Healers - Spirit regeneration and healing in Ulduar
That was partially because OFSR was so potent back then. Honestly, we're not trying to recreate the MC days or healer rotations, though I can understand if some of you are nostalgic for them.
In Ulduar, you should run out of mana if...
1) You don't have enough gear for the instance.
2) You aren't playing the encounter well enough.
If you have good enough gear and good enough skill and aren't standing in fires and are kiting adds correctly and doing all the right things, then you aren't designed to run OOM.
The reason we wanted to nerf regen is that having infinite mana was allowing too much of a buffer on those two factors (it allowed for too much "slop" in organization and execution). Take Saphiron as an example. When mana regen is very high, the dps can sit in the blizzards for a little while because the healers can just heal through it and make up enough mana when they get a clearcasting proc or are running for ice blocks (because OFSR regen was so good). In previous tiers of content, the guild probably would have had to farm the earlier bosses for several weeks to get enough gear to have a chance at the final few.
Now Naxx was designed to be easy, and Ulduar isn't going to be a lot harder. Hard modes on the bosses though are designed to be very hard. That means being inefficient with mana has to be a liability instead of a tool used to make the content less challenging. (
Source)
Healing in Ulduar
We don't generally throw out raid damage so severe that you have to heal multiple targets within one GCD or risk losing them all. If you are finding that to be the case then it's possible your group is not sufficiently geared for the encounter. If players are dying a lot during Vortex, their health may just be too low. After the Vortex had ended, you should have plenty of time to heal someone, target someone else to heal them, etc.
We still intend for you to be able to take any 3 healers (it will probably be closer to 3 for Ulduar) in a 10 player group and be good to go. However, as you start to try hard modes there is going to be more pressure to have every player in the role that most emphasizes their strengths. You may want a mix of healers. (
Source)
Replenishment
I think at this point the discussion is less about clarifying our position and more about some players just not liking the concept of Replenishment or wanting even more flexibility in who they invite. I’m not sure logical arguments are going to sway anyone’s position. Nevertheless, I will attempt to outline the design from our point of view:
- We want you to group.
- We want you to be more powerful when you group.
- One way we do that is by letting you benefit from buffs that other players bring.
- We can’t give everyone a unique buff that guarantees them a raid slot. We tried this in BC. What happens is that the classes with necessary buffs are brought and the others are ignored. There are 10 classes and 30 specs in the game. You can’t bring them all to a 25-player raid or certainly a 10-player raid.
- We asked some cutting-edge raiders during LK development: How many balance druids, ret paladins or death knights are you going to bring? The answer was probably none. They didn’t have any space.
- So our solution was to give you multiple ways to get the buffs. Different specs bring different versions of the same benefit that do not stack. Hopefully those specs will be attractive, but not so attractive that you want to stack the raid with them. You have more flexibility. You can make decisions about which players to bring.
- In BC, Shadow priests brought the buff that we now call Replenishment. As a result, Shadow priests were pretty much mandatory to raid in BC. Great for Shadow priests. Bad for other dps classes. Our solution was not to cut the mechanic but to offer it to more specs to give you more flexibility.
- Now we could have cut the mechanic. We could have tried to come up with another cool benefit that Shadow priests, Retribution paladins and the others bring. But the mechanic worked. Groups were happy when they had a Shadow priest. Shadow priests were happy that their groups were happy.
- Depending on who you ask, there are other buffs that are mandatory. Bloodlust / Heroism and battle rez get brought up a lot. Kings and Fort are pretty huge. We don’t assume you have any of those, except Replenishment. We assume you have a tank, healer, dps, some form of crowd control, and a mana battery in your raids.
- As a hedge on that bet, we also made the introductory content easier. Far more players have experienced Naxxramas compared to Karazhan, and we think that is a big win.
- If you didn’t raid a lot in BC, you may not remember how bad it was then. Perhaps you want even more flexibility than we offer today. That is a valid standpoint to take, but it definitely does get harder for us to offer content of an appropriate challenge (meaning neither too high nor too low) when your group can literally be of any composition with any medley of raid buffs.
- Similarly, if you are skilled and organized, you can likely get by even without essential buffs like Replenishment. Some of you will probably beat hard modes without Replenishment. Others of you won’t dream of trying without it, Bloodlust, Prayer of Fortitude, Blessing of Kings, Mark of the Wild and so on. We are not at all guaranteeing every group will be able to beat the hard modes. Remember, Algalon feeds on your tears.
- We don’t think you need Replenishment (or any buff) to do heroic 5-player content. You do need a tank and a healer. You probably don’t even need a tank or healing spec, depending on your skill and gear (meaning an Arms warrior and Ret healer could do fine).
- We don’t think you need Replenishment to do a 5-player Arena team, but it can be a nice bonus.
- We don’t think you need Replenishment to solo. The issue of how often various classes or specs should have to take a break while soloing (i.e. drink for mana-users) is something we discuss a lot. Some specs don’t have to do it at all, such as any priest with Spirit Tap. Classes with healing spells, especially druids, can top themselves off and keep going. Other classes without mana, especially warriors, have a lot of down time to eat or bandage. It’s a larger discussion, but you can certainly make a compelling argument that every spec should have around the same down time. (Source)
Replenishment and healers
That argues healers are stronger than other classes when solo since it is not your output that is diminished when alone. It is only your regeneration and I haven’t seen too many arguments from healers that say they are OOM after healing themselves from a typical solo encounter.
Put another way, here are the common concerns I see:
1) We don't want to rely on other classes for superior mana regen when grouping.
2) We won't have enough mana regen in 5-player content.
3) We won't have enough mana regen when soloing.
4) We will have too much downtime when soloing.
1 is just the design of the game. 4 is a concern. We aren't convinved 2 and 3 are going to be a big deal. Actually, I will add a 5th, which is that Replenishment makes Int much better than Spirit. There is some validity to that point, but at the same time, Spirit still does something for casters (it is rarely wasted) and you are not often choosing directly between Int and Spirit. But mana regen stats are something we are taking a bigger look at. Either Spirit or Int or mp5 always feels like the queen stat and it is probably not tenable to have so many regen stats in the long term. (
Source)
Warrior rage generation while Power Word: Shield is active in 3.1
This is a buff to warriors versus priests. However, warriors also received a pretty hefty nerf versus priests that not many players are talking about. Specifically, you will no longer be at zero armor in PvP situations. (
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Power Word: Barrier (Power Word: Shield for the whole group) and Hymns revamp
We'd still like to do Barrier, but some of the revamps ended up more extensive than we planned. At this point we'd rather make what we have taste good instead of throwing new ingredients into the stew, but it's an idea we still like.
Believe it or not, hymns are still being worked on. Now that the squid works a little better, Hymn of Hope has even less of a role. (
Source)
No Abolish Poison for priests
As a few players have suggested, we think the solution here is just to make sure that hunters and rogues aren't so good versus priests simply because of the lack of poison removal. We don't think that needs to be giving Abolish Poison or the like to priests. (
Source)