You may have heard that healing in Cataclysm is going to feel different. The role will be more challenging, particularly in terms of resource management. This won?t be news to a lot of regular forum readers, but I see enough ?why nerf healers?? concerns that I thought it was still a worthwhile topic for an inaugural developer blog.

As a blanket statement, healer mana wasn?t a big concern in Wrath of the Lich King. You could run out of mana sometimes, but it really didn?t affect your spell choice in the way it did prior to Lich King. We think resources should be important, though. A lot of gameplay in a wide variety of games comes down to managing a limited resource, whether it's Vespene Gas in an RTS, ammo in an FPS, or even time in a puzzle game. Managing your resources well makes you a better player. Not being limited by resources can feel empowering over a short period of time, but only because it feels like you?re breaking the rules. In fact you are breaking the rules, and once those short periods of time have ended, a game can quickly lose its luster. Godmode isn?t nearly as compelling in the long term as it might seem at first glance.

Now, it is true that resource management is an even bigger part of the game for healers than it is for other roles. ?Not fair!? you might be ready to cry. I used this analogy once before, and it seemed to resonate with lots of people, so I?ll use it again. Dealing damage is like a sprint. You typically want to go as fast as you can. Healing isn?t a race though -- it?s more like darts. You want to be as precise as you can. A big part of the healing gameplay is using the right tool for the right job. The resource cost of those tools is one of the things that differentiates them. Remove the resource constraint and you lose one dimension that differentiates the tools. Good healers used to pride themselves on keeping everyone standing up without running out of mana.

For a number of reasons, all of which were completely our fault, healers had too much mana regeneration in Wrath of the Lich King. Let?s look at the consequences of infinite mana for a moment.

For starters, those expensive, fast heals were never a difficult choice. Expensive doesn?t really apply in the absence of a cost, so they were just fast heals. Why wouldn?t you want to cast a fast heal? Healer gameplay became smaller because they had fewer options. Rather than choosing the right tool, everyone picked a spell such as Power Word: Shield, Flash of Light or Rejuv, and just used that spell. Over and over. We think a cornerstone of good gameplay is making interesting decisions. When your toolbox is too small (because the expensive or slow spells are immediately discarded as tools) then you are making fewer interesting decisions.

Second, since healers weren?t really running out of mana, we had to find other ways to make those raid encounters that were designed to be challenging actually challenging. That often came down to very high tank or raid damage. So now not only did healers not have much of a choice about which spell to use, but they also had to use that spell every global cooldown or risk someone dying. This made healing stressful without the reward of having made good decisions. If you healed the wrong target, hesitated for a moment, or had a laggy connection, then someone was going to die.

Third, anything that played off of mana regeneration, such as a talent, a stat like Spirit, or even a proc from a trinket, became undesirable. Furthermore, since mana wasn?t a concern, overhealing was also not a concern, and players did it with abandon. When everything is an overheal already, then stats like critical strike chance also become devalued.

Fourth, PvP balance suffered. When healers could easily heal anyone to full without fear of overhealing or running out of mana, then battles became very binary. You either killed someone or you didn?t. Nobody sat in a wounded state very long. There was no sense of a changing tide or someone coming from behind. Imagine a tennis match where the outcome of the first serve won or lost the entire match. We could have improved this situation by increasing health pools, which is exactly what we did for Cataclysm, but larger health pools with infinite mana would just make bosses feel unthreatening.

To be clear, we don?t want healers to constantly run out of mana. We want them to run out of mana when they don?t play well. And we don?t want them to always fail. But we do want them to feel good when they are challenged, and overcome those challenges to succeed. When someone is wounded, we want healers to consider whether to use a slow, efficient heal (because they aren?t in immediate threat of dying) or a fast, expensive heal (because they are). That?s called triage, and it was notably missing from the Lich King healing environment. We think triage will make healing more fun. We?re making this change not to make healers sad by nerfing them, but to make healers happy by making the game more fun for them.

Spookysheep posted:

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As usual Ghostcrawler is a complete moron.

He keeps saying what HE thinks healers will find fun, instead of hearing what millions of actual healers are saying they find fun.


How this guy has a job in the industry is a huge mystery.

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-Spacelord- posted:

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I am a healer and i completely approves this. Where else can you not run out of mana without cheating?

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Talehon69 posted:

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Right now damn near no one runs OOM, DPS or otherwise...

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Spookysheep posted:

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As usual Ghostcrawler is a complete moron.

He keeps saying what HE thinks healers will find fun, instead of hearing what millions of actual healers are saying they find fun.


How this guy has a job in the industry is a huge mystery.

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Spookysheep posted:

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As usual Ghostcrawler is a complete moron.

He keeps saying what HE thinks healers will find fun, instead of hearing what millions of actual healers are saying they find fun.


How this guy has a job in the industry is a huge mystery.

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Spookysheep posted:

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As usual Ghostcrawler is a complete moron.

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Voqar posted:

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It's kinda the same as putting CC back in instances. I'm fine with it - I've been playing MMORPGs forever and used to have no choice but to do intelligent strategic pulls back in the day. But once you make WoW an AE slaughterfest that any moron with semi-decent gear can tank and morons with no concept of threat can DPS, you can't just strip it away - you'll crush 50% of your players because they're too stupid to handle anything beyond coloring book difficulty.

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Voqar posted:

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I consider myself an excellent healer and kinda get sick of trade chat mouth breathers even doing half as well as me because of an addon and infinite mana.

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Spookysheep posted:

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That's the thing. Blizzard subscription number dramatically expanded due to the "ease of use."


All these crap changes are going to backfire on them when the mouth breathers can't get dungeon and raid groups any more

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Ravynmagi posted:

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I disliked the infinite mana healers had. As a battleground player this was particularly annoying. So the change sounds good to me.

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Malachi256 posted:

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Ravynmagi posted:

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I disliked the infinite mana healers had. As a battleground player this was particularly annoying. So the change sounds good to me.

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/agree 100% Healers in BGs are ridiculous right now.

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HotJidda posted:

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Why? Because you can't perma-stun them? Or you can't 1-2 shot the soft clothies?

Grow up...they gave healers some staying power in PvP so ridiculous mages, melee's don't eat them for lunch everytime and you QQ about it?

The healers that've owned you probably out geared you and out played you...live with it. You won't always win.

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Malachi256 posted:

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HotJidda posted:

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Why? Because you can't perma-stun them? Or you can't 1-2 shot the soft clothies?

Grow up...they gave healers some staying power in PvP so ridiculous mages, melee's don't eat them for lunch everytime and you QQ about it?

The healers that've owned you probably out geared you and out played you...live with it. You won't always win.

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Lol no. Most healers right now cannot be outplayed in a 1 on 1 situation by a long shot. They take multiple dps to take them down, and that's assuming that NONE of the healer's allies are actually protecting them.

Healers shouldn't be the tanks of PvP - a 1 on 1 fight between a focused dps and a healer should be at least close (and if it goes long, should at least run out the healer's mana). If a healer gets ganged up on, it should be a "burn CDs to survive a while, and then get killed" kind of situation, unless allies come to help protect them. As it stands now, healers tank multiple dps while their own dps kill everyone. It's stupid.

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Malachi256 posted:

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Most of the healers I'm seeing in BGs right now are druids and paladins, and they are exactly as I describe. I see fewer disc priests and shaman, but they're still around and seem to do just fine as well.

Nonetheless, if you're getting killed that fast by a rogue / feral / warrior, something tells me you're playing the class wrong. (Warriors could produce some crazy burst if they got lucky, but they got hit hard with the nerf bat in this patch, so you can't complain there)

What is your resilience and total HP?

Do you have and use the glyph of pain suppression?

Are you going into risky situations while your trinket is down?

Stuff like that. If you really want a better analysis, you could link your character from the armory, but I'd understand if you didn't want to do that.

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HotJidda posted:

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Malachi256 posted:

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Ravynmagi posted:

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I disliked the infinite mana healers had. As a battleground player this was particularly annoying. So the change sounds good to me.

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/agree 100% Healers in BGs are ridiculous right now.

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Why? Because you can't perma-stun them? Or you can't 1-2 shot the soft clothies?

Grow up...they gave healers some staying power in PvP so ridiculous mages, melee's don't eat them for lunch everytime and you QQ about it?

The healers that've owned you probably out geared you and out played you...live with it. You won't always win.

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spaceurface posted:

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"Fourth, PvP balance suffered. When healers could easily heal anyone to full without fear of overhealing or running out of mana, then battles became very binary. You either killed someone or you didn?t. Nobody sat in a wounded state very long. There was no sense of a changing tide or someone coming from behind. Imagine a tennis match where the outcome of the first serve won or lost the entire match."

Yay.

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