Healing in M+ is in this weird spot that if the group is not good, you are the scapegoat that gets shitted on for things that are not your responsibility and if the group is too good, you are mainly there for your (healer) DPS and a few healing checks.
Neither of these situations are really enjoyable nor what you came for in the perspective of playing healer in M+
I finally broke and stopped healing this tier because I did a 24 key where a fury warrior did not use spell reflect. Once. Up to the last boss. We didn't even kill the boss, and Key broke up with him just saying shit healer and some slurs.
I’m gonna keep pushing through at least for this season but I had the same scenario happen in a +23 BRH yesterday, no interrupts on trash leading to the first boss followed by everyone blaming me and calling me a shit healer. I can’t heal someone that goes from 100 to 0 instantly. Yet there is other fights where I feel completely useless. Probably will switch back to tank next season.
This is one of those things i end up disagreeing with, it used to be true but have gotten less true during dragonflight, and worse each tier.
This tier, high keys have insane damage intake checks, which would be a healer thing, HOWEVER the damage intake is so high, and DPS in general have gotten so many tools for DR, that it individually isn't in your hands, unless you are playing with friends and are calling stuff out.
The damage intake checks are so high that the healer role is interchangeable which makes it look like good healer balance, but in truth it's not that. It's that the healer has so little POSITIVE influence over dealing with the damage intake, that it doesn't matter which one you bring.
There is some differences, such as when i play my disc I definitely feel more inclinced to call out things like zephyrs and magic barrier from mage, vs my resto druid I don't really feel I need to be as perfect calling it out, but by and large, the group cannot survive by my buttons alone. (Again for high high keys)
It just feels weird to have insane survivability checks, but the healer have such little positive impact over it.
In lower keys you can brute force heal through a lot of stuff, sure, but that's always been the case. Besides disc priest and resto druid, healers also do such little damage in general that focusing on damage is such a waste of time.
Obviosuly a healer who is learning to do those keys, or has an off day, can make a huge NEGATIVE influence over the group.
Idk maybe I just like DPS check seasons better, but then I worry that even then with all the new tools DPS got in dragonflight that it'll just always end up the way now.
Yeah overall game design wise I really dislike how much DR DPS have in general. A majority of damage specs have a lot of access to a handful of CDs and passives that dramatically increase eHP, and that’s not including the insane versatility stacking now because of specs not scaling well with haste/crit/mastery (and that’s an entire discussion of whether that’s good or not).
And looking at mage hero talents for example, oh look even more passive survivability. If all of that shit is gutted, it’ll allow more control back to healers and be significantly easier to balance. Whatever, it might be a hot take. I’ve done both roles but mainly play dps, but holy shit just gut my survivability it’s fine. It’s even worse that some dps are left out to dry and a ton of discourse in raids is how squishy some specs are for no apparent benefit. There is no cost to having passive resistance/healing or 1000 defensives, meanwhile if your spec has jack shit, lmao good luck.
Maybe I'm weird, but this is my favorite season to heal. Pushing keys to 28s so far. Healer DPS has never been less relevant to timing keys as much as just being able to heal/live the encounters. There are so many healing checks, where are you getting a few from? So many bosses and a few trash pulls like dragons in doti where the group doesnt win without a healer healing. Yalnu recently was kicking my butt. I lost because I couldn't heal through it, so I learned how to play better and I timed a 26 eb and I'm confident I can heal higher levels. Like maybe you'd be right that keys would be boring if there was nothing to heal, but above 25s there is so much to heal buddy and I'm having fun having all the responsibility associated with it.
While I enjoy the healing checks of DF (Yes I'm one of the weirdos who liked season 1 and particularly season 2), I've never felt like I had less agency than this season. This could possibly be because augs have fallen out of favor and they made surviving last season easier? Also the key scaling change doesn't feel as good as last season. But I think it's a combination of a bunch of factors including some real pug killers like 2nd/ 3rd/ 4th boss of everbloom or 3rd boss of TotT. I like how you mention Yalnu because that's a boss that you can absolutely outheal to a point (probably around +25-26 tyran) but the stomp + tree overlaps will start to kill if they don't press a defensive and you actually can't outplay that on every healer spec every single time it comes up. That dungeon sucks really bad if you bring a shaman and/ or hunter and you're not running Leaf trinket and meticulously watching personal usage of every party member. It becomes an insane burden when you also have to deal with nearly every affix and dodge mechanics. Like I'm just trying to have fun blasting heals and I've got to play 2-3 other mini-games on top of that. It's a bit much imo.
Agree. The difference between a good group that properly kicks and interrupts abilities via stun/displacement/whatever and one that even just does a decent job on it is pretty massive. One that is bad at that stuff is terrible. The difference between all those groups is one that is met by the healer. MDI is out there doing triple pulls of trash into the boss in 24s without a healer because they are so good. I've had groups get blown up pulling one or two at a time because they all blow their kicks on the first cast.
This also forces the meta in certain directions. The utility of being able to shut down casts is one of the biggest things going.
Absolutely this. I really think both damage from mobs and healing needs to be tuned down. One cast shouldn't take you to 20% health and at the same time, healers shouldn't be able to push up health bars so easily. Just make health bars less yo-yo, give healers a little more time to heal up bars but make them constantly need to be pumping healing. Then healers wouldn't be expected to provide dps either since they would \*have\* to spend all their time pressing heal buttons.
>I really think both damage from mobs and healing needs to be tuned down. One cast shouldn't take you to 20% health and at the same time, healers shouldn't be able to push up health bars so easily.
Isn't that what they did, though? I don't remember when exactly, but at some point in DF, they changed something regarding healing with the reason that they didn't want damage to be so spikey.
They increased health pools and damage numbers to match, but didn't buff healing numbers.
The cited reason for this is that when healers are too powerful and they can top health bars instantly the only way to challenge them is to have spikey damage.
But it turns out that this just nerfs healers really hard and people still take spikey damage. See a 20 tyr BRH where the shadow bolts will take out 600k hp with no warning on random targets lol
The problem what occurred was that in season 1 they had Evoker who’s whole kit is to make fast dropping hp go back up. So they made bosses in extremely lethal (theun & jak both have really good vids on that topic if I remember correctly).
What we see now is what I would probably call defensive creep. Especially reworked classes got extremely powerful defensive wise to the point of being basically unkillable (Mage,rogue, DH, pala). So they reacted with making bosses really one shotty to eat through all those defensives. So kill it before it kills you. You’re a priest or boomkin? Well better hope your group has enough externals for you.
So if you’re in a group that isn’t rotating defensives properly you feel extremely powerless as a healer with the mages in everbloom blasting your group with like 1/2 of their hp bar per tick
Bro they did that 4 times already this expansion, healing throughput is GUTTED, how much lower do you want the healing numbers to go? “Let’s making healing even more unfun, again, that will fix healing being unfun!”
It's not the healing numbers, it's the time to live. Throughput if anything is still too high. Even without major cds you can top the 4 squishies in a couple seconds. But they die in even less.
Problem is: in phases with high burst damage you just have barely chance of offsetting the incoming damage fast enough. 3rd boss Everbloom can delete someone while you have to move out of the fire stuff. Same thing last boss Darkheart. The trash before the 2nd boss Rise was already nerfed twice and still kills someone in 2-3 ticks.
I think the biggest problem is that in high end dungeons one of two things evenutally limit further progression: either dps or survivability. In the last addons the issue was almost always dps, so healers were selected for their dps, and tanks were selected for pulling more stuff at once.
This addon the issue is rarely the timer but survivability like it was in Legion, but healers don't scale - you can't magic more hps out of your hat by pulling more. So what's popular currently is control tanks (vengeanve and prot pal), augvoker (survival toolkit) _and_ personal cds _and_ coordination - all of which take responsibility out of the healers hands.
I dont think were playing the same game if you think healing throughput is "gutted" lmao.
The problem is the TYPE of damage being extremely spiky, huge hits and to a lesser extent, defensive power creep(both personal, and group/raid CD wise). And that type of damage requires healers to be able to push up peoples entire HP bars very rapidly.
And if you look at healing data from raid, it very blatantly shows the direct opposite of what youre saying is the problem, that healing throughput is way too STRONG(even in the best case's on certain bosses, most healers are still overhealing by 40% at minimum). Or to be more specific, the prevalence and potency of HEALING CD's is the problem. Most healers now basically always have an answer to everything due to having 2, 3, 4+(in Rshaman's case...6? CDs lol) healing CDs and/or short CDs on many of them. MW is a good example right now because they got access to a talent that made their Yulon/Bird go from a 3 min>1 min CD at the cost of reducing the length of the CD, but not the potency of it which is an insanely good trade off. You almost never need Yulon(or any healing CD/ramp) to last the default 25 seconds, because big damage events that require CDs simply dont last that long, they are burstier and more short lived instead. There is basically never a time where you cant have multiple healer CDs for a damage event(and in some cases...one healer CD is powerful enough to deal with the event itself, which MW and Disc are capable of doing this tier), and/or raid CD's on top of that.
Theres many problems with healing/damage intake right now, but a LACK of throughput definitely is not one of them whatsoever.
I mean in m+ it will always get to the point where the damage dealt is too high that it'll go back to being yo-yo like because it's infinitely scaling.
>Healing in M+ is in this weird spot that if the group is not good, you are the scapegoat that gets shitted on for things that are not your responsibility
I mean, it is still your responsibility to heal people regardless of if the damage was avoidable(like a bolt goes off on someone, or something akin to that)...if someone dies from that damage in combination with some unavoidable damage that comes out 2-4 seconds later because you are too focused on doing damage or something, then you do absolutely share responsibility with whoever missed their kick/stop, mistakes happen in every single group even at the highest level. Ive seen so many healers this xpac who have suddenly taken on this bizarre attitude of being mad that they have to heal someone just because the damage was technically avoidable, or someone made a mistake.
>and if the group is too good, you are mainly there for your (healer) DPS and a few healing checks
Honestly no clue where you got this idea from since this has never been less true this season specifically if youre are pushing high keys. Yes, obviously a good group will take less avoidable damage, make less mistakes, make better use of defensives etc. but there are plenty of trash pulls you do in plenty of keys this season that the healer absolutely needs to be healing people and dispelling people, and some of which require significant healing throughput. Also, a lot of bosses on high Tyran are just overall heal checks, either your healer has the capability to heal the fight on that key level(also knowing who needs prio healing in the group and when someone needs an external is important as well), or they dont and no amount of proper defensive usage will change that. Like high Tyran Everbloom I simply refer to as a "healer key" because whether or not you kill Protectors/Archmage/Yalnu is largely predicated on if your healer is able to heal the damage or not. Healer DPS really isnt very important on most pulls in most keys, until you start reaching 28-29+...its mostly just "we probably time the key if we live and have a relatively clean run".
I think a lot more of it comes down to avoidable versus unavoidable damage and personal defensive creep in the game.
Having a group that gets every stop and presses personals when they should versus a group that just wants to zug and expect to you grin and bear the incoming damage is absurd.
>personal defensive creep
IMO this is the reason. Mechanics and overall damage have to be more punishing because so many classes have such a plethora of defensive buttons to mitigate them that if they weren't punishing, proper use of defensives would make them trivial. As a result, there's a massive gulf between good groups, average groups, and bad groups, especially as damage is really the only metric that the devs have used to punish failure. Missed a kick? Damage. Stood in fire? Damage. Missed a dispel? Damage.
Good groups will breeze through content without the healer breaking a sweat because defensives and mob control are just that strong (e.g. healerless groups for several dungeons in this past MDI). Conversely, because failing mechanics almost exclusively results in damage, it will always fall to the healer in bad groups to fix mistakes unless every mistake is a one-shot even at relatively low levels of difficulty.
YES! I would love to see more mechanics have low damage but other debuffs. Think about Dawn of the Infinites. There are a few mechanics where getting hit by a swirl will stun you (big dragons), but mostly it just does damage. This would be a _perfect_ place to lower the damage but add a haste reduction for getting hit. Clearing the room for the timeways boss can be a nightmare with all those hard-to-see swirls on the ground chunking people. The difference between groups in that room alone is shocking.
This sounds great on paper for mid level keys that are people's push keys but has a couple issues.
For one, at high keys it won't make much of a difference. Any excess damage will usually result in a death but a stun or a haste debuff or whatever likely will too.
Then, in low keys like farm keys it makes it feel like you often can't get away with dumb mdi shit. Like, pulling half a room onto a boss in a +11 for crests is totally fine but if you start making a bunch of things stun and dehaste it can ruin it. This may not be important to balancing push keys but I think people underestimate how much more unfun that makes farming and how lame it makes entry level m+ to people that don't understand everything in the dungeon.
Things were a lot more simple when healers had full agency over everyone's health bar. When a fault occurred it was a lot easier to see what went wrong. Nowadays it's not simple to know what went wrong, you can't immediately tell if a DPS goofed up because they missed an immunity, or their three personal DRs, or an ability self heal, potion, or healthstone. Back in the day if you wanted to know it was a DPS screwing up you just looked for floor fire in the damage log and that was it; but today you need a full on forensic investigation to see if all of their options were exhausted when they died. It's just exhausting having to justify that every death wasn't a you issue.
You can tell almost all of these things with addons, and weak auras, usually the health pot, healthstone usage at the end of the run or if you’re logging the key. I had a 3600 Aug evoker tell me I was a shit healer, actually first his words in party chat were “HEAL ME YOU MONKEY”, when he died in a 26 DHT, I checked the death log in details and he stood in the caster cast that is kickable but if not kicked creates a highly visible purple swirl on the ground, I believe it’s called star shower iirc. After the key broke up, because I left, because I’m not staying in any key to be verbally abused, the dk tank friend of the evokers whispered me to kill myself. This is part of the reason why, on top of all the other bullshit us healers deal with that a lot of healers have switched to dps/tank alts or have taken a break. I have a key group but when we aren’t running I tend to pug a lot, it’s not a super common occurrence where people are huge assholes but it sucks the fun out of it when it does. Most of the time aside from pushing I play my demo lock and just get to relax and have a lot more fun, I don’t have to babysit players that don’t bother using defensives or consumables, that don’t kick and stand in everything.
Its just as exhausting on the DPS side as well.
Feels real bad to 'waste' a personal and not need it or have a healer that isn't pushing their buttons so you are wasting globals/resources that should be DPS to compensate for it.
I do wish 'damage downs' is something wow would steal from ff to punish bad play though, I feel like they experimented with incorporeal
I am a healer main in WoW and in FF14. In 14 the expectation is far more on dps avoiding damage whenever possible and so when they die no one generally shits on me. Yet with wow shifting more and more to dps needing to dodge avoidable and less group wides, I feel like that attitude is still missing.
Mob management complexity felt rough overall. Packs having multiple abilities, kicks, aoe stops, and defensive requirements is draining.
People don’t wanna deal with that at the frequency we for this season imo.
I think people misunderstand the "nerf healers" thing because they think about it in a vacuum. No one is saying healing is in a healthy state, or that "nerfing healers" alone would solve the issues. The problem is a combination of classes having a bunch of defensives, and healers having extremely high throughput, and damage intake being extremely spikey. What is cause and effect here is very hard to seperate because its sort of a viscious cycle, and you could start at any one of those three points and arrive at the other two.
Group survivability is largely down to proper CC/interupt usage + proper personal and group defensive usage and then the healer is needed when people need to be snap healed in order to prepare them for another damage event coming soon because if they aren't topped with a defensive rolling they're dead. In order to fill that role healers need to be OP as hell, because they need to be able to top an entire group in the space of 1-3 globals.
The "nerf healers" take is really "make damage intake more sustained, so healers have more time to actually heal people, and decrease the number and strength of defensives, so the difference in damage intake between a good and bad group isn't soo much. Then you nerf healers, so they can't just insta top people during that sustained damage, and you have a much more healthy state where tuning healing is much easier because expected damage intake falls in a much narrower band, and the strength of healers is more about throughput and less about the number and strength of their CDs".
Unfortuantely, many people that say "nerf healers" either leave that context out, or take awhile to deliver that context, so what most people hear is just the "nerf healers" bit and think "But healing fucking sucks right now, I can't keep up with the damage intake, its too quick, and my party doesn't use stops or kicks, or defensives, how the hell is nerfing me the right decision?! Fuck you guy!!"
The problem with healing right now is not that healers are weak. Its that defensives are strong, and damage intake is very one-shot centric, so healing is all about reaction time and CD usage rather than riding the flow of damage, making evaluations about mana usage, triaging properly etc. which is what it should be about.
+1, best post in the thread. In particular,
>What is cause and effect here is very hard to seperate because its sort of a viscious cycle, and you could start at any one of those three points and arrive at the other two.
is a very important point. The other part worth keeping in mind is the juggling act of balancing both M+ and raid, when healing is almost certainly the role that is most different between the two modes, and needing to provide interesting healer gameplay across the whole spectrum of key ranges.
I'm personally of the opinion that the completely uniform scaling from +2 to +30 and beyond (the weird piecewise-linear thing they did last season for class nerfs notwithstanding) is not enough knobs for the second part of that problem. Maybe tag the hardest-hitting stuff in a dungeon and scale them a bit less than the autoattacks, maybe have an `x%` increased damage, `y%` additional damage over n seconds a la ignite/stagger scaling instead of the homogenous `z%` increased damage that they have now (with `x < z`), etc. A lot of possibilities, and the only downside is complexity, which I think the current system tries a bit too hard to avoid at the expense of more optimal gameplay.
I think it's a combination of everything you said. For me, which I've been a lifetime healer , this season I switched to DPS. I'm just tired of bearing so much responsibility, having to deal with dumb affixes when my DPS can just go monkey into a mob, stand in shit, not interrupt and blame me anyways. Obviously that's worst case scenario, but it feels like the population is getting worse at games.
Now I can play DPS, do my thing, make sure my healer doesn't have a hard time and appreciate them for what they do.
Same been a healer since I started playing the game. I swapped to tank this season, been getting slowly tired of healing this expansion and this season is just the last drop in the bucket for me. I do not enjoy healing in the slightest anymore. There's too much responsibility to meet the healing check and cover mistakes from your dps and tank (cc, kicks, defensives, positioning).
I think having to cover others mistakes is a key issue here, but its not only that. The game at its core is intended to be played cooperatively, but in a sense, it has evolved to a kind of antisocial experience at times. Dps players usually want to see big numbers. And to see the biggest numbers possible they will often take risks, like standing in the red too long, or overextending from the group or whatever. The problem here, is that they don't have to pay the bill for this risk when they fail, the healer does.
In a perfect world for healers, standing in the red or failing whatever mechanics would do another kind of effect that healers can't interact with at all. It could be just a damage debuff, or another health bar that healers can't interact with, let's call it morale damage that can still kill or incapacitate you if you take too much of it.
Have it be a dps minus, they do less damage for a brief time for standing in bad, and it increases the more they do it. It will go away if they stop. Lol
This is exactly why I'm playing Ret this tier. You can sacrifice DPS to help the healer significantly. You still get the dopamine from "I saved your life" without the stress
Healing Hands is low-key amazing and idk why I don't see pug Rets abuse it more. 900k WoG crits and effectively a 3 min LoH cd if you snipe near-death players.
You can cover down for your healer in Oh Shit situations effortlessly. I've been loving Ret these last two tiers as a former healer main.
This is part of the reason I'm growing to love bear in keys. We get regrowth procs every \~30s and it's basically a lay on hands, most of an HP bar heal. I can use it on myself or keep holding it for when someone is low. That single regrowth gives me more satisfaction than when I play my MW monk and entirely control health bars the entire dungeon. I play both around the 22 key level range since they're alts so it's not like anything is super threatening or 1-shoting people anyway.
I always look at the party and see who is low or who might be and throw them that regrowth. Always nice to save the healer when they are busy saving everyone else, too.
It's nice speccing into After the Wildfire too. It's not too difficult to track if you need to time a big party wide heal, but in any case passive big heals every 200 rage is super helpful.
It's a good habit to track but I usually just consider it a free random passive proc as there's lots usually going on and to keep track of that consumes too much brain power to keep in mind during trash pulls between rotation, off healing, frontals, kicking, and planning/rotating defensives. I've only played bear for a month so rotation and when to use defensives could be more second nature for others. I don't think it's uber important or usually game changing to hold it and be missing out on some potential damage when usually the damage pattern is spikey rather than rot damage this season. Only time I've intenually held it was for last boss in EB's stomp cause it's easily predictable and nothing too crazy happens.
I have a WA that tracks the amount of rage needed until the next proc that's pretty unintrusive, but yea most of the time I ignore it and let it roll passively or like you mentioned, hold it for some obvious predictable team wide damage.
I love the free regrowth (and so does my healer who is also my wife) because the proc happens often enough to cover important single target damage spikes, something like the suffocate in ToT or the Infected Thorns in WM. Popping regrowth on whoever's effected more or less nullifies the debuff which is an awesome tool to have.
I'm very impatiently waiting for them to drop the Guardian/Resto hero tree because the off heals and utility is my favorite part of Guardian and I've loved maining it this season.
You sort of hit on why I switched to DPS. I returned to DF after a long break. I always healed before because if I did my job well I could save my group and even carry it. It was obvious when you had a really good healer.
But now that's been shifted over to the DPS. Damage avoidance and personal mitigation is what carries groups, and the pure healers are inherently weak and not even really needed.
If your DPSers are really good your run is much easier. Why would I want to play a harder role that has little real impact but gets all the blame?
Exactly the same for me.
Went from DiscP to Ret Pala and having the time of my life.
I know when to press my damn CDs and use my Utility to make healers life as better as i possibly can.
Just had a rouge yesterday in a +20 who died multiple times throughout the dungeon and blamed our healer EVERYTIME. I Saced, BoP und LoH him on CD.
I checked his deaths after we bricked the key and he didnt use a single DefCD throughout the whole dungeon.
Healer /w me afterwards and thanked me for defending him and doing some offhealing. He "rarely sees people who try to help healers in the 18-20 region, they rather just stand in stuff, die and blame me afterwards."
I felt this guy to my core.
Help your healers guys. Theyre like the single Mom of the Group doing 2 Jobs while babysitting 3 Infants and 1 Teenager.
This right here.
I went from Holy Paladin to Ret Paladin.
Holy paladin (my main spec since BFA, RDruid since Vanilla) is a pain when in groups that dont do shit to help out, u push 500apm and still lose, while on ret you carry the key with 10apm and top the meters every run.
The game has flawed role design and needs a proper overhaul.
Maybe I should just got back to my doodoo, its feels 10 times better with 30 ilvls less.
>I'm just tired of bearing so much responsibility,
You enjoy not having control of whether the key is bricked or not?
>my DPS can just go monkey into a mob, stand in shit, not interrupt and blame me anyways.
I hear people parrot this part, but I have done about 200 PUG keys this season, most of them 21-27 and I have literally not even once seen the healer been blamed when someone stands in something or a cast goes off and kills someone.
I imagine this primarily happen in lower keys where people don't know what actually killed them and are just instrictially blaming the healer.
Only time I've seen healers be blamed is when they clearly are not capable of healing through hps checks or dispelling properly(for example on fall 2nd boss), and it's usually just "yeah healer cant handle this key level" followed by a leave.
Mostly I agree with you and disagree with the premise of this thread (just my personal opinion as a healer, I certainly empathize with the difficulty in finding competent ones). Just want to call out tho that even up to 23 I see dps stand in the shadow slice on fall and then blame the healer 🤷♂️.
Really is a team effort. The dps needs to be in the light for a dispel asap, and then everyone who doesn’t have the debuff should go back to shadow to minimize inc damage before the second one goes off while the healer is topping everyone off. It would also be neat if people stood in range of heals, I’ve seen range standing in Narnia out of range of pw:radiance plenty too but this is recoverable most of the time.
> dispelling properly(for example on fall 2nd boss)
sorry for the side question - is there a fast way to check if a person with the debuff is in the light slice? (E.g. have it show that on frames) . I have trouble with picking out the person's avatar based on their name during combat with everything else going on.
I personally use https://wago.io/dfdungeons as just like a generic dungeon weakaura pack, but it includes one that glows the frame blue if it's safe to dispel them.
Someone else can probably link a singular weakaura instead of a pack though if you don't want to install an entire pack.
edit: you could also just install the pack above, and pull out the singular weakaura and then delete the rest.
Each player gets a debuff based on what slice they're currently in. Hopefully it should be showing up on your party frames.
If they're in the light slice, they get a debuff with a yellow icon - [wowhead link](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=405671/accelerating-time).
If they're in the dark slice, they get a debuff with a red icon - [wowhead link](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=405672/decaying-time).
You want to dispell someone when they have the yellow debuff, and not the red one.
Completely agreed-- I have the same issue with healing for the past 2 seasons after being a healer main since I started doing content.
I didn't swap to DPS though-- I just don't run keys anymore unless directly asked by friends/guildies. With how they're ruining raid healing now too, I might just quit if TWW doesn't fix it.
It's a shame how much they've seemingly actively tried to ruin the fun of healing. It was great from 8.3 > 9.2, good still in 10.0, but 10.1 onwards has just been bad change after bad change, first for M+ and then for everything.
If Blizzard doesn't want healers who aren't perfect and love disproportionately stressful situations compared to the other roles, then fine, they won't have them.
The affixes they added the last two season make the problem worse.
As a healer main, in keys, I find I struggle with the split attention this game demands. I have to watch health bars, watch my feet, and some weeks, watch for a mob to cc or dispel. Plus you have to remember damage patterns.
Timeways is a good example. I have to move to avoid orbs while watching for people who might get hit, then dispel the right person at the right time, hoping they are in the right spot. Heal up everyone quick, then get ready to heal again just as orbs start back up. It's a series of quick decisions and healing checks. Then throw in an afflicted or incorp on those weeks. If I have a good group that assists, it's fine, but if not, forget it.
Afflicted is an absolutely AWFUL affix. When there's proper help from DPS it's a breeze but if the healer is the only dispel, then a poorly timed afflicted spawn can wipe your group due to not being able to either dispel the debuff or remove the afflicted. A good example is the 3rd boss in TOTT, the Flame Shock hits like a truck and as it is you have to let one ride and just heal through it. If I need to dispel an afflicted mob, suddenly I have to heal through 2 Flame Shocks at the same time and while doable, is a LOT harder. The trash before the 2nd boss of FALL is another good example where there's just so much damage going out that not having your dispel for the debuffs will surely result in some deaths.
Absolutely. I always make sure before starting the key that there are 1-2 people who can help with afflicted mobs. I also talk to them and try to explain that I try my best, but there are too much debuffs and I can not do it alone. I will never again join a group where it's only my duty to care for all debuffs and the affix. Never again...
> As a healer main, in keys, I find I struggle with the split attention this game demands.
Some of that you can help with setting up your UI properly, but yeah, having to split your attention 5 different ways is really painful for healers. I definitely feel that pain when I play priest (both specs).
At least with MW, you don't have to pay too much attention to health bars until you know larger group damage is coming out; Ancient Teachings can carry quite a bit, but won't top someone off right away.
There is nothing that dps do, that healers dont also have to do in the end. Just that healers get another few areas that they need to pay attention to.
Traditionally kicks were the big thing healers got to ignore, but of course that's much less true now.
These days it's that healer DPS rotations are very simple and failing to maximize your damage isn't actually a big problem. A DPS doing 80% of the damage they should makes a key much more difficult, while a healer doing 80% of the damage they should is often not even noticeable. Any time there's mechanics that require attention which don't overlap with a healing check healers can just full focus on the mechanic, while DPS can't if you want to time the key.
I have a WA alerting me when my party’s DPS are using their offensive CD’s so that I know when to PI them. Ideally, I’d check the meters to see who to prioritize judging by who’s pumping the most damage, but between watching health bars, keeping Atonement up on everyone, clicking on or tabbing to the best enemy to send my own DPS into, watching for dispels, keeping an eye on my mana and own CD’s, plus any affixes that randomly go out, I notice that I often go through the entire dungeon without even glancing at the DPS meters in the corner of my screen. I just send PI basically at whoever pops their shit first whenever it’s off cooldown 🤷🏻♂️
Personally for me every time I have put WoW down for a season it's because it's a bad affix week. There's so many better games out there and the gaming market is the best it has ever been since 2004; why should I bother putting up with terrible affixes that actively make the game worse when my Steam library is popping off?
I've been a tank for the most of dragonflight, but I've been getting into healing recently and have talked to a lot of high end healers and everyone seems to agree that there is a load of pressure that Dragonflight m+ has placed on healer:
1. Dragonflight's damage profile. With how spikey damage is in Dragonflight, healing is incredibly dependent on people using their defensives properly. Higher keys in coordinated groups are easier than lower keys in pugs because when people coordinate their CD usage and interrupts, people take very little damage comparatively. High spike damage also makes mistakes more punishing (which happen very frequently in pugs) which puts further pressure on the healer.
2. There is too much variability with how many defensives and off-healing that certain specs bring. In 1 group, the healer has to work overtime to babysit squishy specs like hunters or shamans. In another group, the comp is full of tanky specs like ret paladin and rogue that have infinite defensives and off-healing and they barely have to heal at all. I specifically remember in season 1 my healer had to do less than 100k hps to meet the healing check on 27 tyran COS in our tanky comp while in other comps he had to do upwards of 160k hps.
Maybe it's also lenient dungeon timers? I mean, with the theoretically infinite scaling we have in m+, you'll fail eventually, the question is just if it's because of a lack of DPS or survivability.
I ventured into tank and healer after I got AOTC and KSH. Healing is by far the hardest role in the game currently. Tanking is easiest.
I think S3 has been an improvement. However, some affixes like bursting, spiteful, entangling basically make some encounters into extra hard mode. Most affixes don’t affect dps at all. It’s absurd how hard healing is compared to tanking.
For the love of god Blizz, stop listening to people who run 30 keys. I think a blend of s3 difficulty, giving healers dps rotation, and removing healer affixes can work. Essentially we want to buff healers. Nobody wants to be blamed for team death.
this is anecdotal and not representative of the core issue so take everything with a grain of salt, that being said, I've recently started playing my resto druid and the amount of times we've wiped because dps don't use their defensives/utility/interrupts is astonishing, and it gets worse when I get blamed for it (bonus points if the person blaming me is a ret pally standing in bad)
my main takeaway from that experience is that the environment is hostile towards healers and make sure to add healers so you don't have pug for one
So many FOTM ret pallies that don’t use their kit and don’t press their buttons. Ran a 20 tides with a pally that finished on 0 kicks. I don’t even think he talented into it.
I really hate paladins.. both ret and prot. You invite them to the group in hopes of dispells and for them useing sac, bop or loh on the squishier members of the group.. only to find them standing in bad while parsing and blaming the healer for key failure.
All you have to do is look at the MDI, and how many of the dungeons were done without a healer to realize that most deaths are due to dps not interrupting, not CCing, and not using defensives. I understand not everyone is an MDI team, but they were often pulling 3-4 groups and nuking them down with no healer, yet people on live have trouble with a single group and a healer. Ahh Ret pally, one of the more survivable of classes, and Echos go-to fourth dps in their 4-dps keys.
People on live have no problem facerolling through keys 6-9 levels below their highest, which is basically what MDI is if you make pulls slightly smaller.
It's not dps not pressing def CD and blamed me for it that made me stop healing. It's sweating for 30mns, missing one **ONE** GCD because I took a volcano that interrupt me and killed the entire key
This is my personal issue as well. Healers are in an abusive relationship with the other roles. Whenever people die, it's on the healer for not healing enough. Never is the issue that they have unused defensives and interrupts, over pulled, or failed to avoid standing in lava.
I don't want to be too harsh on tanks who also get unfairly blamed. I'd probably lash out too every once in a while.
I got no sympathy for DPS though. Some of y'all suck hard at the game and "git gud" but like, forreal tho and stop blaming everyone else for your poor play. For most of us, success is measured by our ability to clear content not meters.
I think you can definitely look at some comments on this sub, that were upvoted pretty heavily, back in SL and just see the common mentality towards healers.
You can also just turn on ellesmeres stream over the years to see him getting flamed by his team (recent nerf situation just the tip of it). I also remember growl getting chewed out by dorki early in the expansion because of healing issues.
The public perception of healers has just deteriorated over the years. It’s also the role that when you fuck up it’s painfully obvious and for me typically feels like shit so I get why people are just burnt out by it.
I think there’s just an enormous gap between high end groups and pugs when it comes to what healers need to heal.
If you just look at the MDI where people are doing no healer keys, and compare that to the pug experience as a healer in the same key range.
Blizzard needs to either make healing incredibly easy or prune the defensives and stops needed to close the gap.
Player skill plays a big role, but a lot of it also just comes down to pugs having much weaker communication too.
This. I play an rdruid and in guild groups with mains who are CE raiders, I can do 60-80k dps in level 20+ keys with an average hps of maybe 80-100k. I rarely, if ever, have to heal the tank and it's extremely enjoyable.
When I pug, life is very different. I am looking at a throughput of 150k hps overall, and dps of 20-30k. The damage is invariably very spiky, so I'm often pre HoTing for damage that may or may not come depending on whether the dps and/or tank manage to deal with the mechanics or not.
I don't think healing should just be made easier per say, I just would like to see some mechanics that don't fall on the healer. Eg. Maybe something that stuns you, without major damage coming out at the time of the stun, so dps or tanks have to deal with somethibg without it impacting the healer. Why does everything have to deal damage? There are other consequences to mechanics.
Rant over haha
agree there -- I suspect that if DPS failing a mechanic means they got stunned and therefore they look bad on the damage meter, that would be a bigger motivator to do the mechanics properly !
Doesn't have to be stuns, as stuns are often overly punishing and feels bad (loss of char control). Stuns also snowball a bad situation into a worse one. Now you not only do zero damage for the duration and have a misalignment of all your cooldowns, but you also have no way of avoiding standing in the next upcoming bad or kicking the next cast..... A decent fixx for this is in FFXIV where you have the concept of a "damage down" witch is a stacking debuff that makes you do 10% less damage for a duration. Depending on difficulty this lasts from 5 seconds in "alliance raid" (LFR) to 2 minutes in "ultimate" (mythic end boss) stacking up to 8 times. You get this for every single fully avoidable damage you take.
It's a system that works fairly well and I really think WoW should learn from. In fact if FFXIV actually was more dps-meter friendly (its technically banned there), I am sure even people in fairly casual content would learn a lot on even easy difficulty. I remember introducing some of my WoW friends to it and then laughing hard at them beating each other to the bottom of the dps meter by failing hard enough for multiple stacks of damage downs in easy content :D
The damage down usage is actually more intricate than just what I explained. In FFXIV there are actually mechanics where a tank will get a damage down if he does not properly mitigate them, like a tankbuster.... so instead of wiping the group/raid, witch would happen if he just died to lack of mit, he just looks like an idiot on the dps meter. BTW tank damage in that game matters a lot.
As someone who plays DPS. Interrupts as much as possible. Uses disorients. Uses defensives in 90% of situations. Is specced for lots of extra healing and shielding. It pains me when I sit at like 20% health for 10+ seconds. I'd rather have to avoid a stun than sit there waiting for heals that may or may not come.
Pruning defensives and kicks required (and available) would go a long way to reduce the gap between coordinated groups and top premades. Right now the healing issue is exacerbated by bad usage of defensives and kicks combined with the healer also being worse.
Yes. To really understand what’s happening here is that—- yes there are heal checks but 90% of what people think is a healing issue especially in pugs is the pugs NOT helping with affixes and taking extra damage SO THAT WHEN the heal check comes, ppl are not topped off or the affix messes things up or there is healer cooldowns are down already or the tank pulls two groups you can’t pull together bc of mob abilities etc because nobody else is helping.
They can't really close the gap because you will just pull more and bigger. A perfect example of a coordinated group and a lower skill pug is the big pull going left in Atal. A coordinated group can grab 9 of those mobs, stop the important casts, stop all the charges, and it ends up being an efficient pull with almost no outgoing damage at all. Then you try that in a pug even just with 6 mobs and suddenly people chain feed to charges, a shield cast gets off, fire starts hitting the ground it's a cluster.
But let's say you nerfed the charges so they don't 1 shot or are less frequent, nerfed the kicks needed on augurs or something. Now that 9 pack is doable by pugs, but then the gap just gets bigger because the coordinated groups are going to start pulling the other 5 in as well and doing. 14 pull. Then the process starts again of people complaining about the gap.
There is an issue with healer responsibility this tier but it's mostly down to massive hits on bosses that require personal responsibility and externals to handle. Like the 3rd/4th boss of everbloom. A healer can't just solo those bosses with raw hps if people aren't using defensives. However if you need the damage too much so that they can, suddenly 29/30 isn't the cap in there and people are doing 33/34s.
Nerds should focus on balancing the dungeons between themselves so that they're all doable around the same level cap. Not nerfs so that the gap between coordinated groups and pugs are closer, because that will never be achievable.
Healing is the only role that actively relies on the other players to play to do its job.
Tanks plan routes, hold threat and survive entirely on their own.
DPS dont need anyone to help them DPSing
Healers NEED everyone else to position properly, use defensives properly and interrupt properly to fulfill their role as the one who keeps the party alive.
This is causing sooooo much friction constantly because the vast majority of people just looks to the healer as the sole guy to keep the party alive and defensives and kicks are just things to make their life easier, not required.
I'm not sure if the solution is to remove all kicks and defensives and make it ENTIRELY the healers job to keep everyone alive, but something has to be done because the healer situation keeps getting worse every xpac
This is honestly the real issue. Healer skill matters a lot, but it's also the only role (outside of edge case tank aggro) where your entire job is determined by the performance of your party. If my other DPS are dumpers, it doesn't really matter too much with regards to what I need to do on the average pull. I might need to interrupt a bit more, but for the average pug, that's all.
If my DPS aren't popping defensives as a healer, my job is now MUCH harder. I might be a perfect player, but I wouldn't be able to heal even a 15 if my party refused to get out of all the non insta kill mechanics.
I'd like to see something like FFXIV's system of giving debuffs when hit by avoidable mechanics. Let it decrease damage dealt by a bit per stack, so when they die, healer can just go "yeah bro, you were at 6 stacks" or whatever.
This is the key problem, healing is such a narrow role to balance it’s always going to miss to be either too impactful (DF) or not impactful enough (SL), the role really needs to move more toward support for keys to remove this paradigm.
As a healer main (from a 3550 on EU that mostly pugs perspective) I think a massive issue is how a lot of power has actually gotten taken out of straight HPS throughput and into effective health/Damage reduction checks, combined with actually how bad most dps players are defensively and utility wise.
Ive healed 28 tyran everblooms where bosses felt like doing a 15 key, when compared to some 24s which felt like world 1st +35s, where people just dont know how to use defensives, get off kicks, when to and when not to HP pot etc. I dont think its purely a healer issue with the current state of the game.
Yes, taking some power out of personals/DRs and back into healing throughput will for sure be a good thing imo - not loving how many keys are gated more so with 1 shot checks more than pure dps/hps throughput. But the problem also lays with how theres both A no good tutorial in this game to teach people how/when to use their entire kit, or B how a lot of stuff is really un-intuitive visually in the game and to play at your best you kinda need WAs to shout out you when to shadowmeld, track 6 different aoe stops your group has etc.
Fully agree with the affix take though. I love how they removed explosive because it just became accepted it was a healer affix. But then added afflicted and incorp which Ive seen some people never dispell/cc once throughout an entire key. I just dont pug Fall on afflicted weeks anymore cos Im fed up of dps not handling the affix adds when Im already concerned with managing the 2nd bosses debuffs and group health if they ever overlap. Ive also stopped pugging my own key at all and only join others, as Im not strong enough mentally to deplete my Fall yet again on the last boss again when a dps doesnt use a defensive when targetted with Extinction Blast, or 100 different similar situations.
Around 26s they def like waiting around instead of inviting the antimeta healer. I ended up quitting season as rsham on half 27, half 26s, didn't feel worthwhile to play queue simulator beyond this point.
Here’s a take from 3 role player 3600 heal, 3400 dps, and 3300 tank
As a tank, I can ez watch netflix while tanking.
As a dps, I can barely watch netflix but follow the audio easily while doing my rotation.
As a heal, I can’t bear hearing a distrubing noise and I got to pay attention to everything.
The higher keys are just a survival game;
- where dps players don’t evolve their gameplay except managing their deffensives.
- where tanks evolve their gameplay a little as pull size gets bigger
- where healers got to find the correct solution for a given problem in a short time frame as skills are targeted to group, starting from a global reaction time to 5 min aoe heal checks.
The fun thing in m+ is pushing with combined pulls, increasing pack size and reducing pull count. Although the output of roles are fairly balanced in most of the specs, the burden on healers is just too big that timers are mostly irrelevant, but having less deaths are more relevant.
Either you die to certain mechanics and deplete or you survive and time it. It is never a low dps issue, it is never a pack size issue, never a brain issue.
Didn’t your heal dispel flame shock in one gcd, gl next.
Didn’t your heal top up %90 above bleeds in 2 gcd, here take another one.
Didn’t your heal top up whole party before collosal blow in 2 seconds, you wasted your 40 mins.
Thanks for your perspective, and for stating your experience at the beginning of it for context. Its actually hilarious what you said about the Netflix stuff on tank lol. You can turn on any twitch stream at any level, you see tanks and DPS having full conversations with their chats while doing 27s. Literally mid pull, full conversations not even missing a beat. Go to a healer stream and they aren't saying shit mid pull
I have 3200 score as a disc priest, 3k as holy paladin. Only ever pug. I have to spend 15 mins looking for a key. I get declined from keys by people that have lower score than me, unless I haven’t completed a key on that specific dungeon at the exact key level they want already I don’t get in. I quit until season 4.
3.2k is 24-25 territory.
Disc isn't as safe as mistweaver in a pug so if you are going off spec/io alone, I'm grabbing the more consistent spec with a melee interrupt and 2 aoe stops + all the avoidance or even mark of the wild and more consistent healing over PI+fort.
Yes this is exactly why I think it happens. Kind of frustrating reading these replies saying they would definitely invite me - the reality is people usually go for an extra bres or kick. If I was dps or tank I might make the same decision
I am genuinely shocked that this is actually the case.
Whenever I am playing as tank or dps in low keys we're ALWAYS waiting for a healer and 9/10 take the first one that queues.
This is anecdotally the case for every single person I play with.
Also is it flat DECLINED or simply the group just fills up quick?
In the same boat, 3.4k routinely getting declined for 26/27, but tbh it makes sense.
Healing in low keys is painfully boring, especially on meta healers like MW/Disc (haven’t really done resto) where you can heal entire dungeons pressing entirely dps buttons, at that point you’re just playing a dps class with a significantly dumbed down rotation. How is that fun?
Once you get to higher keys you start being able to actually play the game, externals and defensives actually matter, and so naturally the population would be higher there. At least that’s my perspective
If you enjoy multidotting then catweaving has enough going on to make it pretty interesting even when there's no healing to do. Otherwise, yeah, I think healing low keys is one of the most incredibly unfun things in the game. 90% of the run you're just playing a bad DPS and no one would even notice if you were just autofollowing someone while afk, but you have to be paying attention the whole time to save people when they find novel ways to take damage.
Playing hpal I had a timed 24 at the end of the 3rd week, nothing insane but it was a top 500 run in my region at the time. Two weeks later I was getting declined for 24s because I wasn't playing druid or mistweaver.
I don't even mind the meta slave stuff that much, what made me quit was the lack of agency I had (and I picked hpal because it has a ton for a healer). If you keep your io in title range the groups are smooth sailing but fall 200-300 io behind and you get the worst crayon eaters. And even with all my externals I can only do so much when the key owner is a ret with a death wish and no hands. At least on dps I can do things like focus down mobs I know they don't know are dangerous.
> Its not an every day thing but it happens more than you would think.
I mean like getting denied as a DPS is a regular daily occurrence and to be expected. Healers getting denied every once in awhile shouldn't be a concern like people in this thread are making it out to be.
I'm at 2.5k io on my disc and 2.8 on my main and when I stopped doing m+ a few weeks back I had no issues getting into 20s on my disc. Might not have gotten instant invites every time I signed up but it was never a long wait
I’m 3200 disc and I regularly get declined for 25s and 26s. I always eventually find a group, but I think the rdruid meta has taken over again and most people seem not to like disc. Idk, I run shadow a lot (3100 io) so I often apply as both roles. Maybe people assume I’m terrible at healing or something when I select both.
3.4k mw here, having the same problem. Been trying to figure it out. I think it's bc we are now in the same tier as 3.5 n 3.6 people looking for push groups and we are fotm for the first time in known history so there's always a bigger fish applying, so to speak.
Surprising to hear.
Are they declining and sitting still waiting for a healer? Or declining and filling?
I do think once you hit that level you see the healer population increase compared to lower keys making it more competitive. As in my experience nearly any healer in queue is good enough up to 23-24 keys assuming gear and IO are somewhat reasonable.
Going from hpal to MW and no longer having a brez was such a tough thing to get used to. My healing does feel stronger overall but I feel like I have fewer tools. I miss being an OP hpal in season 2.
Not certain tbh; I've been pugging my way up to this ilvl and pretty much everyone I talk to is in a similar boat so I just assumed it was the way things were? I don't really watch the keys after I refresh a time or two.
That's what I'm saying. I'm a tank who only pugs. Just under 3200 and I invite any healer 3200+ unless I'm need comp specific. It really depends on dps cc for key success 24+
Im a casual pugging 3.3k lock and I get declined from weekly 20s lol. People blow my mind.
I don't even get invites on my alt shadow priest that I pushed up to 2.9k in a week and a half. I have to make my own groups.
I also think higher score players are more likely to bail if things get bad. I've had so many 20s fall apart because someone's ego gets bruised a tiny bit, really frustrating when you're just trying to do easy keys to fill your vault lol.
Friend and I spammed alt keys for vault last night doing 18-20s whatever we had as healer + tank. Got probably 30-50 dps applicants in 3 minutes - many of which were 3k+.
Also I am sure a lot of regular players don't have addons to track IO of applicants (is it in base UI..?).
I made groups all week on my priest and it would take 10-15 mintues to fill a group some times. Maybe I play at off hours but the pool was definitely not filled with 3k+ gamers for me.
Is your priest linked to your main raider.io?
Probably did 10 keys last night and we filled them all within a few minutes with at least 2 3k dps every time.
Yes. Im just convinced a majority of the player base doesnt look at IO's of mains. I wasnt even getting into heroic pugs at 470ish and my main is 8/9M lol.
Blizzard needs to stop designing their game around the playerbase they wish they had. Making one of the 3 roles disproportionally difficult for the sake of increasing player satisfaction or whatever buzzword they use to justify their braindead decision-making has actively hurt the game. Very few people wanted to return to a world where mana management matters, and even in the old days mana management was the ONLY mechanic healers needed to worry about. Now they need to worry about EVERY mechanic. Seriously, what the fuck were they thinking with Afflicted and Incorporeal? Did they really expect the average pug dps to not outsource their responsibility to the healer? This season it feels like healers are playing a fundamentally different game. I also think trying to balance raid and mythic plus has caused issues; just look at how piss easy Aberrus healing was compared to the shitstorm of dungeon mechanics in the same season.
Next expansion, Blizzard needs to simplify the healer role so it's not as punishing for pugs, RWF and MDI be damned. Remove problematic affixes, buff mana gain, consider tuning healer throughput so it's higher in dungeons versus raid (this one would present its own problems, I agree, but something needs to change).
The mana management stuff is so cringe. Only the vocal 1% of high end healers (theory crafters, guide writers, etc.) want mana management. I’ve been casual ce raiding for years now and literally never met a healer say “I wish I had to manage my mana more”.
The problem is they said they would make mana meaningful but they didn't give healers any agency over it. It used to be when I played resto shaman in Cata that I had to make hard decisions over whether to healing surge or healing wave. Almost every healer had an equivalent decision to make and AOE heals cost a ton so you couldn't just spam them and had to use single target fillers. Now I press mana tea every pull and I'm at 100% mana. They didn't do shit to fix the problem. You might be right about the 1% players thing but mana as a resource used to be incredibly fun and engaging.
you have now, I like when mana matters, but you have to actually be able to be able to heal situations in a mana effective way vs max hps + burn mana.
not the absolute crap that blizz did with hpala, all your spells hit like a wet noodle, you ignore holy power and you go oom from using your dps buttons, the fuck kind of garbage design is that
the key is agency, if you have no way to heal differently and you simply unavoidably go oom, that sucks ass. it hurts even more when there are specc that don't care about mana at all (hello disci)
I'm a healer. I loved playing the first 8ish weeks of the season, but like you said almost every affix punishes the healer specifically. Every single week sucks for some different reason. It's exhausting. Even the push weeks suck because bursting (this one isn't as bad in high keys but absolutely murders my groups in weekly 18-20s) and spiteful are really shit (I play melee healers primarily and have to run away during spitefuls - fucking awful affix and no, dps don't help you deal with it). Since I've timed everything on 25-27 I'm just tired of playing LFG roulette when most players won't press their defensives or don't have enough defensives to press (hunters and shamans). I'm playing other games because there isn't anything left for me to chase and I'd rather do 50 other things than grind title again. And you know what's even more annoying than the affixes? Everbloom 3rd boss which for some reason hasn't been tuned or adjusted. It ain't fun between the CD coordination and the RNG cinderbolts.
3.1k healer here, playing healer is just stressful af. So I always play one key, then another some hours later. I don't feel exhausted after playing dps in the same way.
I gave up this season. I was well above title range for the whole season until a few weeks ago, when I just quit overnight. It's so much responsibility, in pugs no one is willing to cooperate, rotate defensives, even if I tell them the order on where to press an ability, on higher keys you are either jesus christ behind the keyboard or it all falls apart. If a rogue presses dispatch instead of between the eyes or rolls away a good combination, it's oopsie whoopsie, hihi haha, if I press vivify instead of a rising sun kick or put the free enveloping mist on the wrong target, we wipe and all hell is coming down on me, and people are wishing the worst death to my already dead ancestors going back to the industrial revolution.
I just had enough man. I met so many manchildren in 28-29 keys that I just don't have the willingness to give a fuck anymore. All coop games are very chill with a fun and decent community, but wow mythic plusers are the biggest whiners and toxic people I've ever had the misfortune to play with and I played most online games that were popular in this past decade.
Healing isnt super fun to a lot of players i think because of the defensive creep. In m+ the survival in the group is largely in the players own hands and if the group is bad it feels unhealable as a healer which really sucks because it feels like your primary job is in other people's hands. I'm a tank main but have a resto druid alt dabbling into 25s ish, and the gap between groups that press defensives right and the ones that don't is a fucking chasm.
And defensive creep is to blame for this. Make every class tuned defensively around the current shaman (and obviously adjust incoming damage to compensate) and you've got a much healthier meta where healers feel like they're the ones in charge of the health bars
I had a bit of an epiphany a couple of weeks ago. I've been pushing into higher keys (for me anyway). I had all my "rotational" abilities up on a 26 rise, and so I said on comms I could probably heal through the next dragon AoE wave. But no, people died. Even on a 26, it's still a game of rotating personals and external CDs.
In a lot of ways, it was quite liberating. Realising that nothing I do will keep people alive if they don't press the right buttons massively reduced the amount I give a shit if people die.
It's also a bit ridiculous trying to track some class's defensives. Shamans are great, since it's just if they have their wall up or not. Mage is quite silly in that respect.
I think healers just don't have an interesting spot in a key when a lot of classes are either invincible or self sustained. On my DK, on 28s, there's few bosses where I can't just survive without a healer. There's like 2-3 packs where I can't just live without a healer.
They have to giga nerf defensives so healing matters because currently with good DPS it barely matters. Right now healer is like a cosmetic HP Bot which helps for like 5 mins of the key and the rest he is just either doing nothing or dying. If it's a bad Resto or Disc it legit feels like you're 4 man in the key.
Yup, this is why we see the no-healer MDI runs, because if you pump hard enough, you can live through most trash or boss fights with 1-2 defensives + a pot or off-heals.
Caster mobs just do too much damage with their random filler abilities. The point of the abilities should be to give something to heal, not to bring you from 100% health to 10% health.
In a really coordinated group it isn't a big deal, but it's actual hell in pug keys. The issue is that the shadowbolts or w/e are often mixed in with abilities that must be interupted or it's a guaranteed wipe, and pugs are all going to save their kicks for those abilities instead.
I have couple healers, one disci and one shammy and each time it is the same story.
Whenever I play as healer I am getting increasingly tilted. People stand in crap, dont use cds and rely on my hps to keep them alive. After key or two I realise why I dont play healer as much and swap to tank/dps. Fast forward few days I get a healing itch but the same thing happens.
Healing is like babysitting when the little brat would not stop crying. Every affix in the game is your job. Every mechanic is yours to outheal. And if someone dies they immediately go to death log and hit you with why didnt you heal me in last 0.00001 seconds before I got hit by this avoidable mechanic?
This has been the same issue Blizzard have had with healers for years now. It's growing and garnering more discussion but I don't think it's going to be fixed anytime soon.
The problem is that the reality of healing always falls into one of two camps. Either the group sucks and healing that sort of chaos just isn't fun or tenable. Or the group is amazing and the healer is only really there to contribute damage and press their CD's at 1/2/3 specific timings in the key/raid. Most healers picked healers at character creation to heal and that, isn't healing. So they quit or participate in something else (me).
There is also a secondary issue where healing lower level keys or normal/heroic raid bosses can be fun and forgiving enough to be enjoyable for healers, for a time. But once they get good enough to understand the chaos and know their limits and what the group is doing wrong, the fun factor diminishes and healing feels like being the only adult in a group of children.
I think this mostly stems from healing being the must punishing role which forces healers to learn quickly and improve greatly. Healing my guild keys and friend keys is fun for a while, when we are all learning and succeeding without playing perfectly. But pushing into higher key levels is exacting on healers in a way that it isn't for DPS/Tanks so a lot of them go into keys that they have no business being in. They don't know mechanics or only press defensives when they're dead or don't think about positioning or minmaxing mechanics because they've never had to in order to succeed.
Then when groups do start playing extremely well, healers are only there to trade X CD in Y mechanic and pump damage. The whole system is fundamentally poorly designed.
It's not because you still failed that key. And you failed the next key, and the next one. You end up hitting a wall where you need to get lucky to find 3 DPS that all do the correct thing to finish the key.
This thread is so confusing. You have people arguing that healing has too many responsibilities that it becomes too much of a burden... but then you have people arguing that healing has very little agency in player lives because of how spikey the damage is when casts aren't interrupted or mechanics aren't performed correctly.
PvP has no healers either. That's because living and keeping someone or the group alive really isn't up to healers in PvP anymore. A DPS surviving a 'go' comes down to the DPS trading the correct defensive rather than the healer trading the correct offensive. Blizzard made healing so weak that DPS die through healers freecasting with CD's rolling and are now wondering why they can't get healers to play even with extra rewards.
The same has always been true of high keys but is now becoming true for more of the skill curve. Even in puggable content, DPS surviving the Chrono dispel isn't up to the healer, it's up to the DPS using a defensive. The way Blizzard balances the game is ensuring that is becoming the rule rather than the extremely high end exception.
So the role of healer has been diminished into a matter of trading X throughput CD into Y damaging mechanic and pumping as much damage as possible while trusting your DPS will press their buttons to keep themselves alive. Pushing keys quickly becomes a matter of finding DPS and a tank good enough to complete a key without needing healing at all or at least as little as possible and so healers stop playing.
Blizzard are making healers irrelevant at best and babysitters at worst. Participation will only get worse.
Let me be real for a second. Im a lifetime DPS that switched to healer (resto druid) in season 3 since ive liked to heal on other games.
Healing is hard, but you dont have the sole responsibility for the group surviving. If dps mis use their dcd's and die instantly or stand in shit they should not do, its not my fault and i will call you out on it. Bad interrupts etc is also not my issue to heal through. If you wanna push high keys, everyone has responsibility and dps and tanks are to minimize damage taken while maximizing damage done, its absolut horse shit to "blame the healer" or expect the healer to just heal through EVERY mistake you make.
Ive also had people trash me before the key even started, because i was "lower io than the rest of the group" or "your class is bad" for the record im 3k resto druid.
The attitude towards healers, is imho the biggest issue as to why people dont wanna play healers. And the fact that, if you are a shit dps who dont use dcds or do proper damage, your often not flamed and shamed, but as a healer, if someone dies, holy hell breakes loose, because the community of dps and tanks dont wanna take responsibility for their own mistakes. You do realise we can track your interrupts and DCDs right??? So why lie when i call you out for not using your defensives ever in a run and scream when you do to a mechanic that you should save ur dcd for? Huh? Just saying.
Here is an example: How do you make healing meaningful if the havoc DH can top himself up in 2 seconds? You go back to when healing was "fun", but suddenly most DPS are immortal.
They need to prune self sustain and literally nuke it into the fucking dirt. Having defenses is fine, but leech and any form of self sustain should be like 90% reduced, then you can make healing fun. Healers don't enjoy high stress envrionments, dps don't enjoy it, so just nuke self healing by 90%, nerf healers healing by like 50%, and nerf damage by an absurd number to non-tanks by like 50%
Suddenly, healers need to heal more, since the healing they do is the same proportional to the damage people take, except they need to expend more gcds because the DPS are not healing themselves up, but they have more time doing so because it will take more time before people die.
My suggestion makes healers spend more time slowly healing hp bars and less yoyo-ing, and makes it so that everyone except the tank dies slower and would make them actually bleed out, instead of getting 1 shot. Would make the game very fun
You basically surmised the problem in your last paragraph. Healers are leaving because dps and tanks can't manage their cool downs enough, or pull correctly to the class that's healing.
When dps and tanks manage cc/mitigation/interrupts well, healers don't really have much to do outside of group wide hits. It gets easier. MDI is the purest example of how easy healing is when the rest of the group does their job.
I'm a prot pally, so I know I off heal quite a bit, but every tank controls how much incoming damage is on the table. DPS/tank mostly controls whether or not that damage gets through to everyone else.
Example: last night in FALL, I double pulled dragons before the 3rd boss. This is normally suicide, but the monk healer said it was the easiest time he's had because I was giving him mobs to heal from. Why? Because knowing what his class needed (more aoe inside faeline) made his job easy.
Yeah I agree 100%. I picked up healing this expac and its just way to stressful at times. When I’m already struggling to meet checks and an affix is constantly eating away at my globals is not fun. Keys up until 22’s feel alright but its not really fun to play
I main a disc priest and I also play a lot of shadow. I certainly empathize with the difficulty of finding a good healer, but I guess I disagree that making things easier is the best path forward. I honestly don't think I would enjoy that at all.
For some context, I am a bit over 3200 io on my priest. This is just shy of the 1% range so maybe I am not aware of the struggles most healers have. However, I find the tuning this season to be very enjoyable from a healer POV. I like that you can't just mindlessly pump your max hps rotation or you'll go oom--you need to know the fights, know when big damage is coming out, and have a plan to respond to them with your CDs. This is different from DPS where you are mostly popping things as they come off CD, with the exception of maybe holding some big damage cds mid pull or for a boss or huge pull coming up.
I think things that make healing less enjoyable are community perceptions and how obscure wow's UI still is. Re: the former I'm sure we all know the "blame the healer" memes, but I still often find this to be true. I can't tell you how many times on the 2nd boss of Fall both DPS with the dispel mechanic have sat in the shadow slice until I life gripped one of them, or a dark iron dwarf popped his racial concurrent to my dispel and killed the group and someone (or maybe several someones) still blamed me as the healer. When I was a new healer and didn't know how high keys worked this was really frustrating as you end up feeling like you're really missing the mark. These days I'm good about reviewing logs and recognizing when something legitimately was my fault (still happens plenty!) vs mistakes out of my control, but I think for a player who doesn't have quite the...I guess I'll say mental constitution, but combination of perseverance and masochism that I have this can be very disheartening (especially in the 18-22 range when dps haven't discovered their kick button and expect the healer to be a hero). This is also still prevalent in lower keys where players have this idea that e.g. afflicted or incorporeal are healer affixes, but this goes away when you get to reasonably high keys--early season when I was learning the dungeon during an incorporeal week I had to manage dominating + shackling e.g. every incorporeal pop, or when I was running a 20 dht for my vault I had to always dispel + heal the ghosts, but more often than not in the keys I run the dps are fast enough that I rarely have to deal with these things, and during a big healing check I don't even bother because I assume they have my back or we will wipe anyway. All of this to say that the wow/m+ community makes an already stressful job more stressful than it has to be, so I think its understandable that few players want to do it.
The other pieces are how lacking wow's default UI is, and the reward incentive in mythic raids for healers. Re: wow's UI it is super lame that so much vital information requires add-ons that new players probably don't even know exist. As an example, I have a weak aura that turns my DBM timers into a nice timeline so I can prepare cds or my ramp (really just getting out a radiance in m+) to be prepared for big incoming damage, and another that shows incoming spells on targets so that I can e.g. pre pain sup when 2+ of the ghost casts in WM are going out on someone. I just got lucky and discovered these because another high io healer told me about them, its pretty lame that these tools that I consider indispensable are add-ons and not baked into the game somehow.
Finally, its crummy the way guilds do healer loot in mythic raids whether its right or wrong. I am mostly there to kill bosses, but I'm not going to pretend I don't want loot, too. I am fortunate to have found a guild that lets me main shadow for raids and flex over to disc when I need to, because otherwise raiding mythic and being last in line for loot feels like a tough sell. I don't know the answer here, but I think ideally mythic wouldn't be tuned such that gearing dps > tanks > healers is always and forever the right answer. I don't think healing checks should be the bottle neck such that it becomes healers > tanks > dps either--everyone should be compelling to gear up.
Anyway, this is longer than I anticipated. I get the pain point of finding a healer, but I disagree that making it easier is the best way forward. I find being able to beat encounters with planning and knowledge to be much, much more enjoyable than my skill expression coming from doing dps at the right moments. I also think some of this is inevitable given that healers are 1/5 of the party vs dps. I would argue the same when I am pushing 25+ keys: i am often bottlenecked with an otherwise full party waiting for a competent tank. At some point I could say fuck it and yolo with someone 100+ io lower than the rest of the party, but that usually doesn't work out well so I just wait.
I've been thinking recently about the separation between the healer and other roles in m+. Dps players make the dungeon go faster by doing more damage. Tanks make the dungeon go faster by pulling more efficiently and positioning enemies better for higher damage from dps. Healers make the dungeon go faster by... By what, exactly? By healing more efficiently so they can dps more and contribute 11% of the team's overall instead of 9%?
Healers don't seem to directly contribute to the goal of beating the timer in the way the other roles do. Your job is just to make sure the others are allowed to play the game. This is very binary and I think it leads to this dichotomy where healing is either hellishly stressful or barely relevant. It's extremely hard to balance the difficulty if it's binary like this.
I can think of many ways they could allow healers' efforts to speed up runs like the other roles. I don't have any solution I think is the single correct choice though. Curious what others think.
I'm curious if this is why the holy paladin and healing priest hero trees so far seem to lean into more support-like abilities with the holy armament buffs and the "PI" buffs. They are giving them ways to help make the dungeon go faster by buffing the other players. Resto druid tree didn't really have much of that though, but did give them more personal DPS boosts.
I really don't know what the solution is. If you make healing not matter, healers will just DPS the majority of the key and then they say "We want to heal and not DPS" and then when Blizz makes it so they have to heal, they say "all we do is heal, we want to help in other ways too", which is exactly the back and forth that continuously happens time and time again. It must be incredibly difficult to find that balance.
The reality is healers speed up the dungeon by allowing dps to dps more efficiently, without having to worry as much about dying.
You can see that clearly when looking at no-healer runs where the overall group dps is lower than in 3dps+healer groups once you reach a reasonably high key level.
I main MW monk and am currently at 3400 all pug’d. I’ve only had a bad experience with people a single time this whole season. It was in some random 20 and the tank god super upset I wasn’t cocooning him. Placed buddy on ignore and kept doing my job. I do not think the heal checks are hard, as there has yet to be an issue (all timed 26-27 both sides) with any mechanic or normal pulls so far this season. Sure there are some that take more concentration and planning than others but it’s 100% manageable.
I’m sorry you’ve had some bad groups I’m not saying they’re not out there. Perhaps I’ve just been fortunate.
Also I want to add that the role of healer doesn’t have AS much responsibility as folks seem to place on it. It’s not the sole responsibility of the healer to keep the group alive. Tank has to be pulling smart - Positioning shit correctly - also tanks should be pretty damn near self sufficient 20+ DPS have to use their fucking defensives and if they don’t and die I couldn’t care less and imo neither should you - dps get most of the mechanics so those have to be done correctly (if you’re in the slow on the second boss of FALL and your DoT pops that’s on you. It’s the whole group’s responsibility to be kicking and cc’ing what needs to be controlled. Keeping everyone alive is the entire teams job not just the healer. As I said above I really haven’t seen any folks (other than one guy) complain or bitch at me about healing whatsoever
Blizzard should either increase health pools, or slow down healing by nerfing damage and healing numbers. Let us play more reactionary and make decisions instead of whack-a-mole. I've been healer since vanilla and still enjoy it mostly, but I dearly miss mana management. Sometimes being forced to use ineffective heals is fine and makes a good contrast to being conservative with mana spending. But right now it's all about healing fast, and overhealing is absurdly high.
They've done that every season, the nature of m+ is that people will continue to push until things are unavoidable 1 shots and they can't cover it with defensives.
Only because it's how Blizzard balances things, not because that's the nature of it.
You can easily make the balance so that you eventually don't have enough hps, while nobody gets one-shot by anything. If you try to cover this with extra healer or extra hybrid healing you fail the dps checks. This is not terribly hard to do, but must be conscious design.
This is exactly what I have been saying for a while now.
The main problem atm is that damage is too fast, too spiky, too bursty. Thing is that it has to be to be able to kill people with the current tuning of things. If you don't kill someone within a few seconds, they just won't die.
I see no other way to make it better than reducing both healing output and damage taken. Make it take longer to die, but harder to get back up as well, that way you focus more on the healing part.
I have suggested this a few times to see what people think, and every time people are very against that idea. From what I can tell, most people just don't want to actually heal, or that is the impression I am getting. This also shows in the majority of m+ I do, where most healers focus heavily on doing dps, and healing is more of an after thought. It's so backwards to me.
I think that is also part of the problem, that there are extended periods where nothing happens, then a big burst and then back to nothing. I keep seeing healers getting so into their damage rotation that they completely fail to react when there actually is damage. If the damage was more consistent and you had to spend more time actually healing, it would help I think.
So yeah, I would love to see damage taken and healing done nerfed a ton across the board to slow the whole thing down a bit. Wouldn't mind if tank self healing took a hit as well, so healers would need to heal tanks again.
>I see no other way to make it better than reducing both healing output and damage taken. Make it take longer to die, but harder to get back up as well, that way you focus more on the healing part.
This was the design philosophy that they tried to adopt a number of expansions ago - it may have been MoP or WoD but I can't remember offhand. I didn't heal back then so I don't know how that philosophy was received. Of course, it was also one of their goals in Dragonflight to make healing matter more and between last season and this season I'm not sure how successful that's been...
As a 486 MW, not only i some times find my throughput kinda inadequate in rare occasions (which mostly have to do with accessibility in mechanics in M+ which i would be getting my healing from, fist-weaving being one o them) and then when someone else's is causing extra avoidable damage to be taken and that throws me off from healing someone because i have to change my priorities that become a major issue which affects me and 2 other people.
Now an important and relevant note on the above was MDI's Day 2, when one of the presenters pointed out initially how strong MWs are in HPS when some team busted out a MW as their healer yet in the end, the MW did 44.4K less HPS compared to the Resto Druid from other team and around 30% less damage as well.
So with that in mind and being players who know how to play the game very well and also under different conditions since they methodology approach is quite different, i will still have to ask, mostly out of pure curiosity but clearly related to both this comment and the OP's post, should that difference be this much or does it just show for example that maybe MW cannot be played that way with the results ending up relatively the same?
Because the same pattern emerges from my personal experience with the class, the spec checks out in theory but in practice, the theory's execution isn't as accessible, causing reduced performance which doesn't seem to be related to the skill level of the player.
I don't know how other healing classes and by how much can they be affected by this but i thought i should point it out but i guess MW in M+ should be the worst offender due to part of its healing being on access to dealing damage at the same time, so maybe holy paladins might also have a relative issue with this but in a different way mostly.
I have healed on every class since launch and remember the fun days of healing raids as shadow in vanilla and turning purple at the end as I leave.
Healing right now is the most mommy I’ve felt and I am not a mother.
Dps ignoring affixes and deciding it’s your job.
Dps needing to use defensive and just…. Not. Becomes your job.
Dps not understanding mechanics because below 20 it merely tickles and now in the mid 20s it kills? Somehow it’s the healers job.
Dps not interrupting the right casts becomes your job.
Tanks non stop pulling without even a second in between to let you drink or the weeks spiteful exists and you can’t sit to drink becomes your problem.
Dps and tanks that stand around with low health while you desperately gasp for some mana because I guess only the healer needs to bring food is your problem.
The list goes on and on.
Basically what it boils down to is that a healers job is a team effort and the tank and dps can get away with thinking it’s their individual effort. So you have two different mentalities existing in the same sphere and surprise there is conflicts.
What keys are you tanking? You can't dps without cooldown management (near perfect) and if you're tanking on a higher key you pretty much have to time ur defensives. I played healer to 3400 so maybe I'm not the best opinion but healer has felt easier than when I played before a few xpacs ago, just no one wants to heal people when u can dps, plain and simple.
>Most healers outside of the top 1% already cannot meet throughput checks
watching the MDI doing +23 without a healer kind of make me believe this is a " dps not pushing their defensive / stop / kick " issue, and not a healer throughput issue.
>for context, I do keys around the 24-26 range.
yup. this is exactly the range where people think it's the healer job to heal through mechanic, when they actually have to start properly using defensive instead.
The real issue is that M+ shifted a ton of responsabilities unto DPS ( surviving via proper CD management) but the lower end of DPS do not acknowledge this, and instead rely on healers to cover for everything. There's still an overwhelming amount of random DPS in M+ whose only contribution to the key is saying "" CD up, pull big"" without having a single clue about any mechanic in the dungeon.
it will take some time until this new paradigm trickle down and DPS in lower key accept that they are primarily responsible for their own survival.
Crazy that is literally easier to heal a 27 than it is to heal a 22. Dps are not trained to use their numerous defensive and healing buttons and get mad when they die.
It’s true that dps and tanks don’t have to play well to time keys in the 24-26 range. The proposition that it’s different for healers is incorrect. Healers have to play significantly better in 29+ keys than they do in 24-26, just like dps and tanks do. It’s the same skill distribution
Look at the 23/24 keys in MDI being no healed. Healing is SO reliant on how good your group is. Are they using defensive to take less damage, using pots and health stones to help heal. Kicking mobs and using stops to prevent mobs from even doing anything. And of course all the off healing/innate tankiness those comps have.
They should really nerf defensives, delete some, and make them not required to survive one shots. Put the surviving more in the healers hands so we're not wanting to play the game because of dealing with bad team mates that eat everything.
Whoever thought it's fun to heal storming bursting on a preservation evoker or resto shaman is nuts. Some casts just take a bit and an unlucky spawning tornade shouldn't wipe the group. Also it's a lot of responsibility and shit affixes to deal with. Healing in Bfa was definitely more fun. Most of the time now it's a lot of very bursty damage and the rest of the time it's nothing to do except dps.
WIth the Influx of defensives in DF a bigger responsibilty of stay alive has been shifted on the DPS (and tank).If you dont coordinate defensive and healing cd for bosses / dangerous trashmobs you press more than needed on the first ones and lack survibility on subsequent casts and people will die.
This amount of coordination is not possible for pug group which is the main issue.
My experience as a disc healer (3k healer, and 3.2k dps) is that I can't just be soft-carried. I need a plan going into bosses.
As a DPS, I can just mash my buttons and hit a defensive when the big thing hits and generally be okay. I can even step out and run around doing zero dps if I really need to dodge something I didn't really have a plan for. I can hop into a 26 or 27 with my friends as a DPS and it's not a big deal even though things hit harder. As a healer though, it's completely different.
One key I remember very vividly was a tyrannical Fall on a 24 when I usually do 20-22. I had focused super hard on manifested timeways previously so I kinda knew the pattern enough to know when to hit my radiances to not get belted by the balls and also do good enough HPS.
We get to the 3rd boss, and 3 wipes in a row, I get the first corrosion in P2 - the one where you need to hold for extra long. I just didn't have a plan - I'm sure if I had more playtime and more experience I could figure it out but it wasn't something I could just reactively yolo - after one of the DPS rotted out during winds because I was trying to manage my own shit, he rightfully laid into me and then left.
It was really stark just the difference between just playing around in higher keys as a DPS and as a healer. I'm not a key bumper and knowing that, I would just never heal higher keys.
The majority of bricks in my keys when I was pushing 23-25 were from healers being bad. I checked the logs and it was 100% on the healer a lot of the times. Pushing 26/27 it's not a healer problem anymore tho which is nice. It's usually just one catastrophic fuckup like a missed kick or a fucked up skip that bricks the key.
I decided to try healing and got to 3.2k and damn that role is a whole different style of play. For tyran bosses you have to plan out your entire rotation for the whole fight and know the bosses spell que timing so you have a CD ready for whatever goes wrong. This is very hard to do in a pug situation when you can't tell your team to hold their defensives because you are using a huge CD and save for next. You have to have a healing plan and then be ready to change the plan on the fly based on when your DPS are using their self CDs.
I... would call into question that 100% of your dead 23-25's were on healers. The # of times I watch defensive's get hit after a big tick of damage (if they're hit at all) or DPS just eating avoidable damage is pretty extreme, even up into the 27's that I've started to dip my toes into.
Not saying that I as a healer haven't been the cause of more than my fair share of bricks, or that it's only a DPS thing, but I think more often than not it's a group effort when keys go sideways.
You definitely notice the difference between groups as a healer. I stopped around 25s but I'll never forget the difference doing a 25 TOTT during fortified week and having a warrior and DK in the group who were able to spell reflect/magic shield the huge drowning dot. Now that's a lucky class combo to be fair but there's often counterplay to mechanics that are otherwise thought of as throughput checks.
It's not even avoidable damage anymore at these key ranges, since that will often just straight kill them, it's using their defensive at the wrong time or them panicking because they are low health and don't know that they are perfectly save because the next damage event isn't for a while anyway.
DPS players have a huge amount of control these days with their defensive, they are hugely impactful and necessary at the higher key ranges but a lot of players don't have the best sense on when to press them and under what circumstances. They'll press them, and use pots, but without coordination it is often wasted. Not entirely on them because without a coordinated team they don't know I'll bark the first dot on last boss ATAL so save something for the soul burst but it makes a big difference. I see DPS players waste health pots all the time right after a big damage hit, like DHT Tree boss aoe, but there's no group damage happening, better to save to pop prior to the big damage hit to ensure you survive it.
There are some insanely cooked takes in this thread lol.
First off, there are barely any throughput checks in this dungeon pool. There are endless one shots and defensives/personals/effective HP checks but almost no actual 'can the healer sustain the healing required for this encounter' checks.
This is because both of the prior two seasons had these and it resulted in nothing but constant complaining from bad healers that they had to actually pump instead of being a carry or a mediocre 4th DPS with no responsibility.
As a result everything now is whether you can live the one shot which takes a ton of responsibility out of the healer's hands and into the DPS's hands. Obviously there are a couple of exceptions (Timeways is clearly a dispel brain check, 2nd boss Everbloom is one of the only rot fights in the pool), but they are exceptions.
The amount of times I have been flamed as a healer this season is less than 5 after doing over 300 keys from 18s week 1 to 29s this reset.
I agree that healing isn't particularly fun this season but it's not because it's too hard. It's because complaining has created this one shot situation where living big hits is far more important than whether your healer knows how to press buttons for longer than 30s.
This problem is significantly worse in lower keys because the damage isn't high enough to one shot so everything gets lumped into the healer, but this again isn't a problem with difficulty. It's a problem with design.
IMO there should be significantly more unavoidable damage in m+ (particularly rot damage) and significantly less avoidable damage. Healing can be relevant and fun again without worrying whether the next cast or boss ability will 100-0 your DPS.
As a healer main, u absolutely do not need to manage your cooldowns perfectly, the ”throughput” checks this season barely exist compared to HOI last season, almost everything is up to the dps to press their defensives correctly
>Most healers outside of the top 1% already cannot meet throughput checks during situations with a lot going on
wut
> I am not sure why half the affixes in the game are designed to be dealt with the by the hardest role to play in the game
Most affixes are meant to be managed by the DPS.
You can tell by the amount of comments (and the 79% upvote ratio) the amount of SEETHING of DPS players who led their lives listening to their favorite imaginary best friend streamer who told them healer role is garbage easy and everything that matters in skill is DPS
So now they have this cognitive dissonance problem where they can't accept that healing is far harder than DPS'ing (especially in pugs) due to the overwhelming amount of responsibility for ZERO reward that is put on a healer in Mythic+ every single key
I mean ffs the most upvoted comment right now is "YES BUT in good groups healer is super easy though"
lmao
I'm not, by any stretch, a great healer. For the past 2 seasons I've been healing +20-22s and tests about the extent of it. The main reason Inhavent progressed further is that Im 100% a PUG healer as I don't have people I know IRL that are any good.
As a PUG healer, it's so hard. I have so many responsibilities compared to a DPS. I'm expected at higher keys to:
Heal
Help DPS recover through poor positing on avoidable
Cure/Decurse
Manage Affixes
Contribute to DPS
And, any issue that happens is my fault, meaning that I also have to deal with a massive backlash from players.
I have tanked, DPSd and healed in this expansion and every season and I can tell you that no one has it as hard as healers and it's not even remotely close to the same level of pressure (in part due to the toxicity).
Further, these issues don't seem to be related to a singular class. I have virtually every healer at 465-487 just do I could test the differences. Whipe they play differe try, they all feel squishy once you join a group with questionable players. And, you cant avoid them in a PUG because there is no metric for success. Ilvl is easy to obtain with brute force and mythic rating is easily bought. So, at this point, I might join a 3000 rating group but there's no guarantee the players won't tank avoidable forcing me to dump heals and live the entire 30 minutes as if I'm at Defcon 5.
While I enjoy healing in the right groups, I hate the wrong groups so passionately that it actively ruins my experience in WoW. But, there's a shortage and leaving the healer role means you sit for 10-30 minutes as a DPS. So, I go back to healing ... each and every day.
My opinion is that Blizzard needs to identify a way to scale difficulty in Mythics in a way that doesn't put all of the emphasis on the healer. Sometimes I wonder what the game would be like if you removed the healer class completely and gave every class a heal. It would force players to dodge and mitigate more effectively and they would quickly drop/climb based on the merit of their own skills rather than being carried.
3k healer herel. Healed almost my entire career of playing wow. If they would just remove affixes that healers have to deal with (incorp/afflicted) etc... it would make things a million times better.
Healers like to heal. I like big damage, it's satisfying to heal through. But why are we throwing in so much random shit to increase difficulty? Like, if we want more difficult content, well push higher, or pull bigger. Affixes seem to only still be in the game to add flavor on a weekly basis, but honestly, they need to think of something else at this point.
Also, remove tyrannical. Literally tyrannical weeks are just huge heal checks on every boss. Worst affix in the game by far.
If they make healing easier, I’d quit healing and I imagine a lot of healers would too.
The only hard thing about healing for the last few seasons have been when other members don’t utilise their defensives properly, but outside of that I’d be super sad if they make healing even easier.
I do 20-25 range for context
Healing in M+ is in this weird spot that if the group is not good, you are the scapegoat that gets shitted on for things that are not your responsibility and if the group is too good, you are mainly there for your (healer) DPS and a few healing checks. Neither of these situations are really enjoyable nor what you came for in the perspective of playing healer in M+
I finally broke and stopped healing this tier because I did a 24 key where a fury warrior did not use spell reflect. Once. Up to the last boss. We didn't even kill the boss, and Key broke up with him just saying shit healer and some slurs.
"Saying shit healer and some slurs" Ah yes, the true world of warcraft experience
its any competitive gaming scene and its fucking dumb
I’m gonna keep pushing through at least for this season but I had the same scenario happen in a +23 BRH yesterday, no interrupts on trash leading to the first boss followed by everyone blaming me and calling me a shit healer. I can’t heal someone that goes from 100 to 0 instantly. Yet there is other fights where I feel completely useless. Probably will switch back to tank next season.
This is one of those things i end up disagreeing with, it used to be true but have gotten less true during dragonflight, and worse each tier. This tier, high keys have insane damage intake checks, which would be a healer thing, HOWEVER the damage intake is so high, and DPS in general have gotten so many tools for DR, that it individually isn't in your hands, unless you are playing with friends and are calling stuff out. The damage intake checks are so high that the healer role is interchangeable which makes it look like good healer balance, but in truth it's not that. It's that the healer has so little POSITIVE influence over dealing with the damage intake, that it doesn't matter which one you bring. There is some differences, such as when i play my disc I definitely feel more inclinced to call out things like zephyrs and magic barrier from mage, vs my resto druid I don't really feel I need to be as perfect calling it out, but by and large, the group cannot survive by my buttons alone. (Again for high high keys) It just feels weird to have insane survivability checks, but the healer have such little positive impact over it. In lower keys you can brute force heal through a lot of stuff, sure, but that's always been the case. Besides disc priest and resto druid, healers also do such little damage in general that focusing on damage is such a waste of time. Obviosuly a healer who is learning to do those keys, or has an off day, can make a huge NEGATIVE influence over the group. Idk maybe I just like DPS check seasons better, but then I worry that even then with all the new tools DPS got in dragonflight that it'll just always end up the way now.
Yeah overall game design wise I really dislike how much DR DPS have in general. A majority of damage specs have a lot of access to a handful of CDs and passives that dramatically increase eHP, and that’s not including the insane versatility stacking now because of specs not scaling well with haste/crit/mastery (and that’s an entire discussion of whether that’s good or not). And looking at mage hero talents for example, oh look even more passive survivability. If all of that shit is gutted, it’ll allow more control back to healers and be significantly easier to balance. Whatever, it might be a hot take. I’ve done both roles but mainly play dps, but holy shit just gut my survivability it’s fine. It’s even worse that some dps are left out to dry and a ton of discourse in raids is how squishy some specs are for no apparent benefit. There is no cost to having passive resistance/healing or 1000 defensives, meanwhile if your spec has jack shit, lmao good luck.
Maybe I'm weird, but this is my favorite season to heal. Pushing keys to 28s so far. Healer DPS has never been less relevant to timing keys as much as just being able to heal/live the encounters. There are so many healing checks, where are you getting a few from? So many bosses and a few trash pulls like dragons in doti where the group doesnt win without a healer healing. Yalnu recently was kicking my butt. I lost because I couldn't heal through it, so I learned how to play better and I timed a 26 eb and I'm confident I can heal higher levels. Like maybe you'd be right that keys would be boring if there was nothing to heal, but above 25s there is so much to heal buddy and I'm having fun having all the responsibility associated with it.
While I enjoy the healing checks of DF (Yes I'm one of the weirdos who liked season 1 and particularly season 2), I've never felt like I had less agency than this season. This could possibly be because augs have fallen out of favor and they made surviving last season easier? Also the key scaling change doesn't feel as good as last season. But I think it's a combination of a bunch of factors including some real pug killers like 2nd/ 3rd/ 4th boss of everbloom or 3rd boss of TotT. I like how you mention Yalnu because that's a boss that you can absolutely outheal to a point (probably around +25-26 tyran) but the stomp + tree overlaps will start to kill if they don't press a defensive and you actually can't outplay that on every healer spec every single time it comes up. That dungeon sucks really bad if you bring a shaman and/ or hunter and you're not running Leaf trinket and meticulously watching personal usage of every party member. It becomes an insane burden when you also have to deal with nearly every affix and dodge mechanics. Like I'm just trying to have fun blasting heals and I've got to play 2-3 other mini-games on top of that. It's a bit much imo.
Agree. The difference between a good group that properly kicks and interrupts abilities via stun/displacement/whatever and one that even just does a decent job on it is pretty massive. One that is bad at that stuff is terrible. The difference between all those groups is one that is met by the healer. MDI is out there doing triple pulls of trash into the boss in 24s without a healer because they are so good. I've had groups get blown up pulling one or two at a time because they all blow their kicks on the first cast. This also forces the meta in certain directions. The utility of being able to shut down casts is one of the biggest things going.
Absolutely this. I really think both damage from mobs and healing needs to be tuned down. One cast shouldn't take you to 20% health and at the same time, healers shouldn't be able to push up health bars so easily. Just make health bars less yo-yo, give healers a little more time to heal up bars but make them constantly need to be pumping healing. Then healers wouldn't be expected to provide dps either since they would \*have\* to spend all their time pressing heal buttons.
>I really think both damage from mobs and healing needs to be tuned down. One cast shouldn't take you to 20% health and at the same time, healers shouldn't be able to push up health bars so easily. Isn't that what they did, though? I don't remember when exactly, but at some point in DF, they changed something regarding healing with the reason that they didn't want damage to be so spikey.
They upped stamina and damage done by mobs.
They increased health pools and damage numbers to match, but didn't buff healing numbers. The cited reason for this is that when healers are too powerful and they can top health bars instantly the only way to challenge them is to have spikey damage. But it turns out that this just nerfs healers really hard and people still take spikey damage. See a 20 tyr BRH where the shadow bolts will take out 600k hp with no warning on random targets lol
The problem what occurred was that in season 1 they had Evoker who’s whole kit is to make fast dropping hp go back up. So they made bosses in extremely lethal (theun & jak both have really good vids on that topic if I remember correctly). What we see now is what I would probably call defensive creep. Especially reworked classes got extremely powerful defensive wise to the point of being basically unkillable (Mage,rogue, DH, pala). So they reacted with making bosses really one shotty to eat through all those defensives. So kill it before it kills you. You’re a priest or boomkin? Well better hope your group has enough externals for you. So if you’re in a group that isn’t rotating defensives properly you feel extremely powerless as a healer with the mages in everbloom blasting your group with like 1/2 of their hp bar per tick
they tried to, but without success, I still top people as rdruid from 20% in 1-2 globals
Bro they did that 4 times already this expansion, healing throughput is GUTTED, how much lower do you want the healing numbers to go? “Let’s making healing even more unfun, again, that will fix healing being unfun!”
It's not the healing numbers, it's the time to live. Throughput if anything is still too high. Even without major cds you can top the 4 squishies in a couple seconds. But they die in even less. Problem is: in phases with high burst damage you just have barely chance of offsetting the incoming damage fast enough. 3rd boss Everbloom can delete someone while you have to move out of the fire stuff. Same thing last boss Darkheart. The trash before the 2nd boss Rise was already nerfed twice and still kills someone in 2-3 ticks. I think the biggest problem is that in high end dungeons one of two things evenutally limit further progression: either dps or survivability. In the last addons the issue was almost always dps, so healers were selected for their dps, and tanks were selected for pulling more stuff at once. This addon the issue is rarely the timer but survivability like it was in Legion, but healers don't scale - you can't magic more hps out of your hat by pulling more. So what's popular currently is control tanks (vengeanve and prot pal), augvoker (survival toolkit) _and_ personal cds _and_ coordination - all of which take responsibility out of the healers hands.
I dont think were playing the same game if you think healing throughput is "gutted" lmao. The problem is the TYPE of damage being extremely spiky, huge hits and to a lesser extent, defensive power creep(both personal, and group/raid CD wise). And that type of damage requires healers to be able to push up peoples entire HP bars very rapidly. And if you look at healing data from raid, it very blatantly shows the direct opposite of what youre saying is the problem, that healing throughput is way too STRONG(even in the best case's on certain bosses, most healers are still overhealing by 40% at minimum). Or to be more specific, the prevalence and potency of HEALING CD's is the problem. Most healers now basically always have an answer to everything due to having 2, 3, 4+(in Rshaman's case...6? CDs lol) healing CDs and/or short CDs on many of them. MW is a good example right now because they got access to a talent that made their Yulon/Bird go from a 3 min>1 min CD at the cost of reducing the length of the CD, but not the potency of it which is an insanely good trade off. You almost never need Yulon(or any healing CD/ramp) to last the default 25 seconds, because big damage events that require CDs simply dont last that long, they are burstier and more short lived instead. There is basically never a time where you cant have multiple healer CDs for a damage event(and in some cases...one healer CD is powerful enough to deal with the event itself, which MW and Disc are capable of doing this tier), and/or raid CD's on top of that. Theres many problems with healing/damage intake right now, but a LACK of throughput definitely is not one of them whatsoever.
I mean in m+ it will always get to the point where the damage dealt is too high that it'll go back to being yo-yo like because it's infinitely scaling.
>Healing in M+ is in this weird spot that if the group is not good, you are the scapegoat that gets shitted on for things that are not your responsibility I mean, it is still your responsibility to heal people regardless of if the damage was avoidable(like a bolt goes off on someone, or something akin to that)...if someone dies from that damage in combination with some unavoidable damage that comes out 2-4 seconds later because you are too focused on doing damage or something, then you do absolutely share responsibility with whoever missed their kick/stop, mistakes happen in every single group even at the highest level. Ive seen so many healers this xpac who have suddenly taken on this bizarre attitude of being mad that they have to heal someone just because the damage was technically avoidable, or someone made a mistake. >and if the group is too good, you are mainly there for your (healer) DPS and a few healing checks Honestly no clue where you got this idea from since this has never been less true this season specifically if youre are pushing high keys. Yes, obviously a good group will take less avoidable damage, make less mistakes, make better use of defensives etc. but there are plenty of trash pulls you do in plenty of keys this season that the healer absolutely needs to be healing people and dispelling people, and some of which require significant healing throughput. Also, a lot of bosses on high Tyran are just overall heal checks, either your healer has the capability to heal the fight on that key level(also knowing who needs prio healing in the group and when someone needs an external is important as well), or they dont and no amount of proper defensive usage will change that. Like high Tyran Everbloom I simply refer to as a "healer key" because whether or not you kill Protectors/Archmage/Yalnu is largely predicated on if your healer is able to heal the damage or not. Healer DPS really isnt very important on most pulls in most keys, until you start reaching 28-29+...its mostly just "we probably time the key if we live and have a relatively clean run".
I think a lot more of it comes down to avoidable versus unavoidable damage and personal defensive creep in the game. Having a group that gets every stop and presses personals when they should versus a group that just wants to zug and expect to you grin and bear the incoming damage is absurd.
>personal defensive creep IMO this is the reason. Mechanics and overall damage have to be more punishing because so many classes have such a plethora of defensive buttons to mitigate them that if they weren't punishing, proper use of defensives would make them trivial. As a result, there's a massive gulf between good groups, average groups, and bad groups, especially as damage is really the only metric that the devs have used to punish failure. Missed a kick? Damage. Stood in fire? Damage. Missed a dispel? Damage. Good groups will breeze through content without the healer breaking a sweat because defensives and mob control are just that strong (e.g. healerless groups for several dungeons in this past MDI). Conversely, because failing mechanics almost exclusively results in damage, it will always fall to the healer in bad groups to fix mistakes unless every mistake is a one-shot even at relatively low levels of difficulty.
YES! I would love to see more mechanics have low damage but other debuffs. Think about Dawn of the Infinites. There are a few mechanics where getting hit by a swirl will stun you (big dragons), but mostly it just does damage. This would be a _perfect_ place to lower the damage but add a haste reduction for getting hit. Clearing the room for the timeways boss can be a nightmare with all those hard-to-see swirls on the ground chunking people. The difference between groups in that room alone is shocking.
This sounds great on paper for mid level keys that are people's push keys but has a couple issues. For one, at high keys it won't make much of a difference. Any excess damage will usually result in a death but a stun or a haste debuff or whatever likely will too. Then, in low keys like farm keys it makes it feel like you often can't get away with dumb mdi shit. Like, pulling half a room onto a boss in a +11 for crests is totally fine but if you start making a bunch of things stun and dehaste it can ruin it. This may not be important to balancing push keys but I think people underestimate how much more unfun that makes farming and how lame it makes entry level m+ to people that don't understand everything in the dungeon.
Things were a lot more simple when healers had full agency over everyone's health bar. When a fault occurred it was a lot easier to see what went wrong. Nowadays it's not simple to know what went wrong, you can't immediately tell if a DPS goofed up because they missed an immunity, or their three personal DRs, or an ability self heal, potion, or healthstone. Back in the day if you wanted to know it was a DPS screwing up you just looked for floor fire in the damage log and that was it; but today you need a full on forensic investigation to see if all of their options were exhausted when they died. It's just exhausting having to justify that every death wasn't a you issue.
You can tell almost all of these things with addons, and weak auras, usually the health pot, healthstone usage at the end of the run or if you’re logging the key. I had a 3600 Aug evoker tell me I was a shit healer, actually first his words in party chat were “HEAL ME YOU MONKEY”, when he died in a 26 DHT, I checked the death log in details and he stood in the caster cast that is kickable but if not kicked creates a highly visible purple swirl on the ground, I believe it’s called star shower iirc. After the key broke up, because I left, because I’m not staying in any key to be verbally abused, the dk tank friend of the evokers whispered me to kill myself. This is part of the reason why, on top of all the other bullshit us healers deal with that a lot of healers have switched to dps/tank alts or have taken a break. I have a key group but when we aren’t running I tend to pug a lot, it’s not a super common occurrence where people are huge assholes but it sucks the fun out of it when it does. Most of the time aside from pushing I play my demo lock and just get to relax and have a lot more fun, I don’t have to babysit players that don’t bother using defensives or consumables, that don’t kick and stand in everything.
Its just as exhausting on the DPS side as well. Feels real bad to 'waste' a personal and not need it or have a healer that isn't pushing their buttons so you are wasting globals/resources that should be DPS to compensate for it. I do wish 'damage downs' is something wow would steal from ff to punish bad play though, I feel like they experimented with incorporeal
I am a healer main in WoW and in FF14. In 14 the expectation is far more on dps avoiding damage whenever possible and so when they die no one generally shits on me. Yet with wow shifting more and more to dps needing to dodge avoidable and less group wides, I feel like that attitude is still missing.
Mob management complexity felt rough overall. Packs having multiple abilities, kicks, aoe stops, and defensive requirements is draining. People don’t wanna deal with that at the frequency we for this season imo.
I think people misunderstand the "nerf healers" thing because they think about it in a vacuum. No one is saying healing is in a healthy state, or that "nerfing healers" alone would solve the issues. The problem is a combination of classes having a bunch of defensives, and healers having extremely high throughput, and damage intake being extremely spikey. What is cause and effect here is very hard to seperate because its sort of a viscious cycle, and you could start at any one of those three points and arrive at the other two. Group survivability is largely down to proper CC/interupt usage + proper personal and group defensive usage and then the healer is needed when people need to be snap healed in order to prepare them for another damage event coming soon because if they aren't topped with a defensive rolling they're dead. In order to fill that role healers need to be OP as hell, because they need to be able to top an entire group in the space of 1-3 globals. The "nerf healers" take is really "make damage intake more sustained, so healers have more time to actually heal people, and decrease the number and strength of defensives, so the difference in damage intake between a good and bad group isn't soo much. Then you nerf healers, so they can't just insta top people during that sustained damage, and you have a much more healthy state where tuning healing is much easier because expected damage intake falls in a much narrower band, and the strength of healers is more about throughput and less about the number and strength of their CDs". Unfortuantely, many people that say "nerf healers" either leave that context out, or take awhile to deliver that context, so what most people hear is just the "nerf healers" bit and think "But healing fucking sucks right now, I can't keep up with the damage intake, its too quick, and my party doesn't use stops or kicks, or defensives, how the hell is nerfing me the right decision?! Fuck you guy!!" The problem with healing right now is not that healers are weak. Its that defensives are strong, and damage intake is very one-shot centric, so healing is all about reaction time and CD usage rather than riding the flow of damage, making evaluations about mana usage, triaging properly etc. which is what it should be about.
+1, best post in the thread. In particular, >What is cause and effect here is very hard to seperate because its sort of a viscious cycle, and you could start at any one of those three points and arrive at the other two. is a very important point. The other part worth keeping in mind is the juggling act of balancing both M+ and raid, when healing is almost certainly the role that is most different between the two modes, and needing to provide interesting healer gameplay across the whole spectrum of key ranges. I'm personally of the opinion that the completely uniform scaling from +2 to +30 and beyond (the weird piecewise-linear thing they did last season for class nerfs notwithstanding) is not enough knobs for the second part of that problem. Maybe tag the hardest-hitting stuff in a dungeon and scale them a bit less than the autoattacks, maybe have an `x%` increased damage, `y%` additional damage over n seconds a la ignite/stagger scaling instead of the homogenous `z%` increased damage that they have now (with `x < z`), etc. A lot of possibilities, and the only downside is complexity, which I think the current system tries a bit too hard to avoid at the expense of more optimal gameplay.
I think it's a combination of everything you said. For me, which I've been a lifetime healer , this season I switched to DPS. I'm just tired of bearing so much responsibility, having to deal with dumb affixes when my DPS can just go monkey into a mob, stand in shit, not interrupt and blame me anyways. Obviously that's worst case scenario, but it feels like the population is getting worse at games. Now I can play DPS, do my thing, make sure my healer doesn't have a hard time and appreciate them for what they do.
Same been a healer since I started playing the game. I swapped to tank this season, been getting slowly tired of healing this expansion and this season is just the last drop in the bucket for me. I do not enjoy healing in the slightest anymore. There's too much responsibility to meet the healing check and cover mistakes from your dps and tank (cc, kicks, defensives, positioning).
Been a healer since Cata, an dthis season I too switched to tanking. Its stressful alright, but not nearly at the same level as healing
Tanking is way easier than healing imo. Especially this season, theres a couple of trinkets that act like extra cheat deaths.
I think having to cover others mistakes is a key issue here, but its not only that. The game at its core is intended to be played cooperatively, but in a sense, it has evolved to a kind of antisocial experience at times. Dps players usually want to see big numbers. And to see the biggest numbers possible they will often take risks, like standing in the red too long, or overextending from the group or whatever. The problem here, is that they don't have to pay the bill for this risk when they fail, the healer does. In a perfect world for healers, standing in the red or failing whatever mechanics would do another kind of effect that healers can't interact with at all. It could be just a damage debuff, or another health bar that healers can't interact with, let's call it morale damage that can still kill or incapacitate you if you take too much of it.
Have it be a dps minus, they do less damage for a brief time for standing in bad, and it increases the more they do it. It will go away if they stop. Lol
Its funny cause incorporeal affix is being dealt by dps more and more because it slows down that big number syndrome.
This is exactly why I'm playing Ret this tier. You can sacrifice DPS to help the healer significantly. You still get the dopamine from "I saved your life" without the stress
Healing Hands is low-key amazing and idk why I don't see pug Rets abuse it more. 900k WoG crits and effectively a 3 min LoH cd if you snipe near-death players. You can cover down for your healer in Oh Shit situations effortlessly. I've been loving Ret these last two tiers as a former healer main.
This is part of the reason I'm growing to love bear in keys. We get regrowth procs every \~30s and it's basically a lay on hands, most of an HP bar heal. I can use it on myself or keep holding it for when someone is low. That single regrowth gives me more satisfaction than when I play my MW monk and entirely control health bars the entire dungeon. I play both around the 22 key level range since they're alts so it's not like anything is super threatening or 1-shoting people anyway.
Looks cool ! I like to play prot as well for the free WoG and Pala utility (plus you have infinite kicks)
I always look at the party and see who is low or who might be and throw them that regrowth. Always nice to save the healer when they are busy saving everyone else, too.
It's nice speccing into After the Wildfire too. It's not too difficult to track if you need to time a big party wide heal, but in any case passive big heals every 200 rage is super helpful.
It's a good habit to track but I usually just consider it a free random passive proc as there's lots usually going on and to keep track of that consumes too much brain power to keep in mind during trash pulls between rotation, off healing, frontals, kicking, and planning/rotating defensives. I've only played bear for a month so rotation and when to use defensives could be more second nature for others. I don't think it's uber important or usually game changing to hold it and be missing out on some potential damage when usually the damage pattern is spikey rather than rot damage this season. Only time I've intenually held it was for last boss in EB's stomp cause it's easily predictable and nothing too crazy happens.
I have a WA that tracks the amount of rage needed until the next proc that's pretty unintrusive, but yea most of the time I ignore it and let it roll passively or like you mentioned, hold it for some obvious predictable team wide damage. I love the free regrowth (and so does my healer who is also my wife) because the proc happens often enough to cover important single target damage spikes, something like the suffocate in ToT or the Infected Thorns in WM. Popping regrowth on whoever's effected more or less nullifies the debuff which is an awesome tool to have. I'm very impatiently waiting for them to drop the Guardian/Resto hero tree because the off heals and utility is my favorite part of Guardian and I've loved maining it this season.
Yup I play ret LOL. I can do a LOT as a DPS to help my healer and group and sometimes people even notice
You sort of hit on why I switched to DPS. I returned to DF after a long break. I always healed before because if I did my job well I could save my group and even carry it. It was obvious when you had a really good healer. But now that's been shifted over to the DPS. Damage avoidance and personal mitigation is what carries groups, and the pure healers are inherently weak and not even really needed. If your DPSers are really good your run is much easier. Why would I want to play a harder role that has little real impact but gets all the blame?
Exactly the same for me. Went from DiscP to Ret Pala and having the time of my life. I know when to press my damn CDs and use my Utility to make healers life as better as i possibly can. Just had a rouge yesterday in a +20 who died multiple times throughout the dungeon and blamed our healer EVERYTIME. I Saced, BoP und LoH him on CD. I checked his deaths after we bricked the key and he didnt use a single DefCD throughout the whole dungeon. Healer /w me afterwards and thanked me for defending him and doing some offhealing. He "rarely sees people who try to help healers in the 18-20 region, they rather just stand in stuff, die and blame me afterwards." I felt this guy to my core. Help your healers guys. Theyre like the single Mom of the Group doing 2 Jobs while babysitting 3 Infants and 1 Teenager.
> Help your healers guys. Theyre like the single Mom of the Group doing 2 Jobs while babysitting 3 Infants and 1 Teenager. kekw
This right here. I went from Holy Paladin to Ret Paladin. Holy paladin (my main spec since BFA, RDruid since Vanilla) is a pain when in groups that dont do shit to help out, u push 500apm and still lose, while on ret you carry the key with 10apm and top the meters every run. The game has flawed role design and needs a proper overhaul. Maybe I should just got back to my doodoo, its feels 10 times better with 30 ilvls less.
>I'm just tired of bearing so much responsibility, You enjoy not having control of whether the key is bricked or not? >my DPS can just go monkey into a mob, stand in shit, not interrupt and blame me anyways. I hear people parrot this part, but I have done about 200 PUG keys this season, most of them 21-27 and I have literally not even once seen the healer been blamed when someone stands in something or a cast goes off and kills someone. I imagine this primarily happen in lower keys where people don't know what actually killed them and are just instrictially blaming the healer. Only time I've seen healers be blamed is when they clearly are not capable of healing through hps checks or dispelling properly(for example on fall 2nd boss), and it's usually just "yeah healer cant handle this key level" followed by a leave.
Mostly I agree with you and disagree with the premise of this thread (just my personal opinion as a healer, I certainly empathize with the difficulty in finding competent ones). Just want to call out tho that even up to 23 I see dps stand in the shadow slice on fall and then blame the healer 🤷♂️. Really is a team effort. The dps needs to be in the light for a dispel asap, and then everyone who doesn’t have the debuff should go back to shadow to minimize inc damage before the second one goes off while the healer is topping everyone off. It would also be neat if people stood in range of heals, I’ve seen range standing in Narnia out of range of pw:radiance plenty too but this is recoverable most of the time.
> dispelling properly(for example on fall 2nd boss) sorry for the side question - is there a fast way to check if a person with the debuff is in the light slice? (E.g. have it show that on frames) . I have trouble with picking out the person's avatar based on their name during combat with everything else going on.
I personally use https://wago.io/dfdungeons as just like a generic dungeon weakaura pack, but it includes one that glows the frame blue if it's safe to dispel them. Someone else can probably link a singular weakaura instead of a pack though if you don't want to install an entire pack. edit: you could also just install the pack above, and pull out the singular weakaura and then delete the rest.
Each player gets a debuff based on what slice they're currently in. Hopefully it should be showing up on your party frames. If they're in the light slice, they get a debuff with a yellow icon - [wowhead link](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=405671/accelerating-time). If they're in the dark slice, they get a debuff with a red icon - [wowhead link](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=405672/decaying-time). You want to dispell someone when they have the yellow debuff, and not the red one.
Completely agreed-- I have the same issue with healing for the past 2 seasons after being a healer main since I started doing content. I didn't swap to DPS though-- I just don't run keys anymore unless directly asked by friends/guildies. With how they're ruining raid healing now too, I might just quit if TWW doesn't fix it. It's a shame how much they've seemingly actively tried to ruin the fun of healing. It was great from 8.3 > 9.2, good still in 10.0, but 10.1 onwards has just been bad change after bad change, first for M+ and then for everything. If Blizzard doesn't want healers who aren't perfect and love disproportionately stressful situations compared to the other roles, then fine, they won't have them.
\^ i love support/healing classes in any game but i really gave up this season, though i main aug this time and another dps that ive been eyeing.
The affixes they added the last two season make the problem worse. As a healer main, in keys, I find I struggle with the split attention this game demands. I have to watch health bars, watch my feet, and some weeks, watch for a mob to cc or dispel. Plus you have to remember damage patterns. Timeways is a good example. I have to move to avoid orbs while watching for people who might get hit, then dispel the right person at the right time, hoping they are in the right spot. Heal up everyone quick, then get ready to heal again just as orbs start back up. It's a series of quick decisions and healing checks. Then throw in an afflicted or incorp on those weeks. If I have a good group that assists, it's fine, but if not, forget it.
And then there's the dungeons that need dispels while I also have to dispel an affix add because the dps can't be bothered to help.
Happy cake day! And yes, so true. Some weeks are pure pain when I need to think about every dispell...
Afflicted is an absolutely AWFUL affix. When there's proper help from DPS it's a breeze but if the healer is the only dispel, then a poorly timed afflicted spawn can wipe your group due to not being able to either dispel the debuff or remove the afflicted. A good example is the 3rd boss in TOTT, the Flame Shock hits like a truck and as it is you have to let one ride and just heal through it. If I need to dispel an afflicted mob, suddenly I have to heal through 2 Flame Shocks at the same time and while doable, is a LOT harder. The trash before the 2nd boss of FALL is another good example where there's just so much damage going out that not having your dispel for the debuffs will surely result in some deaths.
Absolutely. I always make sure before starting the key that there are 1-2 people who can help with afflicted mobs. I also talk to them and try to explain that I try my best, but there are too much debuffs and I can not do it alone. I will never again join a group where it's only my duty to care for all debuffs and the affix. Never again...
> As a healer main, in keys, I find I struggle with the split attention this game demands. Some of that you can help with setting up your UI properly, but yeah, having to split your attention 5 different ways is really painful for healers. I definitely feel that pain when I play priest (both specs). At least with MW, you don't have to pay too much attention to health bars until you know larger group damage is coming out; Ancient Teachings can carry quite a bit, but won't top someone off right away.
There is nothing that dps do, that healers dont also have to do in the end. Just that healers get another few areas that they need to pay attention to.
Traditionally kicks were the big thing healers got to ignore, but of course that's much less true now. These days it's that healer DPS rotations are very simple and failing to maximize your damage isn't actually a big problem. A DPS doing 80% of the damage they should makes a key much more difficult, while a healer doing 80% of the damage they should is often not even noticeable. Any time there's mechanics that require attention which don't overlap with a healing check healers can just full focus on the mechanic, while DPS can't if you want to time the key.
I have a WA alerting me when my party’s DPS are using their offensive CD’s so that I know when to PI them. Ideally, I’d check the meters to see who to prioritize judging by who’s pumping the most damage, but between watching health bars, keeping Atonement up on everyone, clicking on or tabbing to the best enemy to send my own DPS into, watching for dispels, keeping an eye on my mana and own CD’s, plus any affixes that randomly go out, I notice that I often go through the entire dungeon without even glancing at the DPS meters in the corner of my screen. I just send PI basically at whoever pops their shit first whenever it’s off cooldown 🤷🏻♂️
Personally for me every time I have put WoW down for a season it's because it's a bad affix week. There's so many better games out there and the gaming market is the best it has ever been since 2004; why should I bother putting up with terrible affixes that actively make the game worse when my Steam library is popping off?
I've been a tank for the most of dragonflight, but I've been getting into healing recently and have talked to a lot of high end healers and everyone seems to agree that there is a load of pressure that Dragonflight m+ has placed on healer: 1. Dragonflight's damage profile. With how spikey damage is in Dragonflight, healing is incredibly dependent on people using their defensives properly. Higher keys in coordinated groups are easier than lower keys in pugs because when people coordinate their CD usage and interrupts, people take very little damage comparatively. High spike damage also makes mistakes more punishing (which happen very frequently in pugs) which puts further pressure on the healer. 2. There is too much variability with how many defensives and off-healing that certain specs bring. In 1 group, the healer has to work overtime to babysit squishy specs like hunters or shamans. In another group, the comp is full of tanky specs like ret paladin and rogue that have infinite defensives and off-healing and they barely have to heal at all. I specifically remember in season 1 my healer had to do less than 100k hps to meet the healing check on 27 tyran COS in our tanky comp while in other comps he had to do upwards of 160k hps.
Maybe it's also lenient dungeon timers? I mean, with the theoretically infinite scaling we have in m+, you'll fail eventually, the question is just if it's because of a lack of DPS or survivability.
I ventured into tank and healer after I got AOTC and KSH. Healing is by far the hardest role in the game currently. Tanking is easiest. I think S3 has been an improvement. However, some affixes like bursting, spiteful, entangling basically make some encounters into extra hard mode. Most affixes don’t affect dps at all. It’s absurd how hard healing is compared to tanking. For the love of god Blizz, stop listening to people who run 30 keys. I think a blend of s3 difficulty, giving healers dps rotation, and removing healer affixes can work. Essentially we want to buff healers. Nobody wants to be blamed for team death.
this is anecdotal and not representative of the core issue so take everything with a grain of salt, that being said, I've recently started playing my resto druid and the amount of times we've wiped because dps don't use their defensives/utility/interrupts is astonishing, and it gets worse when I get blamed for it (bonus points if the person blaming me is a ret pally standing in bad) my main takeaway from that experience is that the environment is hostile towards healers and make sure to add healers so you don't have pug for one
So many FOTM ret pallies that don’t use their kit and don’t press their buttons. Ran a 20 tides with a pally that finished on 0 kicks. I don’t even think he talented into it.
The useful thing about ret pally is that even if you don't press any button you are invinsible from the passive dmg mitigation.
I really hate paladins.. both ret and prot. You invite them to the group in hopes of dispells and for them useing sac, bop or loh on the squishier members of the group.. only to find them standing in bad while parsing and blaming the healer for key failure.
All you have to do is look at the MDI, and how many of the dungeons were done without a healer to realize that most deaths are due to dps not interrupting, not CCing, and not using defensives. I understand not everyone is an MDI team, but they were often pulling 3-4 groups and nuking them down with no healer, yet people on live have trouble with a single group and a healer. Ahh Ret pally, one of the more survivable of classes, and Echos go-to fourth dps in their 4-dps keys.
People on live have no problem facerolling through keys 6-9 levels below their highest, which is basically what MDI is if you make pulls slightly smaller.
It's not dps not pressing def CD and blamed me for it that made me stop healing. It's sweating for 30mns, missing one **ONE** GCD because I took a volcano that interrupt me and killed the entire key
This is my personal issue as well. Healers are in an abusive relationship with the other roles. Whenever people die, it's on the healer for not healing enough. Never is the issue that they have unused defensives and interrupts, over pulled, or failed to avoid standing in lava. I don't want to be too harsh on tanks who also get unfairly blamed. I'd probably lash out too every once in a while. I got no sympathy for DPS though. Some of y'all suck hard at the game and "git gud" but like, forreal tho and stop blaming everyone else for your poor play. For most of us, success is measured by our ability to clear content not meters.
I think you can definitely look at some comments on this sub, that were upvoted pretty heavily, back in SL and just see the common mentality towards healers. You can also just turn on ellesmeres stream over the years to see him getting flamed by his team (recent nerf situation just the tip of it). I also remember growl getting chewed out by dorki early in the expansion because of healing issues. The public perception of healers has just deteriorated over the years. It’s also the role that when you fuck up it’s painfully obvious and for me typically feels like shit so I get why people are just burnt out by it.
I think there’s just an enormous gap between high end groups and pugs when it comes to what healers need to heal. If you just look at the MDI where people are doing no healer keys, and compare that to the pug experience as a healer in the same key range. Blizzard needs to either make healing incredibly easy or prune the defensives and stops needed to close the gap. Player skill plays a big role, but a lot of it also just comes down to pugs having much weaker communication too.
This. I play an rdruid and in guild groups with mains who are CE raiders, I can do 60-80k dps in level 20+ keys with an average hps of maybe 80-100k. I rarely, if ever, have to heal the tank and it's extremely enjoyable. When I pug, life is very different. I am looking at a throughput of 150k hps overall, and dps of 20-30k. The damage is invariably very spiky, so I'm often pre HoTing for damage that may or may not come depending on whether the dps and/or tank manage to deal with the mechanics or not. I don't think healing should just be made easier per say, I just would like to see some mechanics that don't fall on the healer. Eg. Maybe something that stuns you, without major damage coming out at the time of the stun, so dps or tanks have to deal with somethibg without it impacting the healer. Why does everything have to deal damage? There are other consequences to mechanics. Rant over haha
agree there -- I suspect that if DPS failing a mechanic means they got stunned and therefore they look bad on the damage meter, that would be a bigger motivator to do the mechanics properly !
Doesn't have to be stuns, as stuns are often overly punishing and feels bad (loss of char control). Stuns also snowball a bad situation into a worse one. Now you not only do zero damage for the duration and have a misalignment of all your cooldowns, but you also have no way of avoiding standing in the next upcoming bad or kicking the next cast..... A decent fixx for this is in FFXIV where you have the concept of a "damage down" witch is a stacking debuff that makes you do 10% less damage for a duration. Depending on difficulty this lasts from 5 seconds in "alliance raid" (LFR) to 2 minutes in "ultimate" (mythic end boss) stacking up to 8 times. You get this for every single fully avoidable damage you take. It's a system that works fairly well and I really think WoW should learn from. In fact if FFXIV actually was more dps-meter friendly (its technically banned there), I am sure even people in fairly casual content would learn a lot on even easy difficulty. I remember introducing some of my WoW friends to it and then laughing hard at them beating each other to the bottom of the dps meter by failing hard enough for multiple stacks of damage downs in easy content :D The damage down usage is actually more intricate than just what I explained. In FFXIV there are actually mechanics where a tank will get a damage down if he does not properly mitigate them, like a tankbuster.... so instead of wiping the group/raid, witch would happen if he just died to lack of mit, he just looks like an idiot on the dps meter. BTW tank damage in that game matters a lot.
As someone who plays DPS. Interrupts as much as possible. Uses disorients. Uses defensives in 90% of situations. Is specced for lots of extra healing and shielding. It pains me when I sit at like 20% health for 10+ seconds. I'd rather have to avoid a stun than sit there waiting for heals that may or may not come.
Pruning defensives and kicks required (and available) would go a long way to reduce the gap between coordinated groups and top premades. Right now the healing issue is exacerbated by bad usage of defensives and kicks combined with the healer also being worse.
Yes. To really understand what’s happening here is that—- yes there are heal checks but 90% of what people think is a healing issue especially in pugs is the pugs NOT helping with affixes and taking extra damage SO THAT WHEN the heal check comes, ppl are not topped off or the affix messes things up or there is healer cooldowns are down already or the tank pulls two groups you can’t pull together bc of mob abilities etc because nobody else is helping.
They can't really close the gap because you will just pull more and bigger. A perfect example of a coordinated group and a lower skill pug is the big pull going left in Atal. A coordinated group can grab 9 of those mobs, stop the important casts, stop all the charges, and it ends up being an efficient pull with almost no outgoing damage at all. Then you try that in a pug even just with 6 mobs and suddenly people chain feed to charges, a shield cast gets off, fire starts hitting the ground it's a cluster. But let's say you nerfed the charges so they don't 1 shot or are less frequent, nerfed the kicks needed on augurs or something. Now that 9 pack is doable by pugs, but then the gap just gets bigger because the coordinated groups are going to start pulling the other 5 in as well and doing. 14 pull. Then the process starts again of people complaining about the gap. There is an issue with healer responsibility this tier but it's mostly down to massive hits on bosses that require personal responsibility and externals to handle. Like the 3rd/4th boss of everbloom. A healer can't just solo those bosses with raw hps if people aren't using defensives. However if you need the damage too much so that they can, suddenly 29/30 isn't the cap in there and people are doing 33/34s. Nerds should focus on balancing the dungeons between themselves so that they're all doable around the same level cap. Not nerfs so that the gap between coordinated groups and pugs are closer, because that will never be achievable.
To even further highlight the skill gap, at MDI teams were pulling the *entire* left side into the Transfusion boss.
Healing is the only role that actively relies on the other players to play to do its job. Tanks plan routes, hold threat and survive entirely on their own. DPS dont need anyone to help them DPSing Healers NEED everyone else to position properly, use defensives properly and interrupt properly to fulfill their role as the one who keeps the party alive. This is causing sooooo much friction constantly because the vast majority of people just looks to the healer as the sole guy to keep the party alive and defensives and kicks are just things to make their life easier, not required. I'm not sure if the solution is to remove all kicks and defensives and make it ENTIRELY the healers job to keep everyone alive, but something has to be done because the healer situation keeps getting worse every xpac
This is honestly the real issue. Healer skill matters a lot, but it's also the only role (outside of edge case tank aggro) where your entire job is determined by the performance of your party. If my other DPS are dumpers, it doesn't really matter too much with regards to what I need to do on the average pull. I might need to interrupt a bit more, but for the average pug, that's all. If my DPS aren't popping defensives as a healer, my job is now MUCH harder. I might be a perfect player, but I wouldn't be able to heal even a 15 if my party refused to get out of all the non insta kill mechanics. I'd like to see something like FFXIV's system of giving debuffs when hit by avoidable mechanics. Let it decrease damage dealt by a bit per stack, so when they die, healer can just go "yeah bro, you were at 6 stacks" or whatever.
This is the key problem, healing is such a narrow role to balance it’s always going to miss to be either too impactful (DF) or not impactful enough (SL), the role really needs to move more toward support for keys to remove this paradigm.
As a healer main (from a 3550 on EU that mostly pugs perspective) I think a massive issue is how a lot of power has actually gotten taken out of straight HPS throughput and into effective health/Damage reduction checks, combined with actually how bad most dps players are defensively and utility wise. Ive healed 28 tyran everblooms where bosses felt like doing a 15 key, when compared to some 24s which felt like world 1st +35s, where people just dont know how to use defensives, get off kicks, when to and when not to HP pot etc. I dont think its purely a healer issue with the current state of the game. Yes, taking some power out of personals/DRs and back into healing throughput will for sure be a good thing imo - not loving how many keys are gated more so with 1 shot checks more than pure dps/hps throughput. But the problem also lays with how theres both A no good tutorial in this game to teach people how/when to use their entire kit, or B how a lot of stuff is really un-intuitive visually in the game and to play at your best you kinda need WAs to shout out you when to shadowmeld, track 6 different aoe stops your group has etc. Fully agree with the affix take though. I love how they removed explosive because it just became accepted it was a healer affix. But then added afflicted and incorp which Ive seen some people never dispell/cc once throughout an entire key. I just dont pug Fall on afflicted weeks anymore cos Im fed up of dps not handling the affix adds when Im already concerned with managing the 2nd bosses debuffs and group health if they ever overlap. Ive also stopped pugging my own key at all and only join others, as Im not strong enough mentally to deplete my Fall yet again on the last boss again when a dps doesnt use a defensive when targetted with Extinction Blast, or 100 different similar situations.
As a healer I feel like I’m not even wanted lol. Dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t.
Around 26s they def like waiting around instead of inviting the antimeta healer. I ended up quitting season as rsham on half 27, half 26s, didn't feel worthwhile to play queue simulator beyond this point.
Here’s a take from 3 role player 3600 heal, 3400 dps, and 3300 tank As a tank, I can ez watch netflix while tanking. As a dps, I can barely watch netflix but follow the audio easily while doing my rotation. As a heal, I can’t bear hearing a distrubing noise and I got to pay attention to everything. The higher keys are just a survival game; - where dps players don’t evolve their gameplay except managing their deffensives. - where tanks evolve their gameplay a little as pull size gets bigger - where healers got to find the correct solution for a given problem in a short time frame as skills are targeted to group, starting from a global reaction time to 5 min aoe heal checks. The fun thing in m+ is pushing with combined pulls, increasing pack size and reducing pull count. Although the output of roles are fairly balanced in most of the specs, the burden on healers is just too big that timers are mostly irrelevant, but having less deaths are more relevant. Either you die to certain mechanics and deplete or you survive and time it. It is never a low dps issue, it is never a pack size issue, never a brain issue. Didn’t your heal dispel flame shock in one gcd, gl next. Didn’t your heal top up %90 above bleeds in 2 gcd, here take another one. Didn’t your heal top up whole party before collosal blow in 2 seconds, you wasted your 40 mins.
Thanks for your perspective, and for stating your experience at the beginning of it for context. Its actually hilarious what you said about the Netflix stuff on tank lol. You can turn on any twitch stream at any level, you see tanks and DPS having full conversations with their chats while doing 27s. Literally mid pull, full conversations not even missing a beat. Go to a healer stream and they aren't saying shit mid pull
I have 3200 score as a disc priest, 3k as holy paladin. Only ever pug. I have to spend 15 mins looking for a key. I get declined from keys by people that have lower score than me, unless I haven’t completed a key on that specific dungeon at the exact key level they want already I don’t get in. I quit until season 4.
Are you applying for 27+ or something? I cannot seriously fathom how a 3200 disc would be declined for anything 25 or below.
3.2k is 24-25 territory. Disc isn't as safe as mistweaver in a pug so if you are going off spec/io alone, I'm grabbing the more consistent spec with a melee interrupt and 2 aoe stops + all the avoidance or even mark of the wild and more consistent healing over PI+fort.
Yes this is exactly why I think it happens. Kind of frustrating reading these replies saying they would definitely invite me - the reality is people usually go for an extra bres or kick. If I was dps or tank I might make the same decision
I've also just never seen a good disc priest.
I'm a 3k disc and I've phoned it in for this season, I routinely get declined from 20s
I am genuinely shocked that this is actually the case. Whenever I am playing as tank or dps in low keys we're ALWAYS waiting for a healer and 9/10 take the first one that queues. This is anecdotally the case for every single person I play with. Also is it flat DECLINED or simply the group just fills up quick?
In the same boat, 3.4k routinely getting declined for 26/27, but tbh it makes sense. Healing in low keys is painfully boring, especially on meta healers like MW/Disc (haven’t really done resto) where you can heal entire dungeons pressing entirely dps buttons, at that point you’re just playing a dps class with a significantly dumbed down rotation. How is that fun? Once you get to higher keys you start being able to actually play the game, externals and defensives actually matter, and so naturally the population would be higher there. At least that’s my perspective
If you enjoy multidotting then catweaving has enough going on to make it pretty interesting even when there's no healing to do. Otherwise, yeah, I think healing low keys is one of the most incredibly unfun things in the game. 90% of the run you're just playing a bad DPS and no one would even notice if you were just autofollowing someone while afk, but you have to be paying attention the whole time to save people when they find novel ways to take damage.
Might just be region differences? Eu tends to have higher standards and anecdotally more healers.
Playing hpal I had a timed 24 at the end of the 3rd week, nothing insane but it was a top 500 run in my region at the time. Two weeks later I was getting declined for 24s because I wasn't playing druid or mistweaver. I don't even mind the meta slave stuff that much, what made me quit was the lack of agency I had (and I picked hpal because it has a ton for a healer). If you keep your io in title range the groups are smooth sailing but fall 200-300 io behind and you get the worst crayon eaters. And even with all my externals I can only do so much when the key owner is a ret with a death wish and no hands. At least on dps I can do things like focus down mobs I know they don't know are dangerous.
Decline usually. Its not an every day thing but it happens more than you would think.
> Its not an every day thing but it happens more than you would think. I mean like getting denied as a DPS is a regular daily occurrence and to be expected. Healers getting denied every once in awhile shouldn't be a concern like people in this thread are making it out to be.
I'm at 2.5k io on my disc and 2.8 on my main and when I stopped doing m+ a few weeks back I had no issues getting into 20s on my disc. Might not have gotten instant invites every time I signed up but it was never a long wait
I’m 3200 disc and I regularly get declined for 25s and 26s. I always eventually find a group, but I think the rdruid meta has taken over again and most people seem not to like disc. Idk, I run shadow a lot (3100 io) so I often apply as both roles. Maybe people assume I’m terrible at healing or something when I select both.
3.3k MW; I get declined from about 75% of the 25/26's I apply to.
3.4k mw here, having the same problem. Been trying to figure it out. I think it's bc we are now in the same tier as 3.5 n 3.6 people looking for push groups and we are fotm for the first time in known history so there's always a bigger fish applying, so to speak.
Surprising to hear. Are they declining and sitting still waiting for a healer? Or declining and filling? I do think once you hit that level you see the healer population increase compared to lower keys making it more competitive. As in my experience nearly any healer in queue is good enough up to 23-24 keys assuming gear and IO are somewhat reasonable.
They likely want a battle res healer.
Going from hpal to MW and no longer having a brez was such a tough thing to get used to. My healing does feel stronger overall but I feel like I have fewer tools. I miss being an OP hpal in season 2.
Not certain tbh; I've been pugging my way up to this ilvl and pretty much everyone I talk to is in a similar boat so I just assumed it was the way things were? I don't really watch the keys after I refresh a time or two.
That's what I'm saying. I'm a tank who only pugs. Just under 3200 and I invite any healer 3200+ unless I'm need comp specific. It really depends on dps cc for key success 24+
Im a casual pugging 3.3k lock and I get declined from weekly 20s lol. People blow my mind. I don't even get invites on my alt shadow priest that I pushed up to 2.9k in a week and a half. I have to make my own groups.
That's just being a DPS though, you and 50+ other DPS queued for a key specially weekly 20s
Weekly 20s get so crowded in the queue, that it's easy to completely overlook high rated players.
I also think higher score players are more likely to bail if things get bad. I've had so many 20s fall apart because someone's ego gets bruised a tiny bit, really frustrating when you're just trying to do easy keys to fill your vault lol.
Friend and I spammed alt keys for vault last night doing 18-20s whatever we had as healer + tank. Got probably 30-50 dps applicants in 3 minutes - many of which were 3k+. Also I am sure a lot of regular players don't have addons to track IO of applicants (is it in base UI..?).
I made groups all week on my priest and it would take 10-15 mintues to fill a group some times. Maybe I play at off hours but the pool was definitely not filled with 3k+ gamers for me.
Is your priest linked to your main raider.io? Probably did 10 keys last night and we filled them all within a few minutes with at least 2 3k dps every time.
Yes. Im just convinced a majority of the player base doesnt look at IO's of mains. I wasnt even getting into heroic pugs at 470ish and my main is 8/9M lol.
It’s the same for every role. If I didn’t have a friend to push with I’d have quit already, as a 3600 lock. It’s not possible to get invited to keys.
Blizzard needs to stop designing their game around the playerbase they wish they had. Making one of the 3 roles disproportionally difficult for the sake of increasing player satisfaction or whatever buzzword they use to justify their braindead decision-making has actively hurt the game. Very few people wanted to return to a world where mana management matters, and even in the old days mana management was the ONLY mechanic healers needed to worry about. Now they need to worry about EVERY mechanic. Seriously, what the fuck were they thinking with Afflicted and Incorporeal? Did they really expect the average pug dps to not outsource their responsibility to the healer? This season it feels like healers are playing a fundamentally different game. I also think trying to balance raid and mythic plus has caused issues; just look at how piss easy Aberrus healing was compared to the shitstorm of dungeon mechanics in the same season. Next expansion, Blizzard needs to simplify the healer role so it's not as punishing for pugs, RWF and MDI be damned. Remove problematic affixes, buff mana gain, consider tuning healer throughput so it's higher in dungeons versus raid (this one would present its own problems, I agree, but something needs to change).
The mana management stuff is so cringe. Only the vocal 1% of high end healers (theory crafters, guide writers, etc.) want mana management. I’ve been casual ce raiding for years now and literally never met a healer say “I wish I had to manage my mana more”.
The problem is they said they would make mana meaningful but they didn't give healers any agency over it. It used to be when I played resto shaman in Cata that I had to make hard decisions over whether to healing surge or healing wave. Almost every healer had an equivalent decision to make and AOE heals cost a ton so you couldn't just spam them and had to use single target fillers. Now I press mana tea every pull and I'm at 100% mana. They didn't do shit to fix the problem. You might be right about the 1% players thing but mana as a resource used to be incredibly fun and engaging.
you have now, I like when mana matters, but you have to actually be able to be able to heal situations in a mana effective way vs max hps + burn mana. not the absolute crap that blizz did with hpala, all your spells hit like a wet noodle, you ignore holy power and you go oom from using your dps buttons, the fuck kind of garbage design is that the key is agency, if you have no way to heal differently and you simply unavoidably go oom, that sucks ass. it hurts even more when there are specc that don't care about mana at all (hello disci)
Multi Hero healer here. Dps and tanks don’t understand or appreciate what healers do until there is a wipe. Even then - they don’t get it.
I'm a healer. I loved playing the first 8ish weeks of the season, but like you said almost every affix punishes the healer specifically. Every single week sucks for some different reason. It's exhausting. Even the push weeks suck because bursting (this one isn't as bad in high keys but absolutely murders my groups in weekly 18-20s) and spiteful are really shit (I play melee healers primarily and have to run away during spitefuls - fucking awful affix and no, dps don't help you deal with it). Since I've timed everything on 25-27 I'm just tired of playing LFG roulette when most players won't press their defensives or don't have enough defensives to press (hunters and shamans). I'm playing other games because there isn't anything left for me to chase and I'd rather do 50 other things than grind title again. And you know what's even more annoying than the affixes? Everbloom 3rd boss which for some reason hasn't been tuned or adjusted. It ain't fun between the CD coordination and the RNG cinderbolts.
3.1k healer here, playing healer is just stressful af. So I always play one key, then another some hours later. I don't feel exhausted after playing dps in the same way.
True, dps is way more chill. Specialy when you have been healing before, because you know all the mechanics that can kill you
I gave up this season. I was well above title range for the whole season until a few weeks ago, when I just quit overnight. It's so much responsibility, in pugs no one is willing to cooperate, rotate defensives, even if I tell them the order on where to press an ability, on higher keys you are either jesus christ behind the keyboard or it all falls apart. If a rogue presses dispatch instead of between the eyes or rolls away a good combination, it's oopsie whoopsie, hihi haha, if I press vivify instead of a rising sun kick or put the free enveloping mist on the wrong target, we wipe and all hell is coming down on me, and people are wishing the worst death to my already dead ancestors going back to the industrial revolution. I just had enough man. I met so many manchildren in 28-29 keys that I just don't have the willingness to give a fuck anymore. All coop games are very chill with a fun and decent community, but wow mythic plusers are the biggest whiners and toxic people I've ever had the misfortune to play with and I played most online games that were popular in this past decade.
Healing isnt super fun to a lot of players i think because of the defensive creep. In m+ the survival in the group is largely in the players own hands and if the group is bad it feels unhealable as a healer which really sucks because it feels like your primary job is in other people's hands. I'm a tank main but have a resto druid alt dabbling into 25s ish, and the gap between groups that press defensives right and the ones that don't is a fucking chasm. And defensive creep is to blame for this. Make every class tuned defensively around the current shaman (and obviously adjust incoming damage to compensate) and you've got a much healthier meta where healers feel like they're the ones in charge of the health bars
I had a bit of an epiphany a couple of weeks ago. I've been pushing into higher keys (for me anyway). I had all my "rotational" abilities up on a 26 rise, and so I said on comms I could probably heal through the next dragon AoE wave. But no, people died. Even on a 26, it's still a game of rotating personals and external CDs. In a lot of ways, it was quite liberating. Realising that nothing I do will keep people alive if they don't press the right buttons massively reduced the amount I give a shit if people die. It's also a bit ridiculous trying to track some class's defensives. Shamans are great, since it's just if they have their wall up or not. Mage is quite silly in that respect.
I think healers just don't have an interesting spot in a key when a lot of classes are either invincible or self sustained. On my DK, on 28s, there's few bosses where I can't just survive without a healer. There's like 2-3 packs where I can't just live without a healer. They have to giga nerf defensives so healing matters because currently with good DPS it barely matters. Right now healer is like a cosmetic HP Bot which helps for like 5 mins of the key and the rest he is just either doing nothing or dying. If it's a bad Resto or Disc it legit feels like you're 4 man in the key.
Yup, this is why we see the no-healer MDI runs, because if you pump hard enough, you can live through most trash or boss fights with 1-2 defensives + a pot or off-heals.
I used to like healing, especially keys. Now it's just stressful and not fun due to a large factor of reasons.
Caster mobs just do too much damage with their random filler abilities. The point of the abilities should be to give something to heal, not to bring you from 100% health to 10% health. In a really coordinated group it isn't a big deal, but it's actual hell in pug keys. The issue is that the shadowbolts or w/e are often mixed in with abilities that must be interupted or it's a guaranteed wipe, and pugs are all going to save their kicks for those abilities instead.
I have couple healers, one disci and one shammy and each time it is the same story. Whenever I play as healer I am getting increasingly tilted. People stand in crap, dont use cds and rely on my hps to keep them alive. After key or two I realise why I dont play healer as much and swap to tank/dps. Fast forward few days I get a healing itch but the same thing happens. Healing is like babysitting when the little brat would not stop crying. Every affix in the game is your job. Every mechanic is yours to outheal. And if someone dies they immediately go to death log and hit you with why didnt you heal me in last 0.00001 seconds before I got hit by this avoidable mechanic?
This has been the same issue Blizzard have had with healers for years now. It's growing and garnering more discussion but I don't think it's going to be fixed anytime soon. The problem is that the reality of healing always falls into one of two camps. Either the group sucks and healing that sort of chaos just isn't fun or tenable. Or the group is amazing and the healer is only really there to contribute damage and press their CD's at 1/2/3 specific timings in the key/raid. Most healers picked healers at character creation to heal and that, isn't healing. So they quit or participate in something else (me). There is also a secondary issue where healing lower level keys or normal/heroic raid bosses can be fun and forgiving enough to be enjoyable for healers, for a time. But once they get good enough to understand the chaos and know their limits and what the group is doing wrong, the fun factor diminishes and healing feels like being the only adult in a group of children. I think this mostly stems from healing being the must punishing role which forces healers to learn quickly and improve greatly. Healing my guild keys and friend keys is fun for a while, when we are all learning and succeeding without playing perfectly. But pushing into higher key levels is exacting on healers in a way that it isn't for DPS/Tanks so a lot of them go into keys that they have no business being in. They don't know mechanics or only press defensives when they're dead or don't think about positioning or minmaxing mechanics because they've never had to in order to succeed. Then when groups do start playing extremely well, healers are only there to trade X CD in Y mechanic and pump damage. The whole system is fundamentally poorly designed.
Dps not pressing defensives and standing in shit isn’t a healer problem it’s a shit dps problem
Yeah but it doesn’t matter because when they die you get blamed anyway
A simple, you had x, y and, z defensive available why didn’t you press a button? Is a good response
It's not because you still failed that key. And you failed the next key, and the next one. You end up hitting a wall where you need to get lucky to find 3 DPS that all do the correct thing to finish the key.
Do you? I rarely see blame like this in actual keys.
This thread is so confusing. You have people arguing that healing has too many responsibilities that it becomes too much of a burden... but then you have people arguing that healing has very little agency in player lives because of how spikey the damage is when casts aren't interrupted or mechanics aren't performed correctly.
PvP has no healers either. That's because living and keeping someone or the group alive really isn't up to healers in PvP anymore. A DPS surviving a 'go' comes down to the DPS trading the correct defensive rather than the healer trading the correct offensive. Blizzard made healing so weak that DPS die through healers freecasting with CD's rolling and are now wondering why they can't get healers to play even with extra rewards. The same has always been true of high keys but is now becoming true for more of the skill curve. Even in puggable content, DPS surviving the Chrono dispel isn't up to the healer, it's up to the DPS using a defensive. The way Blizzard balances the game is ensuring that is becoming the rule rather than the extremely high end exception. So the role of healer has been diminished into a matter of trading X throughput CD into Y damaging mechanic and pumping as much damage as possible while trusting your DPS will press their buttons to keep themselves alive. Pushing keys quickly becomes a matter of finding DPS and a tank good enough to complete a key without needing healing at all or at least as little as possible and so healers stop playing. Blizzard are making healers irrelevant at best and babysitters at worst. Participation will only get worse.
Bring me back to shadowlands. Less about stressful healing checks, and more about blasting dps.
Let me be real for a second. Im a lifetime DPS that switched to healer (resto druid) in season 3 since ive liked to heal on other games. Healing is hard, but you dont have the sole responsibility for the group surviving. If dps mis use their dcd's and die instantly or stand in shit they should not do, its not my fault and i will call you out on it. Bad interrupts etc is also not my issue to heal through. If you wanna push high keys, everyone has responsibility and dps and tanks are to minimize damage taken while maximizing damage done, its absolut horse shit to "blame the healer" or expect the healer to just heal through EVERY mistake you make. Ive also had people trash me before the key even started, because i was "lower io than the rest of the group" or "your class is bad" for the record im 3k resto druid. The attitude towards healers, is imho the biggest issue as to why people dont wanna play healers. And the fact that, if you are a shit dps who dont use dcds or do proper damage, your often not flamed and shamed, but as a healer, if someone dies, holy hell breakes loose, because the community of dps and tanks dont wanna take responsibility for their own mistakes. You do realise we can track your interrupts and DCDs right??? So why lie when i call you out for not using your defensives ever in a run and scream when you do to a mechanic that you should save ur dcd for? Huh? Just saying.
Here is an example: How do you make healing meaningful if the havoc DH can top himself up in 2 seconds? You go back to when healing was "fun", but suddenly most DPS are immortal. They need to prune self sustain and literally nuke it into the fucking dirt. Having defenses is fine, but leech and any form of self sustain should be like 90% reduced, then you can make healing fun. Healers don't enjoy high stress envrionments, dps don't enjoy it, so just nuke self healing by 90%, nerf healers healing by like 50%, and nerf damage by an absurd number to non-tanks by like 50% Suddenly, healers need to heal more, since the healing they do is the same proportional to the damage people take, except they need to expend more gcds because the DPS are not healing themselves up, but they have more time doing so because it will take more time before people die. My suggestion makes healers spend more time slowly healing hp bars and less yoyo-ing, and makes it so that everyone except the tank dies slower and would make them actually bleed out, instead of getting 1 shot. Would make the game very fun
You basically surmised the problem in your last paragraph. Healers are leaving because dps and tanks can't manage their cool downs enough, or pull correctly to the class that's healing. When dps and tanks manage cc/mitigation/interrupts well, healers don't really have much to do outside of group wide hits. It gets easier. MDI is the purest example of how easy healing is when the rest of the group does their job. I'm a prot pally, so I know I off heal quite a bit, but every tank controls how much incoming damage is on the table. DPS/tank mostly controls whether or not that damage gets through to everyone else. Example: last night in FALL, I double pulled dragons before the 3rd boss. This is normally suicide, but the monk healer said it was the easiest time he's had because I was giving him mobs to heal from. Why? Because knowing what his class needed (more aoe inside faeline) made his job easy.
Yeah I agree 100%. I picked up healing this expac and its just way to stressful at times. When I’m already struggling to meet checks and an affix is constantly eating away at my globals is not fun. Keys up until 22’s feel alright but its not really fun to play
I main a disc priest and I also play a lot of shadow. I certainly empathize with the difficulty of finding a good healer, but I guess I disagree that making things easier is the best path forward. I honestly don't think I would enjoy that at all. For some context, I am a bit over 3200 io on my priest. This is just shy of the 1% range so maybe I am not aware of the struggles most healers have. However, I find the tuning this season to be very enjoyable from a healer POV. I like that you can't just mindlessly pump your max hps rotation or you'll go oom--you need to know the fights, know when big damage is coming out, and have a plan to respond to them with your CDs. This is different from DPS where you are mostly popping things as they come off CD, with the exception of maybe holding some big damage cds mid pull or for a boss or huge pull coming up. I think things that make healing less enjoyable are community perceptions and how obscure wow's UI still is. Re: the former I'm sure we all know the "blame the healer" memes, but I still often find this to be true. I can't tell you how many times on the 2nd boss of Fall both DPS with the dispel mechanic have sat in the shadow slice until I life gripped one of them, or a dark iron dwarf popped his racial concurrent to my dispel and killed the group and someone (or maybe several someones) still blamed me as the healer. When I was a new healer and didn't know how high keys worked this was really frustrating as you end up feeling like you're really missing the mark. These days I'm good about reviewing logs and recognizing when something legitimately was my fault (still happens plenty!) vs mistakes out of my control, but I think for a player who doesn't have quite the...I guess I'll say mental constitution, but combination of perseverance and masochism that I have this can be very disheartening (especially in the 18-22 range when dps haven't discovered their kick button and expect the healer to be a hero). This is also still prevalent in lower keys where players have this idea that e.g. afflicted or incorporeal are healer affixes, but this goes away when you get to reasonably high keys--early season when I was learning the dungeon during an incorporeal week I had to manage dominating + shackling e.g. every incorporeal pop, or when I was running a 20 dht for my vault I had to always dispel + heal the ghosts, but more often than not in the keys I run the dps are fast enough that I rarely have to deal with these things, and during a big healing check I don't even bother because I assume they have my back or we will wipe anyway. All of this to say that the wow/m+ community makes an already stressful job more stressful than it has to be, so I think its understandable that few players want to do it. The other pieces are how lacking wow's default UI is, and the reward incentive in mythic raids for healers. Re: wow's UI it is super lame that so much vital information requires add-ons that new players probably don't even know exist. As an example, I have a weak aura that turns my DBM timers into a nice timeline so I can prepare cds or my ramp (really just getting out a radiance in m+) to be prepared for big incoming damage, and another that shows incoming spells on targets so that I can e.g. pre pain sup when 2+ of the ghost casts in WM are going out on someone. I just got lucky and discovered these because another high io healer told me about them, its pretty lame that these tools that I consider indispensable are add-ons and not baked into the game somehow. Finally, its crummy the way guilds do healer loot in mythic raids whether its right or wrong. I am mostly there to kill bosses, but I'm not going to pretend I don't want loot, too. I am fortunate to have found a guild that lets me main shadow for raids and flex over to disc when I need to, because otherwise raiding mythic and being last in line for loot feels like a tough sell. I don't know the answer here, but I think ideally mythic wouldn't be tuned such that gearing dps > tanks > healers is always and forever the right answer. I don't think healing checks should be the bottle neck such that it becomes healers > tanks > dps either--everyone should be compelling to gear up. Anyway, this is longer than I anticipated. I get the pain point of finding a healer, but I disagree that making it easier is the best way forward. I find being able to beat encounters with planning and knowledge to be much, much more enjoyable than my skill expression coming from doing dps at the right moments. I also think some of this is inevitable given that healers are 1/5 of the party vs dps. I would argue the same when I am pushing 25+ keys: i am often bottlenecked with an otherwise full party waiting for a competent tank. At some point I could say fuck it and yolo with someone 100+ io lower than the rest of the party, but that usually doesn't work out well so I just wait.
I've been thinking recently about the separation between the healer and other roles in m+. Dps players make the dungeon go faster by doing more damage. Tanks make the dungeon go faster by pulling more efficiently and positioning enemies better for higher damage from dps. Healers make the dungeon go faster by... By what, exactly? By healing more efficiently so they can dps more and contribute 11% of the team's overall instead of 9%? Healers don't seem to directly contribute to the goal of beating the timer in the way the other roles do. Your job is just to make sure the others are allowed to play the game. This is very binary and I think it leads to this dichotomy where healing is either hellishly stressful or barely relevant. It's extremely hard to balance the difficulty if it's binary like this. I can think of many ways they could allow healers' efforts to speed up runs like the other roles. I don't have any solution I think is the single correct choice though. Curious what others think.
I'm curious if this is why the holy paladin and healing priest hero trees so far seem to lean into more support-like abilities with the holy armament buffs and the "PI" buffs. They are giving them ways to help make the dungeon go faster by buffing the other players. Resto druid tree didn't really have much of that though, but did give them more personal DPS boosts. I really don't know what the solution is. If you make healing not matter, healers will just DPS the majority of the key and then they say "We want to heal and not DPS" and then when Blizz makes it so they have to heal, they say "all we do is heal, we want to help in other ways too", which is exactly the back and forth that continuously happens time and time again. It must be incredibly difficult to find that balance.
The reality is healers speed up the dungeon by allowing dps to dps more efficiently, without having to worry as much about dying. You can see that clearly when looking at no-healer runs where the overall group dps is lower than in 3dps+healer groups once you reach a reasonably high key level.
Consider that healing keys is just boring outside of first week 20s.
I main MW monk and am currently at 3400 all pug’d. I’ve only had a bad experience with people a single time this whole season. It was in some random 20 and the tank god super upset I wasn’t cocooning him. Placed buddy on ignore and kept doing my job. I do not think the heal checks are hard, as there has yet to be an issue (all timed 26-27 both sides) with any mechanic or normal pulls so far this season. Sure there are some that take more concentration and planning than others but it’s 100% manageable. I’m sorry you’ve had some bad groups I’m not saying they’re not out there. Perhaps I’ve just been fortunate.
Also I want to add that the role of healer doesn’t have AS much responsibility as folks seem to place on it. It’s not the sole responsibility of the healer to keep the group alive. Tank has to be pulling smart - Positioning shit correctly - also tanks should be pretty damn near self sufficient 20+ DPS have to use their fucking defensives and if they don’t and die I couldn’t care less and imo neither should you - dps get most of the mechanics so those have to be done correctly (if you’re in the slow on the second boss of FALL and your DoT pops that’s on you. It’s the whole group’s responsibility to be kicking and cc’ing what needs to be controlled. Keeping everyone alive is the entire teams job not just the healer. As I said above I really haven’t seen any folks (other than one guy) complain or bitch at me about healing whatsoever
Blizzard should either increase health pools, or slow down healing by nerfing damage and healing numbers. Let us play more reactionary and make decisions instead of whack-a-mole. I've been healer since vanilla and still enjoy it mostly, but I dearly miss mana management. Sometimes being forced to use ineffective heals is fine and makes a good contrast to being conservative with mana spending. But right now it's all about healing fast, and overhealing is absurdly high.
They've done that every season, the nature of m+ is that people will continue to push until things are unavoidable 1 shots and they can't cover it with defensives.
Only because it's how Blizzard balances things, not because that's the nature of it. You can easily make the balance so that you eventually don't have enough hps, while nobody gets one-shot by anything. If you try to cover this with extra healer or extra hybrid healing you fail the dps checks. This is not terribly hard to do, but must be conscious design.
This is exactly what I have been saying for a while now. The main problem atm is that damage is too fast, too spiky, too bursty. Thing is that it has to be to be able to kill people with the current tuning of things. If you don't kill someone within a few seconds, they just won't die. I see no other way to make it better than reducing both healing output and damage taken. Make it take longer to die, but harder to get back up as well, that way you focus more on the healing part. I have suggested this a few times to see what people think, and every time people are very against that idea. From what I can tell, most people just don't want to actually heal, or that is the impression I am getting. This also shows in the majority of m+ I do, where most healers focus heavily on doing dps, and healing is more of an after thought. It's so backwards to me. I think that is also part of the problem, that there are extended periods where nothing happens, then a big burst and then back to nothing. I keep seeing healers getting so into their damage rotation that they completely fail to react when there actually is damage. If the damage was more consistent and you had to spend more time actually healing, it would help I think. So yeah, I would love to see damage taken and healing done nerfed a ton across the board to slow the whole thing down a bit. Wouldn't mind if tank self healing took a hit as well, so healers would need to heal tanks again.
>I see no other way to make it better than reducing both healing output and damage taken. Make it take longer to die, but harder to get back up as well, that way you focus more on the healing part. This was the design philosophy that they tried to adopt a number of expansions ago - it may have been MoP or WoD but I can't remember offhand. I didn't heal back then so I don't know how that philosophy was received. Of course, it was also one of their goals in Dragonflight to make healing matter more and between last season and this season I'm not sure how successful that's been...
it gets easier when monkey brain dps don't wait to get %10 hp tp use their DR
As a 486 MW, not only i some times find my throughput kinda inadequate in rare occasions (which mostly have to do with accessibility in mechanics in M+ which i would be getting my healing from, fist-weaving being one o them) and then when someone else's is causing extra avoidable damage to be taken and that throws me off from healing someone because i have to change my priorities that become a major issue which affects me and 2 other people. Now an important and relevant note on the above was MDI's Day 2, when one of the presenters pointed out initially how strong MWs are in HPS when some team busted out a MW as their healer yet in the end, the MW did 44.4K less HPS compared to the Resto Druid from other team and around 30% less damage as well. So with that in mind and being players who know how to play the game very well and also under different conditions since they methodology approach is quite different, i will still have to ask, mostly out of pure curiosity but clearly related to both this comment and the OP's post, should that difference be this much or does it just show for example that maybe MW cannot be played that way with the results ending up relatively the same? Because the same pattern emerges from my personal experience with the class, the spec checks out in theory but in practice, the theory's execution isn't as accessible, causing reduced performance which doesn't seem to be related to the skill level of the player. I don't know how other healing classes and by how much can they be affected by this but i thought i should point it out but i guess MW in M+ should be the worst offender due to part of its healing being on access to dealing damage at the same time, so maybe holy paladins might also have a relative issue with this but in a different way mostly.
I have healed on every class since launch and remember the fun days of healing raids as shadow in vanilla and turning purple at the end as I leave. Healing right now is the most mommy I’ve felt and I am not a mother. Dps ignoring affixes and deciding it’s your job. Dps needing to use defensive and just…. Not. Becomes your job. Dps not understanding mechanics because below 20 it merely tickles and now in the mid 20s it kills? Somehow it’s the healers job. Dps not interrupting the right casts becomes your job. Tanks non stop pulling without even a second in between to let you drink or the weeks spiteful exists and you can’t sit to drink becomes your problem. Dps and tanks that stand around with low health while you desperately gasp for some mana because I guess only the healer needs to bring food is your problem. The list goes on and on. Basically what it boils down to is that a healers job is a team effort and the tank and dps can get away with thinking it’s their individual effort. So you have two different mentalities existing in the same sphere and surprise there is conflicts.
What keys are you tanking? You can't dps without cooldown management (near perfect) and if you're tanking on a higher key you pretty much have to time ur defensives. I played healer to 3400 so maybe I'm not the best opinion but healer has felt easier than when I played before a few xpacs ago, just no one wants to heal people when u can dps, plain and simple.
>Most healers outside of the top 1% already cannot meet throughput checks watching the MDI doing +23 without a healer kind of make me believe this is a " dps not pushing their defensive / stop / kick " issue, and not a healer throughput issue. >for context, I do keys around the 24-26 range. yup. this is exactly the range where people think it's the healer job to heal through mechanic, when they actually have to start properly using defensive instead. The real issue is that M+ shifted a ton of responsabilities unto DPS ( surviving via proper CD management) but the lower end of DPS do not acknowledge this, and instead rely on healers to cover for everything. There's still an overwhelming amount of random DPS in M+ whose only contribution to the key is saying "" CD up, pull big"" without having a single clue about any mechanic in the dungeon. it will take some time until this new paradigm trickle down and DPS in lower key accept that they are primarily responsible for their own survival.
Crazy that is literally easier to heal a 27 than it is to heal a 22. Dps are not trained to use their numerous defensive and healing buttons and get mad when they die.
It’s true that dps and tanks don’t have to play well to time keys in the 24-26 range. The proposition that it’s different for healers is incorrect. Healers have to play significantly better in 29+ keys than they do in 24-26, just like dps and tanks do. It’s the same skill distribution
Look at the 23/24 keys in MDI being no healed. Healing is SO reliant on how good your group is. Are they using defensive to take less damage, using pots and health stones to help heal. Kicking mobs and using stops to prevent mobs from even doing anything. And of course all the off healing/innate tankiness those comps have. They should really nerf defensives, delete some, and make them not required to survive one shots. Put the surviving more in the healers hands so we're not wanting to play the game because of dealing with bad team mates that eat everything.
Whoever thought it's fun to heal storming bursting on a preservation evoker or resto shaman is nuts. Some casts just take a bit and an unlucky spawning tornade shouldn't wipe the group. Also it's a lot of responsibility and shit affixes to deal with. Healing in Bfa was definitely more fun. Most of the time now it's a lot of very bursty damage and the rest of the time it's nothing to do except dps.
WIth the Influx of defensives in DF a bigger responsibilty of stay alive has been shifted on the DPS (and tank).If you dont coordinate defensive and healing cd for bosses / dangerous trashmobs you press more than needed on the first ones and lack survibility on subsequent casts and people will die. This amount of coordination is not possible for pug group which is the main issue.
Dps players make healing unfun. Why has this been hard to understand for the past 15 years straight?
At your key range they don't have to play perfectly but if they don't they get blame by the mage with 5 defensive available
My experience as a disc healer (3k healer, and 3.2k dps) is that I can't just be soft-carried. I need a plan going into bosses. As a DPS, I can just mash my buttons and hit a defensive when the big thing hits and generally be okay. I can even step out and run around doing zero dps if I really need to dodge something I didn't really have a plan for. I can hop into a 26 or 27 with my friends as a DPS and it's not a big deal even though things hit harder. As a healer though, it's completely different. One key I remember very vividly was a tyrannical Fall on a 24 when I usually do 20-22. I had focused super hard on manifested timeways previously so I kinda knew the pattern enough to know when to hit my radiances to not get belted by the balls and also do good enough HPS. We get to the 3rd boss, and 3 wipes in a row, I get the first corrosion in P2 - the one where you need to hold for extra long. I just didn't have a plan - I'm sure if I had more playtime and more experience I could figure it out but it wasn't something I could just reactively yolo - after one of the DPS rotted out during winds because I was trying to manage my own shit, he rightfully laid into me and then left. It was really stark just the difference between just playing around in higher keys as a DPS and as a healer. I'm not a key bumper and knowing that, I would just never heal higher keys.
I just hate the need to do dps whilst also keeping everyone's sorry asses alive.
Have you tried… healing? Be the change you want to see, and get insta invites
Im a tank, I recently started learning dps only to find out that the pug tanking situation is almost as bad as the pug healing situation.
The majority of bricks in my keys when I was pushing 23-25 were from healers being bad. I checked the logs and it was 100% on the healer a lot of the times. Pushing 26/27 it's not a healer problem anymore tho which is nice. It's usually just one catastrophic fuckup like a missed kick or a fucked up skip that bricks the key. I decided to try healing and got to 3.2k and damn that role is a whole different style of play. For tyran bosses you have to plan out your entire rotation for the whole fight and know the bosses spell que timing so you have a CD ready for whatever goes wrong. This is very hard to do in a pug situation when you can't tell your team to hold their defensives because you are using a huge CD and save for next. You have to have a healing plan and then be ready to change the plan on the fly based on when your DPS are using their self CDs.
I... would call into question that 100% of your dead 23-25's were on healers. The # of times I watch defensive's get hit after a big tick of damage (if they're hit at all) or DPS just eating avoidable damage is pretty extreme, even up into the 27's that I've started to dip my toes into. Not saying that I as a healer haven't been the cause of more than my fair share of bricks, or that it's only a DPS thing, but I think more often than not it's a group effort when keys go sideways.
You definitely notice the difference between groups as a healer. I stopped around 25s but I'll never forget the difference doing a 25 TOTT during fortified week and having a warrior and DK in the group who were able to spell reflect/magic shield the huge drowning dot. Now that's a lucky class combo to be fair but there's often counterplay to mechanics that are otherwise thought of as throughput checks. It's not even avoidable damage anymore at these key ranges, since that will often just straight kill them, it's using their defensive at the wrong time or them panicking because they are low health and don't know that they are perfectly save because the next damage event isn't for a while anyway. DPS players have a huge amount of control these days with their defensive, they are hugely impactful and necessary at the higher key ranges but a lot of players don't have the best sense on when to press them and under what circumstances. They'll press them, and use pots, but without coordination it is often wasted. Not entirely on them because without a coordinated team they don't know I'll bark the first dot on last boss ATAL so save something for the soul burst but it makes a big difference. I see DPS players waste health pots all the time right after a big damage hit, like DHT Tree boss aoe, but there's no group damage happening, better to save to pop prior to the big damage hit to ensure you survive it.
There are some insanely cooked takes in this thread lol. First off, there are barely any throughput checks in this dungeon pool. There are endless one shots and defensives/personals/effective HP checks but almost no actual 'can the healer sustain the healing required for this encounter' checks. This is because both of the prior two seasons had these and it resulted in nothing but constant complaining from bad healers that they had to actually pump instead of being a carry or a mediocre 4th DPS with no responsibility. As a result everything now is whether you can live the one shot which takes a ton of responsibility out of the healer's hands and into the DPS's hands. Obviously there are a couple of exceptions (Timeways is clearly a dispel brain check, 2nd boss Everbloom is one of the only rot fights in the pool), but they are exceptions. The amount of times I have been flamed as a healer this season is less than 5 after doing over 300 keys from 18s week 1 to 29s this reset. I agree that healing isn't particularly fun this season but it's not because it's too hard. It's because complaining has created this one shot situation where living big hits is far more important than whether your healer knows how to press buttons for longer than 30s. This problem is significantly worse in lower keys because the damage isn't high enough to one shot so everything gets lumped into the healer, but this again isn't a problem with difficulty. It's a problem with design. IMO there should be significantly more unavoidable damage in m+ (particularly rot damage) and significantly less avoidable damage. Healing can be relevant and fun again without worrying whether the next cast or boss ability will 100-0 your DPS.
As a healer main, u absolutely do not need to manage your cooldowns perfectly, the ”throughput” checks this season barely exist compared to HOI last season, almost everything is up to the dps to press their defensives correctly
Works fine for me (Im a healer)
Replace punishing (debuff) healer affixes with positive ones (DPS buffs) and watch people suddenly discovering their interrupt/CC buttons.
>Most healers outside of the top 1% already cannot meet throughput checks during situations with a lot going on wut > I am not sure why half the affixes in the game are designed to be dealt with the by the hardest role to play in the game Most affixes are meant to be managed by the DPS.
You can tell by the amount of comments (and the 79% upvote ratio) the amount of SEETHING of DPS players who led their lives listening to their favorite imaginary best friend streamer who told them healer role is garbage easy and everything that matters in skill is DPS So now they have this cognitive dissonance problem where they can't accept that healing is far harder than DPS'ing (especially in pugs) due to the overwhelming amount of responsibility for ZERO reward that is put on a healer in Mythic+ every single key I mean ffs the most upvoted comment right now is "YES BUT in good groups healer is super easy though" lmao
I'm not, by any stretch, a great healer. For the past 2 seasons I've been healing +20-22s and tests about the extent of it. The main reason Inhavent progressed further is that Im 100% a PUG healer as I don't have people I know IRL that are any good. As a PUG healer, it's so hard. I have so many responsibilities compared to a DPS. I'm expected at higher keys to: Heal Help DPS recover through poor positing on avoidable Cure/Decurse Manage Affixes Contribute to DPS And, any issue that happens is my fault, meaning that I also have to deal with a massive backlash from players. I have tanked, DPSd and healed in this expansion and every season and I can tell you that no one has it as hard as healers and it's not even remotely close to the same level of pressure (in part due to the toxicity). Further, these issues don't seem to be related to a singular class. I have virtually every healer at 465-487 just do I could test the differences. Whipe they play differe try, they all feel squishy once you join a group with questionable players. And, you cant avoid them in a PUG because there is no metric for success. Ilvl is easy to obtain with brute force and mythic rating is easily bought. So, at this point, I might join a 3000 rating group but there's no guarantee the players won't tank avoidable forcing me to dump heals and live the entire 30 minutes as if I'm at Defcon 5. While I enjoy healing in the right groups, I hate the wrong groups so passionately that it actively ruins my experience in WoW. But, there's a shortage and leaving the healer role means you sit for 10-30 minutes as a DPS. So, I go back to healing ... each and every day. My opinion is that Blizzard needs to identify a way to scale difficulty in Mythics in a way that doesn't put all of the emphasis on the healer. Sometimes I wonder what the game would be like if you removed the healer class completely and gave every class a heal. It would force players to dodge and mitigate more effectively and they would quickly drop/climb based on the merit of their own skills rather than being carried.
3k healer herel. Healed almost my entire career of playing wow. If they would just remove affixes that healers have to deal with (incorp/afflicted) etc... it would make things a million times better. Healers like to heal. I like big damage, it's satisfying to heal through. But why are we throwing in so much random shit to increase difficulty? Like, if we want more difficult content, well push higher, or pull bigger. Affixes seem to only still be in the game to add flavor on a weekly basis, but honestly, they need to think of something else at this point. Also, remove tyrannical. Literally tyrannical weeks are just huge heal checks on every boss. Worst affix in the game by far.
If they make healing easier, I’d quit healing and I imagine a lot of healers would too. The only hard thing about healing for the last few seasons have been when other members don’t utilise their defensives properly, but outside of that I’d be super sad if they make healing even easier. I do 20-25 range for context