If you watched MDI this season (congrats Mandatory for knocking down Echo!) you would have noticed a good amount of runs had a tank and 4 dps.
This is not cool. As a healer main, I’m kind of upset that game 5 of the finals (the final game in the entire tournament) was a 23 BRH with no healers.
I feel like all roles are getting way too much self sustainability if they can do an entire high level mythic+ without the need of a healer.
Hopefully The War Within can fix this, or at least close this gap. What are your thoughts on a specific type of content showing you can remove an entire role?
So if you look at videos over the years no healer runs have existed for ages. Heck in BfA you could even have a full DPS run cause of certain classes god tier self sustainability.
As someone who tanks almost always, it’s never phased me.
Imo the problem is actually cc. CC is way too strong. It is absolutely a different game when my groups are CCing well vs when they aren’t, it’s like I am a fourth dps when they play well, the mobs literally do nothing for the entire pull.
I would say, make cc much less important. Tone down “fail” damage, maybe punish people for failing in other ways that are noticed by someone else than the healer for once. But also maybe cut the crazy cc that groups can do to lock down mobs for the entire pull and let them actually do something (slow pulsing damage ideally).
Certain DPS classes do have good self sustain, but those people in MDI are not just healing through the damage. They are actually preventing most of the damage through coordinated kicks, stuns, defensives, etc.
A vast majority of players do not have that level of skill, nor the time to practice. So, I don’t think you need worry about healers becoming obsolete.
Also, some of those matches showed that having an extra DPS instead of a healer didn’t always significantly speed up the run. But, it did always make the run more risky with a very small margin of error.
You need to remember that 23s are trivial/low keys to these players and the MDI is about speed.
But mainly it’s due to how powerful coordinate’d CC/stops are and of course the design change that all tanks should be self sustaining immortal gods.
This also is kind of required by default when you think about how a +30 is mobs doing over 1000% more damage than a +2 yet players don’t immediate cave to auto/basic attacks.
Not sure what to change/fix or if it’s even worth doing anything considering 99.9% of keys on the live game use a healer.
The MDI being crazy speed runs of low (low relative to the skill of the participants) is kind of its own thing.
To be fair there is like…0 outgoing damage in BRH.
The only “heal check” would be at final boss shadowbolt volley before the buff is applied to group, but that is negligible when everyone (properly) uses a defensive
Personal defensives have become too strong. It’s one of the reasons that survivability is more important than dps this expansion. Defensives need to be toned down across the board.
The MDI is like watching a speedrunning contest. You’ll find no keys timed on a +30 or higher with 4 dps and 1 tank. Also, they’re speedrunning +23s which are super easy for them (these teams do +30s on live), and the trash will die before they can even do any really damage.
Also, the reason they can go 4 dps + 1 tank is because they’re stacking classes that have a lot of external group healing. An Aug Evoker can also run an Emerald Blossom build which extends Ebon Might and that becomes the only group healing you need. Then you get the Shadow Priest using Vampiric Embrace, Lock for Cookies, and Mage for Mass Barrier.
MDI players are just better players and they avoid a lot of damage taken that your pugs usually run into.
It’s not necessarily that, that’s due to blizzard thinking that healing was too easy, so they invented problems to make it hard. It’s an issue of self sustain has gotten out of control again like it did in season two with shadow priests vampiric embrace and shamans ancestral guidance. In that now mage, shadow priest, evoker and druid self healing is too high, combined with AD, and BRH both don’t do a lot of unavoidable damage, and for the moments it does all of the above classes have tool kits that can easily shrug it off.
It’s just the unique combination of circumstances that have led to what we saw in the MDI, which practically isn’t replicable on live for most groups.
That these +30 groups are trashing +23 is a feature, not a bug. It’s a feature because it gives the groups the buffer necessary to do some of the over the top wacky stuff that they do to knock down their run times.
And that’s part of what make MDI fun.
I certainly don’t want to watch folks running from pack to pack, and mow them down one by one. I want these crews to be on the edge of being obliterated as they drag bosses across dungeons, round up entire wings of trash, hurdle obstacles, and push mechanics to borderline exploits.
You can’t do that with a team that doesn’t have the excess bandwidth to make those kind of shenanigans happen.
Whether a healer (or anything else) is necessary for that, I honestly don’t care. I don’t care if a specific group of 2 rogues, a mage, a DH, and a shaman stomps the charts.
Because part of the game of MDI is FINDING those combinations, discovering, and executing, those crazy tactics, live, on the clock, when it matters. The dedication, patience, and commitment these teams must have to compete should be rewarded. As long as everyone is running the same toolset, its all good. If 5 DKs can cheese the dungeon, be my guest.
It all comes down to execution. It only takes 1s to win the tournament, and everyone knows that going in. It doesn’t have to be balanced, it only need to be fair. Same toolset for everyone to make their own decisions and come to their own solutions. That’s what makes it fair.
I know this is about MDI, but you can time 20’s all tank (and the pros have pushed well above that). Timing keys will always be a factor of dps (those hit point bars need to drop); surviving is a function of gameplay, stops/cc, and then heals available/self-sustain.
MDI just takes this to the extreme. Consider that MDI is the equivalent of watching an aerial demonstration team (t-birds, the blues) and the train forever on most of those big, coordinated maneuvers. Us mere mortals don’t dedicate the time necessary to not only cultivate the skill, but the team coordination.
A healer’s value to a group is always proportionate to how well the group is in mitigating and avoiding damage. Why aren’t you crying that no life mythic tryhard raiders end up dropping healers for more DPS when they can get away with it? Healing inherently has a very hard cap on value with every literal point over being pure waste.
Also healers are largely split with way too large of a subset of them being worthless healbots who long for the day where nobody has any kind of self sustain and their entire playstyle is staring at healthbars and clicking whatever appropriate heal makes the most sense for that GCD…and they also tend to be the type to instantly start crying and whining and developing a god complex when someone has the audacity to take avoidable damage and “make them work”.
Whereas the good healers know that their objective is to keep people alive…not necessarily at 100%. A battle healer understands that healing NOT needed to be done because a key mob got burst down and/or locked down is a massive net healing and mana save…let alone the time savings in knocking something down quicker and letting the group move on…when then naturally evolves to “what if I was just a DPS and magnified this benefit even more” which is where we’re at now.
I agree that too many class have healing capabilities. With high leech and such too. But this kinda thing is choreographed down to every pull. Not a very realistic aspect of the general gameplay
It’s demon hunters (and to a lesser extent, Paladins). Being able to solo-lock an entire pack for 90 seconds pull after pull kinda kills the need to heal through the damage — it’s all on the self healing tank!
Mobs have plenty of mechanics, you just don’t need to deal with them because of Sigils.