I think their solution was to make it so we aren't FORCED to do 5 mans and 10 mans. We can still do them for fun, but we won't have the massive cockblock of having to key everyone through a 5 man. That's really the only reason the ratios ever became a problem.

Your guild had say, 4 tanks... and say 10-12 healers. You only took 1 healer to a 5 man, meaning each tank had to run it 3 times (assuming even distribution). If we are no longer forced to do 5 mans, the ratio is thus irrelevant.

Blizzard has to consider more than just the high-end raiders. The majority of their players are not min/maxers, they aren't in Sunwell, and they do sometimes get crushed. Getting rid of a source of large damage that only affected some raiders can pave the way for additional healing changes that address the other concerns. By themselves, crushes won't change everything we thought we knew about healing, but I'm sure there's plenty in Wrath we haven't seen yet that could.


Bosses that require big heals with low overheal could be a challenge for the high-end types, and might even be a solution to all this spamhealing/healcanceling/downranking talk*. But for a lot of raiders it would mean wipe after wipe because your tank got crushed dead before he entered the range for a big heal.


*Seems logical from the outside, but I'm not a healer. The point isn't this specific boss idea, just that the future changes to healing will be easier if they don't have to account for the possibility of huge, random damage spikes.

Fair point, back in the retail days the group I used to run Strat, Scholo, LBRS etc with consisted of War / Mage / Rogue / Pala(or Priest) / Druid - where the Druid (me) was a DPS spec who healed on the tougher packs so generally it fit back in those times.

Disagree:

5 man -> 1 healer
10 man -> 2 healers
25 man -> should be 5 healers to be in line, but is actually 7

Many people do take 3 healers into Karazhan and ZA until they learn the fights. When they do, they drop the number of healers from 3 to 2 in order to speed up runs.

Back when Kara was new everyone on my server was taking 3 healers which then became 2.5 and now is 2. This is how raiding goes as you outgear the instances or everyone knows how to handle all the fights. This same scenario plays out in 25man raids where you bring a larger number of healers and then decrease them as gear/coordination improves. It seems to support his point of 1.5/3/7.5 where the .5 is either a hybrid class that can swap gear or some guilds run with 8 others with 7.

I think the whole numbers game is somewhat foolish since shouldn't it be 1/2/5 tanks in every raid?

Yes, but it's a lot easier to convert tanks to dps, than it is to convert dps to healers. If 50% of the playerbase wanted to heal, we wouldn't be having this discussion. But I think that experience has shown us that--especially in the lower tiers of guilds--healers are the primary bottleneck in recruitment.

I want raids to require fewer healers to make it easier for a guild to recruit enough healers so we can actually raid. Blizzard apparently wants 7-8 healers because they find it easier to make encounters around that number.

This is exactly their intention though. As much as an Enh Shaman might enjoy being absolutely invaluable for some guilds it might be hard to get one, and now they have choices, like a Death Knight or whatever duplicates their buffs.

This is wrong. Be it the first lvl 80 5man or the highest level 25man of the expansion, things are tuned assuming you've done the content that came before (the leveling/questing bit at the beginning of the expansion, and the raids on lower tiers later) and its perfectly valid to expect the tank to have XXX defense, for the Healer to have XXXX healing, for the raid to do XXXXXX RDPS.

If you're raiding that far above your tier, well jolly on ya. But with pushing this envelope comes the knowledge that sometimes you wont get lucky (or conversely you'll get unlucky enough to wipe out whatever skill/tactics/whatnot has let you overcome things so far) and the fact that you're in above your pay grade will come back and bite you.

Warrior tanks can get crushed when they fail to avoid 3 attacks in a row within 6 seconds. The boss may be a DWer or otherwise have a fast attack speed, or might just have gotten parry-hasted (what are you going to do, not attack and let all your threat come from misdirects?). The chance of this happening and of the attack actually being a crush are fairly low but they do lead to unpredictable amounts of damage - but only unhealable given current values of basically everything. There's a lot that can and will change: Tank HP pools, Tank Avoidance, size and frequancy of boss swings. I get the feeling that there's a general assumption by most folks that these numbers will be similar, but I highly doubt it. I'm sure Blizzard is very aware of the band-aid fix that is Sunwell Radiance and will be attempting to minimize the amount of avoidance that tanks will have access to.

Additionally, there seems to be a frequent assumption that bosses will be able to do large amounts of damage to the tank outside of normal melee swings via Cleaves, Saber Lashes or whatever. Blizzard may have decided that unpredictable burst damage killing a competently geared tank was a stupid mechanic when it came to attempting to heal them given that its been causing healers to downrank and spam the entire game. Note that predictable burst damage is generally not a problem - how often have competent tanks died on the robots in TK that have a long casting spell that hits for over 10K? Yes, they get low, but healers can tell exactly when they're getting hit and can plan a heal accordingly. Healing the huge burst of Shadow Flame of the drakes in BWL was not a problem for the same reason. Hopefully avoidance won't get so obscenely high as it can now where often two melee hits in a row might be considered "burst".

It might make healing less exciting, but hopefully it will make it less stressful. I always like the regen "game" of priests and would definitely prefer to see fights decided by the longevity of the healers, not their ability to time their heals right since the tank can be taken down from full in (often less than) 2 seconds. I don't see how spamming a single spell is exciting anyway. However, I do sympathize with Paladins in that they are really getting the shortest of shrifts here unless Holy Shock becomes decently efficient heal. But having been playing WC3 a bunch lately, in which the Paladin's heal has the same mechanic as Holy Shock, I find it would make a lot of sense in terms of where they want to take the class. The deep Holy talents focusing on judgements, the changes to the whols seal and judge system, and the mechanics of Hand of Salvation suggests Paladins are not going to be relegated to spamming FoL as much as the downranking change suggests.

TBC: Removal of Downranking kills a paladin because they are only effective as downranked HL bots.

WotLK: Removal of Downranking doesn't hurt so much, if at all, because now Pallies are using GCDs for keeping up Judgements, applying Hands, using a worthwhile Holy Shock, and having a lot more to spend their time on beyond heal-spamming. Also, they no longer have to provide that constant health buffer against burst damage because 3 out of 4 healing classes will have effective HoTs, and 4 out of 4 classes will have effective Oh-&^#$ abilities.

Sure, maybe they have to nerf the hyper-effectiveness of Downranking in order to make doing all this new stuff more attractive. But bosses will be tuned for these changes, and it'll make the game a helluva lot more fun.

Excuse me Raised but what you are describing as a WotLK holy paladin is not a main healer.

In TBC we had one healing niche and that was MT healing. If you use your GCDs liberally when MT healing things go bad very quickly - even with all those hots and oh crap -buttons. If we no longer CAN "provide that constant health buffer agains burst damage", what should we do? Spotheal raid? (our spothealing abilities are now actually much better due to the BoL change)

I realize this is going back a few pages, but I just got a chance to peruse the thread.

No, no it doesn't. As of right now, you take a Warrior as your MT (in most guilds, not all) because his class name starts with a W and ends in R. Going through Hyjal as a tank, and only having a use on the trash plus 2 bosses out of 5 isn't exactly fun. Necessary, not fun. I detest fights that don't have adds, that give me something to do on my pally, because I know at that point in time I'm a wasted raid slot. Does anyone really like that? I also don't like knowing that I have very limited options in being an OT...if I'm not getting whacked, I fall off very quickly in terms of threat generation.

What the change does is actually make your MT named due to their actual skill. If all are balanced in terms of survivability and threat generation, the only variable left is the skill of the person behind the character. This also extends to the other roles. More and more, Blizz is showing that they want to have some overlap of buffs & debuffs that various classes give. This allows people to play in the style they chose, while still being productive - and once again, forces someone to actually have skill to make the slot.

This isn't exactly a bad thing, really.

Some stuff...

In regards to healing perhaps we will see a return of phase healing a la old school MC days? At least in terms of MT healing it may be viable, especially with how ridiculous mana regen is outside the 5SR. Let's say in current TBC you have 4 main tank healers on x boss. They are spamming their downranked heals to be able to keep the tank up. Well since you no longer have downranked heals, but your slowest biggest heal is always the most effecient, then why not use 2 main tank healers instead, spamming their max rank HW or GH or HL? Mana runs out, but you're still using the same amount of healers (7-8 for MOST encounters [lawlz twins] which they seem to be taking it wrath as well). Then the other two healers are regening. I'm sure everyone remembers phase healing. Would be interesting to see it return, though I have no opinion on whether it's bad or good. I thought it was nice back in the day because good healers were organized, but since then there are many more factors now that qualify as a good healer because of new encounter design.

And on another note, Sacred Shield and disc priests and the like are going to blow for warriors and druids. However, there was a blue post admitting that so they are aware of the problem, what fix do you guys think would be appropriate? I'd say it would be simple as doing a calculation to convert damage absorbed into rage same as damage received.

Well for starters you can do the things that Raised mentioned.

The 'every 10-30 second' things may be Judgements or Hands on various targets. (also monitoring who needs the Salv for example, based on threat on raid frames, or whispers/vent, etc)
The 'make sure it's always up' thing (like dots for dot classes, hots for some healers, earthshield, etc) could be Sacred Shield.
Then saving people with Holy Shock when needed. Oh yay it crit, I can use my next couple GCD's on hands or judgements or refreshing Sacred Shield while I watch the tanks health closely, ready for my burst instant HL that will pop him up again.

I can see you keeping yourself very busy, and not just chain casting down ranks or cancel casting max ranks. Seems like a massive improvement in playstyle. Unless you like always being nominated as the MT healer so you dont need to think, or if you like using that as an excuse to be sloppy with Judgements (and the new Hands system).

Raid healing (and tanking, and dps for that matter) between classes changed a hell of a lot from pre-BC to post. I think it would be a very refreshing change for the healers to swap around. Or better yet, be much more interchangeable, based on spec, fight, glyph choice, etc.

Emphasis added.

That was a pally's healing niche because that was the only tool they had, so it HAD to be their niche. With all the other spells, talents, and new judgement/hand system, they have a lot more tools in WotLK. Change is scary, but a lot of classes are going to have to change strategies, and in most cases it looks like it will make it more fun and versatile.

Are you saying that there was a better MT healer than paladin? Priest? Shaman maybe? Paladin WAS the best MT healing class there was. Our inability to other healing assignments has nothing to do with that.

Priests ability to keep up Inspiration makes up quite a lot for their lack of HPS compared to Paladins (in a lot of fights anyways, obviously this only applies if the boss does physical or mostly physical damage).

Additionally, besides what the above poster mentioned, Druids could also keep up Rejuvenation and the ability to Swiftmend. They also have a fast-ish heal (2.0 base) Regrowth that has a very high crit chance.

I think your missing the point here.

In the Burning Crusade, paladins were mainly MT healers and provided blessings. That was it. Now with the upcoming expansion, many changes are coming. This will change many classes/specs abilities/roles. Now, while the paladin's role/abilities might be the most drastically changed, this doesn't mean every paladin has to come into this thread and rant about "omg, I will be useless in this expansion now and blizz is doing nothing about it!"

I think what some people are trying to say, including myself, is that paladins will probably be more of a support class than just a spam bot like they were in TBC (just my opinion, I could be totally wrong). From what I've seen from the beta, and note that I am NOT in it atm, it looks like paladins will have way more tools/abilities at their disposal than just two spells that they cast during combat with varying ranks. This could include going from mainly MT spam bots to being a much more inclusive support class to the fight. This might include the following: putting the new salv on dpsers, saving people with HS, refreshing judgements, keeping up Sacred Shield (as Intermission has stated), etc.

My main point being that this thread is about the new expansion, The Wrath of the Lich King, not The Burning Crusade. I see it all too often where people are still in TBC mindset. This is a new expansion, people will get new abilities/roles and until this goes retail, I think all the whining and bickering people are doing is just wasted breath. And like many people have said in this very thread, paladins roles are now looking to be at least moving towards a new, fresher and varied role. If I played a paladin, I think I would be very happy with where things are going.

You must be naive if you think that HoS (2 mins cooldown) will play any kind of role in our healing "rotation". Nobody wants us judging if it endangers our current healing target - the damage will be pitifull and if the encounters won't be transformed to huge AoE-fests you only want one judgement up (JoW) that can be done by a ret/prot. Ok, maybe it's safe to judge but all the raid gets from it is one paladin with 10% more haste - and that haste will be eaten by the GCD from judging anyway.

It has been numerous times shown that pure "support" classes don't work. We NEED to stand our own in healing if Holy paladins are to be kept in the raids. Sacred Shield better be insane because BoL is a complete joke at the moment.

I AM in the beta, I HAVE healed Halls of the Stone with my almost fully Sunwell geared paladin and let me tell you this: I have never in my healing career felt so helpless. We damn wiped because I WAS OUT OF MANA! In a normal 5-man instance.
Emphasis added. Now the untalented blessings have been reduced from four to two. If you pass the "hands and judgement" part from beta paladin our ways to use skill are greatly diminished: in TBC skilled paladin used downranking to make the "impossible" to possible. Now we don't have that option: we have 2 working healing spells, an emergency button (which was usable in TBC too) and a button we auto-push every 30 seconds.
It's fun that all the counterarguments I've seen here are coming from other classes than paladins. When I see a lvl77 beta holy paladin come here and say paladin healing is ok, I'll adjust my perspective.

What kind of healing assignment would you suggest for a paladin now according to your impressions of the beta?

Hi, I'm a level 77 beta holy paladin (Alcara); Paladin healing is ok. Beacon of Light cost too much mana last time I tried it, but on the whole, the class is fine. The new Holy Shock is especially nice.

Where in Halls of Stone did you run out of mana?

Face room encounter >.<

I think this is a good change. Previously, blessings made paladins artificially valued for raiding- it's hard to pass up a 3rd paladin if it means you give up kings, or wisdom/might, or salvation. That resulted in paladins being dragged along when it wouldn't be justified normally. As a paladin player, I liked this, but I can see for the good of the game that no one class should be guaranteed 3 spots in a 25man raid.