1. #1

    Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    1) You care more about mana regen on gear instead of just throughput. This is the least important consideration because it still works today to some extent.

    2) You care more about your whole arsenal of heals instead of just the biggest, fastest one. Paladins for example currently can go for a Flash of Light build or a Holy Light build but they aren't often mixing the two together. A Holy Light focused paladin isn't using FoL to hit the tank from a small hit. They're just using HL and overhealing.

    3) Boss encounters don't need to be built around destroying the tank in 2 hits. Currently, that is one of the few ways we have to make players actually lose a fight. (The other is that you lose enough healers or dps through attrition that you just can't keep going). Healers running out of mana used to be another point of failure and it pushed things in slightly different directions. Tanks for example cared slightly more about avoidance stats because nobody wanted to be the dreaded mana sponge. Standing in fires didn't have to be about dying in 1 sec if you didn't move -- it was more that you wasted healer mana by taking unnecessary damage. DPS who didn't do enough dps risked the fight going long and the healers running out of mana. Currently the long fight is only an issue if it opens up more chances for tank death or there is a severe berserk timer.

    [...] We're not sure the five second rule is a rousing success. It's not necessarily fun for players to stand there and do nothing. It definitely wasn't fun to heal in rotation and do nothing for a minute or two so you could regen.

    What I'm talking about is just returning HPM (healing per mana) to being a consideration that actually matters again. Do you want to use the cheap spell or the expensive spell? Currently you only really care about the fast spell or maybe the big spell.

    Healers will need some tools to manage their mana, and they already have some like Innervate and the Shadow Fiend. Those tools can't be counted on for unlimited mana of course or we're back to the same problem.

    ...The more careful selection of spells is actually what we're going for. I think that can be just as challenging, and personally probably more fun, than the miss a GCD and the tank gets it style.

    But really I was trying to offer reassurance to those healers who seem terrified that we're going to make healing too hard in Cataclysm. That's not the goal. Making it fun is the goal. However, when healing is too easy, it's hard for it to be very fun. As I've said before (maybe in this thread?) DPS specs can try to see how fast they can make a farm run. The healer doesn't really get to try and "heal faster" or whatever. The most fun a healer can have in content on farm status is trying to keep everyone alive as efficiently as possible. Efficiency implies a mana component.
    I don't know if this is the right forum, but I played a priest back then when they nerf down ranking (still somewhat playing my priest XD), so thought it's good place here to post.

    This sounded alot like how healers (back then mostly priest?) was doing with downranking. We carefully manage our mana and only do flash heals or group heal when it was necessary. (like fishing for a blue dragon proc and then try to use the on use regen trinkets to get more mana regen... etc.. anyhow)

    I remember have the same gear as other priest and the last to OOM with the most healed was actually an indicator of a good priest.

    But they took down- ranking away and the healing game becomes "hit the mole". And now they are changing it back. I am slightly upset by this (mostly indifference now ... lol. Guess can't have indifferent players posting indifference on forums. =P ), because that's what healers was telling Blizzard they are dumbing down the game and will take the healing into destination which is what healing in raids today is.

    Well, i just get that feeling of the following from Blizzard, "OMG you are right, I mean, I could've listened when all the healers were pointing this out 5 (well ok 3ish)years ago!!".

    What do you guys think?

  2. #2

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    No. They're not bringing back Downranking. At all.

    Read parts of that again:
    2) You care more about your whole arsenal of heals instead of just the biggest, fastest one. Paladins for example currently can go for a Flash of Light build or a Holy Light build but they aren't often mixing the two together. A Holy Light focused paladin isn't using FoL to hit the tank from a small hit. They're just using HL and overhealing.
    And that's not counting the fact that they only use Holy Shock while actually moving. Druids and Shaman are the same. Priests barely even touch Greater Heal (it happens, encounter dependent, but still scarce), and with the "Renew build" Flash heal has taken a step back as well.

    Why balance each spell and each tool if they're not going to get used? That's the point they're trying to make. Our healing output in cataclysm is probably going to be a little higher than it is now. Boss damage as well. But tanks will have like double the HP, so if they take a hit, we have time to gauge between our efficiency spells and our "MUST HEAL NOW" spells, because no tank is getting 2 shotted anymore.

    Downranking isn't coming back, they just want us to use all of our toys in the sandbox (instead of leaving those few on the side to rust). And I, for one, like this.
    ~Former Priest/Guild Wars 2 Moderator~
    Now TESTING: ArcheAge (Alpha)
    Now PLAYING: MonoRed Burn (MtG Standard)
    Twitter: @KelestiMMO come say hi!
    ~When you speak, I hear silence. Every word a defiance~

  3. #3

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    After some thinking, I think I wasn't very clear on first post.

    I didn't really mean the actual down ranking, more like how we were using heals. (as down ranking, was just a slower but more efficient heal, you need to anticipate to cast it.)

    That down ranking was relying on planning, more than reflex(which is what alot of raid healing is today) AKA hit the mole.

    I remembered back I could have 50% mana and know that ,"shit, I ain't gonna last this one, if they(dps) don't hurry the burn". It's the gist of that planning and trying to maximize your mana for healing on both throughput and efficiency. (which was why down ranking was used... it's not for the clutch moments)

    When they take away down ranking, they also killed that aspect of healing. (priests back then have said this, I was one of them agreeing~) Blizzard changed healer's healing style and now they don't like the result. (which alot of healers have said that when they nerfed downranking...)

    If you have healed back them, you'd know that priest do care about all the arsenals of their heals. (except lightwell... it sucked donkey balls from day 1. And holy nova, that also suck, to a lesser extend - sidenote, they somewhat make you take holynova, in order to do the epic quest... ... ).

    Group heal, flash heal, shield, greater heal (multiple of ranks..) were greatly utilized. Not sure if it's the encounter design or the spell/talent design, healing back then was actually more fun IMO. (except the fights are usually 5x longer, that part sucks...)
    Hit the mole was tooo tiring.... IMO.

  4. #4

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    As long as tanks are not going to get twoshot in 0.8 seconds, healing will be for the better. I have nothing against fast-paced action, it's fun. But - at the moment, healers are mostly measured on their HPS and how fast they can hit the fast heal on whatever is taking damage, since that is the only thing that matters. If we are not going to be GCD-locked as we are now, haste will be less valuable, crit will be much more valuable. And HPS will not really matter much. Efficiency will.

    If we need to spend 3-4 Gheals to top off a tank, that spell will be useful again, and the choice between a gheal and a fheal will be much deeper.

    Of course, as a result, we will get much less mana. Otherwise, we will spam anyway, and instead of bringing 5 healers to a raid, we'd bring 2.
    I expect all heals to cost double in cataclysm, but their base throughput will only be up +5-10% or so. And, the new regen system will give a lot less returns. We'll have to see what they come up with though, but I do expect to run as OOM at lvl 85 as I was at lvl 80 with T6 sunwell gear. Meaning - VERY much oom after castin 8 heals!

    Non-discipline 2006-2019, not supporting the company any longer. Also: fails.
    MMO Champion Mafia Games - The outlet for Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. [ Join the Fun | Countdown | Rolecard Builder MkII ]

  5. #5

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    well, probably not as extreme as 8 heals will go OOM. (probably something *like* down ranking heals.. need a few of them to top tanks off, but can cast quite a few of them)

    IMO, just make the mana regen less (or something that you somewhat have to watch..) and give the healers a smaller but more efficient heal and make them choose if they want to be efficient and some big heals with less efficiency. Efficiency was thrown out of the windows when replenishment was introduced.

    The replenishment was just a bad band-aid solution to address mana user vs energy user's in dps role. (with the short cooldown on mana regen abilities... this shouldn't be a problem .. IMO.)

  6. #6

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    Personally correct me if im wrong but healing always becomes 'easier' or more spammy if you want to put it that way as the expansion grows older. The thing to understand is that you mana cost of your spells dont increase in cost from the first boss of an expansion to the last, whereas your mana does. Saying your mana pool increase is linear is not 100% correct since at times it will increase or even decrease at a different rate to what it does usually, but in the grand scheme of things it is rather linear. Now the problem i can see is that at the start of the xpac you use less spells to conserve mana, but later on since those spells cost the same and you may have double the mana pool you can spam as much as you like. This may sound dumb but the only real way i can see them fixing healing becoming less of a spam fest using your highest HPS move is to mabey make intellect like haste in that it has DR, so that you start the xpac at say 30k mana, and at the end you only have maybe 35k-40k.

    Anyway thats my opinion people will disagree

    Also as a priest i find i use all my healing spells in my 'arsenal' except Gheal. I'm pretty sure shammies use all their heals except Gheal, and as for the other two well i supose they are what blizzard are pretty much targeting with the 'you need to use a wider variety of spells'

  7. #7

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    Damage scaling properly with content, instead of becoming exceptionally bursty is something I'm looking forward to as a healer.

    Giving bosses Expertise to counteract huge avoidance, instead of ridiculous OP melee swings to "compensate" for the ones that "don't land", is going to be a huge step. Definitely can't wait to see thsi.
    ~Former Priest/Guild Wars 2 Moderator~
    Now TESTING: ArcheAge (Alpha)
    Now PLAYING: MonoRed Burn (MtG Standard)
    Twitter: @KelestiMMO come say hi!
    ~When you speak, I hear silence. Every word a defiance~

  8. #8
    Warchief Sarcasm's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Aug 2009
    Location
    New Zealand
    Posts
    2,052

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    The changes to healing in Cataclysm may actually make me consider playing a healer again.
    Quote Originally Posted by BattlemasterSkarab View Post
    GOD's ARMAGEDDON and DOOM'S DAY!!!!!!.... Imagine that...
    4 apocalyptic horsemen
    Sky turned red
    Sun turned black
    All WoW servers down

  9. #9

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    Quote Originally Posted by scintal

    If you have healed back them, you'd know that priest do care about all the arsenals of their heals. (except lightwell... it sucked donkey balls from day 1. And holy nova, that also suck, to a lesser extend - sidenote, they somewhat make you take holynova, in order to do the epic quest... ... ).
    Truly lack of skills Your priest knowlage posses. Don't know if You've ever done Anub25hc but if You did not, wait till You reach that place, bind Your holy nova button, after kill get back here and edit Your post since this spell is enough good for some fights especially glyphed. Do not generalize ever... it wont make You a good healer. Do not ban spells that are not just common in use. Search for optional use of them.

  10. #10

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    The only thing they are bringing back is the difficulty of healing right now i can heal by mouse clicking. Literally a whole instance without touching my keyboard lol. In the expansion heals are going to be for less and you will have to think about what you are going to do and better manage mana, its not going to be so brainless anymore.
    Lead Game Designer

    YouTube Channel

    https://www.youtube.com/@Nateanderthal

  11. #11

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    I like the direction they're talking about moving in Cataclysm. Healing isn't brainless now, but it's much different than it used to be where resource management is was a much larger part of the equation. Personally, I never really liked the way the game had previously been inadvertantly designed to encourage downranking because I thought it was a sloppy way of giving us a big heal and a small heal, where rather than being Greater Heal and Flash Heal, as intended, we ended up using a max rank Greater Heal as a big heal and a low rank for a small heal because it was just way more mana efficient. They tried to fix that by eliminating downranking so that we would use both Greater Heal and Flash Heal, but they messed up two fold by making mana too easy to come by, minimizing the cost part of the equation, and making bosses hit hard and bursty, making speed even more important. Thus, by reducing mana regen, they fix the first problem and by having bosses hit relatively less hard, by tanks will have larger health pools, and less bursty, by having them scale with mitigation, they can hopefully reintroduce that part of the healing equation.

    Imagine taking current content, reducing relative tank mitigation and mana regen and having tanks with 90-100k health. If the tank is at 40-50k, it might actually be worth casting Greater Heal to help top him off because, chances are he won't either die or be topped off in the next 2s. Thus, assuming we'd have full Greater Heal talents to actually make it meaningfully more efficient than Flash Heal, we'd have use for it again. Meanwhile, Flash Heal would still be more useful if the tank gets really low and may not live long enough for the Greater Heal to land, or for spot healing the raid.

    I want to have Greater Heal be useful again. I want to be less worried about missing GCDs and keeping spells on cooldowns and more worried about choosing the best tool for the job. The state of things now makes healing feel either very much like a DPS rotation, which sort of defeats the purpose of playing a healer, or whack-a-mole, which isn't as fun either.

  12. #12

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    Quote Originally Posted by bambulance
    Truly lack of skills Your priest knowlage posses.
    Grammar and spelling aside. I guess you are saying I lack skills and priest knowledge. (?)

    And your evidence is that (if) I didn't do H25 TotC's last boss.

    This logic is flawed.

    1) You really glyph holy nova for that 1 fight? Like really?

    2) Let's say I really didn't do Anub-25-H. I have to do that to talk about priest spell mechanics?

    3) You are saying generalization is bad, and you counter my "generalization" with *1* specific example. I can just say what you mention is an anomaly, could be exclude from the general examples/principles.

    Honestly, I fail to see how not using holy nova in anub-25-h makes you a bad healer.

    Bad healer is to think you *have to heal* a certain way. IMO, if you didn't let anyone die, gets the job done, you are a good healer.

    Specifics guides, are for beginners that didn't know what to do or just reference to look up. Not something to follow religiously.

    So please, get your argument straight before you are saying others are ... lacking skill and priest knowledge.

  13. #13

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    i remember the times when i was playing paladin healer on an illegal server with downrankings.
    Healing illidan for example i just spammed some downranked flash heal on tank and i never went oom btu i still healed like, crit heal 3k. (illidan had no script so pure tank & spank)

    but tbh downranking shouldnt have been taken off...its really useful for mana users but then again frost mages losing 0 mana with frostbolt rank 1 to slow melee down is just overpowered.

    downranking is good in pve but in pvp its overpowered. Not for every class tho.

  14. #14

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    Quote Originally Posted by Otaka
    i remember the times when i was playing paladin healer on an illegal server with downrankings.
    Healing illidan for example i just spammed some downranked flash heal on tank and i never went oom btu i still healed like, crit heal 3k. (illidan had no script so pure tank & spank)

    but tbh downranking shouldnt have been taken off...its really useful for mana users but then again frost mages losing 0 mana with frostbolt rank 1 to slow melee down is just overpowered.

    downranking is good in pve but in pvp its overpowered. Not for every class tho.
    I'm not following your logic here. Yes, I agree that the effects of downranking were good, in that we had to choose between efficiency and speed/throughput, but that doesn't mean that downranking is the only way to achieve it. In fact, the only reason downranking worked was because the SP scaling didn't diminish on lower ranks at the same rate that the mana cost did. If Blizzard can achieve the concept of choosing efficiency or speed/throughput again, but rather than through downranking, by taking advantage of the tools already in the toolbox, then I think that's a superior solution to just bringing back downranking.

  15. #15

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    Quote Originally Posted by Weena2
    Personally correct me if im wrong but healing always becomes 'easier' or more spammy if you want to put it that way as the expansion grows older.
    Actually this isn't really true, as there have been regen nerfs in nearly every patch. It's been spammy all through wrath, all that's changed is what is being spammed, and that has been driven by buffs and nerfs

    Holy priests have gone from spamming CoH to spamming FH to spamming Renew
    Resto shaman raid healing went form CH spam to LHW spam and then back to CH spam
    Holy Pallies have been spamming HL since 3.0

    Wrath hasn't gotten more spammy, wrath has been spammy since Naxx.

  16. #16

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    I dont mean to derail this into an anti-GC thread , but am I the only one here who thinks GC probably plays a holy pally and has never touch holy priest before?

  17. #17

    Re: Healing "direction" of Catalysm

    Quote Originally Posted by rubberbands
    I dont mean to derail this into an anti-GC thread , but am I the only one here who thinks GC probably plays a holy pally and has never touch holy priest before?
    A few guildies and I back in TBC figured out that he played a Paladin and his wife was just a really really bad BM hunter, thus feeling the need to buff every aspect of it even when it got to a point where it wasn't actually required.
    ~Former Priest/Guild Wars 2 Moderator~
    Now TESTING: ArcheAge (Alpha)
    Now PLAYING: MonoRed Burn (MtG Standard)
    Twitter: @KelestiMMO come say hi!
    ~When you speak, I hear silence. Every word a defiance~

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •