To be fair SL dungeons were mechanicaly way way easier and way less publishing then DF ones.
Especialy bosses Had maybe 1 really deadly mechanic rest was just Basic competence / position check
Season 4 in SL was so fun on holy priests - not only you Had the SL holy priest toolkit which they reworked but i was on like 60 percent mastery at some point 
Was only season when i tried out healing keys 
From a fairly casual point of view, the DF dungeons are just horrible. At least to me it feels like the damage patterns in DF dungeons in general favour massive and frequently occurring burst windows for both trash mobs and bosses rather than an ebb and flow of low consistent and high burst damage to let you catch a breath every so often. It’s high damage bursts all the way to the loot chest.
S3 felt a lot better in that regard IMO. You had a nice mix of different damage patterns, and there have been very few legitimate healer complaints during that season. Now that we’re freshly into S4 and back on DF dungeons, healer complaints are here again. I don’t really think this is a coincidence. Tuning down numbers will only make the same problem come back in higher key levels. It’s a fundamental dungeon design flaw IMO.
But yeah, grain of salt, I am a fairly average player and in no way anywhere even close to the top end.
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I remember something different.
What I remember was that healers were complaining that they were DPSing and wanted to heal.
Not really, no. “Healers” mostly accepted that our role expanded beyond its simplistic and spammy roots. Filling empty GCDs with other abilities was fun and refreshing over sitting around, waiting for mana to come back. Or just standing around doing nothing because you couldn’t waste mana on anything but heals.
There were some people who couldn’t really grow beyond casting a spell every 4 or 5 seconds to conserve mana. Or those who were used to only having 5 buttons to worry about at any given time. But it’s far from the majority and certainly not “healers” in general. The role feels a lot better than it used to.
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Definitely.
Just gonna add my 2 cents.
I personally think a lot of problems stem from the insane amount of defensives most people have access to nowadays. Take WW for example, Karma, Dampen Harm, Fortifying brew and diffuse magic.
It got to the point in SL where the DPS just took care of themselves. And even to a big degree it’s the same in DF. But they’ve added more spiky dmg where if people don’t have anything it’s just one shot fiestas. Because if it’s not that spiky then the DPS just heal it themselves.
I think it balance healing again, the first step is normalize and reduce the amount of defensives DPS have access to.
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idk what u all are playing but hpal struggles with 15s while rdruid is fine till 18s and can also do above with premade
last season 3 was more spiky oneshot damage, this season is more fun in damage profiles for healers to actually heal aoe that ramps
just the throughput and cd cycling is very off for hpals, throughput is not off for prevoker or rdruids
you can have 520 gear and struggle on 400k hps as hpal while doing 600k as rdruid - on 5 mans, i just speak for 5 mans, raid is outdated content
You don’t have the data to prove that.
Before the season even started all the best players ask “whats the best likely to be?” and re-roll to it.
First off that means that all the top runs will automatically be that class - the data is skewed. Next it means that the people left playing pally are probably the diehards that love the class but are in a group that is overall less capable.
That does not mean the bit I quoted is remotely true. Your exception (if you find one) is not the rule.
Why don’t you just post “waaa hpala iz bad” at least thats more honest than making up ‘facts’ through a reality distortion lens.
There were a lot of hps checks in M+ dungeon in shadowlands. The problem more was there were a lot of moments you exactly needed 0 healing to do. The whole platform part of theater of pain was an insane hps check, and the boss there too.
We must have been playing different games.
There were a buttload of places in SL where there were healing checks. 3rd boss in sanguine depths comes to mind. As do most of the others in there to an extent. ditto do da other side and so on and so on.
In my humble opinion, there are a couple of changes from SL into DF.
For one, tanks have become a lot more self reliant. No, a tank cannot solo high keys, but they do not need specific healer attention like they used to. For 90% of the time, a bit of trickle healing will keep a tank alive and well. So healers need to be kept “engaged” elsewhere.
Following the general “toughening up” of tanks (and some DPS), dungeon damage patterns have changed from a mix of different damage types to mostly very spiky burst windows where everyone needs to pop defensives to survive. My guess is that they thought that introducing more - and more frequent - burst windows this would create enough immediacy despite everyone’s tankiness to make healers needed again.
However:
Your average Hunter will just press Exhilaration every time the button lights up. The average PUG DPS will not remember damage patterns and will likely not have defensives available for when they actually need them. If they use any defensives at all. The cursed mid-key range is infamous for still having a lot of players trying to bruteforce content like they know from hero/M0/sub-10 keys, but with DF dungeons this creates an environment where the damage doesn’t immediately kill the DPS, but creates a massive amount of stress on the healer because they now need to counteract the DPS’ lack of defensive usage.
Once you get past that stage and start playing with people that know when to use their defensives, it gets a lot easier again. But from what I noticed in S1-S2, most healers seem to have given up on healing in the 15-18 range already.
Then let’s get to S3 for a moment, the healer resurgence. The one thing that had changed was the dungeon rotation. Now we had almost an entire set of non-DF dungeons, and suddenly M+ was a lot more enjoyable to play. Yes, it was also a lot easier, but incoming damage felt much more varied, with much better spaced out burst windows. I had more fun in S3 than any of the previous seasons, and from what I see in S4, that is going to be dreadful again, thanks to the horrible dungeon design in DF.
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Yeah, 100% correct. There were healer checks.
If there were no healer checks at all (as in ZERO) the meta would have been 4 dps. But it wasent.
But in between those healer checks (which were usually 1 boss in the dungeon) what was there? Nothing. Pure AFK.
Therefore, the generalized meta at the time was to bring max DPS healer because in-between the odd healer check you wanted to go as fast as possible.
And because of it, assuming you did all the mechanics right, the limiting factor of a key was dps.
In other words : M+ scales damage and HP of mobs. And the “maximum” key level was the one where the mobs had so much HP that you did not have enough DPS to time it.
Unlike today, where the “maximum” key level was the one where mobs do so much damage that you cant survive the key.
And a lot of those “healer checks” came from stuff like omega first pull in Halls , or DPS not interupting stuff like on platforma in theater or those few dancerous packs in angel dungeon (damn i already forgot thr name :p)
Even when you did everything right you had a lot of real big healing checks without quotes around it.
This doesn’t make your experience of the game less valid than the top 1%, tbh. If anything, how the average player feels is the most important thing.
I’m not exactly cutting edge material either, but I usually end up with some portals by the end of a season. My subjective impression is that DF dungeons just aren’t very fun, and S4 is bringing that to the front because there’s nothing else. All of them have heavy healing checks, spikes and bursts, while a number have mechanics whereby there is nothing a healer can do to fix mistakes. There’s not even an outlier easy dungeon, there’s no BRH or SBG where you can pick up a weekly for your vault and know that even a bad pug can do this one just fine.
But it is early in the season. It’s possible that once everyone is going into +8s with 510+ gear, they’ll start being comfortable. Although those orbs in AV still hit for 2 million in a +2 so I’m not convinced they will ever be survivable.
While overall difficulty curve may turn out to be fine - but this doesn’t stop me disliking the design. I don’t enjoy being reaction tested all the time, I like when I can get into a smooth flow and rhythm. Right now there isn’t one, there’s just reacting to player errors leaving them on 10% hp with a mechanic coming up that will hit them for 70%.
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It’s a shame in a way, because it makes healers much more picky when it comes to who they invite or run with, more so than before, I feel.
I’m only at timing 8s so far, so I don’t know what 12s are like. A acquaintance of mine heals 10s right now and her overall HPS is usually lower than mine, by a fair margin, and her overall DPS is higher. Unlike me, she’s very picky about who she plays with and flat out refuses to play with some classes/specs or people (even friends whose dps is lower). It’s not how I play the game, or why I play it, but I get where she is coming from.
Hm i refuse to Play only with 2 specs healer evoker and augment.
Most of those have been and are complete trash .
I can count on fingers of 1 Hand good players playing those specs in m+ i did over whole DF
I am enjoying them a lot to be honest.
The only outlier I would say are the changes they did to BH.
The decay totem in the corridor to the 2nd boss is WAY to dangerous, and people still haven’t caught on to using cauldrons.
I liked the design of that mechanic in S2. Now… I think that mechanic alone ruined a good dungeon. They should backtrack on it because I dont understand why they needed to change it.
That, or someone figures out a super tech route that avoids those totems. Im still waiting.
It feels to me like AV is that dungeon, there is no group damage besides breakers and bosses. Everything else is just avoidable damage and the timer allows for a lot of safety pulls / leeway.