Any beta healer have a positive review?

Q u o t e:
What happened to the kinder/gentler damage vs. health model that we were promised in Cata? And presumably these are normal instances which shouldn't require the best possible lower level gear before entering an 85 instance. Are we expected to farm 83-84 instances before setting foot in 85 instances even on normal?

The normal dungeons require a little more crowd control than many LK players are typically used to, but they aren't intended to be brutal. You shouldn't need to farm a lot of gear before stepping into one. Keep in mind that feedback is going to be all over the place in a beta. Some players are heading into dungeons they know nothing about and getting frustrated when someone can't immediately explain the boss mechanics to them. Some just have no sense in investment since this isn't their "real" character (such irony). Some of the bosses are overtuned and some of the class abilities are undertuned at this stage. Because Uldum and Twilight don't have quest rewards yet, there are also some folks who are just really undergeared. Half your glyphs probably don't work. The new enchants aren't readily available. And so it goes. That sort of thing will all get ironed out over the next several weeks.

You shouldn't have huge mana problems in a normal dungeon. Your middle heal should get you through most of it just fine. You'll have to use more of your emergency heals in the heroics and raids, and you'll also be expected to gear up a little more for the heroics and raids. In Burning Crusade, players went and finished the Shadowmoon quest lines or got their reps to Exalted or maxed out their trade skills in order to have the best gear available for the heroics and raids. That is our model for Cataclysm.

Q u o t e:
Q u o t e:


They totally missed the mark when it came to tuning in WotLK. GC admitted that they caved in to QQ when it came to mana costs, for example.



I read every blue post most every day, and never recall him saying this. Feel free to post a source if I'm wrong. The devs have always held the stance that, while they do listen to feedback, will generally make decisions that are best for the game, not based on qq.

This is fairly accurate. Spell costs were more expensive when LK was in beta but we later backed off of it. That isn't the entire reason that the heroic dungeons and raids ended up a little easier than we intended. It was a combination of a lot of things: we got better at designing talents (fewer wasted points), glyphs offered a lot of additional player power, little things like the gathering skill buffs, most raid buffs going raid wide, every spec had access to mana-efficient AE, more survivability tools, specs that historically didn't raid much suddenly out there contributing their unique abilities, etc. etc.

Q u o t e:
I also remember us being told that ICC tank damage would seem less spiky so that tanks wouldn't always in such risk of near insta-death. Anyone else remember that?

I also remember being before the release of WotLK that Pallies would be fine without AoE heals because there would not be as much AoE damage. Then we got smothered in AoE damage. Remember that one too?

It feels like you're mostly just trying to play gotcha here, but I would characterize the above two statements as follows.

We added an avoidance penalty to Icecrown so that we could lower boss spike damage. It was still quite spikey. Now imagine would it would have been without those avoidance penalties. Bosses would have had to hit that much harder in order to compensate for missing so often. I even said at the time that a better long-term solution would be to boost health pools across the board (even for PvP), but that was such a big change that we worried it would take too many patches to get right.

On the paladin issue, our LK model was that healers were still pretty specialized. You want a paladin for tank healing and you want a Holy priest or Resto druid for AE healing. We thought that paladins had enough tools to heal when they were the only healer (i.e. in 5 player dungeons), and that was generally true, though paladin players did have trouble with heroic Loken early on. Since paladins didn't need to solo heal raids and since we didn't want to encourage raids to bring 2 paladins for their 2 healers, we thought that was sufficient. In Cataclysm we are backing off of that even more and trying to make all the healers more well rounded.

Q u o t e:
I was reading the other day that the tanks in Grim Batol can get killed in <3 seconds unless the perfect CC's are put into place (Grim Batol). To me, that seems just as spikey as the things we face now. In fact, those 5 man dungeons scare me a lot - and I dearly hope those were at least on heroic levels.

If you were talking about live Cataclysm, it would scare me too.

Q u o t e:
How are you going to do this? Are you going to enforce, or better restrict the gear level requirements for people using Dungeon Finder?

The heroic gear restrictions are fairly steep. There are no normal restrictions, other than character level.

Q u o t e:
Once you've caught up, you go back to spamming your cheap heal where you regen more mana than you use.

This shouldn't be happening. The cheap heals should be cheap, not free, and not profitable.