Healing Is Really Hard To Balance in World of Warcraft
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- Опубликовано: 4 окт 2024
- This healing thing is so hard to balance. From Classic to Dragonflight, World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV, healing can be a slippery slope to balance both the hardcore and casual player bases. And in this video I cross examine the issues and benefits of the different styles of healing!
ALSO I'm nominated for the MMOawards, if you wanna vote for me use this link! Enter my name as "Bowser the Healer"! The awards I am nominated for are the "Sprout" award and "Valkyrie" award!
mmoawards.com/
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I love it when healers are OP, thats when I have the most fun.
Thats fine, but the point made is that you then have to do dmg and some people dont get that. They want op healers but still do no dmg
I think the time ratio of healing to damage is pretty good right now, my main issue is just that a healer can spam damage and do less than 1/4th of a tank. It makes me feel like I'm just wasting mana, so I might as well cast nothing... It also makes it mandatory to pick up an off-spec for open world content.
what you say is 100% correct and is a great rebuttal to people say that healers only need to heal. feel like people that say they only need to heal really dont understand the game and the content that they are doing. m+ is for finding those windows to dps after all the healing is been done.
Coming from XIV back from Shadowbringers into Dragonflight and onward in WoW, I think you've hit the nail on the head. Good stuff. Be my guide in TWW
🙏
I stopped playing a few months ago but have just found a channel again. It's crazy how many subscribers you have now. Congratulations
Personally this is why i love the "Support " role. As a healer I would MUCH rather use a non healing spell to buff or debuff- not damage... Instead WoW went the other direction where a healer's downtime is spent doing NON healing things.
I would argue casting a heal, and then spending a few moments buffing a group member or 2 is more In line with the "spirit" of people who play healers for the "joy of healing" vs someone just playing a healer for a competitive sense.
Why so opposed to damage?
@@Borene999 don’t get me wrong I think if a theme is build around healer damangd such as disc has been in all for .
Imagine a warlock healing spec where they drain life for damage then spread it to the party .
My main point is the healer mentality in my opinion is to heal and buff the group …. So I don’t wanna moon fire while I’m doting - I’d much rather have a couple of abilities that buff stats or give a buff.
Sorry to seem ranty! Lol I hope I made some sense even if we disagree.
This! We play support roles to support, because it’s what we enjoy, if I’m not supporting, then what’s the point? Also, please don’t say “you can support the group by doing damage” 🙄🙄🙄🙄
@@Linknla amen - I don’t want to “assume” the mind of people who main healers but for me it’s always been a person who wants to support the group in meaningful ways with out just “swinging a sword”
Again I think there is room for a damage based healer but EVERY healer just filling dead space with a weak salable spell is BADA DESIGN. But the video is trying to argue that it’s a good thing because ff14 doesn’t do shit with healers except straight healing haha
@@Linknla I’d also like to add ( just popped in my head) healers doing damage seems to be a hold over design from when every class had some really good healing mechanics that made a healer actually have to heal less- remember that rogue leech poison a few expansion back was godly! And I feel like that’s when healers dealing damage became the thing
Hey Bowser!
i'm relatively new here, but i'm enjoying your content!
As a Tank main, would you consider doing a video about what tanks can do/learn to make a healers life better?
This would be a banger video, I'm so down!
@@Bowserthehealer awesome! I can't wait :o!
As someone with thousands of hours in most MMO's and currently plays FFXIV, you hit the nail on the head with the description of healers in FF. It's the only MMO I don't mainly choose healer. It just doesn't offer what most MMO's offers to healers. I kinda feels like a role made for people who are new to healing so the ones who love healing and wants to main it, really doesn't have a role to choose.
Luckily I prefer dps and raid fights in FFXIV so I have fun with that. But Mistweaver and M+ makes me miss WoW a lot sometimes.
Update:
I went back to WoW and having fun playing all healers.
grats on the nominations my friend, you know I voted for you in both!
and loved the video, one of the things I've found as someone who healed on Holy Paladin raiding during WoTLK (never again, you can't make me go back) was that not having things to do outside of spamming a few heal buttons stinks. Monk and Druid are the two healers I've enjoyed the most in DF because they both have interesting buttons and things to do outside of just pressing their healing cooldowns. being able to fistweave to heal while focusing on doing some damage is a fun way to get a bit of both worlds, and a balance I really enjoy. Cat weaving or Boom weaving while throwing out DoTs and heals as a Druid feels dynamic and fun once you get the hang of when to press what buttons. I feel like finding that balance is incredibly important to making healing feel fun and rewarding, which is really what the goal should be. if I run a key and don't have a "lot" to heal because my team is handling mechanics well or geared strongly and things are just dying fast, I'm not bothered that I don't have to press healing CDs, I just try to enjoy whatever damage I'm pulling off. and if your group is bad and you have this big moments where you are saving everyone in a perfect spot, or preventing a death, or using CC at just the right moment to down a boss or tough mob, those moments are super rewarding as well. finding a balance between those two types of moments is super important, and I think DF has mainly done a good job of it, so I'm hopeful that by the time TWW launches they don't revert back to patterns that are less rewarding and less dynamic. I do think the overall nerfs to self healing for DPS and nerfs to things like Leech will give healers more to do in the actual healing department, which might take away some of those fun damage moments, but as long as it's keeping you engaged in what you're doing I think that's still fine as well.
can't wait for TWW!
Blizzard should not change or alter healing because healing is only hard to balance in high level M+ keys (and only in those keys). That's because, with the scaling, certain packs hit so hard players become unhealable It's a losing game trying to keep everyone up (you will always be playing catch up). It makes more sense to use another DPS and try to burn them before they burn you. The real fix is for Blizz to not just blanket scale up all the damage in the dungeon. They need to stop being lazy, actually go in and tune the dungeon for those keys. Not just rely on an alogorithm to scale it up. Players don't want that AI dev, especially in a sub game with frequent ex pacs. We pay for live service.
From my experience with wow healing I would say holy priest feels like a really well designed healer from both a damage complexity perspective as well as a healing capability one. As healing I always feel like I have something for every situation whether that be intense group healing, slower rot damage or instant swap spot healing and a lot of that comes down to the current tier set and holy words. As for damage I feel like it has just the right amount of damage buttons to feel engaging to weave damage in-between heal checks with chastise holy fire and smite all interacting with each other. All of this comes down to how their CDs are also used cause you can use them for both healing and damage depending on the situation, apotheosis effects all your holy words so it is very versatile and divine word is such a good engaging decision tool because of the way it effects your holy words. At all times I feel like I can heal any situation just by swapping around the holy words I'm empowering and when there is nothing to heal I can offensively use apotheosis and divine chastise to be competitive in damage with tanks and some less skilled DPS in some cases and it just feels so damn good. It's also stuff like this that makes me miss boon of the ascended from SL cause it could feed more into that damage complexity (while still providing healing) and help that feeling of being able to properly contribute to the damage portion of what is needed while still providing that moment to moment decision making that just feels so engaging with holy priest. And I wish other healers were like this cause honestly it's hard to want to learn other healers because they don't really provide that kind of feeling from my experience. (And ya that ff14 stuff was spot on I do wish they would put in a bit more damage rotation complexity)
To me it comes down to simplicity. Healing is much more reactive and complicated than damage from the decision making you have to do. You either need to have a clear idea of the boss fight ahead of time and line up your cool downs acordingly. Or you have to react. Damage doesnt have to do that to the extent that healing does. Yet most dps kits are still more simple than most healing specs. I just want healing to be more simple. Less buttons, more straight forward.
I like being able to dps as a healer (makes solo content less of a slog too). I’d much prefer to be a dps that has other duties like dealing with certain mechanics, dispells and healing than just slowly trickle healing the party 100% of the time.
They tried forcing us to heal only for DF and then we start seeing other classes who can actually top someone from almost dead to full better than healers can (prot pally). This felt pretty bad imo.
Congrats on nomination! Voted! :)
I'm a simple man: I see a Bowser video, I press like!
The healer role isn't easy to balance when every class has so many defensives and dmg reduction sources, they know that yet will do nothing in the short term. I'd love a deep defensive pruning so survivability depends more on the healer and everyone can blame the healer again 💜
I have played since Vanilla. I was a DPS at the time and, frankly, terrible at it. I didn't understand the game or how to do my job, for that matter. My brother's brought me along simply because I was their brother and it was a way for us to hang out. When Lich King came along, I was playing with some new friends instead and decided to give healing a shot. My eldest brother healed but he wasn't a part of our group so I figured why not try it out. Healing was the most rewarding thing I'd ever done and I haven't gone back since. It gave me an identity and I loved it. I know the game has changed but I still long for those days where I had my role and did what I did. I've been a more frequent commenter on your channel as of late and, while I like your content (you are 3/4 of the reason I have any idea what I'm doing on my evoker, so thank you for that!!!) but I just don't think we're ever going to see eye-to-eye on this topic. Maybe there's just too much focus on healers and we're being pushed in this direction, or maybe it's what the vast majority of healers want. I won't really know whether it's possible to separate the two enough to find out which is which and whether a new style of play for healers would be accepted, but I would love to see them try. Healing should be about healing and shouldn't have damage built into them. Holy charges come from damage on my paladin, healing is generated by throwing beautiful graffiti on the ground and then hitting people in the face on my monk, and atonement being put on people on my discipline priest just forces me to do something I don't want to do if I want to be successful. The fact that DPS and and tanks have healing built into them so that they can survive when healers aren't healing them but healers are forced to DPS in order to heal just seems circuitous. If the DPS didn't have healing and the healers weren't forced to heal, doesn't that kind of solve the problem?
I hope you keep doing content because you have offered me different perspectives, sometimes on classes I've played a long time, but every time you mention healer damage or say "and this gives you time to do damage!!" I'm going to end up thinking this exact same thing as nobody (including you) have yet come up with an argument that satisfies my concerns or helps me to understand why it is that I'm wrong and somehow so far behind the times. DPS should do damage, tanks should tank, and healers should heal. Even if we all have little things that we have to take care of or we all have our own responsibilities in dungeons to keep things new and exciting, to me it all comes back to we should all have our role and stick to it or take on the other role once in a while if you want something different.
I think I get your point, but I also think you need to think a bit more about the hollistic viewof the system rather than what you feel. So for instance in the situation that DPS dp damage, Tanks tank and healers heal, you put the entire responsability of the groups success and sustain on the healer. Which as Bowser stated may be fine with players who have skill or friends willing to stick out with them while they learn, but that is not the situation for everyone, so putting that amount of expectations on a player can be a severe barrier to entry and a spike of dificulty that would turn people off the role very fast.
I agree that the concept of healing through damage used to be unique and now we have 3 of the healer specs doing it which I do believe is a bit overkill. But the real balancing issue I feel with healers in WoW isn't that healers do damage for like 40ish% of a key, it is the fact that since defensive utility has gone out of hand, player survival is more closely related to people using defensives appropiately rather than healer sustain.
At the end of the day, a healer's role is to keep the party alive, and healing through the damage is great, but also contributing so packs die faster means there is less damage to heal and less resources consumed which allows for a faster and easier time next pull and so on.
Sorry about the long reply btw.
Combat just needs to be slowed down, self sustain heavily nerfed for tanks, and one shot damage reeled in.
Hey Bowser, I really like your Vids and your attitude how you bring you messages! Really really good work all of your vids! Keep it up! :) Greetings from GER. :)
About the topic. I came back to S4 from a 3 Years WoW break as a Healer (Shaman and Evoker). I really enjoying to be challenge to keep my group alive and to do dmg. So first time I played a hard dungeon and I did over 100k dps overall I was really hyped. :) So im with you. You dont have to do dmg, but this is the space where you can grow as a healer. When you realize, you can keep the group alive and have time, you use it do to dmg.
This was a great video, +1 subscriber 😊
So as a tank I only get annoyed by healers doing damage on pulls where people die. We are punished for deaths (which I will admit I think is just silly below a certain key level but c'est la vie). In those cases I am not saying they are a bad healer 9/10 DPS are tunnel visioned on watching that DPS meter and less focused on not standing in stuff. Thats why I love addons (and I use one when I heal) that announce what killed people. If someone died because they were just standing in something thats not a bad healer ... thats a DPS with a PEBKAC error. Im a fairly laid back tank, I don't tank very high keys I think season 1 I did a 13? But I have fun. I am too old to care about being "the best" anymore and I probably have more hours in the tank or healer role than whoever else is doing the job just somewhere along the line I stopped getting upset when things go awry.
Id like to see healers in a place where if they focus solely on healing people live.
If a skilled healer can keep everyone alive and weave in some dps here and there cool.
If an elite healer can compete with DPS on the meters and still keep the party alive even better.
When I heal I don't really care about putting out massive damage, I will dot when I can, I will attack when I can. I am not a Fistweaver or a Disc Priest so doing damage just isn't what Im in the run for. I heal because I like to help friends. I tank because if I am not with friends I just want to get the key done without the ego of "The largest pulls known in Azeroth" so I opt to tank because I can somewhat set the pace.
This is proof that there are all types of players, in wow I don't even touch the healer with a stick, in ff14 I am a main healer XD. In wow, on the other hand, I'm only dps and I avoid what seems complicated to me, I want to play to chillout, I don't need the "satisfaction" of a rotation executed with 90-100% perfection :P
The question then is, what kind of people is the game for?
Personally, I think that healers as a function should disappear and be replaced by supports, that healing should be easy and that the expression of skill should be in the support aspect.
Healing is very weird, and theres lots of things that can influence it, like you said. Like you may spend a dungeon being a pseudo dps since people arent making mistakes and stunning/interupting properly, and you're also good so you're being very efficient with your spells and CDs. Or you may spend the dungeon absolutely just spamming cuz of things going wrong. Raids can always drop a healer once they get better at the fight or have more gear, but m+ doesnt offer that, and each healer needs to be balanced to be able to hold their own but not too high to the point where they can solo heal raids too. Personally I like dpsing during a dungeon but sometimes it's nice having to healbot an entire dungeon due to affix's or difficulty etc
I think that’s why I pug so much. I get the variety, the challenge, and sometimes a blissful easy key. Again that’s why I think the skill gap is a good thing as this range is only possible with it. And when I’m truly bored I go on another healer, and it’s fun all over again!
Hey Bowser, thanks for the vid (luv these discussion vids) and grats on your nomination. Great points about balancing, especially when it comes to pro grps vs entry lvl grps. A few things that still bother me.
1) Balance-Season 1 of DF, holy priest was so bad that I was often outhealed by our tanks. When another role performs your role better than you do, that just feels bad.
2) Mana, either mana is a thing or it isn't. It feels really bad to get to the last 20% of a fight with 5% mana struggling to make it work, meanwhile healer X is at 60% and is casting their spells almost indiscrimmintantly. Again, balance.
3) Correct me if I'm wrong- but... it seems like Tanks and DPS are given greater freedom to be uber- Tanks can be powerful (randomTankXsolosRaidbossYfor30%) and DPS are allowed to be powerful(mob X dies before I finish my cast), but when healers are powerful the content becomes trivial. While I'm not saying that it's not true, it just seems like it's ok for Tanks/DPS to be OP but if healers are it's an issue.
I started in classic, so my thinking could just be nostalgia. However, I really enjoyed being special in that, for the most part, I was the only one that could heal during combat. So even though I'm squishy and I can't kill things, I felt needed/wanted (I daresay appreciated) in group content, essential. I feel much superfluous now. Hoping there is a way to make healers more relevant without relying on a strong damage profile.
thanks for letting me be a keyboard warrior :P
your last point is 100% correct. Their are many in the community recognizing now that defensive and off healing bloat has become a considerable problem in balancing difficulty and making healers feel unnecessary.
But wouldn#t it be better if healers would support the group in their free time. Instead of pushing out own damage, they could cast spells to increase the damage of their DPS or increase defensive values of the tank. A healer shouldnt be forced to do damage in my opinion.
Honestly, make all healer damage similar to fire breath on preservation.
Thanks Bowser! The balance of healing and damage in wow is a lot of fun, one reason I love evoker. Just wish it was a bit slower. Thanks for bringing this up!
Really dont think increasing healer dmg will have much, if any positive effect on healer balance. All it does is going to make lower bracket healers flamed for not doing more dmg, while the dps are standing in shit. Nobody will listen when they say they "cant cause they have to heal". The fact that people do 4dps in keys is not because healers do to little dmg, its because healing is not needed much with perfect play- that can easily be fixed with balance.
I think healers should primarily heal, and if people are turned off from healing because they do- maybe the roll isnt for them.
I think you missed the point, if you make them so that you must always heal you will make the content far too hard. And you will lose players. That was the lesson learned from Season 2. Increasing the reward of getting a damage opening is a good thing, and I have never seen anyone flamed for no damage unless it was a +12 (23's in the past) where it does matter. Well into top 3% of players.
@@Bowserthehealer thats my point, they arent flamed because healers now make up for only 10% of overall dmg, it doesnt make a big difference for key success if they just focus on healing. If you increase healer dmg they will have more expectations of doing higher dmg (like "i played with a monk yesterday who did x amount, why dont you do that - you must suck). This can feel pretty shitty if youre blocked from doing dmg because you have to heal that guy. I think were we are now in terms of dmg is good we can contribute to dmg as you say, when playing well, but its not essential for key success until extremly high tiers.
I dont really see the problem with healers needing to heal (atleast nearly) all the time, dps has to dps all the time right?
@@Zerg777 The problem is most players are bad at WoW. Much worse than you can even imagine. Many healers in lower keys even middle keys spend most of their time trying to dodge mechanics, spamming the wrong spell, or panic healing a blood dk with full runic power. If a +5 key was balanced in a way that a skilled healer had to be healing 100% of the time. good use of cooldowns and tool kit synergy. the bad healers would instantly be the point of failure in the group.
Comparing this to a bad DPS. the Key just takes a little longer.
The second problem is how constant damage would be delivered. If it is constant aura ticking damage on every pack just so healers have to heal it feels like lazy un fun design. If every mob pack has casters that constant spam random targets it also feels bad because without perfect kicks and cc someone is getting two tapped.
TLDR healers needing to heal constantly is not an upgrade to the currently healing system it is a reversion to pervious iterations of wow healing that we changed because they have their own set of problems.
PREACH!
I mean you must balance the stupidity of the people, it's impossible to balance this. :D
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity
Been playing FF14 for years and healers only felt in a decent spot when they had alot of utilities that had extensive systems behind them (HW-SB AST) but outside of that the only time healing really hits well is when people are completely new only because you have a reason to use your skills, if you aren't in the highest level of content you can easily get through so much content only using like 2 oGCDs to heal anything. DT is still very early and of course its new so there is that "you heal more" attitude because of how new it is to most people but generally I do feel like their is way more unavoidable room/raid wide damage and hoping in the future they maybe consider adding a few more interesting damage buttons back to healers, even the extra dots that SCH and WHM used to have before SHB had something even with their different durations and the mp cost to upkeep made healing abit more spicy.
when u have free time as heal u have to make some dmg u r afk otherwise
when blizz that just we have to perma heal okay but that not what we have learn in the last 4 years
so what should a healer to be today?
big q in a a mmorpg that lost the holy trinity idea
Have you tried Mini Healer on steam?
Can you please talk more about the "barrier to entry". WoW currently has 4 difficulty of raid and 3 difficulty of dungeon with an infinite scaling system. Normal dungeon and LFR are so easy I'm not sure how much lower the barrier could be. I know having played this game for 15 years it is hard to think like a new player and I genuinely want to know how much of the barrier is actual difficulty and complexity and how much is new players afraid of being told they are noobs in text chat.
From personal experience (3.5k holy priest + 3.4k arcane) and teaching alotta players in the past few years alot of it ive noticed is the jump in difficulties is the "barrier", and the ability to rely on others (like in raid) or not know when you can be doing better. For example.. healing without any macros at all is an extremely slow process for new players. Most I've met didnt know about mouse over macros existing, or the concept of click casting etc and the simple introduction of mouseover macros almost DOUBLED their HPS in some cases. Lower difficulties like raiding and stuff HPS values required to pass those checks are often enough for a single good healer to pump through or dont push the use of a full healers kit. I think the barrier of entry bowser is talking about is specifically the huge jump when you get into M+ which is considered the "main game". Healing doesnt have a smooth learning experience especially paired with playing with other new DPS players who are eating all the mechanics. I've had +10 keys that were harder than some of my higher pushing for title keys. Often times aswell healers will just get away without using parts of their kit because they havent needed to or game hasnt pushed them to etc. I've also noticed alot of healers thinking their ilvl was the only reason they were pumping 80k hps and the other healer 20 ilvls above was pushing 250k hps. Alotta new players struggle to grasp the skill vs gear gap in healing and fallback to "oh you have more gear than me, I cant wait to be geared like you and pump big heals."
Another thing.. DPS players can compare themselves to other peoples DPS and have a natural number to understand when theyre doing good and when theyre not regardless of ilvl etc. Healers are always solo in dungeon content and have nothing but themselves to base off of, so I've run with many healers who thought they were above average or good but realistically it was their own ignorance in their own faults with nothing to compare to. I feel like theres tons of fundamental problems for newer healers that really fall back to macro requirements to streamline effectiveness or speed, aswell as bigger unitframes etc. I've coached healers that were using default party frames (the small hp bars with portait) they could barely see and far off from their screen.
It's also easy for other people like bad dps eating mechanics or improper defensive usage, or tanks mismanaging at lower levels not using defensives to blame on healer to keep them alive etc. I feel like the hardest part of healing is because theres so many external factors, its REALLY really hard for a new player to gauge their individual performance because of how many factors play into it. Which leads into healers slacking, and underperforming.. or lower difficulties of content not preparing them to need to use extra parts of their kits. I've met disc priests spamming flash heal and never using atonement healing because it got them through lower level keys. But as it got higher, they were being throttled hard. OFC they should just read a guide but, it goes back on the whole thing of, dps can tell when theyre doing something wrong cause their DPS is lower than the rest of the party. Healers cannot tell because theyre solo, and the only point they can tell theyre failing is when people are straight up fucking DYING, which then some healers turn to blame on their gear etc. It's hard to self gauge performance and coach without either playing other roles like DPS or tank and seeing other healers performance, or reading through logs and such (which most new players dont know exists.) HPS is also not a consistent value they can track. Like good healers might only be pumping 200k+ hps because thats the damage thats being taken, but their top-end highest possible HPS they can pump for example is like 800k. Only a percent of their HPS is being used and is filling the rest with DPS. But the newer player, they might actually cap out at like 150k etc. This can result in some effects like other players padding that gap with defensives and they get by okay but as they go higher the flaws begin to show more. The healer entire time doesnt know theyre a serious problem or making major mistakes until its actually resulting in entire keys bricking and wiping.
A bad dps player is just often at learning levels punished just by being lower on the dps meters and maybe dungeon going slightly slower etc. A bad healer learning is a terrible experience for the entire party and is a major turn off because alot of those times, healers dont know its their fault, or what theyre doing wrong and so on and point fingers at other things... I always recommend anyone wanting to heal, to learn the game as a DPS first, and healer second.
They need to nerf prevoker dmg.
I suppose doing damage as a healer was always a thing especially in pvp. my bitterness towards healers having to dps is probably rooted in them taking away disc priest bubble/absorption mastery & replacing it with doing damage to heal :,(
First of all, wow community is cruel and not kind. I will share my feedback anyway.
I started playing resto druid in 2005. Completed all hardcore content until Shadowlands with good parses and rio ratings. After shadowlands, i stopped playing healer.
The reasons is, its more stresful than fun. All the mechanica are on healers' shoulders and when you make a mistake, omg.. im mostly pugging so there is always someone who ruins your run.
I played healer because it was fun. Now i have to manage everything. Heal, interrupt, affixes, etc.. and people now trying to say that its healers responsibility to do all these things. Not sayin, healers should also help with these mechs. balance is gone.
I wrote a comment in a high sub page that good luck finding healers in the future and people literally emotional damaged me. Now here we are.
Im dps now. Not planning to go back to healing. No responsibilities at all.
Life is good as dps.