Vodrin

What use are these scenarios, if you don't have enough HPS to make the tank survive.
What use would a medium heal be in that situation if your max HPS wouldn't keep the tank up.

-0.7 - Casting FoL
+0.0 - Tank takes damage when cast is at 0.7 seconds (tank at 12k)
+1.3 - Divine Favor
+1.3 - HS heals for 5550 crit (tank at 19550)
+2.0 - Tank takes 8k damage (tank at 11550)
+2.8 - Instant Cast HL11 (Infusion of Light)
+2.8 - HL11 heals for 5500, Light's Grace goes up (tank at 17050)
+2.8 - Casting HL11
+4.0 - Tank takes 8k damage (tank at 9050)
+4.8 - HL11 heals for 5500 (tank at 14550), Casting HL11
+5.0 - /ra I don't have enough HPS to keep the tank up solo so why am I solo-healing him.
+6.0 - Tank takes 8k damage (tank at 6550)
+6.8 - HL11 heals for 5500 (tank at 12050), Casting HL11
+8.0 - Tank takes 8k damage (tank at 4050)
+8.8 - HL11 heals for 5500 (tank at 9550), Casting HL11
+10.0 - Tank takes 8k damage (tank at 1550)
+10.8 - HL11 heals for 5500 (tank at 7050), Casting HL11
+12.0 - Tank takes killing blow

 

Questioner

@ The paladins complaining about their new difficulties with spam healing due to downrank penalties.

I think it is quite obvious that the devs don't like spam healing. Changes to judgements, holy shock and the crit HS -> Instant HL are some of the evidence of this in the paladin tree alone. The devs want you doing more than just R7 R7 R7 R7 R7 R11 R11 R7 R7...etc.

So please, stop comparing it like every fight will be Brutallus 2.0.

 

Hylo

Why would you use 2min cooldown when tank is at 70% hp (14k) and you haven't even used your instant yet? Yes, healing in general would be much easier if you knew what is coming next. The problem is that you don't.

But yea, maybe it's better to leave this branch of discussion for a while.

 

• Playered

Threat UI has changed slightly in 8778.


The amber glow is a warning of pulling agro soon off the player with the red glow.
You still get "Lost Threat" or whatever the exact text when you loose agro on a mob too (above it).

 

Spink

Spam healing seems like it's going to be less common with removal of crushing blows and other changes they've made. They've shown they're trying to get rid of the obsolete things that have warped raiding a bit and start fresh. It's also too early to say how it's all going to play out in raiding/pvp/5man without tanking changes being entirely finished and new boss mechanics being largely unknown.

 

Braque

Why do people keep mentioning the removal of crushing blows in relation to raid healing? No warrior/paladin worth his salt ever got crushed, and druid mitigation from armour was balanced so crushes on them were like blocked hits on a warrior/paladin. What's more many bosses in SW simply do not crush anyway. So how, exactly, is the removal of crushes going to change raid healing?

 

Sydane

The downranking change isn't going to make healing harder. In fact, for the "average" healer, who has been doing things "wrong" by healing reactively and without downranking, it will probably make the game easier. It will certainly make endgame healing different for the best players, whether it's through gear choices, healer rotations, and so forth. Some people will like it more, some less. Thinking how to save mana as a group while working together could possibly be more interesting than just on an individual level.

If spike damage is destroying your tank, or you are oom 60% of the way in, guess what, you're undergeared. In a world of ever accelerating gear levels, that may seem strange, but it will be possible. Just like with potion sickness and some of the other changes, it's going to be harder to bring in undergeared healers and succeed. In three months we are all going to be in blues again, and it will be a long while before the discussions of ideal gear sets return.

 

Calantus

So what else do they do? STOP STOP STOP R11 STOP STOP R11 R11 STOP STOP STOP ?

Outside of special circumstances healers casting big heals should be channeling a heal at all times. They land if they're needed and if not they either land if you can afford the mana loss or they get stopcasted if you can't. Unless they're going to make direct healing entirely predictable that's the way it's going to be. You cant afford to start a big heal when it's needed. When a big heal is needed, it's needed now, which means it needs to be started long before the healer knew it was needed.

 

GSH

The tank is taking 4000 DPS.
Your max rank heal is 2750 HPS.

I'm not really sure how you expect down-ranking to help you win this fight.

The medium healing cases can be covered by FoL a couple of times (3s vs 2.5s for a big heal), or dropping a Renew on the target and letting it tick. And the concern about overhealing is laughable in the face of TBC healing, where 50%+ overheal is the norm.

 

Questioner

That's your opinion, but I am trying to tell you that's exactly what all these changes are designed to prevent. You are still stuck in that mindset. I can't tell you HOW they intend for it to work, but I think it is quite obvious that the trend is to move away from constant casting of the same 1 or 2 spells. There is plenty of talk about it on the paladin forums, where all the people who don't see this point are demanding sheathe healing spec will be trump because it is better for constant casting, whereas the top of holy gives a whole new healing spell as well as a reason to be judging (not healing).

If you want to continue to argue that something won't work in WotLK content none of us have experienced based on TBC content, I'll just step away.

 

Cube

It's not opinion, it's fact based on game mechanics. Heals work only when the target has taken damage. If the tank is full, the heal is totally wasted. In this respect, it's the total opposite of threat for tanks, and DPS-more is not necessarily better.

You're saying that healers are going to be healing in a reactive, rather than proactive, manner. In other words, they should be casting spells based on the tank's current state, not a theoretical one.

Unless we have a solid guarantee that the tank will not take more damage than the healers can reactively heal after they get hit for 3 seconds after taking a hit, then you would be right-healers will be able to cast when the tank has taken damage. Otherwise, if the healers are casting reactively, they'll get behind, which is bad.

However, this NEVER happens to a tank. Damage is rarely 100% predictable, even when crushings are removed from the table. A tank might get a unlucky string of hits or a special boss ability might get through. So, to deal with this, healers need to have heals queued at all times, to ensure that the tank doesn't die.

 

Sydane

Damage doesn't have to be predictable, you watch for when it happens, and you heal it. People heal through phase 4 Zul'jin and Rage icebolts all the time. That's reactive healing. It's actually the way most people playing this game as healers, not at the very cutting edge of theory, heal.

Your tank is not going to die in the two seconds between when you see him take a hit and your heal lands. Especially since he'll almost certainly have hots on him as well as three to four other healers doing the same thing. It's going to mean avoidance means more. It's going to mean healer reaction times mean more. In many ways it makes pve healing more like pvp healing, and less like dps spamming.

Even now the massive bursts that insta-gib tanks almost always happen at predictable times, at which point you obviously would be spamming. High end healing for the best healers is going to change. It means less math and more execution. Downranking was an interesting aspect of this game for some people. It is gone now. To think the game will become unplayable without downranking, when it was already quite playable without it, is foolish.

It is painfully clear that Blizzard isn't happy with the healing side of the game as of the end of BC. The most radical design changes have all affected healing and healing classes the most. Perhaps they will find they have gone overboard and can't manage to balance the game in light of the new healing system. But if anything, the changes look to make it easier for them to balance and tweak things, simply because they are dealing with fewer variables.

 

Rasputin

Actually, this is reactive, predictable healing. You know that the target will be taking X damage over X seconds, so you know how, when, and how much to heal them for as soon as the effect occurs. This is very much in contrast to a tank receiving damage from the boss he is tanking. He will have some 60% avoidance, the boss has a range of damage that he can hit for, and most likely has other abilities besides his melee attack which will cause spiky damage, and which are not on a timer. 60% avoidance doesn't mean he takes 60% less damage, it means that on a long enough timeline, he will not be hit by 60% of the boss' attacks. What do you do if that 60% is all frontloaded? What if he doesn't get any avoidance for 10 seconds? Neither of those situations is unreasonable, and neither of those lends themselves to a reactive healing style. The only way to make a tank live is to be chaining heals on him constantly, on the assumption that he will avoid some, and that if he avoids none, he'll still live because you were already casting the heals he needed. The only way to change this type of healing style on a tank is to either trivialize the damage he does so that spikes will not kill the tank within ~3-3.5 seconds, allowing for reaction and cast times, or make boss damage entirely predictable, so that you know when to cast your heals.

Short version: Tank healers will always need to be chaining enough heals on a tank for him to survive the worst-case scenario of boss damage over the next 3 seconds. Failing to do so will kill your tank when the worst case occurs, which is often in any raid encounter we know of or can imagine using current raid mechanics. Until tank damage is entirely predictable, reactive healing will mean tank death.

 

GSH

There are techniques around this. For example, paladins can sit on instant Holy Lights now. That means we can heal spike damage reactively. Druids have Swiftmend.

 

• alcaras

Holy Shock.

Edit: Nevermind, got beat to it :P

Only thing I'll add is there's a talent that crit Holy Shocks translate into instant Holy Lights.

 

Cube

You're comparing apples and oranges here. My previous post wasn't about downranking at all, it was about the suggestion that healers should be moving to a 100% reactive playstyle than the current proactive one. Heals take a long time to hit. 1.5 to 3.5 seconds is a long time for a nuke heal, and just about every boss in the game has the ability to take a non-overgeared tank down in 3 seconds through random effects, and pure DPS. The removal of Crushing Blows does not change this. Since there aren't any mobs that have a swing timer longer than 3.5 seconds, it's entirely possible for the tank to take 2 or more hits from when they first take damage to when the heal will hit. That's a bad situation, especially for hard hitting mobs. This is why the nuke healer classes(everyone but druids) healcancel their large heals on the tank. This ensures that the worst possible case is that the tank starts to take damage when the cast starts, with the heal 1.5-3.5 seconds off. Most of the time, it will be much shorter than that.

Downranking has no effect on whether or not healers should be healcanceling. Downranking is a mana conservation tactic that's used because max rank spam is generally overkill. Again, overheal is just a waste, so there's a very real incentive to avoid it, especially in a progression situation where mana is tight. Downranking solved that by allowing the healer to tailor their heals to the tank, so they wouldn't be overhealing as much. The issue with downranking, and this existed pre-TBC, is that after a certain gear point, a healer can spam a less-than-max rank of a spell forever, and never worry about mana at all. Making downranked spells more expensive is a "fix" for this. Whether it's the right one or not is a whole different story, and, in all honesty, can only be answered after we get more experience with the raid bosses.

 

Rasputin

Sure, you can sit on a Holy Light as long as you don't need to cast any other Holy Lights. Perhaps that is the envisioned healing breakdown for future raids: Paladins sitting on DF HS and instant HL to deal with spikes while HoTs and priests keep the tank stable. Swiftmend is a viable tool as always, and somewhat more versatile. I franly don't know how they're planning to revamp healing in the face of healing changes. I suppose a more complex division of labor on tank healing would work, and I'll be interested to see the raid design they have coming in 10 and 25 Naxx. Until we do see such raid encounters, I will most likely remain cautiously apprehensive about how tank healing will change with downranking, and how Paladins in particular will fit into a raid without their standard role of tank spamhealer being viable any longer.

 

Questioner

I expect to see (relatively to current game) lower consistent damage with higher bursts as well as tight berserk timers. This would mean lower amounts of healers where mana and timing is more of a concern than pure output. Just because the amount of consistent damage on a tank would be trivial in a spam healing situation does not mean its always trivial. Remove the ability to spam heal and suddenly any amount of damage can be lethal.

You are still spamming a single spell. They want you using the other 10 spells in your book.

No, it is based on TBC gameplay. Which was much different than classic, and should not be expected to be the same.

We already know they wish to reduce the number of healers in a raid, so gameplay will have to change to support less healers.

 

• alcaras

From personal experience, I can say that DF HS HL is not anywhere near fast enough to deal with a spike.

 

• Playered

I believe GC posted on the lines that they assumed 7-8 still hence the overlap of some hybrid classes (Shaman, Druid, Paladin) going above 2 per, will try find the quote and update the post.


Keep in mind Paladins get that extra healing spell at 80 which no one really knows about yet(?).

 

Cube

Spam healing was the same in TBC as it was in vanilla. You pick a spell, start casting it, and before it's done, if the tank is full, you cancel it. You then start casting again.

Purely reactive healing has never been possible in a raid situation. I fail to see how it can be without trivializing the encounters.

EDIT: Playered, here's the quote:
WoW Forums -> Death Knight Viability Question

 

Copernicus

WoW Forums -> Death Knight Viability Question

Ideally around 2 of each class should be in a raid. It can't be 2.5 because most raids require 7-8 healers and not 5. Changing this would be pretty difficult as it would mean adding stiffer enrage timers and other penalties for bringing too many healers. Shamans, paladins and druids (and maybe priests) are probably going to be closer to 3 per raid because their specs are so different and one of them can heal. The question remains of who goes home if the DK comes in? Though a just as valid question is who goes home if the moonkin comes.

 

Questioner

Well that's a change in tune then and it pretty much means everything I've said is garbage.

Quite disappointing actually. I don't really follow him though, since if you have 2 of each class, plus an extra one of each of the healing hybrids (plus one more), with 8 of them being healers, that means they plan on having TWO healing specced hybrids from each class, which means someone is going to get the shaft.

5 man => 1 healer. 10 man => 2-3 healers. 25 man 7-8 healers? I thought the whole point was to remove this silly imbalance.

I guess I'll just go back to my hole.

 

rhea

Simple really, it is roughly 25% for all group sizes. Hybrids being healers is more about healers being hybrids

 

gia

5 man -> 1.5 healers
10 man -> 3 healers
25 man -> 7.5 healers

Seems fairly consistent to me... you can subtract .5 or more if you have some good support through crowd control/off healers/dispellers/etc or if you over gear the instance.