I feel like a lot of my issues with healing come from the new talents and the healing nerfs. It feels like spot healing has basically become nonexistent. I’m speaking as someone who mained resto druid for the first season, and dabbled in holy paladin for this one.
In season 1, resto felt like they had good throughput, but had essentially zero spot healing. Regrowth feels like it barely heals someone for 10% of their hp, hot included, and the weird talent design of resto druid means that swiftmend is much better used as a SOTF buff instead of a spot healing ability. Even if you wanted to use it as an emergency spot heal, well, now you have to have a hot to consume on someone, so lol.
And now, all healing just feels really really weak in general. Looking back to SL, I feel like every heal just did more, and I could use them for their intended purpose, not for the purpose of stacking up three different buffs on my next wild growth. This is even more true for BFA and Legion.
I feel like part of that is the fault of the new talents in general, as I have noticed that issue with many specs. Havoc DH used to have a pretty simple, reactive rotation and short opener. Now it has a massive prio list rotation and a 15 ability opener. Also, you have to use all of your mobility abilities to buff your damage.
I know I’m just rambling at this point but I feel like Dragonflight has a lot of issues that aren’t really being discussed because the top 1% of players are really happy with it.
Season 1 is harder than season 2 comparatively speaking.
Speaking of shadowlands, what keys were you doing? I think you’re misremembering it entirely. The same top people up or they die existed, less lack of capacity to do so but rather the timing of it.
I guess to me it hasn’t changed much.
Oh, I guess I can think of one change: tank healing feels worse. Might also be cause evoker, and not resto druid.
SG alone is almost a 5 man lay on hands every 32ish seconds.
Yulon is very powerful for blanket sustained healing on a short 1 minute cooldown.
And Soom/Envem/vivify spam is a lot of ST healing.
Renewing mists sole purpose is for vivify cleave, which can extend to the entire party fairly easy with Rising Mist and the talent that has enveloping most and RSK apply a 6 second renewing mist.
Spot healing is very bad yeah heard about one healer posting that a ret Paladin was the best spot healer in their raid.
Yuh this is why I hate caster MW just putting up Renewing mists and then channelling Vivifys into someone with Soothing Mist to just cleave heal everyone and thats like all Renewing Mist is good for.
Thankfully as Fistweaver I only really need do to it it if like big burst happens and I have no Mist built up for Sheilun’s just gotta keep the Renewing Mist out
On some point it makes sense, did a 10 UNDR with 401 GS on HPal and needed to pull off 76k HPS which I didn’t even know would be possible with that gear.
But this rot stuff seems to be percantual because 10-22 I always need between 70-85k HPS for that fight independent from Keylevel
I’m not really talking about the difficulty of dungeons and spiky damage, I’m more talking about the other side of it which is the weakness of healers and the weird design behind them. I think you mentioning tank healing feeling worse is a really good example. Abilities that would normally be used for emergency spot healing essentially do nothing now. It feels like you don’t even see health bars move, and overall healing is now more the combination of a million spinning plates than actually using an ability in the moment where healing is needed.
Even holy paladin, which in the past has had a really heavy focus on single target heals, has really week feeling single target heals. It feels like a ret word of glory or prot word of glory does far more healing than a holy paladin word of glory. Why? Because healers having bursty heals is bad or something. Holy shock feels like it literally does nothing, even on DPS. It’s more about maintaining a consistent rotation, especially during cooldown windows like Beacon of Virtue, than it is actually reactively topping people off.
I feel more than adequate for healing incoming damage. It’s more of a “we misplayed” issue than damage being too high or heals being too weak, and that’s above 20s, before enlightenment.
Lost track of this thread, but for perspective I stopped healing during Wrath with Ulduar, haven’t looked back on it since. I cannot speak to DF or any other expansions so if no one is getting abused “Yay!” but I prefer a less stressful environment than getting blamed for not healing through avoidable mechanics–and as a bonus I have a lot more fun nowadays.
healing from paladin was miserable before changes. that’s why we saw that there are almost always 1-2 offhealers in the group. there was no other way.
absolutely brainless and embarrassing design! It couldn’t be more embarrassing!
after the change it is much better. but still not enough. and in the end it depends again on the group. if group doesn’t have hardcore burst dmg or very good def cds → then it’s game over.
a holy paladin can’t even carry a group with trash gear in brak 17. I had defeated the final boss after 4-5 tries. and that was a healer who healed almost every 25-26 first try.
17 is trash content atm. so you can’t take it seriously.
if i want a chilled game, i don’t even invite people under 2800. because there are too many noobs out there even with a rating like that.
and in the low keys you meet these toxic animals that don’t know anything. there are always exceptions, of course.
I do think healers dps should provide smart trickle heals to the group, not enough to defend against a misstep or a boss mechanic but enough to counter rot.
I also think a healer dps should be increased so it actually feels worth it (not to chart topping levels but at least fighting alongside a tank, PvP is balanced separately so it doesn’t matter)
Give them all talents that promote switching between heals and dps, then after the “heal phase” finishes you have a nice chunky damage spell charged up, then after you dps for a bit you have a nice burst heal in your back pocket.
Giving everyone the same feeling as a disc priest doesn’t feel like the play. Granted in the ancient past, disc was strong at healing and provided damage. Unlike the others who couldn’t dream to do the same.
If people want to dps, they would be playing a dps.
Unfortunately, Blizz has designed dungeons/raids with constant damage that requires the healers attention or it will cause a wipe…it just creates an unfun situation for a lot of healers (myself included, although I only alt-spec sometimes)
Overall, they just need to make healing requirements more forgiving and allow those that want to DPS during gaps to do it instead of trying to force heal-only gameplay. If healers want to be lazy during the gaps…then I’m fine with that too, but it’s up to their groups to decide how they want to handle it.
At this point, in my opinion, healing is the most stressful and demanding role in the game.
