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Q u o t e:


What doesn't make sense is that you nerf CoH and WG then oops Ulduar has a lot of raid damage so people stack shaman, then 3 months later you are nerfing Chain Heal... when you could walk down the hall and talk to the encounter team beforehand and work together.

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It's good to know you've already seen this new raid Blizzard has yet to publicy release and confirmed that they just totally ignored that they mentioned that:

1)It'll be harder than the current raids

2)Future encounters would be tuned considering the CoH nerf.

I personally understand the equalization of most specs and abilities in the game so that people can play what they want and still participate in raids, pvp, ect...HOWEVER...i always liked in the oldschool raids how you HAD to have a certain class to move on...like the halls of strife in BWL...no rogue meant you didn't continue

Naxx had the whole priest thing for Instructor whats his face (I know you still have to but I making a POINT here people!)

And whatever the heck hunters did in MC...iunno seemed useful...

ANYwho...when it comes right down to it...if you nerf us or buff other people I'll whine and complain because its fun but i won't quit playing my priest

I DO however really really really hate the hymns...I wouldn't mind if you guys made it do something entirely different...I'd like divine hymns more if its purpose was a pretty graphic that could work as a post boss light show...

And to jump back to a subject no one has talked about because I'm awesome...WTB more epic class quests

P.S. ...I like not reading a thread and then giving input cause it makes meh feel useful

YAY OFF TOPIC POST

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Q u o t e:
I don't want to derail this thread, but you do need to get it out of your heads that shaman or paladin QQ caused us to nerf CoH and WG. Those spells were too good. CoH was too good at the end of BC.

As a few players have pointed out, for them -- for a lot of people -- balance is fun. It's certainly not the only aspect of fun. But games in which players feel like they won or lost the game at the moment of character creation, because some abilities are just overpowered or underpowered, tend to not have the kind of legs WoW has had.

Fun is the most important concern. Trivializing content (whether PvE or PvP) may seem fun in the short term, but like playing any game with a cheat mode on, the novelty quickly wears off. Overcoming challenges is a big part of what makes games like WoW attractive.

Fun is also subjective. It's easy to say "Circle of Healing is fun for me and Renew isn't," but that may have a lot to do with the relative balance of those two abilities or your personal preference. Some players think stabbing things is fun and others think tanking is fun. We can continue to come up with cool new toys for each individual spec or role. However it also may be that nothing we are willing to do will make tanking fun for *you* specifically.

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Well thanks for making COH smart there was really no reason to make it smart. It was fine when Sunwell first open and it was fine in BT/Hyjal. When you made it smart is when priest AOE healing got out of hand. My hope is that you guys change it back to the way it was before it went smart.

Do not make spells or abilities that are specifically designed towards one aspect of the game and then seesaw them with dramatic nerfs and buffs.

CoH was dramatically buffed for WotLK by not only making it a smart heal but adding a glyph that healed an additional target. We already knew this spell was intentionally designed for raiding purposes. The buffs to CoH were the single largest healing priest buffs made in WotLK when you talk about healing output.

Its no secret that a single Holy priest can double the amount of effective healing compared to the next highest healer over the course of a raid. This has occured simply because the bulk of the raid encounters have mechanics that were intended to be protected by aura or aoe damage. A spell that is instant cast and can heal 14K damage every 1.5 seconds can be devastating in the eyes of a boss.

So what is the problem? Well its pretty obvious that balance is a major concern in the eyes of the developers. Another issue is how much more trivial these encounters are with a Holy Priest.

So why buff a spell so greatly and then turn around to add one of the worst nerf mechanics available?

Holy Priests in vanilla wow were Greater Heal tank healers and flash heal spam raid healers. In TBC we were given CoH and it was great because of the party heal only aspect of the spell. It still required us to use our entire arsenal of healing spells on the raid. In WotLK CoH was overbuffed as a smart heal but I beleieve that was done partly because the developers wanted to get away from party stacking classes. Raid leaders could place ranged classes and melee classes in groups together since buffs were raid wide. This would break CoH in a way since those players would most likely not be in range anymore to accept the heal.

Basically the developers gave us a reason to predominantly spam 1 spell through an entire raid but it broke their vision of not only of the Holy Priest spec but of the idea "dont bring the class, bring the player".

Im not going to say that using 1 spell for 90% of my healing is entirely all that fun. But at the same time hugely buffing and then greatly nerfing a raid specific class niche spell in the matter of 3 months is not fun at all. It raises a lot of questions and makes my class ponder what direction the developers have for us and why they cant focus more on addressing the many valid problems that get asked daily in the priest forums.

Lastly, arena for me has become even less fun when I cant control my character because its been stun locked and Im dead.

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Q u o t e:


We often owe it to the community to take the easy way out, because that means faster changes and fewer bugs. But it isn't always the right decision. Elemental dps is low, and instead of nerfing everyone else we buffed Elemental, because that was a lot easier to do. We have a lot we want to do with the game. We are nearly always going to opt for easy solutions unless the outcome is a lot worse.

I'm not quite sure what your point about tanking is. We're pretty happy with the state of tanking. It still takes a reasonably clever person with good gear to MT a raid, but there are four classes who can do it now. I don't think the threat game was a particularly fun part of PvE for many players, but I also don't think that is why the encounters are easy right now. They are easy because the damage and health done by the mobs is low, and because none of the encounters require that much raid coordination (and the trickier ones are encounters players saw before in the 40-player days and were allowed to practice on during beta). Ulduar is all new content and it will be a lot more challenging. I am thinking of one fight in particular that will probably take some time to conquer.

Tanking is still stressful until stuff is completely on farm, not because the tank is furiously mashing Heroic Strike to stay above the lock on threat, but because the tank needs to position the boss and know when to use their cooldowns. Healing will always be stressful, and I don't actually believe the way to make healing more fun is to make healers overpowered. I think it has more to do with giving them cool tools and then beefing up the UI to give them the information they need. Penance is a pretty cool tool. Beacon of Light makes you feel clever when you use it in the right situations. Swiftmend is a lot of fun. I like Riptide.

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strangulate still lasts 6+ seconds if you have silence reduction talents, sw:d still doesn't break glyphed polymorph (but seal of blood does), you can't sap people on mammoths, prayer of mending bouncing stops drinking, about 1000 other things stop drinking too, shadowfiend spawns with 1000 hp and its avoidance and resistances seem to have been dramatically nerfed, you can negate racial resistances with +hit, you can fear people to disconnect them in org arena, you can fall through the platform before the game starts in org arena, you can cc people (sap/divine hymn) through the gates in org arena (btw org arena is horrible and should be removed)

the list goes on....

so about those bug fixes...

I don't think Blizzard's actions show this, though.

I'm seeing a lot of the same issues and disparities in classes (with regards to our "equal" damage) that I did in TBC, if not earlier.

If nothing else, would somebody please, please, please look as the disparity between melee DPS and ranged DPS? The mobility factor? The melee-unfriendly encounters? Encounters that become extremely difficult with a melee-heavy group, but which are trivial with a ranged-heavy group?

You give us "equal" damage, but then give me a cleave, an AoE, a tail swipe, a damaging aura, an explosion, and whatever else to deal with.....while the ranged DPS just stands in place?

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Q u o t e:

Bottom line is we'd ideally like to see 25-player raids with as many different healing classes / specs as possible, but not unduly punish those groups who just don't happen to have that distribution of classes in their guild.

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Q u o t e:

Healing will always be stressful, and I don't actually believe the way to make healing more fun is to make healers overpowered. I think it has more to do with giving them cool tools and then beefing up the UI to give them the information they need. Penance is a pretty cool tool. Beacon of Light makes you feel clever when you use it in the right situations. Swiftmend is a lot of fun. I like Riptide.

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An interesting thing about those "cool tools": none of them belongs to Holy Priests. That's because, unlike every other healer and every other class in general, we didn't get anything approximating a new tool in the expansion. Our one new non-talented healing spell is a shameful laughingstock. And out of all our X1-point talents, dating back from Vanilla, only one is a staple tool--one is an expensive, long-cooldown self-heal; one is something that only does anything active when we're dead; one is a long-cooldown fiddly gimmick that puts the onus on the DPS to heal themselves, rendering it impractical; one is a really good AoE healing spell that's going to take a big nerf which, due to its low throughput when it is not spammed, will gimp it severely; and our "ultimate" talent, the one that's meant to stack up to Riptide and Wild Growth, is a long-cooldown oh crud button which on a good night you should never cast at all.

Our BC stuff was great, but you're about two years behind on the "cool tools" department when it comes to Holy Priests--Shadow as well, for that matter.

As a few players have pointed out, for them -- for a lot of people -- balance is fun. It's certainly not the only aspect of fun. But games in which players feel like they won or lost the game at the moment of character creation, because some abilities are just overpowered or underpowered, tend to not have the kind of legs WoW has had.

lol

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Q u o t e:
Players tend to think of things in terms of whether their class got buffs or nerfs. We tend to think of the overall balance of the game.

The metaphor that gets (over) used a lot is the wobbly chair -- you can cut one leg off or try and extend the other three. We would always prefer to buff rather than nerf, because frankly it's more fun. It generates goodwill and makes players excited about playing. But buffing isn't always the answer. Often a nerf involves far fewer changes the game as a whole. Because testing time is usually our limiting factor for releasing changes, we prefer to change as little as possible.

It's impossible to measure things, especially healing, in terms this simply, but imagine your class can heal 5000 health per second and the other specs can heal 4000 health per sec. Sure we can buff the other three because that's more fun than nerfing you, right? But it might also mean that PvE fights are too easy and PvP damage is too trivial (yes I realize that is an amusing thing to say right now while so many people are concerned about burst damage). Just buffing your spells affects spell balance too -- when you don't care about efficiency because even your light healing spells heal for a lot, then suddenly your toolbox looks pretty shallow, and that Spirit and mp5 on your gear starts to look like a wasted stat.

TLDR version: we prefer to buff when we can, but nerfing is typically far less risky in terms of the amount of data changed.

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Your metaphor is ironic ... geometric reality is that a wobbly chair can always be made stable by extending one leg, or cutting one leg.

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Q u o t e:
See, here's the problem with your "wobbly chair". You go ahead and cut the leg off now, but then you turn around in 3, 6, 8 months and say :

"oops, looks like we cut off too much, we didn't expect the people using the chair to keep growing. We'll be inspecting the chair over the next 8 months and see about rebuilding said chair 'soon'."

Then it's :

"It looks like the chair is no longer compatable with other chairs. We are looking into the other chairs to determine why they are so different from the first chair."

Then we get :

"We've found chairs to be lacking when it comes to tables. We don't want people to feel like they need chairs to be able to use tables. In the next patch, we are going to be replacing some chairs with stools and others with floor cushions."

Eventually we get :

"We've had numerous complaints that floor cushions, while comfy compared to stools, are not quiet able to reach thier mark on the table. Players are feeling like they have to stack cushions to be able to compare to stools. Meanwhile, stools are vastly overshooting where we expected them to be, making reaching things on the table trivial.

To try to balance this, we are going to use a 3-fold approach.

Stools will be getting nerfed so that they no longer stack so well. Stools with backs will have their backs removed and swivelling will be removed altogether. This should bring stools to the level that we expected them to be at in coffee table, dining table and breakfast nook settings.

Cushions will be replaced by ottomans and should find themselves much more viable with the ability to spec themselves into divans.

Finally, we will be nerfing the table by about 50%. I know it sounds like a huge nerf, but we think with the buffs to cushions and the changes to stools, you will find that you lose 0 viability as a table, while gaining much more compatability with cushions and you will no longer feel required to surround yourself with stools to be successful."

Not long after that :

"We have had some unexpected results with the latest changes to tables, stools and ottomans. When we set out to create this dining set, we did so with all our players in mind. In the past, we designed our dining areas with large ballrooms in mind. With so many people, it was easier to balance the furnishings as people only expected the table to be large and flat and the chairs to be elegant and high-backed.

Unfortunatly we learned that most people simply don't have ballrooms in thier homes nor do they frequently have access to ballroooms on a daily basis. As such, we attempted to scale down our designs to include more home diners. We think we were very successful with this, bringing tables and chairs to many, many more people and making meal time much less exclusive than it was when we launched.

When we decided to continue on with the smaller, more intimate designs, we learned that not all people like to eat at a diningroom table. Some people do not even have a dining room. Some simply prefered to eat at a breakfast bar or breakfast nook. Others tend toward using a coffee table in the living room. Still others eat at thier computer desk and some don't want to use tables and chairs at all, opting to eat standing up or pugging their meals outside of the home.

Trying to balance all these options has prooved to be a large undertaking and we think we have succeeded in many ways, however, there is always room for improvement. And there are always mistakes.

Recently, we made changes to tables to try and balance them with the differnt seating options we have been working on. This resulted in a nerf to some seating options, buffs to others and what appeared to be a very substantial nerf to tables. Our testing showed that a 50% nerf to table would allow all sides of said table to be at a comfortable level with both ottomans and stools. However, nerfing the ottoman end of the tables by 50% has lead to a huge increase in mealtime wipes. Stool users are now starving while ottomans are getting buried.

We have now determined that the problem was not with chairs at all. Nor was it with tables. We have found that the problem lies with the floor. Starting tables, stools, ottomans...even chairs and cushions on the same level is becoming problematic as scaling becomes more prevalent. To keep everything even at the top-end, we need to start balancing at the bottom. As such, we will be revamping floors over the next few months and reverting some of the major changes we've made to seating and tables."

It's a bad, bad cycle.

But then, we can't even get forums that don't log you out a million times before you can finish posting, so what else can we expect.

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BEAR MY CHILDREN. PLEASE!

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Q u o t e:

The metaphor that gets (over) used a lot is the wobbly chair -- you can cut one leg off or try and extend the other three. We would always prefer to buff rather than nerf, because frankly it's more fun. It generates goodwill and makes players excited about playing. But buffing isn't always the answer. Often a nerf involves far fewer changes the game as a whole. Because testing time is usually our limiting factor for releasing changes, we prefer to change as little as possible.

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Interesting metaphor. Like all it has one serious flaw. You NEVER can cut the leg perfectly and the chair always wobbles. If you fail to see what you’re doing eventually the chair will have no legs. You will solve the wobble, but it will no longer be a chair. Nerf are over used and simply are an excuse for laziness. They require less creativity and thought. There are times they are valid. This may be one of the rare exceptions. Unfortunately, Blizzard has a nasty habit of chopping off way too much and instead of fixing the problem, they just keep cutting more legs. The WoW community has yet to see a balanced chair, but we do see it getting lower and lower.

Edit: Looking back at some of the posts. It seems what I have posted is redundant. I've played MMO's for 8 years now. I have yet to see a cycle of nerfs ever improve the game.

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

Ghostcrawler said:


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:


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?

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What troubles me is that there are encounters so far, like Sapphiron and Malygos, where CH is limited or not possible at certain points during the fight. Sure, you don't need Shamans to raid but you do need Priests and Druids for some fights and putting their instant casts on a cooldown isn't really going to change it.

Those 2 classes still are more effective in situations that require movement because of other instant casts, whereas Shamans have one instant cast on a 6sec cooldown. If it ends up being the case that it becomes harder to do the AoE healing for some fights that require movement, wouldn't it just make guilds stack more Druids and Priests and make shamans lose raid spots favoring maybe 1 Resto to fill in the gaps with AoE?

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Q u o t e:

Tanking is still stressful until stuff is completely on farm, not because the tank is furiously mashing Heroic Strike to stay above the lock on threat, but because the tank needs to position the boss and know when to use their cooldowns. Healing will always be stressful, and I don't actually believe the way to make healing more fun is to make healers overpowered. I think it has more to do with giving them cool tools and then beefing up the UI to give them the information they need. Penance is a pretty cool tool. Beacon of Light makes you feel clever when you use it in the right situations. Swiftmend is a lot of fun. I like Riptide.

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I find this slightly amusing (in a different context, just to be clear), because most of the time (in pvp) I have to find ways to tank and heal at the same time. Double the stress, double the fun! Ask me how easy and fun this is! Ask me how much my new cool tools help me get the job done!

In fact, when I do win, I don't really feel clever because i popped pain suppression at 75% health and survived a critical 3 seconds longer so my DPS could kill the thing attacking me after I'm dead (with pain suppression still up), as much as I feel relieved that I could decoy the DPS long enough to score a victory. Because, let's face it, I'm not going to heal through that damage if he gets on my DPS.

I do not understand why you spend so much time focusing on providing us with such a non-stop stream of information about pve-related things, and pvp goes by the wayside. Usually unanswered, or answered with information that is not helpful, useful, or even hopeful. Obviously healing in PvE is fine, judging by the number of DPSers out there coming away with crazy gear for minimal effort. Could we focus more on what is not fine?

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Q u o t e:
My only disagreement with that argument GC is that Malygos is fairly impossible with only Paladins/Shaman(Healing). But I would agree with your Naxx example.

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Malygos 10 is easily managed by just paladins. I've seen it first hand. Malygos 25 pretty much requires at least one priest or druid, I would say, but I've never tried it to verify that one way or the other.

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Q u o t e:
Tanking is still stressful until stuff is completely on farm

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Uh....

I assume you mean in future content. Because no, lol, no it's not. At the moment the only element of the game that takes more than a little footwork is...wait for it... healing! :p I would be less whiny about the state of healing if the raid designers answer to every situation wasn't "OMFG SLAM THE RAID WITH AOE THEYRE BEATING THE CONTENT".

You know... rather than figuring out something new after 4 years. I love healing, but I wish there was more to playing a healing class than there is at the moment. I am oh so happy when I get a break on healing to DPS and get to see the gameworld beyond Grid while I slam on it to machine gun every heal I can for AoE damage.

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Q u o t e:
Malygos 10 is easily managed by just paladins. I've seen it first hand.

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Explain how, when you cannot use cast time based spells in the air. Hope you have a truly bad ass Holy Shock

And before someone tries to say something stupid: No, Sacred Shield does not proc from environmental effects, and this includes Malygos's Vortex.

However, to clear something up, I don't give a *@!# about Malygos req'ing a Priest or a Druid healer. No complaint whatsoever, but I'd really be interested to hear how I'm missing such a glaring oversight that a pair of Holy Paladins could handle this encounter themselves.

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Q u o t e:
Explain how, when you cannot use cast time based spells in the air. Hope you have a truly bad ass Holy Shock

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- Make sure everyone has decent HP and is topped off going into every vortex.
- Holy shock the people who are lowest.
- Cast hasted FoLs when you can (it's a misconception that you can't cast timed spells--they just need to be faster than 1s to avoid being interrupted by the vortex ticks).
- Make sure everyone is doing what they can to manage their own heath and not just leaving everything up to the healers. Health stones, pots, abilities to mitigate damage.

Just some initial thoughts.

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Q u o t e:


We often owe it to the community to take the easy way out, because that means faster changes and fewer bugs. But it isn't always the right decision. Elemental dps is low, and instead of nerfing everyone else we buffed Elemental, because that was a lot easier to do. We have a lot we want to do with the game. We are nearly always going to opt for easy solutions unless the outcome is a lot worse.

I'm not quite sure what your point about tanking is. We're pretty happy with the state of tanking. It still takes a reasonably clever person with good gear to MT a raid, but there are four classes who can do it now. I don't think the threat game was a particularly fun part of PvE for many players, but I also don't think that is why the encounters are easy right now. They are easy because the damage and health done by the mobs is low, and because none of the encounters require that much raid coordination (and the trickier ones are encounters players saw before in the 40-player days and were allowed to practice on during beta). Ulduar is all new content and it will be a lot more challenging. I am thinking of one fight in particular that will probably take some time to conquer.

Tanking is still stressful until stuff is completely on farm, not because the tank is furiously mashing Heroic Strike to stay above the lock on threat, but because the tank needs to position the boss and know when to use their cooldowns. Healing will always be stressful, and I don't actually believe the way to make healing more fun is to make healers overpowered. I think it has more to do with giving them cool tools and then beefing up the UI to give them the information they need. Penance is a pretty cool tool. Beacon of Light makes you feel clever when you use it in the right situations. Swiftmend is a lot of fun. I like Riptide.

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What you need is to understand healing more right now your understanding of how people heal and why is extremely limited and absolutely frustrating because you deny what 90% of the player base does.

Hey GC if you don't get my sig i will explain it to you. Keyboard turners among top end players and raid groups are considered terribad scrubs. Usually people kick those types from raids. Most guilds would kick non click healers too.