I tried hard to figure out what thread to put this in, but I believe it would be off the tracks of most, if not all, of them.

Isn't one of the issues with CoH and WG "stealing the thunder" of CH have to do with the ways they heal. Small, periodic raid damage (exemplified by Felmyst) just plays directly into the wheelhouse of CoH and WG. Forcing shaman to waste a lot of their first bounce to clean up what these spells don't cover.

If Blizzard was to push raid damage away from raid-wide small damage into extremely focused pockets of heavy damage, wouldn't that then be in CH's best interest? Say groups of 3-5 people throughout the raid. That way it doesn't become as efficient to use such broad, shallow heals as CoH and WG, and therefore they are emphasized less. However, they would still suffice if need be.

It just seems that GC and the Devs have only considered removing AoE damage to de-emphasize AoE heals, when really they should notice there are other knobs to turn that can preferentially select which class' AoE heals are more effective.

In that way, there doesn't have to be exclusivity either. Some periodic bosses, some deep-damage focused bosses, some with both. There's nothing wrong with healers including shaman using spells different from their main heal from boss to boss so long as it doesn't become the blueprint of all encounters from that point.

So that's what this thread is about. It isn't about CD's or how to change these spells, it's about how to change encounters to highlight these abilities in different ways. Let's give the class and encounter dev's some new ideas on how to address this issue in another way.

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Q u o t e:


This is the situation in a lot of trash pulls en route to bosses. Chain Heal does very good in those encounters, as you'd expect, but Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are also used a lot in those situations, almost to the exclusion of other heals.

If those spells are used on (1) trash pulls, and (2) fights with multiple bosses, and (3) fights with bosses with adds, and (4) fights with lots of AE damage, then the only time they are not used is on (5) fights like Patchwerk where only 2 tanks take damage at all. If Circle of Healing was not the answer to situations 1-3 also, then I don't think we'd have a problem.

With a cooldown, sure you'd still use CoH when several people were wounded -- a common occurence. But while waiting for the cooldown, you could also throw out another PoM, Renews, Flash Heals or Binding Heal.

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But you wouldn't want to. You'd want to spam Chain Heal.

Raid healing is a headache when you're using the wrong tools. These things, the PoMs and the Renews and the Flash heals and whatnot, are a lot of fun... in 5-mans, or PvP. But in a raid, where every healer is Raid Healer #7, you mostly just look on in envy at the shamans who only have to spam one heal while your migraine gets worse.

Smart heals let you short-circuit the Whack-A-Mole Stress game, which is what raid healing is. I wish you'd give priests and paladins a single-target smart heal. It'd mean I could heal in a raid without the blinding pain behind my eyes.

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Q u o t e:


This is the situation in a lot of trash pulls en route to bosses. Chain Heal does very good in those encounters, as you'd expect, but Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are also used a lot in those situations, almost to the exclusion of other heals.

If those spells are used on (1) trash pulls, and (2) fights with multiple bosses, and (3) fights with bosses with adds, and (4) fights with lots of AE damage, then the only time they are not used is on (5) fights like Patchwerk where only 2 tanks take damage at all. If Circle of Healing was not the answer to situations 1-3 also, then I don't think we'd have a problem.

With a cooldown, sure you'd still use CoH when several people were wounded -- a common occurence. But while waiting for the cooldown, you could also throw out another PoM, Renews, Flash Heals or Binding Heal.

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Why bother? Why not just bring pallys to tank heal and jesus beam the rest?

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Q u o t e:


Smart heals let you short-circuit the Whack-A-Mole Stress game, which is what raid healing is. I wish you'd give priests and paladins a single-target smart heal. It'd mean I could heal in a raid without the blinding pain behind my eyes.

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They had this and nerfed it. Remember the "Emergency Monitor" from CT-Raid Assist before they broke all these mods?

Priests will raid heal via CoH + 3x FH. They will hit almost the exact same throughput on the raid as a Resto Shaman does using this rotation. 0.1 targets per second fewer, with slightly better HPS and HPM. A Priest will heavily heal 3 targets in 6s vs a Shaman heavily healing the same in 5s. Factors such as spread, evenness of damage and fight mobility will alter this balance in different directions.

How much tighter can it possibly get?

I'm a holy paladin. I don't mind hitting numerous buttons to make healing interesting and a challenge. Paladins have always complained about their boredom for using very few spells. AoE automatic targeting server-side instant healers are experiencing that same level of frustration, except that it's way more effective in their case.

Please don't dumb down healing. I understand raids can be hard and that having 8 semi-intelligent healers can sometimes be a tall order to meet, but it's interesting to me when it is a challenge. I'm enjoying the challenge of trying to keep up with the AoE healers and I don't think the raw output is too far from balanced even, but I do think the buttons being clicked in the process of making those numbers need to be more diverse. Shamans also fall into this category, because just having Chain Heal and a passive Healing Stream Totem do 90% of your healing is the kind of thing that would give me a migraine.

bingo

Every healer should have something about them that makes them unique and a certain type of encounter / situation where they excel and can feel like they're needed.

When CoH and WG do a better job at AOE raid healing than CH where does that leave the shaman? CH is basicly our claim to fame now that stacking Bloodlust is a thing of the past. The other healers do basicly everything other than AOE healing better than we do.

Don't even give me OH YOU BRING TOTEMS crap, totems are not even close to as good as they were in Burning crusade nor even nessicary anymore.

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Q u o t e:

Raid healing is a headache when you're using the wrong tools.

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So basically a paladin then?

The Paladin 51 point talent becomes pretty useless when we can't get off a single raid heal before the raid members get smart healed to full again in a second. Putting a cooldown on CoH and wild growth is a good change since they seem totally unwilling to alter beacon to make it useful or give us an AOE heal.

Solving this through boss encounters is a really bad idea, unless you want to revert to boring encounters like golemagg or patchwerk, which would benefit paladins but overall make raids boring and limit the designers.

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Q u o t e:


But you wouldn't want to. You'd want to spam Chain Heal.

Raid healing is a headache when you're using the wrong tools. These things, the PoMs and the Renews and the Flash heals and whatnot, are a lot of fun... in 5-mans, or PvP. But in a raid, where every healer is Raid Healer #7, you mostly just look on in envy at the shamans who only have to spam one heal while your migraine gets worse.

Smart heals let you short-circuit the Whack-A-Mole Stress game, which is what raid healing is. I wish you'd give priests and paladins a single-target smart heal. It'd mean I could heal in a raid without the blinding pain behind my eyes.

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I am sorry you have raided as or with a stupid Shaman in the past. Good Shaman pick their primary target on every cast and frantically seek the optimal target as assiduously as a Druid or Paladin. All good healers seek to heal optimally if the opportunity is available to them, and for Chain Heal that means minimizing the over healing on the first hit of Chain Heal (which accounts for 53%-57% of the healing done depending on whether it is Glyphed or not).

I'm all for the cooldown on CoH and WG if it means retuning boss fights. After a couple months of it, I started to absolutely HATE the boss encounters in BT and Sunwell.

A) It felt incredibly boring to just stand there spamming CoH until I was OOM or the 'aoe damage' phase ended.
B) It felt like lazy encounter design. Not trying to be insulting but it seemed like late BC encounter design became "hey I know, lets just have MASSIVE aoe damage so CoH and CH need to be spammed"

Seriously if a cooldown on CoH and WG is what we need to make fights more interesting for healers, and less about just spamming your aoe heal to keep up with the ridiculous amounts of raid damage, then I say BRING ON THE COOLDOWNS!

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Q u o t e:
Every healer should have something about them that makes them unique and a certain type of encounter / situation where they excel and can feel like they're needed.

When CoH and WG do a better job at AOE raid healing than CH where does that leave the shaman? CH is basicly our claim to fame now that stacking Bloodlust is a thing of the past. The other healers do basicly everything other than AOE healing better than we do.

Don't even give me OH YOU BRING TOTEMS crap, totems are not even close to as good as they were in Burning crusade nor even nessicary anymore.

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But when you nerf CoH... What does that give priests? Oh hooray we bring fort. Our "Utility" that priests brought was being a goood AE healer and versatile at everything else. But we arent the best..

So in Conclusion: Paladins are better single target healers bring them over priests. They have alot more utility as well. Shaman are better AE healers than priests. They also have more utility through TOTEMS and Bloodlust. Druids have better Hots which are good buffers and offer more utility than priests.

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Q u o t e:
Every healer should have something about them that makes them unique and a certain type of encounter / situation where they excel and can feel like they're needed.

When CoH and WG do a better job at AOE raid healing than CH where does that leave the shaman? CH is basicly our claim to fame now that stacking Bloodlust is a thing of the past. The other healers do basicly everything other than AOE healing better than we do.

Don't even give me OH YOU BRING TOTEMS crap, totems are not even close to as good as they were in Burning crusade nor even nessicary anymore.

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I know a lot shamans are just selfish and want to be topping the healing chart, no matter what... but if you think you want to excel in AE healing, that means being number 1 on a raid. Where do priest and druids excel? seems like priests are the all-around healer, so the all around healer doesn't excel at all? Not in MT healing because Disc is completely broken and ignored, and Holy with a lot of tools to heal just doesn't do anything as good as other healing classes, nor mt healing nor ae healing.
Ok so yes, you want to excel, and what do you want for priests, as a shaman? a nerf? Because I don't see a lot of shamans thinking about an intelligent nerf, like a mage said in another thread making it less efficient as you spam it, stacking like 6 times, or rise the mana cost to make the spaming impossible.
"Nerf them we want to be better" is just plain idiotic, and the worst thing is devs are listening to you and accepting.

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Q u o t e:


This is the situation in a lot of trash pulls en route to bosses. Chain Heal does very good in those encounters, as you'd expect, but Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are also used a lot in those situations, almost to the exclusion of other heals.

If those spells are used on (1) trash pulls, and (2) fights with multiple bosses, and (3) fights with bosses with adds, and (4) fights with lots of AE damage, then the only time they are not used is on (5) fights like Patchwerk where only 2 tanks take damage at all. If Circle of Healing was not the answer to situations 1-3 also, then I don't think we'd have a problem.

With a cooldown, sure you'd still use CoH when several people were wounded -- a common occurence. But while waiting for the cooldown, you could also throw out another PoM, Renews, Flash Heals or Binding Heal.

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I've posted more than a few solutions in another thread that I see as much better alternatives to the brute-force method of adding a cooldown. I really hope all those suggestions plus others are being considered before a cooldown is slapped on. Being given a choice is fun, having a cooldown restrict what you can and can't do is not. I stare at raid frames 95% of the time, having to micromanage 6 second intervals so I can use my most effective tool will make healing more of a chore than it already is.

That being said, I can't help but feel angry for being given a very good tool for a very difficult job (raid healing in Sunwell and late BT) and then have it taken away because of a small amount of data on what will eventually be an easy level 80 introductory instance that is based on old content. How can you expect people to not be upset over this when they feel raid encounters were designed to make what were originally lackluster spells shine, they grew to like and appreciate those spells and now are having them reduced in effectiveness? It really does feel like being punished for someone else's mistakes.

There have been many intersting and good ideas on how to change CoH to allow the devs to be happy with it. Everything from Changing boss encounters...to accepting the Cool down.

Personally If they add a cool down to CoH it negates it, it doesnt heal enough to matter anymore, thats why you could spam it. It allows you to quickly heal several people up about 3-4k with 3 Insants, you still have to deal with the GCD. Pretty much a Raid weak penance.

One thing i think you might look into is giving CoH a cast time, which was mentioned. Though GC came back saying it takes the o Shizznat part out of it. The way to ofset this is also give CoH an offshoot talent point like inner focus.

Pure Healing
1-2 talent points
reduces the cast time of Circle of Healing by 50% - 100% for 10 sec
2 min CD

This would give us the o shizznat button but would also allow us to keep our raid healing ability intact. Maybe give it a 2.5 sec cast that also can be affected by divine fury,. You can keep the amount healed and the 'smart heal' ability it currently has while also making it that important save the raid button. As well as keeps it in our rotation but not exclusivly.

Personally, I think bosses with large, flashy effects are more fun than ones that just do heavy damage to one or two guys. The real problem is that Bliz is desperately trying to keep healers unique by restricting what sorts of heals some of them have. That's not a good way to go about it at all.

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Q u o t e:
B) It felt like lazy encounter design. Not trying to be insulting but it seemed like late BC encounter design became "hey I know, lets just have MASSIVE aoe damage so CoH and CH need to be spammed"

Seriously if a cooldown on CoH and WG is what we need to make fights more interesting for healers, and less about just spamming your aoe heal to keep up with the ridiculous amounts of raid damage, then I say BRING ON THE COOLDOWNS!

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I agree with your point but I do not agree with cooldowns on healing spells. Healing spells need to be available when they are needed.

I'd rather they find another solution.

So if I'm to understand this correctly, you're worried that CoH is falling into the same category that Lifebloom was in, that regardless of the situation it was always the right answer?

Thing is, as much as I hate to admit it, you're right. Especially with the new Surge of Light, I find myself almost constantly throwing CoH just to get crits to proc instant-cast no-mana Flash Heals(which I've noticed on a couple occasions have critted, even though tooltip states that should impossible). I'd have no objection to a CD on CoH, seeing as how I hightly doubt it will be implemented before LK goes live and as such won't interfere with ppl that are rushing through the BC raids right now.

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Q u o t e:
I'd have no objection to a CD on CoH, seeing as how I hightly doubt it will be implemented before LK goes live and as such won't interfere with ppl that are rushing through the BC raids right now.

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Actually, current content is 100% trivial to this matter. I'd much, much, much rather they wait until your average guild is deep into Nax before deciding on if CoH and WG need a cooldown.