I don’t main a healer. I dabble occasionally. Why do healers still have this tied old model of mana management? Tanks and DPS don’t really have this issue. Shouldn’t the metric of success be casting the right spells, not ‘the dps chained pulled the entire dungeon so i could never drink that stuff the mage kindly gave me but we still lived’?
No, it wasn’t a wipe. The tank died once. Mostly from standing in bad stuff. Why should the healer be responsible for stupid? Bad luck, sure. Hard hitting bosses, definitely yes. DPS so focused on their meters they don’t even see they are taking damage? No.
It’s far beyond time that avoidable damage should also debuff the guilty, not be a mana drain for the healer.
There was a time during Cata when the Holy Charge system was way overtuned for Holy Paladins.
They basically had a quasi infinite mana source and basically never ran out of mana due to Light of Dawn being a strong AoE heal and Word Glory being just as strong with Beacons passing nearly 100% of the heals.
They even introduced a Hummer mana guzzling spell that was suppose to OOM you but barely did, Holy Radiance. You could literlly OMM yourself and heal while you regened mana for more Holy Radiance spam.
For non-Healers, mana is the limiter on “utility”, a Ret Paladin or Elemental Shaman can only cast their off-heals so often before they’ll run dry, but instead their DPS resource is Holy Power and Maelstrom.
Well in the difficulty you run nothing is hard, but when you actually do hard content dps has to do extremly tight dps checks, avoid damage, interrupt key spells, use utility spells for grp.
Healer mana basically serves as a timer to your group’s ability to maintain. The longer a fight goes on, the more strained the healers will be and eventually the group is unable to sustain. Furthermore, mistakes that cause a lot of unexpected damage will cause this clock to run out prematurely, disincentivizing groups from simply eating mechanics and letting the healers cover it.
It’s a more elegant way of pressuring the group than just putting hard-stop enrages everywhere.
I will also add on that it adds an element of gameplay to healers that encourages them not to use the biggest, baddest heal for everything. They have to use their judgement and assess the best tool for the situation and the best tool is not always the most expensive one.
Well I don’t disagree with any of the counter-points raised. I still think there could be better mechanics. I think if we could just stop the DPS race mentality on all fights that might force a change for making better players.
I have never healed progression. I have tanked it, but it’s been a few expansions.
I’ve been messing around with druid, pally, and holy priest healing at 50’ish just for fun. It is true I don’t have mana issues with the druid, and mainly because I’ve healed with druid the most and know the traps all to well.
But thinking about the one encounter in the first Maldraxxus (i think) dungeon where you get the invisible adds. That fight is a piece of cake when the DPS deal with the adds, it’s terrible when it becomes a burn the boss forget the adds fight. If the adds didn’t despawn when the boss died, we would have had a complete wipe. So, maybe it’s as simple as making sure all fights can’t be solved by DPS.
And yes, harder content tends to get you better players and the problems solves itself. Maybe it’s the way it needs to be, I don’t know.
Healing is stressful AF and mana management doesn’t help. There’s so much that healers have to worry about: no one can die, dispel, move move move so you can’t use cast-time spells, oh and your DPS has to be high too. Why aren’t DPS judged on how much healing they do? This is why healers are hard to find, healing is absolutely no fun especially early in an xpac, and the fact that we are the only ones who have to worry about stuff like this really grinds my gears.
No healer that I know of has a group heal that’s spammable. This is what we healers hate - people talking like they understand healing more than the healers themselves. Go press your 3 buttons and pewpew.
