Well its interesting because spikey damage feels bad in higher keys because of difficulty, then you go to lower keys it feels just as bad or worse because people still dont understand defensive cooldown rotation or that blue goo hurts
While healing 20+ keys sucks on occasion - then it still sucks, maybe even more so, to heal sub-20 keys.. but for that very reason. People know they'll die if they don't use a CD on a 20+ key, and they typically know just about when to use them. On sub-20s you're constantly making up for people's mistakes.
Actually, scrap what I just wrote. On sub-20s you heal people's mistakes, or lack of CD knowledge. On 20+ you heal the constant-near-one-shot damage. I personally prefer the second one.
So I'm also not super happy about how healing is in DF, something I think is also worth raising is how weak spot healing / triage is since the hp buffs. It feels like, to me, every healer atm vomits out aoe hps and has very low agency in terms of saving a single person with a scary debuff (think xymox debuffs or something), especially during high raid damage. It's really hard for me to justify hitting a 45k flash heal when my Prayer of Healing does 20k but on 5 people. During something like say Rashok intermission it's incredibly difficult to justify hitting a flash heal. It's stupid that the top 3 spot healers in the game are non healer specs. And I think this compounds the issue in raid/keys, where you can get oneshot from 70%, but my flash heal does less than 10% of your hp bar, so if I send it on you at 70% there's a good chance it wont even save you.
yeah, it's one of the reasons I think people enjoyed the hpal rework so much (despite it being quite overpowered) is Holy Shock finally felt like it did healing again. Would love for Shaman and Holy Priest to also be able to feel a bit more like that like they have in the past though
@@theunwow 100%. I used to play Hpal, but I've been off it since they decided it was a full on melee spec, cause basically since Uldir it's been some version of spam HoPo gen as efficiently as possible and hit LoD as much as you can, I miss the spec where target selection really mattered because your heals were fat, and you really felt like you made a meaningful difference in saving someone's life. I'm glad it's closer to it, and I think it's definitely the "best" at it alongside Rsham with some pwave shenanigans, but it still feels like a bit of a blind spot for healing in DF. Playing Priest this xpac so far has felt like all my buttons have the same amount of immediate impact as Healing Rain or Efflo. :^) I remember seeing Asc Blasts hit during lords intermission and my entire raid's hp bar would jump up 20%, but they still wouldn't be topped. Similarly, my heal in SL hit for 15% of someone's hp bar and crit for 30%, as opposed to 4/8% now. Anyway yeah, sore spot for a lot of healers atm. =/
Resto druid doesn't even spit out aoe healing. It does absolutely nothing for AoE. It's ST healing is decent but requires a longer setup than any other healer. You want at least 4 globals before you can start spamming regrowth on someone
@@theunwownow imagine that devs instead of nerfing good classes buff bad classes, now wouldnt that be good. Seems they insist on this stupid meta that just makes people quit lol. Im pretty sure shadowlands had more players then df
The healer community has been pointing out healer problems apparent in Dragonflight since launch. Only minor changes have been made. The developers don't care or aren't smart enough to know how to fix the problems. Also, I'm very tired of healer imbalance. I struggle to log in even once a week now because healing is all I've ever done. While your criticism lies more with raid healing, my frustration stems from mythic+ healing. I'm tired of the difficulty being placed upon the healer's shoulders and hardly anyone else's. I'm tired of every affix being a healer's problem to deal with. I'm tired of people screaming at me when they die to standing in bad. It's just. not. fun.
I fear they would listen to the community feedback as is and just rework every other healer to be on par with hpal instead of actully fixing the problem they created. I want to enjoy my class as it is, not to play an op class just because they f*cked up the balance
It's ironic that they did these things to mitigate the need for spiky damage and then left that in as the primary challenge. Healing being spinning plates against a constant war of attrition is far more interesting than the current spike damage meta. Solid video, really showcased it well.
the spiky damage was implemented to counter overtuned healers that would never die even after dampening was added in pvp at least. and on the pve side to make healing more "exciting" but its failed and made the game bursty and all about cooldowns and the "go" meta
@@abcdgump616 , another thing that has effected PvP is how powerful CDs are in comparison to your damage without it. It feels really good in PvE to line it all up with bloodlust etc. but in PvP there are serious problems when things get too bursty. That's the first issue. You can solve it simply nerfing % damage of CDs across the board, and then give each spec a passive during that CD that they do that same % of additional damage against non player targets during its duration. You just balance for what feels good in PvP and then make the percentage the same amount and it changes nothing about PvE. On top of this is the second Venruki was talking about where retail has far too many damage modifiers compared to something like Wrath, so your spells don't feel good to use most of the time because they don't do good damage, but sometimes everything can line up and your damage is significantly higher. If that happens when you are using CDs people just get randomly deleted; too many variables. It means there are lower lows and higher highs that have nothing to do with player skill. Because damage OUTSIDE of CDs is so low, this is also part of what contributes to not being able to pressure healers so they eventually go down. The fix for this is really easy on paper but means getting rid of all the lazy talents that are % chance to do something so is a huge ask. The game would run smoother as a bonus without having to do so many rolls for so many effects with each tick of a dot. "the spiky damage was implemented to counter overtuned healers that would never die even after dampening was added in pvp at least." Agree 100%. I'd go all the way back to the resource of mana as a cause though. Think of rage, energy, or focus. In PvE and PvP they function the same. You don't gain more energy to hold as you gear up, so outside of the effects of something like haste it is static. Mana is the opposite: the amount you have is impacted like gear and PvE and PvP need VERY different sizes of mana pools to function optimally. Even if you balance it perfectly gear screws it up, so something needs to change. Dampening is the band aid. I think most developers skip over the mana problem, and this is why they moved to so many builder/spender type classes once mana was no longer a resource that was managed. Next, healers need enough survivability to stand up in bgs but in order to do that it means a DPS can't kill them in a 1v1. The core problem is that nothing accounts for the number of targets attacking the character and this is the variable that needs to be accounted for. With a clear cap on stacks or total amount of damage reduction, the more player targets attacking you the less damage you take from other players. This way you can balance them for the 1v1 and then adjust the buff to what is needed based on the size of the battle. Doing it that way allows you to solve the first two problems I mentioned... without that healers would never die. There are lots of things that need to be adjusted, and I think putting such little work into PvP in general is limiting their options.
@@naejimba there's a problem here: blizzard does not have the skilled developers to do it. You've probably put more thought into it that their full development team combined
i dont think it feels good to do massive burst at all in pvp or pve. you run into the situation were if you flub your burst, your damage for a whole key or pull is crap. this is not fun, its frustrating. more classic style pacing with CDs being important but not the end all be all. also colossal smash style mechanics (Like shatter, shiv, or essence break) need to be trimmed to only a few specs and or just plain removed.@@naejimba
Your final point is important. When damage is spiky, there's no "Triage Puzzle" to solve. There's just two states: alive and dead, which means the way you can express your healing is severely limited. It's all going to be big major cooldowns, and almost nothing is going to be solved by the wide array of semi-passive healing spells (Riptide would be an example). What makes healing fun is the dynamic reorganization of who to heal by what spell. However, for this puzzle to be meaningful there has to be pieces to play with, and currently that's quite limited due to the damage spikes.
aint it the opposite? what's there to solve when you need to keep everyone topped all the time, with smaller heals consistently? that's pure aoe hps. Now there are situations where you have to make a quick decision to (to stick to shaman as example) just survive the spike with a spirit link, blast your pre-cast cloudburst into the group, use your proc'd chain heal for a massive heal, throw out some riptides, and already start pumping the most likely spike target, spread riptide, use primal wave and do a sizeable heal with a healing wave, or pop your big healing cd-s and hope for the best - your job is not to keep everyone 100% hp every single second of the run, in a pug deaths will also happen - to me it seems like the expectation is that healers should be able to easily outheal every mistake everyone else does which sounds rather dumb
Thoes dev's have some kinda complex that makes them have to constantly meddle and fiddle until they break something. When you give everyone self heals and then screw over all the healers it's no wonder it's now in a mess? 20 years of healing and my character feels useless. Spamming big heals and watching a healthbar move literally 1mm is disappointing.
It also doesn't help that recently if you've noticed it, blizzard seem to not give a shit about overlapping mechanics, last boss of vortex pinnacle is a prime example, ever had the nova spawn, him using chain lightning right after forcing you to jump? How the hell are you supposed to heal 3 heal checks in one. Or the hammer smith in neltharus. He starts slamming and you heal the massive damage but suddenly there's also swirlies that makes it perfectly awful to stand still to try and heal the heal check.
Chain lightning isnt a heal check its a do you have a personal defensive CD check. Problem is it can choose the same person 9 times consecutively and that will kill them 3 times in the fight.
Great video dude. All these specific comparisons make it so much easier to understand the difference. As someone who played BfA this really jogged my memory at how different it feels now compared to then, even on "similar damage pattern" fights
I don't main healer (I don't even play WoW anymore), but I tried to play one in Dragonflight, to try it out mostly, with the excuse of Arcanist being a new thing and what not... it was a miserable experience. Gone by are the days were a healer was just expected to heal damage and not waste mana; it nows is a constant panic-moment of top everyone ASAP or they did in the next mechanic within 2 seconds... I found it really annoying to be constantly playing "wack-a-mole" with HP bars and having to react instantly to any sort of damage... ...I'm getting old; but I do really miss simpler times; when tanks were about keeping aggro (not chaning defensive CDs) and healers were about managing mana or timing big heals (not instant-reacting to any kind of damage, every pull, all the time). There is not even (barely) any variety anymore in how you heal different pulls; all feel the same. I don't know if there is a single pull anymore where you only have to heal the tank (because that would be boring; I guess?) so ALL the pulls do damage to EVERYONE, seemingly at RANDOM, so you just gota REACT and heal that SPIKEY damage before the NEXT one comes and finishes the job... Bars going from 100 to 40 and back to 100 non stop, all the time, on everyone in the party... >_
Healers have always been expected to carry the majority of the responsibility for mistakes made by people not doing mechanics as well as many of the affixes. Blizzard is trying to force people to do mechanics but the result is just more stress on healers. As a resto druid running mostly pugs in the 15-20 range, I'm finding it exhausting. As long as maximum dps output is the biggest incentive, people will blow off mechanics. Mechanics failures that result in lower dps rather than only a loss of health would fix many of the issues that casual healers are experiencing.
I think another point for m+ specifically is that it feels like some healers just don't have kits for the damage anymore. There's so much movement during high damage events and so many spiky events that require you to instantly top your group many times per fight for a lot of m+ fights and some healer kits just don't feel like they work for that after the DF talent trees. Feels like we desperately need proper single target heals but also stuff that feels as powerful as an echo'd spirit bloom for m+ group healing (I know prev isn't the most meta healer atm, but unlike some other healers, it genuinely feels really good to heal on atm since you feel like you have agency, just like with hpal) and that feels like it would need a greater kit or talent tree rework for some of the healers which likely won't happen. Great video though, I think you got the point across. Can't wait to see what they do with mana trinkets next tier, if we don't get 1 it looks like we might just be running Rashok the entire tier which would be a shame.
I think a lot of it is the game seemingly moving toward everything-is-aoe. Our singletarget triage primarily feel absolute ass. Every mob, every boss (im more of a m+ enjoyer than raid) shits out aoe damage. I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg, but either the damage was trending toward aoe so blizz gave us tools for it, or we had tools for it going unused so blizz started tuning for it. It's weird though, because we're "powerful" but we don't feel powerful, I'm a hpal main so the last few weeks have been fun. Idk if its a hot take, but I kind of miss when I would be prioritizing dps both in heroic raids and m+. A spike of damage comes out and I switch to healing CDs/Triage. Personally I hate the trend toward CD-focussed gameplay, I know CDs have always existed, but over the last few years it feels like more and more dps/hps is tied to CDs and you feel garbo outside of them. I'm not sure if thats objectively true, but thats how I feel. When I'm playing a DPS alt you do like 30% the damage you would normally do on a pack when you don't have CDs. If the dungeon goes south as a healer so you "waste" CDs where you normally wouldn't and now you don't have them for XYZ boss/pack you're just fucked. that feels bad
yeah, said basically the same thing in reply to the other person but i think the health increases had a knock-on effect for spot healing spells and (up until the hpal rework) it's felt pretty bad for all of DF so far so I agree
I personally dislike the dps as a healer, a healer should prio healing, not trying to dps and sometimes react to the slacking / mechanics of the m+/raids. The only classes that I like to heal with dps is the monk, the DC and the pal when crusading was a thing, cause you still do your primary job, healing through dps throughput. Like let's take the fist weaving monk, even tho it's kind of hated by the community for no reason, it deals incredibly well with the AOE bullshit we have those days. It just lacks some kind of real burst healing, but at least it's fun to play and your dps serves your healing
@@Scape974 Except fist-weaving isn't really viable in raids any more, and we have the same difficulty dealing with spikes as other healers in M+. MW was my main throughout SL and DF. I've retired the charcter, Yu-lon build feels awful to play even if it can pump if you do everything right and don't get trolled by random mechanics during a ramp/yu'lon window, and M+ just feels awful in general.
I never thought I'd do anything but heal. I *loved* healing. Started in early-mid SL. After CE this tier, I rerolled off healer. It's f*cking miserable and I'm over it. Problem is that I don't really want to do anything else at a high level, so I'm just fighting not to quit the game at this point. Really good video. I knew healing was bad in all PvE content rn, but understanding the problem makes me feel less crazy.
Well. I'm giving you a like and a subscribe before I even watch the video. The fact you link articles you reference puts you in a league of your own. Good stuff man! Its always irritating not being able to read the context of what's being talked about. (Edit) Also the content was good. Been a healer for a long time, and this reflects my thoughts really well.
I'm currently playing a mistweaver at almost 3,1k RIO and 7/9M. In raid it feels bad, you got those major spikey events, you got your MRT assignments and chances are that your healing will just sniped by a regular ability by some other healer so everything goes into ovverhealing. Outside of those events nothing happens, there's little to none healing required between those events. I want to heal in between those moments. In M+ pugging becomes more and more difficult as a solid coordination is required to overcome those spikey events. One could argue that you can always create a premate team, but that's a story for another time, given the current meta.
I've played resto druid since BC and this is the first expac I've just quit healing altogether too. I love healing but it's just beyond stressful and feels entirely pointless when the tank doesn't even need me, keeps himself alive, and I'm stuck just trying to to rotate CDs just enough to heal spike damage on the DPS and myself, all while juggling affixes which always seem to affect heals directly with dispels, moving, or indirectly when DPS fail an affix and you have to heal it + any normal damage from mobs and its just too much
I’m 2400 m+rating as healer and most of the time death is sone1 didn’t see the Mécanique because there’s 25 things going off at the same time we as healer almost never have the time to react that pretty annoying
I remember coming back to retail after playing classic through TBC and just being shocked at how powerful an individual healer is. There is no reason I need to be able to top an entire raid with a single channel of divine hymn. Later, I was shocked again at how weak I felt when I started running keys this season. There are actually many ways Blizzard can fix this. One is to nerf the piss out of our healing cool downs, design healing mechanics less around individual AOE heal checks and more around healing sustained damage. This is likely more difficult to balance well, but sure it's doable. If they don't want to change the way they design raid encounters then they could change our talent trees so we have a few meaningful choices that either massively buff our raid cool downs or massively buff our spot heals so we can build for what content we are playing more distinctly. The last option is to give skills different effects based on the content, kind of like how atonement does more healing when applied to 5 or less players. This also feels like too much effort, but it has work for discipline priest. If it were up to me we would get some combination of 1 and 2. Raid healing just feels way too easy right now and turns into a snipe fest during farm and more meaningful choice in the talent trees can't hurt either.
I get your point. I main healer , however after i done my 20s I've stopped completely. Can see you are speaking alot about the raid , the problem is with the M+. I raid you have multiple healers , in dungeons it's only you tring to fix other ppl's mistakes , deal with afixes spam heals with your nab drood class because cant remove bleeds etc. Overall too stressful no fun ..quit. I really hope season 3 will be better if not just gonna reroll sadly
The way DF started was good. This patch has made the game really not fun in a lot of aspects. ZC is basically dead content, healing is just awful, pvp pairing right now is just a mess, art team and music still carrying the game like the chads they are, mythic plus affixes are just awful when the streams cross at the worst time which falls back on healers. Honestly i feel healers are getting shafted so hard i dont blame those people unsubbing.
Awesome job breaking this down. Iv always thought about healing in comparison to our max hp and our dps so it was cool to see you do that as well. When they give us basically the power of 9 legendry's but call them talents our multiplicative power went into the astral realm. I did well over 100 hours of math on the classes going into this expansion. I'm the monk who set all the stupid parses in Ny'alotha. The talents were a larger artificial increase than any time before in wow's history besides late corruption abuse,(and even then you have to cherry pick singular logs). Many abilities are currently doing 5-25x there spell book value because of passives and active talents. There is too much power variance and it plays out in game in a very unhealthy way. I quit this tier because my druid was perma doing 50%+ over healing despite putting up 95+ parses. Why is half of my work wasted but people can still die? Parsing is a big part of my enjoyment as a healer. But its frustrating that the game doesn't provide a challenge for throughput healers. I spend so much time on my WA's and theory crafting, and even practicing in LFR to perfect my craft. But it means nothing cause there is only so much healing to grab. The rest just gets pissed down the drain as over healing. My over healing is so high because I waste so much healing on ramping before actual dmg. Hots just tick on full hp people for 15 secs because you got to pre cast 10-15 secs ahead of time. Then when dmg comes out all the healers gobble up all the healing as quick as they can because there legit isn't enough to go around. On 1st kills it should be
Thank you. I was trying to find out why am i not having fun with healing and this gave me the answer. It's really frustrating when someone presses their button 1 miliseconds earlier and everyone is topped before you get the chance to play the game. I'm having fun healing but i can't if there is nothing to heal. There is no in between either they get one shotted or they are well and healthy immediately. Even sarkareth p1 like in our first kill we basically 2 healed ( 2palas mainly healed and me(holy priest) and evoker were doing damage generally and pressing assigned cds only. Everyone is always healthy immediately after the damage event.
As a long time Resto shaman and mythic raider, I agree it feels terrible that my riptide heals what 5% of someone’s health bar now? All I do is spam it on CD because if tidalwave/set piece interaction… if I look at my healing breakdown in mythic fights I hardly use healing wave or healing surge, just spam chain heal, healing rain and riptide. Oh and for a treat I can unleash life how fun…
This is my first time ever healing. I play a holy priest, I have stopped even bothering with keys. Dps have 500-600k hp and my flash heals/heals just tickle them. If I just used serenity to heal someone, and you are about to take a hit, gl because you are probably dead.
I started maining healer in Shadowlands season 1, playing M+ for the most part. I don't know exactly what key level I was usually at but I remember it being a good bit above keystone master (I boosted a lot of my mates' twinks to keystone master). Back then, it actually felt like I could prevent my team mates' deaths by playing well and reacting accordingly. Sure, there were some crazy and frustrating damage events that would just wipe the group if someone fucked up, but for the most part I felt like I could compensate someone else's mistake by healing well. In Dragonflight however, if somebody messes up, they just die, in most cases.
I dont know why people think healing isn’t fun. I’m enjoying it. My only issue is that it’s difficult to select and cast on the affix. And Resto Shaman in Mythic+ are my favorite class. Resto Druid in Raiding is fun. One shots are not fun but I think that’s a product of pushing keys rather than “healing isn’t fun”.
This also adds to the really engaging gameplay of "I didn't have 10% avoidance or my class doesn't have enough personals, so I get to die at some point where billy presses a 10% DR". I felt this especially on Broodkeeper, but also on Rashok where my little Astral Shift kept me super safe during every other dangerous moment. Then inbetween those moments I just pray that I'm topped before it goes off when the raid leader calls for small personals, because there's nothing left to press. I see this especially on Shaman and Priest, but Boomkin seems to struggle with it as well.
oh, yeah, i feel that, between survival hunter and Arms warrior. SV presses survival of the fittest every 3 mins, Turtle every 3 mins and exhilaration every 1.5 mins. if anything ele hits you? buh-bye. Arms warrior: Defensive stance, Ignore Pain every 12secs, Parry every 1.5 mins, impending victory, same heal as exhilarion, every 25 seconds.
the other thing to remember btw is that on fights like sludge, and that tier, that dmg is also based around having spirit shells on people so they are taking even more than you actually see and then slowly healed back up before the next thing, just adds more to the value of dmg and requirements changing versus now its just mass spam chaos and go oom or kill the boss
18:31 Blizzard seems to go back and forth when it comes to how they add difficulty. My least favorite swings are: 1. Bad visuals. 2. Stupidly overtuned numbers (likely just to require gear progression before it's downed, increasing player retention.) Aside from covenants being locked, DF makes me miss Shadowlands. It's crazy...
I was with you in the first half, but comparing HPS to DPS is meaningless - boss HP and player HP aren't related at all so there's no reason for them to be correlated other than convention/coincidence. Comparing HPS to HP pools though (nzoth example) is legit though
played 24 earlier today as shadow priest (disc main) and the boss smacked 50% of my hp while having fade up if not mistaken and 10% versa, and it's not even tyrannical... sometimes fortified bosses as strong as the ones in tyrannical besides having less hp
Hpal has been insane fun regardless of how OP it is/was because you have so many impactful buttons up all the time. Going back to resto druid to do weekly keys felt awful in comparison :(
How I feel as mistweaver. I have tools (abilities), but very few of the tools I have available are actually good tools. As healers, we should feel effective with many tools at our disposal, not floundering around because we don't have one of our two only meaningful abilities up and the group just took big damage. There's also a big problem with some classes being way better at dealing with damage in general. If you can heal the damage as it's coming in, or shield/apply resistances before, that's a huge advantage vs classes that have to wait for their party to take damage before their abilities have good value (e.g., Sheilun's Gift, revival). I don't care about meta, I'm just looking to have fun, but things just aren't fun right now. My whole experience and enjoyment in a dungeon feels like it's 100% up to the rest of the group and I have very little control.
even at higher rio scores (2900-3100) people are just clowning around and dont even adjust their build to affixes or completely ignore them. then the healer has to deal with that alone + all the avoidable dmg taken (without using any personals). i just overhealed this with pally but going on priest/sham/druid feels like torture (in keys that were free with exodia comp). was really close to quitting last night
I agree 100% healing is super scuffed right now, Question for you @Theun, What happens to Preservation in raid if then flatten the spikey damage? Pres just becomes the Overhealing master?
Even though I am not a healer currently (haven't really healed since MoP), I did try to swap back into it, and honestly I was kinda overwhelmed with the amount of CD's you have now, and I agree with the point of like people just dying from 70% feels horrible. I really miss the days where you had a big hit, but then you had some time before you had to brace for another impact, and not just oh damage comes in, well which of my 5 burst Healing CD's do I want to use to nullify the dmg on the raid.
If I recall correctly, they were saying this was the same exact problem they were having near the end of MoP. Everybody gets burst for like 75% of their health, and all the healers have to rush to get everyone topped off again. I don't recall what their fix for that was
another disadvantage of the current healing/damage paradigm is that healing playstyles which should be suited to dealing with rot damage and spot healing just aren't that attractive at the moment. i can only speak to my MW, and its healing output is completely centered around 1m CD Yu'lon windows which can top up the whole raid. but it still ends up doing an insane amount of overhealing. there's a bunch of fun talents which (on paper) are better suited in tackling sustained rot damage - like chi-ji, ancient teachings, faeline stomp or TFT talents etc - but f**king Kazzara is the only fight where you can actually leverage that :/
Former MW here, and I concur. Yu'lon build killed my interest in raiding, and M+ is just too reliant on dps using defensives and off healing. I got to points in SL where I was raidlogging, I'm not even doing that anymore.
They said they made the damage spiky to pose a threat to the current levels of healing. So before that it took a long time to top players and healing was all about keeping up with the incoming damage to not let anybody die. In df the levels of healing happened to be insanely high so you're easily ahead in this struggle to not people die. So bringing back healing as it used to be would require not only a change in damage profile but also nerfing healing.
Very interesting comparison, honestly even makes the solution evident. Nerf healer throughput (Offhealing as well this time please or healers become irrelevant), and nerf damage events by relatively the same amount.
Meta destroying the game. It’s so annoying if u don’t play meta class/spec even if u really can play your class no matter if u play meta spec/class u literally never get an invite for 20+ keys 🤦 also the mythic community is disgusting
great video, but i think looking at Sludgefist damage taken doesnt work when you have 2 discs with spiritshell. my guess is that they just mega shielded the mega hits. you dont see shield dmg as dmg taken in this log as far as is know
I think the thing that annoys me most about healing is sometimes I feel like there's nothing I can do to keep my group alive. For example my guild just killed Mythic Echo of Neltharion this past week and there are 2 points in that fight where it seemed like if specific players with lower hp totals got the Heart debuff they could just die when the add damage tick + heart debuff + shatter dot + annihilation cast all go off within 2 seconds of each other. I would heal them to full and then 2 seconds later they are dead and complaining that we just need to heal them more. It got very frustrating and I thought the whole point of the hp increases was to avoid this type of damage from happening.
3rd boss in Halls of Infusion is a great example of a good healing fight - people always feel at risk and I have to manage my CDs but I feel able to keep people alive - not just instantly top people.
This explains it so well, I really hope Blizz sees this. In M+ this is actually the only reason the top tier players cant push keys beyond a certain point. Some mechanics just keep scaling to a point where they 1 shot through all sorts of defensives. The last time I had done M+ was back in BFA, yes there were significant dmg moments but you could play around it and only fail timers just because at a certain point you can no longer reach the dps checks.
An exponential scaling system will do that though. Where do people think the "cut off" should be? Or should we all just waltz about running +33's. (That said healing sucks atm)
ty for the vid. great breakdown. as m+ only player i couldnt understand why blizz thought healers were too strong after S1. because even in S1 as an rdru i could still get one or two shot with bark up from like 85+% HP. even S4 SL, as hpri, yeah they had insane healing power, but i used every drop of it sometimes to save a teammate or a run. sure i didnt always need it but when it was oh shit time having that in the back pocket felt good. real good. but the real reason i was there was for fairies (support spell) and PI (crazy good support spell) but thanks to the logs you showed i get it. and that actually seems totally in line with how blizz has managed every change since 10.1 started. they only look at raid logs and they dont play m+. even after watching the video, i still dont understand how increasing player HP and incoming damage by the same percentage makes anything less spikey. if the incoming damage does 75% of the player's health it doesnt matter what the true number is. but if the heals go from replacing 50% of the HP bar to 5%, i just dont see how anyone thought that would work in m+. blend that with dungeon design issues and big damage events overlapping with affixes or big movement or mob/boss abilities the healer doesnt have an answer for in their kit... why would anyone want to heal m+? not i said the fly
Just copy/past healing in wrath. Mana management and reactivity/prevention depending on spec was fine, no need for that healer must dps BS. "You just want to sit in the back and do nothing" No, I want to play a game of keeping people alive and not worry about doing three things at once not even talking about dispelling.
I just don't get it why so many of the 'healers have to be able to dps because there's nothing to do' advocates don't understand they need to advocate for more fun healing and not homogenization
I hesitate using the words "op" for healers. Mainly because blizzard is bad at tuning and is more likely to just nerf healing instead of fixing the real issue. Which is the spikey damage profiles. They can then focus on tuning healers once thats fixed. If they nerfed healers without fixing the damage first it would be really bad.
Which is exactly what's going to happen based on previous "fixes" and the current player sentiment about healers being "op". And healers will quit, and the toxic community will all jump on the forums and comments saying, "well those players are just trash and that's why they left, good riddance"
That Hazzikosta dude is a mythic raider, too isn't he? I don't understand that such things even happen or not getting changed, I mean he plays the game, too. Does he really say to himself after a raid evening: "yeh that was fun and cool, we did a great job design wise, there is nothing wrong with healer balance right now, everything is perfect". I really think that sh*t gets designe how HE wants to see and play the game and not what would be best for the playerbase.
This whole healing thing is 100% a huge oversight. They probably can't change it for so long because it would take to much development time as always. You can see that simple solutions they came up with didn't work.
The main thing that really resonated with me is that "Currently the goal of success is to keep players at 100% hp whereas previously the goal was to keep players alive". A clutch life saving heal feels so much better than a "so you don't die" 50% overheal
I've been saying this since thr start of the %health and damage changes. why not buff olayer health and nerf healing while keeping enemy damage the same? sure you have less risk of dying, but with self heals being low, healers would need to actually press healing buttons. then you could design raid fights with less spiky damage and more constant rot.
Just to counter a point. At 18:12 you keep focusing on the hunter, but if you look at the paladin beside him (Noripalxo), who isn't in barrier, who is close to max hp (maybe 80-90%), he almost dies from the same mechanic. If he had the health of the hunter he would have probably died.
shouldnt resto shaman mastery be really good for those spiky dmg patterns since they heal the most when the raid is low? How come shamans are so bad then?
go into a high mythic key; even a 17-19 tbh and see how fast and how much damage comes in. You still have cast time and riptide is extremely under-tuned compared to shadowlands. It's exactly the reasons this man says.
It's useless 'cause it's either you're at full hp or you die. You can't really utilize your mastery that much when you have to top everyone when they drop to like 90% of their health. If they're low health they're as good as dead. So most of the time you're forced to heal pretty healthy targets.
People make these claims how healing was so overpowered, and the hp/dmg adjustments made sense....... and then we had to sit through piles of dungeon/raid difficulty adjustments. And in season 2, the exact same situation happened all over again. Healing is just stressful, because all stupid damage profiles, and then after the healing nerfs via said adjustments, it made it so only a few healing classes could compete. I don't get why anyone thinks the tunings for healing made sense, when the aftermath of nerfs to dungeons/raids still occurred.
i would like to see reduction of concurent healing CD that are aviable to healers at one time - group those CDs to a choice node (like flouris + convoke , tree of life once per 3min + tree of life from swiftmend) reducing the cooldown buttons at one time from 3 to 2
This same problem is evident in Mythic + keys as well. There are some mechanics that when on boss week will just wipe you off the map even at full health.
i know they're on another level, but the +30 NL tyrannical done by echo proves that you CAN survive, so i guess it's just a question of how good the group is.
@@QuagmireFeetSniffa who cares who said what first; as long as it gets out there so everyone can be aware. You sound like a 10 year old child at the playground. Grow up
Raided as Hpally since MoP but once shadowlands came around w/ the OP venthyr covenant ability & I started getting flamed for not doing enuff dps as a healer - it was at that moment that I quit healing
You are correct the issue is player health is to low when compared to healers ability to top off, which drives dmg to be spikey. Thats why blizzard should have bit the bullet and made the 75% health and monster dmg change. (Now 50% after the 25% change a while back) This isnt the first time this was an issue either, in wrath this was a massive problem especially for tank healing because of avoidance. However ur comparing sludgefist and rashiok like they are similar fights and they are not. Rashiok is a tank buster fight with a massive aoe raid dmg phase so of course it will look spikey. Sludgefist is a hard hitting tank cleave boss that has one moderate dmg spike ability and a ramping raid dmg over the course of the fight. A large portion of sludge fists dmg initially is punching the tank which he stops doing for like 10sec before his charge and after during his stun so the dmg is going to naturally avg out over time to a choppy ramp. But it never stops like with rashiok who has 45 sec dmg spikes. Also the healer to dps dmg comparison means nothing, dps could be doing a million dps and healers healing for tens of hps as long as the boss health is scaled to that dmg and the player health and boss dmg is scaled to that hps.
I've mained a healer since TBC but I no longer heal in DF. I got to about 1900 on my resto sham this season and stopped enjoying it. Swapped to an augvoker (I mained presvoker in S1) and got KSM in about a week. I've always loved healing, but I don't enjoy it as all this season. I think you described why perfectly. I feel like I'm not healing people to keep them alive insofar as I'm trying to beat other healers to the heals.
Thank you very much for your video. It explains to me what I was feeling yesterday, when I tried out raid healing after a long time. It fehlt so bad - in comparision to my expierience in xpansions before - that i quit very fast.. I couldnt explain why, I really like healing, but you put into words perfectly what it was.
I pug all my keys doing up to 26s at the moment so i know the game is going to get increasingly harder for me more than it would for a healer in a consistent and reliable group. I havent done keys in about 2-3 weeks because of how spiky things have gotten. Its bringing me back to tyranical third boss of nok where you just get randomly one shot from gale arrows at full hp if you were a class with long or few defensives. If I do brackenhide on fort week I try my best to use tail sweep, tail buffet, kick, deep breathe stun and still will have a cast go off and kill someone in the blink of an eye. I really hope they lower the spiky hits and lower the power of healers so the game isnt just a bunch of one shots every boss that you have to race against.
This was an excellent video analysis of why healing is not fun anymore. I havent healed a key in a few weeks, and I couldnt put my finger on why I just didnt want to play anymore. Healing is just in a bad place, fun wise. Healing is already a bit stressful, and theyve managed to tip the scales in the direction of more stressful than fun. What I would love to see is a discussion on how they can fix it. Because I think they have heard us, but it seems that Blizzard may be stuck in finding a good solution. I think healers need a direct nerf along with mob damage, because I feel like just adding health wont do much. Also, we have bloated healthbars now. Bloating them more would cause further issues with DPS self healing, which I think is in an ok place. One thing you didnt even mention was affixes. Seems as we get more geared, more DPS and tank players think that the healer will just deal with the affixes. I dont even want to heal M+ on incorporeal weeks and I only enjoy healing on afflicted weeks with my Aug buddy who will help with cleanses. Sad state for healers right now, and anyone who disagrees hasnt looked at group finder lately.
Blizz sadly don't make adjustments... instead of pure nerv they should rebalance the dmg pattern (especially spike dmg, so you don't need to top up each grp member within 2 -3 sec or else wipe...) combined with healer class reworks and healing nerv of all classes (not only healer, also dd and especially tank cds+ heal). Also some healer need an urgent rework since their abilities are outdated or not content proove.
I'm alright if the spike has time to recover, but the spikiness is more like "keep everyone topped off for the 90% health damage incoming, then full heal them again for the next 90% health damage incoming in the next 6 seconds" M Raskok right now is insane in P3. Everyone takes like 500k out of their 600k hp WHILE everyone has a 140k/s DoT. How do you heal that? Most people's defensives are down from the previous intermission.
Yeah, the problem with spiky damage now is that almost every damage taken is like that. It's no more this thing that happens once or twice a fight and should be prepared for somehow. You simply expect every hit to be like that now.
Like for example This week affixes specially Afflicted, and I am doing a 22 key, how the Hell am I supposed to deal with the affix (use Cleanse) and top everyone and at the same do good dmg as a Holy Paladin. it feels like there is soooo much to do and sooo little time to react and do all that stuff.... its actually not fun and stressful to just think about it. Yesterday I was being Flamed that I wasnt healing the tank enough.... well I said blame blizzard for just shitting on Holy paladins... again and again... was super hyped and fun playing my paly after the rework now its just not as fun after being shat on...
I was about to propose the solution of adding more ticking damage but that'll mean HOT (evoker/Druid) would be pretty OP. I think the problem of healing goes all the way back to the fundimentals and we need to ask ourselves "What is the role of healers?". Are we a class that's made necessary because Mobs and Bosses does damage? or are we there to fix and mitigate the mistakes of other players? Are we are support class that makes the dungeon goes faster and smoother? If blizzard's intention for healer is a necessary evil... then these spikes makes sense because without spike damage the raid could just go 2/0/20 and it'll go a lot faster because more DPS and you can even have classes that spot heal to boot. Healer's in this role would just need to make sure ppl don't die and contribute as much dps as possible just like S2 in Shadowlands. Alternatively if healer is just there to cover other ppl's mistakes... you'll have as few healers as possible to account for human error and have these healers able to top up people from 1 to 100 really quickly when people fail mechanics. And if we are a support class... bring lots of priest with PI, maybe have an evoker for rescue and whatever utility that's needed for each boss. Because right now it seems like blizzard's philosophy on healer changes from Season to Season and because each class of healers excel at different things, it shapes the meta...and we don't even know if it's intentional or not. This reminds of an incident where I was pugging as a frost mage in a 11 Underrot. Group comp was Blood DK/Frost Mage/Arcane Mage/Ret Pally/MW Monk. The Monk DC after first boss and I thought there's no way we could do the rest of the dungeon without a healer... but we ended up +2 the dungeon where the Blood DK healed himself up, the Ret pally did spot healing and the mages does dps. We were mostly outgeared for that dungeon but It's strange that we could have completed the dungeon with no healer.. nvm at a +2.
Pretty torn on this. On one hand ive only been playing pres which is perfect for spiky damage and feels like i have many creative ways to get through events and keeps it fun. On the other hand it seems very much like rock paper scissors for anything else. Oh cloudburst + 2 chains dont solve event? Next time ill try CB + AG. Youre not using healer CDs to amp healing over that window, you solely use them to top faster and counter a specifc damage intake. What good is a healer CD that does 6 mil extra healing over 20s when youre solely using just to do 1 mil in 3 seconds and sit a large portion of your CD. No wonder healers are so confused and feel both strong and weak. You can push health bars faster then ever. But you have to commit a CD to a mob that fucking casts a basic chain lightning or aoe spew. Hopefully in the future they can start to think more about inc damage profiles. Healing profiles are kind of dead atm and the more creative they can get with that the more we can see healer diversity or even specialization. There should be fights with 45 second spikes. Fights with continuous rot. Fights with 20s dickdowns every 2 mins. Fights where its just random ST blasts for 70%. I think a lot of people will start to see a healer spec for its strengths and weaknesses rather than just picking the highest throughput. beyond just the upper echelon of players and i think that in itself is very healthy direction for the game. You should want to bring an hpal bc theyre good at topping someone ST with holy shock or a light cast but maybe have to commit CDs or rely on an evoker for AOE events. You should want to bring a pres to cover any spiky aoes while knowing it will only really work in a stack fight and that someone will probably need to do us tanks. You should want a disc priest bc mitigation has more value than raw healing for that fight. Etc. You shouldn't want any of these healers bc they have the most throughput or a raid buff. As a long time healer thats whats boring about it to me. It feels like im playing against the enemies and not as any specific healer. It trains me to see an ability and resopnd with a standardized reaction. Instead of using them to cover my classes weaknesses. Most times you hit your cds its bc here comes an ability, someone will die without it. When it SHOULD be, this damage event is something my class is weak at. I will need CDs to make up for the gap in my classes ability to handle X event.
Great video! I returned to WoW in 10.1 for the first time since BFA and have been healing M+ on Disc. Healing there and the new megadungeon have been super rewarding and fun - however, as soon as I tried healing the raid (only done heroic), I absolutely hated it. The bosses / damage profiles of the older bosses look waaaay more interesting. You basically feel like you’re contributing nothing 85% of the time
I dont think u had in mind that spirit shell disc was the meta in CN. The damage they take on sludgefist is not correctly displayed cause shields covering half their health. Other than that very nice video and i agree. Its so draining to heal atm, m+ especially. I fight for my life at all times it feels like.
Replied to someone else saying the same thing and it definitely lowered some of the spikes a bit, but even on our early farm logs without any disc priests in it looked very close to the graph I showed I probably should have at least talked about Spirit Shell though, yeah
I personally dont like being judged on my dps! Im a healer! I want to be able to instantly hit those buttons and not be mid cast hitting a target.. I dont mind throwing some dots and smites here and there.. but hearing everyone saying my dps should be above the tank is dumb
Is that sludgefist graph not smoothed out simply because BDG killed it with 2 pre-nerf spirit shell discs? Not paying WCL premium to go thru archived fights but that log looks like 30% of the raid damage is going into spirit shells. Maybe not the best example of good raid healing design.
It's barely any different even looking at logs with 0 disc priests in some of our splits, I only picked week 1 because it was a good showcase of what overhealing numbers could look like on a progression boss only 1 expansion ago (but you are correct, spirit shell did alleviate some of it)
What's funny from my perspective as a dps player is, my control over my own health is really high, we have a lot of good defensive talents, I have a TON of health, AND healing is really spiky, but yet if I'm not at 100% health when damage goes out, I'm panicking and smashing my hp pot. Is the answer really to just nerf healing output and damage taken proportionally?
i have healed since vanilla and i prefer following changes for healing to be enjoyable in all content: - nerf the healing from everyone(dps/tanks only the healing to others should be reduced) - remove burstdmg/spikydmg events that would kill someone in dungeons and raids when not topped in 5 to 10 seconds and add more light dmg - remove in dungeons healer punishing mechanics/spells, bring abilities that do light dmg but reduce the dmg done when not interrupted - make healing cooldowns heal lesser in raids they shouldnt be fire and forget and there are to many, playing a spreadsheet bot is not fun and being a cd bot is also not fun as a healer - remade healings cooldowns to be something like yulon from mistweaver or ascendance from resto shaman so you need to invest mana for it to be good, they shouldnt be fire and forget(not a fan of powerfull press 1 button thats it healing cooldowns - remove dmg reduce cooldowns like disc bubble from healers and give them to tanks - give us active mana regg back(doing dmg also gives mana back =feels rewarding even for those who hate doing dmg as a healer) - reduce our dmg done in raids and dungeons and in case for healers who deal dmg to heal reduce the dmg aspect of it and increase the healing % of it (for outer world content increase the dmg of healers in the open world like you did with healing cooldowns in group content + as soon as someone turns warmode on this buff disappears)
One of the main contributors as to why I quit after getting CE in Vault of the Incarnates, but tbh I don't necessarily agree with the notion that it wasn't a problem in Shadowlands at all. It wasn't nearly as bad as now for sure, but damage has been getting spikier with less of a focus on rot / ticking damage since The Eternal Palace in my honest opinion. Spending mana intelligently by using the right spells at the right time is no longer part of healing and it just blows Hope it gets addressed at some point so if I ever get that itch to play WoW again, or get convinced by people I used to play with to join their guild or whatever, that healing is actually fun
(heroic player pov) i enjoy to push my hps logs in raids and currently it's not fun because you can only push when the spikes happen. between the spikes, on heroic, theres nothing to do about m+: i'm convinced the devs have to cap enemy damage scaling at a certain point. this will prevent healers becoming obsolete-by-one-shot and make dps the only defining factor to time a key if the healer is up to the task.
They kept getting feedback in beta that talents were too expensive. Well guess what, now you get more talents and therefore more spells and effects and therefore more cool-downs and now it all becomes very elaborate and difficult to play and they have to nerf everyone so content stays hard and now we’re here. They got this feedback so much. They implemented it. It blew up the game. And it’s not just healers. DPS and tanks have the problems, too. They just manifest differently and in ways that are slightly less frustrating.
imagine shadowlands was better in anything :D i dont heal in raid, im just the stupid tank which takes the hits, so this was very informative showcase of spiky dmg in dragonflight. Now everyone can feel as a dk tank(, even you have no deathstrike to counter your hp going ping-pong).
I'm not sure how I feel about tanks being self-sufficient. It really just feels like you don't get hit at all and other time you're managing your big healing buttons in panic mode.
I've effectively stopped playing because of how it feels to heal in a way. I only M+ and I don't consider myself all that great - I'm roughly 2100 and only doing like a handful of 15 or 16 keys max, which I know some people don't consider very impressive. I feel like it's the best I can do, because anything more is just so insanely stressful to bring myself to group for. So many mobs and mechanics and simply just bring somebody from 100 to 20-40% Health, while also managing a ticking debuff and partywide tick damage, etc. Someone doesn't pop a cooldown and they just die sometimes. I lose focus in a fight for a second or mess something up and someone is just dead rather than facing danger. You often have to predict everything now and heal as damage comes out, which can feel really satisfying if you can execute well and know what to do, but it can feel so polarizing at times. If I'm not super tryhard for the entirety of the dungeon I just can't make it happen, which is really tiring to try and spam dungeons and climb. Overall when the game just becomes "M+ the game" and every M+ feels this way, it stops being very appealing at some point.
wow, i didnt realise sludgefist wasnt spiky at all! one spiky fight i remember from the past was council of blood in CN. spikes were less frequent than rashok, but 90% of them were carried singlehandedly by spirit shell. for the others you'd just stack remaining healing cds and press dmg buttons until last phase. needlessly to say it was one of the least enjoyable fights to heal, granted i progressed it with a rank 1500 guild. overall great video, speaks to my healer heart
Super solid video. I main a tank but just started pushing my healer to AOTC and 2k. I said the same when they announced this change. I knew that increasing the damage and health would have zero impact, literally called it.They need to reduce the damage and reduce the healing. Healing is not as fun as WOTLK and I doubt I'll push my healer any higher in mythics. (I haven't played since WOTLK so can't give any healing insight from previous expansions.
Well its interesting because spikey damage feels bad in higher keys because of difficulty, then you go to lower keys it feels just as bad or worse because people still dont understand defensive cooldown rotation or that blue goo hurts
While healing 20+ keys sucks on occasion - then it still sucks, maybe even more so, to heal sub-20 keys.. but for that very reason.
People know they'll die if they don't use a CD on a 20+ key, and they typically know just about when to use them. On sub-20s you're constantly making up for people's mistakes.
Actually, scrap what I just wrote.
On sub-20s you heal people's mistakes, or lack of CD knowledge.
On 20+ you heal the constant-near-one-shot damage.
I personally prefer the second one.
@Nightykk exactly and what I assume is most players are playing sub 20
So I'm also not super happy about how healing is in DF, something I think is also worth raising is how weak spot healing / triage is since the hp buffs. It feels like, to me, every healer atm vomits out aoe hps and has very low agency in terms of saving a single person with a scary debuff (think xymox debuffs or something), especially during high raid damage.
It's really hard for me to justify hitting a 45k flash heal when my Prayer of Healing does 20k but on 5 people. During something like say Rashok intermission it's incredibly difficult to justify hitting a flash heal. It's stupid that the top 3 spot healers in the game are non healer specs.
And I think this compounds the issue in raid/keys, where you can get oneshot from 70%, but my flash heal does less than 10% of your hp bar, so if I send it on you at 70% there's a good chance it wont even save you.
yeah, it's one of the reasons I think people enjoyed the hpal rework so much (despite it being quite overpowered) is Holy Shock finally felt like it did healing again. Would love for Shaman and Holy Priest to also be able to feel a bit more like that like they have in the past though
@@theunwow 100%. I used to play Hpal, but I've been off it since they decided it was a full on melee spec, cause basically since Uldir it's been some version of spam HoPo gen as efficiently as possible and hit LoD as much as you can, I miss the spec where target selection really mattered because your heals were fat, and you really felt like you made a meaningful difference in saving someone's life. I'm glad it's closer to it, and I think it's definitely the "best" at it alongside Rsham with some pwave shenanigans, but it still feels like a bit of a blind spot for healing in DF.
Playing Priest this xpac so far has felt like all my buttons have the same amount of immediate impact as Healing Rain or Efflo. :^) I remember seeing Asc Blasts hit during lords intermission and my entire raid's hp bar would jump up 20%, but they still wouldn't be topped. Similarly, my heal in SL hit for 15% of someone's hp bar and crit for 30%, as opposed to 4/8% now.
Anyway yeah, sore spot for a lot of healers atm. =/
Resto druid doesn't even spit out aoe healing. It does absolutely nothing for AoE. It's ST healing is decent but requires a longer setup than any other healer. You want at least 4 globals before you can start spamming regrowth on someone
@@theunwow I think it was you that mentioned it when you said it doesn't feel good to do a 30k Riptide into someone with 600k HP :)
@@theunwownow imagine that devs instead of nerfing good classes buff bad classes, now wouldnt that be good. Seems they insist on this stupid meta that just makes people quit lol. Im pretty sure shadowlands had more players then df
The healer community has been pointing out healer problems apparent in Dragonflight since launch. Only minor changes have been made. The developers don't care or aren't smart enough to know how to fix the problems. Also, I'm very tired of healer imbalance. I struggle to log in even once a week now because healing is all I've ever done. While your criticism lies more with raid healing, my frustration stems from mythic+ healing. I'm tired of the difficulty being placed upon the healer's shoulders and hardly anyone else's. I'm tired of every affix being a healer's problem to deal with. I'm tired of people screaming at me when they die to standing in bad. It's just. not. fun.
I fear they would listen to the community feedback as is and just rework every other healer to be on par with hpal instead of actully fixing the problem they created. I want to enjoy my class as it is, not to play an op class just because they f*cked up the balance
I have never ever had anyone screaming at me because they die. Maybe you just a bad healer.
It's ironic that they did these things to mitigate the need for spiky damage and then left that in as the primary challenge.
Healing being spinning plates against a constant war of attrition is far more interesting than the current spike damage meta.
Solid video, really showcased it well.
the spiky damage was implemented to counter overtuned healers that would never die even after dampening was added in pvp at least. and on the pve side to make healing more "exciting" but its failed and made the game bursty and all about cooldowns and the "go" meta
@@abcdgump616 , another thing that has effected PvP is how powerful CDs are in comparison to your damage without it. It feels really good in PvE to line it all up with bloodlust etc. but in PvP there are serious problems when things get too bursty. That's the first issue. You can solve it simply nerfing % damage of CDs across the board, and then give each spec a passive during that CD that they do that same % of additional damage against non player targets during its duration. You just balance for what feels good in PvP and then make the percentage the same amount and it changes nothing about PvE.
On top of this is the second Venruki was talking about where retail has far too many damage modifiers compared to something like Wrath, so your spells don't feel good to use most of the time because they don't do good damage, but sometimes everything can line up and your damage is significantly higher. If that happens when you are using CDs people just get randomly deleted; too many variables. It means there are lower lows and higher highs that have nothing to do with player skill. Because damage OUTSIDE of CDs is so low, this is also part of what contributes to not being able to pressure healers so they eventually go down. The fix for this is really easy on paper but means getting rid of all the lazy talents that are % chance to do something so is a huge ask. The game would run smoother as a bonus without having to do so many rolls for so many effects with each tick of a dot.
"the spiky damage was implemented to counter overtuned healers that would never die even after dampening was added in pvp at least."
Agree 100%. I'd go all the way back to the resource of mana as a cause though. Think of rage, energy, or focus. In PvE and PvP they function the same. You don't gain more energy to hold as you gear up, so outside of the effects of something like haste it is static. Mana is the opposite: the amount you have is impacted like gear and PvE and PvP need VERY different sizes of mana pools to function optimally. Even if you balance it perfectly gear screws it up, so something needs to change. Dampening is the band aid. I think most developers skip over the mana problem, and this is why they moved to so many builder/spender type classes once mana was no longer a resource that was managed.
Next, healers need enough survivability to stand up in bgs but in order to do that it means a DPS can't kill them in a 1v1. The core problem is that nothing accounts for the number of targets attacking the character and this is the variable that needs to be accounted for. With a clear cap on stacks or total amount of damage reduction, the more player targets attacking you the less damage you take from other players. This way you can balance them for the 1v1 and then adjust the buff to what is needed based on the size of the battle.
Doing it that way allows you to solve the first two problems I mentioned... without that healers would never die. There are lots of things that need to be adjusted, and I think putting such little work into PvP in general is limiting their options.
@@naejimba there's a problem here: blizzard does not have the skilled developers to do it. You've probably put more thought into it that their full development team combined
i dont think it feels good to do massive burst at all in pvp or pve. you run into the situation were if you flub your burst, your damage for a whole key or pull is crap. this is not fun, its frustrating. more classic style pacing with CDs being important but not the end all be all. also colossal smash style mechanics (Like shatter, shiv, or essence break) need to be trimmed to only a few specs and or just plain removed.@@naejimba
Your final point is important. When damage is spiky, there's no "Triage Puzzle" to solve. There's just two states: alive and dead, which means the way you can express your healing is severely limited. It's all going to be big major cooldowns, and almost nothing is going to be solved by the wide array of semi-passive healing spells (Riptide would be an example). What makes healing fun is the dynamic reorganization of who to heal by what spell. However, for this puzzle to be meaningful there has to be pieces to play with, and currently that's quite limited due to the damage spikes.
aint it the opposite? what's there to solve when you need to keep everyone topped all the time, with smaller heals consistently? that's pure aoe hps. Now there are situations where you have to make a quick decision to (to stick to shaman as example) just survive the spike with a spirit link, blast your pre-cast cloudburst into the group, use your proc'd chain heal for a massive heal, throw out some riptides, and already start pumping the most likely spike target, spread riptide, use primal wave and do a sizeable heal with a healing wave, or pop your big healing cd-s and hope for the best - your job is not to keep everyone 100% hp every single second of the run, in a pug deaths will also happen - to me it seems like the expectation is that healers should be able to easily outheal every mistake everyone else does which sounds rather dumb
Thoes dev's have some kinda complex that makes them have to constantly meddle and fiddle until they break something. When you give everyone self heals and then screw over all the healers it's no wonder it's now in a mess? 20 years of healing and my character feels useless. Spamming big heals and watching a healthbar move literally 1mm is disappointing.
It also doesn't help that recently if you've noticed it, blizzard seem to not give a shit about overlapping mechanics, last boss of vortex pinnacle is a prime example, ever had the nova spawn, him using chain lightning right after forcing you to jump? How the hell are you supposed to heal 3 heal checks in one. Or the hammer smith in neltharus. He starts slamming and you heal the massive damage but suddenly there's also swirlies that makes it perfectly awful to stand still to try and heal the heal check.
Chain lightning isnt a heal check its a do you have a personal defensive CD check. Problem is it can choose the same person 9 times consecutively and that will kill them 3 times in the fight.
Great video dude. All these specific comparisons make it so much easier to understand the difference. As someone who played BfA this really jogged my memory at how different it feels now compared to then, even on "similar damage pattern" fights
I don't main healer (I don't even play WoW anymore), but I tried to play one in Dragonflight, to try it out mostly, with the excuse of Arcanist being a new thing and what not... it was a miserable experience. Gone by are the days were a healer was just expected to heal damage and not waste mana; it nows is a constant panic-moment of top everyone ASAP or they did in the next mechanic within 2 seconds... I found it really annoying to be constantly playing "wack-a-mole" with HP bars and having to react instantly to any sort of damage...
...I'm getting old; but I do really miss simpler times; when tanks were about keeping aggro (not chaning defensive CDs) and healers were about managing mana or timing big heals (not instant-reacting to any kind of damage, every pull, all the time). There is not even (barely) any variety anymore in how you heal different pulls; all feel the same. I don't know if there is a single pull anymore where you only have to heal the tank (because that would be boring; I guess?) so ALL the pulls do damage to EVERYONE, seemingly at RANDOM, so you just gota REACT and heal that SPIKEY damage before the NEXT one comes and finishes the job... Bars going from 100 to 40 and back to 100 non stop, all the time, on everyone in the party... >_
Healers have always been expected to carry the majority of the responsibility for mistakes made by people not doing mechanics as well as many of the affixes. Blizzard is trying to force people to do mechanics but the result is just more stress on healers. As a resto druid running mostly pugs in the 15-20 range, I'm finding it exhausting. As long as maximum dps output is the biggest incentive, people will blow off mechanics. Mechanics failures that result in lower dps rather than only a loss of health would fix many of the issues that casual healers are experiencing.
Have afflicted target the dps and suddenly when it only effects them and their precious dps they'll start doing the mechanic.
I'm tired of health being only 100%, 80%, or 0%.
Remember when they nerfed healing by 25% while increasing all mob health and damage by 25%?
as someone who's been a healer main for 15 years
the game has never been less fun for me than it is right now.
Two times by now. I HOPE it's only the beginning as the issue still in place
I think another point for m+ specifically is that it feels like some healers just don't have kits for the damage anymore. There's so much movement during high damage events and so many spiky events that require you to instantly top your group many times per fight for a lot of m+ fights and some healer kits just don't feel like they work for that after the DF talent trees. Feels like we desperately need proper single target heals but also stuff that feels as powerful as an echo'd spirit bloom for m+ group healing (I know prev isn't the most meta healer atm, but unlike some other healers, it genuinely feels really good to heal on atm since you feel like you have agency, just like with hpal) and that feels like it would need a greater kit or talent tree rework for some of the healers which likely won't happen.
Great video though, I think you got the point across. Can't wait to see what they do with mana trinkets next tier, if we don't get 1 it looks like we might just be running Rashok the entire tier which would be a shame.
Agreed, made a disc priest alt and trying to get good healing in on the dwarfs in uldaman is a pain in the ass with all the movement
@@yngve9470
I cant ever play disc again without the 4 piece from this tier
I think a lot of it is the game seemingly moving toward everything-is-aoe. Our singletarget triage primarily feel absolute ass. Every mob, every boss (im more of a m+ enjoyer than raid) shits out aoe damage. I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg, but either the damage was trending toward aoe so blizz gave us tools for it, or we had tools for it going unused so blizz started tuning for it.
It's weird though, because we're "powerful" but we don't feel powerful, I'm a hpal main so the last few weeks have been fun. Idk if its a hot take, but I kind of miss when I would be prioritizing dps both in heroic raids and m+. A spike of damage comes out and I switch to healing CDs/Triage.
Personally I hate the trend toward CD-focussed gameplay, I know CDs have always existed, but over the last few years it feels like more and more dps/hps is tied to CDs and you feel garbo outside of them. I'm not sure if thats objectively true, but thats how I feel. When I'm playing a DPS alt you do like 30% the damage you would normally do on a pack when you don't have CDs. If the dungeon goes south as a healer so you "waste" CDs where you normally wouldn't and now you don't have them for XYZ boss/pack you're just fucked. that feels bad
yeah, said basically the same thing in reply to the other person but i think the health increases had a knock-on effect for spot healing spells and (up until the hpal rework) it's felt pretty bad for all of DF so far so I agree
I personally dislike the dps as a healer, a healer should prio healing, not trying to dps and sometimes react to the slacking / mechanics of the m+/raids.
The only classes that I like to heal with dps is the monk, the DC and the pal when crusading was a thing, cause you still do your primary job, healing through dps throughput.
Like let's take the fist weaving monk, even tho it's kind of hated by the community for no reason, it deals incredibly well with the AOE bullshit we have those days. It just lacks some kind of real burst healing, but at least it's fun to play and your dps serves your healing
@@Scape974 Except fist-weaving isn't really viable in raids any more, and we have the same difficulty dealing with spikes as other healers in M+. MW was my main throughout SL and DF. I've retired the charcter, Yu-lon build feels awful to play even if it can pump if you do everything right and don't get trolled by random mechanics during a ramp/yu'lon window, and M+ just feels awful in general.
I never thought I'd do anything but heal. I *loved* healing. Started in early-mid SL. After CE this tier, I rerolled off healer. It's f*cking miserable and I'm over it. Problem is that I don't really want to do anything else at a high level, so I'm just fighting not to quit the game at this point.
Really good video. I knew healing was bad in all PvE content rn, but understanding the problem makes me feel less crazy.
"I just want less spikey damage and to nerf healers to make it fun again"
*Cries in M+*
Yeah but the spiky damage is also the problem with mplus. Dmg events almost one shot the group everytime.
Good point keeping HP bars at 100% feels horrible.
i actually just unsubbed. healer main here. just cant take it anymore living as a pug healer in dragonflight is the worst gaming experience
Same but i had a few friends to play with but figured its not worth it anymore
I just switched to tank and have way more fun, i can play the whole game by myself and just keep me self alive 😂
Same
Just play dps
@@adriankovacs4133 not every one wants to play dps my dude
Well. I'm giving you a like and a subscribe before I even watch the video. The fact you link articles you reference puts you in a league of your own. Good stuff man! Its always irritating not being able to read the context of what's being talked about.
(Edit)
Also the content was good. Been a healer for a long time, and this reflects my thoughts really well.
I'm currently playing a mistweaver at almost 3,1k RIO and 7/9M.
In raid it feels bad, you got those major spikey events, you got your MRT assignments and chances are that your healing will just sniped by a regular ability by some other healer so everything goes into ovverhealing. Outside of those events nothing happens, there's little to none healing required between those events. I want to heal in between those moments.
In M+ pugging becomes more and more difficult as a solid coordination is required to overcome those spikey events. One could argue that you can always create a premate team, but that's a story for another time, given the current meta.
Im relatively new to healing and just in end of shadowlands started to read healing guides, but TBH there is nothing to heal in Aberrus :/
I've played resto druid since BC and this is the first expac I've just quit healing altogether too. I love healing but it's just beyond stressful and feels entirely pointless when the tank doesn't even need me, keeps himself alive, and I'm stuck just trying to to rotate CDs just enough to heal spike damage on the DPS and myself, all while juggling affixes which always seem to affect heals directly with dispels, moving, or indirectly when DPS fail an affix and you have to heal it + any normal damage from mobs and its just too much
I’m 2400 m+rating as healer and most of the time death is sone1 didn’t see the Mécanique because there’s 25 things going off at the same time we as healer almost never have the time to react that pretty annoying
I remember coming back to retail after playing classic through TBC and just being shocked at how powerful an individual healer is. There is no reason I need to be able to top an entire raid with a single channel of divine hymn. Later, I was shocked again at how weak I felt when I started running keys this season.
There are actually many ways Blizzard can fix this. One is to nerf the piss out of our healing cool downs, design healing mechanics less around individual AOE heal checks and more around healing sustained damage. This is likely more difficult to balance well, but sure it's doable.
If they don't want to change the way they design raid encounters then they could change our talent trees so we have a few meaningful choices that either massively buff our raid cool downs or massively buff our spot heals so we can build for what content we are playing more distinctly.
The last option is to give skills different effects based on the content, kind of like how atonement does more healing when applied to 5 or less players. This also feels like too much effort, but it has work for discipline priest.
If it were up to me we would get some combination of 1 and 2. Raid healing just feels way too easy right now and turns into a snipe fest during farm and more meaningful choice in the talent trees can't hurt either.
I get your point. I main healer , however after i done my 20s I've stopped completely. Can see you are speaking alot about the raid , the problem is with the M+. I raid you have multiple healers , in dungeons it's only you tring to fix other ppl's mistakes , deal with afixes spam heals with your nab drood class because cant remove bleeds etc. Overall too stressful no fun ..quit. I really hope season 3 will be better if not just gonna reroll sadly
The way DF started was good. This patch has made the game really not fun in a lot of aspects. ZC is basically dead content, healing is just awful, pvp pairing right now is just a mess, art team and music still carrying the game like the chads they are, mythic plus affixes are just awful when the streams cross at the worst time which falls back on healers. Honestly i feel healers are getting shafted so hard i dont blame those people unsubbing.
Awesome job breaking this down. Iv always thought about healing in comparison to our max hp and our dps so it was cool to see you do that as well. When they give us basically the power of 9 legendry's but call them talents our multiplicative power went into the astral realm. I did well over 100 hours of math on the classes going into this expansion. I'm the monk who set all the stupid parses in Ny'alotha. The talents were a larger artificial increase than any time before in wow's history besides late corruption abuse,(and even then you have to cherry pick singular logs). Many abilities are currently doing 5-25x there spell book value because of passives and active talents. There is too much power variance and it plays out in game in a very unhealthy way.
I quit this tier because my druid was perma doing 50%+ over healing despite putting up 95+ parses. Why is half of my work wasted but people can still die? Parsing is a big part of my enjoyment as a healer. But its frustrating that the game doesn't provide a challenge for throughput healers. I spend so much time on my WA's and theory crafting, and even practicing in LFR to perfect my craft. But it means nothing cause there is only so much healing to grab. The rest just gets pissed down the drain as over healing.
My over healing is so high because I waste so much healing on ramping before actual dmg. Hots just tick on full hp people for 15 secs because you got to pre cast 10-15 secs ahead of time. Then when dmg comes out all the healers gobble up all the healing as quick as they can because there legit isn't enough to go around. On 1st kills it should be
completely true. healing is so dogshit because you're both too weak and too strong to deal with raid damage
Thank you. I was trying to find out why am i not having fun with healing and this gave me the answer. It's really frustrating when someone presses their button 1 miliseconds earlier and everyone is topped before you get the chance to play the game. I'm having fun healing but i can't if there is nothing to heal. There is no in between either they get one shotted or they are well and healthy immediately. Even sarkareth p1 like in our first kill we basically 2 healed ( 2palas mainly healed and me(holy priest) and evoker were doing damage generally and pressing assigned cds only. Everyone is always healthy immediately after the damage event.
As a long time Resto shaman and mythic raider, I agree it feels terrible that my riptide heals what 5% of someone’s health bar now? All I do is spam it on CD because if tidalwave/set piece interaction… if I look at my healing breakdown in mythic fights I hardly use healing wave or healing surge, just spam chain heal, healing rain and riptide. Oh and for a treat I can unleash life how fun…
This is my first time ever healing. I play a holy priest, I have stopped even bothering with keys. Dps have 500-600k hp and my flash heals/heals just tickle them. If I just used serenity to heal someone, and you are about to take a hit, gl because you are probably dead.
I started maining healer in Shadowlands season 1, playing M+ for the most part. I don't know exactly what key level I was usually at but I remember it being a good bit above keystone master (I boosted a lot of my mates' twinks to keystone master). Back then, it actually felt like I could prevent my team mates' deaths by playing well and reacting accordingly. Sure, there were some crazy and frustrating damage events that would just wipe the group if someone fucked up, but for the most part I felt like I could compensate someone else's mistake by healing well. In Dragonflight however, if somebody messes up, they just die, in most cases.
And if they don't mess up.... you gotta heal them back to full instantly or they also die :-P
I dont know why people think healing isn’t fun. I’m enjoying it. My only issue is that it’s difficult to select and cast on the affix. And Resto Shaman in Mythic+ are my favorite class. Resto Druid in Raiding is fun. One shots are not fun but I think that’s a product of pushing keys rather than “healing isn’t fun”.
This also adds to the really engaging gameplay of "I didn't have 10% avoidance or my class doesn't have enough personals, so I get to die at some point where billy presses a 10% DR". I felt this especially on Broodkeeper, but also on Rashok where my little Astral Shift kept me super safe during every other dangerous moment. Then inbetween those moments I just pray that I'm topped before it goes off when the raid leader calls for small personals, because there's nothing left to press. I see this especially on Shaman and Priest, but Boomkin seems to struggle with it as well.
oh, yeah, i feel that, between survival hunter and Arms warrior.
SV presses survival of the fittest every 3 mins, Turtle every 3 mins and exhilaration every 1.5 mins. if anything ele hits you?
buh-bye.
Arms warrior: Defensive stance, Ignore Pain every 12secs, Parry every 1.5 mins, impending victory, same heal as exhilarion, every 25 seconds.
the other thing to remember btw is that on fights like sludge, and that tier, that dmg is also based around having spirit shells on people so they are taking even more than you actually see and then slowly healed back up before the next thing, just adds more to the value of dmg and requirements changing versus now its just mass spam chaos and go oom or kill the boss
18:31 Blizzard seems to go back and forth when it comes to how they add difficulty. My least favorite swings are:
1. Bad visuals.
2. Stupidly overtuned numbers (likely just to require gear progression before it's downed, increasing player retention.)
Aside from covenants being locked, DF makes me miss Shadowlands. It's crazy...
I was with you in the first half, but comparing HPS to DPS is meaningless - boss HP and player HP aren't related at all so there's no reason for them to be correlated other than convention/coincidence. Comparing HPS to HP pools though (nzoth example) is legit though
Shout out to first boss in freehold, double tapping sometimes a one person...
played 24 earlier today as shadow priest (disc main) and the boss smacked 50% of my hp while having fade up if not mistaken and 10% versa, and it's not even tyrannical... sometimes fortified bosses as strong as the ones in tyrannical besides having less hp
Hpal has been insane fun regardless of how OP it is/was because you have so many impactful buttons up all the time. Going back to resto druid to do weekly keys felt awful in comparison :(
It still is massively ahead of all the other healers in m+
@@S_H_A_R_N_I_Eresto druids suck ass right now
Is*
How I feel as mistweaver. I have tools (abilities), but very few of the tools I have available are actually good tools. As healers, we should feel effective with many tools at our disposal, not floundering around because we don't have one of our two only meaningful abilities up and the group just took big damage.
There's also a big problem with some classes being way better at dealing with damage in general. If you can heal the damage as it's coming in, or shield/apply resistances before, that's a huge advantage vs classes that have to wait for their party to take damage before their abilities have good value (e.g., Sheilun's Gift, revival).
I don't care about meta, I'm just looking to have fun, but things just aren't fun right now. My whole experience and enjoyment in a dungeon feels like it's 100% up to the rest of the group and I have very little control.
Resto Druid feels like it's not even worth playing
even at higher rio scores (2900-3100) people are just clowning around and dont even adjust their build to affixes or completely ignore them. then the healer has to deal with that alone + all the avoidable dmg taken (without using any personals). i just overhealed this with pally but going on priest/sham/druid feels like torture (in keys that were free with exodia comp). was really close to quitting last night
I agree 100% healing is super scuffed right now, Question for you @Theun, What happens to Preservation in raid if then flatten the spikey damage? Pres just becomes the Overhealing master?
Even though I am not a healer currently (haven't really healed since MoP), I did try to swap back into it, and honestly I was kinda overwhelmed with the amount of CD's you have now, and I agree with the point of like people just dying from 70% feels horrible. I really miss the days where you had a big hit, but then you had some time before you had to brace for another impact, and not just oh damage comes in, well which of my 5 burst Healing CD's do I want to use to nullify the dmg on the raid.
Can you make a video on the method raid tools / weak aura combo to announce personal cd at certain parts to a fight
If I recall correctly, they were saying this was the same exact problem they were having near the end of MoP. Everybody gets burst for like 75% of their health, and all the healers have to rush to get everyone topped off again. I don't recall what their fix for that was
another disadvantage of the current healing/damage paradigm is that healing playstyles which should be suited to dealing with rot damage and spot healing just aren't that attractive at the moment.
i can only speak to my MW, and its healing output is completely centered around 1m CD Yu'lon windows which can top up the whole raid. but it still ends up doing an insane amount of overhealing. there's a bunch of fun talents which (on paper) are better suited in tackling sustained rot damage - like chi-ji, ancient teachings, faeline stomp or TFT talents etc - but f**king Kazzara is the only fight where you can actually leverage that :/
Former MW here, and I concur. Yu'lon build killed my interest in raiding, and M+ is just too reliant on dps using defensives and off healing. I got to points in SL where I was raidlogging, I'm not even doing that anymore.
So the problem is more on the fights design than the healers power ? Less spiky more constant and it can solve the problem ?
They said they made the damage spiky to pose a threat to the current levels of healing. So before that it took a long time to top players and healing was all about keeping up with the incoming damage to not let anybody die. In df the levels of healing happened to be insanely high so you're easily ahead in this struggle to not people die. So bringing back healing as it used to be would require not only a change in damage profile but also nerfing healing.
Very interesting comparison, honestly even makes the solution evident. Nerf healer throughput (Offhealing as well this time please or healers become irrelevant), and nerf damage events by relatively the same amount.
"even resto shaman... don't hurt me please" 😆
Meta destroying the game. It’s so annoying if u don’t play meta class/spec even if u really can play your class no matter if u play meta spec/class u literally never get an invite for 20+ keys 🤦 also the mythic community is disgusting
great video, but i think looking at Sludgefist damage taken doesnt work when you have 2 discs with spiritshell. my guess is that they just mega shielded the mega hits. you dont see shield dmg as dmg taken in this log as far as is know
I think the thing that annoys me most about healing is sometimes I feel like there's nothing I can do to keep my group alive. For example my guild just killed Mythic Echo of Neltharion this past week and there are 2 points in that fight where it seemed like if specific players with lower hp totals got the Heart debuff they could just die when the add damage tick + heart debuff + shatter dot + annihilation cast all go off within 2 seconds of each other. I would heal them to full and then 2 seconds later they are dead and complaining that we just need to heal them more. It got very frustrating and I thought the whole point of the hp increases was to avoid this type of damage from happening.
3rd boss in Halls of Infusion is a great example of a good healing fight - people always feel at risk and I have to manage my CDs but I feel able to keep people alive - not just instantly top people.
Close to how it used to be but still can be betetr
Healing in SL was super fun. Dragonflight less so
This explains it so well, I really hope Blizz sees this. In M+ this is actually the only reason the top tier players cant push keys beyond a certain point. Some mechanics just keep scaling to a point where they 1 shot through all sorts of defensives.
The last time I had done M+ was back in BFA, yes there were significant dmg moments but you could play around it and only fail timers just because at a certain point you can no longer reach the dps checks.
An exponential scaling system will do that though. Where do people think the "cut off" should be? Or should we all just waltz about running +33's.
(That said healing sucks atm)
ty for the vid. great breakdown. as m+ only player i couldnt understand why blizz thought healers were too strong after S1. because even in S1 as an rdru i could still get one or two shot with bark up from like 85+% HP. even S4 SL, as hpri, yeah they had insane healing power, but i used every drop of it sometimes to save a teammate or a run. sure i didnt always need it but when it was oh shit time having that in the back pocket felt good. real good. but the real reason i was there was for fairies (support spell) and PI (crazy good support spell)
but thanks to the logs you showed i get it. and that actually seems totally in line with how blizz has managed every change since 10.1 started. they only look at raid logs and they dont play m+.
even after watching the video, i still dont understand how increasing player HP and incoming damage by the same percentage makes anything less spikey. if the incoming damage does 75% of the player's health it doesnt matter what the true number is. but if the heals go from replacing 50% of the HP bar to 5%, i just dont see how anyone thought that would work in m+.
blend that with dungeon design issues and big damage events overlapping with affixes or big movement or mob/boss abilities the healer doesnt have an answer for in their kit... why would anyone want to heal m+? not i said the fly
Resto sham here. They gave us an excellent build for HOTs, but HOTs are nearly useless these days. If I'm not spamming CH then people will die.
WUT? We literally do not have a good hot build, what are you on?
Just copy/past healing in wrath. Mana management and reactivity/prevention depending on spec was fine, no need for that healer must dps BS. "You just want to sit in the back and do nothing" No, I want to play a game of keeping people alive and not worry about doing three things at once not even talking about dispelling.
I just don't get it why so many of the 'healers have to be able to dps because there's nothing to do' advocates don't understand they need to advocate for more fun healing and not homogenization
I straight up quit as a rdruid main who was top 10 US for M+ in SL S4.
I don't plan on coming back to the game until there is an overhaul on healing.
I hesitate using the words "op" for healers. Mainly because blizzard is bad at tuning and is more likely to just nerf healing instead of fixing the real issue. Which is the spikey damage profiles. They can then focus on tuning healers once thats fixed. If they nerfed healers without fixing the damage first it would be really bad.
Which is exactly what's going to happen based on previous "fixes" and the current player sentiment about healers being "op". And healers will quit, and the toxic community will all jump on the forums and comments saying, "well those players are just trash and that's why they left, good riddance"
That Hazzikosta dude is a mythic raider, too isn't he? I don't understand that such things even happen or not getting changed, I mean he plays the game, too. Does he really say to himself after a raid evening: "yeh that was fun and cool, we did a great job design wise, there is nothing wrong with healer balance right now, everything is perfect". I really think that sh*t gets designe how HE wants to see and play the game and not what would be best for the playerbase.
This whole healing thing is 100% a huge oversight. They probably can't change it for so long because it would take to much development time as always. You can see that simple solutions they came up with didn't work.
The main thing that really resonated with me is that "Currently the goal of success is to keep players at 100% hp whereas previously the goal was to keep players alive". A clutch life saving heal feels so much better than a "so you don't die" 50% overheal
Funny where was this Video when Restro Sham was meta? ohr right.... Thanks anyway finally someone who shows the issue right.
I've been saying this since thr start of the %health and damage changes. why not buff olayer health and nerf healing while keeping enemy damage the same? sure you have less risk of dying, but with self heals being low, healers would need to actually press healing buttons. then you could design raid fights with less spiky damage and more constant rot.
Nerfs feel worse. They could just nerf the healing instead of the health/damage buffs.
Just to counter a point. At 18:12 you keep focusing on the hunter, but if you look at the paladin beside him (Noripalxo), who isn't in barrier, who is close to max hp (maybe 80-90%), he almost dies from the same mechanic. If he had the health of the hunter he would have probably died.
The point still holds. The damage wasn't as spiky and the healing wasn't so overtuned, which he showed.
shouldnt resto shaman mastery be really good for those spiky dmg patterns since they heal the most when the raid is low? How come shamans are so bad then?
go into a high mythic key; even a 17-19 tbh and see how fast and how much damage comes in. You still have cast time and riptide is extremely under-tuned compared to shadowlands. It's exactly the reasons this man says.
It's useless 'cause it's either you're at full hp or you die. You can't really utilize your mastery that much when you have to top everyone when they drop to like 90% of their health. If they're low health they're as good as dead. So most of the time you're forced to heal pretty healthy targets.
People make these claims how healing was so overpowered, and the hp/dmg adjustments made sense....... and then we had to sit through piles of dungeon/raid difficulty adjustments. And in season 2, the exact same situation happened all over again.
Healing is just stressful, because all stupid damage profiles, and then after the healing nerfs via said adjustments, it made it so only a few healing classes could compete.
I don't get why anyone thinks the tunings for healing made sense, when the aftermath of nerfs to dungeons/raids still occurred.
i would like to see reduction of concurent healing CD that are aviable to healers at one time - group those CDs to a choice node (like flouris + convoke , tree of life once per 3min + tree of life from swiftmend) reducing the cooldown buttons at one time from 3 to 2
This same problem is evident in Mythic + keys as well. There are some mechanics that when on boss week will just wipe you off the map even at full health.
i know they're on another level, but the +30 NL tyrannical done by echo proves that you CAN survive, so i guess it's just a question of how good the group is.
Damn good video. This is the most clear and concise take about the healer issues that I have heard
@@QuagmireFeetSniffa who cares who said what first; as long as it gets out there so everyone can be aware. You sound like a 10 year old child at the playground. Grow up
Raided as Hpally since MoP but once shadowlands came around w/ the OP venthyr covenant ability & I started getting flamed for not doing enuff dps as a healer - it was at that moment that I quit healing
Oh this is why Tranquility feels trash compared to back in BFA. That makes loads of sense.
meanwhile in PvP - healers are so broken, they added dampening so matches wouldn't go on forever... too bad they forgot there's PvP outside of arenas
You are correct the issue is player health is to low when compared to healers ability to top off, which drives dmg to be spikey.
Thats why blizzard should have bit the bullet and made the 75% health and monster dmg change. (Now 50% after the 25% change a while back)
This isnt the first time this was an issue either, in wrath this was a massive problem especially for tank healing because of avoidance.
However ur comparing sludgefist and rashiok like they are similar fights and they are not.
Rashiok is a tank buster fight with a massive aoe raid dmg phase so of course it will look spikey.
Sludgefist is a hard hitting tank cleave boss that has one moderate dmg spike ability and a ramping raid dmg over the course of the fight.
A large portion of sludge fists dmg initially is punching the tank which he stops doing for like 10sec before his charge and after during his stun so the dmg is going to naturally avg out over time to a choppy ramp. But it never stops like with rashiok who has 45 sec dmg spikes.
Also the healer to dps dmg comparison means nothing, dps could be doing a million dps and healers healing for tens of hps as long as the boss health is scaled to that dmg and the player health and boss dmg is scaled to that hps.
I've mained a healer since TBC but I no longer heal in DF. I got to about 1900 on my resto sham this season and stopped enjoying it. Swapped to an augvoker (I mained presvoker in S1) and got KSM in about a week.
I've always loved healing, but I don't enjoy it as all this season. I think you described why perfectly. I feel like I'm not healing people to keep them alive insofar as I'm trying to beat other healers to the heals.
Thank you very much for your video. It explains to me what I was feeling yesterday, when I tried out raid healing after a long time. It fehlt so bad - in comparision to my expierience in xpansions before - that i quit very fast.. I couldnt explain why, I really like healing, but you put into words perfectly what it was.
I pug all my keys doing up to 26s at the moment so i know the game is going to get increasingly harder for me more than it would for a healer in a consistent and reliable group.
I havent done keys in about 2-3 weeks because of how spiky things have gotten. Its bringing me back to tyranical third boss of nok where you just get randomly one shot from gale arrows at full hp if you were a class with long or few defensives. If I do brackenhide on fort week I try my best to use tail sweep, tail buffet, kick, deep breathe stun and still will have a cast go off and kill someone in the blink of an eye.
I really hope they lower the spiky hits and lower the power of healers so the game isnt just a bunch of one shots every boss that you have to race against.
This was an excellent video analysis of why healing is not fun anymore. I havent healed a key in a few weeks, and I couldnt put my finger on why I just didnt want to play anymore. Healing is just in a bad place, fun wise. Healing is already a bit stressful, and theyve managed to tip the scales in the direction of more stressful than fun. What I would love to see is a discussion on how they can fix it. Because I think they have heard us, but it seems that Blizzard may be stuck in finding a good solution. I think healers need a direct nerf along with mob damage, because I feel like just adding health wont do much. Also, we have bloated healthbars now. Bloating them more would cause further issues with DPS self healing, which I think is in an ok place. One thing you didnt even mention was affixes. Seems as we get more geared, more DPS and tank players think that the healer will just deal with the affixes. I dont even want to heal M+ on incorporeal weeks and I only enjoy healing on afflicted weeks with my Aug buddy who will help with cleanses. Sad state for healers right now, and anyone who disagrees hasnt looked at group finder lately.
Blizz sadly don't make adjustments... instead of pure nerv they should rebalance the dmg pattern (especially spike dmg, so you don't need to top up each grp member within 2 -3 sec or else wipe...) combined with healer class reworks and healing nerv of all classes (not only healer, also dd and especially tank cds+ heal). Also some healer need an urgent rework since their abilities are outdated or not content proove.
I'm alright if the spike has time to recover, but the spikiness is more like "keep everyone topped off for the 90% health damage incoming, then full heal them again for the next 90% health damage incoming in the next 6 seconds"
M Raskok right now is insane in P3. Everyone takes like 500k out of their 600k hp WHILE everyone has a 140k/s DoT. How do you heal that? Most people's defensives are down from the previous intermission.
Yeah, the problem with spiky damage now is that almost every damage taken is like that. It's no more this thing that happens once or twice a fight and should be prepared for somehow. You simply expect every hit to be like that now.
so would the solution be to actually nerf our hp/enemy damage and nerf healer throughput overall?
Still issues like these in s3?
Like for example This week affixes specially Afflicted, and I am doing a 22 key, how the Hell am I supposed to deal with the affix (use Cleanse) and top everyone and at the same do good dmg as a Holy Paladin. it feels like there is soooo much to do and sooo little time to react and do all that stuff.... its actually not fun and stressful to just think about it. Yesterday I was being Flamed that I wasnt healing the tank enough.... well I said blame blizzard for just shitting on Holy paladins... again and again...
was super hyped and fun playing my paly after the rework now its just not as fun after being shat on...
As a dps main, I usually try healing halfway thru a patch on alts and it has been extremely hard to get into with all the button bloat
I enjoyed your takes a lot! Hope to see more vids in future
I was about to propose the solution of adding more ticking damage but that'll mean HOT (evoker/Druid) would be pretty OP. I think the problem of healing goes all the way back to the fundimentals and we need to ask ourselves "What is the role of healers?". Are we a class that's made necessary because Mobs and Bosses does damage? or are we there to fix and mitigate the mistakes of other players? Are we are support class that makes the dungeon goes faster and smoother?
If blizzard's intention for healer is a necessary evil... then these spikes makes sense because without spike damage the raid could just go 2/0/20 and it'll go a lot faster because more DPS and you can even have classes that spot heal to boot. Healer's in this role would just need to make sure ppl don't die and contribute as much dps as possible just like S2 in Shadowlands. Alternatively if healer is just there to cover other ppl's mistakes... you'll have as few healers as possible to account for human error and have these healers able to top up people from 1 to 100 really quickly when people fail mechanics. And if we are a support class... bring lots of priest with PI, maybe have an evoker for rescue and whatever utility that's needed for each boss.
Because right now it seems like blizzard's philosophy on healer changes from Season to Season and because each class of healers excel at different things, it shapes the meta...and we don't even know if it's intentional or not.
This reminds of an incident where I was pugging as a frost mage in a 11 Underrot. Group comp was Blood DK/Frost Mage/Arcane Mage/Ret Pally/MW Monk. The Monk DC after first boss and I thought there's no way we could do the rest of the dungeon without a healer... but we ended up +2 the dungeon where the Blood DK healed himself up, the Ret pally did spot healing and the mages does dps. We were mostly outgeared for that dungeon but It's strange that we could have completed the dungeon with no healer.. nvm at a +2.
Pretty torn on this. On one hand ive only been playing pres which is perfect for spiky damage and feels like i have many creative ways to get through events and keeps it fun. On the other hand it seems very much like rock paper scissors for anything else. Oh cloudburst + 2 chains dont solve event? Next time ill try CB + AG. Youre not using healer CDs to amp healing over that window, you solely use them to top faster and counter a specifc damage intake. What good is a healer CD that does 6 mil extra healing over 20s when youre solely using just to do 1 mil in 3 seconds and sit a large portion of your CD. No wonder healers are so confused and feel both strong and weak. You can push health bars faster then ever. But you have to commit a CD to a mob that fucking casts a basic chain lightning or aoe spew.
Hopefully in the future they can start to think more about inc damage profiles. Healing profiles are kind of dead atm and the more creative they can get with that the more we can see healer diversity or even specialization. There should be fights with 45 second spikes. Fights with continuous rot. Fights with 20s dickdowns every 2 mins. Fights where its just random ST blasts for 70%. I think a lot of people will start to see a healer spec for its strengths and weaknesses rather than just picking the highest throughput. beyond just the upper echelon of players and i think that in itself is very healthy direction for the game.
You should want to bring an hpal bc theyre good at topping someone ST with holy shock or a light cast but maybe have to commit CDs or rely on an evoker for AOE events. You should want to bring a pres to cover any spiky aoes while knowing it will only really work in a stack fight and that someone will probably need to do us tanks. You should want a disc priest bc mitigation has more value than raw healing for that fight. Etc.
You shouldn't want any of these healers bc they have the most throughput or a raid buff. As a long time healer thats whats boring about it to me. It feels like im playing against the enemies and not as any specific healer. It trains me to see an ability and resopnd with a standardized reaction. Instead of using them to cover my classes weaknesses. Most times you hit your cds its bc here comes an ability, someone will die without it. When it SHOULD be, this damage event is something my class is weak at. I will need CDs to make up for the gap in my classes ability to handle X event.
Great video! I returned to WoW in 10.1 for the first time since BFA and have been healing M+ on Disc. Healing there and the new megadungeon have been super rewarding and fun - however, as soon as I tried healing the raid (only done heroic), I absolutely hated it. The bosses / damage profiles of the older bosses look waaaay more interesting. You basically feel like you’re contributing nothing 85% of the time
I dont think u had in mind that spirit shell disc was the meta in CN. The damage they take on sludgefist is not correctly displayed cause shields covering half their health. Other than that very nice video and i agree. Its so draining to heal atm, m+ especially. I fight for my life at all times it feels like.
Replied to someone else saying the same thing and it definitely lowered some of the spikes a bit, but even on our early farm logs without any disc priests in it looked very close to the graph I showed
I probably should have at least talked about Spirit Shell though, yeah
@@theunwow Yeah man no worries, splendid content :)
When blizz asks for healer feedback, please just link this!
I personally dont like being judged on my dps! Im a healer! I want to be able to instantly hit those buttons and not be mid cast hitting a target..
I dont mind throwing some dots and smites here and there.. but hearing everyone saying my dps should be above the tank is dumb
Is that sludgefist graph not smoothed out simply because BDG killed it with 2 pre-nerf spirit shell discs? Not paying WCL premium to go thru archived fights but that log looks like 30% of the raid damage is going into spirit shells. Maybe not the best example of good raid healing design.
It's barely any different even looking at logs with 0 disc priests in some of our splits, I only picked week 1 because it was a good showcase of what overhealing numbers could look like on a progression boss only 1 expansion ago (but you are correct, spirit shell did alleviate some of it)
What's funny from my perspective as a dps player is, my control over my own health is really high, we have a lot of good defensive talents, I have a TON of health, AND healing is really spiky, but yet if I'm not at 100% health when damage goes out, I'm panicking and smashing my hp pot.
Is the answer really to just nerf healing output and damage taken proportionally?
I believe it is. The spiky damage profile is what they came up with to threaten the healers as topping people right now is not an issue at all.
i have healed since vanilla and i prefer following changes for healing to be enjoyable in all content:
- nerf the healing from everyone(dps/tanks only the healing to others should be reduced)
- remove burstdmg/spikydmg events that would kill someone in dungeons and raids when not topped in 5 to 10 seconds and add more light dmg
- remove in dungeons healer punishing mechanics/spells, bring abilities that do light dmg but reduce the dmg done when not interrupted
- make healing cooldowns heal lesser in raids they shouldnt be fire and forget and there are to many, playing a spreadsheet bot is not fun and being a cd bot is also not fun as a healer
- remade healings cooldowns to be something like yulon from mistweaver or ascendance from resto shaman so you need to invest mana for it to be good, they shouldnt be fire and forget(not a fan of powerfull press 1 button thats it healing cooldowns
- remove dmg reduce cooldowns like disc bubble from healers and give them to tanks
- give us active mana regg back(doing dmg also gives mana back =feels rewarding even for those who hate doing dmg as a healer)
- reduce our dmg done in raids and dungeons and in case for healers who deal dmg to heal reduce the dmg aspect of it and increase the healing % of it (for outer world content increase the dmg of healers in the open world like you did with healing cooldowns in group content + as soon as someone turns warmode on this buff disappears)
One of the main contributors as to why I quit after getting CE in Vault of the Incarnates, but tbh I don't necessarily agree with the notion that it wasn't a problem in Shadowlands at all. It wasn't nearly as bad as now for sure, but damage has been getting spikier with less of a focus on rot / ticking damage since The Eternal Palace in my honest opinion. Spending mana intelligently by using the right spells at the right time is no longer part of healing and it just blows
Hope it gets addressed at some point so if I ever get that itch to play WoW again, or get convinced by people I used to play with to join their guild or whatever, that healing is actually fun
(heroic player pov)
i enjoy to push my hps logs in raids and currently it's not fun because you can only push when the spikes happen. between the spikes, on heroic, theres nothing to do
about m+:
i'm convinced the devs have to cap enemy damage scaling at a certain point. this will prevent healers becoming obsolete-by-one-shot and make dps the only defining factor to time a key if the healer is up to the task.
They kept getting feedback in beta that talents were too expensive. Well guess what, now you get more talents and therefore more spells and effects and therefore more cool-downs and now it all becomes very elaborate and difficult to play and they have to nerf everyone so content stays hard and now we’re here.
They got this feedback so much. They implemented it. It blew up the game.
And it’s not just healers. DPS and tanks have the problems, too. They just manifest differently and in ways that are slightly less frustrating.
imagine shadowlands was better in anything :D
i dont heal in raid, im just the stupid tank which takes the hits, so this was very informative showcase of spiky dmg in dragonflight. Now everyone can feel as a dk tank(, even you have no deathstrike to counter your hp going ping-pong).
I'm not sure how I feel about tanks being self-sufficient. It really just feels like you don't get hit at all and other time you're managing your big healing buttons in panic mode.
I've effectively stopped playing because of how it feels to heal in a way. I only M+ and I don't consider myself all that great - I'm roughly 2100 and only doing like a handful of 15 or 16 keys max, which I know some people don't consider very impressive. I feel like it's the best I can do, because anything more is just so insanely stressful to bring myself to group for. So many mobs and mechanics and simply just bring somebody from 100 to 20-40% Health, while also managing a ticking debuff and partywide tick damage, etc. Someone doesn't pop a cooldown and they just die sometimes. I lose focus in a fight for a second or mess something up and someone is just dead rather than facing danger. You often have to predict everything now and heal as damage comes out, which can feel really satisfying if you can execute well and know what to do, but it can feel so polarizing at times. If I'm not super tryhard for the entirety of the dungeon I just can't make it happen, which is really tiring to try and spam dungeons and climb. Overall when the game just becomes "M+ the game" and every M+ feels this way, it stops being very appealing at some point.
wow, i didnt realise sludgefist wasnt spiky at all!
one spiky fight i remember from the past was council of blood in CN. spikes were less frequent than rashok, but 90% of them were carried singlehandedly by spirit shell. for the others you'd just stack remaining healing cds and press dmg buttons until last phase. needlessly to say it was one of the least enjoyable fights to heal, granted i progressed it with a rank 1500 guild.
overall great video, speaks to my healer heart
Prenerf marrowgar needed 5 tanks and that damage was spiky to the max ( no pun intended d:)
Super solid video. I main a tank but just started pushing my healer to AOTC and 2k. I said the same when they announced this change. I knew that increasing the damage and health would have zero impact, literally called it.They need to reduce the damage and reduce the healing. Healing is not as fun as WOTLK and I doubt I'll push my healer any higher in mythics. (I haven't played since WOTLK so can't give any healing insight from previous expansions.
How it was at Shadowlands/Sludgefist (see 16:12) is how HP management should be imo. So much more fun!
TRUEEEE