Tanks "healing" more than Healers is bad game design

There is a huge difference between mitigation and self-healing. Mitigation helps tanks sustain the massive hits they receive, but it doesn’t keep them at full health for extended periods of time.

I think at this point we’ve all had runs that went bad and the tank was the only one left alive, only to have the tank end up being able to solo the last 15% of the boss. That’s not mitigation, or equivalent to mitigation, that’s overpowered. One single person shouldn’t be able to perform the job of the entire group for any significant period of time.

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It doesn’t feel bad at all. If your ego requires you to top the meters, play dps. Healing meters aren’t competitive. If anything, a successful run with low hps output means your team played well.

I heal all the time and being beat by the tank feels great. Period. It’s the best thing to ever happen in any game sense the invention of chess and gives every healer except you a big smile.

You are wrong about how all healers feel.

Yeah, assessing those situations is a skill. Good resto druids do it a lot and I’ve seen them do maybe 45-50k overalls in keys.

It’s definitely the hardest spec to do it well on, and far from expected in average keys.

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More hots on me means that my rage is dumped into more razes instead of ironfur and FR. Win/win for everyone.

Moo!

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Should also note that you can take w/e a prot warrior’s healing is and half it. Because half of their healing is basically Ignore Pain.

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I do it all the time on my rdruid. It’s not a hard tell, it’s very obvious when and where, it’s not fun gameplay, it’s busy work.

That doesn’t mean it’s beneficial to let all the ramps expire, so that you are starting from scratch again on the entire group. It’s something that’s constantly being maintained.

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Depends on the situation, hence assessing if you have the opportunity to do damage being one of the hardest things about resto druid.

I’ve also done that on Ret paladin and unholy dk. Hell, I used to solo m+ bosses from 20 or 30 as resto shaman during Shadowlands.

Sure it could be op, not saying that’s never it, but it could also be skill.

I, for one, think that tanks should be able to more or less survive on their own.

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They wouldn’t have to though, tanks can mitigate more and heal way less. They just chose not to design that way. A wall of infinite scaling will be hit either way. Tanks can solo up to a point either way as well.

Offloading some healing to tanking allows tanks to be gods up to certain points and healers to be useless up to those same points. There is little reason to stop splitting the load at 2 and not just split the load between the whole group and stop needing “healers” all together.

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I don’t really know how to measure my performance as a healer in raiding. In keys it is easy, how many death? Low or 0? Ok then it went fine! Many deaths? I check the log to see what they were, if I could have prevented it. But in raiding what do y’all use is HPS actually good in there?

It’s kind of a question of scaling. A boss, raid or dungeon, cannot do more tank damage than 4 whole trash packs on fortified. So if a tank is supposed to be able to share the burden with a healer in that situation, they’re probably able to sustain themselves in less tank damage intense situations.

There was a time when tanks mitigated damage instead of healing it. I’d like to see blizz shift more towards that. Making tanks completely self sufficient is why blizz has to design so many mechanics that one shot dps players. The number of runs this expansion where everyone but the tank dies and the tank just keeps going while everyone else runs back is absurd. It’s fun tanking a boss and killing it solo from 50% when the rest of the group is dead, but it’s not good for the game.

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“Not needing to be a dedicated tank healer” does not mean healers are useless.

Healing can become a lot more interesting and varied if healers don’t have to prioritize dumping their cheapest/most efficient heal into the tank.

Depends what level of raiding. In general mythic progress isn’t about HPS it’s about proper execution of a strategy. Your RL will have everyone’s healing cds assigned to specific points in the fight and it’s your job to execute your healing cd to its fullest potential at those points in order to survive massive damage and mechanic overlaps.

Besides that it’s much of the same, don’t let people die.

Remember healing is a zero sum game, there is only a finite amount of damage in a fight and you have other healers, as well as specs that do their amount of healing so your parse often relies more on what your teammates arent doing than what you are, making it relatively ineffective.

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Eventually they do need healers, but the healers contribution is not valued well.

It is as bad a metric as any metric taken in isolation. DPS can and is padded all the time. It’s a specific design choice to make tanks about healing damage instead of mitigating damage. And it devalues healers and makes people not want to play them. Further, it enables and encourages healer-less groups.

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95% damage reduction for 3 hits or something would be near zero at all levels of difficulty.

We have blood dk levels of healing as opposed to say, I guess warrior?

I will never understand the conceptualization some people have of healers.

Why is being a tank’s pocket healer a more fun/intriguing prospect than… pretty much any other design?

For me, I do enjoy the healing more when I am spending a lot of the time healing like now. I don’t really want to think about dpsing as a healer. If they had talents in the healer trees that would do comparative DPS for overhealing, and equal mana boosts, that would be quite fun for me. I would also play the heck out of a support healer spec.

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