#1 - Feb. 29, 2016, 11:23 a.m.
Note 1 - if this has been answered or discussed, I'm sorry for bringing it up again but I haven't found any information / forum threads that answer my questions.
Note 2 - this may apply to tanks as well, though I'm focusing on healers. Some healers may have better DPS and be somewhat viable for questing, but none of them will be as good as a proper DPS and not all healers will have access to the Druid "Balance Affinity".
I'm an altoholic and a healer, playing all healer classes with the exception for MW Monk, and I'm concerned about solo leveling / questing in Legion with regards to how artifact weapons will work.
Lets start off with a few premises:
1. Healers deal less damage than DPS and will continue to do so - and healers shouldn't be able to compete with DPS in damage since that would make us OP. Healer DPS is also designed clunkily with little interaction or synergy between our offensive abilities.
2. When leveling solo / questing, you want your character to be fun to play and efficient at killing mobs.
Because of this, most healers level up either through dungeons / BGs or by using a DPS offspec till they reach max level. I rerolled healer in TBC and I've been questing as DPS when leveling up ever since, and I'm fine with that.
However, with artifact weapons being central to Legion (and the only weapons available to us), we're going to be tied to the spec that matches the artifact weapon we picked. Blizzard have said that we'll be able to unlock artifact weapons for our offspecs, but my impressions is that we won't be able to access more than one artifact weapon straight away at level 100. My interpretation of what Blizzard staff have said in interviews is that we'll be able to pick up our second artifact weapon at 110.
This means that we're forced into making a difficult choice:
1. Pick the healer weapon and level as a healer. Since healer DPS is weaker and less smoothly designed than that of a proper DPS spec, soloing / questing will be slower and boring. This forces us to level in dungeons.
2. Pick our off-spec weapon and level with that weapon in our DPS off-specs. This means we "abandon" our main specs, we won't have the flexibility of healing in a dungeon every now and then and it'll take away from the character identity and spec fantasy that Blizzard have promised that Legion will be all about. This may also result in us being "behind" in terms of progression when we reach max level, as we'll have to get our healer weapon at 110 and start farming artifact power + runes for it.
My solution to this issue is to allow us to run a second artifact questline after we've run our first - to have access to both a DPS weapon and our healer weapon at the very start of the expansion. On top of that, artifact power should be tied to the character and not to the weapon (this may already be the case) so that we can earn artifact power while questing as DPS but spend it on improving our main spec's weapon. This means we'll be slightly behind those who's main spec is DPS, but that's fine by me.
