Balancing PvE healing is tough. High Keys are an optimized game that demand perfect play. No missed dispells or stops or unused defensives. Every relevant buff for the dungeon.
Raid healing isn’t going to feel very impacted since you’ll regularly overheal 35%+.
In M+ it creates a feeling that you can’t do enough healing when someone is 1 or 2 shot. But 23-25 (where most pugs will stop) has pulls where the 1-2 kit KO is inevitable if someone in the group positions wrong, doesn’t get out the right stop, etc. I don’t think Blizzard should try to be balancing healing around these exact scenarios because then healers would have access to 0-100% heals which is just kind of dumb
S4 will be like S1 where all the healers do about the same hps IMHO. I just don’t know why they’re doing this at the last minute. Holy priests for example got a talent rework then got a 7% hps nerf in the same patch.
The secret plan is to create such a shortage of healers (and tanks, too) for pug groups that all the pugs will join guilds and restore wow to some imaginary remembered state where everybody belonged to guilds, did progression raiding, only played as groups at any time, and none of them ever had anything to do with anyone outside of their guilds.
Funnily enough, Im open to ANY tin foil hat thoughts on this one. lol.
Healers have been complaining for a long while now and some of the details seem very odd to me…like someone is thinking something we dont know about, lol
The only place I think disc struggles is when
we have to play catch up. We have no big instant heals unless specifically talented for one, and even then, PW:Life can only be used if someone falls below 35%. If they drop to 38% you can’t use it, so you’re stuck with flash heal spam and radiance/penance to hopefully pick them back up.
It’s fine if you can predict the damage but you can’t predict player behavior so if someone’s not paying attention and getting chunked by mechanics, we struggle to cover that big instantly needed healing
Which is again, something I always hit that dead horse with, the problem with the weird damage profile.
Because h o m o n e z i a t i o n is such a scary word, they have to design the healers to function is insanely different ways. This would be fun if the game was designed around that.
Instead, you have healers with fantastic spot healing, but absolutely terrible aoe healing. You’ll have a healer than can heal a group to full, but it takes them maybe 5-10 seconds to do so. And so on and so forth. And this would be fine, but the damage profile usually favors of these styles and punishes the others the further away they get from it.
theyre hitting a weird spot where Rdruid and MW are dominant in both M+ and Raid, with disc being strong in raid but fairly balanced in keys, and the others lagging in raid but capable of pulling off high keys in the right hands
so theyre gonna do the blizz special and toss out a bunch of 5%s and hope for the best
we will be fine though
Personally I’m fine with disc having a direct healing weakness. I enjoy the dps → healing playstyle. Especially when I run with friends/guild mates and the group is coordinated.
When I pug tho The sheer panic lol. It’s intense but I just remind myself I get to dps to heal so that’s my trade off
I’m fine with them having a direct heal weakness too. I’m fine with every healer having a strength and a weakness.
The problem, at least to me, is when those weakness are exasperated by the damage profiles and become just straight hinderances.
A disc priest having to put more effort to heal someone is one thing. A disc priest being in a situation where nothing they can do will save someone is a hinderance.
I think a lot of healer mains need to take a step back and have a reality check.
Being able to brute force repeated mechanical failure through healing is bad design. It rewards misplay and enables players who usually aren’t skilled enough to play at a certain level in brackets they don’t belong in.
It’s like if you’re playing basketball, and you miss 5 shots, but you get the points anwyays. It shouldn’t happen.
The reality check healer mains need is stop feeling this perceived stress of being the one to hold the group together and be superman. They need to accept and be more assertive in the position that if someone dies as a result of their misplay, it’s not a healing issue and they have no fault.
Sad part is I LOVE healing with Rshaman.
but Im not playing this game to be annoyed, so I guess thats not happening except for leveling dungeons anymore
They really wanted to see how many people they could make quit playing healers didn’t they?
I personally haven’t found this xpac to be bad, I enjoy healing more and dpsing less but that’s just me. I’m more bummed out that all the FotM rerollers flocked to monk and now think they have the right to demand changes to the spec when they all know they will leave once MW has been significantly over nerfed.
Nerfs because gear is going to push the heali g to high. Its not rocket science. Raids and mythoc plus is supposed to be hard. Wont be hard when healers can heal right through mechanics.
Ok so I don’t know if this was a mad plan of blizzard but I gravitated to this almost fully this last season for keys.
This is, by far, the rudest season I have ever experienced. I have had a ton of great groups and bnetted some lovely people, but this is the first season where I have actually put people on ignore. I have a pretty thick skin.
This season though I have really appreciated my nice and cozy guild groups…where we actually enjoy playing and have fun.
Yeah I’ve definitely been guilty of that. Thinking the group failure is because I simply couldn’t heal enough.
But I’ve gotten to a point where I can tell when it’s my fault vs failing mechanics. Good groups I spend most of my time dpsing and lining up big damage penance casts. Occasionally topping people off but for the most part I don’t directly heal anyone. Bad groups I’m spamming flash heal and panicking trying to keep people alive.
The difference is night and day as disc. Playing holy I just drop holy words on people and bring them up to full in 1-2 casts. Disc I’m always asking “Ok this person dropped to 20%, will they live long enough for me to radiance + mindblast + Penance for big heals? Or do I spam flash heal?”
Yeah, all of this. Sure, it’s fun to carry a bad group by healing through their mistakes, but that experience shouldn’t be the norm. It sets up bad expectations for healers and creates players who blame healers for their own misplays because they’ve been carried by heals before.
Mhm, first thing we’ve gotta recognize as healers is what is and isn’t our responsibility. But the nature of the role makes it easy to feel like we’re supposed to take care of everything.
It also causes healers to burn out when they’re expected to carry poorly performing players. It’s exhausting going into every pull like “Ok what is this guy gonna stand in this time?” Lol
Yeah, that’s a good point. I got yelled at in a Waycrest once because nobody was moving during Aura of Dread and we kept wiping. Our mage goes “why are you struggling on heals” and I was like guys you all had six stacks of Aura of Dread what do you expect me to do here
It was absolutely not my fault but I still felt bad and didn’t want to heal anything for the next two days.
The sheer panic lol. It’s intense but I just remind myself I get to dps to heal so that’s my trade off
