Priests went from good shields to good heals while retaining great utility. Mages go from good raid-wide heals to… what, exactly?
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Despite what’ve sayed in my main post
I agree 100% with OP, Change numbers and keep our gameplay, my post was more about beeing open-minded to the DEVs ideas
I LOVE playing my own game by MRing 4 groups, batching spells and syncing barrages with dmg spikes, gameplay is FUN, we all think this, would rather have 60%/50%/40% of my healing instead of 80% and keep the same gameplay.
DONT CHANGE DE GAMEPLAY LOOP, PLEASE
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Yeah, no - I can read. I know what you said. But that doesn’t make it true.
Your view of these changes suggest you lack a basic understanding of mage healing. Case in point, comparing it to priest shields being nerfed.
If these changes go live as-is mage healing is basically doa. You’re better off bringing a shadow priest. The ability of a mage to blanket the raid with healing is covering up the glaring holes in their toolkit (which, admittedly, can be overpowered at times).
Destroying our ability to do that while simultaneously not compensating us in other ways is extremely problematic.
Not to mention destroying what has been the mage healer class fantasy for the entire existence of SoD.
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I’d be fine with our MR being able to cover only one group at once. There’s many ways to keep our distinctive playstyle while doing that.
For example, have MR beacons get removed when a new MR is cast but remove the cooldown on MR entirely.
Or make our regen and mass regen spells non-channeled spells so we can keep casting other stuff while they happen.
There’s so many options to make us balanced. What they chose feels like the worst option possible because it changes our fundamental playstyle into something unrecognizeable.
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We are talking playstyle change not HPS. We had been shielding for 6 months straight at that point and it was changed with 5 days notice to phase launch. We will be fine same as Priests were.
It does make it true you are just wrong and heavily biased. Mage healing will still be good for the majority of the player base. I made the playstyle comparison because thats what one the complaints was. Priests and now Mages are in the same boat of having a major playstyle change happen to them before a new phase. The thing tying it all together? They were both deserved.
I have and actively raid on every healing class except shaman (because I’m alliance). I can assure you, I’m not heavily biased.
Again, your suggestion that priests and mages are in the same boat displays your complete lack of understanding of the state of mage healing.
No we won’t, they are nerfing the only thing heal mages are good for. What else are we good at? Priests have an entire kit to lean on.
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Clearly you are. Ur biased posts prove that. Have a good day.
We will be great at keeping A group topped and regening. I think this is a nice fresh addition to our playstyle.
And that makes it official. Just blatant trolling lol.
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No we won’t, a single resto druid will be thrice better at it while bringing barkskin, innervate and heal aura to the table. It’s not an addition to our playstyle, it’s a destruction of our current playstyle to replace it by something else. That nobody who really plays this class wants.
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Its not. Again Harboring a different opinion than you ≠ trolling.
I find it odd that you are derailing this conversation. I also find it odd that you are trolling on the Official WoW Classic [Season of Discovery Patch 1.15.7 PTR] forums. Again, have a good day.
Name one other healer that is restricted to heal one group and one group only for 15 seconds and tell me that makes for an effective healer. You can’t. Because healers have to be able to do more than heal one group every 15 seconds.
If that is what mage healing is reduced to, they are not healers - they’re shadow priests. That do less damage.
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Hi, I play two healer mages currently and I wholeheartedly agree with this. The reason our raid teams wanted a healer mage was due to the coverage, the healing % numbers throughput scaled ridiculously out of control in Naxx with the set bonus percentages along with the seal percentages. The healer seal received a nerf in the first week of naxx as well where the damage seal was untouched and mages got to coast through for free, and we now see just a ridiculous amount of throughput which was left completely untouched for the entirety of the naxx phase. My mages are not brought to have the utilities of external defensives, supplying inspiration, battle res/innervate, totems, etc, its strictly the access to 4 groups of healing at a time. If the healing return was reduced by 50%, it would still make sense to bring the mage due to the one unique nature of the spec - its coverage, without that coverage it’s simply reroll in my eyes and will remain a dead spec, which is sad seeing as this is SoD and mage is the only new healer class that was introduced.
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I sure as hell hope they didn’t knee-jerk a full destruction of the heal mage playstyle because they looked at the Naxx numbers which are HEAVILY skewed due to seal of the dawn.
You didn’t do that, right Blizz?
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Naxx will be the end of the road for me if this regeneration/channelling playstyle goes live. I don’t care about the numbers but you cant fundamentally change how a spec plays this deep into SOD, these types of reworks are reserved for new expansions for a reason.
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THIS, 100%, THIS
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Blizzard seems to have 3 core goals with the recent changes on the PTR.
- Reduce the dominance in terms of raid healing caused by the current state of Mass Regen. This is fair as it is currently the single best source of raidwide healing at the moment with a Druid in full Naxx gear being able to potentially compete on some fights with their 6-set bonus.
- Increase the incentives to cast the single target Regeneration, as currently most mage healers don’t even bother to take the rune. This is well deserved, it heals for less than any other heal in the game with a similar cast time, applies the same Beacon that Mass Regen does on 1/5 the people, and represents a significant loss in damage and/or healing just by taking the rune due to competing options in the same slot.
- Incentivize mages to fully channel both of their regen spells. As it stands there is no incentive to channel either Regen spell beyond one or maybe two ticks, as any damage spell you cast instead will provide significantly more healing to significantly more people than the last 1-2 ticks of either of these spells ever will. Additionally, Arcane Mages who want to use Arcane Blast to increase the damage of their spells currently do so by building up stacks, casting a Regen spell, then cancelling it before the last tick so that their Barrage or Missiles can still benefit from the Blast stacks. This is typically the only time it is correct to cast either of these spells. Not doing so currently represents a 15-30% reduction in damage dealt by either of these spells.
However, they have done this in a way that turns the mage rotation from weaving heals in between a consistent DPS rotation to provide moderate, but consistent healing to all of your beacon targets to a rotation primarily dominated by channeling your regen spells and occasionally casting a damage spell after spending an extended duration building up beacons by full channeling regen spells. The changes have also done nothing to make Regeneration a good spell on its own, meaning rather than making Regeneration feel good to cast they have instead decided to just force mages to cast a spell that is still as bad as it always was.
Here is a list of suggestions that would address the same goals without completely altering mage’s rotation or nerfing them into the dirt.
Alternative Nerfs to Mass Regen.
- Make Mass Regen last a shorter duration by nerfing or reworking the Eternal Caretaker shoulder enchant/rune, which would have the upside of opening up that slot for alternative options.
- Have Mass Regen’s Chronostatic Beacon have half effectiveness on top of half duration, only healing targets for 30-40% of damage dealt.
Make Regeneration not Completely Useless.
- Have the Beacon applied by Regeneration heal the target by a larger percentage of damage dealt. This was going to be implemented with the previous T3.5 4 piece, but has been removed in favor of making Mass Regen even weaker unless you have 4 pieces of the new tier.
- Change the channeling behavior of regeneration to be more like Warlocks drain life with their rune, where it is an instant cast spell that applies the channel but allows damaging spells to still be cast during the channel duration. Perhaps pair this with a short cooldown.
- Give the Regeneration rune some sort of passive benefit specifically for healers to make sure it doesn’t get out-competed by alternative chest runes. For example, you could give Mass Regeneration its proposed 15 second cooldown, reduced down to it’s current or a slightly nerfed cooldown if Regeneration is equipped or have it provide a passive bonus or party buff as utility in addition to it’s current effects that would make it out-compete Enlightenment as a pure healer.
Make Channeling Spells Not Completely Awful to Full Channel
(The PTR change to make Haste work with these spells definitely helps, though for some reason it still isn’t working with Arcane Missiles. There are some other changes that could be made to more directly fix these problems.)
- Allow these spells to be channeled while moving or allow more spells to be cast while they are channeling without interrupting them.
- Significantly reduce the channeling time so you aren’t forced to waste a full GCD to heal for an additional 800-1200 health on the targets you are channeling on instead of more than that amount on every target with your beacon on it by casting a single damage spell.
- Make it so the spells don’t consume Arcane Blast stacks when they finish channeling or provide the mage a buff of some sort for full channeling to offset this loss.
While some of the proposed changes would be buffs, they would be buffs to aspects of the spec that it is currently extremely weak at compared to other healers. Mage’s only value at the moment is that it provides consistent uptime, moderate heals across a large portion of the raid. The current changes would leave mage in a position where it is less fun to play while still providing provides absolutely no utility compared to other healers, while also putting it in a position where it where it has no healing it excels at compared to other healers. It will continue to be worse at tank healing than the every alternative healer, will absolutely be outperformed in terms of raid healing by Druids and potentially the other healers. This is on top of them providing absolutely 0 impactful raid buffs, debuffs, or utility options within a fight. We don’t provide a raid buff nearly as important as fortitude, we do not provide the raid with massive mana regen, we cannot battle rez or provide spot mana regen in the form of innervate, we have no meaningful external cooldowns for the tank or raid besides a single burst heal on a 30 second cooldown that requires moderate setup. Unless the proposed changes are paired with massive reworks to spells that have not been put on the PTR, I cannot conceive of a reason why a raid would ever intentionally give a spot to a mage healer over any of the alternatives. I could maybe see an argument for damage being significant utility, but these changes aren’t just a targeted nerf at frost healing. They obliterate the playstyle of Arcane healers as much if not more, and that version of the spec currently does half to a third the damage of a tank so I hardly think that pitiful damage output counts as any sort of meaningful utility.
The fact that the only real attention Blizzard has given to mage healers over the past several phases is to seemingly gut them completely by attacking the only fun element of the spec, primarily casting damage spells to heal. Every change is pushing mage into a direction where they are incentivized to stand in one spot and channel healing spells while occasionally weaving in a damage spell. On top of that, it’s done in the most ham-fisted way possible by locking use of one of the two actually good spells they have across their entire selection of runes behind spamming an under-tuned spell that by all accounts would have been buffed three phases ago if it belonged to one of the current dev team’s favored children like Paladin or Shaman.
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Big fan of these changes. Hope they end up staying, it adds a new layer to our rotation.
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I agree. I’ve been playing mage healer the entirety of SoD and have dealt with the various changes both for the class and the version of the game because as someone who has played every healer in classic through wrath over the years, the concept of healing mage and damaging to heal was appealing to me. Throughout SoD, I have enjoyed both the frost and arcane healer playstyles and feel like they each have their places depending on the raid comp. In my guild, which typically runs 4 healers (2 resto sham, a priest, and me) plus a shadow priest and has 2 other mages, I have felt like a strong raid healer who is the most flexible towards more damage or healing depending on progression needs and provides the WC buff as a support. We are not a speedrunning guild but we do try to focus on progression and improving our parses, so my role in particular as a frost mage healer has found a great niche in that regard.
I don’t want to spend time casting a non-damage channeling spell to heal when I chose to play a different type of healer. I already hate how clunky CSP is and it doesn’t feel like it fits the playstyle. I understand that mage HPS might need some tuning and certainly there are other runes that could use some rework in order to get them utilized more in this role. However, I am concerned that with these changes the playstyle will be changed so drastically that in comparison to other classes that I can’t effectively perform in this niche anymore. It genuinely makes me think I should just reroll to yet another shadow priest (not the first time throughout SoD I have thought this) or a resto druid as one would be far more effective at the raid healer leaning damage heavy and the other more effective as raid healer leaning heal heavy role. Not to mention they also bring much more raid utility with their externals, and their rotations will not be nearly as unfun and clunky as mage healing will be in order to get the job done. It makes me sad to think about, as I have loved healing mage and want to see it continue to be developed properly and maintain a unique and desired role on a healing team. I also want it to live on and not just be a one time experiment for a seasonal version of the game.
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Does mage healing need a nerf? Yes.
But not like this.
Basically there are 2 options right now with the updated tier set.
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frost healing only the one group because can’t give up FoF realistically
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arcane healing (with 4p) on 2-3 groups, and spamming Regen to be able to cast MR and giving basically minimal heals, cause not much free globals for damaging spells
mages healers heal from their beacon, we always have ever since P1. We don’t heal from Regen or mass Regen, those have literally only been used to apply beacons to targets.
The issue with trying to force Regen into existence is that the regens healing scales off healing power, NOT spell power. The way healer tier sets have been designed/being designed is contradictory to how mages have been healing for all of SoD.
All healing mages have stacked spell power because the entire premise of mage healing is healing by doing damage.(healing with our beacon).
So we can either stack healing power and have slightly better Regen heals making beacons useless, or we can stack spell power and make our regens healing useless and only a vessel to apply beacons. Continue to do subpar damage and being great raid healers.
This is bad but it wouldn’t be SOOOO bad if Regen/Mass Regens healing scaled off spell power, not just healing power.
My question to blizzard, are mage flat out healers? Or are mages damage dealing healers? Because as it stands y’all have no idea which and are trying to make us both and it’s not going to work. One or the other please :3
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