Tanks play as if they were in fated raid and m+ gear because they kinda are. I don’t remember a time when tanks were so strong, let alone at the release of an xpac. They are basically invincible (if playing semi correctly).
As for the rest of your post, I want to say “and ?”. Party-wide AoE, AoE fear, you are listing them as if it was groundbreaking but it is quite common nowaday. In fact, I found the new dungeons quite easy compared to previous xpac.
TL;DR : Easy dungeons + godlike tanks = tanks having the urge to mass pull. I have healed every single dungeon many times now and I can assure you that you can keep up quite easily.
But it doesn’t really detract from the annoyance or frustration of the experience if you’re the healer.
You’re dealing with group members who are taking a lot of damage because there’s so much AoE flying around. The tank may have a great time, but that doesn’t mean your job healing has gotten any easier. The crisis management has just shifted from the tank to the dps who are going from 100% to 10% hp back and forth all the time.
Plus, there’s nothing slowing the tank down. Why should he slow down? If anyone dies they can just release and run back. Great experience for the tank, but maybe not so much for everyone else.
And finally, we’re still in this early phase where a lot of players are having their first playthroughs of these dungeons, and just from a zoomed-out perspective, this is hardly the gameplay fantasy anyone is looking for on their first playthrough. It’s a mess.
I’m a healer and, thus far, I haven’t had any problem with healing group wide damage. At worst, if a dps dies (which, again, doesn’t matter because the tanks are invincible anyway), I rez them at the end of the fight.
Indeed, it must suck for a completely new player. I’m the kind of guy who always says, at the very least, “hey” at the start of a dungeon run. Thus far, only 3 people answered back. 3. And I can assure you that I spammed many, many dungeons in the first few days after launch.
I’ve played this game for 18+ years and my capabilities at healing are more than adequate for Normal and Heroic and Mythic +0.
But the balance of the dungeons on those difficulties shouldn’t revolve around my veteran healing skill level at all anyway.
A Normal difficulty dungeon is meant to be a tourist mode for leveling and story purposes. There should be hardly any remote danger of anyone dying. A blind monkey should be able to successfully heal a Normal leveling dungeon.
The tuning is clearly off, because these dungeons are not an introduction experience to Dragonflight. But that’s what they’re supposed to be! The high keys Mythic+ difficulties exist for the stress-inducing challenges. It’s not something we’re supposed to have lengthy forum threads on as it pertains to Normal, Heroic and Mythic +0. Yet here we are.
Well damn, we do have vastly different views concerning the balancing of DF dungeons. I went on the forums to see if anyone commented on how easy they are compared to previous xpac but, well, I guess it is not the general consensus.
In fairness, I have criticized Blizzard for their dungeon design in the last expansion as well. And by and large they’re copy/pasting their design approach to Dragonflight.
Be that as it may.
I would argue that when Cataclysm was released the Normal/Heroic dungeons were challenging. Because they were tuned to be. Blizzard had meticulously tweaked them to provide a challenge for an adequately geared character. And they did!
But the Dragonflight dungeons are just frustrating and stressful. People dying in Dragonflight dungeons is not the result of Blizzard having meticulously tweaked the difficulty to be challenging, but rather the result of them not having done that so the poor Mage just gets obliterated because the room is covered in AoE from the 100 mobs that the invincible tank just pulled.
So the tuning is off. It’s clearly a mess if tanks are invincible and dps are dying left and right from AoE attacks and the healer has to rev up their performance to keep everyone alive in a Normal dungeon.
Blizzard will definitely be tweaking and tuning this, no doubt about it. But they still get the criticism, fair and square.
You do seem to be exaggerating quite a bit ^^’
Tanks are invincible, healers are more than capable of sustaining big pulls (I can attest) and dps are destroying the meters (with some bosses killed in 15sec of bloodlust).
And asking people to watch out for AoE attacks is, I believe, the bare minimum.
Avoidable damage is on them. And unavoidable damage is on the healer. I have never been unable to heal any instance of unavoidable damage thus far, except the first boss of the Offensive (because that’s the whole mechanic of the fight : to shot him with the ballistas before he can cast his AoE wipe ability that no amount of burst healing can sustain in M0… yeah, you can sustain it easily in both normal and heroic).
TL;DR : Healing is currently a snooze fest . Big pulls are the only thing that keep me awake.
In a Normal leveling dungeon the dps shouldn’t lose 80% of his health from AoE damage, avoidable or not. That’s ridiculous. When Blizzard starts with that as the base, then there’s no room for difficulty progression.
Again, I’m going to say that using you and me as benchmarks for whether Normal/Heroic/Mythic +0 Dungeons are challenging is stupid, because we’re clearly not players who needs a slow and smooth introduction to WoW dungeons as we’ve been playing the game for ages. So, these off-the-cuff remarks about you personally thinking it’s easy is kind of missing the point of the issue, i.e. whether the difficulty and tuning is adequate for the people who might struggle the most in WoW. Because it’s those people these dungeons should be tuned for. And they clearly aren’t, or we wouldn’t be having so much talk about it in the EU and US alike. The proof is sort of in the pudding here, right?
Oh but they do not (hence why I said previously that you were exaggerating). I have seen dps taking damage from every single AoE spell in dungeons and, aside from maybe the Magmammoth’s charge against a wall in Neltharus and the long as* “hide behind the obvious pillars you fouls/beware the icy rings hidden beneath the water” casts from the Halls of Infusions, barely nothing deals 80% of your hp in 1 blast.
I think it’s a nice way to learn what is dangerous and what is not. “Hell, those spells were kinda dangerous in normal, I can’t imagine how dangerous they will be in heroics/mythic… better watch out !”. I’m a fan of learning through errors and pain in video games.
Do you think that’s why the healers are few this time around ? I was surprised by the dozens upon dozens of groups who were waiting for healers in M0 despite the new class havng a healing spec.
First time in Brackenhide Hollow and that was a problematic dungeon.
Getting feared a lot on the trash. Tank did pull a few groups. Plus fear sent you into other groups.
As a healer myself I get frustrated in pugs, when the tanks pulls every group separately. I love doing big pulls, cause at least then I have something to do in the dungeon.
I usualy run with guildies and we generaly do most dungeons (HC / M0) in 3-5 pulls. Thats where the fun is. I am not gonna spend an hour in a dungeon picking my nose.
That place has quickly become one of my least favourite dungeons to heal.
AoE fearing mobs, DoT debuffs you cannot cleanse that also happen to be AoE, diseases that stack and spread, if you don’t have disease removal prepare to have a really bad time.
Stealth mobs that will always latch on to you through healing aggro, other mobs that will debuff you which makes other mobs fixate onto you. Big enemies that bladestorm, DPS refuse to move away from them (who would have guessed) and trash that hit tanks like trucks.
I’ve probably missed a few, but that place was designed by a dev who genuinely hates healers.
The more posts I see about people having this experience, the more I feel unique as a tank that actually adjusts to the group, and not suffering from “I am a immortal god” complex. Sure I can without a doubt survive 3 packs and feel dandy by rotating my CDs, but the DPS and Healer wont be fine at all
If the group has good DPS and the healer is chill healing, I can pull more for sure (unless its a dangerous pack that does things such as fears or a nasty debuff that goes quickly out of hand as examples)
If things is dying slowly or the healer seems to have a hard time to catch up on heals, you slow down
I am not dumb enough to pull 3 packs at the start in Brackenhide Hollow and expect it to be fine, it wont be fine, it will be a fear-fiesta with 6 packs and a wipe
If I am doing dungeons or keys with friends/guildies, then I atleast know I can go a bit reckless and hard cause I know these people, and their limits
I aint pulling half the continent in a pug group, unless I can see and feel that the pug group can probably handle more
