Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

Patch 3.2 Arena healing and damage over time changes

So resilience is being changed and apparently so is the way that burst is being handled. With the patch 3.2 changes coming in pretty much the crazy out of control burst is going to be toned down so players won’t be pushing so much damage, however. The burst healing issue has not really been addressed since within one or two global cooldowns, anybody can be healed to full (assuming there’s no mortal strike debuff).

What if resilience affected heals?
We considered the idea that resilience acts like a debuff for heals, but we’re not happy with what that might do to the game. You’d be in a situaiton where sometimes you might not want extra resilience since it lowers your healing. Resilience is already something of a trade-off since it often comes at the expense of other stats (though hopfully less after these changes).

There is a possibility that if fights go on for too long that dps casters may run OOM more than they should. That is something we may have to adjust, but we don’t think it’s simple to math out what kind of buff casters should be given at the moment. Note that the intent is not to turn every Arena match into a 20 minute slog. The intent is to have fewer 30 second matches.

I do see some people saying that healers were already in god mode and this will only buff them. Just realize that player perceptions or intentions are different. For one person, a healer in a 2 vs. 2 shouldn’t be able to keep their partner up alone. For another, having a 1 healer, 4 dps team in a 5 should be perfectly viable.

So with these changes, what’s up with Dots? They’ve always been double taxed and now they won’t be?
Dots were (and currently are) lowered when they do normal damage and lowered when they crit. I don’t think anyone is arguing that fact. What dot-classes often contended was that this design wasn’t fair, while our position was that they were balanced around that design. It didn’t make sense to us that dots that couldn’t crit (say the player didn’t take those talents) should be able to do more relative damage. If anything it made those talents a mixed blessing.

What is changing is that we decided not to continue this design going forward since warlocks and shadow priests could stand to be buffed. If anything, you could say everyone got the warlock design, and perhaps that is a more sensible design in the first place.

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Posted by Spooner | 13 Comments

Stop being stupid about healing meters you bad raid leaders!

AGAIN! Posting from that same tired ass resto-shaman bitching thread. My emotional tampon is full from these guys, “Oh my SHIT! This priest didn’t top the healing meters he must be a baddie we need to replace him with another healer!” fucking retards. Anyway, the shaman thread I pulled the blue post from is just festering beyond salvation with trolls and crazy commentary from blue, at some point they even start talking about healing XT002 hard mode:

One of the designers had an interesting experience. Their first Holy priest had much larger healing (total and effective) on the fight than their second Holy priest, so they asked the second priest to go Shadow. They kept wiping. They then swapped them, and made the star Holy priest go Shadow. The second Holy priest’s healing was much lower, but they won on the first try. The second priest just had better timing and cast the right spell at the right moment, even though his total and effective healing was lower overall. The moral of the story is meters are very useful, but like any tool, their ability to measure what happens in reality has limitations. In my experience, players put too much emphasis on them, especially for healing.

My head just exploded. Why don’t people follow this thought pattern? Did the boss die within the enrage timer? Did we make better time than before? Was there any point in time when the tanks died or had issues staying above 45% health? Did DPS die because there was a lack of healing thus causing enrage timer problems? This is the kind of shit you should be asking yourself not just spamming meters and pointing at them with your jaw slack open looking like some inbred hick. The meters are useful for getting a ballpark figure of what yor DPS is doing or what each healer is doing after taking assignments into consideration. You’ll see AOE classes doing terrible DPS on XT002 for example because they’re busy killing robots while rogues and enhancement shamans and retribution paladins are kicking ass because they just have to worry about killing the boss or the heart.

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Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

No More Class Facelifts, but Healing Changes Coming Soon™

What are these assclowns thinking? I don’t know how else to title this post, there’s just so much shit going around on my screen right now. Every topic Blizzard is posting on seems to be like a cousin of the previous one, everything is either about healing or Ulduar. May the record show I am fucking sick of discussing healing. With that said, GC has pretty much promised that we will not be seeing any major class overhauls and at most there will be some tweaks to the current existing mechanics classes use. About the only “major” change we’ll see is how retribution is going to be changed in its functionality when 3.2 comes around.

If you are looking for a major overhaul for any class in the game, you’re going to be disappointed. Whenever we see that term, it’s a near certainty that the players making it have an entirely different vision for the class than the developers do. The changes to the paladin class seals and judgements are about the largest “overhaul” you’re ever going to see, and that one was an extreme. We like the way the classes work. Nearly all can be improved, some more than others. None of them need an overhaul.

As for healing, they want to change it but they’re skiddish about bringing regen issues and OOC mana regen back to the forefront of the argument. I don’t like that they want to nerf tanks in order to address the healing issue. I really don’t fucking like that at all. Do something about the boss damage, do something about mana costs and cast times on heals, but please if you’re going to change tanks at all, fix the bullshit RNG with avoidance and useless block.

We nerfed regen a little, knowing it probably wasn’t quite sufficient, and there was quite a bit of name-calling in this very forum. We’ll get there, but it’s important not to freak out too many players in our efforts to eventually make things better.

Yes tank avoidance would need to come down along with many other long-term changes, but from a healer point-of-view what we’d like to achieve is a clear distinction between your bread-and-butter heals and your emergency heals. The latter are typically made expensive to discourage their casual use, but when you have the mana for it and the tank always requires those big heals, there is no reason not to use them. It may be that mana costs are not the best way to balance spells. Maybe it’s cast time. Maybe it’s cooldown. Likewise, maybe we should have more fights where say 5 players take damage at once rather than the whole raid. Then the smart, instant heals wouldn’t be quite as attractive in every situation.

There were some good aspects of the healing in vanilla, but we’re not eager to go back to the days of /stopcast macros and healer rotations (meaning someone sits out for OFSR regen while a fresh healer steps in). That’s not what we mean when we say that the risk of running OOM has to exist.

And of course all of this is coming Soon™ and Blizzard will not give out any specifics.

We have to be very careful announcing changes. Last patch, we listed out some specific things we were working on. Some of them came to pass and some did not. For the ones that did not, some players took it very hard. They became upset. They posted that we didn’t care about them or weren’t doing our jobs. Now it’s easy to ignore a few bad apples, but when a large enough portion of your community responds negatively, it can affect the entire community. It can cast a dark cloud over these forums. That isn’t fun for anyone.

Check out this link. It’s a press release about Blizzcon. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see a painfully long explanation about forward-looking statements. Most of that is more geared towards business issues than class changes, but ultimately it’s all part of the same philosophy. It is unfortunate that that is the world we live in. Announcing stuff too early when we aren’t 100% sure we can do it just gets us in trouble.

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