I have never really felt like this. At least with the groups I have played with, I still always spent most of the time healing and dispelling, plus the CC/utility stuff. My dps rarely (or probably never) decided whether or not a key was timed. It was just a few extra buttons to press and gave me a more “holistic” feeling about the class.
I feel that healers being able to damage doesn’t depend on the healer, but on the group. If you play with DPS that play mechanics well, use their defensives and self-healing properly, interrupt and stun/stop correctly, then the healer can do damage. If they don’t, the healer has no time for doing damage.
In most average groups I have healed, people have not played flawlessly (neither have I), so there is always a lot of avoidable damage that goes through, leaving me with less or no time to do damage. It is a large part of why I value good DPS players very highly.
We have had different experiences. Granted, I never got into difficult content, but pugging content is still a valid way to convey experiences.
At times there was so little healing required that you can focus on dealing damage for 15 seconds. Just drop 2xHealing Stream totem, maybe use Ancestral Guidance and let Lava Burst / Chain Lightning “do the healing”. But when many times I decided to not deal damage and instead stay “passive”/ready for the next incoming damage tick, my damage would be very low and yes, there would be people in a M+ sub-10 key that would throw a fit about it.
(Of course at other times I would pop Ascendance together with Healing Tide and it would still not be enough to keep everyone alive, but that’s another story)
But even without dealing damage, a healer easily uses more than 20 unique abilities per boss fight, more than damage dealers.
I think that is probably part of what makes balancing roles and specs difficult: players engage in vastly different types of content. Just raiding and M+ are completely different in the way what healers and tanks do, and that’s before the difficulty tiers/key levels.
I don’t really know what to play in TWW. I had sort of settled on the DK because it’s been forever since I played melee and my group of friends consists of quite a few people who want to heal. My idea was to focus on Frost DK (easy to play, good survivability, useful utility like grips and AMZ) and Blood as off-spec, but they keep nerfing the DK’s hero talents and now Frost gets further nerfed. So maybe I’ll just tank, but then again, I can’t do that in my new raid group (full on tanks).
Ah well, this game causes more headaches than I feel is reasonable for a video game. The early beta was really fun, but the end product is very watered down in terms of how some classes play/feel.
Ironic that you say that because before those changes go live, I find it already hard sometimes to even keep my DDs alive as a healer because they stand in fire or similar since they can’t see in all the spell effects blasting around and mobs covering up their character.
It’s not just different content - it’s the group setup and player ability that plays a huge role.
For one, not all classes are created equal. There are massive differences not only in DPS, but also personal cooldowns, CC and interrupts. Then you’ll have different player ability to make use of the tools the class offers, or in some cases even to simply move out of bad stuff.
And then you will have players that will actively look to mitigate relevant incoming damage (or stop it altogether via CC), while others will either just press their personals whenever they’re off cooldown or never use them at all.
Personally, I feel a bigger difference in dungeon difficulty depending on who I am playing with rather than the key level itself. A 13-15 with more competent friends (or randoms) will be easier to heal than a 10 with less able people, simply because the latter will do nothing to mitigate damage or control the mobs and will require a lot more healing overall.
If there is one thing I am annoyed with it’s the lack of meaningful healer DPS. I feel that in SL I was better able to contribute to overall DPS without it feeling too powerful. In DF damage has been nerfed down to 30-50% of what a tank will do. There is also only very little difference in me having more GCDs available for damage vs me having to spend a good amount of time healing. I feel that there is very little reward in playing efficiently, as healer DPS is completely irrelevant outside of maybe the top 1%.
Definitely true. A couple days ago I did two BH +12s with friends back to back (on my DK, I was dps). The first one was horrible: HPS was below 90k, one of the dps did 200k over the instance. Lots of accidental pulls, poor interrupts. I think we were 7 minutes over. We swapped a couple people and played the same key again. HPS was 150k, everyone did between 400k and 500k dps, stuff got interrupted better, no oopsie pulls, and we timed it easily.
This makes it hard for me to evaluate my own ceiling and ability, especially with a spec/role I’m not very familiar with. I suppose I could do 14s, and maybe 15s, but to find out I have to play with people who can do this too.
[quote=“Elysia-die-todeskrallen, post:70, topic:527696”]
For one, not all classes are created equal. There are massive differences not only in DPS, but also personal cooldowns, CC and interrupts.[/quote]
Absolutely. I also tried a +12 on my BM hunter this week, and the lack of good self-healing and potent defensive CDs, plus a long interrupt, made that an awful experience. The healer couldn’t keep up with the AoE damage (it was RLP), and I stood there with 20% HP and everything being on CD far too often. That experience immediately ruled out hunter for TWW for me.
Tank strength had nothing to do with why people quit Cata. People quit Cata because the dungeons were too hard and the new levelling experience was worse, and at the time most people enjoyed levelling the most.
Power is just one of many factors for popularity. Tanks have always been less common than DPS regardless of whether they’re weak or strong.
Another good reason why tanks are so rare right now is that the imbalance among them is INSANE. At the present time, if you do not enjoy DH, you just can’t tank, leading to fewer tanks as many people don’t want to play DH, myself included.
The main reason I don’t play tank is because I find all of them too spammy. It’s painful to play; physically. I tanked for 6 years, for context.
This change will allow Blizzard to tune the game in such a way that keeping DPS alive will be less stressful.
Because of tank and healer changes… and after 3mil left they made them easier… And to this day Blizzard still think they know best see D4 launch lol then the zombie live stream when the player base went
Imo the problem with D4 is that the mobs scale to the player followed by basically an equivalent to m+.
A game like WoW can get carried through this mistake simply by being a social experience where people play for one another, and WoW is, after all, less gear and levelling focused than an ARPG.
But for a game like Diablo 4 it is a catastrophic design decision. The whole purpose of the genre is to level up and gain gear so you can push further forward. If you scale everything to the player based on level, a level-up becomes a punishment that makes you weaker across the board, and a level-up is the most most important moment in the game.
Nobody wants to play that game.
Diablo 4’s story carried it for me, but as soon as it was over, so was my fun. The moment-to-moment gameplay is fine, but on a larger scale it is so fundamentally broken it beggars belief.
Thats Statement is only true If you Play for 0.1% of top Players.
There are only a few Players with a ceratin group constellation that are able to Play without healers.
Yes, the contrast between dungeon healing in WotLK and Cataclysm was massive. It was extremely unenjoyable to heal in random dungeons. Heals seemed to do barely any healing, everyone was half-dead all the time unless I spammed flash heals which left me mana-dry, and people still didn’t play mechanics or use self CDs. I was a druid back then and switched to feral after the first week of Cataclysm. Didn’t heal for the remainder of the expansion.
in all the spell effects blasting around and mobs covering up their character.
