In the stickied post above, Ghostcrawler wrote:

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Q u o t e:

These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

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Emphasis mine.

I've been wondering about this for some time, and I figured I'd finally bring it to the board in the hopes that I might actually see a blue reply concerning the issue. I know that's unlikely, but I figure it's worth a shot.

The quote above is taken directly from the sticky post by GC concerning the nerfs to mana regeneration that took place in patch 3.1. I'm not here to debate the wisdom of the changes or to ask that they be reversed. In point of fact, my mana management is a bit more creative now, but I'm doing okay with it. Of course, I'm discipline and disc is still in decent shape. I think the holy priests and holy paladins are having more issues, but that's really beside the point of what I'm looking for in the way of a response.

If the idea was to "move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam" as is indicated above, I must say that the development department has failed miserably. I once healed for 1 million effective on Eradar Twins in Sunwell and I thought that was a miracle. I said to myself, "no way will I ever see that much effective on a single fight again."

Well, I sure was wrong. You want to talk about frenetic spam? I offer you Xt-002 (less now than pre-nerf), Hodir's frozen blows, Freya's hard modes, Mimiron, Thorim hard mode, Ignis (again, less so than pre-nerf), Auriya, and Kologarn. I know I haven't beaten those hard modes yet as someone will probably point out (and in fact, we're still working on Yogg,) but I'm not looking for a critique of our progress. All of the new fights are fast becoming "miss a healing GCD and it's game over." In fact, the only fight that doesn't have at least moments of "frenetic spam" is General Vezax, and that's because you CANT AFFORD IT.

Don't get me wrong. I'm okay with this model. I think frenetic spam challenges healers. I think this system works really well. But the logic ghostcrawler used in arguing for the mana regen nerfs is spurious given how the game has been developed in Ulduar.

So my question is this: Where is this change to the style of healing to be "more deliberate and thoughtful" that justified the alteration to the mana regeneration model? Because it seems to me that most of these fights are just more of the same "spam the raid with AE damage and see if they can handle it" method that every fight since BT has used. And like I said, I'm okay with that. But what was the point in nerfing regen when every challenging healing fight still comes down to the same paradigm: "You miss a GCD and someone dies."

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Q u o t e:
To be honest, despite all of the nerfs, mana regeneration still doesn't seem to be an issue for healers in Ulduar. You can often still afford to cast your largest heals and not care about overhealing because the risk of people dying feels like a far greater risk than running out of mana.

We're not sure that will lead to us making any additional nerfs at this time (and Replenishment would probably be the target if we needed to.) So far we're really happy with how the various fights in Ulduar feel. There are very intense moments (like Frozen Blows) but there are breaks as well (in between Mimiron phases for example). Many of the fights are dynamic -- you heal in one fashion at times (say MT healing) and then another fashion at other times (say raid healing during add moment or big AE spells). There aren't too many times where you're just spamming your spells every cooldown or GCD, and when it happens it's not necessarily for too long.

That said, we think we can still make healing more interesting. :)

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I am IMMUNE to your nerfs! We always have 5-7 druids in raid. INNERVATE ME!!!

Well, I've been reasonably satisfied with the changes to disc and believe GC when he says they are working to make healing more interesting.

I'll even try to bite my tongue about pvp for now.

Holy paladin gear issues aside, Ulduar has been very interesting to heal so far. I haven't seen all of it so take that for what it's worth. Hodir and Mimiron stand out for me as the most fun fights to heal. What else can you do besides varying the damage between tanks, spot healing(slag pot), and AoE. Targets being in range seems to becoming more of an issue to be aware of. I.E. Begin casting Holy light on moving tank during ignis. By the time it's cast time is complete, tank is out of range. And yes, mana is an issue more than in lolnaxx. Overall, however, I'm very pleased.

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Q u o t e:
To be honest, despite all of the nerfs, mana regeneration still doesn't seem to be an issue for healers in Ulduar. You can often still afford to cast your largest heals and not care about overhealing because the risk of people dying feels like a far greater risk than running out of mana.

We're not sure that will lead to us making any additional nerfs at this time (and Replenishment would probably be the target if we needed to.) So far we're really happy with how the various fights in Ulduar feel. There are very intense moments (like Frozen Blows) but there are breaks as well (in between Mimiron phases for example). Many of the fights are dynamic -- you heal in one fashion at times (say MT healing) and then another fashion at other times (say raid healing during add moment or big AE spells). There aren't too many times where you're just spamming your spells every cooldown or GCD, and when it happens it's not necessarily for too long.

That said, we think we can still make healing more interesting. :)

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Do you play this game? Honestly? Or are you making the judgement that healers don't have mana issues on fights from the nerfed down versions of easy modes? Because I will tell you first hand that the hard modes that we attempt, and the medium modes we complete - mana is on my mind the whole time.

Do you want us OOM at the very end of every encounter instead of almost OOM? Perhaps it is because my guild can't stack Priests that myself and other healers are working over-time and still coming up short in some scenarios, but the dmg that is taken on say Freya +3 seems to be almost unhealable outside of getting REALLY REALLY lucky. Seriously i got back to back 14.7 k HITS from Tremor and Storm's Lightening in the same second on several attempts. Show me a PvE Resto Druid that has over 28k health. Even with stacking every last ounce of Stam I have I only reached 26K.

I honestly think you judge healing from overgeared guilds doing easy modes, because if you looked at moderately geared guilds doing med-hard you WOULD NOT have these opinions.

And no I am not crying that Hard Modes are too hard because that is why I play this game: Challenge. But to here you think mana isn't an issue or healers aren't spamming leads me question what you are ACTUALLY looking at to basis these opinions on.

If mana regen is nerfed further and healers are pushed to play in a more conservative style (fewer, more strategic casts), then we may reach the point where healers will start having to make hard decisions like allowing someone to die rather than totally depleting their mana and allowing everyone to die, ie Sophie's Choice.

If that's what makes healing interesting, I'm against it.

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Q u o t e:
If mana regen is nerfed further and healers are pushed to play in a more conservative style (fewer, more strategic casts), then we may reach the point where healers will start having to make hard decisions like allowing someone to die rather than totally depleting their mana and allowing everyone to die, ie Sophie's Choice.

If that's what makes healing interesting, I'm against it.

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they could nerf mana to where we are oom in 3 casts and DPS still wouldn't click lightwell.

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Q u o t e:
To be honest, despite all of the nerfs, mana regeneration still doesn't seem to be an issue for healers in Ulduar. You can often still afford to cast your largest heals and not care about overhealing because the risk of people dying feels like a far greater risk than running out of mana.

We're not sure that will lead to us making any additional nerfs at this time (and Replenishment would probably be the target if we needed to.) So far we're really happy with how the various fights in Ulduar feel. There are very intense moments (like Frozen Blows) but there are breaks as well (in between Mimiron phases for example). Many of the fights are dynamic -- you heal in one fashion at times (say MT healing) and then another fashion at other times (say raid healing during add moment or big AE spells). There aren't too many times where you're just spamming your spells every cooldown or GCD, and when it happens it's not necessarily for too long.

That said, we think we can still make healing more interesting. :)

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The problem is that you seem to make it interesting by making healing a bigger PITA than it is.
Honestly, I dont think that you made Uldar harder per-sey. I think that you nerfed class and healing mechanics to make the encounters harder.

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Q u o t e:
they could nerf mana to where we are oom in 3 casts and DPS still wouldn't click lightwell.

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As true as that may be a lot of the time, the fact that lightwell forces the user to change targets is frustrating to everyone. As good as lightwell can be, I doubt you'll ever find anyone who is happy with that mechanic.

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Q u o t e:


That said, we think we can still make healing more interesting. :)

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Please don't do that.

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Q u o t e:
To be honest, despite all of the nerfs, mana regeneration still doesn't seem to be an issue for healers in Ulduar. You can often still afford to cast your largest heals and not care about overhealing because the risk of people dying feels like a far greater risk than running out of mana.

We're not sure that will lead to us making any additional nerfs at this time (and Replenishment would probably be the target if we needed to.) So far we're really happy with how the various fights in Ulduar feel. There are very intense moments (like Frozen Blows) but there are breaks as well (in between Mimiron phases for example). Many of the fights are dynamic -- you heal in one fashion at times (say MT healing) and then another fashion at other times (say raid healing during add moment or big AE spells). There aren't too many times where you're just spamming your spells every cooldown or GCD, and when it happens it's not necessarily for too long.

That said, we think we can still make healing more interesting. :)

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An interesting post, to be sure, but... does it seem to anyone else that GC isn't actually responding to the OP? She says "You didn't really do what you said you would do with healing... just FYI" and he says "Don't worry, we'll nerf you more to make up for it"
???
Oversimplification and tweaking of the truth aside, it's not really on the same topic, is it? She wasn't complaining about mana issues, which seemed to be the main topic of GC's reply, nor was she saying healing was too hard/easy - just pointing out that the rationalization behind the 3.1 changes hasn't really been implemented in the new content.

I'm a holy paladin, and I have almost exclusively 10man T7 gear. I don't yet have 4piece T7, so I'm saving all my emblems of Valor for the tier 7.5 legs.

Our guild goes at a much slower pace than the other guilds you might see, two weeks in a row we've killed 5 bosses in Ulduar. Kologarn, but not Iron Council (5 wipes this week) or Auriya (not attempted).

The first week we ran with myself, a Resto Druid and a Holy Priest.. I think this ended up being a fairly strong group.

This week, same exactly players, but different healers. Two Holy Paladins, and a Resto Shaman (did not have a shaman at all last week). So, we lost AoE heals but gained a Bloodlust.

In my mind, this increased the difficulty of the raid quite a bit. In a 10man instance, bringing 2 Holy Paladins is extremely fail. Paladins don't have a HoT, and only have one instant cast heal, which is a pittance against the 15k+ damage we're seeing our tanks take on the later bosses.

When you say that you think that healers aren't bothering to watch their mana, just cast their biggest heal, it's because we can't afford NOT to. Flash of Light is useless in Ulduar, so I have to cast Holy Light. Therefore, I have to gem and play toward the strengths (i.e. more Int/Crit/Haste plz). Trust me when I say, that I can't worry about mana problems that might crop up THEN, for the death of the tank that happens NOW. I can only hope that what mana regen tools I have will carry me through. If not, tank dies later, but at least he didn't die at the very beginning.

I would much rather have a hard decision to make with less healing spam, and more careful prioritizing of heals. I still feel as whack-a-moley as ever.

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Q u o t e:
That said, we think we can still make healing more interesting. :)

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I love this game you have produced Blizzard, I really do. My biggest wish is that someday I'll actually be able to play and experience it as a healer instead of playing 'Whack A Mole' with my raid frames. Ulduar is the most visually appealing instance yet made and I even upgraded my computer to play at Ultra settings when 3.1 was released. The unfortunate thing is that during raids I often feel like I could be playing on a Commodore 64 for all the difference it makes in what I actually see.

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Q u o t e:
There aren't too many times where you're just spamming your spells every cooldown or GCD, and when it happens it's not necessarily for too long.

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Are healers really not having to heal every GCD? Are you just standing around waiting to heal people? Sigh, my guid sucks at moving out of things. :(

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Q u o t e:


Are healers really not having to heal every GCD? Are you just standing around waiting to heal people? Sigh, my guid sucks at moving out of things. :(

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Quite often in udluar i have 4-5 second windows where everyone is topped off and I just start cancelcasting greater heal on the tank. Yes, your guildies need to move out faster.

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Q u o t e:
To be honest, despite all of the nerfs, mana regeneration still doesn't seem to be an issue for healers in Ulduar. You can often still afford to cast your largest heals and not care about overhealing because the risk of people dying feels like a far greater risk than running out of mana.

We're not sure that will lead to us making any additional nerfs at this time (and Replenishment would probably be the target if we needed to.) So far we're really happy with how the various fights in Ulduar feel. There are very intense moments (like Frozen Blows) but there are breaks as well (in between Mimiron phases for example). Many of the fights are dynamic -- you heal in one fashion at times (say MT healing) and then another fashion at other times (say raid healing during add moment or big AE spells). There aren't too many times where you're just spamming your spells every cooldown or GCD, and when it happens it's not necessarily for too long.

That said, we think we can still make healing more interesting. :)

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GC, Are you considering how the fights were nerfed into account too? I have healed alot of fights on my priest on the PTR, Healing was intense and extremely challenging at that point. Mana regen was a issue and so were alot of other things. At this point in time Ulduar has been nerfed alot, Tanks get hit less .. Less AoE damage on the raid. Healing is far less challenging than it was on the PTR. So before you nerf any mana regen mechanics or replenishment you should really consider how you nerfed the encounter aswell. If the tank gets hit for 15k compared to 25k+ earliear.. Healing isn't exactly an issue.

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Q u o t e:
Are healers really not having to heal every GCD? Are you just standing around waiting to heal people? Sigh, my guid sucks at moving out of things. :(

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What they did in the Mimiron (and a few more) fight was great. If the DPS/tank/whoever ignored the bad stuff, they were instantly killed. Raid damage that should be healed, could be healed.

Of course, then Blizzard nerfed the bots so they can be tanked instead of needing to be kited, other damage in the fight was nerfed so that it could be healed through as well, and the trash sappers so they didn't one-shot people when they exploded either.

And we start the slow trip back the other direction where healers are expected to heal through all damage.

I'd love to see a move away from spammy healing where your healers are required to have less than 100ms latency.

Why must you punish healers that may even a little bit of latency.