Hi, mage healer here. 99+ every previous phase and pretty close this phase.
Mage healing isn’t just casting Wild Growth or PoM bouncing and trucking along. In dungeons or content with mobs that die quickly, since they have to hard-cast a 2.5s ability on a mob to heal you in a mana-efficient manna, they’re ill-suited to content where mobs die fast without just spamming ChronoPres, which isn’t the worst but it isn’t super efficient. If this is the content you’re referring to, it is normal that mana is a little more sluggish for them.
That said, on longer raid fights, with predictable damage, they can be one of the most efficient healers in the game, doing more HPS on the raid than any other healer is even capable of.
Yeah but then you look up their authors and they’re all blue parsers /shrug
This is a really good point though. I have not run Regeneration since P1, only Mass Regen w/ Burnout and careful group organization, using ChronoPres for ST healing as needed.
As for Mage Gems, which you brought up erlier, it’s unlikely you’re ever going to be in a fight long enough to use more than two, so just the two best you can make are fine.
I jsut really strongly disagree with this:
You have, mathematically, the highest potential raid healing in the game right now.
With careful timing, you can get an AB cast off with your Temporal Beacon on a whopping fifteen people, healing for around 1500 total on all of them assuming no crits. And you can do that roughly every 7 seconds, as often as a druid can Wild Growth a single set of only 5 people. The difference is staggering.
And at level 40 he has fights where he did 1k HPS.
My mage landed in the top 100 last phase and I remember pulling him up to compare to #1 and just feeling that I’m still lagging behind.
I can’t speak to whether or not anything was done to pad the numbers, but his top healing on all those fights is mostly himself. Nonetheless, he did 1k HPS at 40, don’t see any druids replicating that.
That’s interesting. I think I play with a much more casual group so I end up needing my gems and evocate a lot. I don’t end up using Mass Regen on the entire raid cause it eats up way too much mana for my sustain, easier to keep it on the tank group in the long run. I can see where at higher levels of play it would be more efficient to forego single Regen but I tend to use it for safety since we still have single people in groups who stand in acid rain puddles LOL
I think that I would like to see a removal of the CD for Mass Regen, as that would make it more viable for healing through things like Jammal’s Penance. Feels pretty sluggish to apply it every 5 or 6 seconds (can’t remember the exact CD atm)
I could safely say this would break the game, and I would solo heal the entire raid.
If that ever happened, it would have to apply a lesser version of temporal beacon with a smaller percentage of healing per damage
Do you not feel like the mana cost is a sufficient draw-back? Genuine question btw, cause I just feel like spamming Mass Regen would OOM me really fast compared to being more diligent with it, hence why you could burn for emergencies but it would cost you later
If you did not get off 2 ABs and, most of the time, a follow up free Arcane Missiles, then yes. But otherwise, our damage used to facilitate our healing is extraordinarily cheap.
Mage healing is in a wierd spot, beacon healing isnt as good as priest and druid aoe heals right now even with batching spells. Depending what content you are doing, chrono with the frost talent ( and take fire talents for for pushback resistance and 46 yrd range) to reduce the mana is like 200 mana for a 1800 top end heal. Its crazy mana efficient, which makes mage healers great at tank and spot healing.
Beacon healing is still better if you want to contribute damage and pad the healing meter, but I have found I never have mana issues if I stick to chrono pres and maxing 5 second rule. I always have mana even on a longer fight like Hakkar. As long as you have some priests or druids for raid heals, you can prevent alot of deaths and wipes with chrono pres. Its not as punishing on movement intensive fights either. Always feels bad to batch a heal into beacon and not be able to squeeze in a bunch of casts before it fades for whatever reason.
The issue with mage healing isn’t the hps, it’s the cooldowns. Most damage in raid can be solved with consumes making healers less potent but cooldowns like pain sup/bark super valuable as you can just opt in to fill a dps in the slot.
When bosses die so fast in classic healing really just doesn’t matter, it’s about the utility you bring. Mage healer definitely does the most damage of healers while pumping insane heals if they are 1-2 healing but if they aren’t, they just don’t bring much.
The cast time of arcane blast needs to be lowered by .5 for sure and they need a tank cooldown. That’s a good start for moving forward, but overall their actual “healing” capability is the highest of all classes.
Have a mage heal in our main raid does decent amount of damage and like maybe 100k less than the 4th healer overall but raid can be 4 healed it’s not as bad as people say just gotta know how to heal properly but tbh count him as a healer DPS
People who believe this are usually half-decent healers in dad guilds at best.
When two DPS frick up and stand in something they shouldn’t, or a pack of adds isn’t picked up by the tank in a boss fight and are hitting whoever, are you trusting your 55% average healer or your 94% average healer to respond quickly and save lives?
Sure, they’re not like DPS parses, where the metric is easy, they just pump, but they are measurements of the top end of how much a healer can do.
Rewind Time could be the tank cooldown if they would move it to a different slot, like Helm or Wrist.
Most people consider healing parses trash, because higher parses generally just mean your raid took more damage then say a group of better of players that would take less damage
It’s harder to compare healer parses compared to DPS parses which are straight forward metrics of performance.
If you are in a really good raid of players you basically have to ask them to fail mechanics to improve your parse. It’s generally not a very useful metric for healers.
Kind of? I feel like healing power is already so juiced that an instant health full heal isn’t even that exciting. And yes it’s “free” but that’s also not that important right now when casters have infinite mana from Paladin’s SoM.
If we want to make Mage Healers better for whatever reason, giving Mage the ability to cause whatever they’re healing to stagger damage, however they want to present that thematically, would work best with their healing profile.
If your healers are skilled, have mid to bad parses, and you are easily clearing content, that just means you are running too many healers.
Solution: Cut healers, add DPS. Parses will go up across the board.
Bosses will be dying in 20-30 seconds soon for most people. Sure it’s sweaty but most are going to be 1 healing by the end of phase, things like nature protection/shadow and holy along with tubber roots means you can easily just dps bosses down before any meaningful damage goes out. It’s not going to be super common but the better guilds will be doing that. That’s what I meant by consumes. Classic is wild with what you can bring to raid, it’s genuinely insane that you can completely ignore raid mechanics due to consumes.
The regen spells are mana hungry and slow to heal, arcane blast is slow to cast… it’s just… everything is slow slow slow. Very easy to get into the weeds with a mage healer.
Because of all of that… I end up just casting Chronostatic like a vanilla paladin healer would cast FoL or HL. It’s cheap, it’s a big heal, and it’s a medium cast time. I only use the regen spells if damage is light or if I absolutely must do an AoE heal.
I was excited to be a mage healer when SoD was released, but I hate where they went with it.
See I think that all of the further posting in this thread is what makes me wish they put out a 2-3 paragraph statement on the intended class fantasy and mechanics for all of the new specs. Would be nice to know the intentions and what stuff each one is meant to excel in, since I think people have a much different idea of Mage Healer than each other. We don’t have years of Classic Analysis to fall back on, this spec has existed for half a year. I want to know more about their philosophy when developing and it (like making rewind time fall on a dead rune slot or having there be zero good healer runes for Phase 3)
The fastest kill of Hakkar is ~2 minutes. That’s with like 99-100 parsers.
Gear is not getting better. DPS is not getting much better. There are already parses out there two healing, but popping Shadow Prots is not going to make it so that a single healer can beat the roughly 1000 HPS requirement of the fight. Those Shadow Pots are gone after a couple blood novas. And even if you could 1-heal the fight, the DPS gain for one extra DPS for a fight you already 1-tank is not going to make that fight become 30 seconds. Lol.
