So GC thinks we need more thinking and pauses

#0 - Feb. 13, 2009, 11:52 p.m.

So GC, while discussing the mana regen nerfs, i came across a slightly disturbing comment.

Q u o t e:
What we would like is for the chance to pause, perhaps to consider the fight, coordinate or just prevent overhealing, to exist. Without these changes, those pauses will just fill your bar back up.

source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14990765234&sid=1&pageNo=7

Let me ask you, the healers of WoW, do you honestly feel like there needs to be more pauses in fights? I know i for one feel bored by content. The only time i have fun anymore is for "difficult" or healing intensive fights where i dont have time to stop and look at the pretty colors or what color fire the boss decides to spew from his mouth, conveniently shaped like a cannon (heres lookin' at you, grobbuus). Do you know what i'm doing if i have time to look at that type of thing? Not healing. I play my druid to heal. I want to actually feel like i'm needed for more then a few seconds every so often when the boss decides to actually have to do something.

Theres a reason theres a healer shortage in most realms and its not because there arent enough healers. There are plenty of healers. Probably near the same number as ever before. The only difference now is they dont feel challenged by a lot of the heroic content and simply dont care. For one, i like to feel needed as a healer. i like knowing that they need me to survive and i like knowing i have to be on the ball to complete the instance. We've gotten to a point in a lot of content where we just dont need the healer as much as we used to. Lets bring back the challenge shall we, so healers actually have a reason to go and do things besides helping out the dps...

Also, where i nthe world did blizzard find these healers who dont have time to look at the boss fights and pay attention to whats going on? The whole challenge of healing is the very fact that you need to pay attention to the fights AND the life bars at the same time. If blizzard feels like healers are paying attention to the life bars and not enough on the fights themselves, thats not a problem with the fights or healing philosophy, thats a problem with the encounter. dont blame the healers for your oversight of not making the healers pay attention to a fight. Healing is very different from tanking or dps in the fact that there is actually a point where you literally cant improve anymore. One cannot progress beyond keepign everyone alive. you cannot, as a healer, distinguish your performance every day from a progression standpoint as long as the boss is down.

I'll give you an example of what bothers me the most about it all:

Healer A has the best in slot gear from maly 25, 3d OS, naxx 25, everything. He knows his class and is amazing. Boss encounter starts, he has his assignment and keeps all of his players alive without batting an eyelash and has tiem to sip a cup of coffee while doing it.

Healer B has mediocre gear, naxx 10 and os 10/25. maybe one or two from naxx 25 but nowhere near the best. Same boss encounter starts and he manages to keep his people alive fairly well but he had to pay attention and time everything well.

i can guarantee you, without a wws or a recount or a third party telling them, the raid would not be able to tell which healer is better. as long as everyone stayed alive, they dont care. there is no reward for doing better then the next guy at all. Healer A is basically stuck with really no way of showing how much better he is then the next guy at all. dps have dps charts and with that is an obvious way to monitor progress. they literally go better as they gear up while still having as much if not more fun doing it. i guarantee you Healer B had more fun doing his job successfully then Healer A by a MILE even though Healer A is clearly better geared and probably better skilled as well. This sickens me and it needs to stop.

Anyway, back to the quote. these pauses are the result of a fight mechanic or a lack of need to heal. Like i said earlier. one cannot be alive any more then he is at 100%. a healer cannot heal more then 100%. the good healers already have these pauses and times where they just dont have to heal and can just watch the fight. I almost feel insulted by the very thought of you thinking we dont and need more reasons to think about the content.

now, i realize that this is blizz trying to keep healers at that line where we will never completely outgear content and will always be in that sense of frantic, "must healing or die" mentality that healers have fun in but you have to realize that you cannot achieve this by simply nerfing healers down to that level. that only delays the problem

TL:DR dont assume healers arent paying attention to fights and fix healing itself. give us a way to progress and feel useful once we've reached the point where our gear lets us keep the raid alive.

Ghostcrawler

#35 - Feb. 14, 2009, 7:36 p.m.

I think you are over-reading "pauses" as "long, boring periods where I stand and do nothing."

My point was more that when it all comes down to it, healing is generally limited by one of three things: 1) Running out of mana, 2) Running out of GCDs, and 3) Just doing the wrong thing in the wrong situation.

The type 3 fights are generally the most interesting for a healer, but you're also not going to find every fight like that, and it might be exhausting if they were. I am generally referring to fights where you shouldn't heal at a certain time, or you need to move at a certain time, or you need to heal the right person at exactly the right time.

Currently we think the game has strayed too far towards the type 2 style of healing, 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.

However, part of backing out of that means carving enough bandwidth out so that players can make decisions about who to heal and which spell to use. The key word is "decisions." A rogue makes a decision about when to blow cooldowns or pop a Healthstone. A warrior tank makes a decision about when to blow Last Stand or sometimes even Taunt. If all a priest is doing is using CoH and PoM on every cooldown and filling in the space with Flash Heal, or if all a paladin is doing is spamming HL and using DP every cooldown, those aren't interesting decisions -- in fact they are the kind of thing that can be macroed and macros are often (though not always) a warning sign that the player isn't or doesn't have to decide which ability to use next.

There will always be some simple "gear check" style fights. Those have their place, particularly to communicate to your group that perhaps you aren't yet ready. But they don't all have to be that way.

Ghostcrawler

#118 - Feb. 16, 2009, 6:25 a.m.

Q u o t e:
GC stated he wants healers to have more decision. Where are these "decisions" going to come from for Paladin healers really? We have no versatility as oppose to Druids or Priests?

Here is a great paladin decision: "Should I heal that guy who likely won't die in the next couple of seconds or does that dependable druid have hots on him already?"

Currently the answer is: "I can afford to waste the mana, so who cares?"

Note that I am not saying you need to necessarily look at the target's active spells to know the answer. If you heal with the same people for very long, you form a good idea of what they are doing. In pugs you might need more explicit rules for who heals whom, but again, you can currently afford to be so sloppy with your mana that it's not worth the effort.