Healer balance and raid damage tuning

[Lorikeet-yojamba]

Some changes are here so we all have to deal with that. I’d love to talk a change I feel is quite large, yet has largely been undiscussed. And that is healing/raid damage tuning.

There’s is no doubt that the most popular healers ulduar have been hpal and disc priest. Algalon 10 man healer clear ratio is actually pretty disappointing.

Before everyone jumps on and says it was like this originally, it wasn’t. Paladin’s got some very nice tools later in the expac that fit well into Algalon. But more importantly Algalon damage was buffed, and buffed in a way that requires more raid member effective hp, way more than raid healing output. Collapsing star damage was increased. Meaning more likely to just kill people outright. But overall raid healing hardly changed. The ~25s between star collapse is plenty of time for the raid to be topped.

Paladin DivSac and priest bubble are very effective at increasing raid effective HP, while the other healers don’t have similar tools. This makes hpals and disc priests even more desirable for this encounter, so even though the classic team hasn’t made class changes, it most definitely has effected healing class balance.

This damage spike change increase the difficulty of the raid composition, but hardly changed the difficulty of the raid healing requirements.

Consider this, perhaps there could have been 6colapsing stars instead 4, with the appropriate tuning done to their HP. That would have considerably increased the hps required of the healers but made little difference to a characters ability to survive 1 hit.

Or perhaps everyone took 500-1k dps while Algalon encounter was active, like saph.

Ofcause these changes would have made strong raid output healers more desirable, again inadvertantly affecting healer balance again.

I’m asking the classic team to consider this going forward. Just changing the encounter tuning does affect healer balance, quite significantly. The difference in how damage is dealt does matter. The damage which can be effectively survived through prevention but not easily healed through effects class balance. If you are going to change raid damage, don’t just turn up the amount each hit lands for.

[Tesalyn-pagle]

Resto druid here.
I disagree. Every spec gets to shine here and there.

[Lorikeet-yojamba]

You disagree that changing the way damage is dealt doesn’t change class balance yet say that every class has its way to shine.

The classic team changing how manageable an ability for each class changes those situations.

Take gluth decimate for example. Massive damage to everyone that a druid can pump everyone back to full health from very quickly. However if you change everyone taking 95% of their max HP in damage to everyone taking 102% of their max HP in damage (a 7.5% damage increase on the ability), then the damage becomes impossible for a Resto druid to heal. The damage has to be prevented by priests or a paladin.

Fact: Classic team buffed the amount of damage Algalon did per ability.

Fact: That changed they way healing was balanced on that fight.

Suggestion: Classic team shouldn’t just increase ability numbers if they want to increase difficulty on fights. If they deem tuning fights is necessary they should be more creative about it.

[Bwill-pagle]

This is the result of optimizing gameplay over 15 years. The only metric that matters is effective health. If everyone lives DPS checks are easy. With enough EH you can cheese mechanics.

Disc and pally are the only healers that bring this attribute.

[Lorikeet-yojamba]

Because Algalon felt “too easy” on the ptr, they buffed the damage. But the buff was in a way that just played into the strength of those two healers.

Yes, it made it harder for paladins and disc priests, but it made it a lot harder for groups trying to use other healers.

I’m saying if the team wants to increase the difficulty for healers, change the mechanics, increase the frequency, not just bump up numbers which will be reduced by these two classes anyway.

[Sprixy-barthilas (Sprixy)]

They should have just left Algalon alone. If “high end raising” needed a difficulty boost they should have nerfed the classes getting stacked. Not buffed the raids to be tuned to those classes. While that may have been in the spirit of the game in Vanilla and TBC, it was definitely not in the spirit of Wotlk. Buffing content to make it harder for the op classes while making other classes unviable would have never been considered as a solution.

Ghostcrawler even made posts about how they were avoiding balancing raids around paladin raid wide cooldowns. The geniuses Devs running classic go and do just that.