MMO-Champion BlueTracker - How are you healing

2008-10-01 06:37:46

Hey guys just a friendly paladin here and I have a question in response to Ghost crawlers post in this paladin thread.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=10535470005&sid=2000

To sum it up, she says paladins are the best healers and that shamans, druids, priest, are having trouble raid healing and five man healing. I have never heard of these problems and so I figure i will take it to you guys, are you having trouble healing in 5 man and raid content.

Thank you for taking the time to answer this.

Bluerage

2008-10-01 12:59:18

Re: How are you healing

This is actually useful feedback. We are bombarded a lot with healers saying their healing class is now nerfed into obsolence and threatening to reroll. Clearly not every healer can be the worst one in the game, though that would be a nice place to be. :)

Unlike dps discussions, another class can't come in as easily and offer a counterpoint. You can't just spam heals on a target dummy and get an idea of how you'll do. Healing has a lot to do with who you heal, when and with what spell.

Ghostcrawler

2008-10-01 22:50:55

Re: How are you healing

This is useful stuff, so I really don't want to derail this thread, but....

To those of you with mana problems, especially in the 10-player raids: were you outside of the FSR much? Were you concerned the tank would die if you stopped healing to let mana come in? I'm not saying that's what you need to do to avoid mana problems. We just want to understand exactly what is happening.

Oh dear, I should probably respond to this too:

Q u o t e:
My biggest problem with Blizzard's class designers (and this goes way beyond just priests) is that the decisions they make on the direction to take things often seem like they are made in a vacuum without the bidirectional feedback with the other class designers, encounter designers and itemization teams that I would assume such decisions should have. The most obvious effects of this are unintended scaling and the emergent (and presumably unintended) mechanics that arise from this scaling.

I thank you for using the word "seem" because it's just not true. Nobody in our department makes a move without bouncing ideas off other people, and that includes consulting item and encounter designers. I'll admit we did have some scaling problems in Tier 6 and 7, but to be fair, scaling wasn't nearly on the radar then like it is now. Now it's something we look at for every spell.

Q u o t e:
A classic case of this was the scaling Holy Paladins enjoyed early on in TBC. Their gear was itemized with a heretofore unprecedented level of spell crit, and the initial incarnation of spiritual attunement let them "double dip," as it were, on shadow priests for mana regen. Blizzard's response to this was to kick them in the balls and steal their lunch money and the general consensus seems to be that they never recovered.

From our pespective, paladins reached a point where it was hard to design boss fights that could really challenge them. The tank dying just wasn't going to happen. Rather than just nerf pallies, we got more creative with the encounters, but in retrospect we should have made some changes to prevent such dominance by AE heals.

Q u o t e:
A more current case of this is the change to downranking--a play mechanic blues claimed was never intended. However, downranking was an integral play mechanic behind priests and paladins in healing if not others and I would assume content was designed around the tacit understanding that players would use this mechanic. We all got used to using it but now they finally decide that they should get rid of it.

Downranking wasn't intended in the sense that we never sat down on day one and thought that would be a cool mechanic. It was just something that emerged. We realized some people enjoyed the challenge of figuring out which spell to cast when, so we generally supported it. But late in BC we realized that mana was just a non-issue anymore. With Shadow Priests and pots and mana oil, nobody was running out of mana anymore. As we tried to move mana management back into the game, we saw players just respond by using lower and lower ranks of heals. We were spending an inordinate amount of design time coming up with the perfect cofficients to make downranking possible but not overpowering, and we finally figured we could better spend that time on something else.

Q u o t e:
This brings me to my second major problem. In most cases, Blizzard's responses to these situations are very reactionary and seem to be made in the same kind of vacuum as the decisions that led to the problems in the first place. Spirit regen for priests and druids scaling too well at the high end in TBC? Solution: send the coefficient (for all classes mind you) into the ground! Then there is the designers' attempts to standardize mana batteries in a "class agnostic" way by basing them around percentages of total mana. Standardization is good but total homogenization is not, and for a good while now priests and druids have been portrayed as classes that should desire spirit (the actualities of the situation may differ), which help make them distinct as classes.

If I am understanding you correctly, we didn't want to buff Spirit. Spirit was finally a stat that healers at least started to take seriously once again, rather than just stacking more and more +healing. We do want mana management to be a part of the game. The right way to play, especially for healers, is not to spam all your heals as fast as you can and then go out of mana. Instead, we want to reward players who can rely on hots, limit overhealing, coordinate with other healers so they aren't double healing the same target, and knowing when a fight is won so you can take a break and start mana regeneration. If healers don't ever go OOM, then the only way to ever lose a fight is for the bosses to hit so hard that sometimes you just get bad luck, to have strict enrage timers so you have to learn to maximize your dps, or make the fights so complicated that they take a lot of explanation and practice. In the good old days, one of the best gear checks was could you keep the tank (and to a lesser extent the group) up without going out of mana.

Ghostcrawler

2008-10-04 23:01:43

Re: How are you healing

I just wanted to pop in again and say that this is an outstanding thread. I really appreciate it.

It's wonderful (and sadly rare) to see a thread go this long and not collapse into arguments, name-calling or completely off-topic issues.

Ghostcrawler