A question about healing "direction"

#0 - May 6, 2009, 10:42 p.m.

In the stickied post above, Ghostcrawler wrote:

Q u o t e:

These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

Emphasis mine.

I've been wondering about this for some time, and I figured I'd finally bring it to the board in the hopes that I might actually see a blue reply concerning the issue. I know that's unlikely, but I figure it's worth a shot.

The quote above is taken directly from the sticky post by GC concerning the nerfs to mana regeneration that took place in patch 3.1. I'm not here to debate the wisdom of the changes or to ask that they be reversed. In point of fact, my mana management is a bit more creative now, but I'm doing okay with it. Of course, I'm discipline and disc is still in decent shape. I think the holy priests and holy paladins are having more issues, but that's really beside the point of what I'm looking for in the way of a response.

If the idea was to "move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam" as is indicated above, I must say that the development department has failed miserably. I once healed for 1 million effective on Eradar Twins in Sunwell and I thought that was a miracle. I said to myself, "no way will I ever see that much effective on a single fight again."

Well, I sure was wrong. You want to talk about frenetic spam? I offer you Xt-002 (less now than pre-nerf), Hodir's frozen blows, Freya's hard modes, Mimiron, Thorim hard mode, Ignis (again, less so than pre-nerf), Auriya, and Kologarn. I know I haven't beaten those hard modes yet as someone will probably point out (and in fact, we're still working on Yogg,) but I'm not looking for a critique of our progress. All of the new fights are fast becoming "miss a healing GCD and it's game over." In fact, the only fight that doesn't have at least moments of "frenetic spam" is General Vezax, and that's because you CANT AFFORD IT.

Don't get me wrong. I'm okay with this model. I think frenetic spam challenges healers. I think this system works really well. But the logic ghostcrawler used in arguing for the mana regen nerfs is spurious given how the game has been developed in Ulduar.

So my question is this: Where is this change to the style of healing to be "more deliberate and thoughtful" that justified the alteration to the mana regeneration model? Because it seems to me that most of these fights are just more of the same "spam the raid with AE damage and see if they can handle it" method that every fight since BT has used. And like I said, I'm okay with that. But what was the point in nerfing regen when every challenging healing fight still comes down to the same paradigm: "You miss a GCD and someone dies."

Ghostcrawler

#1 - May 7, 2009, 6:30 p.m.

To be honest, despite all of the nerfs, mana regeneration still doesn't seem to be an issue for healers in Ulduar. You can often still afford to cast your largest heals and not care about overhealing because the risk of people dying feels like a far greater risk than running out of mana.

We're not sure that will lead to us making any additional nerfs at this time (and Replenishment would probably be the target if we needed to.) So far we're really happy with how the various fights in Ulduar feel. There are very intense moments (like Frozen Blows) but there are breaks as well (in between Mimiron phases for example). Many of the fights are dynamic -- you heal in one fashion at times (say MT healing) and then another fashion at other times (say raid healing during add moment or big AE spells). There aren't too many times where you're just spamming your spells every cooldown or GCD, and when it happens it's not necessarily for too long.

That said, we think we can still make healing more interesting. :)

Ghostcrawler

#118 - May 8, 2009, 11:49 p.m.

Q u o t e:
An interesting post, to be sure, but... does it seem to anyone else that GC isn't actually responding to the OP? She says "You didn't really do what you said you would do with healing... just FYI" and he says "Don't worry, we'll nerf you more to make up for it"

The OP essentially said “I thought you were nerfing regen in part so that there was less frenetic spam.” In my response I was trying to say that we did nerf mana regen, but perhaps not enough. We’re okay with that for now though because the design of the Ulduar encounters had lead to more variety in healing than just constantly spamming your big spells. You still do that sometimes, which is totally fine.

As someone above pointed out, mana is more pressing on the hard modes particularly while you’re still learning them. That will improve a little over time as you gear up. We’ll see how things feel then.

Q u o t e:
GC is trying to convince us mana regen is OP. Maybe from an overall perspective, that is true. However, when people make a mistake and don't get heals off fast enough, it's the druid's job to save the player. I am often having to make up for inconsistencies in the raiding environment. Maybe if everyone is pulling equal weight mana regen is OP. But for many guilds, that isn't the case. The way mana regen is now gives healers a chance to make up for the others who are having an off night.

It may be slightly OP, particularly once everyone is in full Ulduar gear. We’re not going to announce a nerf in the next few weeks or anything (barring something unforeseen).

Q u o t e:
I am posting on an alt because I am just plain discouraged. I play in I think a good raiding guild. We have not cleared Ulduar, but we are on Mimiron. I play a holy priest, and it takes all I have on that boss. We tried it last night, and in phase 2 it is just hard. Hey, I am not a god like everyone else here. I thought I played well, but GC says its too easy and I have mana to blow. Well its not too easy for me, and I do not have mana to blow. More nerfing is going to destroy me.

Mimiron is not an easy fight for anyone and I totally agree it is challenging to heal. It’s kind of at the extreme edge of “You must heal everyone NOW NOW NOW” though. I’m not saying many healers are snoozing through Mimiron. I was saying that even though mana regen can still be high, the regen doesn’t let you overwhelm the content like you could in Naxxâ€¦ at least not in current gear.

Q u o t e:
Vezax has been one of the most fun fights to heal in Ulduar. There is absolutely no mana regen (unless you stand in vapors, in which case you take damage), and a great deal of the raid damage is 100% avoidable. In a situation where, essentially, your mana pool is all you get for the entire fight, you have to make tough decisions about healing. If someone takes some raid damage they should have avoided, do you heal them? Will my Holy Light overheal too much, or can a couple FoLs suffice?

One take-home message here is that when encounters have interesting mechanics and are fairly diverse, playing your class (and even class balance in general) just feels better, and not just for healers.

(Your later point about Verzax being a model for all healing is interesting too.)

Q u o t e:

If mana is effectively not constrained for healers in fights at this point, then, well, the changes made to spirit really did nothing except harm the truly awful healers, perhaps.

But what they have done is made out of combat regen -- not OO5SR -- painful to no effect in Ulduar, but to a major effect in "rest of game".

How about actually re-engineering spirit regen so that it has three different cases:

1) While casting
2) OO5SR but in combat
3) Out of combat

Regen is definitely lower in combat. I’m not sure it’s as binary as constrained vs. non-constrained. Totally agree about your point at large though. One way to go would be to just get rid of the FSR and make out of combat regen (legitimately out of combat – not sneaking a sip during an Arena match) provide very fast regen.

Q u o t e:
How about instead of nerfing regen, give us giant robots if you wanna make us interesting

Done. (Incoming: GC promised me a robot pony.)