Tanks "healing" more than Healers is bad game design

[Lips-turalyon]

blame m+
/10char

[Preelixx-dunemaul]

When the game went from cooperative content where you succeeded as a group of different roles to everyone obsessing about damage meters for the bragging rights on some imaginary scoreboard and the never ending cries of balance homogenized all activities to how high of a damage number you got on the logs.

Welcome to modern gaming.

[Moofurìon-bleeding-hollow]

@Malcvi-stormrage

It didn’t used to be that way.

True in the early patches of most expansions tanks need to kite because they can’t mitigate enough damage and the healers had no way to keep up. This saw a dramatic reduction in the number of tanks in early patches of any given expansion and certain tanks being near nonexistent because they couldn’t kite or relied to much on self healing instead of mitigation.

I personally hated this and hope we never go back to that. I play a bear to take a fist to the melon and bite back not run away.

Moo!

[Sanaera-wyrmrest-accord]

Talk about rose tinted glasses

[Preelixx-dunemaul]

@Lips-turalyon

blame m+

I blame anime. It’s alway anime.

Mythic+ can be fun but it has an unearned dominance on player perception on how the game can be played.

[Malcvi-stormrage]

@Argorwal-ysera

It’s kind of hard to make tanks totally reliant on their healer in an infinite scaling system.

If they needed focused healing from auto attack damage in a +5 how is that going to scale to +25?

This cutoff will happen no matter what and the exact same observable scaling occurs. Instead of how can you need a healer for a +5 and a +25, it’s how can you need a tank to be able to heal for a +5 and a +25. With the distinction that if you make tanks able to massively outheal healers, then even when the healer is eventually needed their contribution and performance is diminished in comparison.

[Hpellipsis-whisperwind (Hpellipsis)]

@Malcvi-stormrage

With the distinction that if you make tanks able to massively outheal healers, then even when the healer is eventually needed their contribution and performance is diminished in comparison.

Yes but how much healing is a healer going to be doing if they’re supposed to keep up a tank that can’t attempt to sustain themselves, and how do you then tune that against the rest of the game where tanks would take significantly less damage and the focus is more on group healing.

If healers have to put out ridiculous theoretical numbers to make up for tanks no longer being able to manage their own health pool then what do you do about them doing ridiculous numbers everywhere else?

Splitting the load between two roles makes way more sense when you realise this.

[Argorwal-ysera (Argorwal)]

@Moofurìon-bleeding-hollow

@Serivahn-proudmoore

Tanks should be mitigating damage instead of healing, I guess. But I’m not game designer, I’m just saying that for me it feels AWFUL to play a HEALER and be outhealed by the TANK.

It really looks like it is a “me” problem here, the VAST MAJORITY of people don’t agree with my take. It’s like 95% of replies disagree with me. I’m ok with that. I will just move on and stop healing, since I’m not having fun.

I would ask that you take a step back and look at it from a tanks perspective.

You are looking to play a tank, what tank do you choose? Right now tanks have a wide variety of play styles from what kind of damage intake they have to what kind of damage they mitigate and if they are primarily a mitigation or healing style tank. What you are asking for is a massive homogenization that would make all tanks the same.

1. BDk - Poor mitigation, most of it is from maintaining your bone shield. However they do high amounts of healing that also grants them a shield. They are very very spiky and prone to one shots. Damage type doesn’t mater.
2. VDH - Equal amounts mitigation and leech, depending on build and tier set can be very spiky or very smooth damage intake. High amount of magic damage mitigation.
3. Prot Pally - Good mitigation, I think its balanced physical and damage mitigation. They have good healing and the healing can be used on anyone. Fairly smooth mitigation.
4. Prot warrior - High physical mitigation but limited magical mitigation. Very low self healing but mitigates through blocks like a champ. Damage intake in most patches seems to be smooth although I’m no expert.
5. Bear - Great physical mitigation almost no magical mitigation, has great self healing in FR and with the new talents has good group healing with after the wildfire and regrowth (I full expect this to be nerfed.)

We see the same types of play styles in healers with focus on single or aoe healing to hots, mitigation or regular heal style and with how many CD’s they have versus the strength of a normal heal. Its important that different specs of a role play differently.

I primarily pug and yes I’m often on top of the healing charts on this character but its because there is often nothing to heal when people follow mechanics properly. When the poo hits the fan in bad groups healers will far out heal me and tend to be thankful they don’t have to babysit the tank. In fact on this character healers love that I can also heal melee as much as I do as it takes some pressure off some of the higher heal checks.

If you want to heal more I would suggest bringing players with lower IO scores into your +20 keys. These payers will often not know how to avoid mechanics or simply don’t care and you will have more to heal putting you on top of the chart. You can also avoid choosing tanks that have high healing like bears and BDK’s.

Moo!

Monk tanks not even mentioned.

They historically have very smooth damage intake with stagger.

[Rita-velen]

I like when the tank can survive easily, because when I get a bad tank, at least the tank isn’t dying all the time. And when I get a good tank, I just DPS more. The tank dying is frequently a group wipe, much worse than a DPS dying. I much prefer a DPS dying than the tank.

[Avarrity-area-52]

could just have super damage reduction, might lead to tanks all feeling the same then.

[Moofurìon-bleeding-hollow]

I knew I was forgetting one. I played a monk tank for about a week when it came out. Sorry didn’t mean to leave you guys out.

Moo!

[Hpellipsis-whisperwind (Hpellipsis)]

@Avarrity-area-52

could just have super damage reduction, might lead to tanks all feeling the same then.

That leads to tanks taking no damage at all in lower content though.

[Malcvi-stormrage]

@Moofurìon-bleeding-hollow

True in the early patches of most expansions tanks need to kite because they can’t mitigate enough damage and the healers had no way to keep up. This saw a dramatic reduction in the number of tanks in early patches of any given expansion and certain tanks being near nonexistent because they couldn’t kite or relied to much on self healing instead of mitigation.

This is still true and would be even if you made tanks that couldn’t heal themselves very much. The singular reason tanks aren’t kiting as much is because the incoming damage is lower than their defenses/healing. That is a result of tuning not of who is doing the healing. Blizz has tuned healers down and tank healing up, that offloads healing responsibility to tanks making healers more of hybrid-DPS. That is an intentional design choice.

[Argorwal-ysera (Argorwal)]

@Malcvi-stormrage

@Argorwal-ysera

It’s kind of hard to make tanks totally reliant on their healer in an infinite scaling system.

If they needed focused healing from auto attack damage in a +5 how is that going to scale to +25?

This cutoff will happen no matter what and the exact same observable scaling occurs. Instead of how can you need a healer for a +5 and a +25, it’s how can you need a tank to be able to heal for a +5 and a +25. With the distinction that if you make tanks able to massively outheal healers, then even when the healer is eventually needed their contribution and performance is diminished in comparison.

They don’t? Especially as damage ramps up in harder content?

Tank healing on meters is also a function of hps being a horrible metric. Like, super horrible. Damage that is mitigated via armor doesn’t get tracked by a meter but taking more damage then healing it back up IS tracked and players get sad.

It makes no sense.

[Gnr-darkspear]

@Siameren-lightnings-blade

It’s not a healers job to sit there spamming heals the entire run.

Not every healer is a reactive healer. As a Resto Druid I start throwing HoTs out even before the damage starts, so yeah, I’m “spamming” heals the entire run.

It’s not at all uncommon for me to out-heal a tank’s self-healing, even a Guardian Druid or Blood DK. They are usually appreciative that I’m making their lives easier.

[Hpellipsis-whisperwind (Hpellipsis)]

@Gnr-darkspear

Not every healer is a reactive healer. As a Resto Druid I start throwing HoTs out even before the damage starts, so yeah, I’m “spamming” heals the entire run.

Yeah but even within that you have the skillset as a resto druid to understand when you have sufficient preparations going and can go cat or get some dots rolling because the damage intake for the next 10 seconds or so won’t necessitate any more hots.

[Preelixx-dunemaul]

Resto Druid is specifically design this way… and such that your hots are running out after applying the to everyone that needs the so that the cycle begins again.

And good luck retroactively trying to spam hots AFTER they are needed.

This is why I find the DPS back steam drivers hilarious. It’s painfully obvious how little they know how healing works.

[Kíli-dragonblight]

But…but thats why I became a healer.

[Preelixx-dunemaul]

@Hpellipsis-whisperwind

can go cat or get some dots rolling because the damage intake for the next 10 seconds or so won’t necessitate any more hots.

Yes for those rare moment in a fight when the boss doesn’t deal damage you get the luxury of DPS busy work dealing negligible contribution to the collective damage output of the group.

Yippee!!

[Rita-velen]

I like reactive healers and feel like it’s easier to play a reactive one if you don’t want to plan so much. Like as resto druid I have to do so much prep before damage comes out. Sometimes I prep and didn’t need to so I wasted globals. As holy priest I’m good for it whenever, I just press POM on cooldown and do what I want when it needs to happen.