Priests can top a tank off with one cast of Penance, but both Regeneration and Beacon healing will barely heal 5-15% for a large amount of mana.
The rune that assists with (borderline mandatory for high damage) tank healing is gated behind an item I need 16 of, and there are only 2 on the AH for 4g each; the item engineers make to farm them is 1g, and apparently won’t guarantee the drop either.
I have 2061 mana and my waters give me 835 over 24 seconds. I use half my mana in 3 casts.
Beacon healing is low and causes a lot of threat, especially in AoE scenarios.
Regeneration channeling makes mages unable to utilize the 5 second rule for mana conservation and cancelling heals. Arcane Blast is the closest we can get to it, but I don’t have the rune yet. I’m holding out for this being a difference maker, since Rewind time (see second bullet point) does not seem realistic to get.
As someone who had a 5x easier time healing in original vanilla and classic in a DPS-specced shaman, priest and druid…mage healing in SoD is the worst healing spec I have ever played. I’m not saying it out of spite, I’m saying it truthfully as someone who has mained a healer since 2005.
Anyways, as the title says, I am open to advice. We cleared the stockades run I did, but I have never felt this hopeless as a healer in my entire WoW ‘career.’
If people are going to get on my case for being impatient and to wait for other ways to get this rune, you don’t get it…I’m not even a proper healing class without that tank healing. Yes, perhaps mage AoE healing in BFD is OP (I don’t know,) but in 5mans keeping the tank alive feels horrible outside of Living Flame beacon healing.
Anyways, I’d love to go over ideas to make mages better, but Blizzard has made it clear to me throughout the years they only want to hear the problem and not my solutions…so here we are.
Let me know if there’s something obvious I’m missing. I’ve even put amp magic on my tank since they mostly take physical damage. It helps, but does not fix the problem
Yeah, I was going to roll a healer alt tonight and was torn between Priest / Druid / or Mage but all I’m hearing from Mage Healers is horrible, pained screams.
I was really looking forward to playing a Healer that can Teleport/Sell Portals on the side…
I wanted to be a gnome healer for a long time (original WoW timeline,) and I think they only got priests in Cata, so finally getting the chance and having it feel this bad…feels bad.
It definitely needs help. Regeneration is only useful to apply beacon. Arcane blast is a slow 2.5 second cast for a mediocre amount of healing around 134. Living flame does great healing if theres more than 1 target its damaging.
Mage is not a traditional healer right now, its more of an off healer/support. Definitely more of a raid healer but even then its dependant on there being a sufficient amount of enemies for living flame to damage.
Its perfectly capable of healing dungeons, but between the healing and having to damage to do healing, you are a threat magnet. I legitimately end up tanking half the time while also toping the dmg meters and toping healing meters. Its fun but all over the place.
This is partly because while abiities are giving classes a different role, the spec trees remains the same. Granted we are only leveling up to 25 for a month or two. But seems that unless a plethora of runes await its a dull experience.
And yeah Living Flame is the only good thing about mage healing right now.
This seems to be the case, because my damage is actually not bad; think I did 80% of the other DPSers dmg while healing stockades (although top dmg was 2x them.)
Capable sure, but bottom of the barrel far as healers are concerned. Too many obstacles.
I really should have lowered my expectations…they did launch SoD very quickly. To me it’s easy to fix, but it’s also a matter of whether or not the devs agree with my assessment of mage healing.
Something tells me they don’t agree, or simply have no idea how mage healers play. Not sure which, but perhaps they were balanced for pre-nerf arcane explosion healing.
In original vanilla (edit: mostly classic since +healing was stupidly rare in original vanilla) this is only something I did after getting sufficient +healing on gear, but unfortunately my problem with mage is that I simply don’t heal enough. Yeah, the mana issue may be solved, but my tank will still get clobbered without Living Flame healing.
Edit: Trying to get arcane blast and having 10 horde constantly patrolling the area where I’d kill the naga…
Yeah I give up. 21 hours on sub and it looks like I’m out. Was fun while it lasted, but ultimately ‘discovery’ when it comes to mandatory character power is not something I’m a fond of. Kinda like Torghast and Covenant choices became mandatory, I’m over it.
Goodluck to any mage healers in the future; I don’t expect any big changes till next phase anyway. I’m out.
100% agree, feels waay too clunky, youre out of mana waaay too quickly, arcane wand does not heal, which it should… I would fix all of this by making temporal beacon reduce the mana cost of arcane spells by like 70%, or at least the cost of arcane missiles, since it seems like it should be the core of the whole healing rotation, if they don’t want us using arc explosion… apply temp beacon, arcane blast, arc missiles.
This was one of the first things I wanted to test, and was really disappointed that it didn’t work.
There’s a lot of ways to fix it. Previously I said I didn’t want to waste time making suggestions, but after reading yours I may as well.
Mana reduction would likely require a damage nerf so that it doesn’t become a DPS arcane requirement, but is not a bad idea.
Make the first tick of Regeneration heal for 300% more if the target already has a beacon on them.
Increase beacon healing by 150% if it’s only on one target, 50% on 2 targets, default on 3 or more.
…Buff low level waters maybe. Side thing, I know.
Casting Regeneration decreases the mana cost of your next arcane spell by 30%.
All but the first one are off the top of my head. I could go on, but there’s only so much you can do with it…and I’m gonna go do other things instead of making suggestions they won’t even read.
My sub runs out pretty soon here so I think this will be my last post here.
Same experience on my 25 mage, outside of their now nerfed to oblivion AoE healing, they are an F tier class/spec.
Hope they don’t plan on leaving it this way for 2 months.
I also think arcane subtlety is bugged and not affecting healing. I have 40% reduced threat supposedly, but the damage healing combo rips threat off people sometimes.
The fact that you can heal and do equal or more dmg than a dps alone is OP. So what exactly do you want here ? Do you want a class that’s comfortably best dps and healer at the same time ? why would anyone play anything else then…
This is nonsense. You can’t easily out DPS other classes first of all. Second of all you OOM faster than any other healer.
Your spot healing is terrible because you have to do damage to do meaningful healing since your very expensive healing abilities that apply beacon do trash direct healing. Your damage is all slow or channeled outside of AE which is now garbage for healing.
Living flame AoE is the only thing they have left that’s impressive. The entire rest of the kit is awful outside of perhaps very well timed burst windows in a raid if you can get two parties to stack within 15 yards of eachother and then dump your mana in 5 seconds.
FYI: for people who know nothing about mages, if someone has no beacon up already, in order for me to heal them I have to spend 206 mana on a spell that only does 204 healing if I fully channel it. I then have to follow up with damage dealing abilities (that can potentially miss even with 10% hit), all of which are expensive besides no-charges AB (and there’s no cheap way to dump charges).
Buy better waters to heal. Use conjured to supplement and sip. The rest of us are drinking Sweet Nectar while you’re using Melon Juice… this is a side effect of 25 being the level cap instead of 30.
Sure. .but from the 5x mages destroying dungeons it doesn’t look that bad really i mean…i dont see 5x priest dungeon groups. Best farmers best aoe dps amd you want “best heals” also hmm why play any other class then?
Just call it season of the mage. Blizzard definitely have a lot of work ahead of them getting the “balance” right
You wouldn’t know what you were talking about anyway. SoD is primarily being played by non-era players that aren’t here for the reasons the tiny number of people play era.
Blizzard should have known their playerbase better and changed more of these things going into SoD.
You see the potential SoD has by the number currently playing it. Despite what era players cried about it being “retail 2.0,” the biggest issues so far are all classic elements, not retail elements. Clinging to bad vanilla mechanics will drive a ton of people away, wasting the potential SoD had.
Pure ignorance at play here. If you try to do both, you’ll go oom super fast and be useless. You’re not interested in the actual topic at hand.
Yeah, that’s the point of my suggestion…?
Even if they are wrong, you posting this = spam.
Wait, I said I want the best heals? That is the most blatant strawman I have seen in a long time.
If you’re going to give a class a heal spec, don’t make it several times worse than other heal specs; it doesn’t need to be better. Yes, obviously they have a lot of balancing to do…that’s why feedback like this exists. To give them a player’s perspective.
Anyways, 15 minutes on sub. This forum really does have too many people talking about classes/specs they don’t play. Suppose that’s the internet in a nutshell.