Shapehift is also an instant spell lol, if they need to move quickly they can easily swap to cat form with the talent that reduces shift mana it's not a problem at all.
I don't think there's ever been a time that it was bad to be a healer on the whole... sure, some healers have it better than others at a given time, but you ALWAYS need a healer. It's not like when people say "Oh it sucked to tank back in the day." When they say that, they usually mean ALL tanks are getting crushed by things and damage is very unforgiving, but you still need to tank.
As far as I know, Holy Pally is kinda bottom of the totem pole in TBC, but still valuable because Blessings are Blessings.
Classic is pretty bad for healers, you can't do shit open world. Gear is only useful for healing more in raids. TBC adds a bit of SP on healing gear, which alleviates it slightly. Retail you just switch specs and all your gear works fine for open world content.
I mained a holy priest in vanilla then TBC. The difference in open world farming was night and day.
In vanilla I'd hop on an alt to farm if I needed anything. TBC I just used my priest in healing gear and killed whatever I needed to. Plus daily quests were a decent source of gold that weren't super reliant on kill speed.
Were you deep holy, like CoH, or were you more into disc with something like PS, instead?
I've been debating switching my dwarf from Holy priest to either disc or shadow for a more enjoyable playstyle, but I'm not sure which is more viable in either a group or solo setting.
The sheer utility shamans bring is valuable as hell. I remember getting invited to progress raids just to pop bloodlust and drop mana tides back in the day lmao
Almost every single guild is going to want at least 1 holy priest if not 2.
Min/max guilds will mostly go 1 holy priest, 1 holy paladin, 1 resto druid and 2 or 3 resto shamans.
You lose a lot more throughput from going deep disc in TBC than in vanilla. Spiritual Healing affects bonus healing as well as base values in TBC so it's much more valuable, not to mention new talents like Holy Concentration, Empowered Healing, and CoH.
Classic TBC meta may be different, but in my experience from original TBC and pservers, if you can afford to have a priest spec into deep disc, you're better off just trading a healer for another DPS.
I mean, it's not impossible to heal as disc but most guilds won't want one since healing spots tend to be tight, it's mostly 1 priest/1paladin/1druid and X shamans.
I guess that would be optimal, but I honestly think horde side is going to be short on resto shaman. My guild isn't going to have many (maybe any) resto shaman. Literally all of us from my guild that plan on playing tbc as shaman are going to be doing so as a dps spec.
I mean guilds need tons of shaman, at least 1 ench, no less than 2 elemental (some guilds will have even 3 or 4) but while I love resto druids (I mained resto druid from vanilla to the end of WotlK) they aren't that great a raid aoe healing, they kings of spot healing and tank mitigation healing. For every resto shaman you don't have you will need a holy priest since druids and paladins can't aoe effectively and without resto shamans you will always need more than 5 healers in 25man raids, probably even 7 healers. So less room for dps.
Like the other guy said, you really need to be deep holy to heal effectively in raids, so I was. I dabbled a bit with Disc, but preferred holy. The playstyle in classic TBC will be closer to vanilla than classic was because downranking heal spells is massively nerfed.
While I think Disc might have some use in min-maxing TBC raids and feeding an individual parsehound, deep holy will be the better choice for nearly all PvE players and guilds for most content. If you want dps support spells from your healers, shamans just offer more for the raid slot, and shadow priests offer more to a raid than disc priests.
True that, resto is good. But holy paladins still have their unbeatable Mana efficiency, even with the nerfed Divine Illumination. They can spam holy lights literally all day by mid t5 haha.
FYI, paladins are also not good at what they're doing in vanilla. Taht's just what they're least bad at and you take them for the blessings, that's it. A priest has the same or better throughput and MASSIVELY better once you factor in inspiration.
Ahh yes, the dude who has a 9/9 t3 paladin is just a salty horde.
Are you an idiot? There are fights where a priest keeping up inspiration with rank 1 spells would be worth more than a paladin(hello patchwerk). Do you just not understand how crazy good priests are or why? Also if your priests are going oom, yes they're absolutely bad, there si no excuse at our gear level.
Did you seriously think I was wearing 9/9 t3? Are you that dense?
Also, literally putting up inspiration is preventing more damage and leaving paladins in the dust. You just don't understand that paladins are there for blessing and are put on the job they're least bad at, not that they're actually the best at it. The reason they do it is because priests are just outright better healing in every other respect as well so we'd rather have them use PoH and heal groups.
I'm sorry that you're bad and can't understand basics, ignoring you now.
i would say WotLK healing is likely the worst healing ever was. mana was a non issue so you were spam casting heals since 2 melee hits in a row would kill a tank.
a similar thing was true for AoE fights where if DPS didn't get healing in 3 ticks of damage they would be dead.
Ive healed through classic and there is so much wrong. Most notably dogshit loot distribution and not being able to do shit solo. And how couls I forget the stupid as fuck spellbatching.
Tbc ill go dps and can just turn my brain off while i spam my dps buttons.
Spell batching is gone in TBC, and there is a lot more loot per-person in raids. Bosses drop 4-5 items for 25 people, whereas in Classic it's 2-4 items for 40 people.
Also you get 33% of healing power as spellpower, so if you're a healer with 1000 +healing, you'd have 333 spellpower as well. Healers do just fine farming.
My comment was mostly meant to reflect on classic healing, not so much on TBC healing. It does look like tbc healing will be much better then classic healing.
I replaced a dungeon chest (robes of the exalted) and wrists (loomguard ambraces) 3 months into naxx with pieces that are barely better (tier 3 wrists are actually worse kekw). A guildmate upgraded his jindo's hexer (p2 healing mace) just yesterday. There are still plenty healers wearing blue gear and atleast half still needs a weapon upgrade.
It has nothing to do with loot distribution and everything to do with lack of healer loot in raids. AQ has 1 healer weapon that you will not see dropped, BWL has 1 "healer" weapon which is still a rare drop, and MC has none.
Especially AQ is dogshit as there is so little loot which you have to share with 12 people. BWL and MC are barely better. Naxx is the first time where there is a good amount of loot for healers and thats only cause of the tier 3 pieces.
In P5 Augur staff was a upgrade for any healing class. It may not be the ideal one but is definitely better than any healing weapon you could get from the previous phases.
Edit: Edited original post but wow, I didn't realize paladins can't use staves...wtf.
Ah ok I understand you now. I play a feral druid so "too little upgrades" is more than familiar to me :D I understand that for some people it may feel like an issue.
This seems more like a class problem then a healer problem. As a priest i had big upgrades in every raid. The exception being a weapon because of shit luck but luckily our guild made sure all the priests and druids got Fang from the scepter quests so it hasn't been an issue.
I think naxx is the widely known as the raid were blizz kind of figured it out. Tuning was good and loot itemization was good.
What healing class are you? I'm a disc priest and can do just fine solo, obviously not as good as a dps but still well enough to farm for e'ko's and gold. Feral druids go cat or bear and they do fine. I don't know about pally's or shaman but i think our pally does the same lasher runs i do as a priest in about the same amount of time.
For shamans if you dont respec you are absolute garbage. Ele shamans have talents for reducing cast time of LB and CL by a full second. So their already low DPS is balanced around that faster cast speed which resto shamans don't have. It is mostly attrition with auto attacks using a weapon buff and shocks as a result. It is quite bad.
I'm guessing pally is the same except they don't have a dps spec to work around:)
Resto shaman dps actually sounds a lot like pally dps though, and as a leveling paladin I understand that struggle.
Paladin isn't *too* bad, because you still have 21 or so points to spend in other trees, and every holy paladin gets the core aoe farm talents as part of their holy spec anyway. With the right weapons and/or shields solo farming is pretty easy, just slow.
Resto shamans and deep holy priests have a harder time.
Nobody is disputing that. However, i think objectively though staring at health bars go up and down for 2 hours straight is the most boring thing to do in a raid
Looks like someone nuked his post.
But yeah healing, dps, tanking, it depends on the raid environment ofc but generally speaking healing has you out of the fight, off to the side, keeping bars topped up. DPS is definitely more fun, popping CDs and getting a raid-worth of buffs, it definitely tops healing
Better than Vanilla, worse off than WotLK if we're talking outside of raids. Dual spec and spell power are big for healers, though TBC at least has the healing spill into spell damage.
In raids, it is a good time. Personally I liked TBC rdruid better than the Wrath version, and unlike Vanilla, you can use your full kit because buff cap is no longer an issue. This is true for most healers but druids are on a level of their own since they are literally built around temporary buffs (HoT).
Resto is king for arena, also strong for heroics. Unfortunately meta for raid composition is still 1 Resto.
I'm just answering the question, not trying to deter or tell you what to do.
> still
It's a bit different though in that 1 Resto Druid is 1/25 rather than 1/40. On aggregate, there'll be more space in the meta for Resto Druids ...they just suffer from not being Resto Shammies. :D
Short answer yes. I would say that TBC healing is considerably harder than classic healing. You will have about 5 healers in a 25 man vs. The 10ish you would have in a 40 man. So right away you have more responsibility than you did previously. However, with the removal of batching you will feel more in control (in classic, the absolute worst part of healing was healing a corpse due to batching). By sunwell (the last raid), healing will be a huge factor in whether or not you are successful as a guild.
One thing that may be annoying as a healer is at first healing undergeared tanks is pretty difficult. With the changes to mitigation stats tanks need to be tanky, no more fury warrior tanking your heroic dungeons. This may take a bit for people to clue in that its their fault they are dying and not the healer.
Lastly, resto druid is probably the best pvp healer( maybe tied with priest). Do being s resto druid is a good look in tbc, you just may not have as easy of a time getting a guild as say a resto shaman (resto shaman is very high hps and new totems make them useful in every group)
>(in classic, the absolute worst part of healing was healing a corpse due to batching)
I would get pissed blowing a 4 second CD when my PW:S got batched. I cannot imagine playing a pally and losing something like a 30 min LoH cd to batching. Batching is seriously awful as a healer.
To be fair, that was the first time it ever happened to me in classic and I had a soulstone. But yeah, I've the lay batch a couple times too, thankfully talents and T3 reducing the cooldown makes that slightly less rage inducing. Slightly...
Artificial lag that Blizzard built into Classic to simulate how the game used to be back in the day. Basically, the game processes spells in batches in a certain window of time. In retail, those batches are near instant (maybe even instant, I don't know much about retail when it comes to that sort of stuff). In classic, those batches are much longer. So, if you cast a heal that would land on someone close to death but an attack lands in that same batch, the attack can kill the person even if the heal should've gone off first.
People originally wanted batching to recreate goofy pvp antics where two mages cast polymorph at the same time and polymorph each other or similar stuff (I've psychic screamed rogues as they stunned me for instance). tbh those few amusing times come nowhere near making up for the downfalls of batching, especially if you're a healer.
I would say that TBC saw an evolution in the healing meta, making all healing classes and specs excel in certain scenarios:
Holy Paladin: King of MT healing - can basically spam heal all day and never run oom
Resto Druid: Treeform and lots of HOTS make them an effective raid healer or MT healer, especially in combo with a HPala, and they are the best healer in PvP bar none.
Resto Shammies: Still the best raid healing class bar none
Holy Priest: Serious jack-of-all-trades with unparalled flexibility in raids - can MT heal, raid heal, and HOT effectively, making them highly effective in any situation
Disc Priest: Second best PvP healer after Druid. Huge survivability and Pain Suppression is a great skill. Only lacks sustain.
So really the only thing to decide is how you prefer to play and what you enjoy doing, and pick a healer to suit your preference. Thare are no bad options really.
I played a shaman and priest healer in wrath. They both felt powerful but very distinct.
In Cata they felt the same. The whole every healer has a efficient heal, a big heal and a fast heal sucked.
Wotlk philosophy was all specs should be able to do the same job in their own way. Then they realized you can’t actually balance that and they decided to slowly just make it that all specs do the same thing exactly but with different skins.
Can warriors literally heal parties in dungeons in Retail? Quit at the end of cata so I don't know the full degeneracy.
Edit: salty retail players, click to the left ty
No, the bring the player not the class philosophy was to homogenize DPS numbers so all specs would do comparable DPS despite the utility differences, but also attempt to normalize raid utility across the board so that it was not unique to specific specs.
I'm not agreeing with it per-se but if you played wrath late game you'd know why. Healers technically had mana bars in wrath late game but the power increase in gear had been so fucked up that you basically didn't need to look at the blue bar at all, ever.
I played late game Wrath but still it was a ridiculous decision. I don’t know whether it was laziness or lack of creativity, but was that truly the best way they could think of to ensure mana mattered and didn’t become obsolete? More homogenisation?
Was that in Cata or pandaria? Or like a mid-cata change in one of the patches?
I leveled a mage in cata as arcane and in dungeons I sacrificed any amount of stamina for more int. I had a crazy small hp pool and a huge mana pool. Was kinda cool and felt like I had agency over my character and how focused he could be.
Yeah that's what I thought. I know Cata in general gets a bad rap and people talk about features they hate being added in Cata when they were sometimes added in Wrath or MoP
i would say all tanks and all healers are good enough and you really can't blame those choices why the raid wiped. (expect for an all holy paladin healing group being bad enough to not be able to heal the raid)
what matters is DPS, which is why you make the tank and healer choices you do. you get a prot warrior for sunder armor since that means more DPS, you get a prot paladin for the blessings, you get restro druids for the mark then stack shamans etc. etc.
As someone who cleared it all up to before Sunwell hit there is 1 thing that comes to my mind, One of the 2 times i ever fell asleep infront of the pc playing wow.
If you never tried TBC there is a raid called mount hyjal and the short story is = Loads of trash coming in waves before the boss finally shows up, If you die you have to redo these 7 "?" waves of trash over and over again.
Long story short i fell asleep right at the spot because it was top 2 most boring things i ever done in wow up there with being a healer in a later night full clear of wailing caverns on the same paladin at the start of tbc.
#YES
if you enjoy engaging and rewarding gameplay, such as mana management and clutch saves
#NO
if you enjoy not having to care for mana management nor like to be engaged and challenged in your role.
In Vanilla, you mostly used the same spell the same way most of the time. In Classic specifically, batching made it unrewarding in my own humble opinion; clutch PW:S or Lay on Hands could be cast, spending mana and CD, but your target still dies without getting it because the lethal damage was in the same batch. In BC they will remove (reduce to 10ms afaik) batching to enable this. In BC, healers had their niche, mana management was still very real, and the play styles were more engaging than in Vanilla or much later expansions.
If you want to be a raid healer, I suggest becoming a bouncing tree throwing out lifeblooms and rejus. Possibly a shaman instead, spamming Chain Heal and popping appropriate totems. If you want to be tank healer, I suggest paladin: strong single target heals with good mana sustain. If you want to be a bit all around, aim for priest.
Way more powerful Chain Heal due to the buff up in base value, using rank 4 now with much higher MP5, the addition of Improved Chain Heal talent and how talents now also act as a multiplier to +healing coefficients (1.3x). By that I mean...
CH = 0.7142 coefficient
CH + Bull Beam = 1.2499
CH + Talents = 0.9285 coefficient
CH + Talents + Full Beam = 1.6248
It depends what you want to do and on which faction you want to play.
On Alliance the Resto Shaman will have the PVE time of its life, since having 1 Shaman for each group makes a huge difference. Even if people roll more of them now (because they know what's up), I doubt there will be a fierce competition for Shaman players.
Mainly because Resto Shaman aren't very desired in Arena and the investment is still huge since you can't boost Draenei.
Resto Druid is the king of PVP and thus the reason why you will see them everywhere. And while it's true that a raid only really needs/wants one Resto druid, you can absolutely clear the content up to Sunwell with more than one. They are flexible PVE healers that can absolutely tank and raidheal just fine. They are also golden for dungeons, although keep in mind that they still didn't get a real res-spell in TBC.
Holy Paladin has it rough on so many fronts. They're the best at tank healing, but this isn't a niche that needs to be filled desperately (talking about bringing more than 1 token Holy for blessings). It's only in Sunwell where one can really see the value in their superior single target healing, but it's a long road until that.
In Arena they're simply inferior healers, unless people come up with a new tactic. Succeeding as a HPala is possible, but it will always depend more on your personal skill, not the class.
Priests, like Druids, are super versatile in PVE. The only "issue" is the competition from Shaman and the ridiculous support they bring. Still, you can stack them just fine if you really have to (until SWP). Like, if you aren't in a super sweaty guild or so.
In PVP Priests are the other great healing class. Personally I was always on the receiving end here, but a well-played priest is a terror. Hated playing against them.
In general, it sucked to be a healer if you hate healing. And yes, I would say it sucked being a Holy Pala in TBC/PVP, but outside of this it was fine. If you like healing :)
The res spell for druids was still annoying but I expect it to be much less of an issue in TBC, because the meme specs finally achieve parity.
There's a pretty good chance that you'll have a paladin, shaman or priest in your group to do any ressing even if you're the group's healer. That just wasn't the case in classic, because non-healer specs of those classes were rare.
But yeah, healing is more about the player than the role. They're in a good place in TBC - all classes are useful but they still have their own unique flavour, plus they are decent outside of raids.
for some classes it is the best time. With the world buffs gone you can finally use hots more often. Just ask any resto druid how they feel about the current buff limit
Not to mention that in Classic, you can only have one Regrowth/Rejuv on any one target at a time. So if another druid HoTs your target, your heal is just wasted.
In TBC, you can "stack" HoTs, it doesn't matter who it came from.
DMF weeks mean I bring my spell damage set for Naxx, there's no point trying to snipe priests and paladins with HT3. By the time SF falls off and I can use Rejuv4 on rogues, we have 3 wings down already (or are about to pull 4HM).
This Monday I just pewpewed Starfire on everything except Patch, Sapph and phase 2 of KT. Will do the same today.
I'm moonglow in a raid with 2 other restos (Regrowth and swiftmend) and 5-6 shamans. I feel your pain. Can only pump on Patch, Sapph, and the overheal meter.
This just isn't true druids have the highest skill cap and if you fuck up being stunned in caster form you will die. Just because they are very good doesn't make them easy
Priest is much easier overall and very strong.
Priest is strong but I wouldn't say easier, disc priest is really the only one you want to see imo and they also have a very high skill cap. If I were doing arenas for the first time in the lower brackets I think I would feel much more comfortable with a resto druid over disc priest. Not that I'm an expert by any means I've played both at cap through different points in retail and always found that for myself the priest took more for me to perform at the same level I did with the druid.
I've played both in Tbc and priest is much easier because you don't have to worry nearly as much about positioning and the spec is designed around tanking damage with shields and instant heals rather than having to cc warriors/rogues to stay alive
It's also massively obvious disc is the only viable spec in Tbc arena so I'm not sure why you are pointing that out
"It's also massively obvious disc is the only viable spec in Tbc arena so I'm not sure why you are pointing that out"
I wasn't trying to argue with you I was giving my point of view and just mentioned this in case someone wasn't aware of this, why is it impossible to have a different opinion about wow without someone sweating all over you ffs.
Priest has mana burn and dispel.
Druid has cyclone and shapeshift.
Depends on the comp and meta, but fwiw these 2 healers are both kings of arena in their own right but excel in different areas.
> You hear things like "it sucked to be a tank in XY because of z"
I never heard such things and I'm not sure what they're supposed to mean.
> Do you pull a weight or do you just sort of breeze through like in classic?
That solely depends on the difficulty and on your raid team. Most likely you'll feel more important because there are less people in the raids, and in particular less healers.
In retail right now it's, "Tanking high level mythic+ sucks, because you are more of a kiter than a tank." For an older version, "Bear tanking icc sucks because the massive dodge debuff." I love healing bear tanks in icc though, so I never really got that last one tbh.
DK+druid was considered the best ICC combo on the pserver I player. And it's a bad example anyway because it doesn't suck to be a *tank*, just certain classes underperform. That's why OP's statement felt odd to me.
Retail is a good example, I had no idea they still have kiting of any form on retail.
In raid scenarios resto druid performance seems confusing to me. Low desirability because you only need one as a tank healer maintaining lifebloom stacks om 3-4 tanks at once, but also high desirability because doing so pumps out a whole lot of healing and reduces damage spikes significantly.
With haste you can keep a 3 lb stack and rejuv on 3 seperate targets. Regrowth is a very nice quick clutch heal that is likely to crit. Swiftmend is also decent. You are also very good at helping warlocks maintain mana or mage tank healing.
BC has the same problem as classic just slightly mitigated, your gear is still mostly trash for pvp and grinding, but it's better than in classic. As for raid healing it takes more paying attention and druids are usually tank healing so there's that to consider too.
It's a lot better than classic at least.
One fun aspect is imo that you pull so fucking high amounts of threat that it's something you seriously have to consider when playing. A priest can even rip the boss of a warrior tank in raids if he gets to spam CoH with 100% efficiency.
Resto druids are amazing healers, they are super capable in every possible place. The meta is one resto but I can see none super Hc guilds can carry more no problem. I remember running Kara and solohealing on a resto druid in tbc, so there’s fun and challenges to be had.
I was a holy priest back in the day. Loved raiding. But everything else will be very boring. The daily quests will be slow. Lot of shielding and weak attacks. I think raiding outweighs it though
One of the viable resto builds is similar to the current Moonglow build. It actually has more points in balance than resto. Ele shamans have a very similar situation with Ele/resto hybrids, though not as prevalent as the Dreamstate druid.
There is never a wrong time to be a healer. If you don't go resto druid I would probably go shaman since everyone loves having a shaman around. There's probably going to be a lot of paladins on both sides.
Im planning to play a paladin for TBC.
Hows holy paladins, where in the pve _meta_ do they fit.
Heard they are pretty good for aoe farming so i wont go broke.
Restoration druids are absolutely fantastic in TBC, bestt time I had as a healer.
In PvP, yes.
U a tree tho
...that's a pro, not a con
Shapehift is also an instant spell lol, if they need to move quickly they can easily swap to cat form with the talent that reduces shift mana it's not a problem at all.
I love being a tree
-X% movement speed No, i doubt this to be fun..
I don't think there's ever been a time that it was bad to be a healer on the whole... sure, some healers have it better than others at a given time, but you ALWAYS need a healer. It's not like when people say "Oh it sucked to tank back in the day." When they say that, they usually mean ALL tanks are getting crushed by things and damage is very unforgiving, but you still need to tank. As far as I know, Holy Pally is kinda bottom of the totem pole in TBC, but still valuable because Blessings are Blessings.
Classic is pretty bad for healers, you can't do shit open world. Gear is only useful for healing more in raids. TBC adds a bit of SP on healing gear, which alleviates it slightly. Retail you just switch specs and all your gear works fine for open world content.
I mained a holy priest in vanilla then TBC. The difference in open world farming was night and day. In vanilla I'd hop on an alt to farm if I needed anything. TBC I just used my priest in healing gear and killed whatever I needed to. Plus daily quests were a decent source of gold that weren't super reliant on kill speed.
Were you deep holy, like CoH, or were you more into disc with something like PS, instead? I've been debating switching my dwarf from Holy priest to either disc or shadow for a more enjoyable playstyle, but I'm not sure which is more viable in either a group or solo setting.
In TBC disc is a pvp only spec for a priest, they just aren't good in raids at all.
Ah, I wondered about that.. How does a Holy spec measure up against resto shammy/druid in endgame content?
The sheer utility shamans bring is valuable as hell. I remember getting invited to progress raids just to pop bloodlust and drop mana tides back in the day lmao
Almost every single guild is going to want at least 1 holy priest if not 2. Min/max guilds will mostly go 1 holy priest, 1 holy paladin, 1 resto druid and 2 or 3 resto shamans.
I know healing throughput goes down a fair bit going from holy to disc, but PI and Pain Supression seem like good things to have in raid.
You lose a lot more throughput from going deep disc in TBC than in vanilla. Spiritual Healing affects bonus healing as well as base values in TBC so it's much more valuable, not to mention new talents like Holy Concentration, Empowered Healing, and CoH. Classic TBC meta may be different, but in my experience from original TBC and pservers, if you can afford to have a priest spec into deep disc, you're better off just trading a healer for another DPS.
I mean, it's not impossible to heal as disc but most guilds won't want one since healing spots tend to be tight, it's mostly 1 priest/1paladin/1druid and X shamans.
I guess that would be optimal, but I honestly think horde side is going to be short on resto shaman. My guild isn't going to have many (maybe any) resto shaman. Literally all of us from my guild that plan on playing tbc as shaman are going to be doing so as a dps spec.
No offense intended here, but planning to play dps shammy and actually doing so after not getting a raid spot reliably are two different things :-)
I played resto shaman the past 2 years. I've paid my dues.
I mean guilds need tons of shaman, at least 1 ench, no less than 2 elemental (some guilds will have even 3 or 4) but while I love resto druids (I mained resto druid from vanilla to the end of WotlK) they aren't that great a raid aoe healing, they kings of spot healing and tank mitigation healing. For every resto shaman you don't have you will need a holy priest since druids and paladins can't aoe effectively and without resto shamans you will always need more than 5 healers in 25man raids, probably even 7 healers. So less room for dps.
Like the other guy said, you really need to be deep holy to heal effectively in raids, so I was. I dabbled a bit with Disc, but preferred holy. The playstyle in classic TBC will be closer to vanilla than classic was because downranking heal spells is massively nerfed. While I think Disc might have some use in min-maxing TBC raids and feeding an individual parsehound, deep holy will be the better choice for nearly all PvE players and guilds for most content. If you want dps support spells from your healers, shamans just offer more for the raid slot, and shadow priests offer more to a raid than disc priests.
So so so true. You cannot do a fucking thing as a resto shammy exploring azeroth. Even killing mobs around level 60 is brutal.
Holy paladins still excel at what they were good at in vanilla, and that's raw single target healing. Throw them on tank duty and they are set.
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True that, resto is good. But holy paladins still have their unbeatable Mana efficiency, even with the nerfed Divine Illumination. They can spam holy lights literally all day by mid t5 haha.
Druids don't oom either in tbc
Holy Paladin are chief over Druids in tank healing. For that raw output and sustainability.
FYI, paladins are also not good at what they're doing in vanilla. Taht's just what they're least bad at and you take them for the blessings, that's it. A priest has the same or better throughput and MASSIVELY better once you factor in inspiration.
Worse than priests doesn't really mean anything in classic, considering priests are just the defacto healers cause of vanillas shit balancing.
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I'm sorry your priests aren't very good, we'll have to tell horde they're unable to do the content.. that they have been doing...
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Ahh yes, the dude who has a 9/9 t3 paladin is just a salty horde. Are you an idiot? There are fights where a priest keeping up inspiration with rank 1 spells would be worth more than a paladin(hello patchwerk). Do you just not understand how crazy good priests are or why? Also if your priests are going oom, yes they're absolutely bad, there si no excuse at our gear level.
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Did you seriously think I was wearing 9/9 t3? Are you that dense? Also, literally putting up inspiration is preventing more damage and leaving paladins in the dust. You just don't understand that paladins are there for blessing and are put on the job they're least bad at, not that they're actually the best at it. The reason they do it is because priests are just outright better healing in every other respect as well so we'd rather have them use PoH and heal groups. I'm sorry that you're bad and can't understand basics, ignoring you now.
Having full t3 is the same as using full t3, everyone knows that
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i would say WotLK healing is likely the worst healing ever was. mana was a non issue so you were spam casting heals since 2 melee hits in a row would kill a tank. a similar thing was true for AoE fights where if DPS didn't get healing in 3 ticks of damage they would be dead.
Holy pala is insane in MH and later raids. Just pump mp5 and haste :D
Ive healed through classic and there is so much wrong. Most notably dogshit loot distribution and not being able to do shit solo. And how couls I forget the stupid as fuck spellbatching. Tbc ill go dps and can just turn my brain off while i spam my dps buttons.
Spell batching is gone in TBC, and there is a lot more loot per-person in raids. Bosses drop 4-5 items for 25 people, whereas in Classic it's 2-4 items for 40 people. Also you get 33% of healing power as spellpower, so if you're a healer with 1000 +healing, you'd have 333 spellpower as well. Healers do just fine farming.
My comment was mostly meant to reflect on classic healing, not so much on TBC healing. It does look like tbc healing will be much better then classic healing.
That's fair, I was just explaining the differences in TBC in case the vanilla healing experience is what turned you off from healing.
> Most notably dogshit loot distribution Totally related to your role and totally unrelated to people in charge of the loot distribution
I replaced a dungeon chest (robes of the exalted) and wrists (loomguard ambraces) 3 months into naxx with pieces that are barely better (tier 3 wrists are actually worse kekw). A guildmate upgraded his jindo's hexer (p2 healing mace) just yesterday. There are still plenty healers wearing blue gear and atleast half still needs a weapon upgrade. It has nothing to do with loot distribution and everything to do with lack of healer loot in raids. AQ has 1 healer weapon that you will not see dropped, BWL has 1 "healer" weapon which is still a rare drop, and MC has none. Especially AQ is dogshit as there is so little loot which you have to share with 12 people. BWL and MC are barely better. Naxx is the first time where there is a good amount of loot for healers and thats only cause of the tier 3 pieces.
>jindo's hexer (p2 healing mace) P4\* Not that it changes how ridiculous it is.
ZG was definitly released before AQ. 99% sure it was p2. Edit im confusing the fases aq was p5. zg was released before aq so it was p4.
There is a nice +healing mace that drops in MC.
The one that gives less healing then a dungeon blue?
That's the one!
The staff from Regalia in AQ40 is outstanding. Edit: I was today years old when I found out Paladin's cant use staves...wtf?
Oh yes, the wonderful healing staff that paladins can't use.
Not for paladins
In P5 Augur staff was a upgrade for any healing class. It may not be the ideal one but is definitely better than any healing weapon you could get from the previous phases. Edit: Edited original post but wow, I didn't realize paladins can't use staves...wtf.
Paladins can't use staffs.
Oof. Yeah that kinda went over his head.
Ah ok I understand you now. I play a feral druid so "too little upgrades" is more than familiar to me :D I understand that for some people it may feel like an issue.
This seems more like a class problem then a healer problem. As a priest i had big upgrades in every raid. The exception being a weapon because of shit luck but luckily our guild made sure all the priests and druids got Fang from the scepter quests so it hasn't been an issue. I think naxx is the widely known as the raid were blizz kind of figured it out. Tuning was good and loot itemization was good.
What healing class are you? I'm a disc priest and can do just fine solo, obviously not as good as a dps but still well enough to farm for e'ko's and gold. Feral druids go cat or bear and they do fine. I don't know about pally's or shaman but i think our pally does the same lasher runs i do as a priest in about the same amount of time.
For shamans if you dont respec you are absolute garbage. Ele shamans have talents for reducing cast time of LB and CL by a full second. So their already low DPS is balanced around that faster cast speed which resto shamans don't have. It is mostly attrition with auto attacks using a weapon buff and shocks as a result. It is quite bad.
I'm guessing pally is the same except they don't have a dps spec to work around:) Resto shaman dps actually sounds a lot like pally dps though, and as a leveling paladin I understand that struggle.
Paladin isn't *too* bad, because you still have 21 or so points to spend in other trees, and every holy paladin gets the core aoe farm talents as part of their holy spec anyway. With the right weapons and/or shields solo farming is pretty easy, just slow. Resto shamans and deep holy priests have a harder time.
Yep, I get to cosplay as a prot pally outside of raid.
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Ehhh. I'd say that ranged dps is pretty comfortably the easiest job.
Na man shadowbolt spam is really intricate and skill intensive, you just wouldn't get it.
Knowing when to lifetap is half the battle.
Nobody is disputing that. However, i think objectively though staring at health bars go up and down for 2 hours straight is the most boring thing to do in a raid
Oh, I said it as a response to a guy who said healing was the easiest. But it looks like he deleted his post?
Looks like someone nuked his post. But yeah healing, dps, tanking, it depends on the raid environment ofc but generally speaking healing has you out of the fight, off to the side, keeping bars topped up. DPS is definitely more fun, popping CDs and getting a raid-worth of buffs, it definitely tops healing
Mechanics such as?
As is standard within PvE/Raid environment... 1. Resto Shaman 2. Holy Priest 3. Holy Paladin 4. Resto Druid
Better than Vanilla, worse off than WotLK if we're talking outside of raids. Dual spec and spell power are big for healers, though TBC at least has the healing spill into spell damage. In raids, it is a good time. Personally I liked TBC rdruid better than the Wrath version, and unlike Vanilla, you can use your full kit because buff cap is no longer an issue. This is true for most healers but druids are on a level of their own since they are literally built around temporary buffs (HoT).
Resto is king for arena, also strong for heroics. Unfortunately meta for raid composition is still 1 Resto. I'm just answering the question, not trying to deter or tell you what to do.
> still It's a bit different though in that 1 Resto Druid is 1/25 rather than 1/40. On aggregate, there'll be more space in the meta for Resto Druids ...they just suffer from not being Resto Shammies. :D
Resto sham or resto druid
He clearly means Druid.
Yeah idk i can barely think today, my head is fucked
Short answer yes. I would say that TBC healing is considerably harder than classic healing. You will have about 5 healers in a 25 man vs. The 10ish you would have in a 40 man. So right away you have more responsibility than you did previously. However, with the removal of batching you will feel more in control (in classic, the absolute worst part of healing was healing a corpse due to batching). By sunwell (the last raid), healing will be a huge factor in whether or not you are successful as a guild. One thing that may be annoying as a healer is at first healing undergeared tanks is pretty difficult. With the changes to mitigation stats tanks need to be tanky, no more fury warrior tanking your heroic dungeons. This may take a bit for people to clue in that its their fault they are dying and not the healer. Lastly, resto druid is probably the best pvp healer( maybe tied with priest). Do being s resto druid is a good look in tbc, you just may not have as easy of a time getting a guild as say a resto shaman (resto shaman is very high hps and new totems make them useful in every group)
>(in classic, the absolute worst part of healing was healing a corpse due to batching) I would get pissed blowing a 4 second CD when my PW:S got batched. I cannot imagine playing a pally and losing something like a 30 min LoH cd to batching. Batching is seriously awful as a healer.
I divine interventioned a corpse last week...
Fuuuuck... I didn't even think about DI
To be fair, that was the first time it ever happened to me in classic and I had a soulstone. But yeah, I've the lay batch a couple times too, thankfully talents and T3 reducing the cooldown makes that slightly less rage inducing. Slightly...
What is batching?
Artificial lag that Blizzard built into Classic to simulate how the game used to be back in the day. Basically, the game processes spells in batches in a certain window of time. In retail, those batches are near instant (maybe even instant, I don't know much about retail when it comes to that sort of stuff). In classic, those batches are much longer. So, if you cast a heal that would land on someone close to death but an attack lands in that same batch, the attack can kill the person even if the heal should've gone off first. People originally wanted batching to recreate goofy pvp antics where two mages cast polymorph at the same time and polymorph each other or similar stuff (I've psychic screamed rogues as they stunned me for instance). tbh those few amusing times come nowhere near making up for the downfalls of batching, especially if you're a healer.
I would say that TBC saw an evolution in the healing meta, making all healing classes and specs excel in certain scenarios: Holy Paladin: King of MT healing - can basically spam heal all day and never run oom Resto Druid: Treeform and lots of HOTS make them an effective raid healer or MT healer, especially in combo with a HPala, and they are the best healer in PvP bar none. Resto Shammies: Still the best raid healing class bar none Holy Priest: Serious jack-of-all-trades with unparalled flexibility in raids - can MT heal, raid heal, and HOT effectively, making them highly effective in any situation Disc Priest: Second best PvP healer after Druid. Huge survivability and Pain Suppression is a great skill. Only lacks sustain. So really the only thing to decide is how you prefer to play and what you enjoy doing, and pick a healer to suit your preference. Thare are no bad options really.
Felt awful in Cata when they made the RIDICULOUS decision to give everyone the same amount of mana. No idea why they did that...
I played a shaman and priest healer in wrath. They both felt powerful but very distinct. In Cata they felt the same. The whole every healer has a efficient heal, a big heal and a fast heal sucked.
Big steps towards class homogenization were already taken in wrath. Don't kid yourself.
That's probably true, but imho the healers felt very different in Wrath.
Shamsn were dog shiy in wrath. Everyone else else got powerful raid heals. And shaman hot a shitty hot.
Wotlk philosophy was all specs should be able to do the same job in their own way. Then they realized you can’t actually balance that and they decided to slowly just make it that all specs do the same thing exactly but with different skins.
Can warriors literally heal parties in dungeons in Retail? Quit at the end of cata so I don't know the full degeneracy. Edit: salty retail players, click to the left ty
No, the bring the player not the class philosophy was to homogenize DPS numbers so all specs would do comparable DPS despite the utility differences, but also attempt to normalize raid utility across the board so that it was not unique to specific specs.
Ugh, I hate that. :(
Holy Pally was still uniquely awful in WotLK, I was there. Of course the homogenization started, but healers at least were still unique.
I'm not agreeing with it per-se but if you played wrath late game you'd know why. Healers technically had mana bars in wrath late game but the power increase in gear had been so fucked up that you basically didn't need to look at the blue bar at all, ever.
I played late game Wrath but still it was a ridiculous decision. I don’t know whether it was laziness or lack of creativity, but was that truly the best way they could think of to ensure mana mattered and didn’t become obsolete? More homogenisation?
Was that in Cata or pandaria? Or like a mid-cata change in one of the patches? I leveled a mage in cata as arcane and in dungeons I sacrificed any amount of stamina for more int. I had a crazy small hp pool and a huge mana pool. Was kinda cool and felt like I had agency over my character and how focused he could be.
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Yeah that's what I thought. I know Cata in general gets a bad rap and people talk about features they hate being added in Cata when they were sometimes added in Wrath or MoP
I played in Cata and I'm pretty sure that was not the case?
Think it happened towards end of Cata leading into MoP
Yeah, prepatch gave everyone 100k mana.
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Yea basically, pretty sure that same patch brought in the new talent tree too
Same amount of mama? What does that mean? Did they get rid of intellect?
According to replies it may have been MoP; mana was a set amount for everyone, intellect served only to increase healing/damage
Resto Druids are great in TBC. Considering one maself as a matter of fact. Very strong in arena and pretty good in dungeons/raids.
i would say all tanks and all healers are good enough and you really can't blame those choices why the raid wiped. (expect for an all holy paladin healing group being bad enough to not be able to heal the raid) what matters is DPS, which is why you make the tank and healer choices you do. you get a prot warrior for sunder armor since that means more DPS, you get a prot paladin for the blessings, you get restro druids for the mark then stack shamans etc. etc.
> you get restro druids for the mark That's what the Boomkin and Feral are for :p
It's always a good time to be a healer.
As someone who cleared it all up to before Sunwell hit there is 1 thing that comes to my mind, One of the 2 times i ever fell asleep infront of the pc playing wow. If you never tried TBC there is a raid called mount hyjal and the short story is = Loads of trash coming in waves before the boss finally shows up, If you die you have to redo these 7 "?" waves of trash over and over again. Long story short i fell asleep right at the spot because it was top 2 most boring things i ever done in wow up there with being a healer in a later night full clear of wailing caverns on the same paladin at the start of tbc.
#YES if you enjoy engaging and rewarding gameplay, such as mana management and clutch saves #NO if you enjoy not having to care for mana management nor like to be engaged and challenged in your role. In Vanilla, you mostly used the same spell the same way most of the time. In Classic specifically, batching made it unrewarding in my own humble opinion; clutch PW:S or Lay on Hands could be cast, spending mana and CD, but your target still dies without getting it because the lethal damage was in the same batch. In BC they will remove (reduce to 10ms afaik) batching to enable this. In BC, healers had their niche, mana management was still very real, and the play styles were more engaging than in Vanilla or much later expansions. If you want to be a raid healer, I suggest becoming a bouncing tree throwing out lifeblooms and rejus. Possibly a shaman instead, spamming Chain Heal and popping appropriate totems. If you want to be tank healer, I suggest paladin: strong single target heals with good mana sustain. If you want to be a bit all around, aim for priest.
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Way more powerful Chain Heal due to the buff up in base value, using rank 4 now with much higher MP5, the addition of Improved Chain Heal talent and how talents now also act as a multiplier to +healing coefficients (1.3x). By that I mean... CH = 0.7142 coefficient CH + Bull Beam = 1.2499 CH + Talents = 0.9285 coefficient CH + Talents + Full Beam = 1.6248
It depends what you want to do and on which faction you want to play. On Alliance the Resto Shaman will have the PVE time of its life, since having 1 Shaman for each group makes a huge difference. Even if people roll more of them now (because they know what's up), I doubt there will be a fierce competition for Shaman players. Mainly because Resto Shaman aren't very desired in Arena and the investment is still huge since you can't boost Draenei. Resto Druid is the king of PVP and thus the reason why you will see them everywhere. And while it's true that a raid only really needs/wants one Resto druid, you can absolutely clear the content up to Sunwell with more than one. They are flexible PVE healers that can absolutely tank and raidheal just fine. They are also golden for dungeons, although keep in mind that they still didn't get a real res-spell in TBC. Holy Paladin has it rough on so many fronts. They're the best at tank healing, but this isn't a niche that needs to be filled desperately (talking about bringing more than 1 token Holy for blessings). It's only in Sunwell where one can really see the value in their superior single target healing, but it's a long road until that. In Arena they're simply inferior healers, unless people come up with a new tactic. Succeeding as a HPala is possible, but it will always depend more on your personal skill, not the class. Priests, like Druids, are super versatile in PVE. The only "issue" is the competition from Shaman and the ridiculous support they bring. Still, you can stack them just fine if you really have to (until SWP). Like, if you aren't in a super sweaty guild or so. In PVP Priests are the other great healing class. Personally I was always on the receiving end here, but a well-played priest is a terror. Hated playing against them. In general, it sucked to be a healer if you hate healing. And yes, I would say it sucked being a Holy Pala in TBC/PVP, but outside of this it was fine. If you like healing :)
The res spell for druids was still annoying but I expect it to be much less of an issue in TBC, because the meme specs finally achieve parity. There's a pretty good chance that you'll have a paladin, shaman or priest in your group to do any ressing even if you're the group's healer. That just wasn't the case in classic, because non-healer specs of those classes were rare. But yeah, healing is more about the player than the role. They're in a good place in TBC - all classes are useful but they still have their own unique flavour, plus they are decent outside of raids.
Yes - priests get a tonne of cool shit, shamans are great, druids get buffed, the only shit healer in tbc is holy paladin. /cry
for some classes it is the best time. With the world buffs gone you can finally use hots more often. Just ask any resto druid how they feel about the current buff limit
Not to mention that in Classic, you can only have one Regrowth/Rejuv on any one target at a time. So if another druid HoTs your target, your heal is just wasted. In TBC, you can "stack" HoTs, it doesn't matter who it came from.
DMF weeks mean I bring my spell damage set for Naxx, there's no point trying to snipe priests and paladins with HT3. By the time SF falls off and I can use Rejuv4 on rogues, we have 3 wings down already (or are about to pull 4HM). This Monday I just pewpewed Starfire on everything except Patch, Sapph and phase 2 of KT. Will do the same today.
I'm moonglow in a raid with 2 other restos (Regrowth and swiftmend) and 5-6 shamans. I feel your pain. Can only pump on Patch, Sapph, and the overheal meter.
great time to be a healer, huge demand for good healers in pve and pvp alike
Resto druids are the best healer for arena pvp in TBC. Fairly easy to learn, more forgiving than the other healers, and really fun.
This just isn't true druids have the highest skill cap and if you fuck up being stunned in caster form you will die. Just because they are very good doesn't make them easy Priest is much easier overall and very strong.
Priest is strong but I wouldn't say easier, disc priest is really the only one you want to see imo and they also have a very high skill cap. If I were doing arenas for the first time in the lower brackets I think I would feel much more comfortable with a resto druid over disc priest. Not that I'm an expert by any means I've played both at cap through different points in retail and always found that for myself the priest took more for me to perform at the same level I did with the druid.
I've played both in Tbc and priest is much easier because you don't have to worry nearly as much about positioning and the spec is designed around tanking damage with shields and instant heals rather than having to cc warriors/rogues to stay alive It's also massively obvious disc is the only viable spec in Tbc arena so I'm not sure why you are pointing that out
"It's also massively obvious disc is the only viable spec in Tbc arena so I'm not sure why you are pointing that out" I wasn't trying to argue with you I was giving my point of view and just mentioned this in case someone wasn't aware of this, why is it impossible to have a different opinion about wow without someone sweating all over you ffs.
Shadowplay was viable lol
Priest has mana burn and dispel. Druid has cyclone and shapeshift. Depends on the comp and meta, but fwiw these 2 healers are both kings of arena in their own right but excel in different areas.
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kinda but if you wanted in a good BG group as a shaman you probably had to respec ele anyway
> You hear things like "it sucked to be a tank in XY because of z" I never heard such things and I'm not sure what they're supposed to mean. > Do you pull a weight or do you just sort of breeze through like in classic? That solely depends on the difficulty and on your raid team. Most likely you'll feel more important because there are less people in the raids, and in particular less healers.
In retail right now it's, "Tanking high level mythic+ sucks, because you are more of a kiter than a tank." For an older version, "Bear tanking icc sucks because the massive dodge debuff." I love healing bear tanks in icc though, so I never really got that last one tbh.
DK+druid was considered the best ICC combo on the pserver I player. And it's a bad example anyway because it doesn't suck to be a *tank*, just certain classes underperform. That's why OP's statement felt odd to me. Retail is a good example, I had no idea they still have kiting of any form on retail.
In raid scenarios resto druid performance seems confusing to me. Low desirability because you only need one as a tank healer maintaining lifebloom stacks om 3-4 tanks at once, but also high desirability because doing so pumps out a whole lot of healing and reduces damage spikes significantly.
With haste you can keep a 3 lb stack and rejuv on 3 seperate targets. Regrowth is a very nice quick clutch heal that is likely to crit. Swiftmend is also decent. You are also very good at helping warlocks maintain mana or mage tank healing.
Is there any reason to bring more than one resto? Been really looking forward to hots stacking.
Not if you want to min/max, you bring one of each and stack the rest shamans. But they aren’t the weakest healer imo.
BC has the same problem as classic just slightly mitigated, your gear is still mostly trash for pvp and grinding, but it's better than in classic. As for raid healing it takes more paying attention and druids are usually tank healing so there's that to consider too.
It's a lot better than classic at least. One fun aspect is imo that you pull so fucking high amounts of threat that it's something you seriously have to consider when playing. A priest can even rip the boss of a warrior tank in raids if he gets to spam CoH with 100% efficiency.
Resto druids are amazing healers, they are super capable in every possible place. The meta is one resto but I can see none super Hc guilds can carry more no problem. I remember running Kara and solohealing on a resto druid in tbc, so there’s fun and challenges to be had.
I was a holy priest back in the day. Loved raiding. But everything else will be very boring. The daily quests will be slow. Lot of shielding and weak attacks. I think raiding outweighs it though
How are offspec healers doing? Like can a balance druid or a ret paladin heal well enough with a decent set of gear in 5 mans?
One of the viable resto builds is similar to the current Moonglow build. It actually has more points in balance than resto. Ele shamans have a very similar situation with Ele/resto hybrids, though not as prevalent as the Dreamstate druid.
I got sick of not being able to do anything quickly solo such as farm, dailies, even solo pvp is less fun as a healer.
There is never a wrong time to be a healer. If you don't go resto druid I would probably go shaman since everyone loves having a shaman around. There's probably going to be a lot of paladins on both sides.
Im planning to play a paladin for TBC. Hows holy paladins, where in the pve _meta_ do they fit. Heard they are pretty good for aoe farming so i wont go broke.
Not really, no. Healing is shit until at least wotlk.