coming changes to healers
moriella — Thu, 01/29/2009 - 18:50
I think we are going to see HUGE healing changes in 3.1, not so much as reworking it totally , as that would take too much development at this time. From the reading I've been doing on the forums and sorta wartching blizz since 2004, I'd like to make the following 'educated guesses' about what is coming
1. Replenishment is going to be nerfed into the ground, and frankly may even cease to exist as we know it.
2. Holy Pallies thruput and efficiency going to be nerfed
3. Difficulty is going to be ramped up maybe 25% overall however ..... instead of 25 mans with 5-7 healers, guilds will run with 7-10 healers.
By nerfing mana regen again Blizz is going to force raids to being more healers, which will result in lower dps, making fights go longer making mana more of an issue.
The next content is going to be balanced totally on the healers again.
There have been enough blue comments recently about the above issues that in reading between the lines, one can clearly see it on the wall.
Blizz TRIED to balance mana use by nuking pots in 3.0 - due to the replenishment mechanic, crazy efficiency on pallies and disc, the nerf to regen really didnt hurt at all. Good healers adapted quickly and started stacking intel to max the returns from replen.
This will be 'attempt 2' to make content more difficult due to mana /healing issues. We all know Blizz sometimes makes wide crazy swings, look for this one to be severe.
Love your healers, brush off your alts. I predict we will be stacking healers of all types again soon
Reasonable Resolution
Adwarflol — Sat, 01/31/2009 - 10:40Honestly nerfing healers and requiring people to bring more would just make people mad imo. I mean I like healing, but it's not as interesting to me as Shadow DPS. So far wer really just specualting and it could be awhile before any real changes come into effect. The solution isn't simple so it could be awhile before they come to a reasonable resolution.
Until an actual change goes
Shihli — Sat, 01/31/2009 - 10:11Until an actual change goes through I would not worry about healers being "nerfed".
healers wont be 'nerfed' in a loss of raw power
moriella — Sat, 01/31/2009 - 10:24in fact, raw hps may be buffed.
Blue has stated they want healers to feel 'more powerful' but w/o unbalancing the game. HPS will do this, just as DPS makes melee feel 'more powerful'.
To allow this, the lenght of time that a healer can heal w/o worrying about mana will be shortened.
Come on: I know pallies that never go under 90% mana in a boss fight.
Not rolling on pallies, but it's similar but not as extreme for other healers as well. Still all healers probably have too much mana and too much regen
If mana efficiency isnt' of concern, then why even have a mana bar.
Well other than pvp. Thats currently the only place non pallie healers even have to look at mana bars.
Well here's more full
saedo — Sat, 01/31/2009 - 08:37Well here's more full quotes:
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/14697601407-gc-why-should-we-be-worried-...
You are welcome to disagree with out decisions, but I do not recommend coming onto our boards with the intention of insulting us. This is not constructive feedback and will get you banned.
I am sympathetic if you find healing too difficult. Many players do not and are clamoring for more of a challenge. There are many ways we challenge players in PvE, including complex encounters, short enrage timers and high damage. When mana management, or healing in general, are too easy then certain encounters become too easy. Furthermore, the game mechanics as designed don't work -- Spirit and mp5 become stats players aren't interested in. Choosing efficiency vs. throughput is not a meaningful decision. Healers in general are marginalized because raids can get by with fewer of them.
When you claim we are dumb for thinking healing is too easy, you are disagreeing with a lot of other players who post on these boards. Your conclusion must be that they are dumb too and we should design the game just to support your playstyle. Above all I am constantly encouraging the community to read what other players are saying. They are not always going to agree with what may be blindingly obvious to you. Does that mean they are wrong? Does that mean you are wrong? Of course not. All it means is the WoW community is large and diverse.
We have structured the game in such a way that you can find a difficulty level you are comfortable with. Naxxramas is one of the easiest raids we have ever done. Malygos gets a little more difficult, and Sartharion with multiple drakes is fairly difficult. Going into the future we will keep adding even more challenging and hardcore encounters while still making sure players who just aren't into that can still enter raids. The game has difficulty levels. If you are finding things so difficult that they aren't fun then by definition you probably aren't a cutting-edge raider. That's cool. We want to make sure you still have plenty of interesting things you can do, even within a raiding environment.
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/14697501262-inc-mana-regen-nerf--healer-nerf.html
We consider Replenishment mandatory. What I mean by that is we assume that you have Replenishment available to your raid. It is technically possible to go without it, but you will need to overgear the instance or otherwise compensate for it in other ways.
That doesn't mean we will or will not nerf Replenishment. But we don't want it to feel optional (assuming you are in reasonably challenging content) and nerfing it too much might have that effect.
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/14657055882-gc-bring-the-player-not-the-class--heal.html
From our POV, we assume you have Replenishment just like we assume you have a tank. You can get by without it, but it will be challenging (assuming you're on content that actually challenges you). Bloodlust is below that. It's very nice to have, but not mandatory most of the time. If you are learning brand new content or hard modes then I would definitely recommend bringing a shaman.
Keep in mind that Bloodlust's benefit is currently overweighted because the fights are so short. On a 2 min Patchwerk fight, you can have Bloodlust up 33% of the time. If that was a 5 minute fight, it goes down to 13% of the time (and the cooldown prevents you from keeping it up more).
From the posts I'll say:
1) Ulduar will be harder.
2) Fights WILL be longer. This would automatically force more thoughts into regen.
3) Replenishment doesn't seem like is something they want to nerf. They will consider it mandatory and balance encounters assuming you have it.
CRIT wall of text.
moriella — Sat, 01/31/2009 - 10:19Al lot of that didn't 'have' to be quoted. But in essence it really boils down to what I pointed out.
The rest of the comment is really addressing forum qq. THe brass balls of this it that blizz admits
(paraphrased)
'healing is too easy'
'it's trivializing content'
'mp5 and spirit are useless with our current mechanics'
'healers are marganilized' (read: you will bring more)
In forum language, this means replenishment is being looked at. You can also look at this to mean, that because they want it mandatory - making regen even harder will make it more important.
Currently healing is limited only by our hps thruput in most cases. It's NOT limited by going OOM once you are geared up. Simply making fights longer wont make healing difficult because if you are putting out max hps in a fight and still regen mana as we are now - why even have a mana bar then?
The other night I raided the first part of naxx w/o replen. I almost paniced. At the end of boss fights I was close to 50% mana! Normally I finish above 70%. Was there any danger of going oom? Probably not, and if I did - I had a pot, shadowfiend, and a silly hymn as well.
You cant make a fight harder bejond the point that hps outgoing vs damage incoming is balanced to the encounters gear level, or NO GUILD could do the fight. There is a level in game mechanics that outgoing dps cant exceed, it can be pushed to that edge, but no futher. This is overcome with more healers which cuts dps slots, which means dps has to have a buff. Otherwise, spell cost can be increased for healers or regen of some type nerfed.
They admit spirit and MP5 is worthless, they dont like that. they have to insure those are valuable
Replenishment will be nerfed. If fights are harder and we start relying on spirit again with one pot, even a trivial amount from replenishment will not feel OPTIONAL.
The other side note I think we can draw from this.....
we are months away from new content.
I guess maybe it is time to
Olorien — Fri, 01/30/2009 - 10:51I guess maybe it is time to start collecting healing gear for Olo.
To the GROUND baby!
Mmm, not really sure what to
Septima — Fri, 01/30/2009 - 10:41Mmm, not really sure what to say since this isn't "for sure". However, I'm pretty sure fucking your healers over sideways and in the ass isn't exactly the best measure to take. :|
Finding healers is hard
garreth — Thu, 01/29/2009 - 21:08Finding healers is hard enough. Healing could be construed as a "shitty job". Reducing their perceived power isn't a great way to get more people to play healers.
Just when I'm trying to
Adwarflol — Thu, 01/29/2009 - 21:01Just when I'm trying to change to a dps D:
Source? Or is this doom and
saedo — Thu, 01/29/2009 - 19:01Source? Or is this doom and gloom just from people on WoW forums putting words into Blizzard's mouth?
one source from GC
moriella — Thu, 01/29/2009 - 20:19Well, to be fair, they did
starstalker — Thu, 01/29/2009 - 20:43Well, to be fair, they did kind of bring it on themselves with the 20man achievments.
exaxctly
Agoney — Fri, 01/30/2009 - 11:24Exactly.. Not to be elitist or sound it, but blizz did this to themselves. Nerfing content (i understand its the beginning stuff) but in the same regard this content is a hell of a lot easier then beginning TBC content. The whole "bring the player not the class" thing i agree with on one level, shouldnt need to bring 8 warriors to a raid to do one encounter, but they took it way to far. There is almost no class uniqueness now, outside of a few things.
Make the encounters more difficult, more damage to the raid as a whole, and maybe rework replinishment. I could be wrong, but I think most healers would agree that the only challenging to fight currently to heal on would be both non-heroic and heroic Sarth 3d.
yep, blizz did it
moriella — Fri, 01/30/2009 - 15:58I STILL MAINTAIN that the majority of these issues really started when Pallies and Shammies were made avail to both classes. This one thing had ripple effects that spread so wide Blizz is still chasing it's tail. I believe the reason they did this was the Arena system and their prior vision of 'rock paper scissors'. Unfortunatly it had far far reaching effects in PvE.
I do not believe the original lead dev's of WoW are still working at Blizz. I think if there were, there would not be all this seeming 'tail chasing' by the current devs. We have reached a point where Blizz makes a change and they really have no idea how it will subtly effect SOME other aspects of the game, which results in another change being required.. and so on and so on. Constantly chasing their tails.
The Homogenization of this game is killing it. Each different character class used to be a unique 'star' in the raid. We are more and more becoming 'cookie cutters'. Again, I attribute this largly to the arenas.
By wow 4.0, we will all be 'tanks','healers' or 'dps' - just as blizz wants their forums.
Problem here is with the CoH nerf, devs said they will be cutting raid aoe damage BACK to make up for the nerf. (see that vicious circle again?) More AoE damage now, would mean stacking shamies again.
Mark my words, the next changes will be to replenishent, divine plea and even spirit regen. Now that spells cant be downranked, prepare for the TRUE great healer shortage when we cant do farm content w/o 7 in a 25 man and 10 for progression. BTW, dps will probably be buffed a bit more as a result. Less dps in raid means Blizz can afford to allow them more damage, and that will keep some customers happy. OMGWTFBBQSAUCE! LUK @ mah 733T damage! I pwn joo!!
When exactly did WoW detune from adult players to pre teens? Seriously, most 12 and 13 y/o players couldnt handle WoW and excell at it. (i know a few can) But I guess since they cant get cheat codes for WoW, Blizz had to make it so they could still feel like they are great players. My nephew is 14 and still doesnt want to play console games w/o cheat codes, when he hits something in game that infinite health etc wont get him thru, he asks me to come "press the square button over and over real fast". Then he's happy again, hes got his new weapon or w/e (purples)
I'm all for blizz enhancing the difficulty. I think we are all starting to come together on the same page that WoTlK is 90% easy mode boring. But I'm sick and tired of everything being balanced on the healers while dps and tanks continue to face roll , watch videos while raiding, eat supper, of kill the pvp healer before he gets even one heal off. (heh, no offense to our dps and tanks cause you guys rock)
Ahh, but you forget, if they
starstalker — Fri, 01/30/2009 - 16:50Ahh, but you forget, if they buff dps to make up for needing 10 healers, then they will again be imbalanced in arena's, creating a need to buff healing classes, which will in turn make dps...wait....head.....arrrghhhh
/head explodes