Topic I want to talk about
That was a beautiful write up. I hope your passion and questions are heard by developers. I want to also talk about proposed changes for the Healing Hands talent for Ret and why I feel like it misses the class feel for me.
(see # numbers at the bottom for flavor text)
I am not a fan of the proposed change from the Undermine(d) Development Notes and reading what you wrote helped me better articulate why.
- As a preliminary, if this change is solely to make ~CLASS BALANCE~ work and no other way of tuning worked well enough, then I get it. Oh well.
What you said about every class doing similar things but needing to do it in a different way really resonated with me. With this change pruning the incentive to heal your team, I know the "best" way **#1** to use this talent is to heal only myself with WoGs for bonus healing. This makes me think of WoG as being kinda like Death Strike -a button you press when you are low to sacrifice active dps for self healing.
Someone could even make the argument that if you squint, Death Strike is like a WoG you can only put on yourself, and in exchange for that you get some consolidation dps. If Death Knights had a talent that would let them donate the healing of Death Strike to an ally, some players would take it, some players would like using it, and some players would say it feels too strong/too weak.
- All (or a vast majority of) players would agree that it doesn’t really fit the theme of Death Knight. However, the spell Raise Ally does fit the theme and is a “team help utility”
With the proposed changes in Undermine(d) WoG will still be usable on allies, and very often still be very helpful to the team. WoG will still read like a Paladin ability: #2 However trimming the incentive to heal others just feels like its pulling hard away from the Paladin class fantasy. Is there something about the powers of the Light that make it heal a Paladins trusted ally less than themselves? That feels pretty… selfish? -not sure the word to use.
Suggestions (yes I’m sorry I can’t help myself)
Let me get this out of the way, suggestions aren’t offered because I believe any of my brass tacks, hard math numbers ideas are any good, just as an aid to help see why I want something to be some way. Again, the overall goal is to keep the incentive of player power for spending a talent point to line up with the Class Fantasy. In no particular order:
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Give the bonus healing component an internal cooldown.
“This bonus healing cannot apply on the same target more than once every 7 seconds” - Still encourages the Paladin to help and off heal, not spammable to the point a Ret could do a Healers job (mana considerations aside) Gives added skill expression of trying to save the bonus for the best time (if possible) -
Make the bonus healing effect use more mana.
The mana cost of WoG is getting increased for Ret in these patch notes any way, if mana is supposed to be a considerable limiting factor for healing, let players have a choice of harder hitting WoGs that -may overheal -may make you go OOM -may make you out of mana for other blessing usage -etc but keeps the incentive and player power aspect of healing others -
Instead of flat bonus heals, give other following sources bonus healing
If watching a Ret bounce someone else’s hp bar back up is too strong, let the Ret’s WoG on a low health target give them the satisfaction of knowing that they are still helping the Healer (and the Team) by having subsequent healing get additional effectiveness for a short duration. This will take away some of the Rets instant feedback gratification of seeing an ally’s HP bar bounce back up but skilled healers will still know and feel when they are being helped -
Give the bonus healing an additional requirement tied to the Rets Damage
"You want ur bonus heals to save yourself or a teammate? Show me that you are doing something difficult or otherwise skillful besides just building holy power. Did you get any successful interrupts? Did you Hammer of Wrath any execute range targets recently? Did you keep above X% uptime on Expurgation?
I shouldn’t overload this list as it’ll rapidly become a wall of text, but I hope this helps you see why I want to keep the incentive to heal others and what other options can be levied to reign in its power or consistency.
Flavor Text
#1 Yes the “best” way is a constantly changing situational matrix that will never actually be useful in an argument setting. I’m doing my best here ;-;
#2 “Yea they got that button thats like a big heal or something costs combo points idk man -its really annoying when they chain heal themselves in pvp just stun em or make them go OOM”