by utilizing them all
- Too many CDs, just feels like we need to cram a lot for Heroic Jugg or Thok

Disagree in that
- They're already removing quite a bit of abilities so it may be greatly hated if too much is taken away

[Deleted]

I both agree and disagree,

I love playing Holy Priest, and Disc being more optimal for alot of fights just because it mitigates damage gets kinda annoying.
However, I'm not sure that adding mitigating cooldowns / throughput cooldowns would change alot. And depending on which cooldowns got added/changed some classes would likely still be stronger.

I think that a better solution would be to make healers less reliant on cooldowns, and make it more about how well the group of healers does in a high damage moment.

[Hitei]

Why would you want this? DPS having CDs adds an extra level of mechanics to fights, it makes playing DPS more interesting.
Do you really hate your DPS raid members so much that you want them to tunnel vision do their rotation and stay out of fire on every single fight? Some of my favorite moments as DPS are those moments where quick and clever use of raid CDs or other utility abilities benefits or saves the group.

Also while I realize your desire for a level playing field at that high a level of raiding. Homogenization is NEVER a good thing in the long run. The classes are already a bit too close together, do you really want to turn every healing class into cookie-cutter healing spells with different colored effects?

[Deleted]

Some healing classes are devalued due to the lack of a mitigation CD, as damage mitigation CD’s are significantly more powerful than throughput cooldowns.

Healer balance will always be troublesome simply due to mechanics, absorbs being OP, etc but the gap between healing comp viability can be bridged by giving each healer an equivalent cooldown.

As of now, Mythic raids will be hard pressed to consider a throughput oriented healer in a 4 or 5 heal setup as damage mitigation CD’s become more valuable the fewer healers you have.

Cloakboy is right

Been begging for it on the battle.net forums for ages, but given up after several times where blizzard doesnt respond.

I remember during heart of fear progress where all the paladins got sit out because devo didnt work and we had tons of warriors/discs anyways