As a returning player, it seems like unavoidable group-wide damage is everywhere in TWW. Raid bosses, dungeon bosses, heck even most trash packs seem to be pumping out AOE damage that I can’t do anything to avoid. I’m not even talking about swirlies, frontals, interruptible casts, etc. Just massive amounts of pulsing unavoidable AOE damage everywhere.
I understand the devs wants to “challenge” the healers and give them a reason to use their cooldowns, and I wouldn’t mind it happening occasionally, but in higher M+ keys it creates scenarios where the healing throughput is literally a limiting factor to completing the dungeon, even when the group is doing all of the mechanics correctly and using all of their defensives, even when the healer is appropriately geared. The current state of the game makes me not even want to attempt to heal M+.
It’s not fun or challenging to be taking massive amounts of damage constantly, having to use defensive abilities on CD, despite making no mistakes and not getting hit by anything directly, it’s just annoying. If I am dodging swirlies, frontals, not standing in anything, and interrupting casts, I should not be taking this much damage. In my opinion, taking large amounts of damage should be punishment for doing something wrong, not something that’s constantly happening regardless.
Don’t mistake this post as me just whining and asking Blizz to make the game easier. I just wish player skill was tested and rewarded by more interactive mechanics than unavoidable group-wide damage. I would actually prefer an increase in swirlies, frontals, pools, etc. to what we have currently. Additionally, they could make more use of magic debuffs, poisons, curses, etc. because at least they can be actioned by players.
There would still be a tank that needs to be healed, people will still make mistakes and get hit by stuff, and there can still be the occasional group-wide damage. I just think there’s way too much of it currently.
Not sure if you read my whole post, but that’s not what I’m asking for.
I suppose the Shadowlands model of “bring the healer that does the most damage because they’re irrelevant most of the time” is better?
I’m exaggerating your point, to be sure, but I think a better way to address “healer throughput is the limiting factor” would be to adjust the scaling of unavoidable damage rather than the frequency of damage events. More consistent damage events, I would argue is a lot better for healer skill expression and for the design space to differentiate between healers.
I would agree with this. I recently did a +10 City of Threads where we cleared the entire dungeon without issue until the last boss, then suddenly our healer couldn’t keep up with the damage going out. We were all ~620 ilvl. I feel like I’m dying that entire fight despite not getting hit by anything.
That fight need every player to move and dodge and use def CD at correct time. Healer must study the fight and plan how to heal the last boss. Watch video, Not possible to simply learn in dungeon. Healer must rotate healing CD to heal big aoe damage. Healer must use correct talent to heal the best. Since +10 give mythic gear reward in great vault, +10 should be challenging. DF season 3 is a joke which make mythic raid irrelevant.
This is multi-layered. One part is that during Shadowlands, there was very minimal unavoidable damage and healers were pretty much AFKing if they were not using their GCDs for damage. This caused a lot of drama because there were players telling healers to DPS if no one needed heals. Always be casting. The other side of the argument was that they were healers and not DPS so they felt that they should be allowed to stand around.
This caused a bunch of healers to state that they would rather increase the need for healers to heal the entire time instead of dealing damage. Then came Dragonflight where Blizzard listened and increased the group wide damage. To nobody’s surprise, many Healers started complaining about needing to heal too much.
There is a lot of unavoidable damage, but right now it’s not in a bad place. Most of it is avoidable with the use of utility.
The other layer is that timing your defensives is an extension of skill expression. Knowing when to use your defensives becomes extremely important. You need to learn to use it before you get hit by a big mechanic, not after.
Regardless, if you are a returning player I can guarantee that you are taking much more avoidable damage than you think you are. You can get the Elitism Helper addon that can report unavoidable damage. I have it so it only posts the final report at the end of the run instead of every time someone gets hit.
Yeah, mostly external defensives from the healer and heals after tank busters.
As a healer, I personally think the last boss is the easiest out of the 4 lol. Gotta keep moving, get your friends out of the roots (easier is stacked of course) and have a healing CD for every slice. That dance is so much easier imo than blob dude, duo brats, or tiny circle of doom boss.
I have only timed a 10 in there though.
All about learning on the fly. I think the last time I did this was a raid back in shadowlands where I sort of watched videos on the bosses.
How fights are tailored you can 100 percent learn in dungeon, certain things just take longer to click in. Took me forever to realize the dispel on first boss in SV without reading it for example.
Yet at this point mechanically speaking a lot of fights just start clicking for skilled players even if they never watched a video before and can start happening during the pull quite easily.
It’s the same in FFXIV. It’s so mechanically tailored that every new fight I already start thinking about where all the safe spots are and what pattern the boss abilities occur to create them.
Also tanks can never be ignored but a good tank will let you DPS and Heal quite easily without needing to hyper focus on them. In that regard BDK’s and Brewmasters are gods.
By that argument there shouldn’t be unavoidable auto attacks or casts, make everything dodgeable like plunderstorm and now the game doesn’t need tanks or healers and it turns into an action combat game but then group content becomes horrendously boring because now it’s just 5 solo players that happen to be fighting the same enemies like every MMO that tries to kill the holy Trinity devolves into
My unpopular opinion is that that constant AoE damage and ground swirlies is because of addons. Blizz can’t make fights revolve around difficult mechanics because addons will just solve them for you, I.E Hellfire Archimonde and Azshara. The only way to add “difficulty” is by making every fight do ridiculous unavoidable damage