Topic
What happend to oldschool cata healing
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Hello. We all remember the start of cataclysm. The pain. The horror. But still, we are here today playing like it would be any past patch. What happend? Blizzard goal was to make healers to managing their mana.
Do we still consider it being hard as it was before? Well, thats up to you. I belive it's not. I'm playing a paladin. I've done 4 heroics in dragonsoul. I can use whatever spell I want. I can cast lots of flash heals even if it's not needed. And still, we will kill the boss. Did gearing up really make all these differences? Heavely AoE healing is kinda new thing. But what about the 5 mans heroics that was hard before? Even the latest Heroic of twilight instances is very kind against healers. The way I see it. Is that Blizzard can't handle the gear they actually give the players. So why do they give us so much gear? There is no plan in this design of the game. It's ignored and the boss developers doesn't really communicate with the gearstats designer. In my point of view. I didn't forget the reason you changed my holy light to be a cheap spell. It was to managing our Mana. I can actually just delete holy light from my action bars. The argument that blizzard told to us whiners, that felt that healers was broken. That argument isn't valid anymore. This is just some advice in your upcoming games |
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It does. Keep in mind that not only did our regen/output go up, our manapools went waaaay up. And in the short-fight world of 5mans, having more mana means you don't really need your regen or output much, you got the mana to last the fight even on inefficient spells. |
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Managing mana still exists, even if not as punishing as before though. If it didn't, we would be reforging first out of Spirit, and we wouldn't be using trinkets like Heart of Unliving and Jaws of Defeat.
But the 5man situation you state is a problem. I am signing up as healer and go in as Enhancement healing only with Maelstrom and with totem. It's enough. If the group knows to avoid damage, there is no need for more than 6-7k hps per boss or trash pack. That's less than the healing required on bosses like Rajh, Isiset, Setesh in Halls of Origination, Throngus and Valiona in Grim Batol, Siamat in Lost City of Tol'Vir and a lot other in 4.0 |
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Mana management was never punishing in cata unless you were bad.
I oomed in ICC hardmodes/Ulduar hardmodes/ToC hardmodes, oomed in Cataclysm 5 man heroics. Which I did in utterly broken spec (disc) one week in to the expansion in leveling greens + boe pvp blues, in LFG random groups while not even doing normals first. Did anything change? No. Was it challenging? No. Was it annoying? Yes. It is and simply has been simple and boring, healing has been slowed down to such levels Granny Smith could do it with her athritis riddled fingers. There arent any real judgement calls left anymore. Downranking in TBC and the ability to pull off miracles in WoTLK if you were quick enough were much much more fun. Damage comes in slow and its nonlethal if people dont fail (if they do they die anyways so its no skin off my rosy nose), plenty of tiem to heal up and twiddle your thumbs. Healing has been simplified and slowed down and if you were bad at resource management you thought it got harder. Which was never the case. |
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The stats from the gear is to high imo. Really... It would be easier if they reduced the hp from the bosses and also the stats from the gear, though the dmg output from the encounters could stay as it is today therefore making it more challenging for the healers.
In addition the crit buff they added at the start of firelands was just retarded... |
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Edited by Saphiramoon on 22/02/12 10:27 (UTC)
What Sigrid said.
And yes, Carrigan, if you make funny eyes looking at disc specc, you should have tried playing disc from the launch of cata till end of February when PWS and some other things were ludicrously buffed - and by that I mean PWS being tripled in absorb value (heck, a 10-20% buff everybody has seen but a 300%? Gives you an idea about how broken the things were launched.). When disc stopped having issues, no other specc had them anymore anyway. Also, you can oom fine as disc nowadays too, if you dont handle rapture. Had a friend recently rolling disc, 2 days ago he was complaining about horrid mana issues on a disc priest with 3k spirit. Said he cant get used to PWS, and hes got all other healing classes at 85. As for the original topic, yes, outgearing ftl(w?). Besides, ppl were bored of spamming Heal/HealingWave/Nourish/ Holy Light after a month, I cant say I miss that. I still use a fair bit of holy lights on my pala, but thats because im not raiding on her. |
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Yes, but wasn't the mana model of Disc always exempted from the Spirit-based regeneration, due to being based on Int? Meaning it reached "sustainable" at a much faster pace than the other specs, output-problems or not? |
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Edited by Saphiramoon on 22/02/12 10:43 (UTC)
Yes, and rapture in december was 2.5%, today its 7% - another buff that came in february. Disc didnt gain much from spirit and at that point it gained quite little from int too, especially considering 2.5% from those mana pools wasnt much (was barely covering the cost of a 10k shield - so, you were gaining a free 10 k heal every 12 seconds and that was all the core of your mana regen). To give you an idea of what rapture means for disc priests - its usually 3 times more mana during a boss fight than replenishment gives me. You !@#$ up rapture and you will oom, even nowadays, just as you would oom if you left water shield drop. Int based regen doesn't come passively - sure its better than spirit one, but it generally requires more input into it too (keeping lb up, keeping rapture on cd). Not saying its rocket science, but it prolly is balanced around a medium use of those abilities, while the passive holy priest kind of regen is just a static number. Tbh the only class that is exclusively based on spirit regen are the holy priests: - disc priests and druids have int scaling regen mechanics - resto shamans have a partially spirit based mechanic via mana tide and a flat regen via water shield (and I'm tempted to believe the flat one from water shield outweights the mana tides for shamans, maybe I'm wrong here). - paladins scale from spirit via their new judgement system and from int via divine plea that restores a flat amount of mana pool. Holy priest regen mechanic is the worst, most boring and stupid mechanic ever. It requires you to stack a single stat for one purpose only and 0 interaction from your part, unless you consider the decision to heal or not to heal interaction. |
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Edited by Ailawiu on 22/02/12 10:43 (UTC)
It wasn't just gear. It was people complaining about it being oh-so-hard, demanding buffs and completely forgetting that they were still in greens. Plenty of healers just couldn't deal with losing their WotLK god-like status and managing mana. They used to heal everyone to full in 2 casts, while being able to spam flash heals forever. Mana? There was no such thing in WotLK - well, maybe Holy Priests would run out of it once in a while. Maybe.
Add to this increased difficulty of 5 mans. No longer you could chain pull everything while Priest kept "healing" with Holy Nova. Some debuffs actually hurt and had to be dispeled. Flash heal was no longer the only single target healing spell. Paladins were also a problem. They were "overpowered" and got nerfed. However, people considered them "the only balanced healer" (and Paladins considered themselves "The Only Skilled Healer") and demanded to be buffed to their level. And Blizzard caved in. Druids got regen buffs. Priests got regen buffs. Shamans got 15% specialization buff. We got buffs, we got epics... and we got crazy raid damage which made sure that "triage" was completely useless in raids anyway. Instead Blizzard introduced raid cooldowns arms race. |
Which what is the main theme of cataclysm. Raid cds. It made classes awesome or useless depending on their possibilities to provide those. |
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I'm mainly concerned that damage and healing scaled faster than health pools, resulting in the tank-health jojo we saw in WotLK.
Last week on Zon'ozz hc, the boss decided to take our tank from full health to dead in 0,23 seconds (swing+drain right before shadow with 7 bounces). That kind of spiky damage is exactly what we were told wouldn't happen in Cataclysm. We didn't see it in T11, and we didn't really see it in T12 aside from Decimation Blade, but then T13 comes around and here we go again... |
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Ah, true. My bad. :) |
Disc was severely crippled at the start of Cataclysm. PWS absorbed 8-10k with mastery, Rapture returned 2.5% of nothing (since we were all at ~100k mana, that was 2.5k rapture for a 6k mana shield - so no, our mana regen mechanic wasn't making us exempt from spirit based regen at that point). On top of that, we had the weakest heals of all healing specs. It wasn't until the multiple patches of tweaking we went through in ~February (where we became godlike, and then a week later when we got nerfed rapidly again, followed by PWS being more efficient as holy with the body&soul buff, before that got nerfed as well) |
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Sounds like Discs have it so bad. Here, I've designed an EXTRA sad smiley to show sympathy for your suffering: :(((((((((((((((((( |
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@Phatpimp (dat name..) either you have a severe shortage of attention span or you lack the grasp of grammatical tenses and cant understand that "was" refers to something in the past. No matter these rather innocent flaws, I can see you have a warm heart deep inside and I appreciate your sympathy, even though its slightly late, but it is my great pleasure to inform you that disc priests have indeed been buffed about 2 patches ago, and we're all fine. Here is a special designed smiley to express my sincere thanks for your empathy with our misery.
<3333333333333 |
Actually, not true, Rapture was buffed on the 15th December 2010 from 2.5% to 6% of total mana pool (see http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/1232869 and search for Rapture). It was later buffed again, to 7%, after the buff to the strength of Power Word: Shield resulted in Blizzard increasing it's mana cost, which increased the cost of the shield to above the mana return in average gear for the time. Yes, discipline had it relatively hard at the beginning of Cata and mana regen was an issue, in that you had to pay attention to Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope when first entering Raids/Heroics, but it was never as bad as you're implying. The big problem with Disc was that it's throughput pretty much sucked, but at least Barrier was more powerful and available more often. |
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Edited by Phatpimp on 22/02/12 15:01 (UTC)
@Phatpimp (dat name..) either you have a severe shortage of attention span or you lack the grasp of grammatical tenses and cant understand that "was" refers to something in the past. No matter these rather innocent flaws, I can see you have a warm heart deep inside and I appreciate your sympathy, even though its slightly late, but it is my great pleasure to inform you that disc priests have indeed been buffed about 2 patches ago, and we're all fine. Here is a special designed smiley to express my sincere thanks for your empathy with our misery. But that's the thing! Discs had it so bad before, it's a psychological miracle they still exist today! If that was my class, I'd probably just take the easy way out, collect my monthly paycheck, buy that old Smith on the pawn shop and try to make a big enough mess for a CSI crew to clean up, at least they would remember me. |
