asan

With the combined nerf to mana regen, I guess its sensible to assume we won't have tons of mana to cast. We would be back to pre-tbc healing where you heal not preemptively, but after the damage lands.
So far, this make Shamans really desirable if and only if Spirit Link works like we imagine. Spirit link changes the healing made with a resto shaman in the raid so that healing can be done after the damage lands. Other classes (priests, for example), are still meant to overheal, as they even have talents to return mana after an overheal.

There is no possible way for Spirit Link to be a "weak" ability, aka, not working in end game bosses now.

 

Kortar

According to Blizzard, their goal is to have 4-5 healers for a 25-man raid. Whether or not they get there is anyone's guess, but that's their stated goal.

 

Shakes

Nope, that was what some of us were implying from their earlier quotes, but now they've explicitly said healer stacking shall remain:

(From WoW Forums -> Death Knight Viability Question)

 

Skytor

Do you have a source for that? (the 4-5 healers goal)

That would be a pretty radical re-design of the whole dynamic - not saying its not possible (its only adjusting dps-in after all), just a radical departure for raid and encounter design.

 

Sipack

Another puzzling thing would be how our new talents Tidal Waves and Ancestral Awakening tie in with this change?
From talent descriptions I would think Blizzard intends us to use HW and LHW more often then now, but on the other hand, both of those spells are mana hogs at top ranks.

The only thing we could consistently use, even at max rank, is good old CH (and even that only with s.priest present). So the idea is to just cast CH most of the time and only HW/LHW on emergencies? I guess nothing much changes for shaman healing in WotlK then...

All this assuming cost/regen is comparable in WotlK and in TBC.

And I'm not even touching how this change would look in pvp, if we don't see some other changes, it would just end up in /rant.

 

Skyhoof

This change to a single rank of every spell seems an extreme way to curb downranking. With the introduction of a talent such as Tidal Waves, it would make sense that Blizzard doesn't want shaman casting Rank 1 Chain Heal to lower our casting speed on HW or LHW by 30 percent for the next three casts. Or to prevent us keeping Ancestral Fortitude up with a Rank 1 Healing Wave. And they probably don't want us interrupting spells with Rank 1 Earth Shock (especially in PVP).

However, it seems extreme to eliminate all but the highest rank of the spell. Why not limit our spell choices to spells learned after level 65 (or some other level that gives us a few choices of spell ranks)?

Not every healer down ranks. Some prefer to maximize mp5 or Intellect. However, using downranking is a perfectly valid way to play the game as a healer. It would be terribly sad if Blizzard were to completely eliminate a way that many healers enjoy playing the game -- especially since shaman have no talents to restore mana from overhealing. And let's keep in mind that how much mana we have for a fight is being limited through the potion debuff and shadow priests returning less mana.

So if my spell cost is fixed and my mana for the fight is basically fixed, then I have to return to the days of interrupting my heals if the tank isn't low on health. I will only be able to cast a certain number of heals during a fight and the trick will becoming in having them land at the right time (and land quickly enough).

Blizzard has stated it wants to make tanking more "fun." Why are they then making healing more a headache?

 

Sprout

Assuming they tune costs I guess this is not a huge nerf or anything. Cleanup healing is going to suck without a DW since LHW costs so much. They can fix this but Im guessing it will get missed.

It DOES make it easier to tune fights from a healiing perspective.
(Xhealers*Y mana/Z cost) =total heals per fight.


It also makes healing ALOT more boring. The thing that shaman complain about now is the spam CH snoozefest fights.This is just going to make it worse. you will have 3 heals...think about that. I have 6 I use now. I guess Ill jus create a stop casting macro to replace one....

One option to minimize overheal and make this a bit more reasonable would be to give us 1-2 more spells between LHW & HW. Make it mana efficient to use to clenup damage to a single target, even if the cast time is a bit higher (2.5 sec base cast, reduce too 2 sec)


This is also a HUGE buff to priests. With their overheal mana proteciton priests will be the kings once again, since the cost of an overheal is so mitigated.

 

Toastradamus

Well we can't know until they tell us, but there are a couple of pretty simple and obvious reasons why they might want to kill off downranking: ease of understanding and flexibility of encounter design.

Downranking is not intuitive. From my experience, most people expect their new spell ranks to be replacements for their old spell ranks just like most people expect gear upgrades to replace old gear. They gain a level, go to the trainer, learn the new rank, replace the old rank with the new one on their bars (hell, you don't even have to do that anymore, the game does it for you), and go "Yay, now I'm better than I used to be." They do not learn the new rank, put the new rank on a button next to the old rank, do a bunch of math factoring in their current gear and estimated fight lengths, and come up with a complicated system for when to use one rank and when to use another. It's one thing to gain a little edge on your peers by doing some research, but it's another entirely for that research to be required in order not to suck as a raider, and Blizzard has been trying to open up raiding to the masses for a long time now. This is similar to hunter autoshot clipping mechanics, which is also getting fixed in wotlk (to the joy of most hunters).

Removing downranking also allows the developers to create more skill-based encounters for healers (as opposed to research- and spamming-based). They can tune incoming damage so that healers have to actually decide when to spend mana and when to hold it in reserve. They don't have to worry that after creating some neat, tricky fight where burst damage hits just hard enough and just the right amount of time apart and just unpredictably enough and for just long enough total to be really fun and full of hard choices, the first raid group will just cheese healing by having everyone drop down a couple of ranks and act like a massive healing stream totem for the raid, healing everyone who gets hurt every couple of seconds with a bunch of moderate heals that require choosing a target but not really anything else.

Basically, I think Blizzard is removing downranking because they think it will make the game more fun for the players and because they think it will allow them to make the game even more fun for the players in the future. I think that they think that choosing which spells to use when instead of which ranks of spells to spam is more compelling gameplay. And personally, I think that they will probably end up being right. But that relies heavily on them actually implementing spells and encounters that lead to interesting choices, which may or may not end up happening. I guess we'll find out eventually.

As a side note, on the topic of rank 1 Earth Shock in arenas: I was wondering what they would do about Earth Shock since they've gone through and stopped all the other interrupts from triggering the GCD. I figured they couldn't do that and leave ES the way it is now, but they can't just give shamans a non-GCD-triggering instant nuke, right? Well of course they could, but I doubt they would ever consider that option very seriously. Now with the removal of the version of the spell that trades pretty much all of the damage for a reduced cost there are two compelling reasons to either remove the damage from the spell and make it a straight interrupt (with an appropriately-reduced cost) or split the interrupt off as its own ability and give ES some other shock cooldown-worthy effect.

 

Plummer

First of all, they did tell us. (Source) Secondly, how is downranking not intuitive? A mage at 50% health does not need the same amount of healing as a warrior at 50% so why should 1 rank fit all? When I leveled my shaman, I purposely did not use the new rank of healing spell because I simply did not need that much healing to be done. Instead of having a heal do a massive amount of overheal and cost more mana, I would save that mana for the next fight so I won't have as much downtime.

Something along the lines of what Daidalos came up with would be ideal(I realize no one responded to you but a simple "I agree" isn't exactly contructive). Casting a smaller heal would net no benefit to casting a big heal in terms of healing/mana and casting the most appropriate heal becomes important. It seems they pretty much threw in the towel at trying to find a good downranking system and decided to axe downranking all together.

As far as making the game more fun, I don't think spending an absurd amount of mana to simply top someone off so they don't get killed by some random AoE boss ability because they don't have as much health as a tank, is very fun. Also, we always have to be deciding which spells to use since one spell does not fit all and removing downranking makes healing less skillful.

 

Bunni

I would fully support a change like that, I started downranking on my Priest well before +healing was even available to me. It wasn't about abusing the system, it was (and is) about matching the heal to the needed health deficit. Downranking isn't counter intuitive, using a 5k heal on a player that took 1k damage is. At the very least if they push this through I would like to see them provide healers with some sort of midrange heal that isn't penalized because it's the "emergency" speed heal.

I also can't understand why they seem to be so focused on making sure dps spec tank classes can still tank and at the same time they seem to be hell bent on making successful healing rely heavily on mana returned through relatively high healing talents. I think these changes are going to hurt the most while gearing up and trying to heal while specced for leveling with pure or hybrid builds.

 

Valderen

To address the first bolded part...that's why we have lesser healing wave. Now downranking made lhw obsolete mostly because it's more mana efficient...but we do have the tools to cast smaller heal when needed.

About the second bolded part, I disagree, downranking is what makes the healing less skillful. You end up having a heal that matches all damage done...all you do is play wack-a-mole. This requires little skill.

I think it requires more skill to actually know what spell to use and when to use it...to maximize you mana/heal ratio and still manage to keep people alive. Is it better to keep the tank at full health using a smaller less mana efficient heal, or wait till you can cast a bigger heal and not have overheal and be more mana efficient...now you have some decision making...wack-a-mole isn't about making decision.

 

Darian_TruBlade

How much the changes hurt largely depends on how Blizzard implements the two spec system. If switching between your leveling spec and your healing spec is easy and without any notable cost then the issue is mostly moot.

As for tanking, it's extremely likely that any Warrior, Paladin, Druid or Death Knight speccing for DPS is going to want to DPS in both PvP and PvE. To solve the current 5-man/Heroic tanking problems you need these players to be capable of tanking without reserving one of their specs for the role. This is why Blizzard's emphasizing making tanking more than just passable for DPS specs. In the end, it isn't going to have much raiding impact. You won't be seeing DPS Warriors or Paladins tanking where a Protection spec is required unless a guild is desperate.

 

Shakes

Haven't you just described what downranking is actually about? Using the spell to suit the situation? Without downranking, shaman have three healing spells. Of those three, the "right spell" 90%+ of the time is chain heal (at least in BC). Without downranking you reduce shaman healing to a single button, you would literally have the "face roll chain heal" situation that people joke about.

If you want people to have to pick the right spell for the situation, you have to give them choices. Hopefully blizzard plan on giving more spells to shaman (and paladins).

 

asan

most of the people keep forgetting that
Priests: have talents to regain mana when they overheal.
Druids: will suffer the less with this change, they just adapt the number of hots+swiftmend+DHeals to match the mob's DPS
Shamans: Spirit Link will double the tank's HP pool. So we will be healing for half what we heal today for each spell cast. No reason to overheal anylonger with SL up all the time
Paladins: maybe they will re-buff Illumination.

 

Toastradamus

Plummer, all that link said was "it's a technique that was never quite intended". There is no explanation of why this unintended technique was determined to be undesirable enough to bother removing from the game.

Shakes, I think you are missing Valderen's point. Part of the reason that chain heal is the "right spell" 90%+ of the time is because downranking it can be more effective than casting something else, replacing that other spell in your list of options instead of complimenting it (another is that chain heal's design has allowed it to scale from a complete joke spell early in the game to a complete beast currently while LHW and HW have failed to keep up, an issue that Blizzard has shown that it is working on addressing with the beta talents). Your post assumes that in wotlk chain heal will still be used 90%+ of the time. What Valderen and I are saying is that we would rather Blizzard change the game such that we have to choose between LWH, HW, and chain heal each time we cast rather than between 3 ranks of chain heal.

Yes, this relies on Blizzard successfully designing all three heals and the encounters where they are used such that each actually is more useful than the others in at least one common situation. Yes, Blizzard has failed to do this in the past. But to me it always seemed like they failed because they didn't bother to try, while this beta cycle they have been eagerly tackling just such fundamental playstyle revamps. And to be honest I am very impressed with how they are going about it, from following the Death Knight and, particularly recently, the hunter. I'm actually excited to see what they end up doing with the survival tree in the next couple of weeks. And I am very excited to see what will happen when they get around to implementing their plans for the healers of the game. I expect big changes for pallies and shamans in particular and I am curious what form those changes will take.

They are cutting out a sizeable chunk of what healing is right now and they have to replace it with something. I think they will replace it with something better. Hopefully I'm right, otherwise your "face roll chain heal" prediction will probably come true (or worse, we will wish it had).

 

Shakes

I did say I was talking about BC content, since we can't know what WotLK content will be like.

The real problem I see is that shaman don't have any real mana management options. We don't have the spirit of a priest or a druid which makes sneaking out of the 5SR an option. We don't have innervate or shadowfiend to fall back on. When a shaman is out of mana we're out of mana. Therefore whatever we do we have to think about efficiency first and foremost.

This has a flow on with way healing wave and lesser healing wave work (single target direct heal). Efficiency being the prime concern means one is always going to be the better choice nearly all the time. Currently it's HW, since LHW is too expensive. Make it cheaper to compensate, and HW becomes pretty much pointless.

The talent changes don't really give any more choice as I see it, instead they lock shaman into a chain heal, healing wave x3 rotation.

I don't think they're done yet at all. I'm just saying that it's pretty clear that shaman need mana regen options and a greater variety of heals to make them an interesting class to play. Despite being quite powerful through most of BC, I feel resto shaman have lacked the depth of some other healers (priests and to a lesser extent druids) to make them really interesting to play. I know most paladins feel the same way about their class too.

I really hope you're right and that this change is a step backwards in order to go forwards, not a sign they want to simplify things even further, as the quote about us being happy they're removing buttons implies.

 

Kindralas

In general, there are essentially three concerns with a heal in an MMO: speed, mana cost, and amount healed. It has been Blizzard's MO so far to give people one of those three, either a fast heal with a high cost and no healing (LHW), a slow heal with a low cost and no healing (Lifebloom), or a slow heal with a high cost and a lot of healing (Greater Heal). There have been varying degrees of success in the matter, but overall, I think that philosophy lends toward the game becoming horridly homogenized. Every class gets access to one kind of those heals, potentially with one them providing AOE healing benefits.

Instead, Blizzard should be looking to provide heals which have two of those particular factors, which gives you more options in each of the situations where each option is more important. For example, right now, if time is a factor, you cast LHW, as it's your fastest heal. You can spam it for a little bit until things become better. If you had a low cost fast heal, and a high heal fast heal, then you have to choose on the basis of what is actually happening. If the target has just taken a large spike and is in danger of dying, you can blow a lot of mana on the bigger heal. If the target isn't in danger of dying, but needs to be topped off, you can use the lower cost one, at the risk of, potentially, dying due to the smaller heals.

The intent is that the healers get some combination of these six potential heals, but not all six, thus making certain healers better suited to certain situations. A healer with a low cost, big heal is suited to main tank healing in situations where damage is predictable, but perhaps that same healer doesn't doesn't necessarily have the same fast healing selections, making other healers more suitable to handling spike damage, or perhaps his other heals are somewhat cost prohibitive. This isn't to say that he only spams the one heal the entire fight, and that the fight requires only that heal, but that he tends toward that role, and the other heals compliment that role in situations where other forms of healing are necessary.

Do I expect Blizzard to get behind such a philosophy? Not at all, unfortunately. They've shown a marked stubbornness to making raiding on the whole engaging, whether it's spamming big heals on a tank or simply sticking to your DPS rotation. The way they make fights fun is through artificially introducing elements, such as movement or raid splitting, and not by making the role you perform engaging in and of itself. Such elements are necessary, of course, but in the end, it makes most fights identical, and as long as you have everyone performing their variant of a DPS or heal rotation for approximately 10-15 minutes of time, you win. Healing in that environment simply becomes one of "you must spam as much healing as you can as quickly as you can in the windows the event allots you." In so doing, you account for the external factors which force you to do something other than stand-and-spam, and you keep as many people alive as long as possible in order for them to do their jobs.

Run around for 2 seconds, stand and spam Chain Heal (or in WotLK, Healing Wave, if you happen to be tank healing) for 10 seconds, repeat. WotLK doesn't change the basic formula, it just changes the name of the spell you're using.

 

Skytor

Currently it has to be hard to design a niche spell for the existing classes beacuse it has to compete against a whole range of downranked but +heal boosted versions of existing spells.

Removing the downranks opens up some design space to fit in the new spells - that both Shaman and Paladins really need.

My experience is that priest healing is the most fun at the minute because you have a whole range of different active effects to choose between in any given case (and conversly i find tree healing the least interesting - stack and maintain HoTs - hope for the best with 1-2 emergency buttons to mash in a panic).

Hopefully one of the longer term results of this change will be an expansion of active spell choices for all healers (except priests, who have about enough viable buttons to press right now).

 

Bellante

Posted today on mmo-champion:

Earth Shock and downranking
We're working on a rank-1 Earth Shock equivalent spell. Not sure when it will be in, though. (Source)

Just FYI.

 

Daidalos

I ran some 5 man instances after the downranking change and my fears were pretty much spot on. If the person you are healing is taking damage but doesn't have huge amounts of health you still end up using a max rank heal on them since you can't risk them getting too low. I was going through my mana at an alarming rate going on 5 man bosses is almost embarrassing for my gear. Its true I itemized for haste and +heal so I might bit harder by this change than others but I find it severely frustrating not being able to choose a rank of heal that fits the hp defecit needed. Forcing overhealing because downranking wasn't intended just seems silly.

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Iod

I'm glad I wasn't the only one. I had to resort more often to using healing stream simply because it made more sense for patching up the random damage and stay OO5s, but my run with a DK tank in Zero defense gear (and just short of 10K health) was pretty brutal. I think the only way I was able to keep him up was with a very bugged Spirit Link (that was only hitting me instead of the two other melee). All in all I found healing to be much less pleasant, and for now I respecced to bash things in the face for a while. I'll give it another whirl when Spirit link is fixed and Ancestral Awakening heals someone other than me (as opposed to people who're actually hurt). Oh yeah, and a working mana tide would be nice, too (along with not-broke restorative totems). As some folks in the Beta forums are ruminating, this may indicate that Restorative Totems + Mana Tide may be in for a revamp. I certainly hope so.

As a reference, I don't really have crazy amounts of +haste/heal. I'm pretty much decked out in all the ZA + Badge gear. I've been more of an MP5 junkie as far as enchants and gemming go, and it still left me rather uncomfortable about my rate of mana expenditure.

 

TheSilverHand

Source didn't come through on copy-paste. Here it is.

 

Daidalos

Yes unfortunately I was doing AN (spider instance) and had to keep poison cleansing totem down.

Tidal waves just screams to me as an opportunity to use a down ranked HW. You get 3 HWs with increased HPS so instead of just standing around and not using this buff or using the 1 HW which heals the tank to full it seems a perfect fit to use a small to meduim size heal that is mana efficient to heal a tank up esp if the tank doesn't have much health to begin with. Spi link seems to buggy to rely on atm. I personally hope that adding +heal will still be a viable way to increase healing longevity as opposed to stacking mp5. Currently its looking like stacking mp5 will be the way to go and +heal is only going to of marginal benefit.

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Iod

Yeah, I haven't gotten to Azjol'Nerub yet since the leveling has been a little slow recently after having a bug leash me to the No Man's Land teleport spot in Valiance Keep :-\ Go world server crashes.

Anyways, I've started to be a pain on the Beta forum about adding another heal that's identical to a downranked HW. I'd really prefer something that both benefited from Tidal waves and stacked healing way, because if things stay the way they are now, there's not much point in speccing into Healing Way anymore (the buff dropped way too often to be of any use). It's probably too late at this point to be throwing in these suggestions, but healing was nothing but frustrating. I got to do a couple runs before the base mana cost was implemented, and some after. While completely removing the +heal coefficients for downranking blew chunks, at least there were still options to throw out low-grade heals for less mana than we spend now.

While the addition of deathknights and changing tanking to be more fun might've worked, I wouldn't be surprised if a considerable number of healers may decide to go do other things.

edit: Caine took down his good post and replaced it with an executive summary... nevermind.

 

Daidalos

Yeah I've been meaning to do a write up about resto synergy and downranking but I wanted more information on what exactly bliz is planning. It sounds like they are looking at create new heals to fill in for downranked ones we used to use. If so as long as tidal waves applies to this and possibly healing way as well that would take care of most of my complaints at the moment but without knowing what they have planned I couldn't decide if I should hold off or go ahead and post now. Basically I don't care what a spell is called if they give me back a lower rank hw .. say one that does half the healing of a max rank for half the mana and acts like healing wave in other regards that will most likely satisfy me.

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg