Mage healing is a letdown (but am accepting advice)

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
21

AB is definitely the difference maker. It’s kind of key to the whole shebang, because your most efficient, baseline level of healing revolves around churning out as many 0 charge ABs as possible. Regeneration is bugged: it is amplified by the AB debuff but doesn’t consume it like the tooltip indicates, which slightly harms your HPS and makes the rotation less fluid.

But just in general you’ll want to AB>Regeneration/Mass Regeneration>AB, then depending on your HPS needs and Clearcasting procs you will fork here. If healing needs are low you can just wait for the debuff to be ~2.4 seconds from falling off and start casting another AB, which will result in a 0 charge AB cast. If you hit a proc you cast AM into another 0 charge AB. If healing needs are moderate you can cast a second AB before either waiting for the debuff to fall or utilizing a Clearcasting proc for AM. Whenever you need to reapply Beacon you will want to do that during the highest AB debuff count that you are reaching. If things get really bananas you can cast a third AB and then either cast a fourth if Clearcasting procs, or dump it with a Regeneration/Mass Regeneration, regardless of Beacon needs (from what I can tell they are better HPS and HPM than Arcane Missiles).

I’m not sure if peak HPS is spam-casting AB or if you still want to dump the charges due to the healing amp, but as you can see your general goal is to cast as many of the lowest charge AB casts as possible, while maintaining Beacon on the targets you wish to heal, and while otherwise dumping your charges as efficiently as possible. I haven’t done BFD yet, but so far as I can tell this is how the build is set up to function, and AB is absolutely crucial to make it work as a proper healer. It is a very proactive healing style and you need to stay ahead of the incoming damage to succeed. Especially without AP and PoM our ability to recover from heinous where we have nothing set up is limited.

22

Arcane Blast solves your issues. Bite the bullet and go grab it. I’ve been healing very well so far even without the two other runes. You should be consistently in the top 2 for damage as living flame is up every 2 pulls.

My only gripe is threat. Doing this much damage while healing yanks threat very often.

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23

This is for dungeons. On the BFD raid, mage heals need to be tuned to actually be good. Mages rock in dungeons, but suck so bad in the raid. At least that’s IME.

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24

Yea I’ve had AB since level 18, it sucks that there’s no way to cheaply dump charges. Even rank 1 AM isn’t that cheap considering what it does. I’ve also tried fishing for conc procs with rank 1 spells, but I don’t think that’s really that great either.

Beacon application being as expensive as it is I still think even with AB you’re by far the least mana efficient healer in the game.

I just got arcane surge which I’m going to test, but based on the tooltip I doubt it’s worth using over living flame currently.

edit: Spoiler alert, arcane surge is possibly the worst rune in the game. I spammed my mana away to test it and it restored maybe 2-300 mana at 25. If they nerf living flame as many have asked them for, we’re still not going to use arcane surge.

This is really only true because of living flame, which does the same thing they nerfed AE by 80% for.

25

I’ve only got regeneration and I’ve only spot healed in a pinch when our pally healer was struggling, but the MP consumption is absurd.

If I were to use regeneration + arcane missiles/arcane explosion, the amount of aggro you get is absurd.

I did something like night where I seemed to be stuck proccing the heal from the Temporal Beacon heal and everything turned to attack me. No idea what I did other than arcane missile a mob.

26

What’s most funny of all I think is that arcane surge and rewind are the hardest to get, but neither is even worth using since rewind is up against AB and surge is up against living flame (in addition to surge being trash).

Surge may have minor usefulness in ganking someone, but even at full mana I don’t think it’s even the biggest nuke in the game.

27

Yea Living Flame and Living Bomb are super nice. Lot’s of group damage.

28

AB buff last what 7s? let it run out

ab buff should lower AM cost or something

29

Part of the problem is that arcane blast does not work as written. The effect says that it increases the next arcane damage or healing spell, but it does not effect regeneration. Casting regeneration does not remove the effect, and the healing amount doesn’t get boosted.

Based on the description, it feels like the rotation should be 2-3 arcane blasts (more with clear casting) followed by a boosted Regen on the tank, or to a group member that needs it. With the arcane explosion nerf, that clearly isn’t the way they want us to play and arcane missiles sucks at healing because the amount is too small, and it takes too long. Mobs die before you get the healing. The way this all works feels completely cobbled together, because I ran with two mages yesterday and their arcane spells were healing targets I buffed, even though they weren’t running Regen. It seems like this “spec” is a broken mess in implementation.

IMO, regen needs to be boosted by arcane blast like the description says and casting it should eat that effect you create a semi-decent rotation.

30

I do that sometimes, I still think they need to make a lot of improvements to the spec.

This would be one way of doing that.

PvP is another issue since spell pushback is devasting to regen and AB and only AM can get pushback resistance (and at 25 I don’t think it’s worth picking up).

I think regen and AM should be changed to cost per tick so you can 1 tick regen to put up a beacon more cheaply and so both aren’t as punished by pushback.

31

My mage healer friend was healing me easily through Deadmines. I don’t know what to say to this, really.

32

Has nothing to do with anything being discussed really.

I can heal all the dungeons fine, but it’s still a poorly designed spec, particularly mana wise.

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33

I do fine healing, but it’s a mess. It isn’t smooth like priest or pally, and I’m scrambling for living flame or to dump arcane blast stacks.

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34

Say someone needs healing badly. Most healers have say a 1.5 second cast or via runes maybe even something bigger/faster like penance. Or something like PW:S. A mage has a long channel that’s expensive and does very little healing. You could one tick it and then start to cast AB, but AB is a 2.5 second cast. Even if you have rewind, that doesn’t work as an emergency heal because the beacon has to be on the target for 5 seconds for it to even do anything at all (also you probably wouldn’t even use rewind if you had it because you’d be using AB).

This is just one of many examples where the mage healing kit just doesn’t feel good at all.

I think part of the problem is also that they nerfed the healing of regen significantly after the blizzcon reveal. I believe in videos it did like 450 healing for the channel at blizzcon. Now it does 204, but costs more mana now than it did then. It costs more mana and does half as much upfront healing as it did when they first revealed it.

35

It doesn’t remove the debuff, but it does receive the amp.

36

I think they should consider a full rework. The biggest problem with damage healing in classic is that there is no way to avoid the last percentage of spell miss which will obviously cause raid wipes if your healers can miss lol. Healing is supposed to be proactive and reactive and not spamming a DPS rotation.

Maybe they should move toward AB and AM being targetable on allies that have TB and adjust the numbers accordingly. For example the flex option with mage healers would be doing damage would cause less healing but be better for raid healing than the single target AB on allies.

37

I’m a Healer Main so I would love to see Mage Healer get the fixes it needs.

Infact, I think my first Alt will be a Mage Healer after I max this Priest.

38

I missed it then and took this too literally.

Advice was buy water at 25 for best available recovery, something otherwise not brought up in thread.

I know where you’re coming from with the jank of polishing off two level 5 waters at level 18 because you don’t have the next rank of water yet. I’ve leveled multiple mages over 30 in hardcore and am no stranger to what you’re experiencing.

Leveling in Classic is characterized by progressive resistance (those jank moments) and sudden relief (buying the next skill rank or getting that next weapon upgrade). That is the game. That experience is ironed out in Retail with a magic spellbook that levels with you (and is honestly one of my biggest annoyances with runes–since it’s only for 25 levels, I swallow my pride on it).

Classic is and should be for all intents and purpose a format of vanilla, jank relics and all. I’m not drawn to Classic because I think it’s going to be a Retail experience. I’m there because I want to get away from some of the expedience and overwhelm from Retail.

Player numbers spike as new people check it out and returning players pop back in to see what it’s like. They’ll pop back out too and that’s okay – if Retail couldn’t keep them, there’s no expectation Classic should either.

You are right. But the sheer ignorance of stating Classic WoW isn’t Vanilla WoW and then suggesting to remove Vanilla from it is mind numbing.

Lest we forget, calling out spam is also spam.

For what it’s worth, in general, I agree that there’s a problem in the leveling design and how Mage healing is delivered because mana economy isn’t built for a cast-filled combat loop. Arcane is the most mana heavy school for the least amount of damage and requires targets to replicate healing. And yes, while I’m not a SoD Mage, I have years of experience with Atonement Priest, and know the ups and downs of buffing and nerfing conversion rates and damage amounts trying to find a sweet spot, only to be left with just another heal spec.

We should remember that class design isn’t just a Mage problem – how Mages heal and where they are performant (moreso where they aren’t) also defines space for other healers. It’s one of the biggest reasons I also don’t want Shadow to simply become just another DPS Caster. Priest should be a Priest first. Mage should be a Mage first. Yes, there should be elements of friction, and given your Stockades run was successful, there should also be tools available to overcome them.

39

Some changes would be nice, but I’ve been able to make it work with my roommate and I. We’re on a mission to try and duo all the dungeons.

We’ve only done Ragefire and Deadmines so far, but we’ve managed to get clears without much issue. He’s a shaman tank and I’m healing as mage. Living Flame is an amazing CD. Not sure how many people have noticed, but it does Spellfire damage, meaning it’s partial arcane, so each tick is doing heals per target hit.

40

for real, mage healing needs a buff and a big mana reduction