How many times since release have Blizzard buffed player health and reduced healing to make player health bars less squishy and prone to 1 shots, and to make healers feel valued.
Health bars are going from 100% to 5% 10 times in 5 globals. And it feels like even a “good” healer going into lower keys (>20) doesn’t have anywhere near as much impact as a talented dps or tank.
I think we have shot ourselves in the foot here. The healer community cries out for more throughput so we can push health bars from low to high instantly. The only way Blizzard can create a challenge in this environment is to deplete them faster than you can top them.
I genuinely believe it would be a far better experience all round if hp bars were increased and all healing done was significantly reduced. Giving healers better value and more freedom.
I have plenty of impact but I don’t feel like I have to constantly cover for DPS failing BECAUSE the damage is spiky and fails/bad use of defensives result in people getting oneshot.
If health pools are bigger and HPS lower, everything becomes a healer mechanic.
I have noticed that DPS need to be more aware now and not just stand in the fire as long/much as they used too without a really big negative impact on the overall run be it raiding or mythic+.
On the plus side to it though, there are more people who are now being aware of these mechanics due to addons or just learning by getting killed so many times, they end up being kicked from that group content.
A little while ago I installed the ElitismHelper add-on, just for self-improvement (it only sends data to me, not in the party chat). It’s really enlightening to see how much avoidable damage people take (myself included). It’s frequently a substantial percentage of the healer’s overall healing output.
I haven’t really noticed. Tbh I don’t think damage taken is a good metric for measuring performance. Sometimes I stand in stuff on purpose because my heal is more impactful than the damage I could avoid. And as long as people don’t die or force me to go out of my way to spamheal them, I don’t really care.
Depends on the tank as well. DH and Blood DK is notorious about having jumpy health bars while Pala can stand their ground thanks to the myriad of damage reductions.
Above that it comes down on how well the tank handles cooldowns and whether the party deals enough damage and /or with the mechanics. From what I’ve seen most healers are’nt struggling unless they are severly undergeared or new (or both)…or if the group screws up big time.
healing is still fine. they only thing that went through the rough is selfhealing of tanks and their giant health pools. I generally don’t even need to try to heal tanks as my heals feel like vanishing on tanks. Mostly you don’t need to heal tanks though anyways.
So they can make it a general goal to make tanks immortal and healers focus only on 4 people. I am fine with that…
They increased damage of mobs, they increased health pools, healing remained the same. The end result would be the same as increasing health and reducing healing done.
If I’m playing my druid as a dps I have barkskin on a 1 min cd, which does almost nothing against dangerous damage patterns we’ve seen in DF, because of the CD on it. I have renewal on a 1.5 min cd, which really doesn’t do much either in the long run.
Yep, that’s it. Regrowth? Doesn’t even heal 10% of my hp per cast.
well for holy priest at least, flash heal is only a cd reduction tool for serenity not really for healing :x
and with serenity basically having 4 charges, it is also not necessary to heal with flash heal unless small hp bumps
Which causes issues with the damage patterns we’ve seen through the seasons.
Hyrja in season 1 as an example.
PoH isn’t even worth speccing into in 5-man content because it heals for absolutely nothing compared to the damage people take when aoe happens.
If I log on my priest I played in SL season 2:
Flash heal, a non-CD heal that you cast to maintain FC, heals for 12% of its hp per cast.
Heal, a non-CD heal and 1.3 sec cast with FC activated, heals my priest for 18% of its hp per cast. This is the heal you casted to reduce CD on serenity.
Serenity heals it for 34% of its hp.
Then I log on my current priest:
Flash heal heals for 8% of its hp. This is what you cast to reduce CD on serenity.
Serenity, a 1-min CD heal - reduced by every flash heal cast - heals my current priest for 22% of its hp. It’s absurd how weak healing has become, which is caused by the inflated health pools that comes with DF and the increased damage they thought was a good idea to just throw into the mix.
That’s only with current set if you have 2 procs when you start throwing them out. This set isn’t gonna last forever nor are you guaranteed procs. They should fix the spec instead of making it rely on crutches that only empowers the already strong parts or they need to stop designing encounters with damage patterns that are a joke to heal on one spec and rough as hell to heal on another.
Nah it was just a reduction on healing done in net effect.
What they needed to do was to just increase the amount of health. Straight up. No more. The health pools are yo-yo’ing like crazy, healing is really high but you can’t use it in time cause you gotta fiddle with CD’s and the damage is also really high.
I looked at some old Shadowlands footage and when I see stuff like the first boss on mythic I can see a damage profile that’s way less spiky. People losing 30-40% of their HP somewhat frequently, and then it takes like 10 seconds for people to get topped off, and that’s entirely okay. Nowadays, if you leave someone at 60-70% HP they’re probably going to die instantly to some random BS being thrown in their general direction.
And then there’s the tanks. Almost no point in healing them. They yo-yo like crazy, and if they mess up they die in 3 seconds - and if they don’t, then they are just literally immortal some of them. I’ve seen tanks in a +23 just solo a boss from 10%. How in the heck is that even remotely fair anyway? And it’s causing a situation where healers generally don’t have anything to heal other than when trading CD’s or someone messing up.
And because everybody is either topped off, the tank, or taking crazy damage, requiring CD’s and will heal people back up super fast for doing so, healers spend most of their time dealing damage because there is nothing to heal.
I set it to report results only to myself, it’s not shown in party chat or in the “say” chat. I don’t play with random players often, but I also don’t want to tick off my friends! I just installed it for self-improvement, because I felt I take too much damage sometimes and wanted to get some feedback and details to help me play better.
One of my most joyful moments was when the healer in a key had this set to report in party chat and my character wasn’t even on it. I kept a screenshot of that
