We *can* raid heal but aren't "raid healers."

#0 - Aug. 11, 2010, 5:04 a.m.

Perhaps I'm looking too deep into it, however looking back on it now it seems that GC never really said "We want Paladins to be able to AOE heal." I'm sure that he's always said they want us to be able to heal the raid, but raid healing is something completely different.

Technically speaking, we could always heal the raid. I mean anything that wasn't tanks was something that could be considered 'healing the raid.'

However with the spells that we do have, I think that what they are trying to do is make it easier for us to heal the raid, however I think raid healing is something that we won't necessarily be able to do amazingly.

I say this because our two AOE/Raid healing spells are on 30 second cooldowns, GC has stressed that the game probably doesn't need anymore Smart Heals, and Guardian is a "You heal this target nao" spell as it seems.

Now forgive me for speculating this, but it's midnight and I'm probably looking too deep into it. What if we're meant to heal the raid and it look like this:

HL
HL
HH
HL
HL
LoD
amg FoL this guy!

To me that looks like it's different than what we're currently doing. Because as it stands we're not meant to heal like other raid healers, but we certainly should able to heal the raid.

I'm kind of realizing that the goal for Cataclysm is to be "Bring the healer not the class." That doesn't go to say that the class is the best for a certain role (I.E Tank healing is to Paladin as raid healing is to Druids), but it will be no longer ludicrous to tell Druid A to heal the tank because he's better at it than Druid B who's superior at raid healing.

I feel like we will still have our defined niches that we specialize in, but now we're going to have the freedom to do other roles because we will have the tools given to us.

I think it'll be how we use those tools on how effective we are in that role.

Again please forgive me if I sound completely loony, crazy and/or demented. I'm probably looking too deep into this. I hope to get your feedback.

Ghostcrawler

#10 - Aug. 13, 2010, 11:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Perhaps I'm looking too deep into it, however looking back on it now it seems that GC never really said "We want Paladins to be able to AOE heal." I'm sure that he's always said they want us to be able to heal the raid, but raid healing is something completely different.

We try not to divide classes / specs into such discrete buckets. Our overriding design is to try and have classes feel diverse, such that rerolling or adding a new class to your group feels interesting, but still give you the tools to fill your role. If any healer is too good at one thing, they tend to get stacked, and if a healer is too weak at anything, they risk being unwanted.

Put another way, we used to have this design that say DKs were the magic tank and paladins were the AE tank. The thought was that if you had a paladin in your group you were happy when you had an AE fight but that you'd be fine with anyone else. In reality, this didn't play out so well. Players felt compelled to swap players in and out of their groups, or be reluctant to run a 5-player dungeon with the "wrong" tank. We decided that tanks need to be tanks.

Likewise, our model for healers for a long time has been that everyone has their little niche. We now think healers should just be healers. We just have to make sure that they still feel different enough that you'd prefer to have as many different healers as you can. The big difference is that raids have more healers than tanks, so we have a little bit of room to make the healers more differentiated from each other than the tanks are. But only a little bit, and that space is going to be even smaller in Cataclysm than it was in LK.