Healing

[Tons of Phun]

So I am looking to see how the healers out there feel about healing. I had to switch to heals so our guild could run raids. But after being introduced to healing in Naxx I started to like it and still do, having healed all the content available.

Now a few patches back the Devs wanted to change replenishment and mana regen because they felt like healing was becoming boring and people would just spam one button and never run out of mana, boring!!. So after that patch it turns out there still are no mana issues and people still end up spamming one button. Now with Cataclysm coming out the Devs want to change healing again to try and make it more fun. From what I have read from the possible changes I get the feeling that Blizz wants to make the healers pick the right spell for each dmg amount. Which then comes off like if you pick the wrong spell you just F'd up and now will have no mana left by the end and you wiped your raid or you didn't pick the right spell and didn't heal enough so now the tank died and you wiped your raid. This sounds terrible and possible problems would be the ones I listed or you just panic and don't heal and then wipe. However it could just turn out like it has in the past and all these changes just end up with gear/regen being OP and you spam one button again.

TLDR? Basically just wanted to see if all the healers enjoy healing as it is and if the changes to make healing more "fun" according to the Devs is really needed.

[fabian]

What is awesome about just mindlessly spamming with the only distinction being the number of players damage or what is on CD? I'd rather have healing be strategic like they want it instead of a mindless spam of whack the mole using our best heals.

[Kelesti]

If you actually played a Resto Shaman or a Holy Priest in endgame, you'd see there's a lot more going out than one button or a simple rotation can figure out. Mana issues are still present for Holy Priests and Holy Paladins (at least to some extent. They still burn through their blue bar faster than any other).

Mana regen needs to affect all healers. But one way to do that is to nerf it to the ground, giving you choices. The choices they list, ToP, aren't Renew vs Greater Heal.

It's Flash Heal vs Heal vs Greater Heal. Fast and light, cheap and average, or expensive and huge. No matter what button you push, healing goes out. Its your usage over an entire fight that change what happens. If a boss frenzies, you can almost guarantee that everyone's switching to their "Greater" versions of healing spells. But how you manage yourself outside of those phases is how you make the limited regen actually count for something, and switching between those (and all your other spells) keeps healing off of ever feeling like a rotation (or one button spam)

[AnotherPaladin]

I still love healing on my holy paladin. Hopefully we get a mass dispel and also a HoT other than the sacred shield flash of light one.

[Geekzilla]

I enjoy it now (do a daily random heroic on one healer of each class every day, and have healed ICC 10 on three of them), but that's not saying that I think they shouldn't change anything. I'm looking forward to, or at least, interested in, all the healing changes except the dispel-related ones. I shall have a going away party for my cleansing totem the night before 4.0.X goes live.

[harky]

They're trying to roll the entire game back to TBC, which is thus far the most balanced version of WoW. They made a mistake with 3.0 in that they nerfed content, but buffed players. Much of what 4.0 is hinting at is a mass nerf to all specs of all classes. All DPS will be doing less damage in relation to player health and all healers will be healing for less in relation to player health.

The obvious change is that it will slow PVP down (finally), but what a lot seem to be missing is they're also doing it to bring back TBC style healing. Healers needed to be careful and efficient and honestly that's gone. The best healing setups in the game involve just spamming the crap out of everything, then blowing cooldowns when things get hard. 3.0 and Wrath in general was a big mistake and Blizz has realized it. So... the changes are good. Look at how long Blizz waited to bring out T8 content and you'll realize that they had planned on Naxx/Sarth lasting 4-5 months, not 1-2 weeks. They forgot that they'd nerfed PVE by ~30%, then they proceeded to buff players DPS and Healing by ~50% while also making threat easier to produce. So people would full clear Naxx in an afternoon in blues without much of a problem.

The changes coming for Cataclysm are meant to make the game serious again, rather than a spam fest. DPS is too high now and healing is too high now. It just is. If Blizz tried to make T11 at 80 they wouldn't be able to do it. They would need to increase damage so much that everything would be RNG based. Remember doing ToGC at the right gear levels? People exploded. Well, to make T11 possible they'd need to upgrade damage. Fun. No, instead what they did with T10 is this: Level off damage so that it's almost trivial, but flood the raid with trivial damage. It's the only thing they could do... but it's bad. Wrath's highest success point was Ulduar. They didn't need massive damage auras to keep everything from being 2 healed, etc. The issue was that if they just redid Ulduar as T10 but just pumped up the damage, you'd have players being one-shot by AOE. It's a problem with the core of the combat system and also a huge imbalance in PVP which has virtually killed the arena scene. Remember how popular PVP was in TBC? Yeah... not so much anymore.

Anyway... rant over. Healing nerf will help the game. A lot.

[Danner]

I would say the holypriest is already the healer working like cataclysm intended, except we don't have a single cheap heal at the moment. Cataclysm will fix that; I expect it to see less and less use as we progress in cata content.

The holypriest do have the option of matching a large range of damage patterns, and heal them optimally witrh the proper tool usage. I personally very much love this aspect of healing; it's basically boiling down to tactics. You have to keep track of a lot of parameters and find the right tool for the right situation through split-second decisions, while continuously do on-the-fly re-priorities. That's the tactics part of healing, really. All healers do this to a varying degree; I would argue that the shaman and holypaladins are the classes with the least tactics options though. Paladins due to a lack of heals, and shammies due to a lack of cooldowns.

But the holypriest is also the only healer with a strategic criteria. Tactics is about winning your battles. Strategy is about picking the right battles in order to win the war. While both paladins and priests stand the risk of running OOM easily, paladins refill their bluebar every 2 minutes and really never run oom as a result. Holypriests don't. That means that a holypriest must always chose between spending mana now (spamming PoH to get the raid up, for instance), or use a more affordable choice (currently: let the other healers do it and pick your nose waiting. Next expansion: Use a cheaper heal) at the risk of people dying before finishing everyone up.

Sometimes the strategic choices give us very weird tactical conclusions. We've all been in situations where we've spammed the tank with binding heal and let the overaggroing dpsers die horribly, or just done a /poke instead of throwing a heal at the mage fireballing out of the green goo. Sometimes, accepting those deaths means you can't beat the enrage, and that's where cooldown usage comes in. Do you use the Guardian Spirit, or do you blow a Divine Hymn? Can you let the other healers handle it if you give them some mana through Hymn of Hope? Or Life grip!

Tactical choices are usually fast-paced furious fun. Strategic choices are for the thinking man. The combination of the two is what makes healing so darned awesome.

--

WoTLK has managed to break both the tactical and the strategic healing game.

The strategic game stopped being interesting when everyone got infinite resources. Really, imagine a game of starcraft 1 where everyone had 200 marines being auto-produced every second and all you had to do was to point them in the right direction? Actually, that map exist. And it sucks bigtime - it removes any strategic choice from the game. It's basically a test who can press the most buttons.

The tactical game stopped being interesting for the same reason. When every healer discovered that no matter the situation, the correct answer is to spam your #1 button (rejuv, HL, pws), or in the case of shammies, pressing two buttons. Holypriests are the only healer right now without a working #1 button. It's also the reason why we're considered weak healers, and why we have to work so much harder than our brethren to achieve marginally the same result. Still - I prefer this playstyle by a lot. And it seems GC prefers it too. I am never bored when healing. I know our shammies, paladins and discpriest are aching to go DPS to dull out the boredom. I never have that problem as a holypriest.

In fact, the only time in WoTLK I had a sense of boredom was when I got enough mana to chain-cast flash heal. This was back in the days where any other heal in the holypriest arsenal was virtually useless due to prohibitive cost. It felt like I had mastered the game - and it stopped offering me anything. Blizzard nerfed replenishment, and added fights where heavy use of AoE heals were both useful and required to pass. Saved the game for me!

[harky]

Careful, you'll get scrubby Disc Priests claiming their #1 works. :

When small heals are back to being <1/4 of a Players health the game will be fun to heal again. For now it's mostly fun to pretend to be DPS and watch the meter roll. There's no real consequence to doing it either, fun fun.

[Chefjayman]

I am a new priest by every standard imaginable, but I've played a resto druid to 80 and I must say that on either character, I've loved to heal. The new random dungeon option the game currently enjoys has allowed me to practice my priest healing skills and improve in every group I'm a part of. I don't especially love the bad groups, and there seem to be more of those than good groups, but every group teaches me something about healing I didn't know before it. Every group allows me to become more efficient and a better healer, in fact the bad groups do a better job of this than the good ones since the good groups allow me to heal far less whereas the bad groups force me to heal beyond my limits.

Anyway, I love healing and always will. I don't care what the devs do to the mechanics of healing because they will always and forever change to suit the style of play and their collective whims, so we best adapt to it or leave the game.

[Maxpowr]

If Blizzard tries to push healers into having a "rotation", you will see me very quickly switch back to my hunter as my raider in Cata or even worse, try out FFXIV. About 80% of the joy I get out of healing is because we have to think about what to cast next instead of spam these 3 buttons to win.

Overall, I approve the changes being made to healing/priests.

[harky]

Nah, they're aiming for TBC healing, not Vanilla healing. No healing rotations, just more dynamic healing.

[Zeuq]

I enjoy healing now and I look forward to a lot of the change. I remember when I had multiple ranks of GH to help achieve a balance between throughput and mana that was approrpriate for the fight. I remember being a lot more careful about healing assignments and how much I could or could not afford to deviate from those assignments. The problem is now that that entire part of the equation is pretty much gone and I feel very much like I'm playing DPS because it's all about maximizing throughput because mana is almost entirely handled by the incidental Intellect and Spirit on gear.

What this means is that gear is primarily chosen because it maximizes throughput and not because it provides a balance or is useful in different situations; in fact, I feel like gear that I should think is good is a downgrade because I simply don't want to trade the throughput on the current piece for the regen that I simply don't need. What this means is that the only real decisions we're making is with regard to who we should target with whatever ability is up in the priority. I'd like to have more thought go into my healing decisions again, where the size and mana cost are considerations so healers can work together to top people off rather than race because the waste mana doesn't matter.

I would say Holy Priests are probably the closest to the Cataclysm model of any healer, since we still have some mana considerations, but we still have spells that are heavily neglected because the mana considerations, so I expect that we'll be nerfed the least in this regard. I expect where Flash Heal is now both in regard to cost and healing amount is roughly where Heal should be.

I expect Paladins will not need a whole lot of changing, except I except the current mana situation with HL spam to be about what the medium/cheap heal to be, though healing for a whole lot less, and that the kind of throughput they get now very well should be unsustainable for more than a brief period. I wonder if they'll get a true AOE heal or a HoT... that could change things.

I really have no idea how they'll address Shamans and Druids because I expect that especially Druids will need to be heavily rebalanced. I imagine there will be a lot of players of both of these classes who will be unhappy because they're so unused to managing their mana.

[harky]

I would say Holy Priests are probably the closest to the Cataclysm model of any healer, since we still have some mana considerations, but we still have spells that are heavily neglected because the mana considerations, so I expect that we'll be nerfed the least in this regard. I expect where Flash Heal is now both in regard to cost and healing amount is roughly where Heal should be.

You lost me here. Flash Heal will most likely do what it does now, but cost quite a bit more proportionately. Heal will most likely be as efficient as the current Flash Heal, but heal for more and cost more. Greater Heal has been said to be Priests Holy Light, so I'd assume similar HPS output and cost ratio.

I expect Holy Light to be slowed down substantially and then have their own 'Heal' added, then Flash of Light having it's healing tripled (or more) and cost multiplied by 5. They've already said healers will have an inefficient but fast 1.5 second heal, a slower 'general use' 2 second heal and then their 'big' 2.5 second heal.

So... yeah. Flash Heal will be back to what it was in TBC... horribly inefficient. Holy Light and FoL will swap places from what they were in TBC on efficiency, but HL will be slowed down. Both classes will get a new efficient spell for general heals. They're leveling the playing field on tank/raid heals the same way they did to tanks in Wrath and then they're even doing more equality changes to tanks (everyone gets block, health normalized, etc).

That's what it is though... we'll all have this now: 1.5 second cast inefficient spell / 2 second cast efficient spell / 2.5 second big and efficient spell
Priest: Flash Heal / Heal / Greater Heal
Shaman: Lesser Healing Wave / Healing Wave / Greater Healing Wave
Paladin: Flash of Light / ??? / Holy Light
Druid: Nourish / ??? / Healing Touch

It's just a flash back to TBC only we'll be using medium size 'normal' heals instead of smaller heals in between our big heals. Most likely because they intend to scale up health, but scale back healing.

[Cemetary.]

I played dps in Vanilla, Dps and Tank in BC and in Cata I've played Healer and DPS. IMHO healing is the hardest of the 3 and that's why I love it, more challenge = more satisfaction for me.

[Tons of Phun]

I did not heal back in TBC so I cannot comment on anything about it. All I have heard was that healers had to rotate so that some could stand out and OO5SR to get mana back? But what I seem to gather out of your responses is that you will most likely get 3 heals. 1 heal to heal from 80%-95%, 1 heals to heal from 45%-79%, and 1 heal to heal from 1%-44%. If this doesn't make sense basically small heal, medium heal, and big heal. So all you have to do is just look at health bar and then pick 1 2 or 3. Assuming you do not suck at healing and can do this then you just switched from hitting one spell to heal what 1 and 2 would do with hitting just a different button. Is that change really that different?

However from the poll so far most people like the healing as it is. Now I do not know the people's exp, who are voting. Do the people that are voting have Vanilla, TBC, and/or Wrath exp with healing? So those people who are voting may not have exp like myself with any other kind of healing philosophy. If it all just boils down to the top exp of 1,2, or 3 heal then that doesn't sound so bad. Seeing how bad you get penalized for picking the wrong might be a different story.

The other issue that the Devs are trying to solve is this "FUN" issue. Dps is fun because you get better gear and you numbers go up and you kill the boss faster. You get to see a direct upgrade and improvement that gives you the feeling of success. Tanking and Healing have the issue of ok where is my direct show of my upgrade, imo. I have done all three. I like dpsing, I like healing, and I hate tanking. No matter what the Devs do to tanking I don't think I will ever tank. I think this can work for healing as well. The people who like healing - heal, and the people who do not like healing - don't heal. I don't think those people (the ones who do not like healing) are sitting around saying "Oh I just wish healing was more fun", they just don't like it. Some may switch to healing but I don't think a huge number of people are going to just switch over from what they have been doing.

I enjoy the healing atm but then again I am Holy and I use 5-6 heals every fight. Unlike Paladin or Shaman who just spam 1-2 heals.

PS could replenishment be a possible culprit to causing spam healing with really no consequence?

[Lysdexic]

I think spirit regen got raped a while back so that we'd grovel before our replenishment overlords. Apparently they want to diminish its effect, but I don't see the point of it if it's "skippable."

For any moderately challenging content you're still going to reserve a dps spot for somebody who can offer replenishment.

I think I'm going to whore regen. Since details are scarce, I dunno exactly how things are playing out, but I could see pure spirit gems again if they make spirit tasty for us..... (Again just my opinion, longevity is winz0r)

[Kelesti]

That's what it is though... we'll all have this now: 1.5 second cast inefficient spell / 2 second cast efficient spell / 2.5 second big and efficient spell
Priest: Flash Heal / Heal / Greater Heal
Shaman: Lesser Healing Wave / Healing Wave / Greater Healing Wave
Paladin: Flash of Light / ??? / Holy Light
Druid: Nourish / ??? / Healing Touch

It's just a flash back to TBC only we'll be using medium size 'normal' heals instead of smaller heals in between our big heals. Most likely because they intend to scale up health, but scale back healing.

From the look of things, harky, for druid's it's likely to be:
Regrowth / Nourish / Healing Touch.

And for Paladins, they have two choices: One is call the middle heal "Light". The second is make the middle heal "Holy Light", and rename the current HL to "Greater Holy Light". : How original.



And back ontopic to Tons of Phun.
You were pre/stop-casting at least three different ranks of Greater Heal in TBC as the situations called for them over the course of a single boss fight, but you still had to weave in Mending's, the occasional Renew, and a Flash as needed. Switching to a spell after the fact was nearly always wasteful, in time and most likely mana as well.

The only thing you'll be "penalized" for is your mana pool. Cast a single Prayer of Healing now, when a single Renew would have sufficed. That's the equivalent of a Greater Heal vs Heal. If it happens once or twice, you should be able to pull through. But if you're frivolously throwing your mana away, it will eat at your lovely blue bar until there's nothing left.

And to be honest, I like getting upgrades as a healer. Sure, upgrades mean less to me, than they do to a DPS. I see my reliance on regen cooldowns get pushed down so I can use them effectively for more than myself (either rDPS increase, or multi-person mana increase, often both?). I see my reaction speed (due to haste, not latency or brain-lag) go up, as well as my effective output increase along side it. Does getting that 12 SP upgrade of a neck slot make that big of a difference to me, over say a mage who will push out more DPS with it? Not necessarily. Doesn't mean I don't like being able to push that much more.

My own reflexes and being able to pull through an encounter makes me feel happy. Upgrades just make it happen a lot easier (and also make you able to start bleeding healers out, to 5-heal whatever you possibly can).

[Euthanasea]

Tons of Phun, that rotation about healers being able to step out of the five second rule was more along the lines of Vanilla and not so much BC. BC would sometimes require a single healer to heal less in order to abuse the five second rule but generally it was not required as a rotation, it was generally done on the fly based on many factors.

In regards to the different heals, with the three different types of healing we're getting a lot closer to BC style healing. Generally, as Kele said, healers had a few ranks of Greater Heal to solve their problems. It was not clear cut as if between X and Y health cast this rank. It mattered greatly how much healing you were expecting the target to take. That was entire idea behind stop casting - start casting a heal that is greater than the damage the target currently has (usually a tank) and if at some time (generally 1.5-2.0 seconds out of the 2.5 second cast) if the target is still at that much damage or lower let the spell finish. The BC healing style was far more about efficiency than about speed like LK healing has been. Renew was a good way to heal someone, not just a spell to cast til another person gets a Direct Heal off on the target (just an extreme example).

In regards to the fact that healers don't benefit from upgrades as much, Healers do really like upgrades (Especially Kele =P) But their progression isn't as continuous as a dps's increase is. When a dps gets an increase to a piece of gear they feel the difference because they're always casting. A healer is not always healing and therefore the increase is not so readily apparent. But there is still a huge benefit to healers getting gear essentially in the form of plateaus that you start to accomplish. Kele gave a great example of being able to 5 heal things (even if raid leaders don't want to). This is a very tangible result of the gear that healers have gained. Healing, by its very nature, is a reactive process, that is if no one took damage there would be no one to heal, it is based on the damage of other players. So gear is a nice benefit in that it increases the number of situations where the raid or group can succeed. While this isn't as obvious as dps it is more important honestly.

In reply to Lysdexic, Spirit got nerfed because it was starting to reach such extremes as to be rendered useless. Healing costs did not increase with the scale that mana regen did. And, like other things that have gone out of control, Blizzard stepped in to fix this problem (some would argue that they created another problem with their solution but that's another argument) because they did not want to implement a Icewell Radiance type effect for spirit regen. They were right to nerf it, in higher gear levels the results were ridiculous. The idea of escaping the 5 second rule also wouldn't have fit well with the "OMG PEOPLE ARE DYING" style of healing that seems prevalent in LK.

[harky]

From the look of things, harky, for druid's it's likely to be:
Regrowth / Nourish / Healing Touch.

And for Paladins, they have two choices: One is call the middle heal "Light". The second is make the middle heal "Holy Light", and rename the current HL to "Greater Holy Light". : How original.

My friend and I were discussing 'Holier Light' and 'Slightly Less Holy Light' among the options.

And yeah I just relooked:
"Unlike the other healers, Restoration druids will not be receiving any new spells. They have plenty to work with already, and our challenge instead is to make sure all of them have a well-defined niche. A druid should be able to tank-heal with stacks of Lifebloom, spot-heal a group with Nourish and Regrowth, and top off lightly wounded targets with Rejuvenation."

Makes sense, actually. The way they phrase that is interesting if you've had a Druid in both Wrath and TBC. The old tank healing for Druids didn't involve any direct heals except Rebrowth's initial hit. Maybe (maaaaybe) Swiftmend. You just kept up Regrowth + Rejuv and rolled Lifebloom, which worked out to a pseudo-FoL heal. The interesting part now? Nourish. With my current stats Nourish is a 1 second cast, heals for 10.3k average (with 3 HoTs), has 59% crit and on crit leaves a 'PoM' for ~4.5k average. Now, I'll admit I spend like three quarters of my time raid healing, but if Blizz' intent is to make everyone raid/tank healers and bring back TBC healing.... they need to be careful. Sometimes I wonder if they even realize that Nourish scales as well as Greater Heal with less than half the cast time. :-\

[Revitalize]

One thing I dislike about healing at the moment is the amount of emphasis on having replenishment through the raid.
Generally mana issues aren't seen nowadays, but I can tell you when all our replenishments are M.I.A in raids our healers definitely feel it.


Back on topic.
I healed as a priest in Vanilla and TBC.
In vanilla as a priest, downranking Greater heal was where it was at.
And Blizzard's similar solution is brining Heal back into the picture, which is really great if you ask me.
However, the healing style of vanilla was rather boring and was based around casting one spell, sitting for five seconds to wait and cast another.
While I had no problem with this, It wasn't exciting for me.

In the TBC, the healing was changed abit.
Holy priests use CoH as their bread and butter and greater heal.
However, this is where things got out of hand.
All holy priests did is stack absurd amounts of spirit just to spam circle of healing.
It was the most effective, but I dont advocate spamming one spell over and over and over.
The healing was more exciting and tight on mana, but the playstyle was rather based on using one spell in my arsenal.

Wrath came along and in present day its pretty much the same without the worry of running out of mana. (If you have plenty of replenishments)
We base all our gemming through maximizing our throughtput.
I never see people in high end progression gem intellect anymore.
One thing that dissapointed me the most was the removal of mana potting on CD.
I quite enjoyed having to worry about my mana and hoping my next mana pot came off CD before I became oom.
Anyone remember the good ole' Alchemist Stone?
I swear I used that thing forever just to get more mana return out of my Pots in TBC.