When i mentioned situations where you would need to use them i was referring to progress fights. Once you have content on farm the heal amount will be less important.
And from what i gather the mats for the tonics are going to be extremely cheap/easy to acquire anyways.
Time is a resource far harder to acquire than pots from an auction house for many. It's more of a shift in emphasis to be honest, players are going to be expected to use Pots/Healthstones in lower level content now, whereas on Live Healthstones are a bigger deal for high end raiders.
My one concern over this is whether this counts as the class losing a healing cooldown, and thus a loss of survivability in the broader picture; or whether 'everyone' was previously balanced around having HS anyway so it being a global nerf just keeps us in line.
IMO, I think that Healthstones being inferior to Alchemist made potions is a good thing. Why? Because it brings relevance to professions again. For the longest time NO ONE ever utilized potions..at all..because they were pointless.
Last edited by Novx; 2014-09-02 at 01:37 AM.
I had plenty of 300 food too. But like I said in my other post, time spent gathering resources to make them -including buying from the AH- is more precious than the consumables themselves. For that lower level of content, I am content to take the chance using completely free healthstones, which I probably won't use anyway. That is assuming I assign a separate keybind, which to be honest I probably won't.
300 food required alot of different mats to make and the non cart food was expensive to make, requireing stuff from farm fish and mob drops.
tonics are compelety different and more akin to the 100 secondary stat food. They require one mat and it is so plentiful and cheap tonics may as well be buyable from a vendor for silver.
People who don't care enough or are too lazy to grab tonics, are likely the same people who don't bother to grab healthstones from wells or bind them.
The number of people who would be willing to save tonics to use inferior healthstones despite the incredible availability and cheapness of tonics is very small.
Few people are going to care enough about saving a few coins to keep switching keybinds out for healthstones and picking them up. If a person already has tonics most would rather just use them, and if they don't have tonics they probably won't care enough to use healthstones.
Even if heathstones and tonics were equal you would find many people in raid groups that have consistent warlocks, and still they would often use tonics.
Making tonics stronger just makes stones almost useless except in the rare case of non raid content where you have people that don't get tonics but might actually grab stones (though they rarely use them or forget to keybind them)
I just can't see any argument against making tonics and healthstones equal that makes any sense. (or isn't just spiteful)
The point is to make HS useless. Why do you not get this?
I think that most people tend to forget that Healthstone is a core defensive ability for warlocks above anything else. Nerfing it this hard and making it not reset its cooldown until you get out of combat is beyond retarded, and that's my main issue with these changes.
Destruction PvP movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXXkGgkpcis
Because some people are cheap. Like I said I probably won't waste one of my newly freed up keybinds on it, but one day I might find myself in Normal/Heroic without a Tonic and I have a fall back. Yay.
People who are cheap often don't bother to use healthstones, using a tracker I find this often happens.
Those who don't care enough to bring tonics won't care enough to click and bind healthstones.
You are talking about an incredibly small amount of people who care about their performance enough to use a restoring item, but not enough to get tonics but just enough to pick up healthstones every fight. People who care about their performance but not enough to use the best item so they can save maybe 100gold over the course of the expansion (exaggeration but tonics really are crazy cheap) The same kind of person that buys exactly as many vials as they need to make flask ect to save 2-3 copper.
There are people like this but its so few they might as well scrap healthstones all together. Which would be sad since healthstones and the ability to give them to others has been in since classic and is as iconic as fear.
They are NOT trying to make healthstones useless... I have no idea where that's coming from.
They ARE trying to make first aid useful... and healthstones are becoming a casualty of that change because they apparently can't think of a better way to facilitate that.
No, Bacon, really, they explained this like a dozen times already. They're levelling out the utility pool, Healthstones took us over the limit when you look at our Multistrike, Spellpower, and Stamina buffs, Gateways and Soulstone. We were a thing overbudget, so Healthstones got cut, that's just how it is.
I think it's absolutely clear when a developer tells us it is now a class perk, that it is no longer considered a part of our raid utility.
They did say perk and compared poorly to mage food, I don't use twitter so I don't know where.
I'd argue making healthstones inferior makes them useless and making them equal lets them be a perk without making tonics usless. (in mythic, regardless of changes health potion/tonics are always useful outside raids and see plenty of use)
Edit:
From front page
There's no LW restriction on Drums of Rage. I can go buy them off the AH same as Healing Tonics
Drums are designed to be different. A backup, not a primary source, obsoleting a raid buff brought by several classes. (Celestalon)
I understand that the distinction may be hard to see, but it's very intentional. Tonics are the primary reason for... (Celestalon)
...First Aid to be valuable in Warlords. Healthstones are a minor perk to a class, like Mage food, not a raid buff. (Celestalon)