Hey guys,
i wanted to provide some feedback about how i feel about Mage healers.
Some things about me, i play WoW for about 18 years now. A lot of private servers when i was younger and started with retail in Legion. And nowadays i enjoy the PvE of every game Wow has to offer. So im bouncing between the games. On retail it’s mostly M+ and in SoD i raidlog cause there is nothing to do outside of raids.
So let’s talk about the Mage Healer then.
First of all i want to say that i am overall really happy with the decision to make Mages Healers, because i really enjoy doing dps as a Healer. But there are a few things which don’t feel so great while playing.
I compare Mage Healers a lot to retail Disc Priests cause they heal with the same mechanic but Disc Priests feel a lot more well rounded because they have a few more tools.
As long as we did only 10-man raiding it was’t that apparent and the only part that about our kit that sucked, was Massregen not having a Charge System like Power Word: Radiance. And maybe that resists don’t heal which can kill your group even though you’re hitcapped (no counterplay)
Because as a Disc Priest you prepare youre healing with applying some single beacons into double Radiance and then you pump when the damage hits. That is possible because on retail you have exact timers for boss mechanics so you can time your ramp perfectly to line up with the dmg event happening.
In Classic we don’t have that luxury. Bosses do their abilities whenever and sometimes you have no clue that big aoe dmg is happening. And when the dmg is coming and you haven’t been pressing Massregen before, you kinda had to press Massregen on grp 1 and grp 2 was without healing for 6 seconds cause you couldn’t do anything.
I feel like with the randomness of damage in Classic, a Massregen with 2 charges is warranted.
So now we go into 20 Man raiding and i wish we would have gotten a few more tools to apply our Beacons to the raid. For Example if we could make Temporal Anomaly apply Beacons for 15 seconds to the party it would allready be a great start. Even with Massregen not having charges you could do something like 5 Singleregen on grp 1 → Massregen grp 2 → temporal anomaly you’re group (lets say 4) → Massregen grp 3 and you could become Thanos for 3 or 4 arcane blasts once a minute. You still had to time your Thanos moment to be at the perfect spot, but it would feel super satisfying if you do.
Another thing that could help us in that regard is if we get a spell like Evangelism. Evangelism increases the duration of the Atonements (same as Beacons) by a few seconds.
Now onto another problem I encountered yesterday. It was the first time i was healing with another mage and we split the groups for us. I was healing grp 1+3 and he was doing 2+4.
Our MT was in grp 1 so my other mage was using Singleregens on the tank. But by doing this, i couldn’t hit the tank with Massregen anymore and had to Singleregen the Tank aswell even though i allready spent so much mana to give Beacons to the entire party. That doesn’t feel great. If there is a possibility to make the 15-Second Beacons also apply, even though the target has a 30-Second Beacon from someone else, that would be great.
The last point i have is about us not being able to press anything while on the move (besides once every 3 minutes) and our healing being tied to 2.5 Second casts with no pushback reduction. The pushback feels super punishing at Jammal’an and his aoe penance. But with perfect play you would just bank a missile proc for whenever he does his penance althought its kinda hard to time since classic has no real timers, as i stated earlier. Will try this next id though.
Not being able to do anything while moving is pretty frustrating though. I’m not asking for much here, maybe just make missile procs being castable while moving (i really enjoy this on my retail mage) or give us something else that is minor.
Otherwise we really feel good. Our healing is superb, our dmg is strong compared to other healers and Mana is also manageable.
I hope it was somewhat okay to read through this post, since english isn’t my native language.
Looking forward to some Discussion in this thread and to hear how other mages feel
EDIT: I’m obviously completely fine if our healing conversion gets nerfed from 80%, if we get compensated with easier and broader application of beacons. But maybe consider something like Sins of the Many on retail for 5-Man content. Because even now you have to fall back to Chronostatic Preservation quite often to keep your tank alive. And the easier and broader application of beacons isn’t needed in 5-Mans. Therefore it would only be a straight up nerf for mage healing in dungeon content.
