shuffle is without a doubt the best feature ever put in the game
major problems:
leavers
healer demand
healer complexity
The problem with wow these days is its complexity, especially for healers, there’s no way to be a good player without having a relevant commitment.
The discrepancy of a healer who plays well is absurd for one who is starting to play and it frustrates all players, the healer who is trying to start, the players who lose due to this new healer, the healer who is good but earns 0 points.
How to solve the problem (it may sound drastic but it is necessary)
remove half of healer buttons
the remaining half of the buttons must be efficient
healers should be drastically more rewarded
Some players will probably disagree with me, but if you think the current healer state is okay, get ready for the snowball effect:
scarcity of healers
frustration to new healers who try to play and give up
queues that was 5 min becoming 10, 10 becoming 15, 15 becoming 20, 1 hour queue (already happening)
Better plan. Nerf the 10,000 interrupts/disruptions/ranged CC that every Melee has, delete mortal strike effects from the game, and dial back ALL dot damage from UHDK/Assassin/DH/Afflic/Spriest/Feral
Edit: And for the love of Fing god delete 90% of the pets.
well, at this rate the game (pvp) will die, its just a matter of time, the amount of healers is being funneled, it will not increase, it also will affect players which are not healers
I don’t think the complexity of excessive keybinds is the issue. To me the unnecessary complexity comes from all the addons and macros that are mandatory to succeed in PvP. It’s very unintuitive for someone starting out, especially focus macros which are needed in arena but generally irrelevant in world pvp and battlegrounds.
Reducing keybinds won’t solve anything. Sure, they can combine a few abilities rather than eliminate them altogether. Look at how poorly it went for holy priests when shadow mend was removed. It’s one of the reasons holy priests are the worst healers in solo shuffle right now.
It is, healer should be easy, the more keybinds you have more windows you close for new players start to play as healer.
the more keybinds you have, more commitement is required, the gap is bigger, the frustration for the new player, players who play with this new healer are just bigger.
Easy solution for the “too many keybinds” problem is to use online flashcards to learn your keybinds. There are a few of them which are free if you can deal with the ads that pop up often. You should be able to learn your keybinds in a few hours.
I don’t mind if they combine a few abilities, but for godsakes no more excessive pruning like we had in the past.
believe me, is to make simple as possible, so new players can feel rewarded for playing as healers
holy paladins has a lot of this problem, it should heal ONLY through holy shock, flash heal, holy light and maybe a “sacred shield”…
theres no way a new player be sucessful as holy paladin in solo shuffle
Or how about we just give appropriate rating when leavers ragequit because they are being slammed all game. Let them have their deserter buff, let us have our rating, and further penalize their rating for leaving. Easy fix.
This is dumb. Removing buttons isn’t going to help a bad healer effectively trade cds or position themselves better anyways. The healer shortage isn’t because healing is hard it’s because it feels like sheet to play in shuffle when the common consensus is to zug mid whilst tanking every cd known to mankind without pressing a single cd and dying.
surely this change will give more space for new players to work on this aspect
it is, the gap between a main healer and a new player is astronomic, maybe a year of commitment wont fix it. Guess what, nobody will get crushed over a year in order to play equally against good healers.
This right here, nail on head. Not to mention healers get screwed when “that guy” is on their team (the one getting trained). Three wins, three losses basically guaranteed in that case. Zero rating change every time.
And then when we actually do win 4 or 5 to get rating they always leave. Meh.
what I see most is that “that guy” is the healer who makes 0-6, who is cursed by everyone and gives up being a healer which results in the respective scenario:
bad healer: damn being a healer is awful
players who play with this bad healer: damn this healer is bad
good healer: damn, 6-0, 0 points, being a healer is awful
nobody is happy… because the problem is the healer gap
Holy moly can we stop bringing up the leaver thing?
Yes, its VERY annoying, but they already said theyre working on implementing a per-round score even if people leave with the leaver being further penalized. Its also been the holidays. I recognize that this is a game we pay a monthly sub for and can therefor have expectations for changes every few weeks, but let people have their holiday season.
Yes, there IS a healer shortage, but there is no easy short term fix (and it wont change Q times at higher rating especially).
Honor/conquest bonuses are useless, because you basically need to be fully honor geared to Q and you already cap conquest SO fast.
You could incentivize them with dungeon reward bags or extra boxes (dungeons are roughly 3k gold between the runes and coins)
But i think in that case youd see a bunch of inexperienced healers showing up, pressing their buttons poorly, and flooding the lower ranks. This wouldnt feel good for anyone, the healer new to their environment, or the players playing with those healers.
We told them in September on beta that leaving shouldn’t void wins for people. They had plenty of evidence leavers where making it hard to collect data on beta. They wanted to argue with us.
Some lazy dude literally couldn’t be bothered to open the solo shuffle code and kept messing with deserter code because it was easier for them to do while eating their cream puffs.
They argued deserter was enough (dude was on an evoker and was terribly specced so delusional had to be a dev)
This season we saw devs put in a “bug” that let their bros buy full sets of gear via gold through trophies of stife on the AH, for all you know people were not only queing solo shuffle with full gear day 1, but also mmr bugging. Without even taking balancing and the sketchy way solo shuffle matchmaking is handled where it artificially lengenths que times this has been one of the most scuffed seasons.
The devs got mad at beta feedback and sabotaged solo shuffle via leavers just to justify putting account wide deserter in because random bg lifers need a sense of power in their lives.
So I am going to put my 2 cents in as someone who likes healing and gotten to almost 2k in solo shuffle as Disc;
I heal most of the time but I found that around 2k is when the games get too stressful for me to heal in solo shuffle. Lack of coordination and fast pace of games eventually leads to frustration.
I don’t want to always heal as I also like playing alts that are DPS but having a way to send honor/conquest to my alts would definitely make me queue more to gear them up.
There needs to be a priority queue system account wide for players who queue solo shuffle as healers. This system should give the account priority queue when the player switch from playing a healer to dps class at a rate of 6 rounds won as a healer = 1 Priority Que for DPS spec/alt. There should also be a minimum Healer rating requirement of 1200-1500 to prevent people from trying to abuse priority queue.
Obvious one but offer more incentives like gold, material, randomly drawn transmog items from old raids, etc.
There should be a better balance amongst healers to make sure mana efficiency, throughput and utility are balanced as much as possible across all specs.
Having a positive win record for any given game (4-2, 5-1, 6-0) should give some rating and never result in 0 rating gain. The gain can be small like 5 pts but should never be 0
Incentives as short term solution would work but eventually what the game needs are new healers. People who play mainly as dps but would like to try healing as well.
Mid to long term healing in pvp needs a more drastic solution. I am talking about the realm of smart heals. It needs to be easier in general to attract players who haven’t tried out healing before.
There needs to be a UI overhaul with healing as well. Maybe smart heals would solve this to an extend but far too much time is spent staring at unit frames then actually playing the game