Don’t forget that Blizzard increased the maximum health by 40% for level 70 characters.
And many healing spells work based on % of total HP, especially tank skills.
But 40% HP and 40% damage do not cancel each other out.
If blizzard were to back off on both % then we would be looking at true dungeon difficulty.
SL dungeons were way more easy.
The difficulty in SL dungeons was mostly just a DPS check, that’s why healer meta was around doing dmg instead of healing.
DF dungeons have more unavoidable dmg which means tons more of healing is required. A lot of scary mechanics from mobs can only be interrupted by stunning them which it wasn’t a thing back in SL adding a new layer of difficulty.
Ruby life pools is full of adds that can’t be interrupted but you need to stop their cast by stunning them.
Whoah, blizzard didn’t decide this. Players and information sharing did. Even back in wotlk, the best healers were the ones wanding whenever they could.
Information just got shared over the years. Players started to realize healers could (and should) do damage because otherwise they had a lot of downtime. M+ came out, and damage became important to beat timers, which lead people to push towards getting as much out of healer damage as they possibly could (with a couple top players like Zaelia really pushing the damage meta a few times).
Blizzard’s healer damage design has never really changed. Most the healers have enough damage options to solo, but none of them barring maybe disc (and that’s really stretching it) have any complexity in their damage rotation at all - they aren’t really designed with ‘this healer will have such a cool damage rotation!’ in mind - and that’s really what you’d need for them to be designing toward healer damage.
And there’s still plenty of mechanics that are random target, or target ranged and require focus heals. Player mentality changed quite a bit - but even playing classic wow BC healers were doing way more damage than they were in actual BC.
Healer wanded in the past because paladin’s used to have a seal to use with judgment that would allow them to get mana back, that would eventually get reworked into being replenishment before being removed. This doesn’t negate what I literally said, and you decided to cut from your quote even though it’s entirely relevant too, and frankly makes what you said irrelevant. Namely…
“Healer DPS only ever felt rewarding when it wasn’t expected and doing so was a nice bonus for the healer due to either the group taking less damage, or the healer managing the mechanics well enough to add it while keeping everyone up.”
It is incredibly hard to take you serious when you say nonsense like this. Paladin literally went from a 2 button tank healer wearing a dress to a 2 hander melee healer in plate. To say that type of transformation doesn’t reflect a dramatic change in the philosophy and design is just insane.
Pre-Cata no healer did DPS as an expectation for it’s class. After Cata until MoP only disc did, with MoP came Fistweaver, and so on and so forth. As the DPS to healing options expanded Blizzards design did as well, from traditional long range cast your heals when needed and regen mana when you don’t, to the always be casting, either heals or damage, design that more closely mirrors DPS that actual healer design.
Which is not a trend towards designing for damage? And this mostly happened in BfA with the advent of glimmerdin, post-those player decisions I was talking about. Caster paladin was still being played back in legion. You know, when M+ came in and caused people to start playing all their healers towards damage like I was saying?
They wanded regardless. You wanded in dungeons with no paladin around. And again, in classic BC, priests were throwing smites and holy fires out when they could get away with it - because player mentality shifted, even if the classic TBC design was legitimately the same as the end of BC.
The point was that these healer damage kits have BARELY changed over the years. Blizzard didn’t make catweaving out of design intent. It happened because people wanted to push timers and found swipe was very good for pumping up your damage, and Blizzard let it be a thing.
I know you may not be used to this, being it’s the internet and all but, I don’t have the memory span of a goldfish…
It was actually you in another thread who pointed out to me how Holy Paladin has changed, how it used CS to get access to Holy Shock, and actually has incorporated more DPS into it’s design and playstyle. To act like the Holy Light/Flash of Light spam playstyle has even anything remotely in common with the current design is silly. I’m giving the benefit of the doubt here, but you really seem to just be saying garbage for the sake of saying garbage as oppose to just admitting the reality that class, and dungeon, design has very much changed with healer DPS in mind.
Ah yes the disc kit of SW:P, Smite, and Holy Fire has barely changed with literally an entire talent tree worth of damage talents, an entire shadow healing playstyle, etc etc. Druid totally hasn’t changed, except gaining access to tools that buff the damage they do in kitty form, getting access to boomkin form if they want it, etc etc.
The idea that Blizzard hasn’t actively evolved their design decisions around the expectation of healer DPS, adding more talents and spells, as well as opening up old talents that wouldn’t of been accessable in the past in order to create new playstyle that are based around healer DPS is just stupid. Your attempts to act as if nothing has changed can’t even come close to debating in good faith. It’s just nonsense and a waste of time.
Yes, but this changed in BfA, really. It was still played like caster paladin even back in legion, and not a ton changed except players wanting to push damage for M+ timings and glimmerdin being discovered.
But like… at a base level, what is the Holy pally “damage rotation”?
They’ve got Crusader strike, Hammer, HS (which is a heal, and not always used offensively) to build holy power, Consecration and shield of the righteous if they want to dump holy power for DPS (which you don’t do unless you’re very safe or you’re playing risky).
That’s not some crazy complex rotation, and those spells weren’t even new - heck shield didn’t even exist when the playstyle moved towards it - players just started playing it way more aggressively. That was my point. Blizzard didn’t specifically design paladin to be this crazy aggressive healer DPS. All their design decisions were to move Paladin into melee - not to make it a DPS or really even to emphasize straight DPS for it. Yeah, they changed the playstyle to create a melee healer. No they didn’t change the playstyle to make a DPS healer. That’s the distinction I was making - I’m not sure - Does that make sense?
I mentioned Disc as the one exception, but it still very much isn’t a strictly damage kit. This is the first expansion where its rotation is even slightly interesting.
They’ve had access to this for a while and weren’t shifting into cat/moonkin ever until players started prioritizing damage - good ones were shifting into bear to survive, but you’re acting like in shadowlands they had talents that made cat form amazing. They could do that on a long cooldown, I guess, but even if you removed that talent people were going to cat/owlweave regardless because they wanted to push damage, not because blizzard was making them or something.
In Dragonflight, maybe, but no, they really didn’t emphasize damage on healers much over the years. They backed up playstyles that emerged - Glimmerdin’s a great example of that - they’ve brought glimmer to every version of paladin since it showed up and in Shadowlands they made it stronger by giving it legendary synergies, sure, I’ll give you that. But let’s not pretend that Blizzard intentionally designed healer DPS into the game. Players did and then their designers responded.
You are attempting to make a distinction that does not refute anything I said, and frankly doesn’t really matter in the slightest.
It does not matter the reasons as to why Blizzard decided to design around the DPS healer concept, be it in response to players starting to DPS more, they prefer the style, or their CEO woke up on the opposite side of the bed and decided to do it for the hell of it.
The reasons, which seems to be all you are talking about, for why Blizzard is doing it does not matter and has nothing to do with me pointing out that they have, and continue to do it.
Mate you are taking s1 in isolation. If we are going to do that lets just compare s4 then when players i know who couldn’t do +25 keys any other xpac were doing them then.
But lets look at dungeons. BFA had kings rest, tol dagor for 2 examples. Legion had Halls on high tyr weeks, kara etc. SL dungeons in my view ALL UP did not have the road blocks that the other xpacs had in keys.
As for disc specifically, Legion, disc in its current iteration was brand new and a learning experience in itself let alone the dungeons.
Yes i agree. Im not opposed to it either. I like an xpac where healing holds sway.
That compared vanilla to wrath but neglected the step up i cata difficulty 
But i know you know that 
Yeah. Season 4 was a joke as often last seasons are.
That would be very useful if its accurate.
Im not sure how you can say 2-3 months and the rest of it in the same sentence Its a 2 yr expac
In regards to this week: its fairly easy, but the biggest issue is going to be Sanguine. We don’t have shining force to kick adds out of the pools anymore which doesn’t help. Some dungeons are worse off than others. Nok and AA are probably the worst. You’ll see 15-25 mil+ sanguine healing if its not played right which is like reducing the dungeon timer by 2-4 minutes. On most dungeons its not really an issue because the timers are super lenient, but add in 1-2 wipes, and you got no chance.
I finally got brave enough to test the waters on a fortified +16 RLP and this place is significantly toned down compared to week 1. The #1 reason is that everyone’s like 20-30 iLvls higher and their hp pools are bigger plus the nerfs they made. Inferno won’t full health any players as it does like 60-70% of their hp. The only hard trash is the dragon with the exploding dot.
I also got my 2-piece bonus on Holy. It changes the playstyle a little bit because you can use the advantage of casting PoM and then quickly using a 0.5s cast PoH like a CoH.
For M+ it just lets you quickly heal somebody with Heal, but it requires the setup of using PoM, and then that. Not game changing or anything, but a little added bonus.
I probably won’t get the 4 piece until the Catalyst because were getting terrible drop rates on the priest tokens. I’m curious what the uptime is on the crit bonus w/ Miracle Worker.
Also, a new trick I learned is that dominate mind works on the creatures on the last pull in Jade Temple. There’s adds that smash the tank for 350k and you can mc one of them to make their life easier.
Healing this xpac is def challenging, there is just so much to do.
In regards to DPS- I honestly feel like I have NO time to DPS, besides all the extra healing going out, there’s a lot of positioning, dispelling, and offensive dispelling. Moreover, people drop in global cd which makes me rather leery of going into DPS mode beyond a Holy fire here and a SWP there
-Tanks- oye tanks- they can make a dungeon nice or make it an absolute PITA. My issue right now is that tanks are so OP that they don’t need healing or whateves and they pull dash pull dash. 1) I’m at almost zero mana after every other pull, the new affix doesn’t buff mana (which is SUPER annoying) but they keep pulling 2) it’s hard to know when tanks actually need healing. I burn my healing cds on tanks only to have them use their self healing right before my cd hits them and bam wasted cd. Idk, I feel like tanks and healers used to be a team. Now we’re just… superfluous. 
The difference between Tyrannical and Fortified is noticeable. Fortified trash in some dungeons still hurt, but they’ve nerfed a lot of the pain points, and a lot of new routes I’ve seen skip the nasty trash pulls. Tyrannical bosses on the other hand just absolutely push the difficulty up like you’re doing keys +2/3 higher. There’s a couple bosses where you’ll basically be OOM at around 15-20% and you’ll just have to pray your group can finish.
Keys start becoming walled around +21/22, even for most push groups (ignoring SBG and CoS because those dungeons are just free). The biggest wall is being able to survive and heal through everything. The last boss on a +20 CoS just obliterates the group on Tyrannical week when on Fortified week its usually survivable with some defensives. The DPS requirements are also way high… like everyone has to be doing 80-100k+ at that level.
So it’s a matter of tuning + getting more gear.
To much dispelling for the fact dispels have a CD. Its a “ton” of fun having 3 strong DoTs ticking on ppl knowing you can only clear 1 of them before the other two expire
CDs on dispels was one of the dumbest things Blizz has ever done.
I dont think bringing down tank healing will help anything but bringing up our damage and our heals would.
I would like Blizzard Devs to stop playing Meta classes and start working on shadow priests, healer priests, Resto shaman. I need my shadow priest to do more. I’m breaking my head trying to figure out how to keep up with other classes with the damage “Cast” delays and all the mechanics and seeing low perfomance on my end. My guild already offered me to switch my shadow priest dps even though the damage is decent. I"m 384 item level and doing like 28K-30K single target dps. I see other classes do more dps with far less item level in gear. I’m already gearing my Enhancement shaman. All these blizzard promises on prepatch that they’ll work more on Feral druids, priests, and here we are… Where are they?. The most recent buff to shadow priests single target didn’t feel like it was enough.
Yes, I have been noticing that as well. It keeps making me wonder if my health got that low and I didn’t notice.
I think the decision we have is to switch to meta or suffer inadequate performance due to balancing issues and fight design. This expansion seems to be favoring anything highly mobile and ranged. Melee eats so much damage to keep their numbers up that I heal them like they are offtanking.
Shadow priest so far is terrible. The 20% buffs they gave us somehow feels like 5%, and still doesn’t keep us in par with other DPS. Consistently at the bottom of the meters. Makes me wonder if something is broken in their formula, while we keep thinking it’s us. It’s like we are gaslighting ourselves while Blizzard, who knows exactly what is going on, stays silent and watches us like we are bugs in an aquarium.
Holy priest is very Mastery dependent, with Echo of Light being our highest healing factor overall, but the gear that I see dropping consistently doesn’t have Mastery on it, so my Mastery is currently suffering. As a result, I am consistently low on the HPS meters and struggling to keep everyone alive. I would love to see what some people are talking about–healers standing around doing nothing, etc. I am button pushing like a madman, blowing cooldowns even on trash just to keep everyone alive the whole way through. I’ve even resorted to making macros that cast things instantly on focused targets just to make my reaction timing faster, because players are dropping like flies.
I just dont like where we are at all. Healing feels weak and Shadow feels even weaker yet blizz is overlooking both.
This… All of this!
My main issue with M+ healing on high keys is having the mana endurance to last 3.5-4 minutes on some of these bosses on Tyrannical week. There’s several bosses that just pelt the group with AOE damage every 10-15s the entire duration of the fight that ping-pong the groups hp from 100% to 25%.
I’m using mana pot, shadow fiend, symbol of hope, etc. and I’m running out of fumes when some bosses are at like 15-20%. I’m having to kill myself just to use the 22s extended Spirit of Redemption and meticulously ask myself “should I cast this ability?” to conserve mana. Apotheosis is being used for mana conservation instead of as an emergency group heal.
Raid healing isn’t even on this level of mana management.
Holy also blows on some fights like the thundering boss in Nok and the 1st boss in RLP. It’s all heavy RoT auras. It’s do-able, but it takes less effort on a Resto Druid who just hots the entire group through everything.
I made a joke to my guild run last night while discussing these things: we should all create druids and make a full druid 5-man group and roll over the content easily. It would be hilarious.