#0 - Feb. 16, 2009, 3:53 a.m.
The root cause of this is the removal, for all practical purposes, of the threat mechanics in game.
Prior to the removal of Blessing of Salvation, the buffing of threat generated by tanks, the shortening of threat dumping talents by DPS, this was not a problem.
Before the above, tanks did everything they could to concentrate on generating the most threat they could, this meant that they would forgo extra DPS if it meant they could do something else that would generate more threat.
When tanks had to work to generate threat, and had to sacrifice DPS to generate that threat, that meant that the DPS could not go all out. Back then, if there was one paladin on the raid, he cast Blessing of Salvation on the DPS, not Kings, not Might, not Wisdom, Salvation . DPS, even with Salvation could still surpass the tank in threat, so they had to take breaks, and had to watch their agro, because if they didnt, they could pull the boss of to come over and smack them for it, which would put other DPSers that were below the melee threat cap, but above the range threat cap, also in danger of getting smacked. These pauses allowed the DPS to lower their mana or resource comsumption to the level that they could not run out of mana, because if they tried, they would pull agro and wipe the raid.
With the removal of the above, the infinite resouce DPS classes, rogue, warrior, warlock could now hit their maximum DPS and sustain it forever, without ever worrying about pulling agro and wiping the raid. Since the above classes could hit their maximum DPS, unless something was changed, the resource constricted classes could not keep up and raids would, and did, start substituting the unlimited classes for the limited ones.
So now Blizzard needed to fix the limited DPS classes so they could go on forever, like their unlimited DPS breathren so that raids would not stop taking them. They did this by implementing Replenishment, and uping mana regeneration abilities and finally by tying Intelligence into the Spirit regen model.
The problem with this is that healers are can also gear like DPS can gear and as all healers are part of the limited resources group if they gear that way, and are treated like a limited resouce DPS in a raid, they will get unlimited resouces to cast their highest HPS spells as often as they can.
Question for all the raiders out there. When was the last time you heard about a DPS pulling agro and wiping the raid with a competent tank? It doesnt happen. Now the only things that can kill DPS are enviromental damage, ie standing in a fire, or lack of healing of boss splash damage, ie raid wide damage.
Another question for the raiders. When was they last time you got healing agro from the raid boss (Not the adds that may have appeared just as your 15k heal landed), but actually healed so much damage that you surpassed the tank in agro? When was the last time anyone put points into pure agro reduction talents? There is a reason that paladins were originally meant to be main tank healers, and not just for their unlimited mana, which they didnt have at the time, its because Paladins have a 50% addtional agro reduction built into their healing spells so could do twice the healing of any other class before drawing agro.
It is the elimination of the threat mechanics of the game that are causing the developers so much grief when designing new content and challenging fights.
There are two solutions to this problem, bring back threat, or change healers to a different "mana" type than DPS are on. Have an offensive mana pull, that is affected by all the different replenishment tools in game, and then a defensive mana pool that is not...
