Warlords of Draenor Dev Watercooler: Building Healthy Gameplay

People have to realise that the whole game is tuned around healers.

Currently in MoP, healing is ridiculously bursty and "smart". The result is that bosses need to deal significant damage to the raid (and the tanks, who are once again able to be nearly 1-shot by certain bosses), which means everyone has stupidly high HP, which means DPS burst damage is also insane to be able to kill anything in PvP.

When healing is slower, more strategic and mana throttled, everything else can be less. Bosses don't need to deal millions of damage per hit, tanks don't need ultra high health, dps don't need insane burst. It makes for a healthier game. While seeing a huge heal crit and loads of HPS on your meter might be "fun", it affects every other area of the game negatively.

bleh i don't understand how nerfing healers into the ground is supposed to make it more fun to play :/

you can tell they don't really have a clue about what ppl want when you read something along the lines of.

'we want healers to make skilled decisions'

and then

'we are giving you a huge boost to early regen'

great so you want us to make smart decisions but, in the end they won't really matter because of the regen. or they won't matter at first but then you'll hit the regen wall and go 'holy shit this style of play i have been using from 90-100 was working fine, now it sucks'.

then you have the 'heals won't scale with damage' so gearing up won't have the feeling that your actually doing any better.

meh if i even bother staying for another expansion so far it looks like ill be changing my main role. to me it sounds basically the same as cata, but with less instant casts.

time will obviously tell how this pans out but i want fun fluid healing with more endurance based boss fights, instead of strict calculated 5 min burns where the whole raid is spiking between 10 and 100%. challenging is one thing but this is something else.

in the end i'm just tired of having to relearn how to play my class after 9 years. its like this is supposed to be a selling point 'forget what you know welcome to the new expansion where we revert you to noob status and you get to spend the first month learning everything all over again for the umpteenth time'.

No they don't have to remove scaling. They just need to make sure it's appropriate, so that healing/DPS does not outscale HP.

If you don't outscale the others HP, you will feel no improvement of your character.

I seriously do not understand what is so hard to grasp about this concept.

Unlike tanks, who see the hits they withstand getting bigger, healers don't care about the absolute numbers of their heals, because they do not have the time to actually watch the numbers.
They care about "how much does the player health bar move when I cast X" and "how often can I cast X before I'm oom".

If Blizzard reduces scaling on both fronts to a tiny amount, the player will get gear, but won't notice much difference.

Blizzard's capacity to walk on the same rake more than once is astonishing.

Overall sounds realy good to me.
The 1,5s cast time on some of the instant heals will feel akward in the beginning but we will get used to it and yes we all know that this is necessery.
Looking forward to test this bring on the beta its about time!!

Originally Posted by Neoz

The QQ from healers and worries about potential lack of healers in WOD will be too much, these will never make it live

I like how my Disc Priest plays. I enjoy the movement I am afforded with my heals. Yes there are times when I sit and have to turret say for big damaging effects or if I'm just filling time, but for the most part I can wonder free without greatly affecting my throughput. I play this game because I like the playstyle, but reverting back to turret disc with Blizzard pushing me to use the Heal Spell! is not what I am looking to do with my time.

I'm exploring games like Wild Star and ESO because those games thrive on active combat.

Even playing shadow for my guild, I enjoy that I can do great damage and still have a bit of mobility. Running FDCL might not be completely optimal, but it sure as shit beats turreting mind flay. The change they are proposing seems to take that away for healing.

Originally Posted by Granyala

If you don't outscale the others HP, you will feel no improvement of your character.

I seriously do not understand what is so hard to grasp about this concept.

Unlike tanks, who see the hits they withstand getting bigger, healers don't care about the absolute numbers of their heals, because they do not have the time to actually watch the numbers.
They care about "how much does the player health bar move when I cast X" and "how often can I cast X before I'm oom".

If Blizzard reduces scaling on both fronts to a tiny amount, the player will get gear, but won't notice much difference.

You are taking a much too simplistic view of this. First, you are assuming characters completely scale in perfect unison with one another (which doesn't happen until the complete end of content when everyone is fully kitted out in gear), and you are assuming all enemies (PvE or PvP a like) are completely identical. As you gear up, current content will become easier (in PvE anyway), allowing you to tackle newer content (what's my DPS on Patchwerk!!!"), in PvP the game won't change as much as there won't be parts of the parts of the expansion where Healing > Burst then Burst > Healing, instead it should be a bit more balanced for the life time of the expansion. This promotes a more even game play that is probably a lot easier to balance, which is what most PvP players want. They don't want even new gear iteration completely changing the game, and in PvE players want to know that if they gear up they will be able to handle the next Tier of Raids.

The idea that while scaling Blizzard (or anyone) could completely balance 30+ specs to exactly consistent with gear scaling is also a bit of pipe dream anyway, but that's a different issue altogether.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by maomoa

I'm exploring games like Wild Star and ESO because those games thrive on active combat.

These forums are great. In the past, we like talk about all the bad changes Blizzard makes (or has made) and how they directly reflect their dropping subscriptions. How they catered to casuals, how they made the game easy mode, etc.

Yet now they want to propose making healing a lot more like it was back when the game subscriptions were at it's peak, yet people keep saying they want to quit the game because it sucks.

We can't have it both ways, we can't pine for the old days one day, then threaten to quit when they acknowledge their mistakes and propose to fix it.

I've not played WoW in 4 months, but was determined to re-sub for WoD.
But seeing that they're essentially trying to bring back cata healing and "prune" a lot of stuff, WoD is probably not for me.

Why do they try to reinvent the wheel each expasion to make it more angular and sqeaky? Cata healing was sh*t in the beginning, Pandaria faction grind was sh*t and now they're trying Cata healing again. Also their stance on "casters need less instants and mobility" grinds my gears. This is so 2005! Casters need more mobility, not less. Maybe make them cast-on-the move and thus interruptable like lock and shaman spells, but being a shadow priest for example makes you want to slit your wrists whenever any kind of movement is required, be it PvE or PvP.

(In b4 "why do you visit a WoW site then?": It's because I was hyped to try the new expansion after having not played in months. But seeing that they're planning on repeating their old mistakes, I'm probably not going to.)

Originally Posted by Siddown

1. Pick a class with a Healer Spec
2. Spec Healer as your secondary spec
3. Queue For Dunge...oh sh!t, insta pop!
4. ???
5. Profit

But you forgot about the healing part, where you have to play a healer in a pug in a harder dungeon, with now mana issues to worry about. If cata is any indication, it would be that healers would quit playing healers in mass, or the competent healers would just stop using random que again.

Originally Posted by azurrei

A) that could be a fury warrior unless that is pally tier I don't recognize offhand from the SS

B) the new Crusader class in Diablo 3 can use a 1h or 2h MH + shield...maybe they are adding that for protection paladins (warriors too?)

A) That's a Paladin PvP gearset. Wrathful Gladiator.

B) That'd be weird for gameplay. Maybe the person who made the image didn't realise?

Originally Posted by Snorlax

Cataclysm saw the biggest rate of sub losses for any time period of the game, yeah we should totally go back to that style of play.

The drop in subscription was many factors - and from what I recall alot players found the content to difficult. This was mainly on dungeons and raids difficulty and the issues with pigging these.

Since Cata we now have LFR, which is tuned to be passable by "casual" players. In addition normal mode dungeons will be much like (or easier) than MoP level 90 dungeons.

So WoD doesnt appear to be locking out or excluding "casual players" ie Normal dungeons, LFR, normal scenario, etc

Sounds great. Hard casting druid healer sounds interesting, might play that if they don't bend over to whiners. I'd love to see pretty much every instant damage/heal spell go.

Whats with the adhd generation having problems if they have to sit 30-60 seconds without doing anything once in a while? I liked a lot fights like Firemaw or 4H in vanilla, where you had small pauses in the action. It gave you time to look around the art and see how the raid is moving and working like a clock work (though this just isn't as impressive with 25 mans), laugh at others in your class channel or just relax, take a sip of water and chat for a second before engaging again. And for officers it gave a good window to look how players are actually playing when not requested to fraps (especially healers whos true contribution can some times be very hard to determine without seeing what they do/did), instead of just parsing some addon data like a noob. But I guess the last part isn't that relevant anymore with these minuscule size raids.

So glad to read they finally admit how bad early Cata healing was. It was guild breaking. The efficiency nerf was so bad that gaining a level was a negative!

I would not mind seeing heal spells that heal X% of the player they are used on. Instead of healing a flat amount, or percentage of the healers health, just heal % of targets health and be done with it. That way you can have your "big" spell that does 25% of a players health, be they a tank or dps, have aoe's that do about 10 to 12 percent and so on. This would make tank damage so much more manageable.

Damn Cata sucked, I watched two different great guilds implode. Most of our 5 man healers were the significant others who played, when they left they took two players, themselves and the SO. It gutted a great 25 man to where by the end of the first two months we barely fielded a 10 man. Tried merging with another guild only to be at max of 2 ten mans... and even that was a stretch. So its great to see they figured it out.

Originally Posted by Snorlax

T Except that ties into the Realm Firsts, sure it might have inspired some negative gameplay but over all it spurred rivalry and competition a.k.a. elements of community. So we have a return to the travesty that was Cata's first tier while trying to throw under the bus even more elements of community.

Had you been around vanilla/tbc, you would know that achievement system itself actually hindered the community. Take the realm firsts for example, in vanilla/tbc instead of getting an notification you had to ask around, actually talk to some one. Which one do you think builds more feeling and knowledge about the community and might even make you new friends? Now multiply this with potentially hundreds of achievements that all take away little bit of that interaction between players and community and the end result is very detrimental for the community in the long run.

Absorbs
If everyone is constantly in a state of partially injured, don't absorbs inherently lose a lot of value?
Yes. (Celestalon)

Odd. I look at these abilities as "Damage delay's" during fights and at the start, damage preventing. Most of the time in mid-low damage situations with raid/party wide damage, an absorb will be followed by a HoT to bring the health pool back up. Perhaps they could incorporate a system where some absorbs have a chance to apply a HoT when they are applied? Absorbs should be "planned" in preparation of extreme damage incoming, but they're only single-target with CD and debuffs such as weakened soul...

Originally Posted by cityguy193

But you forgot about the healing part, where you have to play a healer in a pug in a harder dungeon, with now mana issues to worry about. If cata is any indication, it would be that healers would quit playing healers in mass, or the competent healers would just stop using random que again.

Except the whole "mana issues" thing is just made up by angry posters. Read the update to the article, it specifically points out that healers going OOM was a problem in Cataclysm that they won't repeat.

Let's face it, as much as everyone here begs for change, when it happens they hate it. That or it's just another thing to complain about, so in a way, they love it.

Best news in nearly 4 years. Hopefuls they won't perform ostrich defense move under whining pressure of some players.
Bring some skill back to the game, stop with the running like a headless chicken constantly.
Cata healing was challanging but perfectly fine in guild groups when tank and dps did not act like twats trying to plow through everything at end of Wrath speed. Quit complaining, quit LFGing. Enjoy what really made mmorpgs successful - socializing with people around you, be it guildies or other friends.

Hope Blizzard sticks to the concept.

Originally Posted by Snorlax

Except that ties into the Realm Firsts, sure it might have inspired some negative gameplay but over all it spurred rivalry and competition a.k.a. elements of community. So we have a return to the travesty that was Cata's first tier while trying to throw under the bus even more elements of community.

But Realm Firsts interest about, what, 1% of the player base if that? And those people will just track those types of realm firsts other ways anyways (Raid Trackers, Realm Forums, etc.). People tracked unofficial Realm Firsts long before Achievements existed.

Love every bit of change they proposed. With the major of cc abilities being reworked, that change had to come. Hard cc's made sense in a game full of instant spells and freedom of mobility. In WoD that many instant spells would frustrate the shit out of any melee player, more than it did in MoP anyway.
Good changes overall..

Originally Posted by chaddd

Should I find the best deals for you to reorder all of the games, for your new account in 6 months, or shall we wait? Blizzard still puts out the best quality MMO IMHO. If there were a better 1 then it would have more subs. People's wallets have spoken!

False on all accounts or do you mean Justin Bieber is the best musician since he has the most people buying his music?.