I think tank DPS (~ 50% of a DD) is OK. I dont agree that Blizzard puts less effort on balancing that damage though. Every season there is always a drastic difference between tanks in the DPS department.
As for healer DPS, I think 30% of a DD is a good number. What I dont agree is with the direction Blizzard has with respect to classes that heal with DPS (MW and DPriest).
I dont mind abilities that do that. What I do mind is that I find it terribly unfair for the rest of the classes that have to choose between healing and DPSing.
So from the healer point of view, I think Blizzard needs to normalize this situation. For example, giving RShamans a talent that sais: Every 3 healing spells gives you 1 instant cast off the GCD chain lightning, and vice-versa. Things like that.
And I think its important. Because DPS in healers is a mini-game that adds depth to the spec. A completely optional thing to do, but it adds an additional skill level that is fun IMO.
And right now I think its unfair to have 2 specs where the “optional” mini-game is forced, and 4 specs who have a much higher risk of playing such mini-game.
In previous discussions I have gone to the exact opposite end of the suggestion, and instead forwarded the idea that in instanced content with dps requirements (this means M+ and raiding) then the total contribution of both tanks and healers in damage done should be exactly equal to 0. I don’t care if in the overworld or the target dummies healers can reach the same dps as damage dealing specializations; in fact I do support the idea of healers being able to match damage dealers in the overworld at the expense of massive resource cost (therefore not able to sustain it for long).
Mechanics and calculations with regards to healing, threat, shielding etc. that are based on damage dealt would still work as if the abilities dealt damage, the enemies just wouldn’t be receiving the damage part.
I’ve even suggested that offensive dispels and interrupts should be 99.99% the job of damage dealers and not of tanks or healers, by making it massively costly for the latter.
Happy to see this get some attention again. I’ll try to reply to everyone here.
That’s only ever going to be because the tank massively outgear the DPS and they get a free carry, or the DPS are so bad that they can’t play at even 50% of their potential.
An across the board buff to pve dps happens constantly as we get more gear anyway, that’s not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is that I want something meaningful to do as a healer for the 50% of the dungeon that doesn’t require any healing. If people don’t want to dps and rather stay afk for half the dungeon, fine, they most likely do trivial content where there’s no need for them to fully utilize their kit anyway.
I agree that the damage buff should only apply to pve (obviously, since this thread is focused on m+ and I’ve stated several times that I’m not advocating for pvp changes).
Yes, but then the dungeons need to have massively more rot damage in them as there’s currently no need to focus 100% on healing. That would drive away most of the healer population because they’d probably feel like the dungeons (that are already challening to a lot of player) would just become flat out impossible.
An alternative that I can think of is giving healer more support abilities, similar to augmentation evoker (although that would mean that the current aug design needs to be scrapped and that’s a whole other issue, which is why I don’t think that’s feasible).
Great points, and that sounds like a reasonable reason to keep healers damage low, even though I don’t agree with that design philosophy. I’d much rather like that every member of the party can contribute with important plays throughout ALL of the dungeon.
I realize that healers being able to do noteworthy damage would create an expectation of them to actually do that, but I think that’s mostly an issue in low keys (below 10) where most members aren’t pulling their weight anyway and look for a scapegoat to blame when the run fails.
I couldn’t agree more.
Sure, but likewise tanks primary job is to keep agro and use defensives properly, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t expected to do also:
Help with interrupts.
Use dispels.
Deal damage.
Keep a pace that fits the party well.
Use off-heals/externals to make healers life easier (lay on hands, blessing of sacrifice, intervene etc.).
Same goes for DPS, whenever I tank or heal I always expect DPS to use their toolkit for the benefit of the group, that includes the same responsibilities as previously mentioned.
Bad players will always blame someone else for their shortcomings. I’ve learned to shake it off, and I believe any competent healer will know when their at fault and when they’re not.
When you’re saying “you”, are you refering to me personally? Because I also heal, I already know what healers have to do in dungeons. I just believe that there’s a lot of downtime, and that downtime should be used to do something impactful for the benefit of the group.
This isn’t about pvp.
I agree, every healer should be on equal footing.
Agreed.
Whilst I can see how that could work (even though it would be hard to tune fights for it) that would probably drive a large population of tanks and healers away from the role. What should we (healers) do when there’s not outgoing damage to heal? Grab some coffee and wait for the next set of unavoidable damage to take care of? Letting both healers and tanks damage matter means that it can create a feeling of being meaningful throughout ALL of the dungeon (or raid).
Correct, this is world of warcraft.
This is about pve, m+ to be specific. Although if that happens in BGs it’s because the DPS are awfully bad at the game.
This already exists and is called “support”. We used to have more of that in the past, but nowadays only Augmentation fits the bill. Mayyyyyyyybe you could create some custom builds through specific talents with some specializations like Enhancement Shaman that focus on healing and damage dealing at the same time (for example spending all your Maelstrom on Chain Heals or Healing Surges), but it would be massively less effective than going pure dps.
There are 2 huge misconceptions here. The first is that adding rot damage would not mean that non-rot damage would be reduced. You can easily add blanket AoE damage of, let’s say, 50k per player per second which would require an additional 250k hps from the healer as AoE. But this rot damage can be counterbalanced by reducing the spiky damage from enemies at a similar value.
The second misconception is that increasing healing requirements would drive away healers. No, it at most would push away damage dealers who play healers. Players who prefer healing as their primary role welcome such a change.
This is an issue with the current game design where damage is somewhat scarse and most of it comes from player mistakes, when it should have been the opposite: Party group damage taken should be near constant and player mistakes should add little burden on the healer. But this would bring the skill floor and the skill ceiling closer together and neither the top end of the playerbase nor Blizzard want this.
The list of jobs depends on your role, sure thats not up for argument. but its expectation vs reality argument, healer is the only role where your basicly making up for other peoples mistakes and when a key falls a part 99% of the time the healer gets the mouthful now you want me pick up the slack for dps to?
Wile thats kinda of true, how we expecting to grow the healing base? New healers coming into this environment, when there expected to do everything on top of gaining confedance to do higher skilled content when your always being shot down by some random DPS who refuses to use cds?
Not you personally, more the idea. Yes healers have downtime, but is that a bad thing? Downtime is seen as a waste or suboptimal, but if your smart you can use that time to drink or use it to get your cooldowns back. This idea of everything being 1000mph just isnt needed, Yes in +18 / +19’s your argument carrys more weight, but even then smart players can use every second to there advantage.
The simple truth is wow as become more intence over the years, you have to make split second decisions that could make or brake a run, not all roles are created equal. As a long time healer I have to know just as much as the tanks and other players cds and also the instance, a healers workload is just crazy, adding more to it at this point would just create to much sensory overload for anyone other a caffeinated 12 year old
The latter seems to happen regularly yeah, and not everyone has the confidence and/or thick skin to shrug it off. Altho I assume healers who get fed up enough will stop pugging, to save themselves that particular headache.
And I understand your first point. From what I’ve read of healers, I think quite a few prefer it if their meaningful contribution to the group is through healing, not dps. This was one of those comments that kept popping up in the discussions throughout SL.
I do agree with you tho that doing damage as a healer can be intensely fun. I don’t like disc priest, but I adore mw monk. In that sense I also agree with Uda that other healers where dps is disconnected from the healing could perhaps be revisited and have it better integrated in the healing model. Having to choose between the two will always feel clunkier and more restricted than when it somehow organically feeds into each other.
This is the recipe for having 4 healer specs in a dungeon where they all do damage and anyone can heal when needed. If they only do insignificantly less why should I take an ele shaman to my key if I can take a resto shaman? The difference is needed for role balance.
What is it with people wanting to change the entire holy-trinity setup constantly?
The holy trinity works, too good, but it works.
Let healers heal, tanks tank, and DPS do damage.
Trying to mix any of that just doesn’t work.
Go play GW2 if you want everyone to be a DPS, or FFXIV if you want to join the anti-trinity-cult.
Yeah, dps would have their dps rotation procs etc. for that, while having the exact same spell as DPS and as Heal without modifiers should result in the same number.
I think he isn’t wrong, but that is because of the difference between expectations between players.
His view comes more from an organised group’s perspective, where everyone knows what their job is and they do not slack on it. In that environment healers have a lot of downtime to do damage, and in higher keys (which I assume is the environment he is talking about) healers do not cover mistakes from players, as a mistake means someone is going to die.
Your perspective, to me atleast, seem to come from a random pug’s perspective, where groups without communication try to make it through a dungeon run. In such an environment obviously the role responsibilities are not equally distributed as there is a lot more leeway for errors that the healer can fix, so people expect them to fix it. It is also heavily influenced by the meta and what they do in high key levels.
It is because people do not want to think, they just imitate and hope it is enough to get through the day.
I think healers having to DPS during downtime is not a bad thing as outside of that healing is…well, boring. There is nothing interesting in waiting for health bars to move, so being able to do damage is a good way to spend your idle time.
In lower keys this is not a must to complete keys though, but if you choose to pug you have to accept that these things will be expected of you.
Also all those problems you describe is something a well played retribution/protection paladin was doing already as late as Legion atleast. I distinctly remember not only having to do my rotation, position trash and the boss and use my off-healing capabilities as a protection paladin, on top of also using my external utilities to help with mechanics.
The problem you have is primarily a player base issue, and I have to be honest I do not know how Blizzard can really fix it, as the problem comes from players not from in game sources. I certainly would not want them to dumb roles down further because players are irresponsible.
@OP:
I think, as Uda said above, if they would make it so that healer damage are more or less equal, and non-DPS centric healers would have an option to be able to heal and DPS at the same time I think we would be fine. Mistweavers can already do some really decent DPS, and I think that should be the limit of what healers can do. Maybe they could get most of their damage to come from DoT sources that only need to be keep up on targets, and the rest can be distributed between skills that can contribute to some trickle healing to targets, but to actually push good healing numbers every healer should need to stop and hard cast.
I can still remember cat weaving druids able of doing single target DPS that rivalled that of DPS and that I certainly do not want to go back to.
Fair enough, saying that it will push away healers from the game was an assumption I probably shouldn’t have made, as I see a lot of complaints about healing being “too hard” when you can in fact get carried as far as 14s as a healer if you’re just running with a good enough group (yes, it’s not likely to happen, but since even 14s has been done without healers it’s possible).
I somewhat agree, and I believe it’s easier to give healers some ability to pump out more damage rather than redesign the entire damage intake in WoW dungeons. With the examples I’ve given the increase in healers damage would result in somewhere around a 5% nerf to dungeon timers as they are today, although I think we can keep the timers as they are instead of designing them with healers dps in mind.
I’m not asking you to pick up any slack. If people play bad, the key fails, simple as that. I’m asking for the possibility to pick up some slack if I desire too, as it currently feels like I can either choose between afking between damage windows, or do next to meaningless damage.
Increasing healers damage without decreasing m+ timers shouldn’t result in players expecting healers to deal more damage, except if the players lack a very basic understanding of the game.
As far as I know, you can’t drink during combat. Im not asking for healer to deal more damage outside of combat (that’s impossible anyway), but I’m asking for healer’s to have something to do during the downtime of their healing rather than just afking.
I disagree, unless we’re talking about always running with people that doesn’t have a clue about what they’re doing. As a healer I often have times where there is nothing to heal, and I’d rather use that time to help the group in some way.
I wouldn’t mind that either, but I think if you make constant healing mandatory in keys even as low as +10 a lot of the playerbase are going to call it quits because it becomes too hard, therefore I think allowing healers to have something to do through dealing damage would be a better change. Alternatively make healers use support spells like aug during their downtime, but then aug has to be redesigned too.
Oversimplyfing, and stupid, that wouldn’t solve anything. It would lead to healers being literal gods worthy of worship that can by no means have any marigin of error else the key is dead, even in lower keys.
Yeah this wouldn’t work either, perhaps with the previous suggestion that the increased damage comes from abilities with an expensive resource cost, like prot paladins Word of Glory. That way you can do a lot of damage for a little while, but you won’t be able to do much healing as you’ll have no resources left for it.
Because we care about the game and want to see it improved. If you hate change, go play classic.
Sure the trinity works, every bit that has been in the game as always worked (more or less). Doesn’t mean that things can’t or shouldn’t be improved upon.
Support specs would be great, but then we need more of them than just augmentation. Also, that’s another discussion.
Meh, only the worst of the bad players do this anyway, they ain’t worth listening to.
I agree with most of what you’re saying here, although I think mistweavers should be ever so slightly buffed in terms of damage (and other healers should get bigger buffs to be brought up to pair). I don’t think DoTs has to be the only source of healers damage, but it could for sure be a source for some healers damage. Class/spec differences are important for the fun factor.
Yeah, that’s not what I wish for either, that reduces the importance of DPS specs.