Going into 11.2 either Mythic+ or Players need some tuning. Unfortunately Mythic+ seems to usually be an afterthought. It was on the PTR for TWW and still seems to be to this day regrettably.
The current tier sets on the 11.2 PTR look to be strong. Very strong. This is good, as players will have fun with it. However two problems arise as a result.
With strong DPS tier sets players will scale their key level up fast.This leads to scaling issues specifically around survivability. In the current season several classes (Death Knight, Mage, and Oracle) are used to combat this as they can grant squishier players higher effective hit points to live overlapping mechanics or poorly tuned mechanics that would otherwise one-shot you. Please keep in mind that these classes are not the issue, the content scaling is the issue. This leads to a key being decided by your EHP rather than your DPS and also makes it difficult to create meaningful Healing content as players are either at full HP or simply dead and only classes which can prevent this are preferred.
With strong healer Tier Sets it will be difficult to provide meaning healing content as stated previously. Currently most content around the +20 keys you traditionally just get one-shot. Hence the need for the current meta comp. This also means healing content prior to 19-22 Keys is simply not challenging in most scenarios because incoming damage events can be reversed by healers in one global until the point where players are simply dying within a global.
One of the primary goals going into TWW on the 11.0 PTR was making healing more meaningful. Common feedback from healers on the TWW PTR was that player health was not high enough relative to the content despite the Stamina increase early on. This problem is likely to be exacerbated in 11.2 because strong tier sets lead to faster higher keys, and mechanics simply become one-shots/globals and cannot be healed; reducing the need for a healer, and increasing the need for EHP machines. Including the 11.0 PTR we are past 1 year later and this problem has not been addressed yet despite being called out so long ago.
I know the devs hate when you try to list a solution. So the problems are listed above. However in the past this has been tackled with the following solutions so I will simply enumerate them and hope the Devs come up with a good solution which is perhaps one of these or better:
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The easiest, tried and true solution is to simply increase player health and let content scale as it was already scaling and then let periodic tuning take care of the rest. The problem with this is usually Raid tuning (as the Raid actually receives tuning well in advance, unlike M+). That’s why this solution would need to be implemented sooner rather than later.
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Alternatively, increasing the rate at which mob HP scales compared to mob Damage. This has the downfall of the meta healer becoming the one which contributes the most group damage and results in content which feels boring to heal and address. The benefit is it can be changed after the patch goes live or with short notice as it is independent of the Raid entirely.
Obviously solution 1 is the preferred solution for player enjoyment, but the time to act would be now/very very soon.
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keys being decided by dps isn’t good for healer gameplay though.
Outcomes you can influence are more fun than outcomes you can’t. One shot meta isn’t exactly great, but better than “we ran out of time, because dps sucks.”
Did you mean to type HPS instead of dps?
Running out of time because DPS suck is better than not even attempting the key because there’s no way to live through the first bosses 20 second cooldown that does 200% of your HP in damage. And/or requires you to be in voice comms with a group of 5 calling out all your exact pre-planned defensive tetris game (since addons wont work for whatever reason). Or only one exact composition can be used because its the only comp that can tetris the defensives all correctly to live it.
I’d vastly take “Dps just suck.”
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Keys stop somewhere. Why is it such an issue if it’s survival instead of flat out lack of dps?
If it’s a persistent dps issue, key is too easy, and you don’t need healers.
For healing to be fun, people need to be able to die. (From lack of healing.)
One shot meta isn’t great, but I don’t exactly see an alternative.
Well, could have more fights like Candle King / Khajin, I suppose? Last boss of Ruby Life Pools was also good.
so you don’t want the content to kill you, you just want to not progress despite clearing the content.
very strange angle.
So they just got to cut 15-20% off the timers and we’re good then?
If all timers lost 5-8 minutes you wouldn’t be able to climb to the key levels where one-shots occur after all.
Although I can already see the outcry from people thinking that they should’ve timed their priory key with 0 deaths and average 2.5m dps.
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You can design challenging healing content without needing to set up a raid plan prior to engaging the dungeon to map out every defensive so players are not killed in one hit.
Take for instance the First boss of motherload. The stomp on +20 will kill most DPS unless they have a cooldown for each one. A lot of DPS do not have a cooldown for each one. Those DPS are now playing the game in Dornogal. Or you bring a Disc priest, and now the healers are playing the game in Dornogal.
How do we fix the first boss? Half the damage the AoE slam does and double the damage the damage over time effect it applies. This way the healer can actually heal the damage instead of people without the correct class toolkit simply not being able to live the content and being relegated to not being invited to groups.
Does blizzard want to look at every ability that works this way and redo the ability? No. How do we fix this in the short term? Increase player HP.
I can assure you Azzerok still absolutely slaps and requires your healers to do like 4mil HPS on a +20. They will still feel the pain no matter how much HP you have as having more HP doesnt decrease incoming damage, it just prevents poorly designed dungeon overlaps and bad class toolkits. Increased HP doesnt mean healers have to heal less. It just lets more players and more classes play the game. This is for current keystone levels, current damage, and current healing.
If everyone did double the damage and hps you will now be doing like Motherload +30 and you’re back to players being oneshot again and playing Looking For Group simulator in dornogal. Except that without keystone tuning prior to the patch, the people doing +12’s now will be doing +20s due player power increase and no accompanied health increase. And they’ll actually be able to experience this problem for themselves where their class simply cannot live the content and won’t be invited to content. Instead of pretending like its not a thing on the forums.
FWIW, I’m at 3800 io with multiple healers at 3600 and 3200. I’ve seen people I enjoy playing with simply not able to play the game. It’s not an unreal problem, its just not something you are seeing with current tuning in your +12-14s. But if we increase player power without increasing player HP proportionally, you will be seeing it in your weekly keys soon enough. Not sure why I get hate from people on the forums for trying to look out for the general playerbase.
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Oh, the tragic tale of the lawful-good hero just trying to make everything better for everyone. It brings a tear to my eyes.
you realize you just gave billions of dollars worth of consulting away for free?
Every single healer has done Motherlode +20. Doesn’t need fixing at all.
Sorry in infinitely scaling content, at some point, you can’t go higher anymore? Like… maybe we need Diablo 3 numbers. +150 for everyone!
Whether due to DPS or healing or tank survivability, something gives, at some point.
Let’s stop this “if we change X, my key will +1 with same inputs.”
Because they are trolls and just exist on these forums to argue with people.
I have always wished mob health scaled faster than mob damage in M+.
False dichotomy is kinda their schtick. Don’t feed.
Considering what Fauxstrasza said, maybe motherlode wasn’t the best example.
That said, I wouldn’t mind if they had more dungeon bosses be a hps check similar to Candle King, where resto druid is the meta pick. Equally we could have more tank check bosses like first boss in priory, but tune them differently to favor different healers. Overall, the devs did really good with the dungeon pool and balancing this season since all specs can do the higher end of title range keys. It’s just sad that the community’s perception on what’s balanced or not is so skewed.
A solution to one shot problem would probably be having everything have an absorb component, but then we kinda run into the same issue: People dying because healer isn’t skilled /good enough.
Just expressed differently, I guess healers might feel better if they had say an arbitrary 30 seconds to meet a pass/fail check that is numerically tightly tuned so it’s extremely easy to fail.
Healing is based on twitch reactions while DPS is about performance over the entire key.
Even if Motherlode was changed as per suggestion, someone’s still going to fail to meet it or maybe people move to like +23 and find out “You kinda can’t.”
It’s time to consider removing this privileged role.
No one wants to be a healer responsible for the team’s HP.
Everyone should be responsible for healing themselves and using their own damage reduction skills.