Prepare for a somewhat long wall of text
I decided to play a Resto Druid in Legion, having avoided playing healers for the entirety of the 12 years that I've been playing this game. Played a Warrior all this time, went pro in WOTLK, got R1, stopped playing in Cata due to mongoloid gameplay, came back in Legion.
I was excited, it was new to me and I sort of imagined it to be quite chill and laid back.
Remember that Planet of the Apes movie? Where that astronaut leaves Earth and comes back to see the entire planet taken over by apes? Yeah, this is what it feels like, I left in Cataclysm thinking that this is about as bad as it could get and oh boy, oh boy was I proven wrong.
The Arena Experience:
Having played this spec for 3 seasons straight, I've noticed something about PvP. It is horrendous towards healers, I dread queuing in anything PvP related because every single time I show my head from behind a corner or appear somewhere, there's always the same bunch of mongoloid melees going absolutely apeshit with white foam frothing from their mouth chasing me down with no pause to their attacks.
In arenas, there's no pause to their attacks, they can press any ability that is not on CD and that'll do damage to me so they don't have to actually think "what spells should I use against him?", they just "SMASH ALL THE SHINY BUTTONS".
So I try to juke their casts, note that I ALWAYS successfully juke because the majority of these apparent 2.2k melee players haven't heard of fake casting before. And every single time, there is a pseudo interrupt, pushback, stun or fear. There is ALWAYS something they can use, and if you're up against TWO melees, jesus christ, I'm so sorry. But the amount of forgiveness these players get is astounding, it's like as if Blizzard is sitting next to them holding their hands and telling them: "It's okay to fuck up, don't worry. Just press that stun and use your swofty macro".
So I've discovered that juking doesn't really work like it's supposed to and sitting in caster form is a death sentence, 900k - 1.2 million white hits, no thank you. So I HOT up, sit bear form, dull gameplay.
This somewhat keeps me alive for possibly 10 seconds longer, I notice my partners health going down, I come out for a grand total of 3 seconds to apply 2 rejuvs to my partners and I shit you not, I lost half my health. So I jump back into bear form, try to vortex + displacer away, nope, not on this melee's watch. I watch him do his mongoloid leap towards me and continue his mindless rampage. "Oh well, I thought. It was worth a try".
The sense of being defeated despite pulling off a cool move to "outplay" them, is crushing because they didn't put any effort into it, they just kept on mongoing and they win. What is the point of that? Why are you rewarding them for doing PvE in a PvP oriented game mode? I struggle to understand this.
Skill and Outplaying your Opponents:
That's the thing about playing a healer in this expansion, it makes me SO angry, I am always angrier than I was before I logged in. I hit 2k for each season to get my elite set and I stop queuing. I absolutely refuse to go on any further, I am afraid of arenas. I always mutter to myself "fucking mongoloids" every single time they do some ridiculous swofty damage and leap around like a goddamn monkey and still win, absolutely no strategy, no thinking. I'm serious, they probably stare at their screens pressing the same keys, their eyes starting to close from tiredness and boredom.
The fact that there is no way of outplaying these people makes me seethe with rage, as I watch them spam their same mongoloid 3 button rotation and not get punished at all for making the biggest mistakes ever, overlapping def CDs? LUL no problem, uses burst into my defensives? LUL no problem, he'll die anyway. Gets juked? LUL no problem, just stun him, fear him and then interrupt him when it's back up after pumping him with 3 million damage total while he casted absolutely nothing.
I played with a Destro Lock a few weeks back to 2k and every single time we queued into a Warrior comp all the Warrior did was train my partner for the ENTIRE game and still killed him. He didn't even stormbolt me, his MW Monk healer didn't even try to CC me, it didn't seem apparent that he knew how to either. That's right, the Warrior LITERALLY kept spamming his rotation into the Warlock like how a PvE player spams his rotation into a training dummy until he died from dampening. No amount of cyclones or outplaying worked, I couldn't believe my eyes. Nothing we did worked, NOTHING.
As for the Resto Druid rage threads...
I've noticed people rage at Rdruids due to how OP they seem, but it's like as if they don't even understand why they're OP in the first place. They're only OP when they're sitting in bear form, ever seen what happens to a Rdruid not in bear form? Dead. And their partners peel for them, which keeps them alive. The Rdruid is LITERALLY useless when he's in bear form, ever tried switching to his partners? It's effective. I'd understand Rdruid hate if they could cast heals on their partners sitting in bear form as well, but they can't. They have to leave bear form to keep their partners alive and you can just stun them and swofty macro.
Rdruids are only good with a good team that knows how to peel. Don't be a mongoloid and hate on me just because you can't mongo me down in bear form like you can to a Disc Priest
Where are the developers?
The point of this thread is not solely about Rdruids but about all healers, we are getting raped upside down with no way of stopping these melees in their tracks, they ALWAYS have something to use to continue their damage spamming.
PvP participation is at it's lowest at like 35k right now, 60k in S2 and 150k in S1. Healers are quitting left and right and that means DPs are quitting as well due to not being able to find any healers as well.
And we've got Holinka and Celestablet posting cat pictures on Twitter, while turning this magical knob called "nerf/buff" up and down then going back to posting about alcohol and some other irrelevant stuff because they're too scared to come to the official Blizzard forums to listen to feedback.
So I'm gonna end the whining and provide you with some fixes that you can implement to make the experience better for healers, and for everybody else.
- Add a freaking DR to interrupts, seriously. This is long overdue and why this hasn't happened yet is beyond me.
- Completely change the top honor talent row to reward juking, so if you juke someone and they waste their interrupt on you, that should proc some interrupt immunity for 5 seconds. Another talent could give you damage reduction, another one could give you an immunity to stuns as well. Those are just examples. Just let us use our PvP trinkets in instanced PvP instead of an entire honor talent row.
- Increase healing output of every single healer class, reintroduce baseline CC/stuns for every class and make healers killable via CC and stunlocks. Not through brute mongoloid damage.
- Reduce health pools, reduce damage back to WOTLK levels. Maybe this isn't possible so I would be okay with maybe MOP/WOD health and damage, I can't see a thing with all those huge millions popping up everywhere.
- Revert the goddamn pruning, give us our spells from WOTLK, give us our old talents system. They WORKED. If developers feel like they have to "leave their mark" then just change the names or something I don't care. Hell, you can change the icons if it makes you feel like you're "leaving your mark" in this game. Just stop trying to fix what isn't broken. Once you unprune our stuff, you can work from there without deleting any abilities. You can instead add more talents on top of it all, maybe make hybrid specs a thing again.
- Remove PvP templates, add resilience back in the game again. It won't only fix the ridiculous instagib damage in arenas right now due to the 50 traits being activated but it'll also fix the disgusting state of WPvP tremendously as the PvE players won't be able to oneshot based on item level.
- Activate trinkets in instanced PvP, like seriously. Why do we have trinkets again?
- Delete DH class.
- Bring back glyphs so we can further customize our gameplay style, and no, before you say it, those glyphs are cosmetic. I mean the REAL glyphs that allowed you to reduce CD on certain abilities or add a second charge to X ability etc etc.
And well, I've got more ideas but I don't wanna keep you guys reading any longer.
Goddamn, what a wall of text.
/mic drop.