Healing Design Philosophy

#0 - Nov. 6, 2008, 7:31 p.m.

Why is it the intent of the developers now when one spell becomes over used in a pve or pvp setting to reduce it, rather than adding new effects to other heals, or re-designing encounters, or looking at decreasing mana efficiency to compensate?

First druids had lifebloom reduced twice to make it so that we would use other heals, and now wild growth is supposed to be next again after just recieving a compromised buff?

This design philsophy of punishing classes for things they've found effective to use is pretty appalling from a healing stand point, and really it's you the developers that should be putting more work into the game by improving all healing spells (if you want us to use them relatively equally). Or you could design pve encounters / pvp counters that may or may not favor certain heals in our arsenal that are not normally used.

It really is sad to see something like "Oh look I have found X to be really good here in most situations"
Dev: "Ok they are using X too much so instead of making the other heals more appealing by improving them we'll just make X less effective."

Healing is really fast becoming less and less enjoyable for me as a druid because all I have seen so far is: "Oh you can heal like a priest or a pally, but wait, you can't have your most unique spell (lifebloom) be that effective". Sure wild growth and nourish will be good spells, but there could be so many better things put into the resto tree to make healing more enjoyable. (aka a talent to make hots crit) (a talent to make ht put a stacking buff on a target the more times you use it) (a talent to make regrowth increase all hot durations by 2 seconds for a maximum of 6 seconds), just something, idk, anything.

Ghostcrawler

#11 - Nov. 8, 2008, 12:51 a.m.

We always prefer to buff things to nerf them, just because it does feel better for the player. But we have to evaluate the magnitude of the changes involved.

To make CoH / WG work in their current form, we would have to increase raid damage on the group, and increase the healing on your other spells to compete, and increase the magnitude of other types of damage so you want to use those other spells. Increasing single target damage means we might have to adjust tank health (which generally means gear) so that you feel like you have a chance to heal them before the e.g. 30,000 point Hateful Strikes land. It is easier in this case to nerf CoH / WG and lower raid AE damage.

This is the classic metaphor of balancing a chair -- you can try and extend three legs or just cut one down to size.

We don't always take the easier way out, but sometimes that is the more responsible thing to do. We'd rather spend a little bit of time tweaking current encounters and more time working on future encounters than the reverse. We'd rather fix other problems with healing than spend our time rebalancing a whole lot of healing spells.

Plus, since this change will happen after the game is already Live, we do owe it to the customer to attempt to minimze bugs when possible, and in this case that means changing as little as possible. (You can take this argument too far of course and argue we should never change anything. It's a balance, as with most aspects of game design.)

Remember, our ultimate goal is to make the game more fun, not slap you around. I get so many kudos and warm fuzzies when I announce a big buff to a class that I would always prefer to be greeted with that than all the bad feelings that surround a nerf. Nerfing is never fun.

Ghostcrawler

#29 - Nov. 8, 2008, 1:14 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I just find it apalling that you could look at any parse and conclude that druids are "spamming WG too much", because the very mechanic of WG itself is anti-spam. The only time you'll see druids casting WG in succession is to put it on multiple groups of people while the direct heals from other classes follow up on it. Is that so wrong? Isn't that the entire purpose of HoTs in the first place... to be able to have them active on multiple targets or multiple sets of targets?

I think "spamming" gets used as shorthand in this case (by me too) to mean "using too much." All we really care about is the numbers showing what percentage of healing is from Wild Growth versus other spells. If you were casting it once and it healed for that much, it would still be a problem. Adding a cooldown means you aren't going to be using it as much, so the percentage of healing it's doing will go down.

A secondary consideration is that you have a lot of other spells and we ideally want you to use more of them. I think for that consideration, WG is probably not the go to spell to the extent CoH is, but we still think it is gettting used too much.