Hi, this isn't strictly a thread about healing but it was inspired by a blue post in a healing thread:

Ghostcrawler said:

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Q u o t e:
You don't need Resto shamans to raid.

If Chain Heal ends up being the only spell that gets used to heal, or the spell that pushes Holy priests and Resto druids out of a raid, then we'll nerf it. We don't think those cases are likely, but we always try to leave the possibility open.

I've already said we'll adjust the content with the assumption that CoH and WG aren't going to be as huge a percent of total healing.

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That got me to thinking of other changes that were a result of such thinking and here are some:

Early on in 3.0.2 ish some Holy Paladins were going as far deep as 44 points most 33 points in Retribution tree to get talents that would help with healing. This was mostly due to the fact that Holy tree past 31 points simply didn't provide anything as useful as Ret tree did for healing and utility - how was this fixed - Ret talents got both nerfed and moved further up the Ret tree - Holy talents remained majorly unchanged minus the minor, and I mean minor JoTP buff. I altered Ghostcrawlers quote with this in mind:

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Q u o t e:
If Retribution talents end up being preferred over deep Holy talents to heal, or the players continue to forego Holy talents for Retribution to raid as a healer, then we'll nerf them

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Wouldn't it be more reasonable in that particular scenario to tweak Deep Holy talents and make them good and desirable and causing people to spec Holy because it was worth it, not because it was no longer worth it to spec Ret? You can't spec 51/00/44 or 51/00/31 or even 51/00/22 - if the 51 point talent or even 50 point were great - this problem wouldnt've existed to begin with.

I just keep seeying it over and over, nerfing everything to make it equally bad versus attempting to change / buff / tweak other things to make everything equally good.

Anyone else doesn't agree with this mentality?

I was actually really surprised those series of changes weren't discussed more.




The logic behind nerfing Ret because Holy sucked has escaped my since it happened, but it seems we are all to busy crying about CoH getting a cd to really care.

The proposed changes to mental quickness for shamans were for the same reason. Fortunately they changed it back, but the justification was that elemental shamans were going deep into enhancement because elemental talents were so lackluster.

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Q u o t e:
I was actually really surprised those series of changes weren't discussed more.




The logic behind nerfing Ret because Holy sucked has escaped my since it happened, but it seems we are all to busy crying about CoH getting a cd to really care.

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Hehe, didn't really mean to focus on any class in particular, it's just an example I am familiar with, I am sure other classes can come up with their own.

This trend is mostly the result of the Expansion Mentality of "I must feel stronger". Expansions are a great way to get a ton of new content, added features, and tweaked playstyles. What most players want though, is to feel stronger. In PvP it just doesn't work at all, but even in PvE there is only so much Blizzard can do before they break the game's dynamics. And they have found they did too much, in nearly every issue.

Content, at the moment, is too easy. They made everyone too strong in PvE; challenge is required to make a game interesting for the long term, and this game does not have any. Nerfs are more appropriate, at the moment, then buffs.

We will get buffs as they find the need. But it is always better to change the anomoly then to make that the new standard. If a single class or spec or style is out of wack, you change that one, you don't bring everything else to it's standard. And right now what they are seeing is the overpowered items, not the underpowered ones. So they are nerfing.

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Q u o t e:
This trend is mostly the result of the Expansion Mentality of "I must feel stronger". Expansions are a great way to get a ton of new content, added features, and tweaked playstyles. What most players want though, is to feel stronger. In PvP it just doesn't work at all, but even in PvE there is only so much Blizzard can do before they break the game's dynamics. And they have found they did too much, in nearly every issue.

Content, at the moment, is too easy. They made everyone too strong in PvE; challenge is required to make a game interesting for the long term, and this game does not have any. Nerfs are more appropriate, at the moment, then buffs.

We will get buffs as they find the need. But it is always better to change the anomoly then to make that the new standard. If a single class or spec or style is out of wack, you change that one, you don't bring everything else to it's standard. And right now what they are seeing is the overpowered items, not the underpowered ones. So they are nerfing.

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While what you are saying makes sense it does nothing to really counter my point. If you read my example you will see that the anomaly in that particular case was that Holy tree was so lackluster that players specced into Ret tree to heal better.

This anomaly was brough about due to a piss poor Holy tree, not due to Ret tree being OP for healing. By your own logic the wrong thing got fixed.

They have a lot of trees that are generally crap and they stick one or two great things in them... then later nerf them... leaving only the crap.

Right now there is quite a bit of crap.

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Q u o t e:

Content, at the moment, is too easy. They made everyone too strong in PvE; challenge is required to make a game interesting for the long term, and this game does not have any. Nerfs are more appropriate, at the moment, then buffs.

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Most appropriate, though, might be to buff mobs.

Either way will accomplish the same goals, but one will not take away from the players "feeling of power" you aptly pointed out. Players like seeing big numbers...

Well.. they certainly don't seem to be nerfing dps...

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Q u o t e:


While what you are saying makes sense it does nothing to really counter my point. If you read my example you will see that the anomaly in that particular case was that Holy tree was so lackluster that players specced into Ret tree to heal better.

This anomaly was brough about due to a piss poor Holy tree, not due to Ret tree being OP for healing. By your own logic the wrong thing got fixed.

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I think it is safe to say that, at the time, Blizzard felt that it wasn't holy that was lackluster but Ret that was OP. The Holy Paladins may have had a different view point then Blizzard, but I can't fully falut Blizzard for their particular take on that issue. They were getting a crap ton of "feedback" from the comunity at the time about Ret. I also think they have gotten a bit more filtered feedback from the Holy Pally community since then and might have a different view now. Honestly it feels like the next healing buffs will be hitting you guys and/or Disc.

What I took from your post was that Blizzard is in a very nerfy mood ATM. You even said it's not about one change in particular but about the perception you get from them in general. And I just think that the nerf bat is probably more appropriate then the buff bat right after an expansion. The post expansion patch has been posted, it's going into effect soon, and I wouldn't be suprised if after it goes in you see a lot of talk about "spec specific buffs" Blizzard is looking at for 3.1.

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Q u o t e:

Most appropriate, though, might be to buff mobs.

Either way will accomplish the same goals, but one will not take away from the players "feeling of power" you aptly pointed out. Players like seeing big numbers...

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I was actually highly dissapointed at the weakness of just the normal everyday mobs we were fighting from 70-80. I realise some of this was the lack of a huge equipment spike early on like we saw in BC. This was something I was advocating... and liked seeing.. abd it had it's side effects.

But I think a lot of it was that in Classic Wow mobs pretty much had no abilities. They autoattacked and you fought back with twirly high class moves. In BC mobs got one or two things extra to do, and there was a little more fun in some of the fights. A few nice suprises. But in Wrath, the mobs didn't get any smarter. In fact it kind of felt to me like they got a little dumber. I was really hoping to see "normal" mobs that threw four or five things at you. This is a tough thing to ask a server to do, and there were definitly improvments in other sections of the game that probably took up processor time. But I was dissapointed in that aspect of leveling.

A harder entry dungion... or at least a little heavyer balance on the 25 man versions, would probably have been ok. But I also didn't like the constant Kara nerf after nerf. I'll support a bit of second guessing on Blizzard for the easy Naxx, they had a decent beta run to add some meat to it, but I can't fault them fully for it.

They could make everyone hit for 100k on autoattacks and give bosses billions or trillions of hps, that way they could nerf you and you still see big numbers which comforts me

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Q u o t e:
Wouldn't it be more reasonable in that particular scenario to tweak Deep Holy talents and make them good and desirable and causing people to spec Holy because it was worth it, not because it was no longer worth it to spec Ret? You can't spec 51/00/44 or 51/00/31 or even 51/00/22 - if the 51 point talent or even 50 point were great - this problem wouldnt've existed to begin with.

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First of all, for PvE, Deep Holy was always better than deep Ret. Judging every 8s for some mana leads to dangerous, inconsistent healing.

More importantly, no Holy should not have been buffed. Holy Paladins scale way too well with Intellect and Crit to justify buffs to our healing ability.

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Q u o t e:


First of all, for PvE, Deep Holy was always better than deep Ret. Judging every 8s for some mana leads to dangerous, inconsistent healing.

More importantly, no Holy should not have been buffed. Holy Paladins scale way too well with Intellect and Crit to justify buffs to our healing ability.

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So instead of 8 seconds we have to judge every 20 to keep the judgement up because some mental Fkn Midget decided to Nerf CS and people renewing their judgements.

At the same time they designed encounters that need AE healing and didnt give Paladin anyting that even resembles a AE heal unglyphed. While they gave the MELEE dps tree the classes only talented HoT effect to heals and also increased Prot and Rets healing ability through conversion talents which are way better than Holy Guidance both in function and talent point cost.

Their solution? Paladin will cast faster with talented haste and be able to keep a stream of healing going to ONE target while they spam their butts off. This pretty much locks paladin out of any NON MT healing raid position.

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Q u o t e:
So instead of 8 seconds we have to judge every 20 to keep the judgement up because some mental Fkn Midget decided to Nerf CS and people renewing their judgements.

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No, you don't have to judge every 20s. Especially since all Holy Paladins (if there are multiple) should be helping each other keep up JoWisdom (JoLight is best used by Ret because their higher co-efficients result in a stronger debuff or Prot because of the broken threat issues with JoLight atm).

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Q u o t e:
At the same time they designed encounters that need AE healing and didnt give Paladin anyting that even resembles a AE heal unglyphed. While they gave the MELEE dps tree the classes only talented HoT effect to heals and also increased Prot and Rets healing ability through conversion talents which are way better than Holy Guidance both in function and talent point cost.

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First, HoTs in PvE aren't better than direct heals for anything but preemptive healing. I don't know where this mentality comes from. In PvP, HoTs are great because they're instants and instants keep you mobile and out of a spell-schooled state. In PvE, HoTs are not that particularly good and until Wild Growth, raids stacked Shaman/Priests for raid healing. A standard HoT would not significantly improve our ability to raid heal.

Second of all, our near infinite mana and insane raw healing + Beacon + HL glyph does actually make us a half decent raid healer. Certainly on the level of Shaman. When Priests and Druids get nerfed, we could be on their level at raid healing while still having our own niches.

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Q u o t e:
Their solution? Paladin will cast faster with talented haste and be able to keep a stream of healing going to ONE target while they spam their butts off. This pretty much locks paladin out of any NON MT healing raid position.

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The reason Paladins are tank healers is because we're 2x better than anyone else at it and any Raid Leader worth his weight in salt will assign his Pallies there.


Paladins have:

Near infinite mana
The largest raw healing of all healing classes
The greatest personal survivability
The best single target healing ability in the game

so what if we're a little worse than Priests and Druids at raid healing pre- and possibly post-nerf? Get over yourselfs.

In any 5-10 man there will only be 1 Holy paladin.

If you are the only Paladin (which is entirely possible due to there being other classes) YOU are the one judging every 20 seconds to keep Light or wis up.

Having a sheath type HoT means that you can throw 1 crit heal on a party/raid member who is down a little instead of 2 thereby decreasing your baby sitting time on each player who is not the tank or if multiple people need healing.

You mentioned Mobility. Paladin need all of it they can get in PVE and PVP. An instant cast FoL from a HS crit with no healing over time is an IFY way to provide this especially when you have to move a lot. Why not just give them a HoT that costs the same amount of mana as a HS + FoL and is instant instead of relying on RNG? Just put some sort of CD on it.

I am ok with Beacon and the HL glyph.

Priests, shaman and druids got better single target healing in wrath and in their current state disc priest and shaman can pretty much take a paladins place as MT healer. Paladin can not fill their typical raid positions. MT healer is the only place a Raid leader would ever assign a Holy paladin because they cant do any other raid healing assignment.

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Q u o t e:
Priests, shaman and druids got better single target healing in wrath and in their current state disc priest and shaman can pretty much take a paladins place as MT healer. Paladin can not fill their typical raid positions. MT healer is the only place a Raid leader would ever assign a Holy paladin because they cant do any other raid healing assignment.

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You clearly do not know what you are talking about. If you think anyone can MT heal near as good as a Paladin, you're just straight-up a nub.

I'm very confused about a conversation involving ret vs Holy...

But for the record, I've hit the public realm a bit, and the Glyph of Paladin AOE healing dosen't quite make them Shamans.

Maybe Druid and Priest level AoE, MAYBE, but it's a stretch.

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Q u o t e:
You clearly do not know what you are talking about. If you think anyone can MT heal near as good as a Paladin, you're just straight-up a nub.

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Says the guy who pulled the "survivability" card.

Bubble plate and heals. YOU LOSE.

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Q u o t e:
I'm very confused about a conversation involving ret vs Holy...

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When Bliz asked holy for feedback, we complained about: Lack of AOE heal, lack of HOT, lack of mobility and regen problems.

Bliz responded by giving ret an aoe heal and a hot.

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Q u o t e:


Says the guy who pulled the "survivability" card.

Bubble plate and heals. YOU LOSE.

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That's Twilight Vanquishing Chanamel the Undying to you, not guy.