Trying to Make Sense of Healing+Scaling

Community General Discussion
1

So, I got a group earlier which made me question how Scaling actually works with Healing, as there seems to be no rhyme or reason within it.

I was, at the time, roughly Lv45-48 or so and I was a bit undergeared I will admit, a Holy Priest.

In my group were two DPS: One level 80 with 4385K health, and a 72 with 672K health.

It was a Dire Maul, and I noticed that when I casted Flash Heal on the Level 80, I would heal roughly 25-30% of his life, sometimes getting a crit for upwards of over half his life. He goes down to 70% or so, one Flash Heal zips him to full. He was a melee of some sort, I don’t recall what, though.

The 72? They were a shaman, not sure what kind, I don’t remember. I think they might have been Enhance.

She got down to like 50%, and I threw a Flash Heal on her, and for a moment, I thought I was silenced or stunned or something and the spell didn’t go off, so I casted another Flash Heal. She gained about 10% of her health. I casted 2, 3, 4 more and finally she was almost full.

This makes zero sense whatsoever. I didn’t see any debuffs on her that would reduce her incoming healing, and I don’t remember seeing anything on the melee that should increase healing received and the next dungeon, I got into with that same shaman, and again, my heals are barely touching her while I can zip anybody else to full in a couple Flash Heals.

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2

Just scaling weirdness. It’s not going anywhere.

Enjoy!

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3

Wish they’d at least fix this crap to at least make it work in some sensible way…

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4

Scaling is not something they seem to spend a lot of time on, and for most everything it’s a temporary problem anyway, so just get to 80 and enjoy.

5

Ya, the solution here is to get to 80 and not deal with it anymore

6

Given that these scaling issues are present every time someone wants to level a character, and/or every time you do a timewalking event, even after the anniversary is done, maybe they should actually try figuring out why the system doesn’t work half the time like it should.

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7

The bigger problem is that in some cases it’s actually working as (unfortunately) intended in the 71-79 range, because the gear jump expected going to 80 usually isn’t met by the gear you’re picking up until you get to around 74-76. If you weren’t geared decently from S3/S4 of DF, that level band is rough as hell right now in Timewalkers.

Part of the issue is they saw people getting through TWs “too quickly” (a moronic take, but Blizzard is familiar with those from time to time) during the first week of the anniversary. First week was great- easy blasting for easy content. They just need to go back to that.

8

What they NEED to do is have gear dropping to match leveling.

They didn’t slow leveling down at all. My 60 priest has 5.5 hours of /played logged. She’s a vulpera which means she started at 10, but to be honest? 1-10 on Newbie Isle is like 15 minutes if you know what to do. Maybe 30 if you stop to smell the roses.

I can do entire dungeons, gain 2-4 levelups in a dungeon, and get 0 pieces of gear. And when I do get pieces of gear, the same slot drops. On my priest, doing the 5 dungeon weekly, I had three pairs of gloves, and 2 robes drop, and 1 pair of shoes. Oh, and two rings, but one of the rings that dropped was the same as my highest I-level ring which was annoying AF. Really wish they’d get rid of that Unique-Equipped crap until Endgame.

Point is, my character is more than 80 item levels low and the gap gets worse the further I go. Bosses need 100% drop rate on stuff at this rate, to keep up.

Or at the very least, the game needs to be weighted in such a way that if an item drops, 75% of the time it’s going to be the piece that’s the lowest I-level you have equipped so I can stop getting robes or gloves over and over and over again.

I finally got a pair of legs out of the Chromie Codex box. At level 60.

What were my pants?

i16.

SIXTEEN. (the ones you start the game with)

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9

Oh yeah, that’s most of the issue. I took a family member in on his freshly boosted 70 in 463s and it was dropping like 405 gear. What the hell good does that do him?

I’m lucky in that I played almost every character in S4, so I had tier and trinkets. I’d hate to be doing TWs now without that.

10

Dude, I’d be ecstatic if I’d get 405s on a 70.

My warlock who is now 71, has like 2 pieces of gear, one of them is a 405, and the rest of her kit is like 200.

But yanno, you can do several dungeons in a row and get nothing.

I’d go kill some rares in TWW areas, but I’m not sure I could actually solo a rare with that kind of gear.

11

Sounds a lot like a bug I reported a while back for healing in TWW leveling dungeons.

Not enough people care about the leveling experience so it’ll probably be broken for years.

12

Blizz do some things great, and others not so great.

Scaling is not their strong point, never has been.

13

That’s because the game was built upon spaghetti code, and core game design back in Vanilla was such a mess.

Then, when they started to learn how to do game balance in some reasonable way about the time Wrath came around, instead of stopping to go back and fix stuff, they decided to slap a bandaid on it and call it a day.

Cataclysm came and they decided to fix some of the gearing issues (like gear that is nigh useless because of ridiculously stupid stat allocations), but they didn’t fix a lot of stuff, IE, anything that didn’t “need” fixed.

And of course they continued to pile more stuff on top over the years, and now we got this jumbled mess of a game where stuff from different expansions was made with entirely different design philosophies and mechanics.

Like, go into Zul’farrak and note how everything spams Polymorph over and over again, or go into Strat and see the trash packs spamming silence on the healer over and over again even if they aren’t casting anything. This is just the kind of BS they did back in the day, that they (Thank God) stopped doing since.

Did they actually go in and fix this stupid crap? Of course not.

14

I just finished leveling a blood DK and level 71 onward was rough. I was sitting in gear ranging from 180 to 400, and my headpiece and chest were 70.:rofl: The Plated Saronite pieces from the starting zone.

Just replacing those two doubled my health, but not before seeing me have to take Deadmines really slowly - and luckily with a patient group.

15

Yeah, see, I’ve been tossing the idea of leveling some alts through TW, and…

You always see people go “wHy aRe ThE qUeUeS sO lOnG!? wHeRe ArE aLl ThE tAnKs!?”

And this, here, is why. I’m asking myself, “Do I really want to tank with impatient groups and go into dungeons with subpar gear because I can’t find gear when I need it, and I get into the mid-70s and I get roflstomped by trash because I’m 80 item levels low and people expect me to be invincible and I can barely handle a single trash pack?”

It’s getting harder to talk myself into playing a tank. Heck, I’m dreading what’s going to happen when my healer gets to about 75… I can envision doing nothing but spamming Flash Heal just to try and keep the tank alive and then having people asking me why I let DPS die because if I stop healing the tank for a second, I’m going to fall behind because my flash heals are probably only going to heal 5% of their health or some ridiculous crap like that.

Also, of ALL the dungeons they coulda brought back for Classic TW… they chose Dire Maul.

Dire Fricken Maul.

Words cannot express how much I hate that place, all the boss skipping, people expecting you know exactly where to go, blah blah. Gear is hard enough to come by, I don’t like skipping 2 out of 4 bosses in a dungeon.

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16

i leveled 70-74 presvoker, resto shaman, holy paladin, disc priest during halloween inside headless horseman dungeon

The holy paladin heal wont even noticeable or probably 5-10% only idk

i always wiped when i was on holy paladin. now im intimidated to even try healing with holy paladin

17

And this is why I enjoyed the old scaling for TW - I tend to heal while leveling on characters capable of healing, and I never had to worry about scaling issues as players were all scaled to the same place instead of mobs scaled to the levels of each player in the group.

Now I have to worry about the scaling interaction with the random members of my group.

Sometimes I toss a basic heal and watch it instantly fill an HP bar, most of the time it moderately moves an HP bar, and sometimes it doesn’t move the HP bar at all.

And this is all with the same character in the same gear using the same healing spell.

There just doesn’t seem to be any way to control how this interaction will happen, though keeping a character geared seems to reduce the chance of getting the result of healing doing nothing.

But that isn’t guaranteed and besides, the game still sucks at providing enough gear while leveling to keep up with the scaling curve - and I’m not about to go waste gold buying crap off the AH nor am I going to waste time running off to farm old content such as WQ in DF while leveling.

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18

They’ll do it when levelling is too enjoyable.

They made levelling harder when people were melting dungeons using Season 4 DF gear (as expected??) then this made it harder for people levelling up from other expansions.

They did it again with linear scaling for gear: https://www.wowhead.com/news/timewalking-dungeons-buffed-up-to-66-more-health-349288

I LOVED the old scaling. There were communities around Timewalking and having fun optimising for them.

19

The old scaling was better, but exploiting certain OP items to have a power advantage in what is intended to be normalized gear is bad behavior.

20

So… what, what we have better now is somehow “better”, where we have Lv11 Prot Warriors soloing dungeons, while Lv75 tanks can barely survive fights?

I don’t see how that’s better. It doesn’t solve dungeons being too easy, in fact, dungeons seem easier now than they did before, provided some Lv11 XP-locked warrior Qs up and ends up in your group and there’s a disgusting number of them anymore.

Meanwhile, people who want to play the game legitimately are punished and penalized because they out-level gear, and you get these idiots wanting to skip bosses because they just want the end of dungeon reward and you end up being even MORE undergeared which means the dungeons end up being even harder if you’re Lv60+.

My now-71 healer is almost 140 item levels low and she’s feeling it. Sometimes my heals feel like they do nothing, and I even bought the 3 pieces they had available with TW badges. To be honest, they need to make all 16 pieces available if they’re going to pull this crap.

And to top it all off, we get idiots saying “Hurr hurr gear don’t matter until 80!” … yeah it does when you get 60s and 70s getting killed in dungeons because the tank and heals are struggling to keep people alive because their gear is so low.

EDIT: And it’s not just Prot Warriors… had a Deadmines run where a Lv11 Fury Warrior was tanking and pretty much solo’d the dungeon, it was absolutely ridiculous.