I have been trying out a few healers. I enjoy healing, but its starting to bother me a bit, that as a healer, I am trying to squeeze every bit of DPS out of the spec, while healing just enough to allow myself to keep DPSing. While for a period, this was interesting, lately it just hasnt been feeling right to me.
I kind of miss, ya know… just healing people. I dont know why. There was something cathartic about that playstyle. Now healing always feels a little frenetic. Im trying to push out DPS and throw patch heals out. DPS, DPS, DPS. Then small periods of actual healing. Then back to DPS.
I know many healers like to DPS while they heal. And at times its fun. But as a playstyle, I guess it just aint stirring my kool-aide right now… But of course I heal to get into them M+ groups.
UPDATE:
So I think it is just Mistweaver healing that was irritating. I enjoy Brm tanking a lot, but in order to gear and get into groups, I had to heal as well. While MW healing can pump some healing, it is a more busy and maintenance style healing. Keeping renewing mists out, while rising sun kicking, then vivify to handle spikes, while essence font and rising sun to maintain hots ect… It is just a little more frenetic.
I was healing a bit on my Shaman last night. It just felt like EVERY heal, was just so effective. And unlike MW, mana wasnt really a concern at all. I really think MW needs to have either their mana regen drastically increased, or the cost of their spells decreased. I can manage MW pretty well, but if the group makes a few large mistakes, or something and I need to actually heal fast? Mana plummets.
There is a difference, between dealing damage during downtime, and full on DPSing as much as you can, till your group/raid starts to drop in health. Then pump heals fast, so you can get back to DPS.
In vanilla ( I played vanilla as well) Healers would usually Wand DPS to conserve mana.
Maybe I’ve always been bad at healing (at the very least, I’ve never healed a raid) but in most expansions healing alone and constantly trying to anticipate and prepare for the 5 top ways things could go sideways has kept me plenty busy. Only time I ever had significant stretches of no heals is in groups absurdly overgeared for the content.
I’m a healer main in a different certain ‘critically acclaimed’ mmo. Over time you get a very satisfying feeling of being able to keep everyone topped up easily while also being a DPS machine.
I admit I don’t always like the intensity and feels like more work, but it does keep me busy.
This just sounds like you miss vanilla basically where DPS would have a 1-2 button rotation and healing would be basically as you describe.
I think they could make the game that way for some of the waracraft veterans perhaps.
If early EQ was anywhere close to as easy as WoW, I’d still be in P99 - I like the autoattack and a second or 2 between attacks (warriors only get kick and slam or bash outside of autoattacks). Sadly, the rest of the game is just way too hard solo
To me, Cata was the constantly busy era. Slow mana efficient heal or fast heal, but always be casting something…
WoTLK got a little out of hand. Mana wasnt really a worry, and healers could just spam the whole fight. Cata healing was fun. Very tough at first, but I enjoyed it. You had to heal very deliberately. But at the end of cata, it was back to spamming heals till your fingers hurt.
I also think they have designed themselves into a corner a bit. We have a couple healers who deal DPS as a part of their healing kit. Then we have healers that have the two kits separated. So there is going to be a disparity there.
Im not saying removing DPS from heal specs. But maybe have it be a byproduct of their healing, or have it be the means which they triage heal.
Your experience was quite different as a healer main in Vanila than mine.
I mained a resto druid during Vanilla and doing anything but healing was looked down upon because the raid leader didn’t want you wasting mana doing dps. That was reserved for keeping the party alive. I remember them looking at meters to make sure healers didn’t do dps at one point.
Two problems I remember from a healer doing dps in Vanilla. One was wasting mana that you couldn’t afford to waste, as I said before. And two was you would attract more threat, which you sure didn’t want to happen either.
Your statement states the complete opposite of how it was on my server when I played. Healers did not dps. If they did, it was considered bad.
Healing in this game is very lenient, i can probably heal 4 dps in 20+ as tank right now, there’s just no way a healer that only heal that waste 60% of their gcd doing nothing would not be considered trolling/griefing.
At some point you just have to ask what did you bring to the team as a healer that is worth more than bringing another prot pally.
Too be fair this has always been the case, however it is becoming more publicly known and thus expected.
The general rule has always been if there is nothing to heal you do damage, of course not at the expense of too much mana.
The reason it is probably bigger today is more tanks are self-sufficient so there is a lower amount of sustained damage taken that requires healing. Combined with a timer that encourages things to die quicker it incentivises more damage to be dealt by the healer.
Oh baby. Can’t wait to do those world quests going oom after two Crusader Strikes!
Depends how early, but yes. Triage healing was heavily forced in pre-nerf Cata so efficiency was key.
Things like Flash Heal casted faster and healed more but were heavily impacted by the mana cost so acted as a kind of panic button.
Druid kind of got lucky with Nourish being both an efficient and fast casted spell but having the offset of requiring HoTs to improve it’s throughput.
I recall late Cata it wasn’t much of an issue though as gear had eclipsed the point where mana no longer mattered greatly again.