Buff healers now, they feel weaker than ever

Community General Discussion
22

The quick answer : NO. Healers are fine. Even HPal.

The long answer :

NO. Buffing healers will be worse than leaving them as they are.

Buffing/nerfing healing is a never ending cycle of Catch 22 situations. It has been ongoing since Classic, with different policy changes.

Some expansions healers are immortal gods, others they actually have to work.

There are three main problems with healing (PvE) at the moment :

  • (A) As time goes by, Raid and M+ become more and more specialized. To the point where most (if not all) specs use completely different talents. Some even use different gear stats, trinkets, ect…

However, Blizzard is having a really hard time adapting to the situation. Many classes get nerfed/buffed according to the raid, and leave them OP/Worthless in M+. And vice-versa.

Blizzard is catching on though. They “kind of” see that a divorce is inevitable.

Proof of that are the most recent nerfs to discipline Attonement healing. In raid it was ~ -10% overall healing, in M+ no changes.

Another proof is the aforementioned increase to health bars + damage of bosses. That was a 100% raid tuning change, that left M+ in a very, very sketchy situation.

However, 1 or 2 skills being divorced is simply not enough. And the devs (for some unknown reason) hesitate to do what needs to be done and do the complete divorce.

  • (B) The overall problem with healers is that there exists the concept of “over-healing”.

As long as this concept exists, healers will always cycle between being over-stressed with 1-shot mechanics or, AFK for 80% the dungeon.

The solution is simple. Remove over-healing as a concept. Add shields that would effectively be like adding a dynamic HP pool to players.

What this allows Blizzard to do is to balance classes in a % throughput with respect to incoming damage. With out affecting the gameplay (becoming too bursty, or not enough damage).

  • (C) Currently, in M+ healer throughput balance is actually pretty good. Not the best, but pretty close.

However, when healer throughput is “well balanced” then Utility (and DPS) is used to define the meta. For minor utility options (like slows, stuns, CCs and so on) most healers have something of value they provide. So its not a big issue.

The issue is with the “irreplaceable major buffs” some bring to the party. Those are : BL, CR, and PI.

And that is why RDruid is meta in high keys right now. Because of DD and tank meta. None of them provide CR, and RDruid provides it. And performs slightly better in both HPS and DPS than HPal does.

And Priest meta in high keys specifically depends on which of the 3 specs is “decent enough” for high keys. When SP is on par (DPS wise) to other caters, the meta shifts to SP and Disc+Holy stop being meta. And vice-versa.

All because of Fortitude and PI.

And shaman “meta” depends on DDs that provide BL, and its relative power to PEvoker.

So if you want to “normalize the meta” you should normalize those 3 buffs. BL, CR and PI.

23

Lol, what?

Did you even play s3 as a healer?

The damage was very spiky to the point that people would die and you couldn’t actually heal it if they didn’t press defensives.

The hardest fight to heal so far this season out of the dungeons I’ve done is still khajin in halls of infusion but it was still easy compared to s2, holy priest has been buffed since then and got a better tier set.

24

I feel this is more related to everyone having multiple defensive CDs and self-healing.

PvP is irrelevant in a discussion about M+. This is a separate issue and healers can be balanced differently for PvP.

1 Like
25

^

I think some DPS are completely overloaded on defensives. Like retri paladins are practically impossible to lose to any damage events unless they straight up don’t press their defensives, on top of them being a vers stacking spec.

Hunters? They’re awful to play with because they tend to just die without being able to press more defensives, so if others don’t press their defensives and you can’t focus on them then they just die.

Same with moonkins, they have barkskin and then bear form. If that doesn’t help, then they just die.

Absolutely awful specs/classes to play with in m+ from a healer pov.

1 Like
26

Okay, so does that constitute a reason for buffing healers or for nerfing those specific DPS? :stuck_out_tongue:

Retri/DK is actually infamously OP right now as a comp.

In any case, I still believe that healer made a mistake. You should not die at 10% unless your entire team messes up and you’re against literally near rank 1 players all while messing up yourself. I refuse to believe that they had literally everything the entire team could do shut down by minute 1, and I think it even more absurd that you use that as a counter-argument against what I’m saying regarding the healing output. If they can’t do any healing output then obviously my statement is irrelevant. It’s when they can. You can’t run them OOM and you can’t outdamage them ever, even with a large amount of players on their tails. You must wait for dampening or pull something completely crazy only an OP class can do - and you’ll probably want two - even against pretty bad healers.

Not if their healing and incoming damage is dramatically weakened - see Shadowlands.

Jesus please no.

That’s what dampening is supposed to do, so yes, but I don’t like the way they’re playing in M+ either. Their throughput is an absurdity and it means that you’ve got things like a boss sticking on your back doing like 20% of your HP a second and stuff like that, or just mechanics that literally straight up 1-shot you.

Yeah, I can CD out of it. But what do you do when you play a class that can’t? Well, you hope your healer is actually good and can pump out like 200k HPS for a bit, or you quit the class and cry to Blizzard. There’s really no way to defend yourself other than an immunity because healers are so strong compared to your own defenses except immunities, and encounters get tuned around it.

27

I definitely don’t agree with this at all.

If people don’t press their defensives, you can’t actually heal the damage that’s going out in a lot of cases.

I tried algethar on +10 several times last week, it’s one of the few keys I’m missing teleports to from DF seasons so I thought I’d get it.

Nope, people just straight up died to the screeches on bird boss. Can’t heal it because they just get one shot because they don’t press defensives.

If it wasn’t that, it was the overlap on vexamus because people didn’t let orb through and then they instadied to the overlap, I couldn’t do anything about that either - they just need to press defensives or they’re dead.

Never managed to do it on a 10 key or higher last week, runs ended at bird boss or vexamus because people didn’t press defensives.

28

Well you clearly didn’t read the whole thing. I did edit it a bit to be fair, to clarify. You have to use immunities - damage reductions often isn’t enough.

I have literally been killed in 3 seconds despite using alter+images in this season.

29

I don’t have any immunities as a holy priest and I’ve managed to survive everything by pressing my fade so far or combining it with desperate prayer if I don’t have enough hp to survive the hit, fade is 10% DR on top of my protective light which is another 10% DR, DP is an additional 25% health for a few seconds but DP has a 1.5 min cd.

A lot of DPS have stronger defensives than that.

Only once have I been one shot through defensive usage and that was due to a misplay on bird boss where the guy didn’t kick the ball in even though he was stood there with it. Everyone but the tank died to that screech because he didn’t put the ball in.

30

Its very possible.

But then last week you likely did IT with people who Had like 900k HP pools while in 4-5 weeks dps will have 1.3 mln and tanks 2 mln + .

Im sure then it will stop 1 shoting people in +10 wont it ?

31

I think this is correlation with ambiguous causation. We could equally say that healers have to be able to counter massive damage bursts and that means they have to have buttons that push a health bar up in 1 GCD.

Personally, I’m not a fan of this reaction testing whack-a-mole. I’d like to get back to a state where it’s ok to have a 3.5 second cast time because player healthbars aren’t bouncing around so perilously, and we’re not going to be forced to move more frequently than those casts would complete.

Which, perhaps ironically, is easier found in raid environments. I am enjoying raid healing, there’s enough overall coverage from the team that I can focus on keeping a steady baseline output and plan ahead to time my cooldowns with damage events. Raiding delivers a steadier, more methodical gameplay for healers. It’s more about finding a rhythm and staying in it than quick reactions. If you do your stuff right and stay in the flow, things will work out.

Move to dungeons however and it’s blam blam blam, spike spike spike, IMPENDING DEATH AVERTED, blam blam blam and it’s just a heaping pile of stress that I think a lot of healers are opting out of. It’s not a coincidence that there’s a healer shortage in the pug pool.

2 Likes
32

Remind me again, how many healer specs made it into the top 0.1% of S3?

33

Or the general dps, tanks are bad in using their defensives on the RIGHT time.

34

Absolutely right, absolutely right! It’s not clear which started the snowball, but the point is there is a snowball, and if you just nerf the damage of enemies then healers just get bored, and if you nerf healers without nerfing the damage you get frustration; so you have to tune healers around the mobs… right?

But the thing is, while mobs can be tuned to whatever we want completely independently, healers are a player specialisation and it has to work across all areas of the game, so you’re not as free. Therefore, I think tuning the healing so it feels like a reasonable design and then designing the enemies around this is the right approach, which is why I worded it that way; saying mob damage must be insanely high to counter insanely high healing.

1 Like
35

Help me clear my memory :

If I recall correctly, in SL the “meta” healers were those that did the most DPS.

Am I right?

Is that what you want? Because then we are back to where we were : Healers AFKing half the dungeon. So damage gets buffed… and what does “buff base damage” mean in a dungeon environment? It means spiky damage. Why? Dungeon scaling. Thats why.

And we are back where we were. I have seen this cycle more than once since classic.

You yourself said it :

Like it or not, mathematically the problem blizz has with healers (the cause of the snowball effect you mention) is the existence of over-healing. Or, fixed (unchanging) HP pools of players if you will.

I can prove it if you want to read a couple of paragraphs.

36

Healing doesn’t matter in low environments where the damage is insignificant to health pools, then it matters a lot in mid environments where failed mechanics chunk people and you have to recover from people’s mistakes, then in high environments healing doesn’t matter outside of predictable unavoidable damage because every mistake / avoidable damage event just results in death.

You genuinely end up doing more healing in a 6 than a 12 right now.

38

I played holy priest in season 4 of SL and was night fae, my dps was basically non-existent due to being NF but people were very eager to invite me when I was pugging.

It was absolutely ridiculous giving the cooldown reduction part of the night fae ability to a fire mage. Lead to pretty high uptimes on combustion.

I had an uldaman +8 where people were like “bro, heal more”.

I was at almost 200k hps overall when we killed the 4th boss and they were still dropping like flies and then they left. My DPS was non-existent.

Bro, stop the casts.

I then did a +9 algethar where I did like 47k hps overall. It’s insane how much of a difference a good or bad group makes for how much you have to heal.

39

simply healers have to heal … and do it best as posible… heal is not suppose to be easy that healer is half of time is doing dmg … simply helear is to heal and dps is do to other stuff

40

This counts as DPS.

Like the Vesper Totem of Shaman. I had other options. But for M+ it was the choice that did most DPS.

Otherwise, Shamans (meta healer in SL) would have gone Venthir with Chain Harvest.

Also I don’t know what key levels you played. But in my case I was most DEFINITELY constrained by DPS. My 1st leggo was Elemental with Earthquake. And none other.

And I don’t remember in SL depleted keys because of lack of healing.

It was ALWAYS lack of DPS.

I was looking at recounts more than health bars… cause if stuff did not die, we would not time the key.

41

I did up to +26, attempted 28 gambit but we ate dirt so hard. Tank just disintegrated on pull, wasn’t a DK tank.

Tried to play gambit several times until it had been depleted down to a 23 before I gave up, lol. We almost made it to last boss on either the 27 or 26 one but somehow the whole area at last boss got pulled and we wiped. We would’ve had enough time for 1 try if we didn’t wipe to that.

42

That’s assuming tanks have those cds aviable.

Same is with healers too.

Problem with bad groups is that both tanks and healers often have to blow their cds to early and then improvise when they dont have them up for when they know they will need them