I decided to sit and call it at 1850 rating in RSS on my Healer paladin since it is so frustrating and punishing. Moreover, I got the full Xmog set and got not real incentive to keep on pushing in these conditions.
Then I decided to switch DPS and try my Warlock. Oh boy…
At least 30 mins queue.
Everyone plays melee and will tunnel you.
Toxicity is rampant.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution, But It is saddening to see a game format that is appealing and so much promising on paper going so wrong and bad.
Oh they came up with solutions but DPS cried for them to be nerfed.
The reality is DPS queue times are directly tied to healer participation and as long as playing a healer is a toxic experience from both players and blizzard systems and design philosophy it won’t happen. If you want faster queues you need healing to be enjoyable and less dependent of a role.
Right now healer in WoW is what support was in S2 League of Legend. Yes you had your impact running around on Sona/Soraka spamming your heals and buying auras but none of it felt anywhere near as impactful as Thresh hooks who rewrote the entire support role.
Likewise Disc was rewriting the healer role with strong DPS that allowed a healer to actually be a threat that had to be respected for once and naturally DPS couldn’t have that. One thing I’ll give League when people complained about Thresh they didn’t backdown or abandon the design philosophy like blizzard did when it came to a high damage healer.
Their solution was to allow lower/higher mmr healers to join into dps lobbies, as it only really matters that the healers are matched with each other, that aren’t similar mmr to them.
And it worked, que times were much faster in s2. This however was greatly complained about for obvious reasons so now here we are back at 30min+ que times since it appears to be stricter on how close the healers have to be to the dps.
Blizzard can’t do anything about the fact that healers are traditionally a much smaller population size compared to DPS in every single game mode (and every mmorpg for that matter)
This was a 100% inevitable outcome to giving this game a solo que rated arena system. If the dungeon finder had rating attached to it, it would play out exactly as solo shuffle ques do.
Ah yes just like it was idiotic to tie games modes such as mythic+ raiding, and coordinated arena/rated BGs to them as well.
This is just a sour grapes comment that has no real validity or thought behind it. Back to the league example it’s just like the people who complained about support even being a role and saying Riot should remove it even though Riot didn’t come up with it, the players did in response to game design.
The reality of WoW design is healers are essential in all forms of group content with the only potential exception being 2v2s.
Back to the topic of RSS the thing is in coordinated groups you can have low agency classes with high impact skills, this tends to be where healers fall with the perfect example being a Rdruid who has low agency for ending a game but can have huge impact with stuns/cyclones/roots/etc giving them solid control and setting up teammates to win. The problem with this comes back to WoW design. Outside of coordinated groups all of that set up often gets ignored by teammates and results in the Rdruid’s impact becoming negligible to no real fault of their own. This is why I keep saying healers need more agency, they need more ability to actually punish mistakes to end games without having to depend on rando’s to take advantage of set up 90% of them wouldn’t even know happened.
that’s why the healers stopped queuing and queue times increased because healing was already aids and people were not pressing their defensives. with this change it gave healers the chance to play with people 600 mmr under them and get even more tilted so they all quit
Indeed different individuals will have different reasons, however, individuals won’t make queue times go down and so looking at system issues from how the design of the game conflicts with RSS is a better place to start imo than the rewards system.
You can get people to interact with specific elements of your game for less rewards if those elements are enjoyable for them to begin with.
You can’t fix people though. More rules will just make the game less fun. While it’s nice for people to be respectful and friendly, it just won’t happen. More rules will just get abused and less people will play. The better thing is to fix the reward system first and make time input more valuable.
While I get what you’re saying about changing the role some, I think that would just muddy the water more and make the game even more difficult to balance. NOT that it can’t be done or that it’s not a good idea, but seeing Disc or even Augment play these past two expansions, it’s just difficult to balance a damage and healing spec. From a play stand point, disc was super fun last expansion early on, but it was also busted. I don’t think they’ll ever be able to balance atonement properly.
I think if they make healer MMR slightly out pace dps mmr, people would heal a lot more. WAY MORE. If you knew you could get higher playing a healer over a dps, that would be a natural draw. As is, you get less, so why not go the easier route?
I agree you can’t change people, I would also point you back to League a game known for it’s toxic community and yet it continues to have a massive audience playing every role, and yes some are bigger than others, but outside of very high ratings no one is waiting 30+ minutes for a queue to pop. Yes some of that is the auto-fill which can be annoying but even with that the eversion to support has long since declined since it is no longer Sona/Soraka but also can include even mage supports like Vel’Koz/Brand/Lux/etc.
Yes if you position disc where it needs to be it will be overpowered, and I intentionally use that instead of broken or busted as you did, because overpowered can be addressed with tuning and redesigning classes in similar roles to fit the new design philosophy. Broken and busted designs really don’t have a method to be healthy. Disc doing proper damage like it did with the original expiation build should of been the benchmark for Blizzard looking at other healers and going “how can we make them feel as good to play at this?”
If they had brought other healers up to discs level instead of knocking disc back down to being all impact no agency like the entire healer class is now, we wouldn’t be having a conversation about long queues.
I mean imagine if you wanted to be a grandmaster but all you where ever allowed to do is coach. Yes you can impact the players you coach but you have no agency over how the game is actually played and you want that agency. That is healing specs in this game right now.
I haven’t even gotten to play this season yet outside of a few meme 2s because I drop out after 45 minutes every time. I wish I still had a 2s partner just to avoid this god awful queue, or that Death Knights could heal.
Just by its design though, it either feast or famine. If your damage is doing enough to keep targets topped, there is no reason to heal. Likewise, if damage isn’t doing enough healing, you fall behind on pressure/damage and healing never lets you catch back up.
It’s a fun design, but I just don’t think it will ever work.
Could add NPC healers to fill the gaps.
They might suck real bad, but probably not as bad as a 40 minute queue.
There are some decent bots playing the game right now lol
You’re still competing against the other healer though and not the DPS. The ultimate issue is the mmr but I agree it’d be nice if they took like 20% of the damage away from DPS and gave it to healers. Also it’s messed up that DPS have infinite resources meanwhile healers run oom so fast and all their DPS abilities cost so much mana
I’m not saying every healer should be designed like disc. You can give each healer different DPS patterns, just like DPS have, in order to make them effective. Disc for example depends a lot on consistent damage because of it’s healing to damage style. Rshammy on the other hand could depend on burst windows, like Stormkeeper(buff it), while Rdruid could be more DoT based to play into it’s overtime theme.
The issue is very little has really been done to enable these playstyles in pvp as all the damage profiles of those classes, outside of disc, are clearly designed for a pve setting such as Rdruids kitty cleaving, and Rshammy acid rain.
When everyone is doing threatening damage in their own way that is designed specifically for pvp then we can start talking about balance but until that is done discussing balance is moot imo.
Another option they could give to healers in order to make them a threat would be to add back spells like Mana Burn and create other options that actually screws with resource systems again. Blizz has it in their heads that DPS resource systems are set in stone and no one should ever be able to mess with it, hell they removed mana burn from priest because of how good it was against rets/boomkins/mages/shammy/etc during BC–>early Wrath which was stupid.