I would love to heal on my druid at 25. Cats only use 1 bleed, their defining characteristic, on 7 encounters in the entire game. Every other pve or PvP encounter bleeds aren’t used. It’s boring.
I healed on a shaman in retail for years. Would love to in sod, but it’s not really viable right now.
I don’t think “nerf penance” is some magic cure-all. Shadow needs fixed and other healing classes need help with efficiency. But I’m sure I’m not the only person who has given up on healing on other classes for this phase. I actually rolled a priest to level last night just in case.
Then do it. They are the literal best raid healer for BFD. The optimal comp is priest + druid.
They don’t use bleeds right now because rake is not worth the energy over mangle and power shifting doesn’t allow for getting two finishing moves out of the rotation until the helm is available. Not enough energy.
This is partially due to bad rune support and partially due to shaman lacking some critical features for healing they don’t get in this bracket. A lot of the “pain points” for Phase 1 is due to level cap 25. Priest has everything they will have going forward right now. Most other healers do not.
The pinch on healers isn’t caused by priest being OP, it’s caused by priest being a popular class + not having an alternative option. All priests are healers, so therefor all 400k of the priests are fighting for those healing spots. Even if they nerfed priests tomorrow that won’t change. The only way to change that would be to nerf priests SO HARD that they aren’t wanted anymore, which would leave 400k players without the ability to play the game.
I tanked Zul Farrak as my shadow priest in Classic because there weren’t enough people at that level when we went in there. Challenge accepted in Phase 2.
Part of the problem isn’t that priests are so strong, its that based on the current raid content, without priests raids are just hurting. Nerfing priests would only compound the problems as many people are already struggling with the last 2 bosses, and reducing healing would hurt this even more. Most healers weren’t setup to heal a raid at 25, spell ranking at 25 is awful, and some like shamans and paladins got little in the way to actually make their healing better, and they don’t even really have runes you could improve that would make a difference.
I’m aware. But similar to the problem with feral bleeds, you’re talking about 7 encounters in the whole game. Priests are dominant in every other situation. Which is totally fine. I actually agree they should be the best healers with 2 healing trees.
But that’s half the game. Best practice in PvP for resto druid is literally wild growth and root anyone focusing your priest. I’m dead serious. Not only that, but we’re so inefficient that int/stam gear is mandatory if you shift at all. Bear is incapable of tanking these new abilities so the only relevant shift is cat, and feline swiftness becomes mandatory as an escape. So I can PvP as feral with wild growth and keep our priests alive, or I can spec resto with spirit gear and raid heal bfd and dungeons. Which is why I gave up on resto.
You make good points, and I agree nerfing penance in isolation may cause more problems than it solves. But tuning it is part of the equation.
Coming from a Resto druid, I personally don’t have too much of an issue with Penance. Sure, the mana cost could be upped a little bit. My issue is with Pray of Mending. It shouldn’t heal as much as it does.
So why not say the same for arcane missiles? Make it tic for 300 after wsg resilience. Mages are easy to kill so it should be fair, give it an even bigger cd at 12.5 seconds. That should make it fair.
If something has a counter then the numbers don’t matter. Kiting warriors is easy, so blizzard can give them second wind and 5k hp, just learn to play!
This is a numbers game before all else, the numbers literally decide everything else. It seems like if you can’t discuss the numbers and just bring “l2p” to the table you aren’t really prepared to defend your position.
