* Glyph of Inner Fire - Increases the duration of Inner Fire by 100%.
This is pretty much a step backwards from the previous version. It's not as if increasing the duration of IF is going to make any difference at all in a PvE environment (which is the only place where anyone would be using this glyph).
I just can't imagine the devs thinking, "But adding 10 charges would be too strong."
What we really need is new ranks of Heal or Lesser Heal and having them with a base cast time of 2.5 seconds, affected by Divine Fury for a 2 second cast time.
I am slightly amused, but with this change it seems like Druids are the best-rounded (key word) healers. Especially with their Glyph that makes Healing Touch a 1.5 second cast. But besides that, they have 1.5s Nourish, 2.0 Regrowth, 3.0 Healing Touch. And of course Lifebloom which heals every second and Swiftmend which is just a gcd.
I know inscription isn't in yet, but I sincerely hope there is a way to "activate" and "unactivate" glyphs without replacing them (and obviously not during combat).
"Heal" with a cast time of 2.5 seconds would be really ideal. That'll give us instant power word: shield, 1.5 flash heal, 2.0 heal, 2.5 greater heal. (Although, on second thought the term "heal" might be slightly confusing, maybe we should just keep "lesser heal" and get rid of "heal" all together).
On a broader note, I wonder how professions are going to become rebalanced around Inscription. Some glyphs look almost mandatory for raiding (though unfortunately, none of the priest ones seem to fall under this category). We know that Alchemy is getting a considerable buff, but even then, extra mp5 or +healing is something that can be compensated for, unlike a large number of the glyph effects.
First glance seems to say that Inscribers get 1 bonus inscription, no answers so far on if its a major or a minor, or even both. Their other perk seems to be 15 minute hearthstones. Engineers have loads of new self-only enchants, that seem cool, but I can't see anyone ever using them for raids (at the cost of normal enchants).
I think the most intriguing thing is Armorsmiths get two metagems.
I know inscription isn't in yet, but I sincerely hope there is a way to "activate" and "unactivate" glyphs without replacing them (and obviously not during combat).
The glyph "sockets" appear in your spellbook and I think you unlock them as you level. So think of glyphs as gem sockets for your spells. You can only have a fixed number of them and a fixed number of each type. So I believe you will have to replace them.
The new Renew Glyph will be powerful in PvP. It increases uninterruptible healing output. While I do use Renew to top people off in PvP, I also aways put it up on my primary healing target before using any cast-time spells if I'm in range of interrupts. Unfortunately that means using a global cooldown for not a lot of healing per second, but still better than nothing. With the new Glyph using Renew to keep someone alive becomes much more appealing and it would help to survive getting melee trained.
The Inner Fire thing is just nonsense. The duration really isn't a problem. Nor are the charges actually. In solo PvE you've got shield to keep your charges and in PvP you often can't cast anything while you need your Inner Fire, so there are plenty of global cooldowns available to refresh it. And what that Blizzard poster said is probably true: Not keeping track of Inner Fire makes someone a worse Priest.
The real problem with Inner Fire is that it's kinda weak and can get dispelled too easily. It raises the question wether Priests were balanced around Inner Fire being active or not. My other problem is that I want to put it on other people like in WCIII! But I guess that's never going to happen.
* Glyph of Spirit of Redemption - All heals cast while Spirit of Redemption is active have a 20% chance to increase the remaining duration of Spirit of Redemption by 20 sec.
This will probably have an inner cooldown, else death is just a minor inconvenience for priests. The chances to get that proc within SoR redemption time is quite high.
SoR is 15 seconds, that's 10 spells. So if i remember my math correctly the chances to get it are
1- 0.8^10 = 89%
If you can get that proc several times in a row there's a good chance for sticking around for a few minutes,as long as there is someone to cast a heal on.
Regarding losing tools and options with the downranking nerf:
Shouldn't we be concerned that Serendipity is going to have the same impact on our playing style as the downranking nerf?
Even if they give us mid-sized heals back (through upgraded versions of Heal) won't it be the better choice to just overheal massively with Gheal and get 60% mana refunded?
I would much prefer to see a change to Serendipity, so that it rewards good play and not bad one. This could be done by changing it to:
Serendipity: gives a 33/66/100% chance to refund 30% of the mana cost when your direct healing spells bring the target to full health. (or whatever mana refund percentage is appropriate)
With this iteration of the talent there is an incentive to play well and choose the right heals (provided that we will actually be able to cast mid-sized heals). You get rewarded for topping people up, not overhealing them. Big difference.
Anyone with access to beta forums feel free to forward this to the priest forums.
Shouldn't we be concerned that Serendipity is going to have the same impact on our playing style as the downranking nerf.
Even if they give us mid-sized heals back (through upgraded versions of Heal) won't it be the better choice to just overheal massively with Gheal and get 60% mana refunded?
I suspect that might well be the case. Would need to make some spreadsheet where the efficiency of a spell as a function of the amount healed would be calculated. With a couple of fields to input spellpower and talent ranks, this shouldn't be overly hard once there's some clarity about the numbers and talent functionality. (With Serendipity currently broken, as well as Blizzards future implementation of this change.) Would give some interesting curves, with efficiency of a spell crashing down once you cross the Serendipity threshold and then gradually increasing again. One of the rather weird things which from the top of my head should be visible is that the maximum efficiencies for spells are going to be achieved with just over 50% overhealing (aka, just before Serendipity won't proc), as you get about 50% of a spells power for 40% of the mana cost. Additionally plotting the spell efficiencies would mean it would be easy to construct a range of healing done for which spell X is optimal, another range for spell Y, etc. Given the weird effect which Serendipity has on the efficiency of the spells, I am pretty sure it would be an extremely strange and counter intuitive collection of spellchoices, with higher ranks and/or spells being highly efficient near there Serendipity threshold but less efficient than others.
Probably when putting them in order (with downranking still possible, and depending on the penalties some spells would get even then), would give something like:
With the other heals fitting in somewhere based on the numbers; going to look rather strange in any case. It's definitely an extremely powerful talent when considering the elimination of downranking, but its effects basically go against everything we consider good and intuitive healing mechanics.
How do you deal with damage like that? Right now, priests downrank GH,
You're not losing the ability to downrank, it's just less efficient to do so. So you have two options. Downrank for no improved mana efficiency, or use max rank Greater heal and use serendipity for it's intended purpose.
Nobody is losing any spells, they're just losing efficiency of using lower level spells. All this does is make flash heal a more valuable spell, and serendipity a more valuable talent.
The devs are fixing something that should have been changed years ago. Higher ranks are intended to completely replace lower ranks (see rogues and warriors). The only reason they kept the lower ranks is because of situations like "Oh crap all I have is 200 mana left, guess I'll use that lower rank spell". Downranking is something they have been trying to eliminate for years, but were hesitant to do so because it was so prominent. They finally took the leap they should have done a long time ago.
Not everyone has Serendipity. I don't see how Discipline priests will cope without down ranking, Serendipity just means that it auto-down ranks your spell for you. Rapture totally fails on overheal, and Divine Aegis+Rapture only helps with critical heals. Grace becomes less useful if you have to spam max rank spells to maintain it, and with only an 8 second duration you really will need to overheal a lot to keep it up in a fair few situations.
I think for Holy Priests, no one will really notice this change, but Discipline priests will definitely hurt from it. Making it even less likely to bring a Discipline priest to a raid.
You're not losing the ability to downrank, it's just less efficient to do so. So you have two options. Downrank for no improved mana efficiency, or use max rank Greater heal and use serendipity for it's intended purpose.
Nobody is losing any spells, they're just losing efficiency of using lower level spells. All this does is make flash heal a more valuable spell, and serendipity a more valuable talent.
That suggestion is basically grasping at straws. Losing efficiency? With lower ranks being more expensive than the max rank spell, somebody has to be monumentally stupid to use downranked heals in the future. For all effect and purposes, downranking is no longer possibly for people with a remote semblance of sanity.
The devs are fixing something that should have been changed years ago. Higher ranks are intended to completely replace lower ranks (see rogues and warriors). The only reason they kept the lower ranks is because of situations like "Oh crap all I have is 200 mana left, guess I'll use that lower rank spell". Downranking is something they have been trying to eliminate for years, but were hesitant to do so because it was so prominent. They finally took the leap they should have done a long time ago.
This is no different than the mana pot nerf.
Again, there is a pretty big difference between the mana pot nerf and this. The manapot nerf was to eliminate a dumb and counter intuitive mechanic which in cases forced people to chain mana pots for a total result of about 100 mp5, more than a full tier of gear, as well as requiring encounters to be designed with this in mind. It's basically an extension of the Alchemy revamp from early TBC. Downranking for healers is a pretty intuitive mechanic which healers use to adapt to the healing output required by using smaller spells if less heals are required. Before you start telling us that we should use Flash Heal for this, the intention of Flash Heal is a not overly efficient and fast heal, not a small heal. Which looks like it will not be used that much more due to interaction between GHeal and Serendipity.
Similarly, Rogues/Warriors can't be compared to healers. Their moves are based off an infinite resource, whereas the healer resource pull is very much finite, needs to last until the end of an encounter, and as such requires a much different approach. A rogue low on energy waits a tick and continues with his attacks, autoattacks in the meantime delivering damage. A healer out of mana will be unable to provide any healing to a tank requiring it until he has regenerated mana, which is at a far slower rate than rogues. With this infinite resource, there is little reason for rogues and warriors to use lower ranks, whereas for mana classes, this finite nature of their resource very much causes this to be an issue. Additionally, there is no such thing as overDPS, whereas overhealing is very much a part of healing which influences efficiency and as such mana management for a healer. It can't even be described as comparing apples to oranges, more like comparing apples to bread...
You can't downrank in every situation. Do you downrank when tank healing? I don't. I'd much rather overheal the tank than underheal him and cause a wipe. If you're able to look at someone's health and decide you can use a spell that takes just as long to cast but costs less mana and heals for less, then there isn't enough pressure on the healers. Imagine if people downranked Power Word: Shield, or hots because they were able to say "well I know this person won't take more than X damage/second in this fight so I can use this lower rank spell".
Downranking is not the same mechanic as mana pots, but its a way of improving mana efficiency, and is effective Mana per 5. You called mana pot chugging a "dumb and counter intuitive mechanic". Well so is downranking. No one does it but healers. When you get a higher rank spell it should be better than the previous rank in every way, and it should make the previous rank completely obsolete. That was the comparison I was making to Rogues/Warriros. Yes they have unlimited resources, but mana classes aren't supposed to. Downraking and mana pots have caused running out of mana to be less of a threat since the spirit fix. They're basically moving healers back to where they were before the insane mana regen.
Yes, there is skill in using a cheaper rank of greater heal to conserve mana, but there is also skill in judging risk versus reward of choosing whether to use renew, flash heal, greater heal, etc. All this does is make holy priests, paladins, and shamans less of a one trick pony using various ranks of the same spell.
I'll pose this question. How often do people downrank in arena? Does this mean they are less skilled at healing? No, you just can't afford to downrank in arena because there is always that threat that someone can be bursted down.
It might very well be true that people don't downrank heals in an arena environment. That doesn't change the fact though that the removal of downranking spells in the PvE domain is a significant change which not everybody is truly happy about. To answer your earlier question, yes, I do downrank spells when tank healing, even on encounters like Brutallus. It's a matter of necessity, especially when there are no beneficial classes like shadow priests etc available.
I also don't quite understand why you call downranking spells to improve efficiency a 'dumb and counter intuitive mechanic' like mana pot chugging. How so? Nobody knows for sure how healing will work out in Wrath but it certainly doesn't seem to turn into a more intuitive way of pushing up health bars.
Furthermore, downranking efficiently was a fun minigame for healers to alleviate the drudgery of healing. Most of the time one wasn't forced to play this game because of ...guess what...mana pot chugging, but if one did engage in that activity it was very satisfying to come close to the mark when healing somebody for 3000hp who needed 2950 hp.
In all likelihood, this will be completely removed now.
You can't downrank in every situation. Do you downrank when tank healing? I don't. I'd much rather overheal the tank than underheal him and cause a wipe. If you're able to look at someone's health and decide you can use a spell that takes just as long to cast but costs less mana and heals for less, then there isn't enough pressure on the healers. Imagine if people downranked Power Word: Shield, or hots because they were able to say "well I know this person won't take more than X damage/second in this fight so I can use this lower rank spell".
Yes, I do downrank in tank healing. There's plenty of situations where a tank can take pretty unpredictable burst damage, but the damage incoming outside of these burst isn't extremely high, and requires much less HPS. The result? Have people keep the tank topped off using smaller heals, with healers also being ready (and some of them possibly cast-cancelling max ranks) to counter the big bursts. In a situation where the tank requires to remain topped off to counter burst, you don't keep him topped off with max ranks; that would mean a rather quick OoM. Keeping tanks topped off with Flash Heal wouldn't cause you to fare much better. Nor can you take the risk of letting the tank's health drop down a few thousand, as the following burst could kill him.
You don't downrank Power Word Shield, since due to its efficiency (or current lack thereof) you will not use the spell when it's really needed: an inefficient emergency shield to keep someone alive. Obviously you want to use the spell at maximum power, and it will not 'overheal'. And FYI, to my knowledge HoTs do get downranked. I have done it occasionally in the past, and I am pretty sure Druids also downrank Rejuvenation at times.
Regarding pressure on the healers: It actually requires more skill and focus for healers to manage their mana pool over the course of the fight, modulating their healing output to fit the situation, while being ready to counter burst thrown at them, than to have them operate at max HPS during the entire fight.
Downranking is not the same mechanic as mana pots, but its a way of improving mana efficiency, and is effective Mana per 5. You called mana pot chugging a "dumb and counter intuitive mechanic". Well so is downranking.
-Mana pot chugging: Blindly drinking potions every cooldown, since while you may not need the mana now, you could possibly need it about 5 minutes in the future. Giving the bonus of a full tier of gear.
-Downranking: Fitting your heals to the magnitude required by the encounter, this way not wasting mana because the highest rank of a spell is too powerful.
Which of the two is not intuitive?
No one does it but healers.
Have you ever heard a rogue complain "Damn, I wish I had a rank so I could have damaged that boss for 200, but because I can only use one rank of Sinister Strike, I hit him for 1000. I wasted 800 there on overdamage." ?
The answer is 'no', obviously. Overdamaging does not exist, and with their infinite resource pools, there is no incentive for them to manage their manapools and downrank because they might not make it through the fights. For mana users, their finite resources are very much possible to run out, and for healers managing the manapool to endure a fight is one of the essential skills.
When you get a higher rank spell it should be better than the previous rank in every way, and it should make the previous rank completely obsolete. That was the comparison I was making to Rogues/Warriros.
Again, you cannot compare Rogues and Warriors at all. With their steady generation of energy/rage and their roll being to DPS, there's basically no reason why they would not want to operate at maximum capacity. The only time this happens is when they are close to pulling aggro, which means they have to lower dps and may actually end up with excess rage/mana and downranking would be pointless as well. With healers, encounters and situations which develop during them call for priests to cast spells of various ranks to respond to the healing demanded, since the palette of max rank skills each class gets for this is insufficient.
Similarly this change would mean that Spellpower would be less beneficial for Healers than for DPS (AP for physical classes). These classes benefit across the board as their output increases. For healers, this will essentially mean it's only useful if the gap is bigger than the max rank of the heal, as beyond this it might often just be overheal. I will never need the full power of a max rank to heal a non-tank, nor would I like the tank's health to drop far (if at all) below this value at regular frequency.
Yes they have unlimited resources, but mana classes aren't supposed to. Downraking and mana pots have caused running out of mana to be less of a threat since the spirit fix. They're basically moving healers back to where they were before the insane mana regen.
Balancing the resources perfectly is not going to work, but similarly you can't exactly compare them either for the same reasons. No, rogues and warriors are not supposed to run out. Healers however, are not supposed to run out of mana during a fight, as this means people start dying. That doesn't mean that they should have unlimited mana, it means they should be capable of managing their mana to last the fight, and have the tools to do so. If you think healers should be massively overhealing their spells because otherwise they would not run out of mana, you are balancing in a way which takes all the skill out of healing, a situation in which tons of mana are wasted to make sure mana is still an issue. This is a stupid situation: what should happen is that with the potion nerf in mind (which actually simplifies matters, and I fully support) Blizzard adjust the mana regeneration so that skillful management of the mana pool means people will be able to not run OoM during the fight, while people who waste mana do. That's an intuitive situation where people need skill to properly heal.
Yes, there is skill in using a cheaper rank of greater heal to conserve mana, but there is also skill in judging risk versus reward of choosing whether to use renew, flash heal, greater heal, etc. All this does is make holy priests, paladins, and shamans less of a one trick pony using various ranks of the same spell.
When it comes to judging whether or not to heal a tank yet, like I mentioned you can often not even make this decision since leaving the tank with a health deficit is too risky. Similarly there is fights like Naj'entus where people need to be topped off (typically 2-3k deficits) or die, you don't have the time to wait for HoTs to tick, and using Flash Heal for the entire fight is likely to run you OoM.
FYI, I do not only use various ranks of GHeal, I use the other spells to, in the situation they are tailored for:
-Renew: Damage buffer on tanks, moderate damage on raid which does not need to be hurried fast, but with me needing to mainly focus on other targets.
-Flash Heal: People needing a quick but inefficient heal to prevent them from dying.
-Power Word Shield: An emergency spell to save people from dying when even Flash Heal is not enough. Also added protection for easily anticipated damage, and to protect squishy classes.
-Binding Heal: People needing a fast heal while I simultaneously need one myself.
-Greater Heal: Highly efficient heals, for situations requiring the highest HPS and throughput, as well as situations calling for efficient healing which doesn't need to be applied in emergency fashion.
-Prayer of Mending: Aggro generation for tank on pull and aggro resets, situations with multiple people taking damage so it bounces around.
-Circle of Healing: Raid healing with clumped groups (currently parties) taking damage.
-Prayer of Healing: Healing on party on range which has taken considerable damage when the party is in range, often used together with Inner Focus. Also for party healing when people are too spread out to use CoH.
I already use all these heals in the situation they are designed for. I do already make these choices. Together with the rank choices, it's what makes healing fun as a priest. The issue though is that Flash Heal is not designed as a small heal. It's an emergency heal that is inefficient and happens to not be overly huge because it would imbalance things. It's not intended to do the task downranked heals are currently used for, and it will not with the removal of downranking since GHeal bombs are in most cases still more efficient. Basically, in any situation I previously used these spells, I still will. In situations where I used downranked GHeals, I will likely be dropping max rank GHeals with Serendipity. How this increases the choices made, and makes for more intuitive and skilled healing is beyond me. As I detailed in one of my previous posts, it causes an extremely idiotic situation in terms of efficiency, where spells reach their peak efficiency when overhealing for over 50% (and less than 60%), since you get 50% of the spell for 40% of the cost. How do things like this create an intuitive situation promoting choice?
Basically the one thing I end up wondering from your posts in this thread is what your actual experience is with healing in raids, looking at your guild and gear (PvP, shadow spec), as well as your apparent impression that Priests only use GHeal currently. I don't mean to be condescending or elitist (it's not like I am 'elite' when it comes to my own progress), but based on your posts I don't really get the feeling you truly know what you are talking about when commenting on priest healing and downranking in raids.
I'll pose this question. How often do people downrank in arena? Does this mean they are less skilled at healing? No, you just can't afford to downrank in arena because there is always that threat that someone can be bursted down.
Exactly, in PvP the incoming damage normally speaking means that in 5v5, full power healing is required on the character tanking the damage, as all power is needed to counter this. Talking about 2v2 and 3v3? I've frequently downranked there. Often enough you want to keep people up to reduce the risk of a burst (or the healer getting crowd controlled/silenced) but current incoming damage and deficit does not justify max rank usage.
Well, when I said non-repeating, I meant that the person wasn't under the effect of some dastardly 2000/tick or 2000/sec DoT but was hit by some random cleave or splash or <fill-in-the-blank> damage. The kind of damage that you want a fire-and-forget spell to deal with because it might happen again or it might not. So a renew is a great response. If someone is only going to take 2000 damage once over the course of the fight, let em bandage. If they take 2000 every 20 seconds, let the chain heals get them. In the span of 20 seconds, they are bound to get hit by some kind of area or smart heal.
I'm not going to discount the usefulness of a mid-range heals for mid-range situations but there are 4 other healing classes in the game. The diminishing bounce of chain heal, smart CoH and the more useful lightwell are all existing tools we have for the "nickel and dime" healing you're talking about.
Cruumash, my point was this.
Discipline priest are going to have their feet knocked out from under them. Why? Because they cannot downrank. If a player takes 2000 damage, one time that is non-repeating, as a holy priest in WotLK I can make rank flash heal them for probably 4k+ and get 60% of the mana cost back (NO PROBLEM), even more I can max rank greater heal them and get the mana cost back for sure.
The problem lies when a discipline priest is forced to throw a renew on that target and pray that 6 seconds goes by without anyone else healing that target, because if they do the disc priest has just wasted their time, their mana, and looks stupid. If downranking was allowed, they could downrank a flash heal or a greater heal to properly heal for approximately 2000 health.
The fact that discipline priests have no functional way of dealing with non-repetitive, minor damage is a fundamental flaw.
Originally Posted by Brinas
You can't downrank in every situation. Do you downrank when tank healing? I don't. I'd much rather overheal the tank than underheal him and cause a wipe.
No you're right you can't downrank in every situation but there are a plethora of situations you can. Cast cancelling is another trick that we healers use, if they were to say that was no longer allowed by making us finish casts we started there would probably be uproar as well. Downranking is a very smart way of dealing with the damage, and knowing the heals you need to cast. Take Brutallus, who hits like a truck but I find it safer to downrank greater heals to rank 3/4 and finish the cast consistently (even if it 100% overheals) as it could crit for inspiration, proc a holy concentration, proc [Memento of Tyrande], proc your meta gem etc. I wasted less mana than if I had cast a max rank greater heal, but during a stomp you would never want to downrank.
Downranking was about knowing the fight, knowing your character limits and how much each of your heals heal for, and choosing the appropriate tool for the appropriate job. (Sorry I cannot comment on the arena, as I'm not much of a PvP'er.)
Last edited by Sinndir : 08/15/08 at 1:55 PM.
Reason: Responding to Brinas
You can't downrank in every situation. Do you downrank when tank healing? I don't. I'd much rather overheal the tank than underheal him and cause a wipe.
Originally Posted by Brinas
If you're able to look at someone's health and decide you can use a spell that takes just as long to cast but costs less mana and heals for less, then there isn't enough pressure on the healers. Imagine if people downranked Power Word: Shield, or hots because they were able to say "well I know this person won't take more than X damage/second in this fight so I can use this lower rank spell".
You don't heal a tank because you see that his health-bar is low, you heal him because you expect him to take damage and doing that, you can't use 717 mana/cast spell for a long time.
Originally Posted by Brinas
Downranking is not the same mechanic as mana pots, but its a way of improving mana efficiency, and is effective Mana per 5. You called mana pot chugging a "dumb and counter intuitive mechanic". Well so is downranking. No one does it but healers. When you get a higher rank spell it should be better than the previous rank in every way, and it should make the previous rank completely obsolete. That was the comparison I was making to Rogues/Warriros. Yes they have unlimited resources, but mana classes aren't supposed to. Downraking and mana pots have caused running out of mana to be less of a threat since the spirit fix. They're basically moving healers back to where they were before the insane mana regen.
You can't compare healing to any dps-class, that's just stupid. DPS will always have their abilities to hit for it's full power, a healer will only hit a heal for the amount of missing HP the target has, using a 6000 heal for to heal 3000 missing HP is a waste of 3000 healing. Also, dps-spells costs much less, untalented a GH7 costs 825 mana, compare this to a Frostbolt R14, it costs 345 mana, that's 480 mana less, almost 60% less.
Can't say that healers have any insane mana regen now, the spirit changes only affected two classes, priests and druids. Shamans and paladins havn't changed. Mana is still a issue (and it should be, it's part of healers gameplay) but forcing healers to maxrank their spells will make fights over 2 minutes impossible if WotLK bossfights reassembles anything near the fights we currently encounter in Black Temple and Sunwell.
Originally Posted by Brinas
Yes, there is skill in using a cheaper rank of greater heal to conserve mana, but there is also skill in judging risk versus reward of choosing whether to use renew, flash heal, greater heal, etc. All this does is make holy priests, paladins, and shamans less of a one trick pony using various ranks of the same spell
Healers are always evaluating what spell to use, we don't think of a different ranks of spells, every rank of every spell are considered a unique spell with certain properties, what we do is evaluating the situation and what spell is most feasible to solve the problem. This change simple takes away 80% of our options, sure, many of the spells wasn't needed, but some of them was used constantly as there wasn't any other good option.
I see somewhat stupid argument, that if GH heals to much, then use FH/Renew, but they arn't a replacement, FH has a much higher mana/hp cost, renew don't isn't usefull in many situations as it doesn't heal for much on a tick and there is to long time between each tick.
Originally Posted by Brinas
I'll pose this question. How often do people downrank in arena? Does this mean they are less skilled at healing? No, you just can't afford to downrank in arena because there is always that threat that someone can be bursted down.
Many arena fights are about endurance, especially in 2vs2, the team where the healer goes oom first loose, downranking and choice of spells have it usage even in arena.
Some thoughts about this.
For me, healing has always been a balance with my own mana pool and my group-members health pool, you need to conserve mana as you never know when you need to burst heal away 5k mana (takes about 20 seconds to loose 5k mana) and knowing when and what to heal. With the upcoming changes this will not be valid anymore, mana managing will be a question of heal or not to heal, in other words, ignore that group-members take damage until the have taking enough damage that my heals are effecient.
There are several changes that will make this a less issue, but I don't think they are enough.
Serendipity
Great talent, a must have for raid-priest, but it has become so good that it will be almost impossible to be a healer without it, this is not a problem for raiding priests as they max their mana/healing talents, but those who doesn't will have a hard time. Try to heal a heroic or raid with a hybrid disc/holy spec will be very very hard if you don't outgear it completly, like going to Karazhan in Sunwell gear. There has been alot of focus making most tank-classes able to tank without being pure tank-talented, but will healers need to be pure healers to be able to heal?
Shamans and paladins don't have this talent, what can they do when they can't save mana?
Crushings are removed and from what I understand will encounters be less random, the question is, how less random, can we actually start casting heals when the tank takes damage again, if so, then using max-rank heals can be usefull, but what if it not, today most tanks can die in 3 seconds on about any encounter that they don't are overgeared for, 2 seconds arn't even close to get any real heal in on, that's the core of why healers have to heal tanks that have full HP, you don't know what happens the next 3 seconds.
Large mana pool, mana regen and there are more mana-returns from various classes but our spells will costs much more, GH costs about 1350 mana untalented, flash heal about 750 mana.
You can't downrank in every situation. Do you downrank when tank healing? I don't. I'd much rather overheal the tank than underheal him and cause a wipe. If you're able to look at someone's health and decide you can use a spell that takes just as long to cast but costs less mana and heals for less, then there isn't enough pressure on the healers. Imagine if people downranked Power Word: Shield, or hots because they were able to say "well I know this person won't take more than X damage/second in this fight so I can use this lower rank spell".
Downranking is not the same mechanic as mana pots, but its a way of improving mana efficiency, and is effective Mana per 5. You called mana pot chugging a "dumb and counter intuitive mechanic". Well so is downranking. No one does it but healers. When you get a higher rank spell it should be better than the previous rank in every way, and it should make the previous rank completely obsolete. That was the comparison I was making to Rogues/Warriros. Yes they have unlimited resources, but mana classes aren't supposed to. Downraking and mana pots have caused running out of mana to be less of a threat since the spirit fix. They're basically moving healers back to where they were before the insane mana regen.
Yes, there is skill in using a cheaper rank of greater heal to conserve mana, but there is also skill in judging risk versus reward of choosing whether to use renew, flash heal, greater heal, etc. All this does is make holy priests, paladins, and shamans less of a one trick pony using various ranks of the same spell.
I'll pose this question. How often do people downrank in arena? Does this mean they are less skilled at healing? No, you just can't afford to downrank in arena because there is always that threat that someone can be bursted down.
Just because you can't downrank in every situation, that doesn't mean it's 'dumb and counter intuitive'. Using an 8k+ heal on someone who is 4k below max health is far more counter intuitive to me.
If people expected every arena match to last 8+ minutes, they probably would downrank. Comparing arena to 25-man raiding is an "apples to bread" comparison, as someone mentioned above. Not to mention, people frequently do downrank in arena for things like earthshock, roots, aoe's to find stealthed opponents, etc.
I seem to recall reading a reference to a blue post saying that supposedly they instituted the potion sickness because they didn't want mana users to have to chain chug pots, because they didn't want running out of mana to be a concern. But if you can't downrank, going oom is a very real concern.
I disagree that a new rank should make the old rank "completely obsolete". Does an assault rifle make a pistol obsolete? Does a nuke make a hand grenade obsolete? Does a boxer's haymaker make his jab obsolete? No, obviously not. It's about using the right tool for the job. DPS and Healing are completely different animals. DPS is about doing as much as possible as quickly as possible. Healing is about doing as much as needed as efficiently as possible. I think most people agree that if we had a smaller efficient heal (doesn't have to as efficient as downranking, but more efficient than Flash Heal), that would solve this problem, to a large degree.
Last edited by Turgid : 08/15/08 at 2:00 PM.
Reason: Spelling, verbiage
Discipline priest are going to have their feet knocked out from under them. Why? Because they cannot downrank. If a player takes 2000 damage, one time that is non-repeating, as a holy priest in WotLK I can make rank flash heal them for probably 4k+ and get 60% of the mana cost back (NO PROBLEM), even more I can max rank greater heal them and get the mana cost back for sure.
The problem lies when a discipline priest is forced to throw a renew on that target and pray that 6 seconds goes by without anyone else healing that target, because if they do the disc priest has just wasted their time, their mana, and looks stupid. If downranking was allowed, they could downrank a flash heal or a greater heal to properly heal for approximately 2000 health.
The fact that discipline priests have no functional way of dealing with non-repetitive, minor damage is a fundamental flaw.
I don't dispute that Discipline priest may have a disadvantage in this particular example, but not every spec of every class can handle every situation identically. For example, what does a paladin do when a group of 5 takes 2000 pts each. Try to FoL each one up to full? That would be silly, he lets the CoH priest take care of it. Are paladins fundamentally flawed because they can't heal more than one person at a time? I don't think so.
My point is that there are likely 5-7 other healers in a 25 man raid. Asking what one spec of one class is going to do about a single hit on a single player just doesn't make sense. Perhaps the answer is best, "the discipline priest does nothing, that's not his role."
I don't dispute that Discipline priest may have a disadvantage in this particular example, but not every spec of every class can handle every situation identically. For example, what does a paladin do when a group of 5 takes 2000 pts each. Try to FoL each one up to full? That would be silly, he lets the CoH priest take care of it. Are paladins fundamentally flawed because they can't heal more than one person at a time? I don't think so.
My point is that there are likely 5-7 other healers in a 25 man raid. Asking what one spec of one class is going to do about a single hit on a single player just doesn't make sense. Perhaps the answer is best, "the discipline priest does nothing, that's not his role."
Can't only think of a raid environment, the paladin would use their new tool Beacon of Light I would hope.
If you want to take it for a raid setting (assume tank healing for the disc priest) then you can look at what happens if the damage incoming is enough that renews don't overly help it, but a max rank greater heal is too much, why shouldn't that disc priest be able to downrank? You need to keep the player at full life (so no insta-gibs happen), but at the same time you want to be efficient both time and mana-wise. Like perhaps being the Caribdis healer in the Fathom-Lord Karathress fight, you heal small amounts of consistent damage, I used to rotation between greater heal rank 1 and greater heal rank 3... I couldn't wait for our tank to take enough damage to rank 7 him, because at anytime near 50% hp, Karathress could shadowbolt the tank and cause a swift death.
I hope you are understanding that the downranking change is a very poor one, I'll admit we need to do a bunch of testing (I'm not in beta so that is up to you guys), but from my end just imagining not being able to do it... it seems very poor.
As I said before downranking is counterintuitive, because ideally everyone should be having to use their best abilities at all times to be successful in the encounter. It's not counterintuitive to do it. It's counterintuitive that it's BENEFICIAL to do it in the first place. I wasn't implying that it's smart to use an 8k heal on someone who's missing 4k hps. If you're downranking spells, then that means the encounter is not putting as much pressure on you as it should be. I think that downranking heals is a very smart thing to do in TBC, but I think that it's just silly that it would ever be more beneficial to use a weaker version of your spells in the first place. Hence, I'm glad they're eliminating the practice.
And since you feel the need to question my raiding experience. I am currently spec'd shadow because I also have a resto druid and have been using him for raiding recently. I have healing experience in all raid group formats, but have not been to t6 content. I don't post comments on the T6 threads because I haven't been there, but this is a basic principle of raid healing that we are discussing, and anyone who has healed successfully in a 25-man raid can contribute to this discussion.
As for druids, the only downranking I ever do on my resto druid is using a lower regrowth when the hot is already on the target, so that I don't overwrite the hot.
"people frequently do downrank in arena for things like earthshock, roots, aoe's to find stealthed opponents, etc." I was referring to healing. In most cases you don't downrank your heals in arena. Unless you're fighting priest, druid, hunter or the sort. The downranking you refer to is exactly why warriors never used to be able to kill a mage, rank 1 frostbolt spam to proc the snare. Being able to use a lvl 1-10 spell to get the same effect as your lvl 70 spell is borderline exploitative as far as I'm concerned.
"Does a boxer's haymaker make his jab obsolete?" Bad analogy. This is like comparing Flash Heal to Greater Heal. A better analogy would be a boxer using a Jab with the same strength he had at 12 years old, when he's 25.
Anyways this is way off topic. I was merely expressing my opinion that I think downranking was getting out of hand, and I for one say it's a welcome change, even if it will make for more mana issues when healing.
You know, removing the cooldown from Penance would be a viable option for Discipline. Seems like a perfectly viable mid-range heal so far.
Of course, that just means Disciplinarians would probably just spam it on the tank. So my proposal? Perhaps Penance should give a Weakened-Soul like debuff rather than a cooldown. Actually, the more I think about this, the more I like it a lot. Think of situations where there are 2-3 tanks, if Penance had a debuff-cooldown of say 8 seconds, you could easily keep Grace up on 3 tanks.
[e]
/Sigh
Why is it counter-intuitive to use the heal for the appropriate amount? When I was leveling up, even when I was Shadow, I knew right away upon training a spell that Greater Heal healed me for more health than I needed. I never used a max rank Greater Heal on myself while leveling up, I always used 1 rank below until I gained more stamina.
P.S.
I downranked in the arena. When you have 200 mana and your partner needs a heal, what are you going to do? Stand around for 10 seconds praying for full FSR regen and getting to 714 mana needed to greater heal? Or throw a greater heal rank 1 ~ heals for 3500, procs your Crystal Spire of Karabor for another 200.
Have less mana? No problem, flash heal rank 1, faster cast, solid 1k - 1.2k healing (with Crystal Spire).
I cede, in the arena I don't really do it for efficiency, but rather out of desperation. But honestly, it depends. In 2v2's, damage is a lot more predictable.
I hope you are understanding that the downranking change is a very poor one, I'll admit we need to do a bunch of testing (I'm not in beta so that is up to you guys), but from my end just imagining not being able to do it... it seems very poor.
The downranking change will be a poor one if Blizz just froze the talents and spells at their current level. As of this moment, I don't see any reason to believe that will happen though. Perhaps we are just debating the half-empty/half-full slice in time that we're in?
And so far, I've healed every 5man using max rank gheal anyway. You should see how squishy all these Deathknight tanks are in their greens.
Brinas you suggested that downranking caused healing classes to become "one trick ponies" as they would just use different ranks of the same spell, but healing as a priest, you should have quickly come to the realization that this is not true.
I would like to spew on and on about how wrong of it is for Blizzard to consecutively "dumb down" the task of healing but that is just my opinion. I play a priest because the versatility presented a very entertaining challenge, say compared to the healing tasks of a shaman or paladin. Quite simply, I am opposed to this change. I am also opposed to the priority targeting given to Circle of Healing. I am opposed to the Serendipity talent. Priests have been asking for utility and what we've been given were more tools to become brainless fill in healers that can play whack-a-mole more efficiently with less effort.
Edit
Originally Posted by Brinas
"Does a boxer's haymaker make his jab obsolete?" Bad analogy. This is like comparing Flash Heal to Greater Heal. A better analogy would be a boxer using a Jab with the same strength he had at 12 years old, when he's 25.
That analogy was poor but it makes more sense than yours. We downrank because we can with better gear. We wouldn't downrank as much if we were in T4 now would we. In any case, the whole boxing thing has gone awry.
I think Brinas' original remarks about downranking has been sufficiently torn apart so that I don't think I can add any more value with my own rebuttals, but the one thing I'll say is this: all of us for the most part agree in one way or another that downranking heals was simply a way for us to fill the gap between Greater Heal and Flash Heal. In this manner, we can probably agree that "downranking is dumb" because of the design of our healing spells and not because of how people use it.
As has already mentioned several times in this and other threads, if Blizzard gave priests a heal that fulfilled the role of GH1, a lot of us would be very happy with the downranking change. As it stands, however, we have no choice but to downrank, so it's natural to not want our "last resort" to be taken away.
08/14/08, 8:54 PM
