How to address CoH/WG/CH through raid bosses

#0 - Nov. 7, 2008, 4:35 p.m.

I tried hard to figure out what thread to put this in, but I believe it would be off the tracks of most, if not all, of them.

Isn't one of the issues with CoH and WG "stealing the thunder" of CH have to do with the ways they heal. Small, periodic raid damage (exemplified by Felmyst) just plays directly into the wheelhouse of CoH and WG. Forcing shaman to waste a lot of their first bounce to clean up what these spells don't cover.

If Blizzard was to push raid damage away from raid-wide small damage into extremely focused pockets of heavy damage, wouldn't that then be in CH's best interest? Say groups of 3-5 people throughout the raid. That way it doesn't become as efficient to use such broad, shallow heals as CoH and WG, and therefore they are emphasized less. However, they would still suffice if need be.

It just seems that GC and the Devs have only considered removing AoE damage to de-emphasize AoE heals, when really they should notice there are other knobs to turn that can preferentially select which class' AoE heals are more effective.

In that way, there doesn't have to be exclusivity either. Some periodic bosses, some deep-damage focused bosses, some with both. There's nothing wrong with healers including shaman using spells different from their main heal from boss to boss so long as it doesn't become the blueprint of all encounters from that point.

So that's what this thread is about. It isn't about CD's or how to change these spells, it's about how to change encounters to highlight these abilities in different ways. Let's give the class and encounter dev's some new ideas on how to address this issue in another way.

Ghostcrawler

#1 - Nov. 7, 2008, 4:58 p.m.

Q u o t e:
If Blizzard was to push raid damage away from raid-wide small damage into extremely focused pockets of heavy damage, wouldn't that then be in CH's best interest? Say groups of 3-5 people throughout the raid. That way it doesn't become as efficient to use such broad, shallow heals as CoH and WG, and therefore they are emphasized less. However, they would still suffice if need be.

This is the situation in a lot of trash pulls en route to bosses. Chain Heal does very good in those encounters, as you'd expect, but Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are also used a lot in those situations, almost to the exclusion of other heals.

If those spells are used on (1) trash pulls, and (2) fights with multiple bosses, and (3) fights with bosses with adds, and (4) fights with lots of AE damage, then the only time they are not used is on (5) fights like Patchwerk where only 2 tanks take damage at all. If Circle of Healing was not the answer to situations 1-3 also, then I don't think we'd have a problem.

With a cooldown, sure you'd still use CoH when several people were wounded -- a common occurence. But while waiting for the cooldown, you could also throw out another PoM, Renews, Flash Heals or Binding Heal.

Ghostcrawler

#91 - Nov. 7, 2008, 11:10 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I can't help but think trying to balance healing for one class is going to make WoW that much more boring for all healing classes.

I had some ideas about healing that would make it something similar to what rogues have with finishing moves and combo points: have spells like chain heal, CoH, wild growth, and maybe even a paladin AoE that can only be cast when you've first build up enough "combo points" to make it effective. Your base direct heals and HoTs would give you those combo points and classes could be balanced around how effective their finishing moves are compared to how effective normal spam casting is for them.

I'd also like to see a more interesting synergy between the healers, if certain spells are currently on a target or recently been cast on a target and another spell is cast on them it has a much better effect than the individual parts. For example:

A target has HoTs from 2 or more healers and is hit by a direct heal from a non-HoT class (based on the current low usage of riptide, I'm considering shaman a non-HoT class), that target takes less damage or does more damage for a few seconds. If an HoT from another caster is ticking on a target and you shield them, riptide them or holy shock them that target also gets an additional benefit - it can be more health immediately gained, increased rage/energy/mana regen, whatever. It would certainly make healing more interesting and the combos you could come up with are really only limited by your imagination and the current game engine.

Those are all really cool ideas and definitely the kind of thing we want to explore with the healing revamp I allude to sometimes. They are beyond the scope of what we can do for Naxx, Chamber and Malygos raiding though.

The vortex phase of Malygos is what you end up with in order to challenge the AE healing possible in the game now. It's a cool mechanic, but we don't want to do that on every fight and for anything less, the healing just feels too trivial to accomplish. That's why we don't think the "just don't so so much raid AE" is the answer. Because whenever we DO want to do raid AE, we won't be able to.

In answer to another question, we haven't applied the same homogenization phiosophy of tanks to healers. Mostly that is because a raid needs 1 tank for several fights but never 1 healer for anything larger than a 5-player dungeon. And for those, we have tried to give you more tools to do your job. However, even in that case, a Holy priest, Holy paladin or Resto shaman should not be mandatory, especially for the 10-player versions. We don't think this change would change that.

Even if we wanted the Holy priest and Resto druid to be the best AE healers, which we don't, they would still be trivializing the content (by which I mean level 80 content) with their current tools.