GC: how will HoTs work in Cataclysm?

#0 - April 27, 2010, 10:34 p.m.

GC would you be so kind as to address how you believe HoTs will function as viable flavor for Druids in Cataclysm? I think a lot of us are quite wary of being pushed into using more and more direct heals when we enjoy the flavor that HoTs bring to the class. A lot of what you've posted for Cataclysm design goals for healing is very very HoT friendly, i.e., large health pools that are often not topped off and an emphasis on mana efficiency. On the other hand, you've stated that you're going to kill Rejuv blanketing with WG spam on CD as you don't find it to be compelling gameplay. Would you be willing to share some of your ideas for how you are going to accomplish this, while still keeping HoTs viable and useful?

Put another way:

1) You've stated you want to increase health pools and get away from the binary feeling of healing where players are either at full health or near death / dead.

2) HoTs need to be both more mana efficient and more powerful than direct healing otherwise the player has no incentive to use a HoT instead of a direct heal. Without superior mana efficiency and superior throughput over a longer time frame, HoTs disappear as a viable heal given their downsides of "delayed" healing when someone needs something "right now" as well as the downside of HoTs being healed over due to the time delay component. HoTs have always, always worked this way.

3) You've also stated that you want to kill Rejuv blanketing + WG spam as uninteresting gameplay.

4) How will you accomplish #3, given the truth of #2?

5) Given the planned future ineffectiveness of Rejuv spam + WG, how do you see Druids remaining effective raid healers? The only reactive raid heal we have is WG, everything else we do to heal multiple targets is very proactive and requires setup time. Rejuv makes for a very poor reactive heal. Either you have the HoT up on people ahead of time, or you don't. Even in today's rejuv friendly environment, you can't spend 10-15 seconds applying rejuv to 10 players after those players take damage as you will fall behind in healing, and other heals will heal sooner before you finish all that "reactive" hotting anyways. Regrowth as our fast and inefficient heal also will be a poor option for covering multiple targets with HoTs, as the intended design is to run healers oom if they rely on their fast heal too much.

It just seems as a whole that the proactive HoT flavor of the Resto Druid is at odds with some of your design goals for multiple reasons: It's too mana efficient and it's too "spammy" and anti "choice" relative to what you want healing to feel like.

#54 - May 1, 2010, 12:54 a.m.

We don't want druids in Cataclysm to be tabbing through the raid throwing out random Rejuvs like many druids do now. Frankly, we don't think it's that fun and we know plenty of druids agree with us.

That also doesn't mean that hots are going away. We like hots to be a big part of the druid arsenal. We just don't want them to eclipse all your other heals. It's easy to point out specific things like glyphs and set bonuses that have given Rejuv in particular so much leverage. That's fine for now, but not where we want to be in Cataclysm.

I also agree that hots risk being overpowered in an environment where they aren't overhealing constantly. In a world where players spend more time being wounded, hot ticks will be enormously important. That's okay to a point. We want you to push them. But we don't want such a large percentage of your healing to come from one spell. We don't want Rejuv to win the decision every time you're thinking about whether to cast say Nourish or Regrowth instead.

To think about it another way, druids already have a pretty different rotation when tank healing than when raid healing. What we want to do is further split out raid healing into situations where players are occasionally taking damage and situations where everyone is constantly taking damage from raid-wide auras. You should use different types of spells in those situations -- maybe WG and many Rejuvs in the latter, but more Nourishes and Regrowths thrown in there with Rejuv on the former.