I liked the old style, too. The main choice I want to make as a healer is: "Can I get away with efficient and slow healing or do I need to resort to the fast but expensive version?" Choose wrong and either people die or you go oom. That was the game play I loved and would like to see more of.
i love to do burst healing but i love rot fights, where you lirerally burn your mana and try to time stuff efficiently to cover as much time as possible. its okay if you have to burst 80% but rotting 10% is nice. if you miss by a sec or 2 no one dies that easily but if you dont pick up pace you will lose because of missing throughput or mana. i loved the fight in sl with the 4 guys. as example. burst healing was useful to push them up but keeping it up so people dont drop to low and no one can catch up anymore. it should be a healthy mix. burst phases and more rot fights. and some bosses are super boring to heal. like 3 healer for 15m and you try doing max dps and healing happens by the way (hpal view)
Really resonate with the fact that everything just seems to do 80-90% of hp damage nowadays. I find myself topping people off COMPLETELY in fear of people getting one shot if they were at 90% at all times, and it's getting kinda ridiculous.
i agree. It also makes knowing the damage patterns of upcoming trash way too important. There are plenty of times that you could let your entire team sit at 50% hp while you dps, but because of how much damage stuff does, unless you 100% know they wont take damage, you HAVE to heal them. In the past instead of letting them sit at 50% hp you would use slow heals that cost less mana. Now thats not even a choice..... either you do damage or you heal. Before you either did, Slow efficient small healing. Fast not very efficient healing, or strong and slow inefficient heals. three different spells that did something similarly but you get rewarded for picking the right one.
I remember the days when a good healer healed non-stop and was integral and not just there to use a 2/3 min raid CD at the exactly right moment to look like they did something
Just like in pvp, back then if you didn't have a healer you were shit out of luck. No every class can heal almost just as good as some heal specs in arena......
Something else I don't think you mentioned (if I missed it, sorry!) is that it (burstiness) also creates an environment where you're encouraged to do massive overhealing and to a degree be inefficient with your mana to make sure people are topped off, where in the past you were instead rewarded for being efficient for managing it. It feels bad to look at logs and see a massive amount of waste in overhealing that you should have been able to do better, but you can't because you're playing with fire if you do. In the past, if someone died there was likely something you could have done differently as a healer to keep them up. Which is still the case, but now it's like a three way split between super heavy damage profiles, being able to see the future, and an actual way you could play better.
I’ve made the same comments to my raid lead. It feels like you have to keep everyone topped off the entire time nowadays because the amount of situations someone can take 60-70% in a global is ridiculous.
@@AutomaticJak In some ways it makes grievous a non-affix, because you have to play every dungeon every week the same way by keeping everyone topped off the entire time...
I think that these "skill checks" are actually a good thing to some degree, because they much improve the learning of dps players. Back in the day a lot of dps players would not even properly know of their fails, because they didn't see any direct consequences. But I see that you cannot have both an interesting healer role, and a lot of punishing skillchecks on players.
@@nilsp9426 If you want it to be a skillcheck for dps it has to be a 100% hit, because then its obvious you were in the wrong place. Or you have to punish dps output - they tried that with some bosses but as soon as you make it dispellable, its back to the healer to fix it.
My favourite fight for this was Imperator Margok in WoD. Extremely long fight where every healer would OOM if they didn't pace themselves. And yes, I fully agree.
Each expansion and each iteration of healing it seems like stress is increasing at the expense of fun. As time goes on it just feels like we are playing catch up more and more despite playing like grievous is a permanent affix.
I was thinking exactly the same, wondering what changed so much from the time when I played Legion. I thought as I became older that my reflexes are not as good as they were, but probably its just the fact that before it was mostly OK to let people heal slowly back to full, not needing to stress about keeping them at 100% all the time.
@@tomasrada8559 exactly. It feels like the slightest mistakes these days can send half the raid healthbars or more to the brink and it’s a constant game of catch up. Particularly during tougher progression fights. All the respect for those who have stuck with disc priests. Having to decide whether to abandon your ramp to spam or use a cooldown when you don’t want to because of an example like above or keep the ramp going hoping the raid will survive to the next mechanic all while maintaining a dps rotation, cooldowns and fight mechanics is just excessive levels of stress. I know some people thrive on that kind of stuff but for me it’s just too much stress and not fun. And it’s hard to pinpoint all the reasons for this phenomenon. If I look back at the last expac I truly had a ton of fun healing it would be legion.
Always good stuff from Jak. My gripe with keys is the "tick, tick, BOOM" dmg that happens WHILE having to move.. Or worse, NOT being able to precast due to interrupt effects. LET US HEAL! Don't make the BIGGEST dmg happen when we have to move and get silenced. I'm looking at you, Ruby Life Pools and Vexamus.
As a holy paladin I did not get to experience this "massive healer strength" people are talking about that has lead us to this insane burst damage profile. Right now the numbers have evened out a bit as we got some splash over from the Ret rework and evoker gets nerfs, but It requires using a build that bypasses our mastery almost completely and never uses infusion procs. The crazy burst aoe profile of M+ has been a nightmare for a lot of healers. If Beacon of Virtue isnt up, people are dead. Now I see all these no healer runs and I am just kind of baffled because just a few weeks ago hpal was working our asses off to do anything above a 20. I am sure other non druid/evoker healers had a similar experience at some point, and it feels like we are suffering the consequences of their success.
No healer has been nerfed as "consequence" of Druid and Evoker success in Dragonflight. Its the opposite. Healers are gradually buffed to match it. Yes those 2 specs overperformed but except for Preservation nerfs due to some oversights on the design front by Blizzard we don't really see them being touched much. At least Druid. Same with Prot Warrior on the tanking front. Its THE Tanking spec going into dragonflight but now others- especially prot pala are catching up. I think every expansion has outliers *cough cough* holy paladin for the last 2 expansions which you seem to disagree with quite a bit? The only "Suffering" I can imagine you'd be having right now is bad player mentality of "You're not in the top 5 of specs this patch so I don't want you in here" One thing to note is a Holy Paladin friend of mine does talk about how they seemed to have hit Holy Paladin with the "You're not allowed to deal damage anymore now" bat after those debacles in the last 2 expansions but I assume you were talking about healers in general which I think are sometimes flawed but still fun and comepetetive
@@Blythe985 To clarify, I did not say any healer was nerfed due to Druid/Evoker success, but rather that the strength of those specs has contributed to the design of damage patterns in this expansion, to the detriment of other healers who were not performing to that level. As for "not being in the top 5 specs", for healers that is dead last at the bottom. There are only 6 specs, 7 if you count priest twice, but again while that feels bad, numbers are not what I am getting at with my complaints (It would have been more of an issue a month ago). Holy paladins issues are far beyond numbers at this point and it suffers from a number of fundamental design issues regarding our mastery, holy power, melee vs ranged healing, no damage, bad talent tree design etc. etc., I could talk about it for hours at this point. The summary of it is that hpal has changed in design every expansion and was rooted in borrowed power and the addition and removal of systems, leaving it in a janky and unrefined place. I have a Resto Druid alt and it's a whole different world, never struggled once with less gear, and I've played Hpal for 3 expansions now. I don't have experience playing a priest or a monk, and I know that early Resto Shaman was rough as well, so I am just assuming that other healers have felt some kind of issues as well.
I totally agree with you, friend. The paladin tree is a hot mess - stupid dusk and dawn and worthless procs, multiplied by floor level throughput outside of wings and a mastery that was considered crap back when it was revealed in legion. I miss WoD HPala with short wings bursts :(
@@Alynis_ that's cool, u can feel how i've felt since end of legion. hpals in my guild seem to be doin good despite what you say. they do say its not that fun to play it, but healing-damage wise they're doing good (cleared mythic 13th week)
dude im 3.1k io as an hpal. our kit is fine. the perceived meta is just ridiculous. ellesmere timing 28s as hpal. the class is good. not rdruid good, but it's still good. you pre virtue whenever big dmg comes out. i have never had any issue healing as an hpal currently
Pretty on point. Haven't been healing on my Sham for quite a while and had to step in on Mythic night today for my guild. Some of the dmg effects really took me by surprise although I knew most of the situations from a dps perspective. I was really dumbstruck to experience that you either a) don't need to heal at all and could just go brrrr stormkeeper or b) had to heal like there is no tomorrow in a very small span of time. There was absolutely no in-between. It felt a bit like ffxiv healing, where you are only expected to heal at certain points and do dmg for the rest of the encounter. Not my cup of tea tbh. As Jak said: I want to be pushed and challenged to constantly heal as a healer.
What really feels SOOOO BAD about having to top ppl up at 80% is we do so much overhealing because our heals are so strong it just feels so bad to waste a gcd on an 80% tgt. This is the first expac since BFA I have not played a healer I actually quit at the start of DF because healing was not fun.
@@branislavmiloradovic168 bruh, 100%. I just picked up MW last week, have it to 404 ilvl now. Sheiluns gift feels really good, but also SUPER shitty most if overhealing.
So this is why I'm not enjoying healing as much these days! I couldn't figure out why healing felt so horrible beyond the fact I was needing to DPS all of a sudden. I've been healing since TBC and I've never felt so crappy about healing. I never really knew why "Best DPS healer wins" had become such a thing, and I hate it (I mostly pug M+), but you've nailed it. I get people up 80% of their life almost instantly, then I have dead time during which I'm expected to DPS. Mana is borderline worthless now, I don't even look at my mana bar unless I am in a higher M+ and the tank is chainpulling - but then on the other hand I know that if I do stop to drink and the tank doesn't notice then it's basically a wipe because the damage is so huge (except for the tank ofc, they seem borderline immortal at times). I remember the times when I could stop and drink with the knowledge that the group would be ok for 5-10s, that's no longer the case - I see the tank pull and I have to immediately abandon drinking and run to heal. I've been Resto druid main since Wrath and last expansion's advent of "catweaving" was utterly depressing. I hate being expected to DPS M+. If I wanted to DPS I would have rolled DPS, and even if I rolled DPS I would NEVER choose a melee. I would quite like to retain my utility (interrupts and such) as I see them almost like a shield - something I can use to stop damage... but enough with the DPS, please. Thank you for this. I hope to god blizz fixes it.
I think this was a very good commentary. I hadn't realized this is exactly how I felt. It almost is like an anxiety that I need to top someone off or something will just destroy them.
Great commentary. Its felt very different to heal this expansion, even for someone who isnt really a veteran main healer, and I think you hit the nail on the head here. Healing before was being efficient all the time, but with room for mistakes. Currently I feel like if I'm not 100% on the ball at the right moments its all over, but then I can essentially afk for long periods of time as well.
Agreed. I think it’s so dumb that you can straight up get one shot by certain unavoidable abilities that tyrannical bosses have. Like, being me down to literally 5% health and give me a chance to heal from it
This is actually something I noted in the beta. Usually realtive healer strength increases with more gear and therefore every content in an expansion. And usually there was a huge reset at the start of expansions where you'd feed really weak. But in DF this reset missed completely. The numbers you're doing now (in % max heath) are already ridiculous and if the trend of increasing healer strength continues ... I'm not even sure where we'd end up since increasing raid damage is already basically not feasible anymore. For example on Kurog you have rot damage that ticks for more than 50% health per tick. So you have 4-5 healers with each one having to heal 250-300% player health every ?3? seconds. M+ has very similar problems where everything that kills you basically is a oneshot or combination of hits. And I do agree it's a lot less fun having to top off everybody all the time, basically instantly instead of managing your mana and heal more "strategically" with occasional spotheal on targets.
1/2 way done with the video and I gotta say you're nailing it. I wish blizzard would talk with us before the game launches. I called this problem out after doing 50+ hours of math before the expansion even launched. It's a math problem pure and simple. This problem stems from talents. We have talents synergizing together to change the amount that a base spell heals for by up to 2000% percent a.k.a 20x. In previous versions of the game with talent points you would be lucky to get a total of +100% to a spell, and it would be designed with that/those talents in mind. Talent points back then would increase your healing by only like 2% per point to "A" spell. AND it often only effected the base or spell power coefficient of the spell. BTW base healing for spells was a super good thing to have in the game because then they could have very low scaling. A Perfect example of the current situation is (R)ejuv druid. I had average cast being around 20x what my spell book says it does. Because I'm using like 10 talents to increase its duration, give it a chance to replicate, allow it to stack to 2, make it tick faster and so on. Blizzard needs to nerf talents by like 80% imo. We can't have basically half of our talents being old legendary abilities. They were legendary for a reason lol. Now where it all went wrong( the math blizzard didn't do)is when you add in secondary stats. They balanced the game at launch. But they lacked the ability or awareness to do the very important prediction math. Since stamina only has vers it stack with multiplicity with (which dps and healers don't hard stack) It only has 1 multiplier. But healing has Int x mastery x crit x haste x vers which means int has 4 multipliers. Stamina never had a chance. When you factor in what happens to a spell after secondary stats and then TALENTS, the math gets hilarious. Even if they buff stamina again this will happen again because of multipliers.
Yeah, that's pretty spot on, they have turned it too much into a math problem and the new talents have significantly diminished base spell coefficient in favour of some exponentially stacking talent combinations and procs of procs that balloon beyond proportion with the "right" talent choices that someone will eventually math out. It is also insane that currently even in this first raiding tier you can stack secondaries like haste, which scales exponentially, to 40% without even accounting for haste procs from spell sources, trinkets etc especially when you consider all these modifiers that already amplify things like Rejuvs. As you say, many of these things are relic effects from legendaries that were introduced in their respective expansions for a reason. They need to figure a new way for vertical growth of your healing toolkit that maintains balance, sense and cohesion with your base spell heal by focusing on gameplay aspects and conditions that reward good play e.g. bring back a condition for mw to extend your ReMs infinitely when Y condition is met (as a consequence of good play), and make it a balancing act of how many Vivify cleaves you can get out without dropping your HoTs instead of the current rng proc of proc crappy passive system that you have no control over. But also on Jack's note about old encounters, they also need to introduce fights with varying healing patterns and varying timers, not the bloody same copy-pasta routine that Vault of Incarnates currently has which functioned as a mere selling point primarily for Pre.Evoker followed by R.Druid.
YES! Thank you for explaining it so clearly! We need less burst and more unavoidable rot damage, so healers actually have something to heal without people dying in one global.
I used to be a mythic raid healer. The last raids I did before coming back in Legion and healing was very different than it is now. To me it's not as fun. I mained a shaman until I came back for dragonflight and wow, they really screwed with them while I was gone. Yes, they have done a lot to them now that make them good again, but I have switched to my other raiding toon, a druid. I feel like I can not let a single hot fall off or it's over. I am constantly throwing some kind of heal and sure, that is what I am supposed to be doing but now I am stressed about doing heroic like I was back in mythic and to me something just isn't right about that. Don't even get me started on mythic keys. I'm older, and have slowed a bit thanks to health stuff but not THAT much but I continually feel like I am struggling or not doing as much as I should be because when I am busting my ass to put out what I do. I'm on the verge of wondering if it is just not worth paying to play any more for me which really makes me sad because I do honestly love the game. I have played since vanilla. I even played with a broken hand. lol I only left because I had no choice but now I do.
You nailed it. I get frustrated plying Holy Priest in that most of the fight I'm just topping ppl off so I've got something to do, the big damage times as you said are very scripted and timed. I don't feel like I'm having any impact at all on the outcome of the fight, as long as I get my CDs out on time. I don't care about my gear, or running mythic+ - who cares, I pull 90%+ parses just spamming AOE heals. For the first time in years I'm seriously considering changing to DPS for the next raid where at least it feels like your skill really impacts the course of the fight.
To be fair, it's always been a bit like this (though I agree with your points mostly). Healing skill only matters until you barely survive the mechanics. DPS skill matters all the way throughout progression (usually). So if you are interested in really pushing yourself, then DPS is challenging for longer, whereas for healing the challenge is front loaded.
@@karlzone2 Yeap. It used to be healers needed to sync their CD, discuss amongst themselves the play before the pull, dedicate a healer to the tank - all those things are gone now. Its basically a HPS race against the other healers. Holy always win that because of all the insta-snipes. I base my CD's now on log spikes, I dont give a toss that it overwrites some other dudes CDs, thats a him problem.
I got so sad after watching this video because it's so true, you put it into words so well. I'm a new player having never played wow before DF which I started in january. I've been playing resto shammy exclusively for the time being and recently something has felt really off since I've gotten to the high end of m+ dungeons. Not to toot my own horn, but I can consistently get 30k dps in dungeon, which I hate. I would consider myself to be a good healer, but I hate these dungeons and especially raids where I am a "healer" but during boss fight I actually have to wait a minute or so for the group to receive any damage. In which I respond by pressing one big cooldown everyones full and oh look I have nothing to do anymore. My favourite bosses are the raging tempest from nokhud and hyrja from halls of valor. I feel like these are the only ones where my skills are being tested and I actually get to heal.
The number of times during a Mythic+ dungeon the whole party is dead due to some burst mechanic and the tank solos the last 10 percent of a boss without everyone is really disenfranchising as a healer. Why bring us? I can literally miss a cast and BAM you're dead or hardly see the mechanic that got you but the tank can sit there chugging along. I"m starting to miss the older days of WoW where tanks used to be powerful for aggro control and taking alot of little damage but reliant on us to CC mobs to keep from getting overwhelmed... there was a balance between the triad of tank mitigation, crowd controls and healing throughput.
must say that i don't like the idea of a "meta", ofc it is unavoidable that some will stand out but all healer being equal should be the key and maybe like switching classes for a certain optimal comp is the thing. i like doing m+ as a healer but the damage part is soooo hard to pull off in pugs and grps that require you to be constantly healing. its the reason i stopped playing my druid at 2.4k rio cuz in the 20 range pugging is way too brutal and taxing and only 1/10 grps were optimal to do good dps and keep everyone alive. my fix? well overall hp inc is a starter to make all dmg taken less impactfull and maybe increase the passive dmg of certain healers (like dot or bleed effects) so they can contribute to dmg but in a less active way so we can focus on keeping ppl alive.
sooo I def wanna push back on the "healing bar from 20% to full" maybe b/c i'm undergeared or whatevs, but as a holy priest, one of my biggest issues this xpac is that my heals hit like wet toilet paper, ESPECIALLY on tanks. On of my biggest grips with healing is how powerful tanks have become to where they don't need healers. What's more, is their mobility and self reliance frankly makes them kinda crappy to play with sometimes, as they are too self reliant and choose speed and showmanship over group cohesion, but I digress. I SUPER agree with the sentiment that as a healer I WANT TO HEAL, i'm so over this "you need to be dpsing" as a healer mov't. If I wanted to dps, I would roll a dps class. I've even heard people say "that's how they do it in FFXIV" well, I'm not playing FFXIV, i'm playing wow, and that's one of the reasons why. If you want a game with only dps, go play guild wars and stop trying to tell other people how they should play. Finally, while I hear where you're coming from Jak, I really feel healer imbalance has been an issue for a long time. My class in particular (holy priest), I've felt for the majority of wow's history, has gotten short stick. In BFA holy coudln't even do M+. With the exception of the end of SL and Legion- comparing holy to say resto druid or paladin is a joke. The egregious imbalance currently between evokers/druids and other healers and the fact that blizz has done little to address 6 months into the expansion is beyond the pale. It just feels like Blizzard doesn't really care at all about healer balance. I think you're right that health pools need to increase or dmg overall has to come down but it wont help if 1-2 classes can still press a button and heal 1/2 the raid to full or if tank health is soooo out-of-sink w/ other role health pools that you can't bring dmg down with out diminishing the meaningfulness of what they do.
I agree totally. It’s kinda lame to see healers in m+ to constantly talk about gear towards dps vs. healing. I miss the days of when you didn’t have time to dps it was more about managing your groups health/mana and cool downs. Healing now I am constantly in the mindset hurry and top off the group so I can spam more chain lightning. Not very fun and interactive game play if you ask me.
holy moly that mana bar makes me anxious. really great video. i love that you do the deep dive into the healer meta and not just complain. rly shows that you know your stuff. as someone who played holy priest for most of my wow career, i rly miss those fights, where you can shine with slow sustained healing. getting sniped by evoker and druid, while i wait for my slow hots to top off people or my hymn to channel for half a minute felt awful this tier
You hit the nail with this vid, I remember our RL used to call "don't use CDs, chill, top off people slowly". I don't remember him calling like that at all this tier :D It's just one -80%HP mechanic after another, all the time. Health pools and healer power should be balanced around incoming damage patterns, and to make things spicy people should be expected to stay on low HP for some time alright! I remember knowing for sure when I'll be healed over time and when I needed to use pots & stones. But now it's just random deaths in our raid when healers get distracted a bit and some DPS player gets bullied with no heals when he believed he didn't need to use anything on a healer mechanic lmao. Maybe that's a skill issue, oh well!
Yeah one thing I really dislike is that EVERY healer spec now is very bursty. Basically what was discs speciality (and at some points even holy paladin in Legion), is now boiled down into the general healer gameplay. Now everyone is balanced around big dmg events on short timers, meaning everyone has an answer to it every 1,5min, which again, is something only certain specs could do. It's one big reason why disc is in desperate need of some kind of update, as it's clearly outdated for the state of healing we are in now.
Mythic Raszageth is especially bad for this and is a perfect example of a horrible fight design in terms of healing... the very sudden bursts hitting for 80-90% of health bars constantly from different mechanics, and needing to make sure everyone is basically topped off before anything hits. And this is progging the fight now after nerfs and with higher ilevel. I can't even imagine how bad it was for the early guilds.
In my experience as a healer in Dragonflight: DPS standing in poop is the BANE of my existence. Yes there is unavoidable damage, we all know. But there’s nothing quite like getting flamed to hell because “healer did no dmg trash healer diff” meanwhile they’re too stupid to realize that if I had stopped healing at any point, the group would be dead because almost everything does AT MINIMUM 50% health per hit. No amount of damage your healer does will make up the difference of letting a DPS die. Healer damage should not be relied on as a win condition for your raid/key. Imagine kicking a ret paladin from your group because his HPS was too low. Just because he CAN heal, doesn’t mean you rely on him for it. I love healing, but it is in a terrible spot at the moment where, for some reason, healers carry 80% of the responsibility and 100% of the expectations of others.
The death of attrition-style healing is definitely a reason I'm not having as much fun as a healer in raids right now. Current model is actually very much like FFXIV to me. CD-oriented bursty healing. I don't get to use my entire kit. So much overheal and friction between healers using their stuff between moments of burst damage. Damage events feel too telegraphed and scripted. Not sure if Blizzard changed their philosophy or what is going but it also just feels more epic when the entire raid is bleeding out.
Definitely resonate with the basically just relying on global raid CDs for most bosses now. Which also makes pugging content much more difficult because communication on staggering CDs is non-existent so it's always just a shit show.
The actual meta hurts Disc priest hard too for the same reason i guess. Considering the "rot healers" also have huge burst healing, and .. evoker, seems like wierd to exist.
Healing last tier with two Prevokers was a fucking nightmare. I've been a Resto Shaman since BC and last tier had me wanting to quit. Grey parses for months unless the Prevokers weren't there, then parses were purple or orange.
NO NERF, NO NERF TO HEALING OR HEALERS. You said it yourself, that healers need to be on point and deliver when we all know the next incoming dmg will wipe off the team or wipe off a few members because the dmg will be enough to wipe out the remaining health bar. That in no way calls for a nerf to healing, but rather it does call for a sustain or maintain. What other games have done, and I do play other games, is that they introduced buffers who provide resist to dmg to the team, and they also provide defense in the form of dodging. In other words, they provide players a percentage to dodge attacks buff. A combination like that does relieve healers. If the developers decide to go this route , then you can nerf the healing and give them other kinds of instruments to buff the team, damage mitigation types of buffs. If no quality resistant to dmg buffs are provided for the team, or dodge buff provided, the weight on healers is tremendous. I began playing Evoker when I began playing WoW for the first time, and I did that choice after doing a lot of research. Looks like my research paid off well. But I agree the weight is immense. I play GW 1 and GW 2, and City of Heroes and other games, and I specialize in playing support characters. City of Heroes has the best healers and support repertoire out of any existing game on the planet. Yet, the support options are so varied that many times you don't need a healer, you can get by with other buffs and it provides a nice variety to the game play and team compositions. You can also play characters that debuff the dmg of the enemies and slow the enemies' attack rate and movement so efficiently providing greater survival to the whole team. But I do love the fact that when I am not healing, then I can join in the fun of doing dmg. So I enjoy the downtime of not having to heal and being able to have more variety or diversity in what I do. As in other games, the majority of players do not want to be stuck doing only healing. They want to join in the other fun stuff as well, like debuffing and doing dmg.
100% agree, ive only been healing for the first time a little bit in DF, returned after long time away, and i notice the meta in general feels very different to when i think about raiding in WotlK etc. Tanks do so much self healing that they barely ever need actual direct healing outside of big mechanics. Even dps in general so so much passive self healing that they also essentially arent affected by rot damage. From the little bit of healing ive done it feels like your only there to pop big cooldowns at certain phases, do a bit of aoe healing and thats it. Mythic plus is even worse, again aside from some specific instances, the only time you really need to heal someone is if they took damage from something that was avoidable, and most of those avoidable sources of damage at higher levels just one shot people anyway. I find myself dps'ing as a healer the majority of the time and its not fun. Hell theres even people timing 28+ keys as 4 dps 1 tank.
Healers should have 75% of the total support tools of the party. Dps classes should have personal defensives and personal utility. Healers should have personal AND GROUP defensives and personal AND GROUP utility.
I have said this for a long time. Cataclysm release was probably the best healing iteration there has been imo. Not only has the gameplay become too fast paced for healers, they essentially don't hard cast spells anymore. This makes target selection much less important. In cata, If you spent 2 seconds casting a divine light while having Avenging Wrath is active, you felt REALLY bad wasting a lot of healing. Canceling casts was important to conserve mana. This also opens up the possibility to precast spells as a fundamental gameplay element instead of something done on niche scenarios. Being proactive by precasting with a reactive healer is something that brings a lot of fun to healers. Makes predicting damage on a small scale rewarding while also allowing ramp specs to feels good. If healing was much lower i also believe you would see more healers for their healing profile instead of their cd profile.
Canceling casts was removed with the change from 5 second rule to permanent mana regeneration but precasting still exists. Try Disc priest (Radiance) or Preservation evoker (Empowered spells) if you like that playstyle. Shaman and Hpriest has also some lengthy casts you can start before damage events. Granted, there are no 5 second cast times anymore but those don't really make sense with permenant mana generation. There are healers which are super high on instants but most cast a lot actually. With the current encounter design you need a certain amount of abilities which allow you to move.
Couldn't agree more with the last point about just wanting to heal. For the love of god do I hate the feeling of having to push dps all the time when I'm healing (more prevalent in m+). I main DPS roles because I enjoy dpsing, I alt HEALER ROLES CAUSE I WANT TO HEAL.
They gotta come up with something for healing, it's just weird. I absolutely hated how healing m+ in BFA was basically keeping Riptide on your group and for 95% of the run that was good enough - the remaining time you were on 2 button dps rotation or affix bitch duty. And then of course in season 4 came the odd dungeon boss that just randomly required 5 quintillion hps before going back to Riptide spam for the remaining dungeon. I kinda enjoyed the change of pace with DF at first, you know, actually having to heal on just about every boss and every trash pack - but then again, I was also playing Evoker... so it's not like it was particularly impossible for me. But nowadays, it's just getting tiresome being back to having nothing happening for 80% of the dungeon, once more being back to 2 button dps rotations and affix bitch duty and then there's the 20% of bosses/packs that still require silly healing and just straight up murder anyone who's only at 90% HP because I dared sneezing at the wrong second. But the problem is then nerds like Nerf coming around, pulling some random +28 Tyrannical keys without healers out of their ass. This role is just weirdly flopping back and forth between being useless & having nothing to do and requiring the most intricate planing & perfectly executed rotation or otherwise you're responsible for depleting a key. Getting kinda exhausting - especially when healer balance is so all over the place that your ability to participate in anything above the base level is pretty much dictated by how long it takes Blizzard to fucking address Druids and Evokers being 50% ahead of everyone else.
I think there is definitely a good middle ground, but the examples you gave haven't really found it. I want to feel like I'm making a significant impact without having to keep everyone at 100%. Blizzard seems to have a habit of making healers and dmg overly bursty or feeling like you are constantly crawling your way out of a hole to have any impact at all. Both are flawed. I will say that I do find the current style of healing more fun and keeps you on your toes more than a slow grind to top everyone off. Remind me of WotLK healing, which I loved.
I don't see it as too big of a problem (although still a problem at times, like running up the stairs on Sennarth), but it is absolutely a problem in M+. There's no reason people's health should drop 80% in an instant... it's way too stressful
Thanks for the interesting perspective. I really enjoyed the balance of doing damage and keeping the group alive on my alts, but I main melee dps so thats not surprising. Looking at those older Boss fights really brings your arguments home and if our fellow main healers enjoy this more than pls let them have it. Still miss my full corruption Holy Pala tho :)
Honestly, I'm very new to WoW. I started a week ago and I've only done a handful of raids and dungeons. This is the first MMO I've decided to not heal in, and I think it comes down to design philosophy. For example, in FF14, everyone is a DPS spec. The main DPS are better at it, but everyone is focusing on pumping damage before everything out. My value as a healer wasn't "keep the raid topped off", my value came down to how much I could do without letting anyone die. I could spam out debuffs on one job, I could pump damage with my summons on another, or I could layer HoT effects so that I can get my fully optimal DPS rotation every time. Healing in WoW just feels off. I'm doing my job, but it feels really limiting. It's weird having my most exciting moments be "oh that pally fucked up but I saved" instead of "dude I edged the tank for 3 years and did more damage than our bard, I'm godlike". I feel like enhancement shaman is a good example, although that's obviously a melee dps spec instead of a healer. Enchancement shamans don't feel like they're shoe horned into melee damage and buffs, despite that being their main thing. I still have a cast rotation, I still have procs, there's a lot going on. I'm not stuck doing my job, and it's up to me to decide how much I need to do that job vs other things. Or with something like a Balance druid. You can spec pretty heavily into bear. You might even be able to off tank in emergencies. But you're not really stuck doing any one thing. But I hop on resto and suddenly I'm playing "how many reju's can I spread before my eyes fall out". Then again I might just be bad. Like I said, still a noob, but I do have experience in MMO's. I know WoW is like the oldest game still alive, but I really think they should reassess how they design heal specs. I don't think they're far off the mark, but they don't seem to be going in the right direction.
i guess the root problem is how m+ works Scaling Damages leaves no other choice (at some point) to create the 100%hp or dead situation This means that healers need to balanced around this and THIS is forcing the Raids to be the same ... The other reason is "Timers" in m+ You can have "scaling Damage" if there is no Timer and you are forced to CC Trash and play it slow and save ... If you get down to 5% health as dd => play it save stay back until the heal brings you back up This doesnt work with Timers ... If there are Timers you HAVE to be able to Burst heal people back up asap But you cant "slow down" m+ because a lot of people like the fast and dynamic playstyle And without Timers the DD dps is meaningless outside of Boss encouters with enrage mechanics ... If you have no Timers ... Trash is just slow and dds do not need to do anything ...(except cc) If you want DPS to be meaningfull in Trash you have to completly redesign how trash works or use Timers ..
As a holy paladin coming back after quitting before cata...can't relate. Healing feels amazing. Finally getting to unleash the beast constantly without carefully guarding my cooldowns or going oom. Noticed you didn't mention paladin once; even when referencing burst healers, you went with disc priest. 😂 You want constant small healing...paladin would need a 100% rework or we'd be expected to constant DPS until out bursts are needed. I hate the sound of that.
i expierenced this with resto shaman. i was playing this shitty riptite primordial wave focused build for m+ since launch in draognflight, all problems aside with modifiers/button bloat/ dmg being low etc what really surprised me was 10.7 rshaman doing a super buffed CHAINHEAL with a 0 cd topping everyone in the group. if healing is that easy well of course you have oneshotty dmg from everywhere since , assuming you survive it. it takes 2 seconds to get topped again like nothing happened. it a very feelgood moment to top everyone so fast but if its just a buffed chain heal or 3 normal chainheals with 0 cd is all it takes then it loses the glory moment
100% jak. And any current rot damage now is currently covered by druid/prevoker hots. Playing a healer like hpal or disc feels really shit at the end of a tier. You're always over healing unless you're sniping the tank's Death Strikes or WoG's lol
This would probably fix pvp too. At least for people like me who don't like to watch people 100-0 people in 2 seconds or 1-100 people on heals in the same amount of time. Rubber banding HP bars isn't fun or interesting.
Absolutly some feeling when i see a player in my group with less then 100% hp my alarm goes off HEEE DIEEES noo... absolutly crap seriously this is just not even funy xD you cant let ppl go belove 90% because most of the time something on the way to 1 shot them -,-
Agree 100%. Pisses me off when I look at the meter and the damn TANK outhealed me. Makes me wonder why I'm even there...why healers even exist for that matter. Back in the day the group lived (and died) on the skill of the healer and that was a very rewarding thing. Now...meh.
Great video. I feel like I have to constantly overheal just to keep up. Bring back the OG Disc priest and I will go back to maining it. Enough with this damage to heal dumpster fire.
I know many people would hate this. However, I was thinking healing would be more fun if it was interactive. Meaning remove all mana sources from the game and replace it with builder, spender. For instance, Holy paladins would spam flash of light to generate holy essence to generate power for word of glory. Holy shock would generate a bunch. But for pve it would be more interesting, PVP may be a bit of a nightmare to tune due to interrupts and yada yada.
recently gave healing a go and after a few runs in pugs.......lets just say I never noticed how nearly every tank in retail these days thinks he's sonic and "gotta go pull everyone fast!" and thinks he can pull everybody in eyes sight and be fine, I'm 30 and it feels like I'm already having a mid-life crisis, playing healer just feels like it's adding onto my stress levels. so yeah, to all healers out there doing the most thankless job and first one to blame when the tank inevitably pulls too many causing a wipe....I've felt your pain.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. Also, I have not renewed my subscription for wow specifically because of what the healer meta is right now. I have been a healer for some 20 years. This is just not fun what they have going now. I'll always check back in after some time, but it's not worth my money right now. Based on how subscription numbers have dropped by millions over the years, you know I am not the only one. I, and many other healers, feel like the developers do not understand what healers want. We are used to being put on the back-burner and it honestly sucks. We can't even quest as healers ("just switch to another spec"). We should be able to heal NPCs to fight for us or something. It's odd to me that such an opinion comes off as extreme when it really shouldn't - it should be baseline to the game-play. It's indicative to just how far away the developer's minds are from what would be good for healers. The second part to this whole current healer meta problem is the reaction from non-healers as well. They do not understand our frustration and respond with negativity on the forums. Healers are bashed constantly. A large portion of players do not want to be made to feel like they are worthless to others or are doing their job wrong when what's really the culprit is the healer meta itself. Being the target of hate is going to make people tap out. The problems of the current healer meta have a ripple effect that touches many facets of the game.
In my opinion as a healer, this season it is mandatory to precast skills when dealing with certain mechanics. I think that not all specs have the ability to react to the unexpected instantly. thats make the role boring and punishing.
I didn't think they would ever go back to WotLK when they did exactly the same mistake and healers started to complain that healing became whack-a-mole game. It also made Val'anyr disproportionately more powerful because shields were the only thing that allowed to create a cushion that allowed to avoid playing that game
While often need burst heal, or even AOE burst heal, they forced to dealing damage beside healing. That is why more and more healer leaving the M+. Simply to say they are far more overwhelmed than the tank and the dd-s. Better design would be that in dungeon and raids the healers damage would be suppressed greatly. The devs have no idea how to make harder a fight beside making hard the healing. Usually the parties and raids want to minimalize the healers or force them to heal. Either way making the healers job much more difficult and when shit happens they are blaming the healer(s). A new extra difficulty that the evokers range of far shorter then another healers. I often stay in the centre of the raid which is kinda suck because the mechanic of lots of my skills, but even from the centre, I often cant reach the half of the raid.
Problem is, with the current design of many dps, you won't need healers if there is no need for burst healing. I can self heal myself just fine with my DH/ret without a healer if it's only slow dmg. It would require a redesign of dps specs as well as healers specs.
Its not only bad for healers, i as a dd get the feeling that i am squishy as fuck no matter how many cds i use. Fights like rasza and Kurog were you could use your entire def cds in under a minute and then were pretty much helpless. It gets rediculus when you begin to look at a piece of new gear and dont think: oh nice + x primary stat or sec stat but instead oh nice x amount of vitality, maybe now i can survive boss ability x when i am not at 100% health.
Yeah, I love healing, but it is *miserable* right now. There's not enough to go around in raid and there's too much to go around in keys. I've only been in endgame since Shadowlands and it's just not fun right now.
Think I fully agree someone who is at 80% hp shouldn't be at risk of dying. Old healing was much more fun. Healing is literally coming and using a cd at the right time rather than the ability of the actually heals
I solo healed the Garosh HC (Thok 25man HC as well) as a disc in the O'days. Probably lost 2-3kg-s on the fight, but it was fun AF. :D Btw. I totally agree with you! It's bothering me too, that some abilities kill you in one shot at 80% Hp...
I just wish mana management was still a skill set that's useful. I basically only find Disc Priest to be any interesting to play, due to how hard it is to execute correctly. All the other healers were way more interesting when they had to think about the trade-off they did between which heals they were casting.
I don’t care if you do 12 dps stop taking avoidable damage, I’ve mained healers and tanks since sunwell in bc and I just got ksh on my tank and only at 2200 on my healer and I’m done with healing is not fun anymore it’s pure chaos and insanity
They also need to do something about healers and defenses, take holy priest e.g.. At the moment I play restoration shaman, and tbf, I mained that for ages. Never a dull moment, esp. in pugs, if I don't heal, people die lol :D !
Great video. The degree that damge coem out and your basically alive or dead in a 2second span constatnly I agree is awful. Hopefully they listent o the feed back!
the way healing in wow currently is is a lot like FFXIV Savage fights where if you literally miss 1 mitigation or mechanic the whole group dies lol feels really annoying tbh
Having raided mythic every raid since 8.3, I can 100% say the most fun I've had on a fight was Mythic Maut intermission in Nyalotha - Scaled well with gear so you couldn't "outgear" the healing check, constant damage going out, able to control damage taken if your healers are struggling, or just pumping DPS and HPS I have not seen a fight nearly as well done as that since :c
All of 8.3 was great. Nzoth Mythic was really fun just because of the huge damage all the time. But my fav was probably Shad'har, just due to how hectic and constant the damage output was. :) Didn't scale with gear, though, the damage was insane still.
I can not stress this enough. I noticed it as well in the first season of df (I took a break in sl). Everything healer do now is top everything as fast as they can. Where is the constistent damage in raids? Healing is not that fun anymore if you have to fight with every other healer for the next burst dmg that lasts like 3 secs :/
Back in legion blizzard had this goal of letting ppl sit at 70% hp or 60% hp and that was fine. That was the play style for it. Now it feels like they took a 180 with that.
Why not nerf dps defensives and stop those -90% spellz ? More healer = faster queus and more keys. they have to make the role less sweaty and more fun.
healing as become less enjoyable overall for many expansions now, the classes and the game play of healing specs are great i love them but the actual experience of healing itself is just not fun, do to the over saturation of mechanics and damage coming from every single direction at all time some not even clear or visible you just have to know its there sometimes , now when it comes to wow its the reason im not a healer main ( which makes me sad since i main healing in almost any other game or mmo that has it) and my experience is not involving high end healing content but you know its bad that even though i dont to the top end stuff and i still find it frustrating, playing classic (since i didnt play wow until cata and i didnt touch healing then) i felt that healing was more intuitive and relied more on actual understanding of what was going on (which of course you still do now but it feels less so) rather then give healers a bunch of buttons some cases a lot of button bloat so that they can just burst heal everything because we are gonna just make everything stressful and burst all the time
I really like current state where healers are support and utility classes And are not afk spamming 1 button. There are a lot of situations where you have nothing to heal and can do damage. And it is great.
Agreed. Some of the most fun I'vve had healing is when the health pools are relatively high vs healing, like at the start of dragonflight, when people were new to the dungeons M0 and taking a lot of avoidable dmg, was a lot of fun to heal, healing healthbars was more of a tug-of-war push/pull than whack-a-mole. They need to scale up health as M+ keys go higher, or healing is reduced as M+ keys go higher (and the monster dmg doesn't scale quite as fast as well) so that pushing higher content doesn't just become binary "pass/fail". I'm in a weird spot right now where I need to be pushing mid 20s, but I just don't want to it's not fun. And I would argue that it's not my skill that helps the group hit the timer, it's on everyone to NOT stand in bad because it WILL kill you. Has nothing to do with the healer strength/skill. I actually miss healing early content and, as weird as it sounds, when people were constantly standing in bad and taking lots of damage but not dying outright. I felt like I had a big impact on the success of the run. I'd like to see the gameplay mimic this by reducing the avoidable damage that kills you outright and adding more unavoidable damage while scaling health fast enough to keep the heals relatively small vs health pools.
This is well written, and I wholly agree. All healing specs sort of have the same gameplay in raids, because overall there's way too much output for the "non-bursty" moments to be of any consequence. They all just have to look at the incoming mechanics and prepare, like what should be mostly a disc priest or resto druid's skill expression. There's no distinction there anymore. And in M+ it's straight up awful to play. I feel like a detriment to groups, because I don't know exactly when to pop my cooldowns, and that's even though I'm doing key levels where reacting to damage should be a reasonable way to play a healer.
As someone who outright quit the game because of the healing issues and its bullshit that blizzard is starting to add, They made healing outright a total nightmare for too many people and i dont see the point in playing anymore because its just not fair and a total waste of time.
The best time for me as a healer was begining of cata especially chogal because people were never at 100% and it was really inefficient to try to keep them at 100%
this video really nails the problem, im finding healing less and less fun as the healer checks are just too easy. And yet the damage patterns are really bursty, its just not satisfying as a healer
I think the actual issue is a lack of niches for healers. I have 3 characters (spriest, druid, and prot pally) all around 3k rating for m+ and will only be talking about this from an m+ perspective as I don't raid often to care. I think for m+ the healers are relatively balanced enough but there is a lot of blending of niches. Currently, there's only 1 baseline thing needed from all healers which is to be able to reach the bare minimum of healing output of a dungeon. Anything more than that is what creates the niche. Disc priests have the lowest output but do a lot of dmg, have good CDs, and can buff a key DPS. Druids have the highest output and mobility, while providing decent dmg. Evokers are Jack of all trades and bring lust. These three classes dominate their own niches and the other less viable classes can't compete. Why take a monk that doesn't have the hps output or dmg when you can take literally any other healer? Why take a holy priest when they are just worse versions of an druid/evoker? Resto shamans are definitely a partial exception but in the end if they didn't have lust their viability would be questioned a lot more. In m+ the goal will always be to reach the baseline healing needed the fastest, so you can do things like more dmg (or if you want to think of it this way, the faster you can do the healing, the more you can do other things). Dungeons should require different healing outputs (some should have large bursts where others are slow burns). The fix should be along with adding more of a niche and a unique spec design to each healer. Balance all healers to reach the bare minimum and then play around with the niches. Maybe monk becomes the cc healing spec? Maybe holy priest becomes a buff/utility spec? Maybe another spec becomes good at burst healing and bad at sustained healing? Maybe another has great burst healing and low dmg when cooldowns are popped, and then high dmg and low healing when they aren't (like burst windows for healing). Right now, the meta specs (especially druid and evoker) just do the jobs of other healers better. And that's not even getting into the differences of pugs and premade groups cuz God knows I won't trust a pug disc priest and would only pick up a resto shaman if we don't have lust. Basically, what I'm saying is each healer should have their lane that they alone excel at which will make them more viable. Tldr the biggest issue is that the healing needs of dungeons are too similar, specs aren't very unique because of a lack of niches, and the design of m+ in general are more catered to reaching the baseline amount of healing needed as quickly as possible so you can do other things.
feels tome like healers are based off their surviability and CC they bring, as holy priest i dont have interrupt, i have instead weird stun in chastise and fear, i also have magic dispell - we actually wiped +20 Academy, bcs my friend didnt realize i dont have dispell poison for the tree boss and that mechanic would just one shot him without dispell of poison
Late to comment but i agree healers need to heal again and not do all the mechanics for everyone else so they can have a great time. Its no wonder the healer population is so low not many people want to heal, dps and do each pulls mechanics, while everyone else is just yapping in disc having a great old time chilling. Might be a bit over the top there but it feels like that at times in dungeons at least.
The only problem is youtubers like you making videos like this gaslighting ppl into believeing there is a problem, the only problem with healing i encounter is either player skill or gear nothing else
I started offspec healing part way into mythic vault and definitely felt like the most important part of healing was making sure our healer CDs were coming out at the exact right time. Everything else was kinda eh
I liked the old style, too. The main choice I want to make as a healer is: "Can I get away with efficient and slow healing or do I need to resort to the fast but expensive version?"
Choose wrong and either people die or you go oom. That was the game play I loved and would like to see more of.
tbh,... we had such situations before,... like in ICC, so the "old style" depends on how old you wanna go
shaman plays a lot like this (at least what I've experienced)
Totally agree
i love to do burst healing but i love rot fights, where you lirerally burn your mana and try to time stuff efficiently to cover as much time as possible. its okay if you have to burst 80% but rotting 10% is nice. if you miss by a sec or 2 no one dies that easily but if you dont pick up pace you will lose because of missing throughput or mana.
i loved the fight in sl with the 4 guys. as example. burst healing was useful to push them up but keeping it up so people dont drop to low and no one can catch up anymore.
it should be a healthy mix. burst phases and more rot fights.
and some bosses are super boring to heal. like 3 healer for 15m and you try doing max dps and healing happens by the way (hpal view)
8:50 seeing jak do the same hand gestures 5 years later is so funny to me xD great takes jak! love the content as always :)
thats him self casting renew so he doesn't get too mad at the game
Really resonate with the fact that everything just seems to do 80-90% of hp damage nowadays. I find myself topping people off COMPLETELY in fear of people getting one shot if they were at 90% at all times, and it's getting kinda ridiculous.
i agree. It also makes knowing the damage patterns of upcoming trash way too important. There are plenty of times that you could let your entire team sit at 50% hp while you dps, but because of how much damage stuff does, unless you 100% know they wont take damage, you HAVE to heal them. In the past instead of letting them sit at 50% hp you would use slow heals that cost less mana. Now thats not even a choice..... either you do damage or you heal. Before you either did, Slow efficient small healing. Fast not very efficient healing, or strong and slow inefficient heals. three different spells that did something similarly but you get rewarded for picking the right one.
from m+18 upwards everythink kinda oneshots tho lol ....
@@Trudas00 not really.
I remember the days when a good healer healed non-stop and was integral and not just there to use a 2/3 min raid CD at the exactly right moment to look like they did something
Just like in pvp, back then if you didn't have a healer you were shit out of luck. No every class can heal almost just as good as some heal specs in arena......
Something else I don't think you mentioned (if I missed it, sorry!) is that it (burstiness) also creates an environment where you're encouraged to do massive overhealing and to a degree be inefficient with your mana to make sure people are topped off, where in the past you were instead rewarded for being efficient for managing it. It feels bad to look at logs and see a massive amount of waste in overhealing that you should have been able to do better, but you can't because you're playing with fire if you do.
In the past, if someone died there was likely something you could have done differently as a healer to keep them up. Which is still the case, but now it's like a three way split between super heavy damage profiles, being able to see the future, and an actual way you could play better.
I’ve made the same comments to my raid lead. It feels like you have to keep everyone topped off the entire time nowadays because the amount of situations someone can take 60-70% in a global is ridiculous.
Yuuup. Overheal spam to keep everyone alive everyyyy time
@@AutomaticJak In some ways it makes grievous a non-affix, because you have to play every dungeon every week the same way by keeping everyone topped off the entire time...
I think that these "skill checks" are actually a good thing to some degree, because they much improve the learning of dps players. Back in the day a lot of dps players would not even properly know of their fails, because they didn't see any direct consequences. But I see that you cannot have both an interesting healer role, and a lot of punishing skillchecks on players.
@@nilsp9426 If you want it to be a skillcheck for dps it has to be a 100% hit, because then its obvious you were in the wrong place. Or you have to punish dps output - they tried that with some bosses but as soon as you make it dispellable, its back to the healer to fix it.
as a healer in most expansions, i definitely agree with all of it. i love attrition fights and less about mashing cooldowns at certainpoints in fight
My favourite fight for this was Imperator Margok in WoD. Extremely long fight where every healer would OOM if they didn't pace themselves. And yes, I fully agree.
I hate having to dps as a healer, I want to be forced to heal.
Each expansion and each iteration of healing it seems like stress is increasing at the expense of fun. As time goes on it just feels like we are playing catch up more and more despite playing like grievous is a permanent affix.
I was thinking exactly the same, wondering what changed so much from the time when I played Legion. I thought as I became older that my reflexes are not as good as they were, but probably its just the fact that before it was mostly OK to let people heal slowly back to full, not needing to stress about keeping them at 100% all the time.
@@tomasrada8559 exactly. It feels like the slightest mistakes these days can send half the raid healthbars or more to the brink and it’s a constant game of catch up. Particularly during tougher progression fights.
All the respect for those who have stuck with disc priests. Having to decide whether to abandon your ramp to spam or use a cooldown when you don’t want to because of an example like above or keep the ramp going hoping the raid will survive to the next mechanic all while maintaining a dps rotation, cooldowns and fight mechanics is just excessive levels of stress. I know some people thrive on that kind of stuff but for me it’s just too much stress and not fun.
And it’s hard to pinpoint all the reasons for this phenomenon. If I look back at the last expac I truly had a ton of fun healing it would be legion.
Always good stuff from Jak. My gripe with keys is the "tick, tick, BOOM" dmg that happens WHILE having to move.. Or worse, NOT being able to precast due to interrupt effects. LET US HEAL! Don't make the BIGGEST dmg happen when we have to move and get silenced. I'm looking at you, Ruby Life Pools and Vexamus.
Yes, this… add the “screw the healer” affixes to this as well and it’s just… not fun.
As a holy paladin I did not get to experience this "massive healer strength" people are talking about that has lead us to this insane burst damage profile. Right now the numbers have evened out a bit as we got some splash over from the Ret rework and evoker gets nerfs, but It requires using a build that bypasses our mastery almost completely and never uses infusion procs. The crazy burst aoe profile of M+ has been a nightmare for a lot of healers. If Beacon of Virtue isnt up, people are dead. Now I see all these no healer runs and I am just kind of baffled because just a few weeks ago hpal was working our asses off to do anything above a 20. I am sure other non druid/evoker healers had a similar experience at some point, and it feels like we are suffering the consequences of their success.
No healer has been nerfed as "consequence" of Druid and Evoker success in Dragonflight. Its the opposite. Healers are gradually buffed to match it. Yes those 2 specs overperformed but except for Preservation nerfs due to some oversights on the design front by Blizzard we don't really see them being touched much. At least Druid. Same with Prot Warrior on the tanking front. Its THE Tanking spec going into dragonflight but now others- especially prot pala are catching up. I think every expansion has outliers *cough cough* holy paladin for the last 2 expansions which you seem to disagree with quite a bit? The only "Suffering" I can imagine you'd be having right now is bad player mentality of "You're not in the top 5 of specs this patch so I don't want you in here" One thing to note is a Holy Paladin friend of mine does talk about how they seemed to have hit Holy Paladin with the "You're not allowed to deal damage anymore now" bat after those debacles in the last 2 expansions but I assume you were talking about healers in general which I think are sometimes flawed but still fun and comepetetive
@@Blythe985 To clarify, I did not say any healer was nerfed due to Druid/Evoker success, but rather that the strength of those specs has contributed to the design of damage patterns in this expansion, to the detriment of other healers who were not performing to that level. As for "not being in the top 5 specs", for healers that is dead last at the bottom. There are only 6 specs, 7 if you count priest twice, but again while that feels bad, numbers are not what I am getting at with my complaints (It would have been more of an issue a month ago). Holy paladins issues are far beyond numbers at this point and it suffers from a number of fundamental design issues regarding our mastery, holy power, melee vs ranged healing, no damage, bad talent tree design etc. etc., I could talk about it for hours at this point. The summary of it is that hpal has changed in design every expansion and was rooted in borrowed power and the addition and removal of systems, leaving it in a janky and unrefined place. I have a Resto Druid alt and it's a whole different world, never struggled once with less gear, and I've played Hpal for 3 expansions now. I don't have experience playing a priest or a monk, and I know that early Resto Shaman was rough as well, so I am just assuming that other healers have felt some kind of issues as well.
I totally agree with you, friend. The paladin tree is a hot mess - stupid dusk and dawn and worthless procs, multiplied by floor level throughput outside of wings and a mastery that was considered crap back when it was revealed in legion.
I miss WoD HPala with short wings bursts :(
@@Alynis_ that's cool, u can feel how i've felt since end of legion. hpals in my guild seem to be doin good despite what you say. they do say its not that fun to play it, but healing-damage wise they're doing good (cleared mythic 13th week)
dude im 3.1k io as an hpal. our kit is fine. the perceived meta is just ridiculous. ellesmere timing 28s as hpal. the class is good. not rdruid good, but it's still good. you pre virtue whenever big dmg comes out. i have never had any issue healing as an hpal currently
Pretty on point. Haven't been healing on my Sham for quite a while and had to step in on Mythic night today for my guild. Some of the dmg effects really took me by surprise although I knew most of the situations from a dps perspective. I was really dumbstruck to experience that you either a) don't need to heal at all and could just go brrrr stormkeeper or b) had to heal like there is no tomorrow in a very small span of time. There was absolutely no in-between. It felt a bit like ffxiv healing, where you are only expected to heal at certain points and do dmg for the rest of the encounter. Not my cup of tea tbh. As Jak said: I want to be pushed and challenged to constantly heal as a healer.
This is why I love watching your videos, I feel like you always have great takes on the issues alot of healers face.
What really feels SOOOO BAD about having to top ppl up at 80% is we do so much overhealing because our heals are so strong it just feels so bad to waste a gcd on an 80% tgt. This is the first expac since BFA I have not played a healer I actually quit at the start of DF because healing was not fun.
Nothing feels more bad when you hit 150k plus heal and overheal most of it. I dont want to talk when my CBT is at 500k and it overheals 70% of it. :(
@@branislavmiloradovic168 bruh, 100%. I just picked up MW last week, have it to 404 ilvl now. Sheiluns gift feels really good, but also SUPER shitty most if overhealing.
yeh i miss the days when you could look at overhealing meters as a guage of healer performance/efficiency. now overhealing is just a given
So this is why I'm not enjoying healing as much these days! I couldn't figure out why healing felt so horrible beyond the fact I was needing to DPS all of a sudden. I've been healing since TBC and I've never felt so crappy about healing. I never really knew why "Best DPS healer wins" had become such a thing, and I hate it (I mostly pug M+), but you've nailed it.
I get people up 80% of their life almost instantly, then I have dead time during which I'm expected to DPS. Mana is borderline worthless now, I don't even look at my mana bar unless I am in a higher M+ and the tank is chainpulling - but then on the other hand I know that if I do stop to drink and the tank doesn't notice then it's basically a wipe because the damage is so huge (except for the tank ofc, they seem borderline immortal at times). I remember the times when I could stop and drink with the knowledge that the group would be ok for 5-10s, that's no longer the case - I see the tank pull and I have to immediately abandon drinking and run to heal.
I've been Resto druid main since Wrath and last expansion's advent of "catweaving" was utterly depressing. I hate being expected to DPS M+. If I wanted to DPS I would have rolled DPS, and even if I rolled DPS I would NEVER choose a melee.
I would quite like to retain my utility (interrupts and such) as I see them almost like a shield - something I can use to stop damage... but enough with the DPS, please.
Thank you for this. I hope to god blizz fixes it.
I think this was a very good commentary. I hadn't realized this is exactly how I felt. It almost is like an anxiety that I need to top someone off or something will just destroy them.
Great commentary. Its felt very different to heal this expansion, even for someone who isnt really a veteran main healer, and I think you hit the nail on the head here. Healing before was being efficient all the time, but with room for mistakes. Currently I feel like if I'm not 100% on the ball at the right moments its all over, but then I can essentially afk for long periods of time as well.
This guy just had to use a Varimathras kill clip that I wasn't in, I wanted to be RUclips famous 😡
:)
biggest problem I think is with scaling, too much damage to abilities at higher levels. This is the worst mythic+ season with healer.
Agreed. I think it’s so dumb that you can straight up get one shot by certain unavoidable abilities that tyrannical bosses have. Like, being me down to literally 5% health and give me a chance to heal from it
This is actually something I noted in the beta. Usually realtive healer strength increases with more gear and therefore every content in an expansion. And usually there was a huge reset at the start of expansions where you'd feed really weak. But in DF this reset missed completely. The numbers you're doing now (in % max heath) are already ridiculous and if the trend of increasing healer strength continues ... I'm not even sure where we'd end up since increasing raid damage is already basically not feasible anymore.
For example on Kurog you have rot damage that ticks for more than 50% health per tick. So you have 4-5 healers with each one having to heal 250-300% player health every ?3? seconds. M+ has very similar problems where everything that kills you basically is a oneshot or combination of hits.
And I do agree it's a lot less fun having to top off everybody all the time, basically instantly instead of managing your mana and heal more "strategically" with occasional spotheal on targets.
1/2 way done with the video and I gotta say you're nailing it. I wish blizzard would talk with us before the game launches. I called this problem out after doing 50+ hours of math before the expansion even launched. It's a math problem pure and simple. This problem stems from talents. We have talents synergizing together to change the amount that a base spell heals for by up to 2000% percent a.k.a 20x. In previous versions of the game with talent points you would be lucky to get a total of +100% to a spell, and it would be designed with that/those talents in mind. Talent points back then would increase your healing by only like 2% per point to "A" spell. AND it often only effected the base or spell power coefficient of the spell. BTW base healing for spells was a super good thing to have in the game because then they could have very low scaling. A Perfect example of the current situation is (R)ejuv druid. I had average cast being around 20x what my spell book says it does. Because I'm using like 10 talents to increase its duration, give it a chance to replicate, allow it to stack to 2, make it tick faster and so on. Blizzard needs to nerf talents by like 80% imo. We can't have basically half of our talents being old legendary abilities. They were legendary for a reason lol. Now where it all went wrong( the math blizzard didn't do)is when you add in secondary stats. They balanced the game at launch. But they lacked the ability or awareness to do the very important prediction math. Since stamina only has vers it stack with multiplicity with (which dps and healers don't hard stack) It only has 1 multiplier. But healing has Int x mastery x crit x haste x vers which means int has 4 multipliers. Stamina never had a chance. When you factor in what happens to a spell after secondary stats and then TALENTS, the math gets hilarious. Even if they buff stamina again this will happen again because of multipliers.
Yeah, that's pretty spot on, they have turned it too much into a math problem and the new talents have significantly diminished base spell coefficient in favour of some exponentially stacking talent combinations and procs of procs that balloon beyond proportion with the "right" talent choices that someone will eventually math out. It is also insane that currently even in this first raiding tier you can stack secondaries like haste, which scales exponentially, to 40% without even accounting for haste procs from spell sources, trinkets etc especially when you consider all these modifiers that already amplify things like Rejuvs. As you say, many of these things are relic effects from legendaries that were introduced in their respective expansions for a reason.
They need to figure a new way for vertical growth of your healing toolkit that maintains balance, sense and cohesion with your base spell heal by focusing on gameplay aspects and conditions that reward good play e.g. bring back a condition for mw to extend your ReMs infinitely when Y condition is met (as a consequence of good play), and make it a balancing act of how many Vivify cleaves you can get out without dropping your HoTs instead of the current rng proc of proc crappy passive system that you have no control over. But also on Jack's note about old encounters, they also need to introduce fights with varying healing patterns and varying timers, not the bloody same copy-pasta routine that Vault of Incarnates currently has which functioned as a mere selling point primarily for Pre.Evoker followed by R.Druid.
YES! Thank you for explaining it so clearly! We need less burst and more unavoidable rot damage, so healers actually have something to heal without people dying in one global.
I also feel like mana bars should have more importance than they do currently.
I used to be a mythic raid healer. The last raids I did before coming back in Legion and healing was very different than it is now. To me it's not as fun. I mained a shaman until I came back for dragonflight and wow, they really screwed with them while I was gone. Yes, they have done a lot to them now that make them good again, but I have switched to my other raiding toon, a druid. I feel like I can not let a single hot fall off or it's over. I am constantly throwing some kind of heal and sure, that is what I am supposed to be doing but now I am stressed about doing heroic like I was back in mythic and to me something just isn't right about that. Don't even get me started on mythic keys. I'm older, and have slowed a bit thanks to health stuff but not THAT much but I continually feel like I am struggling or not doing as much as I should be because when I am busting my ass to put out what I do. I'm on the verge of wondering if it is just not worth paying to play any more for me which really makes me sad because I do honestly love the game. I have played since vanilla. I even played with a broken hand. lol I only left because I had no choice but now I do.
You nailed it. I get frustrated plying Holy Priest in that most of the fight I'm just topping ppl off so I've got something to do, the big damage times as you said are very scripted and timed. I don't feel like I'm having any impact at all on the outcome of the fight, as long as I get my CDs out on time. I don't care about my gear, or running mythic+ - who cares, I pull 90%+ parses just spamming AOE heals. For the first time in years I'm seriously considering changing to DPS for the next raid where at least it feels like your skill really impacts the course of the fight.
To be fair, it's always been a bit like this (though I agree with your points mostly). Healing skill only matters until you barely survive the mechanics. DPS skill matters all the way throughout progression (usually). So if you are interested in really pushing yourself, then DPS is challenging for longer, whereas for healing the challenge is front loaded.
@@karlzone2 Yeap. It used to be healers needed to sync their CD, discuss amongst themselves the play before the pull, dedicate a healer to the tank - all those things are gone now. Its basically a HPS race against the other healers. Holy always win that because of all the insta-snipes. I base my CD's now on log spikes, I dont give a toss that it overwrites some other dudes CDs, thats a him problem.
I really like healing through burst and doing other things like dealing damage in the downtime. It makes it more interesting.
I got so sad after watching this video because it's so true, you put it into words so well.
I'm a new player having never played wow before DF which I started in january. I've been playing resto shammy exclusively for the time being and recently something has felt really off since I've gotten to the high end of m+ dungeons.
Not to toot my own horn, but I can consistently get 30k dps in dungeon, which I hate. I would consider myself to be a good healer, but I hate these dungeons and especially raids where I am a "healer" but during boss fight I actually have to wait a minute or so for the group to receive any damage. In which I respond by pressing one big cooldown everyones full and oh look I have nothing to do anymore.
My favourite bosses are the raging tempest from nokhud and hyrja from halls of valor. I feel like these are the only ones where my skills are being tested and I actually get to heal.
The number of times during a Mythic+ dungeon the whole party is dead due to some burst mechanic and the tank solos the last 10 percent of a boss without everyone is really disenfranchising as a healer. Why bring us? I can literally miss a cast and BAM you're dead or hardly see the mechanic that got you but the tank can sit there chugging along. I"m starting to miss the older days of WoW where tanks used to be powerful for aggro control and taking alot of little damage but reliant on us to CC mobs to keep from getting overwhelmed... there was a balance between the triad of tank mitigation, crowd controls and healing throughput.
must say that i don't like the idea of a "meta", ofc it is unavoidable that some will stand out but all healer being equal should be the key and maybe like switching classes for a certain optimal comp is the thing. i like doing m+ as a healer but the damage part is soooo hard to pull off in pugs and grps that require you to be constantly healing. its the reason i stopped playing my druid at 2.4k rio cuz in the 20 range pugging is way too brutal and taxing and only 1/10 grps were optimal to do good dps and keep everyone alive. my fix? well overall hp inc is a starter to make all dmg taken less impactfull and maybe increase the passive dmg of certain healers (like dot or bleed effects) so they can contribute to dmg but in a less active way so we can focus on keeping ppl alive.
sooo I def wanna push back on the "healing bar from 20% to full" maybe b/c i'm undergeared or whatevs, but as a holy priest, one of my biggest issues this xpac is that my heals hit like wet toilet paper, ESPECIALLY on tanks. On of my biggest grips with healing is how powerful tanks have become to where they don't need healers. What's more, is their mobility and self reliance frankly makes them kinda crappy to play with sometimes, as they are too self reliant and choose speed and showmanship over group cohesion, but I digress.
I SUPER agree with the sentiment that as a healer I WANT TO HEAL, i'm so over this "you need to be dpsing" as a healer mov't. If I wanted to dps, I would roll a dps class. I've even heard people say "that's how they do it in FFXIV" well, I'm not playing FFXIV, i'm playing wow, and that's one of the reasons why. If you want a game with only dps, go play guild wars and stop trying to tell other people how they should play.
Finally, while I hear where you're coming from Jak, I really feel healer imbalance has been an issue for a long time. My class in particular (holy priest), I've felt for the majority of wow's history, has gotten short stick. In BFA holy coudln't even do M+. With the exception of the end of SL and Legion- comparing holy to say resto druid or paladin is a joke. The egregious imbalance currently between evokers/druids and other healers and the fact that blizz has done little to address 6 months into the expansion is beyond the pale. It just feels like Blizzard doesn't really care at all about healer balance. I think you're right that health pools need to increase or dmg overall has to come down but it wont help if 1-2 classes can still press a button and heal 1/2 the raid to full or if tank health is soooo out-of-sink w/ other role health pools that you can't bring dmg down with out diminishing the meaningfulness of what they do.
I agree totally. It’s kinda lame to see healers in m+ to constantly talk about gear towards dps vs. healing. I miss the days of when you didn’t have time to dps it was more about managing your groups health/mana and cool downs. Healing now I am constantly in the mindset hurry and top off the group so I can spam more chain lightning. Not very fun and interactive game play if you ask me.
holy moly that mana bar makes me anxious.
really great video. i love that you do the deep dive into the healer meta and not just complain. rly shows that you know your stuff.
as someone who played holy priest for most of my wow career, i rly miss those fights, where you can shine with slow sustained healing. getting sniped by evoker and druid, while i wait for my slow hots to top off people or my hymn to channel for half a minute felt awful this tier
I am massive fan of the background jak, almost mimicking current jak lol
You hit the nail with this vid, I remember our RL used to call "don't use CDs, chill, top off people slowly". I don't remember him calling like that at all this tier :D It's just one -80%HP mechanic after another, all the time. Health pools and healer power should be balanced around incoming damage patterns, and to make things spicy people should be expected to stay on low HP for some time alright! I remember knowing for sure when I'll be healed over time and when I needed to use pots & stones. But now it's just random deaths in our raid when healers get distracted a bit and some DPS player gets bullied with no heals when he believed he didn't need to use anything on a healer mechanic lmao. Maybe that's a skill issue, oh well!
I miss healers healing... tanks being tanks... and damage doing damage.
Yeah one thing I really dislike is that EVERY healer spec now is very bursty. Basically what was discs speciality (and at some points even holy paladin in Legion), is now boiled down into the general healer gameplay. Now everyone is balanced around big dmg events on short timers, meaning everyone has an answer to it every 1,5min, which again, is something only certain specs could do. It's one big reason why disc is in desperate need of some kind of update, as it's clearly outdated for the state of healing we are in now.
Mythic Raszageth is especially bad for this and is a perfect example of a horrible fight design in terms of healing... the very sudden bursts hitting for 80-90% of health bars constantly from different mechanics, and needing to make sure everyone is basically topped off before anything hits. And this is progging the fight now after nerfs and with higher ilevel. I can't even imagine how bad it was for the early guilds.
Help rdruids in pvp! they r a complete trashcan now
Bang on the money Jak. Hope Blizzard sees this!
WTB MoP disc again... i loved mop disc
Thank you! I am a healer darn it! I want to heal, not dps.
In my experience as a healer in Dragonflight:
DPS standing in poop is the BANE of my existence. Yes there is unavoidable damage, we all know. But there’s nothing quite like getting flamed to hell because “healer did no dmg trash healer diff” meanwhile they’re too stupid to realize that if I had stopped healing at any point, the group would be dead because almost everything does AT MINIMUM 50% health per hit.
No amount of damage your healer does will make up the difference of letting a DPS die. Healer damage should not be relied on as a win condition for your raid/key.
Imagine kicking a ret paladin from your group because his HPS was too low. Just because he CAN heal, doesn’t mean you rely on him for it.
I love healing, but it is in a terrible spot at the moment where, for some reason, healers carry 80% of the responsibility and 100% of the expectations of others.
The death of attrition-style healing is definitely a reason I'm not having as much fun as a healer in raids right now. Current model is actually very much like FFXIV to me. CD-oriented bursty healing. I don't get to use my entire kit. So much overheal and friction between healers using their stuff between moments of burst damage. Damage events feel too telegraphed and scripted. Not sure if Blizzard changed their philosophy or what is going but it also just feels more epic when the entire raid is bleeding out.
Definitely resonate with the basically just relying on global raid CDs for most bosses now. Which also makes pugging content much more difficult because communication on staggering CDs is non-existent so it's always just a shit show.
The actual meta hurts Disc priest hard too for the same reason i guess. Considering the "rot healers" also have huge burst healing, and .. evoker, seems like wierd to exist.
Healing last tier with two Prevokers was a fucking nightmare. I've been a Resto Shaman since BC and last tier had me wanting to quit. Grey parses for months unless the Prevokers weren't there, then parses were purple or orange.
Hey Jak! It's Laycie from way back if you still remember :D Great to see you doing well as a content creator! Keep being awesome :)
OH MY GOD! Damn I always remember the ole last wordddd days!
You're doing us all proud by carrying our banner within your heart. If Abba could see you now, he'd probably say the same :D
NO NERF, NO NERF TO HEALING OR HEALERS. You said it yourself, that healers need to be on point and deliver when we all know the next incoming dmg will wipe off the team or wipe off a few members because the dmg will be enough to wipe out the remaining health bar.
That in no way calls for a nerf to healing, but rather it does call for a sustain or maintain.
What other games have done, and I do play other games, is that they introduced buffers who provide resist to dmg to the team, and they also provide defense in the form of dodging. In other words, they provide players a percentage to dodge attacks buff.
A combination like that does relieve healers. If the developers decide to go this route , then you can nerf the healing and give them other kinds of instruments to buff the team, damage mitigation types of buffs.
If no quality resistant to dmg buffs are provided for the team, or dodge buff provided, the weight on healers is tremendous.
I began playing Evoker when I began playing WoW for the first time, and I did that choice after doing a lot of research.
Looks like my research paid off well.
But I agree the weight is immense.
I play GW 1 and GW 2, and City of Heroes and other games, and I specialize in playing support characters.
City of Heroes has the best healers and support repertoire out of any existing game on the planet.
Yet, the support options are so varied that many times you don't need a healer, you can get by with other buffs and it provides a nice variety to the game play and team compositions. You can also play characters that debuff the dmg of the enemies and slow the enemies' attack rate and movement so efficiently providing greater survival to the whole team.
But I do love the fact that when I am not healing, then I can join in the fun of doing dmg. So I enjoy the downtime of not having to heal and being able to have more variety or diversity in what I do. As in other games, the majority of players do not want to be stuck doing only healing. They want to join in the other fun stuff as well, like debuffing and doing dmg.
100% agree, ive only been healing for the first time a little bit in DF, returned after long time away, and i notice the meta in general feels very different to when i think about raiding in WotlK etc. Tanks do so much self healing that they barely ever need actual direct healing outside of big mechanics. Even dps in general so so much passive self healing that they also essentially arent affected by rot damage. From the little bit of healing ive done it feels like your only there to pop big cooldowns at certain phases, do a bit of aoe healing and thats it. Mythic plus is even worse, again aside from some specific instances, the only time you really need to heal someone is if they took damage from something that was avoidable, and most of those avoidable sources of damage at higher levels just one shot people anyway. I find myself dps'ing as a healer the majority of the time and its not fun. Hell theres even people timing 28+ keys as 4 dps 1 tank.
Healers should have 75% of the total support tools of the party.
Dps classes should have personal defensives and personal utility.
Healers should have personal AND GROUP defensives and personal AND GROUP utility.
I have said this for a long time. Cataclysm release was probably the best healing iteration there has been imo. Not only has the gameplay become too fast paced for healers, they essentially don't hard cast spells anymore. This makes target selection much less important. In cata, If you spent 2 seconds casting a divine light while having Avenging Wrath is active, you felt REALLY bad wasting a lot of healing. Canceling casts was important to conserve mana. This also opens up the possibility to precast spells as a fundamental gameplay element instead of something done on niche scenarios. Being proactive by precasting with a reactive healer is something that brings a lot of fun to healers. Makes predicting damage on a small scale rewarding while also allowing ramp specs to feels good. If healing was much lower i also believe you would see more healers for their healing profile instead of their cd profile.
Canceling casts was removed with the change from 5 second rule to permanent mana regeneration but precasting still exists. Try Disc priest (Radiance) or Preservation evoker (Empowered spells) if you like that playstyle. Shaman and Hpriest has also some lengthy casts you can start before damage events. Granted, there are no 5 second cast times anymore but those don't really make sense with permenant mana generation.
There are healers which are super high on instants but most cast a lot actually. With the current encounter design you need a certain amount of abilities which allow you to move.
@@felixW94 thanks for man’s planing to me what healer to play.
Couldn't agree more with the last point about just wanting to heal. For the love of god do I hate the feeling of having to push dps all the time when I'm healing (more prevalent in m+). I main DPS roles because I enjoy dpsing, I alt HEALER ROLES CAUSE I WANT TO HEAL.
They gotta come up with something for healing, it's just weird.
I absolutely hated how healing m+ in BFA was basically keeping Riptide on your group and for 95% of the run that was good enough - the remaining time you were on 2 button dps rotation or affix bitch duty. And then of course in season 4 came the odd dungeon boss that just randomly required 5 quintillion hps before going back to Riptide spam for the remaining dungeon.
I kinda enjoyed the change of pace with DF at first, you know, actually having to heal on just about every boss and every trash pack - but then again, I was also playing Evoker... so it's not like it was particularly impossible for me. But nowadays, it's just getting tiresome being back to having nothing happening for 80% of the dungeon, once more being back to 2 button dps rotations and affix bitch duty and then there's the 20% of bosses/packs that still require silly healing and just straight up murder anyone who's only at 90% HP because I dared sneezing at the wrong second.
But the problem is then nerds like Nerf coming around, pulling some random +28 Tyrannical keys without healers out of their ass.
This role is just weirdly flopping back and forth between being useless & having nothing to do and requiring the most intricate planing & perfectly executed rotation or otherwise you're responsible for depleting a key. Getting kinda exhausting - especially when healer balance is so all over the place that your ability to participate in anything above the base level is pretty much dictated by how long it takes Blizzard to fucking address Druids and Evokers being 50% ahead of everyone else.
I think there is definitely a good middle ground, but the examples you gave haven't really found it. I want to feel like I'm making a significant impact without having to keep everyone at 100%. Blizzard seems to have a habit of making healers and dmg overly bursty or feeling like you are constantly crawling your way out of a hole to have any impact at all. Both are flawed. I will say that I do find the current style of healing more fun and keeps you on your toes more than a slow grind to top everyone off. Remind me of WotLK healing, which I loved.
I don't see it as too big of a problem (although still a problem at times, like running up the stairs on Sennarth), but it is absolutely a problem in M+. There's no reason people's health should drop 80% in an instant... it's way too stressful
Thanks for the interesting perspective. I really enjoyed the balance of doing damage and keeping the group alive on my alts, but I main melee dps so thats not surprising. Looking at those older Boss fights really brings your arguments home and if our fellow main healers enjoy this more than pls let them have it. Still miss my full corruption Holy Pala tho :)
Honestly, I'm very new to WoW. I started a week ago and I've only done a handful of raids and dungeons. This is the first MMO I've decided to not heal in, and I think it comes down to design philosophy. For example, in FF14, everyone is a DPS spec. The main DPS are better at it, but everyone is focusing on pumping damage before everything out. My value as a healer wasn't "keep the raid topped off", my value came down to how much I could do without letting anyone die. I could spam out debuffs on one job, I could pump damage with my summons on another, or I could layer HoT effects so that I can get my fully optimal DPS rotation every time.
Healing in WoW just feels off. I'm doing my job, but it feels really limiting. It's weird having my most exciting moments be "oh that pally fucked up but I saved" instead of "dude I edged the tank for 3 years and did more damage than our bard, I'm godlike". I feel like enhancement shaman is a good example, although that's obviously a melee dps spec instead of a healer. Enchancement shamans don't feel like they're shoe horned into melee damage and buffs, despite that being their main thing. I still have a cast rotation, I still have procs, there's a lot going on. I'm not stuck doing my job, and it's up to me to decide how much I need to do that job vs other things. Or with something like a Balance druid. You can spec pretty heavily into bear. You might even be able to off tank in emergencies. But you're not really stuck doing any one thing. But I hop on resto and suddenly I'm playing "how many reju's can I spread before my eyes fall out".
Then again I might just be bad. Like I said, still a noob, but I do have experience in MMO's. I know WoW is like the oldest game still alive, but I really think they should reassess how they design heal specs. I don't think they're far off the mark, but they don't seem to be going in the right direction.
i guess the root problem is how m+ works
Scaling Damages leaves no other choice (at some point) to create the 100%hp or dead situation
This means that healers need to balanced around this and THIS is forcing the Raids to be the same ...
The other reason is "Timers" in m+
You can have "scaling Damage" if there is no Timer and you are forced to CC Trash and play it slow and save ...
If you get down to 5% health as dd => play it save stay back until the heal brings you back up
This doesnt work with Timers ...
If there are Timers you HAVE to be able to Burst heal people back up asap
But you cant "slow down" m+ because a lot of people like the fast and dynamic playstyle
And without Timers the DD dps is meaningless outside of Boss encouters with enrage mechanics ...
If you have no Timers ... Trash is just slow and dds do not need to do anything ...(except cc)
If you want DPS to be meaningfull in Trash you have to completly redesign how trash works or use Timers ..
As a holy paladin coming back after quitting before cata...can't relate. Healing feels amazing. Finally getting to unleash the beast constantly without carefully guarding my cooldowns or going oom. Noticed you didn't mention paladin once; even when referencing burst healers, you went with disc priest. 😂 You want constant small healing...paladin would need a 100% rework or we'd be expected to constant DPS until out bursts are needed. I hate the sound of that.
i expierenced this with resto shaman. i was playing this shitty riptite primordial wave focused build for m+ since launch in draognflight, all problems aside with modifiers/button bloat/ dmg being low etc what really surprised me was 10.7 rshaman doing a super buffed CHAINHEAL with a 0 cd topping everyone in the group. if healing is that easy well of course you have oneshotty dmg from everywhere since , assuming you survive it. it takes 2 seconds to get topped again like nothing happened.
it a very feelgood moment to top everyone so fast but if its just a buffed chain heal or 3 normal chainheals with 0 cd is all it takes then it loses the glory moment
100% jak. And any current rot damage now is currently covered by druid/prevoker hots. Playing a healer like hpal or disc feels really shit at the end of a tier. You're always over healing unless you're sniping the tank's Death Strikes or WoG's lol
This would probably fix pvp too. At least for people like me who don't like to watch people 100-0 people in 2 seconds or 1-100 people on heals in the same amount of time. Rubber banding HP bars isn't fun or interesting.
Absolutly some feeling when i see a player in my group with less then 100% hp my alarm goes off HEEE DIEEES noo... absolutly crap seriously this is just not even funy xD you cant let ppl go belove 90% because most of the time something on the way to 1 shot them -,-
Agree 100%. Pisses me off when I look at the meter and the damn TANK outhealed me. Makes me wonder why I'm even there...why healers even exist for that matter. Back in the day the group lived (and died) on the skill of the healer and that was a very rewarding thing. Now...meh.
Great video. I feel like I have to constantly overheal just to keep up. Bring back the OG Disc priest and I will go back to maining it. Enough with this damage to heal dumpster fire.
I know many people would hate this. However, I was thinking healing would be more fun if it was interactive. Meaning remove all mana sources from the game and replace it with builder, spender. For instance, Holy paladins would spam flash of light to generate holy essence to generate power for word of glory. Holy shock would generate a bunch. But for pve it would be more interesting, PVP may be a bit of a nightmare to tune due to interrupts and yada yada.
recently gave healing a go and after a few runs in pugs.......lets just say I never noticed how nearly every tank in retail these days thinks he's sonic and "gotta go pull everyone fast!" and thinks he can pull everybody in eyes sight and be fine, I'm 30 and it feels like I'm already having a mid-life crisis, playing healer just feels like it's adding onto my stress levels.
so yeah, to all healers out there doing the most thankless job and first one to blame when the tank inevitably pulls too many causing a wipe....I've felt your pain.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. Also, I have not renewed my subscription for wow specifically because of what the healer meta is right now. I have been a healer for some 20 years. This is just not fun what they have going now. I'll always check back in after some time, but it's not worth my money right now. Based on how subscription numbers have dropped by millions over the years, you know I am not the only one. I, and many other healers, feel like the developers do not understand what healers want. We are used to being put on the back-burner and it honestly sucks. We can't even quest as healers ("just switch to another spec"). We should be able to heal NPCs to fight for us or something. It's odd to me that such an opinion comes off as extreme when it really shouldn't - it should be baseline to the game-play. It's indicative to just how far away the developer's minds are from what would be good for healers.
The second part to this whole current healer meta problem is the reaction from non-healers as well. They do not understand our frustration and respond with negativity on the forums. Healers are bashed constantly. A large portion of players do not want to be made to feel like they are worthless to others or are doing their job wrong when what's really the culprit is the healer meta itself. Being the target of hate is going to make people tap out. The problems of the current healer meta have a ripple effect that touches many facets of the game.
Playing my Rdruid is super stressful this expansion. Feel like I can't let my HoTs work by themselves to top people off.
In my opinion as a healer, this season it is mandatory to precast skills when dealing with certain mechanics. I think that not all specs have the ability to react to the unexpected instantly. thats make the role boring and punishing.
The only healing I know it's the classic ones XD flash heal on tank spam. OMG vanilla is so good I'm crying every time I think of it :Q_____
I didn't think they would ever go back to WotLK when they did exactly the same mistake and healers started to complain that healing became whack-a-mole game. It also made Val'anyr disproportionately more powerful because shields were the only thing that allowed to create a cushion that allowed to avoid playing that game
While often need burst heal, or even AOE burst heal, they forced to dealing damage beside healing. That is why more and more healer leaving the M+. Simply to say they are far more overwhelmed than the tank and the dd-s. Better design would be that in dungeon and raids the healers damage would be suppressed greatly. The devs have no idea how to make harder a fight beside making hard the healing. Usually the parties and raids want to minimalize the healers or force them to heal. Either way making the healers job much more difficult and when shit happens they are blaming the healer(s). A new extra difficulty that the evokers range of far shorter then another healers. I often stay in the centre of the raid which is kinda suck because the mechanic of lots of my skills, but even from the centre, I often cant reach the half of the raid.
Problem is, with the current design of many dps, you won't need healers if there is no need for burst healing. I can self heal myself just fine with my DH/ret without a healer if it's only slow dmg. It would require a redesign of dps specs as well as healers specs.
Its not only bad for healers, i as a dd get the feeling that i am squishy as fuck no matter how many cds i use. Fights like rasza and Kurog were you could use your entire def cds in under a minute and then were pretty much helpless. It gets rediculus when you begin to look at a piece of new gear and dont think: oh nice + x primary stat or sec stat but instead oh nice x amount of vitality, maybe now i can survive boss ability x when i am not at 100% health.
Yeah, I love healing, but it is *miserable* right now. There's not enough to go around in raid and there's too much to go around in keys. I've only been in endgame since Shadowlands and it's just not fun right now.
Think I fully agree someone who is at 80% hp shouldn't be at risk of dying. Old healing was much more fun. Healing is literally coming and using a cd at the right time rather than the ability of the actually heals
I solo healed the Garosh HC (Thok 25man HC as well) as a disc in the O'days. Probably lost 2-3kg-s on the fight, but it was fun AF. :D
Btw. I totally agree with you! It's bothering me too, that some abilities kill you in one shot at 80% Hp...
I just wish mana management was still a skill set that's useful. I basically only find Disc Priest to be any interesting to play, due to how hard it is to execute correctly. All the other healers were way more interesting when they had to think about the trade-off they did between which heals they were casting.
I don’t care if you do 12 dps stop taking avoidable damage, I’ve mained healers and tanks since sunwell in bc and I just got ksh on my tank and only at 2200 on my healer and I’m done with healing is not fun anymore it’s pure chaos and insanity
They also need to do something about healers and defenses, take holy priest e.g.. At the moment I play restoration shaman, and tbf, I mained that for ages. Never a dull moment, esp. in pugs, if I don't heal, people die lol :D !
Great video. The degree that damge coem out and your basically alive or dead in a 2second span constatnly I agree is awful. Hopefully they listent o the feed back!
The only healer that should be doing damage consistently is a disc priest, the rest should be healing…. The old days man
Did nobody tell you? It’s the overhealing pad the meter expansion. Gotta keep those overheals up! If you don’t, we all get one shot!
I quit to go play ffxiv but the mechanics of those fights are equaly as boring, you either know exactly where to stand or die very very boring
the way healing in wow currently is is a lot like FFXIV Savage fights where if you literally miss 1 mitigation or mechanic the whole group dies lol feels really annoying tbh
Having raided mythic every raid since 8.3, I can 100% say the most fun I've had on a fight was Mythic Maut intermission in Nyalotha - Scaled well with gear so you couldn't "outgear" the healing check, constant damage going out, able to control damage taken if your healers are struggling, or just pumping DPS and HPS
I have not seen a fight nearly as well done as that since :c
All of 8.3 was great. Nzoth Mythic was really fun just because of the huge damage all the time. But my fav was probably Shad'har, just due to how hectic and constant the damage output was. :) Didn't scale with gear, though, the damage was insane still.
I can not stress this enough. I noticed it as well in the first season of df (I took a break in sl). Everything healer do now is top everything as fast as they can. Where is the constistent damage in raids? Healing is not that fun anymore if you have to fight with every other healer for the next burst dmg that lasts like 3 secs :/
Back in legion blizzard had this goal of letting ppl sit at 70% hp or 60% hp and that was fine. That was the play style for it. Now it feels like they took a 180 with that.
Why not nerf dps defensives and stop those -90% spellz ? More healer = faster queus and more keys. they have to make the role less sweaty and more fun.
healing as become less enjoyable overall for many expansions now, the classes and the game play of healing specs are great i love them but the actual experience of healing itself is just not fun, do to the over saturation of mechanics and damage coming from every single direction at all time some not even clear or visible you just have to know its there sometimes , now when it comes to wow its the reason im not a healer main ( which makes me sad since i main healing in almost any other game or mmo that has it) and my experience is not involving high end healing content but you know its bad that even though i dont to the top end stuff and i still find it frustrating,
playing classic (since i didnt play wow until cata and i didnt touch healing then) i felt that healing was more intuitive and relied more on actual understanding of what was going on (which of course you still do now but it feels less so) rather then give healers a bunch of buttons some cases a lot of button bloat so that they can just burst heal everything because we are gonna just make everything stressful and burst all the time
I really like current state where healers are support and utility classes And are not afk spamming 1 button. There are a lot of situations where you have nothing to heal and can do damage. And it is great.
we're back in the same situation as in end of WOTLK,... instantly top someone or he's dead
Agreed. Some of the most fun I'vve had healing is when the health pools are relatively high vs healing, like at the start of dragonflight, when people were new to the dungeons M0 and taking a lot of avoidable dmg, was a lot of fun to heal, healing healthbars was more of a tug-of-war push/pull than whack-a-mole. They need to scale up health as M+ keys go higher, or healing is reduced as M+ keys go higher (and the monster dmg doesn't scale quite as fast as well) so that pushing higher content doesn't just become binary "pass/fail". I'm in a weird spot right now where I need to be pushing mid 20s, but I just don't want to it's not fun. And I would argue that it's not my skill that helps the group hit the timer, it's on everyone to NOT stand in bad because it WILL kill you. Has nothing to do with the healer strength/skill. I actually miss healing early content and, as weird as it sounds, when people were constantly standing in bad and taking lots of damage but not dying outright. I felt like I had a big impact on the success of the run. I'd like to see the gameplay mimic this by reducing the avoidable damage that kills you outright and adding more unavoidable damage while scaling health fast enough to keep the heals relatively small vs health pools.
This is well written, and I wholly agree. All healing specs sort of have the same gameplay in raids, because overall there's way too much output for the "non-bursty" moments to be of any consequence. They all just have to look at the incoming mechanics and prepare, like what should be mostly a disc priest or resto druid's skill expression. There's no distinction there anymore. And in M+ it's straight up awful to play. I feel like a detriment to groups, because I don't know exactly when to pop my cooldowns, and that's even though I'm doing key levels where reacting to damage should be a reasonable way to play a healer.
As someone who outright quit the game because of the healing issues and its bullshit that blizzard is starting to add, They made healing outright a total nightmare for too many people and i dont see the point in playing anymore because its just not fair and a total waste of time.
The best time for me as a healer was begining of cata especially chogal because people were never at 100% and it was really inefficient to try to keep them at 100%
this video really nails the problem, im finding healing less and less fun as the healer checks are just too easy. And yet the damage patterns are really bursty, its just not satisfying as a healer
I think the actual issue is a lack of niches for healers. I have 3 characters (spriest, druid, and prot pally) all around 3k rating for m+ and will only be talking about this from an m+ perspective as I don't raid often to care.
I think for m+ the healers are relatively balanced enough but there is a lot of blending of niches. Currently, there's only 1 baseline thing needed from all healers which is to be able to reach the bare minimum of healing output of a dungeon. Anything more than that is what creates the niche. Disc priests have the lowest output but do a lot of dmg, have good CDs, and can buff a key DPS. Druids have the highest output and mobility, while providing decent dmg. Evokers are Jack of all trades and bring lust. These three classes dominate their own niches and the other less viable classes can't compete. Why take a monk that doesn't have the hps output or dmg when you can take literally any other healer? Why take a holy priest when they are just worse versions of an druid/evoker? Resto shamans are definitely a partial exception but in the end if they didn't have lust their viability would be questioned a lot more.
In m+ the goal will always be to reach the baseline healing needed the fastest, so you can do things like more dmg (or if you want to think of it this way, the faster you can do the healing, the more you can do other things). Dungeons should require different healing outputs (some should have large bursts where others are slow burns). The fix should be along with adding more of a niche and a unique spec design to each healer. Balance all healers to reach the bare minimum and then play around with the niches. Maybe monk becomes the cc healing spec? Maybe holy priest becomes a buff/utility spec? Maybe another spec becomes good at burst healing and bad at sustained healing? Maybe another has great burst healing and low dmg when cooldowns are popped, and then high dmg and low healing when they aren't (like burst windows for healing). Right now, the meta specs (especially druid and evoker) just do the jobs of other healers better. And that's not even getting into the differences of pugs and premade groups cuz God knows I won't trust a pug disc priest and would only pick up a resto shaman if we don't have lust. Basically, what I'm saying is each healer should have their lane that they alone excel at which will make them more viable.
Tldr the biggest issue is that the healing needs of dungeons are too similar, specs aren't very unique because of a lack of niches, and the design of m+ in general are more catered to reaching the baseline amount of healing needed as quickly as possible so you can do other things.
feels tome like healers are based off their surviability and CC they bring, as holy priest i dont have interrupt, i have instead weird stun in chastise and fear, i also have magic dispell - we actually wiped +20 Academy, bcs my friend didnt realize i dont have dispell poison for the tree boss and that mechanic would just one shot him without dispell of poison
@@poro9084priest is a huge disadvantage in M+ feels so bad I just don’t do it anymore
Late to comment but i agree healers need to heal again and not do all the mechanics for everyone else so they can have a great time. Its no wonder the healer population is so low not many people want to heal, dps and do each pulls mechanics, while everyone else is just yapping in disc having a great old time chilling. Might be a bit over the top there but it feels like that at times in dungeons at least.
The only problem is youtubers like you making videos like this gaslighting ppl into believeing there is a problem, the only problem with healing i encounter is either player skill or gear nothing else
I started offspec healing part way into mythic vault and definitely felt like the most important part of healing was making sure our healer CDs were coming out at the exact right time. Everything else was kinda eh
It leaves much less room for skill expression. :(
as a resto druid in m+ I do 40m healing and 70m overheal -_- 1 spel go of and a dps lose 95%hp