Fair enough. I love playing holy priest honestly but it would be nice to have something more than raw HPS at times. I’m good with mass, PI, dispel and mind soothe but I’m certain I’m not using dominate mind optimally. I basically never use it because the DPS always pull what I’m targeting.
I wish we had a battle rez or interrupt though. Not having the interrupt stings. A 60 sec stun just doesn’t cut it.
Absolutely!! That would be the sensible approach.
This kind of thing I find problematic if it is not addressed quickly. Holy Paladins were nerfed since the start of 10.1.5 but are still majorly OP. That remains a problem.
If the lack of balance continues too long, I, for one am out in a couple weeks. And usually once I am out for even a few days, I will probably not look back for a while, being utterly disgusted.
The numbers are all there as far as I’m concerned. I would not be surprised one bit if the efforts at anything more than cosmetic tuning are going to be delayed like with Ashen Hollow.
Exactly. Ones these things grow roots, good night Gracie! Non-meta players who want to push into high keys may as well send their non-meta toons out to pasture.
Seriously. These ought to be standard to the kits for ALL healers. They are necessary tools that all groups need and the more there are in a group the better. The fewer is most definitely a liability. And with nothing else to compensate for them when they are lacking, there is a problem.
Rsham/mistweaver might be farther behind.
Priest/Druid/press are pretty close but still behind.
Buffing others is a better solution than nerfing hpal.
None of those things barring spirit shell are on the level of Ashen Hollow’s S1 performance, even the worst ones. And Spirit shell got nerfed before the raid tier was even over.
They’re cherry picking Ashen Hollow over and over again because it’s an example of a very extreme balance problem - but those don’t happen all that often. SL was probably the worst balance we’ve seen since M+ getting introduced in Legion healer-wise.
But the person they were responding to was entirely talking about Dragonflight, and saying that healer balance is about at the best it’s ever been except for the past 2 weeks of pally. They disagreed and said that it’s wildly unbalanced, and Blizzard has so much money so should be able to balance it perfectly. My point was that the person they’re responding to was correct - Dragonflight has had solid healer balance outside VERY early prevokers and the last 2 weeks of Paladin - and that balance will never be absolutely perfect, it’s impossible to accomplish without homogenizing.
Ashen hollow has nothing to do with DF balance, and it doesn’t even have anything to do with Season 4 SL balance (which, by the way, despite being dominated by Hpriest - still had other classes clearing those top keys).
PI could be the reason for no Brez or lust, but why no interrupt? Do mass dispel and mind soothe equal an interrupt? Maybe.
Maybe just prioritize a holy pally if you are a priest for their constant interrupts….who knows
I agree with this.
I really dont agree with the idea that homogenizing is the only way to balance.
I think it can be done with a common sense approach. For example, you rate all of the healers by their utility. And you do that by weighing the pros and cons of each in a general sort of way. You can tweak utility as well, for example by adding or minusing charges of abilities or tweaking the numbers. For example you could tweak the amount of DR of Pain Suppression up or down five, or whatever. Regardless, you try to get a fix on the value of the whole package and assign it a number. Like say out of 100. You say Holy Paladin has a score of 95, Disc priest say 75 and so on.
Then you look at the HPS which can easily be increased or decreased. Then you look at damage and do the same. And so that each class has a score out of a total of 300.
Now you try to balance it out by looking at the numbers IO gives you. You say, hey, wow, of the top 5000 healers 99% are holy paladins. That speaks volumes. Then you reduce the total healing they do by 5% and tweak all other healers, say by giving them a boost. And every day for two weeks or whatever you tweak the numbers until they are in line wiht each other. And say you have over the past seen that participation in keys of certain healers has always been low, say for monks. So you dont expect it to have equal representation, so if it historically has only participated in 3% of all keys ever done then you dont push it up beyond healing so that it is equally balanced across all healers.
I dont know if you follow but computers allow you to approach things with mathematics and tweaks and an incredibly wide way of monitoring on a minute by minute basis. Such ways of collecting data could easily be built into the system. You could tweak and adjust how you weighed the criteria for balance in ways into you got it right.
I dunno, but a system could be worked out. There has just never been much effort to do so.
If healers all have different utility, you would have to homogenize the encounters for one type of utility to not overshadow others.
Okay. Here is a simplification of the concept so you understand. The idea is you look at the overall value of the healer. That is, the total package and you evaluate it in terms of things like how in demand it is overall for say level 15 keys, level 20 keys, and level 25 keys. So if, for example, 95% of groups invite 95% of a certain healer type that queues for a 25 and only 5% of 95% of a different certain healer type that queues for a 25 then the first is nerfed and the last is buffed. And that is done until both are brought in line with each other so that they get an equivlent level of invites. And this is done on average for all dungeons to get a general fix on the desirablility of the different healers–and so as to bring them more in line with each other in terms of the level of demand for each there is across healers.
It’s hard to continue conversing when you come across as condescending. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your tone.
My apologies. I guess I am just tired of hearing this same idea over and over like nobody in the game can think outside of the box and has let someone else do the thinking for them and then just jumped on the bandwagon. Not you, but the idea involves very one dimensional thinking. Like you have to do everything an exact certain way and if you dont you cant do it.
This is the idea I have a problem with. It is bullocks. Plain and simple. And I’ve heard it over and over and over.
Why? Because you have tons of encounters in any dungeon and series of dungeons–like one group in one season.
But when one healer is clearly superior across the majority of encounters because of superior HPS, superior DPS and superior utility or some combination of these that is a problem. It is all of them added up. Hence, you can tweak the potency of these things to compensate for weaknesses. That is, for example, you can up the damage reduction of Power Word: Barrier or Pain suppression or reduce their CDs or give them charges or more charges. You DON’T have to give a disc priest Blessing of Protection at all to make the healers on par at, but you have to give them potencies of their spells to compensate them for weaknesses vs other healers.
To me, from what I’ve seen on review/tier rank videos H paladin is clearly superior in multiple ways. That is the problem.
Edit: In SL, H paladin damage was insane, on par with a pure dps class or close, and while still having good healing, and first rate utitlity–hence, putting them far ahead of other healers and by a huge gap. And that was because H paladin was the full package and then some. When your group can melt packs in a flash because everyone in your group is pumping high damage, and in addition to that you can do good healing when needed, plus you have first rate utility it is no wonder people were auto declining other healers who could generally not do half the damage you could.
I may have to revise my assessment of priest’s utility. As a holy priest I felt like I could trivialize incorporeal with dominate mind and shackle undead. Chastise is not as good as an interrupt but it’s not bad. I wish disc had it.
Plus PI and mass dispel are clearly amazing.
Yes, this task is myopic and generally has turned out pretty bad for games that attempt it. If you only ever balance for the absolute top level of player, you can introduce things that actually cause problems for the rest of the playerbase. By the same coin, if you never make any changes targeted toward the top level, you risk churning them, too.
But also, this data is just way too hard to actually collect into some actionable steps. “Invite percentage drop-offs” as a statistic is just unreliable. If 3% of your healer population actually plays Monk. Then if 3% of the healers invited are monks, that’s a way better representation than if 95% of the healer population are Paladins, and they only make up 50% of party makeup.
You might say, “well 3% of healers playing monk is a problem!” And that might or might not be true, because then you’re begging the question of why that is. And that could be because they’re not as powerful. But it could also be that people don’t really like the current playstyle. So then comes the experiment - if you buff the monk considerably, does it become more popular? Well, yeah initially it almost certainly will by the longtime audience - because people want to try out new changes. So you have to wait a bit longer to see if there’s drop-off again. If it there’s no dropoff, then it might tell you that power is why that spec is unpopular. But if there is considerably dropoff, you’re back to square one. Etc. etc.
But beyond popularity, maybe both specs are the exact same popularity, but one is overrepresented. OK, the question is why - is it utility, damage or general HPS? Is it the healing style vs the damage patterns of the dungeons? Is one toolkit specifically better for things that aren’t represented much in the dungeons? Does that mean that balance shouldn’t necessarily happen at the class level, but instead at the dungeon fight design level?
And you’re supposed to do this for 7 classes at once against each other. It’s simply not as easy a job as you’re trying to make it out. Especially because even if we were to use your method, that is to say “balance every patch till as close to 14% as possible on every healer.” First of all, you’re unlikely to ever hit that point (as we’ve already said - popularity isn’t ALWAYS about power). But second of all, it’s going to take time, so you’re going to have a ton of imbalanced patches between that point. So chances are, players like yourself are still not going to see the full picture of balance over years of time, because your attention is myopic to the biggest outliers (hence randomly returning to SL balance in a discussion of dragonflight) and very specific timeframes.
I totally agree with your entire post. And this point, sure. That said, Blizzard is a seven billion dollar company that employs 13,000 people. That the case, I think they can do better than they are doing now (that is since Holy Paladin is so OP now) and better than they have done in the past. Sure, for a while there balance was pretty decent. That said if they are going to have majorly OP classes that are not brought in line quickly some people are going to quit the game. They could hire a statistician and/or mathematician with a mind for analysis and dig deeper for one, or if they have already one, look into it. They could assemble a group meeting once a week with a few people to get on top of this. Etc, etc. There are loads of ways to tackle balance.
Or not. Either way, if they are going to blatantly mess up on balance (totally my view) then I am out in less than two weeks. I cant speak for others but have been hearing about healer imbalances when watching Twitch streams long running, and by streamers and their watchers, some of which view it as a serious problem and I share the view. In all honesty, sure, just reroll and join the FOTM bandwagon, and the problem is solved. But the lack of balance is a pattern I have seen in Blizzard games long running. Some specs/classes/character types, whatever, in other games have been so ridiculously OP vs others that they have simply blown away other classes for most content in the games.
guys, we might have won. Blizzard is doing a disc priest rework. Let’s hope they trim this hot mess down.
I doubt anything major is going to be done. My hopes are that the HPS and DPS numbers are better, there is a small cutdown of button bloat for example by removing Mind Games and maybe Mind Blast and that Boon is added in place of those two. I like disc in its current state generally speaking and mainly dislike how far behind Holy Paladin it is (as are all other healers).
oh hell no. I hated being locked into 10 seconds of boon in keys or raid. In this healing dependent season, we are in i don’t think it would be useful either.
What i DO want back s mind sear
edit: Also if you got rid of mind blast and mind games TE doesn’t exist. BUT with mind sear i can see a world where good game play buffing mind sear wth it and shadow cov would be very nice
Mind Sear would rock. Mind you the damage transfer to atonement is only from one mob.
Funny you didnt like Boon. I used it all the way up to 25s and it rocked great AOE healing on bosses and big packs.
You used it in an era where healers concentrated on damage because there were no healing checks. Take that into account. A lot of bosses have multiple healing checks and you need to cover all of them. Boon covers one. MB and MG in my mind do better in the long run. Especially with scov
And i understand mind sear but i want it for damage and thermotic options.
Maybe. I dunno. But I had a super undergeared priest and she was pumping heals on 20s no problem with Boon. There were healing checks in that case and she passed with flying colors. Ha ha!
I will never stop my hoping for Boon! I loved it for questing as well.