STOP with the DMG/2sec debuffs. Please.

#0 - Jan. 21, 2010, 8:18 p.m.

As a Discipline Priest with a Holy Paladin alternate, its getting frustrating how many encounters take advantage of the "take X damage every 2 seconds" debuff.

Really, I understand the point of it. You're trying to challenge the healers. It was fine as a unique mechanic for Sapphiron or even Valkyr Twins. Its downright annoying to find it being used now for Putricide, Queen, and Festergut. I can only imagine how much of a role it plays in the Arthas or Sindragosa encounters.

Damage over time debuffs that effect the entire raid during an encounter degrade the value of Discipline Priests and Holy Paladins. We don't have great tools for working in these situations. Priest shields get absorbed immediately and poor Paladins are spamming Holy Light (and nothing else). Which means that Discipline Priests are almost always being shoehorned into a Holy spec (defeating the purpose of duel specs for them entirely) and Paladins once again being forced to spam a tank.

The mechanic is played out, unoriginal, and downright depressing to heal through as a single target-specialized healer.

Thanks.

Ghostcrawler

#31 - Jan. 22, 2010, 6:29 p.m.

In general, we think it's more important to the game to have diverse and interesting fights than it is to have 5 way ties for healing "usefulness" on every fight, just as we don't go out of our way to have melee vs. ranged dps ties on every fight, or even an even number of fights.

We already place a lot of limits on our encounter designers as to whether what they want to do is fair to class balance, yet they still manage to come up with boss fights that none of us have ever seen before. Telling them they can no longer do raid-wide damage auras, or can only do them on 10% of bosses or whatever is just a restriction I don't think the game design needs. You may feel better in the short term where you're just as awesome on fight 2 as you are on fight 31, but in the long term you might lose interest in the raiding game when all the bosses start to feel the same.

Here is the most important part of my post: The community tendency is to push for homogeneity (in roles, in buffs, in healing and damage, in representation, in available enchants, in awesomeness of badge items, etc.) because "that's fair." We push for new, unpredictable and interesting things because it keeps players interested in the game.