UPDATE: Since mage healing P8 tierset has changed a lot, I have added a new comment on this thread to give some feedback specifically to the new changes. I do think that the changes in this post should be considered as well. So I hope you enjoy reading both!
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Giving some feedback regarding the potential changes to the mage healing toolkit and tiersets for P8.
While mage healing has been quite strong in phase 7 given the amount of contant raid-wide healing, it seems like these changes are accounting to balance for naxx and not all of the other content. Particularly talking about:
Temporal Beacon healing change:
Records the subject’s space-time position. 80%70% of all Arcane damage done by the caster will be converted to chronomantic healing on each of the caster’s current Temporal Beacon targets.
Changes to Mass Regen (MR) - CD increased from 6sec → 15sec
Healer 4P Bonus
Your most recent Regeneration target receives 100% increased healing from your spells and effects. Regeneration reduces the remaining cooldown on your Mass Regeneration by an additional 2 seconds each time it heals.
I think the changes of 1 above makes sense. Mages are already outputting a bunch of HPS and having that be offset a bit will help with balancing. However, 2 and 3 above are likely going to completely invalidate mage healing for a few reasons:
Relying on direct heals - These changes will need mages to fully cast regen/MR. Mage healer toolkit does not scale well with direct heals from regen/MR. This also brings up the following problem:
Needing to stand still to refresh CD - Most healers, given their toolkit and new tier piece, are now going to have tons of free, instant cast heals. This is a great idea given that you need to be more mobile for raid mechanics. Mage healing already needed to stand still more often given the cast time for arcane blast and needing to apply beacon. With these new changes, mages are going to need to stand still more often and will then need to choose between healing or moving, effectively decreasing so much uptime for healing.
These are huge huge changes that will make mage healing useless in any other content until you have 4pc SE tier, and even then you will still have the problems from above.
I wanted to provide some feedback on how to better balance mage healing.
Revert changes to MR CD and 4pc - the 4pc we had before really tackled a blind spot for mage healing: Tank heals.
Using regen by merging with MR rune - A lot of the previous tier bonuses were trying to get us to use regen, however the other chest rune pieces work super well with our toolkit. I think it would be good to merge regen and MR into one rune for legs. I think this would encourage people to use regen more often. Specially with all the tier piece bonuses.
Change temporal beacon as below. I think this would make it so having active beacons in 3-4 groups be a little bit more balanced such that it is not as over powered while also not punishing group healing for 1 group / 5 man content. Healing is then reduced by 20% for 2 groups, 30% for 3 groups and 40% for 4 groups. And this can then be off-set a with SE 2pc and 4pc set.
Temporal Beacon
Records the subject’s space-time position. 80%70% of all Arcane damage done by the caster will be converted to chronomantic healing on each of the caster’s current Temporal Beacon targets. This healing is reduced by 50% on self, and also reduced by 80% when damage is done by Arcane spells that damage multiple targets. Additionally, chronomantic healing is reduced by 2% for every active temporal beacon. This effect activates past 5 active temporal beacons.
I think these are balancing changes that would make mage healing not obsolete while also making it more fair for other healers in your raid.
Additionally, I think mage toolkit could also have the following changes:
Temporal anomaly now works on the group of your target and scales with SP - Temporal anomaly is such a wasted potential. Being in a ranged group, you are often never going to have any use out of it. Having it spawn on your target would be super helpful. Moreover, having it be a flat healing reduction of about 1k is super low given the inflated health values in SoD. It doesn’t have to be a huge scale, but having it feel stronger as you get more gear would be rewarding.
Merge Advanced warding with temporal anomaly rune - As a healer, you need to have magic dispel. So losing that for temporal anomaly feels bad. Having them together would fix this problem.
Advanced warding reduces CD on fire/frost ward - It would be good to apply these wards more often since 30s CD makes it so you can only apply on 1 person (generally yourself or the tank). And, since it only absorbs so little, it does not feel good to waste a GCD since you cant even use it for so long after. If the CD is something like 10-15s, I believe it would encourage people to ward more often in those fights where F(F)R is needed.
Mana shield returns some mana - Advanced warding could have something like rapture for disc priests in cata, where it has a chance to return % of the mana it absorbs once its fully depleted (the effect can only proc every X seconds). You barely use mana shield since it consumes a ton of mana. Also, advanced warding is only really used for magic dispel. I think this and the previous point can help get more out of the rune.
I hope this is helpful and would love to hear from other mage healers.
I support merging temporal anomaly and advanced warding. I’ve actually never once used temporal anomaly, and still probably wouldn’t, but they’re both healing runes so why not?
I’d rather see temporal anomaly reworked as a cooldown to increase or refresh the durations of temporal beacons. Get rid of the orb aspect (imagine trying to convince your raid to stack up to get hit by it? I already can’t convince melee dps to stand within 40 yards of each other to get hit by mass regens). Make it instantly hit everyone in the raid, and add ten seconds to their current temporal anomalies (nothing if they don’t already have one).
I support advanced warding lower the cooldown, and possibly increase the duration of the buff. It actually does a fair amount of shielding, it just doesn’t feel like it in Naxx because shields don’t scale. When I first read the ability, I thought it also applied to Ice Armor and Mage Armor, etc. Could be an interesting way to give us damage reduction cooldowns. But so could doing ANYTHING with dampen / amplify magic.
I don’t support nerfing chronomatic healing based on number of beaconed targets. It just makes our tank healing even worse, and doesn’t really address anything.
Thanks for your reply and thoughts! It’s nice to hear what other people think. And glad to see you agree with certain things.
I can see that. I think that with having the old 4pc for SE would help a lot with this where you would regen the tank and so you’d still have 60% extra healing on the tank if you have beacon on 4 groups (and perhaps even more since the 2pc). The 2pc set would also help to offset it since if you decide to fully channel it, then the decrease would be -1%.
I agree with this. I think even in MC it didn’t feel as powerful to absorb fire. But I think that was again because it was only usable every 30s. Definitely having it scale would be great.
LOL! gotta love melee dps I had thought about something like this before and gave it as a feedback point in previous phases. Disc priest have this in retail (check out evangelism). I think it’d be nice to have an absorb that actually worked well as it’d help to prevent damage. And, it’d be useful in moments where the dps is stacked, which happens often enough during certain phases and fights.
I don’t want to doom and gloom, but this change will kill mage healing. Blizzard seems to forget that we need to actually have GCD and mana to damage to do healing and not spend everything putting on the beacon.
I totally agree with your post. Makes a lot of sense and hope Blizzard can help with this. Mage healing is not well balanced right now and makes it feel like we are more a support healer to the raid healers vs a main healer. I’d like us to have the tools to be strong tank healers but due to the makeup I don’t see that happening so I’m happy to be a raid AOE healer but also have the right tools to do it well
Mass regeneration CD is now 12seconds (used to be 6 and then 15s with the previous update)
Discussion
I’m happy the team has been hearing us out and are making changes. I do think that this is an improvement as the previous set did make it so we would barely move and have to rely on direct healing. But, this new set will make new problems that will affect mage healing severely. In broad strokes, this tier set will severely deplete mage healers’ mana. For naxx, mage healers that took the 6pc healer set did not have mana problems. Let me explain why these will cause these problems.
2pc: I do like the idea of arcane blast proccing something new. However, arcane blast’s effect past 2 already dumps a ton of mana.
4pc: I think this is okay While it doesn’t have the same mana problems, I do think it is quite underwhelming.
6pc: This is a huge problem. Arcane power already will make it impossible to keep our mana at a healthy level. Additionally, while its nice that it resets the CD of Mass regen, it will also bring the problem that outside of arcane power, heals will be super minimal.
Lowering MR cd is better
Additionally, given the buff to priests in general, having a lag on being able to effectively raid heal given the CDs, mana problems, and competing against absorbs and that will now heal for a huge amount (from 20% → 60%! which has historically been 20%) and super low CD instant group heals (CoH and now PoH being instant), mage healers will likely end up super low tier/unwanted and best to switch to DPS or another class.
Feedback
Generally, I do think that the changes I proposed above will still work while providing balancing, I wanted to provide direct feedback on this tier set if its something that will for sure happen.
2pc. I think this can go in many ways, so here are some ideas:
And makes your next arcane spell instant and cost no mana. This should work with channeling spells including regen and mass regen.
And also resets the CD of MR
Lower the CD of presence of mind by 15seconds
Reduces the cost of any arcane spell to 0
Reduces the CD of arcane power by 10 seconds
4pc. I think this could be improved as follows: “Rewind Time also reduces all damage taken by your target by 20% for 8 sec. Additionally, it places an absorb shield equal to 20% of the damage healed.” This rune is a bit controversial as many healers do not take it. I don’t think this piece bonus will sell it, and may actually disincentivize mage healers to use it more often since they’d want to line it up just right. I think itd be okay if this rune was a spell book also. But, that could be a lot.
6pc. I think this can also go many ways, so here is a few ideas, which I think that paired with some of the changes to the 2pc above would remove the last bit of MR cd reduction:
And reduces the mana cost increase from 30% → 5%
And also resets the CD for presence of mind
And gives you 5% casting speed
MR cd could be changed to 9 seconds or make it so that temporal beacon from MR lasts 21 seconds from the get-go. I think this would allow for mage healers to use different shoulder enchants and not rely on the one.
This does not mean that ALL of the ideas have to be implemented, but a set of ways to mix and match or select one or two from each to still make mage healing viable while balancing it out as having huge mana problems will make mage healers twiddle their wand while waiting for mana to regen. Or at the very least, I wanted to show the problems I see and open the door to brainstorm ideas that will help with these problems.
Moreover, I do think that the additional feedback I provided before should still be considered:
Anyways, let me know what yall think would love to keep discussing on how to make things a bit more balanced.
All I’m going to say right now is that the percent mana increase from arcane power is additive. I tested it on PTR just to be sure. So arcane blast will increase mana costs by 175% per stack. Four stack: 700% increase. Add 30%, and it’s 730%, or 8.3x mana costs. In total that’s a lot, but the amount arcane power is actually adding is negligible. It’s the arcane blast itself (and thus the arcane tunneling keeping it on) that will run us out of mana.
I am only sharing my thoughts and observations as mage healer.
Mass Regen healing for raid healing TAKES TIME to scale up as you need to apply beacon for each group. Any changes or nerfs will make raid healing worthless in my opinion, so the current nerf is PLENTY enough to push it down from 80% to 70%… this is approximately 18-20% nerf overall…
Regen is currently inferior compared to mass regen as it doesn’t quite benefit the tanks (eg. receiving more heals compared to mass), so it’s easier to heal the group rather than single persons.
T2.5 set is for burst healing, which works better if you can time your heals, but you have 2.5s window, and it’s MANA INTENSIVE, so it’s not even worth it generally.
Scaling with mage healing is a bit wonky when it comes to arcane blasts. More stacks currently doesn’t mean more heals (would be nice for tank healing).
I never use rewind. It’s generally not worth my GCD considering I already need to waste GCDs to apply beacons. Besides, Druids already can give out 20% DR, so this makes it a bit redundant.
Chromatic is nifty, but heals so little, and benefits so little compared to just spamming mass regen.
Overall, I believe mage healing is perfectly fine with mass regen at the moment, but the issue is single target healing has very limited utility when it comes to GCD consumption.
If you don’t know as a Mage healer that Rewind time is off gcd AND can be used while you are casting, you are not to be taking seriously. Rewind Time is literally insane. dad gamers are a different breed man
Mana isn’t really a problem with the right raid comp. Running 3 ret pallys and 3 spriests in our comp and I truly don’t think I ever go below 90% mana spamming AB non-stop.
I like the cope here. “If you get six players to funnel you mana, it isn’t a problem.” True. And if you have 12 druids innervating you, it is ALSO not a problem. If you take 40 people and zerg it down, it’s not a problem.
and would love to hear from other mage healers.
I had thought about something like this before and gave it as a feedback point in previous phases. Disc priest have this in retail (check out