I’m a healer, always been since I started in 2007, last expansion I pugged my way to KSH 3 seasons in a row and while not every dungeon was the same in difficulty I eventually completed all 20’s(10 in season 4) for the portals.
While I think WW is a great expansion so far I feel the tuning and difference of some dungeons is still way off. I used to main Hpriest in DF but I had to switch to disc because it offers better utility and aoe healing. All this is fine, I also like to play disc and am able to time +8 and +9s for some dungeonse but the problem really lies in the difference between dungeons or even between bosses. I’m at 2150 score and 619 ilvl now.
There’s dungeons/bosses that are tuned okay and still offer a challenge but then there are a few where I can’t even stand still for 2 seconds to hardcast a spell, It’s insane how many mechanics they can fit into one dungeon(!) boss fight.
At higher keys most of these are instant death and I often had to make a choice to either let my heals go off and run the risk of getting hit, which I sometimes did, or stop healing alltogether to run (if pennance was on CD)
It doesn’t help here that my teammates often refuse to use self-healing or defensives when I’m alive.
I feel this expansion moved to the “end” too quick.
Before the squish, you had to “grind” your way through a lot of keys.. And lets be honest, the level differences were at times very minor, but(!) this made people learn to slowly progress and figure out to press their buttons. Of course you would have people doing higher keys not doing it, but in general terms.
While I do enjoy the squish, they kind of “messed it up” with Delve gearing. People then proceeded to fly up in gear and the lower keys became redundant.
My personal experience is, this has made a lot of people who before maybe pushed +15s (old system) towards the end of a season now are doing +6, +7, even higher but with the same mentality.. “Oh a +7 is easy, I don’t have to purge myself I just popped my damage CDs!!” or “I will use my defensive CDs now to randomly to be able to face tank an avoidable mechanic so I can damage” and then not have it when its needed. (The amount of times, I’ve seen a rogue pop cloak in Ara-kara last boss to keep pumping instead of finding a puddle and then not have cloak available for that time they got sucked in, is very high! xD )
So this on top of some bosses just being hard, doesn’t quiet help.
(And before someone comes in… This is my own personal experience, and by no means facts)
I feel you. As mage dps… I think there is lot of things what can stop you from healing. Lot of aeos and effects and most of time i ruin my rotation and dps only because im avoiding to get hit to stay alive. Most of heal specs are not meta and most of specs in meta are those specs with movement and casting in same time like arcane mage,shaman…its balance problem i guess.
I have tried melee, ranged dps, tanking and healing at low mythic+ keys , what is weird for me, that the difficulty discrepancy is so huge between these too.
DPS: don’t stand in stuff , interrupt, know when to use def cd, know your rotation. If You mess up something it doesn’t really punish You, it punishes the healer. If You afk 3 sec, nobody notices.
TANK: know where to stand, where to face specific mobs, bosses, know your rotation, press def cd when needed, taunt sometimes. Generally feels very easy, but You have to know every tactic beforehand, that seems to be the hard part.
HEAL: You have to know the same as the DPS, but while You spam your skills, at a single global cooldown half the team is low hp, You have 0.3 sec to realise You have to use big CD otherwise its a wipe in 1 sec. It feels to be 10 times harder than the other roles, no wonder everyone is shaman, that way it is a bit better.
I am sorry but this is not true. People do not just randomly wake up at 20% hp in half a gcd in low keys.
If it happens, then something happened before that.
Something you should have noticed ahead of time and prepared for, that is literally your job.
Especially if you are a proactive healer, you cant just wait the damage to happen.
Shaman has nothing to do with the problem you highlighted.
I can agree as healer you need to be prepared for some route same as tank and know where to expect what dmg and what skill to use. But that doesnt work with pugs where you need expect absolutly everything around you will make problems…it hard in compare with other classes. Sham is meta for big heals and easy access to heal whole group without using all cds and big aeo spells
There are not 3374848 scenarios that can happen in a given pack of mobs.
And if it is a low key when mistake aren’t always fatal just prepare for the worst.
Aka people not kicking and taking extra damage. If that does not happen then adjust later.
No one cares about healer doing damage if people die cause you were gcd locked when poop was about to hit the fan.
Stonevault +10, curse dot at the start can easily do that to you.
City of Threads on +10 at the last boss, good luck if you ran out of defensives on the AoE, same goes for the mob before that
There’s a bunch of high damage AoE dots in several as well that cause a similar situation.
It’s not even that you don’t know it’s coming in most scenarios, it’s that you can’t tell ahead of time if someone is going to press a defensive, or even if they have one. You’ll have to use addons to track defensive uses for others, which just adds way more complexity to the healer job. You only have as much in terms of big buttons to press.
“low” key is relative to your item level due to stamina. If you’re higher ilvl the range of “low” keys where this context applies scales up.
If you’re 600 then a +3 is relatively high, while when you’re 610 then a +6 is relatively high.
People with 620 gear won’t be doing “low” keys, it’s people with low item level that will be doing “low” keys, making them relatively weaker to the key level.
S3 of DF saw the biggest participation rates. In low keys, AND the highest participation rates in push keys (>20+ at the time). Gear was easy to get, and Myth track easy to acquire. And everyone was happy. All we complained about was the 1-shot meta at the time.
All blizzard needed to do is copy-paste that model. Smooth out damage and remove some nasty RNG mechanics (EB mage boss comes to mind)… with that, we would have had the best and most succesfull M+ season ever.
Popular with casuals. Popular with pushers. Plus the hype of a new expansion.
But alas… they did not get the memo apparently… Blizzard listened to the wrong people…
They listened to raiders that complained that Myth drops were useless if you had M+… screw them !
They listened to asocial people that get aneurysms if they have to play with other people…
They listened to people with mental problems that have an issue with having a timer ticking in the top-left corner, even if you could hide it and not have to see it…
And as a result of listening to a very, very, very small minority we got this garbage M+ scene we have now for the majority.
The person i responded to is doing +2/4 key rage with 610 + ilvl groups, so as far as i am aware “low keys” applies.
Of course if you do a +6 with a 570 group people are going to get chunked.
But i really doubt that is the case in pugs.
And also, keys dot not exactly scale linear with your gear. I had around 4.2 M hp at 584 ilvl, 40 ilvl later i have 6M hp. That is like 40% increase, things do 136% more damage in +10 (forti/tyr aside).
So even with lower gear, you most likely wont approach a 4 as if it was a 10. Unless, as i said, you go there with a full brutally undergeared premade. Which, again, i doubt it happens in pug.
I think You’ve missed the point tho. Obviously it is not impossible to play perfectly, and have little issue healing. The issue is, that your mistakes are extremely punishing, while DPS mistakes are not punishing them (mostly), they are punishing You. This makes the role feel much harder & stressful to play than the others, by far.
This might not be true, but personally I think this is one of the hardest expansion/season to be a healer, good job for all of them who still do a good job at it.
But it dosent change the fact that if an individual did not like M+, did not play M+, and had no intention of playing M+ in any way… well… instead of asking to change M+ to fit his special needs in expense of the majority, he should have simply played something else.
Like I have always been saying. All these “solo casuals” are not a majority. Never were. And if I have to read another stupid post about “follower M+” im gonna loose it ! I swear.
Same applies to RTWF and cutting edge guilds and their raiding/e-sport BS. They are not the majority. Never were.
You should take a break from the forums then.
Saying people have mental problems is not the way to oppose an idea.
Its just insulting and hurtful to those that don’t fit into your cathegory of “normal people”.
I get that m+ is not right this season.
But I don’t think solo casuals are at fault here.This is turning into divide and conquer…
I saw a streamer or two asking for m+ to have less key levels,so if thats the problem,there is your answer.
Or even if not,I am sure one of those people asked for whatever you have now and don’t like.
That’s the demographic most listened to tbh.
I am not saying you have to play perfectly, what i am saying is that is not normal to have someone being almost globalled h24 to the point that you heal in a semi panicked/stressed state.
There are situation that you know people will eat damage.
For example, Nar’zudah in necrotic wake. You know people wont purge the shroud, you just know it.
You should not be caught off guard by that, go into the pull as if you will have to deal with it.
Dps mistake punish the whole group, cause if they dont kick a cast maybe the cast chunk the hp of another dps.
You are punished “more” in the sense that your job is to refill the bar after that but being the last line of defense against failure does not mean that failing to repair the damage=your fault.
Just heal what you can, dont stress over it. If you can fix their mistake then good gor you, if you cannot, then let them know what they should have done differently to help you.
Keeping people alive despite their mistake should be taken as a challenge with yourself, not as a reason to stress over not being able to keep them up.
I agree with you. You didn’t say the names of dungeons and bosses that are completely imbalanced, but we all know which ones you are talking about. Some bosses are so cruel, some trash packs are so ridiculous, that they can kill your key before you can even try.
Blizzard should have learned by now to balance the dungeons correctly. It’s only 8 of them each season and the balance issues are very obvious. It really should not be too much to ask that they finally get this right.