Any thoughts on raid wide Holy Nova?

#0 - Feb. 2, 2009, 1:31 a.m.

Holy Nova in 5 and 10 mans is decent now that it's glyphed, because your party is generally around you for the most part.

However, in raids, we generally aren't grouping people by location for Nova because of it's pitiful range, because we only have 2 priests anyway, and because Shaman CH crosses party lines anyway.

I think if Holy Nova was opened up to a raid, but was still "dumb" and healed the nearest 5 targets within it's limited range (10 yards) that it would still be lucky to hit 3-4 people in many cases. It is still centered around the Priest, so we have to run to an ideal location before casting it, just like 5 and 10 mans.

It would be a small change, but one that helps give us some control on our AOE between CoH cooldowns (PoM is a random bunny) without turning it into a CoH spell by any means.

It would also move Blizz closer to eliminating party based spells.

Holy Nova
Instant Cast
27% of base mana
0 Yard Range

Causes an explosion of holy light around the caster, causing 76 to 88 Holy damage to all enemy targets within 10 yards and healing up to 5 raid members within 10 yards for 121 to 139. These effects cause no threat.

Ghostcrawler

#11 - Feb. 2, 2009, 5:43 a.m.

The reason we haven't switched every spell over to be raid-wide is some of them don't scale easily. With something like Holy Nova, you have two options:

1) Heals well in a 5-player group, so it heals phenomenally well in a 25-player group.
2) Heals well in a 25-player group, so trivializes anything in a 5-player group.

In other words, if you make it raid-wide and heal 25 for as much as it heals 5 for then it is just 5x as good in a larger group. So you start considering a 5 player cap, but then positioning is really tough because you can't pick out the 5 most wounded people to target. So then you consider making it smart, and suddenly priests have 2 or 3 spells that work exactly like CoH.

The right answer might be something like it heals less per person the larger your group, but even that is a little strange and changes the role of the spell depending on group size.

But we have some ideas.

Ghostcrawler

#71 - Feb. 2, 2009, 5:34 p.m.

Our long-term goal is to get rid of the notion of groups within a raid. We want players to be able to organize their UI however they want -- by class, by role, alphabetically or whatever. With the overhaul to the buff / debuff system we made a lot of progress towards this goal, but that left us with a few awkward reasons to still put certain players together.

From a high-level, the design is to be in a group. That group can have 5, 10 or 25 max players depending on the content. There shouldn't be a (weird) notion of being in both a 5 player and 25 player group at the same time. Imagine for a 25-player raid that the UI just shows 25 players.