Frankly the game should be better at making players aware of that, not adding a role that allows them to shirk that responsibility entirely.
Never been a fan of the “Nothing matters until it does” style of balancing blizzard does with mechanics.
That’s the problem though. You’re thinking far above what most players are concerned with.
They rolled a destruction warlock with the intention of doing damage. Not to shadowfury on pull. As an example.
That DPS have a tool in their toolkit to help healers and tanks doesn’t mean they know when and where they’re supposed to use it. This here gets a lot of PUGs in hot water.
If you dedicate it by role the PUG now doesn’t have that problem. Sue is in our CC role. I’m not expecting the destro lock to do anything but DPS. He still has shadowfury for his PvP comp but it’s not important to me now.
Personally I think the result of that is myopic gameplay.
WoW should be better at both teaching and rewarding players for using their kit, as well as giving them meaningful places to utilize it at all levels of play.
That’s what we have today. When you step outside of your group you’ll see it.
And we’ve always had this. We’ve only noticed the “problem” because content got harder.
I don’t see people who don’t push buttons not being able to do content where they need to push buttons as a problem.
I see a game that doesn’t adequately prepare or reward players for pushing buttons early enough as a problem.
Dps do damage, healers heal, ccers cc, tanks hold aggro is mind numbing.
Training grounds were good for people who were interested in the gray area of a class. It didn’t do much for the people who just wanted to DPS in them.
I play lots of games. I used to play PoE extensively. D2 as well. The number of players who play those games compared to the number who like one button mashing builds compared to the number who extensively use the toolkits are 10:8:2. Easily. It has always been this way.
My healing mantra has been that the only important hit point is the last one. There’s no reason to keep people topped off. The question is: should there be?
I wouldn’t mind if we added more mechanics like the DH interrupt that rewards you with numbers if you do the “soft” skills better. And punishes people other than the healer if you do it “wrong.”
WTB chickens for a support role.
Support chickens.
Like Gonzo has.
I think the game needs more ways to encourage soft skill usage, players tend to ignore anything until it outright kills them.
I love the haste debuff punishment with the new affix. I hate that it is considered a “healer” affix, though, to leave the DPS to their tunnel vision.
I don’t think you can necessarily avoid that. At the end of the day healers are playing a zero sum game and dps aren’t, so their gcds are going to situationally be worth less. The only way would be to forcibly single out individual players each time and have only them able to interact with it.
As a shadow priest I typically MC one and silence the other if it’s not already CCed, then shackle it if it’s still casting. But if I’m playing with more coordinated players I let my healer take one every time unless it’s a strenuous part of the encounter.
Make it require more than a single player to handle, and make it an integral ability of any dungeon crawling experience - not just an affix. This exists to a degree, but so much nuance is lost with mass CC rotations, and it tends to punish the healer.
I think the difficulty of that is, as a healer, you are the role best positioned to mitigate errors and failure of an affix of any sort is ultimately an error the same as any other.
Every other one does, you could I guess have two spawn every time but then one is still going to be on the healer unless they are otherwise occupied.
Again, you’re playing a zero sum game as a healer and dps aren’t.
Eh, back in Vanilla you had multiple “mezzers.” A mezzer would never have a place as long as things like sap, frost trap, and poly exist.
The details are for the designers. I’m sure there’s a way that Blizzard can “encourage” DPS to use as much of their kit as healers do.
I’m okay with shifting some of the damage to the Evoker.
That said, they need to see this through, add 3-4 Support specs and make M+ comps a required 1/1/1/3. At worst they need to add 1 more by 10.2 and another 1-2 after.
There is, but at the end o the day if the thing requires a gcd of investment. Yours are worth less on average than the dps. You can’t really change that. What you can change is add dps incentive to invest those gcds so its a net gain for the dps player, but outside of that if anyone can do it, then 90% of the time the healer should.
Hell, give a successful interrupt a short damage buff. Emphasize talents that make your CCs make enemies take more damage. All that good stuff. It doesn’t have to be solely punitive.
Yeah I like all of this sorta stuff, I think my point was more how do you make something like incorporeal not predominantly a healer’s job.
Yeah, I gave an overly specific example for a more generalized point.
But to bring it more back on topic… I would also be fine with delegating these types of mechanics to a support role to specialize in if we get more support specs.