Midnight Alpha Testing - At this point, certain Healers are forced to play DD spec when being solo

Community General Discussion
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I mentioned it before with Holy Paladin and the removal of Crusader Strike. First it is an identity loss, now it has become for healers in general a mandatory decision point to play DD in solo situations in PvE, otherwise they won’t get :poop: done!

From what we can read in balance changes during the testing phase, it seems like Blizzard is tuning the game more like some coop game with mandatory player count and not like a MMORPG with a variety of content.

What use has playing a healer in the open world, when you can’t interrupt :poop: , are forced in result to OUTHEAL or use your defensives specifically, just to avoid big damage spikes that were prior interruptable for you as a healer.

Worst of all, it seems that Blizzard is very keen to design the healer role now to be a specific “instanced content role pick”, instead of a specialization you want to use voluntarily.

Honestly, I am even further tempted to stop playing a healer and going back to being a mediocre Damage Dealer in the content I play. Because Healer role is literally at this point on the Alpha PTR a liability, not a role.

And before someone brings up “but they’re changing AI behavior”… THAT DOESN’T MEAN :poop: WHEN YOU PLAY SOLO BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE BUT YOU WILL BE TARGETED!

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Do we even know solo content has interrupts ?

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So you have tools to deal with whats happening? Wheres the problem?

The only time it becomes an issue is when there is no counterplay. If a mob casts a heal that you can’t stop and outdamage its a problem.

If the solution to the problem used to be interrupt and now its “cast a heal” - so what?

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Good thing you can freely swap to dps. Your gear stats change.

Cannot imagine your post during tbc or wrath times.

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They haven’t neither confirmed nor denied it. So I will just assume it will be the case, as it is already, but less often in uptime.

AI healing themselves will be much more often the case if they intent to make the game more intuitive. If enemies can’t have OHK/Burst abilities due to limited addon support going forward regarding combat, then they will have to shift the damage away towards AI supporting each other. Which means healing, damage resistance and co.

And with Healers having no interrupt, solo play sounds to me like a nightmare. Hence I say Healer mains are basically forced to swap to DD for story and questing.

Interrupts didn’t cost Mana or respective resources, so technically this will cause Mana to be more drained than already during combat and potential damage spenders being stopped and healing prioritized instead.

As example, when Midnight would launch with the current state of the Alpha, I as Holy Paladin have only 3 attack spells. Holy Shock, Judgement and Shield of the Righteous. Not counting Hammer of Wrath, since that requires still trigger conditions.

So, when an AI hits me really hard due to an interruptable cast not being interruptable due to having none, I have to waste a potential Shield of the Righteous use for a Word of Glory instead. Or I will have to cast Holy Light instead, if I have no Holy Power at that moment. So either way I have to sacrifice a resource. Either Mana (Holy Light) or Holy Power (Shield of the Righteous) to deal with something we currently on the live-servers can deal with an Interrupt instead. And those resources I could have used to attack instead (in case of Holy Power). But since I don’t want to die, I have to heal myself first.

Ultimately, this means combat for Healers in PvE solo will be taking even longer than already. Which doesn’t sound fun at all. It takes already with certain healer classes half a minute to beat certain mobs.

As others have said, Blizzard takes away tools from healers the game is fundamentally designed around since years.

This is a massive “make or break” moment for Blizzard. And given their track record recently with QA, I am pretty sure this will be more break than make.

Which I will quite likely do. Especially since I dislike Blizzard turning Holy Paladin into a much more passive caster instead of a Melee-driven healer. I don’t want to carry a weapon just for show, man.

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To me that sounds like you, as a healer, will be handling an encounter in accordance of your role design.

Will anything realy change though? Most healers only have servicable AoE so you do not pull multiple elites together anyway, so it is slow to clear already.

Holy light is also getting boosted in power and one or two casts of holy light after it looks to become instant cast during wings if you want, so I think you are losing less there than you think.

While it sucks to lose such level of control as a healer in the end some level of responsibility need to be pushed over on DPS instead. If you as a healer and the tank handles everything, then DPS will only learn that the two other roles can just take over everything from them.

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Good thing we no longer have 1k respeccs then?

Not as if that’d matter in this inflated economy, lol.

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I’m afraid you need to create 2 set of talents. One for doing world content and one nce you enter M+ or Raid. Switching between them usually takes 2 clicks. I’m pretty sure you can handle it broski.

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You’re penalising yourself with suboptimal choices if you’re playing healer in world content where you need to kill things.

Now you’re complaining blizz is making something suboptimal a littlemore suboptimal. Just smells disingenuous to me. Instead of it taking 30 seconds it takes 35 because you had to cast heals. Or you could go dps and it takes 10 seconds. :thinking:

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