Does anyone find it funny that...

You don't generally bring more healers because the healers you have are OOM. You generally bring more healers because the healing per second you need to achieve can't be managed by the number of healers you have. (There are exceptions of course.)

Look, it's in your (as healers) best interest for groups to want to have many healers. You are in a bad place when the guild starts to say "You know, we could probably clear Naxx faster with just 2 healers because we could bring another dps."

It might be a peaceful utopia if 25-player raids scaled directly from 5-player groups, meaning that you had 5 tanks and 5 healers and 15 dps. We just don't think the encounters are as fun with that setup, and they certainly start to have a sameness after awhile (lots of adds or tank rotations on every fight for example). You have to do a lot of crazy things to enforce only 5 healers, because as soon as the group brings 7 or 8 healers, the content might get a lot easier.

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Way back far too long ago it used to be that healers (priests) would have a healing/wanding rotation on a boss judged with wisdom to recover mana. If the regen nerfs require it that might happen again.

That was partially because OFSR was so potent back then. Honestly, we're not trying to recreate the MC days or healer rotations, though I can understand if some of you are nostalgic for them.

In Ulduar, you should run out of mana if...

1) You don't have enough gear for the instance.
2) You aren't playing the encounter well enough.

If you have good enough gear and good enough skill and aren't standing in fires and are kiting adds correctly and doing all the right things, then you aren't designed to run OOM.

The reason we wanted to nerf regen is that having infinite mana was allowing too much of a buffer on those two factors (it allowed for too much "slop" in organization and execution). Take Saphiron as an example. When mana regen is very high, the dps can sit in the blizzards for a little while because the healers can just heal through it and make up enough mana when they get a clearcasting proc or are running for ice blocks (because OFSR regen was so good). In previous tiers of content, the guild probably would have had to farm the earlier bosses for several weeks to get enough gear to have a chance at the final few.

Now Naxx was designed to be easy, and Ulduar isn't going to be a lot harder. Hard modes on the bosses though are designed to be very hard. That means being inefficient with mana has to be a liability instead of a tool used to make the content less challenging.

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GC, I have to disagree here. ATM the expectations is, that healers HAVE to heal through this type of AoE damage. As long as you don't hit DPS by something that can be healed through, healers will be expected to manage and are getting screamed at if they don't.

Do not run with bad players, IMO.

While we like the idea of sometimes nerfing dps if they stand in the fire, overall you have to understand that when you are signing to up to be a healer you are signing up for the primary responsibility of keeping the raid alive. And no we aren’t going to make that incredibly easy to do. :)

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Yes, however, Blizzard's solution to deal with raids downing bosses with slacking DPS is to nerf healers, which strikes me as absurd.

To be fair, we nerfed tanking and dps a lot in this patch too. Still, if the idiots stand in the fire, guild kick them. If you don’t have that power, then find a better guild. “Blaming the healer” is to some extent a social problem. There are plenty of healers who thought Naxx was way too easy and are eager for more of a challenge. They will find it in Ulduar, at least in the hard modes. They will find the deck stacked against them. They are not good encounters for people who stand in fires.

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Making healing even less fun and attractive than the already hassle-rific and masochistic tanking role.

You know, if you don’t enjoy healing and you don’t enjoy tanking, I’m kind of at a loss for why you raid. I’m not saying we can’t improve those aspects of the game – we absolutely can. But you act as if a great many players are telling us how much they hate going on our raids, or that the current raid content is way too taxing.

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Try asking us how to make healing hard without a massive spirit nerf (maybe just a tiny spirit nerf). We've got ideas. Give us an outlet for them. If you sticky a thread asking for alternative ideas for hard-but-fun-raid-healing, and the thread gets no replies, then you can point at the lack of replies and say "we must nerf spirit".

There have been several posts in various threads that try to tackle that subject. I do read them.

The reason I am often hesitant to launch the kind of feedback thread you are describing (even though they sometimes yield good results) is in the long-term it seems to hurt us. You see a lot of "They didn't listen to any of our ideas" or "Why did they host that big thread just to ignore it?" I'm not saying our feelings will be hurt, because let's face it, you can't do this job for more than five minutes if you have thin skin. But I do think there is a risk that if you make players feel too involved in the design process that they stop giving feedback altogether if and when they feel burned because their idea didn't make it into the game.

It's challenging sometimes to succesfully harness the energy of such a passionate player base. We'll continue to explore more effective methods of letting you offer your two cents though.

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I have however given less feedback because of what GC has said on occasion; something that I took to mean they only ask super-hardcore WoW player's opinions because those are the only ones that matter.

If that was true, I wouldn’t be on these forums. But yes, we do tend to take very seriously the feedback from expert players. Theirs is not the only voice though.

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I assume he is implying you kick them if they make no effort to change their ways after you try to help them. I'd personally just not group with them but still, if the person is a liability and doesn't make any effort to change you shouldn't be expected to continue to drag them through content.

Right, The question at hand was what to do when the dps essentially play bad and then blame the healer for running OOM, and the insinuation was that Blizzard shouldn’t let healers run out of mana in order to prevent that. I was saying stand up for yourself a little bit. If you are wiping on challenging content, then you need to step it up a notch. If you feel abused by your raiding group, and can’t get that behavior turned around, then by all means, find some better friends. I don’t think that is Blizzard’s problem to fix, though.

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Q u o t e:

In Ulduar, you should run out of mana if...

1) You don't have enough gear for the instance.
2) You aren't playing the encounter well enough.
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Q u o t e:
So you are saying if your group is geared for the content, and you know what are you doing mana shouldn't be an issue? Isn't that the exact point of all these nerfs? You saw that players outgeared the content and were not running out of mana, so you nerfed mana regen, but you basically said they should not be running out of mana in Ulduar.
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No, they aren't the same problem at all. You put too much stress on the first part, and not the second
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You aren't playing the encounter well enough.
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If your DPS stands in the fire, your Tanks don't use their cooldowns well, and your Healers don't heal the right targets, then you will run OOM. If your DPS gets out of the fire, your Tanks watch all their cues, and the Healers are careful with who they heal, then your mana will be fine.

This is the way it should be. Your not supposed to be fighting your raid (i.e. the Bads) your supposed to be fighting the boss. When healing is more about fighting the raid than the boss, then something is wrong. When healing is more about fighting the raid than the boss and you still win, then something is very very wrong.

Quoting Angua here.

They should not be running out of mana in Ulduar if they play well. In Naxx you can do things like stand in fires, overheal like mad, bring players in green gear to get geared up, or not even explain the fights to pugs because you can brute force your way through them. One the mechanics that allows you to brute force is having so much mana regen. Now all of that is appropriate for the first raid tier. Things will start to get a little more difficult now, and a lot more difficult if you want to do the hardest fights. Naxx = play bad and win. Ulduar = play good and win.

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Yeah, I don't really buy the "oh the forum trolls got their feelings hurt" excuse that bliz throws out for any call for specifics.

The adults will understand and be grateful for any additional information/ability to converse with the devs. The forum trolls never will, no matter what you do.

Vs

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See, the thing is, we already feel like you ignore our ideas. Every time a constructive, well thought out thread/idea is presented, it is often ignored. You say you read these threads/posts, but that doesn't mean you're listening, just that you see what we're writing and then ignoring it.

You can see the awkward spot blue posters are often in. :(

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I love the game, and healing is my favorite role. As far as Uldaar, I guess it all depends on how it actually is when it goes live.

Short of the achievement modes, the current content is admittedly easy. If you jumped it up some for Uldaar, well it seems that is what should be happening to me, so I am with you on that. But as always, it depends on the degree of escalation, and how evenly the increased difficulty is shared by the class roles.

My biggest concerns, and continuing fears, are you have tunnel vision on healing being the single variable upon which escalating difficulty is based, and on nerfing being the only way to increase difficulty.

It isn’t. We had to fix some problems, and very rapid mana regeneration was one of them. Another big one was amazing tank cooldowns (mostly from the DK). However we stepped up the difficulty on the encounters too. There is no “just burn him down” boss like Noth. The trash will require crowd control on some pulls. Ulduar is not Sunwell. It is not a huge leap up in difficulty from Naxx, but it is a step up. If that isn’t enough of a challenge for you, then I suggest you try the hard modes and pay a visit to Algalon.

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This Seems to be at odds with your previous statement (listed below). We are supposed to heal people who stand in fires (it's our "responsibility"), but we are not supposed to have the mana too... You realize when someone gets hit by a blizzard if they are unlucky they can be in the middle of it, then be slowed, have to crawl out only to have a new blizzard land directly on top of them on their way out (Something I have seen happen countless times). My point here is not to pick apart your one specific example listed below, but it is to point out that you make the RNG of the game make it all but impossible to avoid damage... And when that happens you expect healers to heal it... Only you have taken away their ability to regen enough mana to heal that kind of raid damage...

The content is not balanced to a point where if one player gets hit by a blizzard you will wipe. If that was true, you wouldn’t see groups clearing Naxx with 2 healers (in 10-player mode). Yes the responsibility of healing the raid is yours. The responsibility of doing things that let you do your job is that of the dps and the tanks. If the tank doesn’t blow her cooldowns and then blames her death on you, she is a bad tank. Giving you more mana isn’t going to fix that.

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@Tang- The real problem is that these forums represent a TINY portion of the playerbase. Even if 1,000 people said an idea on a forum was good, that's only .00000001% of the playerbase. And to all those that say, "everyone wants X" I say this, "You are a liar. You can't possibly speak for 11 million people."

I am a healer, and I don't want healing to be harder. Does that make me a bad healer? Nope. Nor am I lazy. That's just the way I like to play. I am perfectly OK smashing nothing but Holy Light and Bacon until I win. So to all the people in this thread who say that "everyone wants healing to be harder" I say, "not me."

Marxalot is correct. By the same token, we don’t expect every player to come to a consensus before we make a change. That would be silly. So we read as much feedback as we can and try and make informed decisions. Some players want content to be harder and some want it to be easier. We can’t satisfy both extremes, and we don’t really try to. Our solution for this patch is to make the standard content more difficult, but not soul-crushing. However, if you like soul-crushing, you should be able to find that too.

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GC, in general I still want to have your babies.

You understand that the theory I lacked Y chromosomes was disproven, right? Just making sure.

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I disagree. One thing I don't think many people are considering about the elimination of Blessing of Wisdom and Mana Spring stacking--for a number of the 10 man encounters I believe you will not see resto shaman in attendance because a paladin and any of the other healers, in conjunction with any dps sham (likely elemental, since most of the enhance sham buffs were given to DKs) will more easily fill the spot. Think about 10 man 3d Sarth and tell me you see a reason to bring a resto shaman as one of your two healers, over a paladin / resto druid or paladin / priest combo.

If you have one paladin, you are getting Kings or Wisdom, and probably Kings. You can add a second paladin for Wisdom, or you can get a Resto shaman and get “Wisdom” plus other nice things like Bloodlust. If you have that covered too, then maybe the last slot is up for grabs, and you can take whoever you want.

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Healing is currently facerollitis right now. Anything to make it so you run out of mana again would be good. Chaincasting holy light will not necessarily oom a pally now. That's insane! Only on my resto shaman can I even begin to feel the bottom of the mana barrel looking at me, and once he went to naxx 2 times, I'm not sure its possible to OOM him anymore.

This is how we see it for those guilds who are thinking about Twilight Zone and similar achievements. We have to make sure it is possible to go OOM to make some of the Ulduar hard modes actually hard.

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The thing to me was that I really did see in Wrath healers got some love and each had different feels. 3.1 seems to be the homogenization of healers.

I absolutely understand that feedback. It is of great concern to us. However we also have to balance that with the players who feel like their Holy paladin can’t heal 5-player heroics or their druid can’t repair an OT after a Patch hateful strike. If you are referring strictly to Lifebloom, the nerf there was to hit its efficiency, not scare you away from casting hots.

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GC you're going too hardcore. Your comments seem to indicate this game is about hard core raiding and that is all.
Alot of the nerfs seem to affect leveling a great deal and they seem to forget about that. Not everyone has tons of time to play so they need to keep an eye on the specs people use while leveling so as not to nerf anything there. I see alot of changes in 3.1 that will gimp leveling specs and tools we use for a number of classes.

That isn’t our intent at all. Lich King’s first tier of raiding and all the heroic content is much easier than it was in Burning Crusade in order to make it more approachable for players not interested in hardcore raiding. I think there is a lot of focus on hardcore raiding because 3.1 brings a gigantic raid with it, however there is non-raid content too and not every patch will have those in the same skewed proportion.

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One of the huge successes of Naxx is that casual guilds could handle it. I define a casual guild as one that doesn't kick someone out if they aren't performing very well. Guild composed of RL friends or relatives are often like this. Hardcore guilds have no hesitaton to do so, but that's very corrosive of relationships.

I'm not sure you really want casual guilds to be penalized too much. Perhaps this is all old hat to you, and the casuals remain the target for the non-hard modes. In that case, the non-hard modes will be tuned for having some fraction of the raid being functionally afk on each fight.

Totally. But players at that level should not have problems with mana, even with this change. But you will have to kick it up a notch to raid Ulduar. You won’t have to become a hardcore guild, but it will be more challenging. You will have to CC some trash for instance.

The elite should also note how many players here are worried about Ulduar shutting them out. You can call it srs bzns and all that, but yet a lot of players who are sophisticated enough to post on forums (true casuals don't do that) are worried that Ulduar may be too much. This is the kind of thing we have to balance.

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To your credit you do seem to be doing it less these days (the 3.1 previews were nice for instance).

That was the idea, however the previews also spawned quite a few “broken promises” threads all the way to a few who said “I wish they wouldn’t announce anything until they’re 100% sure.” It’s easy to dismiss those comments, but at some point you have to justify to yourself why you are dismissing player comments. We’re not sure how we’ll handle previews the next time.

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Can you please look into, or provide some kind of hope to those staring down their first heroic UK boss with small mana pools and tiny regen.

We can try to do some tests to make sure healers don’t go OOM on their earlier heroics.

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The best players get the spots. Get key buffs, perform well, win. This game isnt so dependant on buffs that buffs > skill.

That is our stance. I think it would have been harder for us to advocate that stance in the Sunwell era, but we are getting closer now.

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Can this not be likened to Ret paladins killing themselves to do relatively lower dps? (because they are a hybrid)

The fires typically do a lot more damage than Seal of Blood. What is the most you have ever been bled for on a Judgement crit? Maybe 10K? And that’s a crit. No offense, but your healers probably laugh at the kind of damage you are inflicting on yourself. The tank is getting hit for much more, much faster and the fires or big AE sprays generally do more. A stray PoM or CL can probably top you off. I know you don’t want to use Command, but if you’re sitting at 10% of your health or you know the dragon is about to breathe, it may be an attractive option until you get healed back up again. I know the self-damage is a concern of the paladins though, and we’ll keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t feel like too much of a liability in raids.

Some of you seem to be arguing that you should be able to heal players that stand in fires or otherwise they will think you are a bad healer.

We have made the raid content much more approachable than it has ever been in WoW. However, we still want you to have to work at it. You still need to take it somewhat seriously, even when everything is on farm.

If you are really honestly having trouble in Naxxramas, or players are really complaining about your inability to heal them, then all I am saying is you need to take a look at what you are doing and who you run with. You can improve, and so can they. If they refuse to improve and place all the blame on you, then you need to ask yourself if it is worth playing with them. You can tell them "I read that the design of this encounter is for you to move out of the fire. It is not designed for me to heal you through it." Send them to the forums if they still don't get it. The players here will set them straight.

We are a long, long way from making content so difficult that our most casual players are just shut out of it. That was not always the case, and it will not be the case for the Ulduar hard modes.