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Q u o t e:
But at the end of the day what that really means is that instead of casting a heal, you do nothing and just chill for a few seconds. Is doing nothing ever fun?

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Most of the time in this situation, i'll just start DPSing. This won't work on any mana limited fight but on trash replenishment more than covers any mana i use. The biggest problem is that 90% of the time, it dosen't feel like i am making any meaningful difference with that damage. In healing gear i can throw FS>LvB and then like 2-3 lightning bolts in 10 seconds, then realize that if i was ele, i could do that much damage in 2.5 seconds. To add to that, most of the required dps talents are far to deep in my dps trees to make much of an investment worthwhile. My druid on the other hand can spec 21 points into resto and have at least passable dps with insect swarm+wrath, priests can throw points into smite based specs which again are not great, but make milk runs more interesting. It would be really nice if shammies and pallies could have some way to do passable dps when healing is not required. (move lightning mastery to tier 1-2 ele and give deep holy a no cd exo.)

Step 1: Nerf healing by 20%.

Step 2: Nerf Mortal Strike by 30%.

Step 3: Nerf off-the-global interrupts that take no effort

Result: Healing is now more enjoyable in PvP


Edit: Unintentional First to GC's response.

But seriously: I don't understand why all of these healers are so obsessed with complaining about how healers are somehow discriminated against. If you don't like healing, or think that healing is too hard, DON"T BE A HEALER. I just don't understand the constant complaints of "don't make healing harder" or "don't make healers have to think about mana".

I don't think you responded precisely to the intent of the comment here:

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Q u o t e:
. . .And as far as you say for healing milk runs - its a milk run. DPS can snooze - why can't I? Tanks can use more DPS gear, but why can't I as a healer do some DPS too? OH, thats right, healers cannot DPS very good cause thats like.... bad, or something. . .

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They are asking for the OPTION to DPS if healing isn't needed on a "milk" run.

Because this game is basically a battle model, (not a puzzle or pure adventure type), the requirement to be able to fight and kill mobs is necessary even for healers. What I would like to see more of is healers having more "power" and/or "utility" in their arsenal when healing isn't as needed, so they can contribute and have fun with the DPS.

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Q u o t e:
The conversation was about whether paladins use Holy Light too much. (I'd say they do.) A few players said that paladins need more spells. My response was that paladins need more attractive spells. Right now HL solves every problem.

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Paladins don't gear to use Holy Light because it's an amazing spell, they gear to use Holy Light because it's the best spell they have. If you think paladins use Holy Light too much, I really have no idea what your ideal for the class is. Flash of Light is minuscule, Holy Shock is even worse HPM than Holy Light, and neither of them procs Glyph of Holy Light - what do you envision the breakdown of spell usage should be?

Two really good responses from GC in this thread. Nice to see that although nothing specific is promised or really even hinted at, some of the complains that I've had over the years that I think are simply inherent to healing are being recognized.

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Q u o t e:

We think paladins would feel fine too if they really used their full arsenal. But since cost is almost irrelevant (you can afford the mana and can't afford to not have the big heal) and since Holy Light can be hasted so much and crits all the time, everything looks like a job for Holy Light. I think Beacon and Sacred Shield have done a lot for paladins and maybe there is room for one or two more heals, but I don't think the size of the toolbox is really the problem here. Druids have a big toolbox, yet some druids can go through a whole raid with almost nothing but Rejuv and Wild Growth. If we nerfed Holy Light -- hard -- then other paladin spells would look more attractive. But that would be a big change with a lot of ramifications, and not one we're going to make for 3.3.

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I'm not sure the size of the toolbox, as you say, is ever really the issue anymore. Everyone has more than enough buttons that they COULD use, and I think a lot of classes could easily argue that they have too many. The reason, IMO, that so many healers use a couple main spells in PvE is because those spells either do something that other healers can't do or that they can't do nearly as well. In other words, healing classes have a niche that they are filling maximally by using a small subset of their healing arsenal. For example, if paladins were to receive a blanket-able HoT that was way worse than Rejuv, and a smart group heal that was way worse than the existing ones other classes can use, I would think that there wouldn't be very much change in the tendency of the "typical" raiding Holy paladin to spam HL.

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Q u o t e:
You're smart healers, right? But at the end of the day what that really means is that instead of casting a heal, you do nothing and just chill for a few seconds. Is doing nothing ever fun?

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Nope. I am curious what solution if any there is to this because it's a problem that seems inextricably linked to the healing role. There isn't really a competitive aspect of healing the way there is with DPS. As soon as the group itself is no longer challenged, healers are not pushed and essentially wait for the DPS to kill the boss so we can collect our loot.

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Dear Blizzard and World of Warcraft players,

I have been playing a restro-druid for a while now.

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Resto. How hard is that?

"Destro" comes from pronouncing "Destr" (that is, it sounds better than "destru"), which is from "Destruction."
"Resto" comes from "[/i]Resto[/i]ration."

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Totally agree that the occasional break is good, and makes fights feel dynamic instead of the same thing over and over for six minutes.

But back in say vanilla WoW when mana managed a great deal, what we had were banks of healers who would heal for awhile and then sit back and regen for awhile. If you were the colonel commanding the troops, this probably felt really clever. If you were the healer sitting there watching your mana increase and doing nothing else, you probably had to resist the urge to tab out and browse the net.

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I miss those days, because that's when healing was the most interesting.

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Bigger dps, bigger health, less heals. Got it GC. You want Cataclysm to be WotLK part 2: Electric Boogaloo for pvp. So, could you, I dunno, make priests/hunters more survivable before you make this happen? Because it wasn't fun the first time.

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Did you even read his post? He clearly said that blizzard wants higher health pools and LESS damage in relation to those health pools.

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While that sounds good on "paper," my fear is that you would see groups just swapping all their healers out for paladins on boss 1 and then for shaman on boss 2. If you look at all of the mechanics of an encounter, you'll notice that the designers spend a lot of attention on trying not to prop up any single class or role too much. For example, there are not many LK encounters that scream "replace all your casters with melee" or "drop all of our melee for three more tanks."

To be honest, I'd much rather it go the opposite direction and players stop approaching raid invites as "They'll want me because my class is so awesome," and instead "They'll want me because I'm good."

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Hey GC, here's an idea: Why don't you add a "class combo" system to healing. E.g. if a shaman casts a chain heal and heals all the dps to full, and a holy paladin casts FoL and misses it because the chain heal already got everyone, the target the paladin FoL'd gets a temporary damage shield? Or something?

This all boils down to the fact that you guys have made it so dps/tanks have great synergy on boss targets, but healers have absolutely NO synergy on raid targets. It doesn't matter what healers you bring, if you heal, you heal. Now if you made some special effects that interacted between classes, like, say, living seed from a resto druid giving a 2x multiplier to a holy paladins FoL... That would be going towards introducing some raid synergy.

If there's anything I would want you guys to think about, it's this: Bosses get tons of debuffs from the DPS/tanks that benefit the other dps and tanks in the group (sunder, etc.). BUT. Healers don't have such a system where healers actually can see how they are working together to improve each other's healing.

In a raid, it still feels like it's Every Healer for Themselves.

Paladins spam HL not so much because its the catch all heal for them but because their other heals are wastes of time. The time you spent hitting Holy Shock or Flash of Light is the time your tank took 2 hits and went from 100-0

Im sure we've all been there where we saw a 50K+ health tank was instagibbed by a boss within a single GCD. (Im looking at you heroic Beast) anything less then your most massive heal is almost insane in nearly all the boss fights in this game.

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Q u o t e:
My response was that paladins need more attractive spells.

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You've already said you want to give paladins another spell in Cataclysm, but you said that paladins are spamming Holy Light too much now. Since you are dissatisfied now, I'd like to know what your ideal is for paladin healing in ICC, not Cataclysm.

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You understand, I hope, that responses like this are why it is often so hard for us to communicate to players what we are thinking.

The conversation was about whether paladins use Holy Light too much. (I'd say they do.) A few players said that paladins need more spells. My response was that paladins need more attractive spells. Right now HL solves every problem.

Your response to that was "Don't nerf me, bro." :(

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We had a paladin just leave our guild becuase our other paladins DIDNT use holy light too much.
He said, this isn't naxx or uld, this is togc 25 and holy light is the only thing that flys, and these other paladins are using too much flash of light, /gquit.
Im being 100% honest here.
the other paladins after the fact said sure they start spamming holy light when its needed.

So right now, if they dont spam holy light they aren't doing anything for the raid.

Standing around doing nothing may not be particularly fun, but by the same token managing mana as a healer adds a lot of depth and by extension fun to the overall game. Why not allow healers to have moderate dps spells that cost no mana? Holy fire is a pretty fun spell. It may not hit for a ton, but it's satisfying in that it looks cool and has a nice feel on the sound effect and cast time. Even at 40% of the effective damage of a true dps class, that is enough to be a meaningful contribution to the fight, easily 10% of the overall group's damage (in 5-man). If the weak damage spells had no mana cost, healers would have something to do while regenning mana or not healing, and then you could push mana a lot farther as a resource. As an added bonus, they'd also have a much easier time soloing!

wow there's a lot of people here who fail at reading comprehension.

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Q u o t e:
Standing around doing nothing may not be particularly fun, but by the same token managing mana as a healer adds a lot of depth and by extension fun to the overall game. Why not allow healers to have moderate dps spells that cost no mana? Holy fire is a pretty fun spell. It may not hit for a ton, but it's satisfying in that it looks cool and has a nice feel on the sound effect and cast time. Even at 40% of the effective damage of a true dps class, that is enough to be a meaningful contribution to the fight, easily 10% of the overall group's damage (in 5-man). If the weak damage spells had no mana cost, healers would have something to do while regenning mana or not healing, and then you could push mana a lot farther as a resource. As an added bonus, they'd also have a much easier time soloing!

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Or at least more 'active' ways to regenerate mana, perhaps. Paladins sitting around melee'ing the boss with JoW/SoW, for example, is a cool mechanic--though Paladin attacks as Holy need to be drastically overhauled to be worth something.

I remember when wanding was a big deal as a Priest, but that was too fire and forget.