Currently we think the game has strayed too far towards … where if you miss a single global, your target might die. This may not be the case if you are on Naxxramas milk runs, but it was certainly the case in Sunwell and other more challenging content. Since you must heal for your max amount every GCD, and the penalty for failing that heal (i.e. wiping) is probably worse than the penalty for overhealing, the healing game feels very spammy. More situational or efficient heals lose out compared to heals that maximize throughput. Coordination among healers doesn’t feel particularly necessary because overhealing isn’t a big deal. Paying attention to what is going on in the fight is a luxury because you need to keep those max casts coming.
There is an old Chinese curse that comes to mind whenever I read about the upcoming changes to healing: “May you live in interesting times.” However, it seems that for once Ghostcrawler has discussed a more complicated (interesting?) approach to healing without making me want to reach through the internet and throttle him.
internet punch!
He’s right, in this post — for a while now healing has been about being able to spam as much heal per second as possible and little else. Sometimes it’s the tank that needs all the attention, sometimes it’s the entire raid, but there have been plenty of times in recent memory when for whatever reason I screwed up my GCD timing (Surge of Light can get me all confused if I’m in a rhythm) and the group or raid wiped. On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time anyone died due to my lack of mana.
A few years back someone explained the DPS caster approach to fights as being a fire hose: as long as you have mana, you just want to be blasting out as much as possible at all times. There is little regard for their own regen mechanics — no DPS caster is going to stop casting to regen a while. If they have mana (and no boss mechanics preventing it) they are DPSing as hard as they can. And lately, healers have been acting like casters as well, only with fewer innate mana limitations.
Greater Heal has fallen by the wayside for Flash Heal. At the modern levels of mana regen, without a huge boost in GHeal efficiency why would you use it? A tank can easily be gibbled in a second, and Flash is cheap and hits for decent numbers now. I can stand there and chain Flash on one of the off-tanks for the entire 3+ minutes of Patchwerk and not even use half my mana. (Note: Usually we have two healers assigned to each OT on PW, and if my partner is using small fast heals I WILL use GHeal to compliment them.) Pre-nerf, why use the slower, more efficient Prayer of Healing when you could just CoH your group?
This reminds me of that old chestnut I saw everywhere pre-nerf: “If you spam CoH, you are bad.” I’d actually argue that if you WEREN’T spamming CoH in most situations you were bad. Again, in this era when mana use matters very little, why the hell would you NOT be spamming the most HPS you can? The same holds true now, even without the option of CoH spam.
Triage Chart
I miss triage. While standing around playing the Five Second Rule never appealed to me, one of my favorite parts of healing has always been learning how to be efficient given the variety of classes on a raid. DPS get a shield, unless they have persistent aggro (bad dps!) in which case they get flash heals. Tanks get GHeals. Timed group damage gets PoH, unstable group damage gets CoH. I, along with Ghostcrawler it seems, miss healing being a little more of a precision operation, and less the fire hose “how much HPS can you spray everywhere” method.
If they come up with a way to create tough fights where the healers can stop spamming for a second and actually THINK about what they’re doing, well… those will be interesting times indeed, and not in the curse way either.
MUST SPAM BIGGER HEALS!!!!!!
Seriously though, they are going to take our mana. OMFG OUR MANA! I am not sure what the nerfs are going to look like, but remember our days of BT, where we ran with every healer we had in the guild?
How come Naxx does not need that? Entry level content is entry level I guess, but Kara needed more work than Naxx does. They nerfed us last week, I have not even noticed, except last night when our noob guildies all got hit by flame wave (seriously, like 8 of them at once).
I think Blizz has lost track of their game. Sema and I have both had Holy Shock crits for over 10.5K (Sema’s was 11K), that’s an instant cast, lesser heal?
Not sure what they are going to do to fix it, but their game mechanics are borke.
Storm
“And lately, healers have been acting like casters as well, only with fewer innate mana limitations.”
If you’ve ever played a shaman in a group that doesn’t have replenishment, as I often do, you would know that statement to be entirely ridiculous. I sometimes run out of mana when I actually -do- have replenishment available.
Maybe the other 3 healing classes have too much mana, but shaman sure don’t.
Hmm, fair point. My comments are mostly based on raid healing with a good level of replenishment, which at the moment seems to sate even our resto shamans’ need for mana. (Or so I’ve been told.)
Blizz DOES seem to be orienting their mana management changes around having replenishment around, which definitely could prove to be challenging in small groups.