Xal'atath's Bargain: Devour - Healer perspective

Community General Discussion
1

Hey everyone,

I’m mainly looking for opinions from other healers here.

Healing is my passion—I only play as a healer, always have, and I love it. But this affix is already driving me insane! It feels like tanks and DPS (in general) expect healers to magically top everyone off within seconds… which just isn’t realistic.

As a Priest, I’m lucky to have Mass Dispel, but it only works if everyone is grouped up, and it comes with a 2-minute cooldown. My single-target dispel is on an 8-second cooldown, so I can only clear one person at a time while trying to heal the other four and deal with massive group-wide AoE damage—it’s just too much!

It’s only day one, and I’ve already had enough this week. Running Mythic+ with pugs is way too stressful, so I’m sitting this one out until next reset. Not as a statement, but because it’s just not enjoyable right now.

When Blizzard introduces affixes like this, shouldn’t more classes have tools to help manage it? Either that, or they should lower the healing requirement or reduce dispel cooldowns to make it more manageable.

I’m not here to argue—I just want to hear from other healers. Am I missing something? Any advice or insights? I can’t be the only one feeling this already.

2

Xal’atath’s Bargain: Devour is dispelled by:

– Self only

Death Knight: Anti-Magic Shell (with Unyielding Will)
Hunter: Feign Death (with Emergency Salve), Aspect of the Turtle
Monk: Diffuse Magic
Paladin: Divine Shield
Rogue: Cloak of Shadows
Warrior: Bitter Immunity

Self or targetted:

Druid: Nature's Cure (healer), Remove Corruption
Evoker: Cauterizing Flame, Expunge, Naturalize (healer)
Mage: Remove Curse
Monk: Detox
Paladin: Cleanse (healer), Cleanse Toxins
Priest: Purify (healer), Purify Disease
Shaman: Cleanse Spirit, Purify Spriit (healer),
Warlock: Singe Magic (imp pet)

AOE:

Monk: Revival (healer)
Priest: Mass Dispel
Shaman: Poison Cleansing Totem

Furthermore, dwarf racials work.

Seems plenty of us can deal with it. Certainly enough in most groups to be able to cope/help out.

3

Instead of dealing damage, it should reduce haste and crit by 90%, you’d see how quickly DPS would react to dispel themselves…

Instead it’s yet another “who cares the healer can do it, that’s their job”

3 Likes
4

On my mistweaver it usually ends up using my Shielun gift cooldown on every. It is a very frustrating affix. You only need 2 players in your group not being able to remove it and you need to commit cooldowns.

5

They’d just yell at the healer even more

6

Try to not join groups where there isnt others that can dispel. Looking at your rio the last run did have a shaman in it though, which should have been helping with both poison cleansing totem and personal dispel. Just remind them at start of the run and if they dont use their dispels, then let the mobs heal back up.

1 Like
7

Here is my take:

On keys <12+ you dont really need to cast CDs on trash packs. Just some very specific moments.

A dungeon lasts for 40 min. And you got 4 bosses per dungeon (some 3), at ~3 min per boss. So 12 min.

40 min - 12 min equals 28 min. In those 28 min of “non boss” where you dont have to cast healer CDs you can save them for the affixes and rotate them.

And that is how you do the affix if nobody wants to dispel. And you will know if DDs will assist the 1st time the affix comes at the beginning of the dungeon. If they do then gucci. DPS or Kick or do something else. If not, then you have your rotation of affixes to do.

8

I really don’t like this affix. Healing is a responsible enough job as it is. Why not make an affix for dps for once?

2 Likes
9

DPS will still find a way to dump it on the healer, its an impossible mission.
Even if they make an affix that has a dps check it will still be on the healer to do more dps.

2 Likes
10

I honestly dont understand why some dps are so reluctant to deal with an affix on themselves.

I instantly dispel mine (GCD permitting) and carry on dpsing. Anything I can get rid of, in general, that is cast on me I remove.

1 Like
11

Multiple answers:

  • Some are not experienced enough to know that they can deal with it on their own. I didn’t even know at the start of the season that I could mass dispel it with Poison Cleansing Totem for example and I was manually dispelling it from 2 people and healed the rest. Probably some players still don’t know they can get rid of it on their own.
  • Some got used to have the healer do it, or got conditioned to consider it a strictly healer mechanic, and now consider it an expectation. I remember a Mists of Tirna Scithe run back in Shadowlands where the group insisted that it’s the healer’s job to check for the path in the maze, simply because the more experienced healers had enough skill to both heal the group and check the 4 icons at the same time while the rest of the group was killing the enemies.
  • Some are too focused on “pumping” and defer the burden of playing around mechanics to other players. It’s the same situation as players who focus the boss and refuse to switch to adds or use interrupts or stop charging an ability with cast time to move out of fire immediately despite knowing they should do it.
12

These are all accurate but it does make me laugh how regardless of that, all of them boil down to “hurr durr me pewpew brrrr”.

2 Likes
13

Most people who play a game want to kill bad guys. While levelling, they learn how to use many abilities and gradually form a hierarchy in their minds of what abilities to use that will help them achieve that the fastest. Abilities that do not deal damage get left in low priority or even outright forgotten.

It’s the same reason why the crushingly vast majority of casual players in Pokemon games have 4 damage-dealing moves on their pokemon and no buffs or debuffs despite that being massively unoptimal and eventually a harder player experience when battling bosses.

14

All of what you said, while true, just describe a bad player.
Any player that puts in even a little bit of effort will dispel themselves whenever possible because they think for the good of the group.
This week whenever i pug, when i invite someone that can dispel themselves or others, i will check their talents and see if they run their dispel. If they dont i will ask them to, if they refuse they can go look for another group.
Now ofcourse they can also just go along, take the dispel and then not use it but hey, they will learn the hard way because i wont be dispelling or healing anyone that has that debuff and a dispel off cd.

1 Like
15

In 90%+ of keys I have done this season, most of the dps players had less than 5 interrupts throughout entire dungeons and 0 dispells. I’ve had dps with 0 on both. The vast majority don’t even use defensive abilities to reduce incoming damage when they get afflicted by some nasty dot.

Bad players make the majority of players, at least in the sub-5 key range where I play.

There are players out there who don’t even know you can interrupt the casters in Awaken the Machine! I’m going off on a tangent, but we need Proving Grounds back.

1 Like
16

Oh definitely. And i fully realize that i am trying to fight a wildfire with a glass of water here, but as long as i can teach/show/make a few dps dispel themselves this week, when they did not use to before, i call that a win.
I told a mage to dispel themselves on the affix after they didnt for the first 2, we ended up doing 2 more keys and they never failed to dispel again, if thats not progress, i dont know what is.

1 Like
17

I agree that this debuff is annoying. Just ran a dungeon and the Mage didn’t have Remove Curse. Why assist the group / healer when you can damuuuuuuuutch.

I think it is silly when spells like Remove Curse are in the talent tree that you actually have to spec into. But this Mage I had with me were clueless as he ended at 614k overall when hilariously tank doubled his damage on a +10. Kinda sad to know from start he wont assist me / group even tho I gently asked him to spec into Remove Curse.

18

There are obviously also classes which can’t deal with it that easy. Like when it is your main defensive you probably want to keep it for the next dangerous thing coming.
And with that it simply is by design a healer affix.

19

I dont think anyone is necessarily denying that it is, at its core, a healer based affix. However most classes have ways to deal with it and should do so whenever possible.
For example on the last part in GB i will tell my healer i wont Feign Death the affix but i will instead pop Exhilaration because im saving it for if i get targeted by Corrupt, and they will know they are gonna have to deal with the affix for me as opposed to spamhealing me through a 15 stack Corrupt.

20

Yeah and that is totally what you should do. The problem is there are so many of those occasions that a healer simply need to assign healing cooldowns for every time the affix shows up. It is a crap frustrating annoying affix.