The Daily Blues
Each day WoW.com will take you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From Ghostcrawler's latest posts to the lowdown on StarCraft II and Diablo III, we'll keep you informed.
The Daily Blues, in which Ghostcrawler is chatty as hell about healing.
Table of Contents
Ghostcrawler
This is definitely one of those cases where we'll have to see how it feels, but it is more intuitive when you're actually casting spells in the game than it might sound on paper.
Yep. Healing Hands is one of the ways we want to let paladins raid heal and it might even be the dominant way. We want to give them a group heal that isn't Circle of Healing or Chain Heal, because we've already done those spells and we want to do something new here.
What we want to avoid: "Well, we don't have our paladin tonight to heal the tank, so let's call the raid."
What we also want to avoid: "Well, we have too many paladins and they can't raid heal, so let's replace one with an undergeared alt."
There are extremes of course. All things being equal, we'd rather you not stack too many of any one spec. We just don't want to make it impossible to heal a raid if your group of friends just happens to have a lot of Holy paladins.
Q u o t e:
The goal is, indeed, to make you viable raid healers. That can be accomplished without neutering your single-target healing (and without making you the gods of all raid healing).
We change our minds sometimes, like about letting Charge work in combat for example. :)
In fact, one of the reasons we changed our minds about Heroic Leap (and Camo, and Trap Launcher) were so many players that were sad about seeing those abilities not make it in LK.
Our goal is for paladins to be able to raid heal. Don't look at the designs for spells that none of you have even been able to try and conclude those mechanics can't possibly allow you to raid heal and therefore our goal can't possibly be met and will therefore be abandoned. It's fine to raise concerns -- that's one of the reasons we announce stuff like this early -- but some of you are trying to get a spell buffed that you haven't even cast yet.
I will say our vision for the AE spell though is not that the paladin runs around constantly, but that you position yourself where you can do the most good. Sometimes that will be back with the healers. Sometimes that might be in the melee. Sometimes you'll have to spread out and your group healing won't be as efficient (in the same way a shaman's group healing isn't as good in the same scenario).
Tranquility is on a very long cooldown. It is not the way druids AE heal. We want to shift it from 5-person group to raid because we'd like to do that with every spell. Having to organize players by arbitrary group is a strange concept since it doesn't actually manifest itself in the real world (in the way distance from you on the battlefield does).
We aren't going to give paladins anything resembling Circle of Healing. One (or two) of those spells in the game is plenty.
Spirit will be a good stat to stack but only to a point. Once you can heal say a six minute boss fight without going out of mana, then any additional Spirit is pretty much wasted. At that point stats like crit start to look pretty attractive because they increase your spell's throughput without increasing the mana cost. Maybe you'll be able to heal someone with one cast, allowing you to swap over and heal another player. In today's healing environment, where a lot of that excess healing will be wasted overhealing, getting a huge crit on a spell isn't nearly as valuable.
We'll have to see how raid healing goes. We might be okay with the tendency for groups to still assign paladins to tank healing because they are particularly good at it. What we want to avoid are those cases where a group feels like they can't possibly keep tanks alive because they lack a paladin or they can't possibly keep groups alive because they have too many paladins.
We'd like to change PoH too. The challenge there is making it not feel like CoH.
Yes, I agree that having high mana regeneration will allow you to use inefficient spells more often. I was reacting against some of the player saying they would just stack Spirit and nothing else because Spirit also allows you to cast big heals or fast heals more often. A hasted Flash of Light is still going to be pretty good in many situations, as is a Flash of Light that crits for a big amount. The numbers should be such that all stats are valuable, not that the guides say "Stack Spirit and all other stats are garbage."
Q u o t e:
Does this mean there will be changes made to Prayer of Healing?
Q u o t e:
You seem to be operating under contradictory premises here, GC. On one hand, you're saying "mana will matter for healers in Cataclysm." On the other, you're saying "Players will only want Spirit to a certain point." Players will want spirit until mana becomes trivial, which would violate that first premise. Even if a player has just enough to heal that six minute fight, more spirit will allow a higher HPS because it will allow the use of more spells that are inefficient. While you can argue "crit increases HPS too," more spirit increases HPS in a way that's completely controllable by the player.
I would say it thusly:
1) If Paladins lose their current standing as OP tank healers then they need to be reliable raid healers
2) To be a reliable raid healers, we need to be reliable raid healers.
Cast times, ranges and mana costs are technically a hindrance too, but healers seem to do okay anyway.
Again, it's fine to raise concerns. It's a bit premature to pronounce a spell dead on arrival, let alone an entire goal (specifically that paladins can raid heal better).
Q u o t e:
Just to clarify: We may be perfectly effectual and good at either raid or tank healing, but the PERCEPTION is what is important here. Perception of a class does matter. And if everyone perceives Paladin healers as being technically weaker than all other healers, it's going to be tough justifying using them in raids.
Q u o t e:
Basically blizzard doesn't want Holy Paladins to have a clear cut position in a raid when it comes to healing but they don't want to give us the tools necessary to actually be interchangeable with druids/priests/shamans.
Q u o t e:
1) If Paladins lose their current standing as OP tank healers then they need to be reliable raid healers
2) To be a reliable raid healer we need to be able to raid heal in multiple situations
3) HH is not set up in such a way as to allow Paladins to heal in multiple situations
Q u o t e:
Unless one of the Holy talents is 'you can now cast HH on any target <or on your beacon target> and increases the range by 10/20 yards and the healing done by 5/10%' then HH is just a hindrance for holy paladins.
Q u o t e:
You should quote the whole entry GC -- if you read the 3 points and the rest of the entry, then it makes sense.
He meant this. Tranquility will always be raid wide, just because the concept of a "group" within the raid is kind of a strange one. What does that group refer to in the game? It's not distance for example. We'd like to do this with every spell.
Q u o t e:
I think "Tranquility will be raid wide" is a different sentence completely unrelated to the Tree of Life stuff.
Right. I mentioned this in another thread today, but you have a few broad options: either PoH heals the 5 most injured folks (in which case it's a lot like Circle) or it heals the whole raid (in which case it's likely overpowered or not useful enough) or it has a longer cooldown to compensate for the previous (in which case it's a lot like Divine Hymn) or it heals the target and the 4 closest targets (in which case it's like old CoH).
Q u o t e:
PoH has to be a tricky one to make raid-wide. If PoH became a smart raid-wide heal, then priests get a poor man's Chain Heal in addition to CoH/PoM, which might make priests trump all other healers for raid healing.
We don't want that either, and in the absence of a five second rule, it won't help you that much anyway. Instead, we want you to choose whether you use your GCD on a moderate heal, a huge heal or a fast heal. Today almost every GCD is spent on the fast heal because someone will die if you don't do that and your mana regeneration supports that play style.
So you're arguing that anything with a reasonably long cast bar is either not fun or useless?
That's exactly what we're doing. If you've read many of my posts though, you'd know that whatever reason =
1) Downranking is the kind of thing you'd only learn from reading forums or having someone teach you. It's very non-intuitive.
2) Downranking allowed players to game the coefficients on lower ranked spells. Not only were they saving mana for smaller heals, but the heals actually weren't much smaller because the coefficient mattered more with a certain level of +healing than the flat points.
Q u o t e:
I don't want to play a game situation where I sit back and wait, pausing for 2-5 seconds at a time before i take an action.
Q u o t e:
Right, so we don't spend that 2-5 seconds waiting to start to cast, we spend it watching a slow efficient cast bar waiting to decide to cancel the cast if it's not needed. Fantastic!
Waiting is waiting, whether it's between casts or for the cast. At least when we wait between casts we can be mobile.
Q u o t e:
Cataclysm is basically just adding downranking back in. Moderate heal, Huge heal, Fast heal. Exactly the same model that many used when downranking was available. Quite funny, really. They removed downranking for whatever reason, and now it's just being added back in but with different spell names for the different ranks.
I'm not sure I understand the logic here. Having larger crits makes crit chance attractive on gear, but I don't think the reverse is true. You won't be at a disadvantage if you have high crit and low mastery because you will just crit more often. You won't be at a disadvantage if you have low crit and high mastery because when you do crit, your heals will be larger. Crit and mastery do complement each other well and I can understand why it might be a problem if haste and Spirit weren't attractive stats so you were pigeon-holed into just crit + mastery gear, but those should both be very good stats.
(I'm ignoring the effects of Illumination, overhealing and the (specious) argument that "crit is inherently bad because it's RNG" to keep things simple, so let me know if any of those is key to understanding this.)
I agree with this, but that's like saying that if at any point in the expansion Holy damage is a poor damage source for Retribution, they would have no other spell damage source to focus on. If paladins don't care about crit, then we have a problem. It doesn't matter at that point that they care more about crit than other healers. Disc priests care less about crit than they might because of Power Word: Shield, but that doesn't mean crit won't improve their healing.
So if you're arguing the flaw is that there is a risk to the paladin if crit isn't valuable, then I guess I see that. If you're arguing there is just an inherent flaw no matter what, then I'm not following you.
I think there is a problem now because more throughput (in terms of bigger heals because of crits) is wasted on overhealing. Paladins rarely have trouble healing a single target to full. Their problem is not having enough GCDs to bring up everyone before the next round of damage happens again. That won't be the case in Cataclysm hopefully.
I can understand that argument to a point. At the same time, if you integrate things over a long time then most of our stats make you better at healing over time. I think you'd feel pretty differently is you swapped from say 1000 mastery rating to 1000 crit rating.
I agree with that, and I further agree that it makes them both highly desirable. As long as it doesn't make other stats very undesirable then I don't see the fundamental flaw here.
Yeah, I agree with that. For a number of reasons (that I've gone into before), we allowed some stats to become much more valuable than competing stats that also occur on your gear. We're really trying to prevent this in Cataclysm. We're making changes including, but not limited to, letting hots and dots crit, asking healers to care about mana regen, getting rid of group buffs that improve hit, keeping combat rating from getting inflated, etc.
Q u o t e:
My issue is with our Mastery stat (our third throughput option) being functionally tied to an already existing stat such that it will be hard to separate them should the need arise.
Q u o t e:
It doesn't refute the argument that having a mastery so closely tied to the stat crit will reduce the number of choices when it comes to paladin gearing.
Q u o t e:
If at any point in the expansion crit is a poor stat for paladins, they have no third stat to retreat to.
Q u o t e:
Well do you think there is a problem now? I would take more comfort in your words if critical strike hadn't been nerfed mid expansion and then our final tier of gear was itemized with crit on every piece.
Q u o t e:
If I give it +1% crit chance its now a 125.5 average heal, if I give it +1% crit size instead, it will be a... 125.5 average heal.
They *feel* like the same stat. So if I'm look at gear with +Crit, +Mastery, it just looks like +A lot of Crit. If I see gear with +Crit, and + Haste, it looks like +Crit/Haste, if I see gear with +Mastery and +Haste, it looks like +Crit/Haste.
Q u o t e:
Increasing crit and mastery will be more effective than increasing either alone
Q u o t e:
If I were to rephrase the issue, I would say that what we need to watch for is a specific combination of secondary stats becoming mathematically superior to the point where we stack that gear at the expense of all else. As has been evident repeatedly throughout WotLK, one secondary stat combo or another tends to trump the rest. This is a highly numbers-dependent evaluation, however. While it is absolutely worth flagging, I don't think we can say yet whether it's a major issue.
Our goals are that you won't be spending as much of your tanking time AE tanking in Cataclysm as you did in Lich King. A second goal is that when you are AE tanking, you should use different abilities than when you are single-target tanking. A third goal is that when you are AE tanking, you should use more than one (or maybe two) abilities. None of those seem contradictory.
If you want to challenge our goals as being unrealistic or dumb, then feel free. But we're seeing a lot of this inductive (specific to general) logic where a player tries to poke a hole in one ability and use that to mean our goals can't possibly be met.
Try one of these arguments instead:
1) I disagree with Blizzard putting more emphasis on crowd control and single-target damage.
2) I agree or am ambivalent about that goal, but I don't see how we'll get there because of X reason.
3) I agree or am ambivalent about that goal, but I don't see how Y ability will help realize that goal.
We could increase the damage of Thunder Clap and Shockwave if we needed to. I'm not convinced we'll need to, particularly in a world with the Vengeance concept. Warrior AE threat was generally fine in Naxxramas. It only started to slip in later tiers, and in comparison to (some) other tanks.
Not every new spell is there to help realize those goals. If we wanted to give warriors a new AE ability, we'd give them something either spammable or persistent. We're just not sure they need a new tool in that space. Any balance issue can be solved with number tweaking of existing tools.
There will almost certainly be staggered adds sometimes. It won't be every encounter. In those situations you'll need to use your full tool box to handle them. Maybe you need to save Thunder Clap for a few seconds. Maybe the rogue and hunter help pull the adds to you. Maybe you Devastate and tab. Maybe you blow Challenging Shout. Maybe you blow Intimidating Shout until Thunder Clap has finished its cooldown. If we wanted you to always have an answer for every single add situation, then Thunder Clap would have no cooldown. That would make tanking easier for sure. Is making tanking easier really more fun? At what point is it so easy that you're just standing there getting beat on?
I don't think warriors have any AE issues now, except for two: some classes have to do less work to AE tank, and the threat generation doesn't scale with gear as well as it needs to. Again, we don't want to make tanking just hitting one button or a macro. It's not a matter of giving you an ability for any conceivable situation you might find yourself in. It's only a problem if you're horribly broken in those situations and I don't really think warriors are there. As I've said before, we like how warriors AE tank. It generally works. It didn't work when Tclap had a 4 target limit.
Do you really struggle for example in 5-player heroics? Did you struggle in Naxx? Did you wipe a lot on Ony whelps when a warrior tanked them?
Yeah, this is kind of our feeling.
Maybe I'm misremembering something, but the goal going into LK was that warriors should be able to AE tank rather than every group using paladins for trash, and that casters should be able to use their AE spells, otherwise what are they there for? We succeeded in both of those, but a little too well on the latter to the extent that anything with more than 1 mob became a job for Blizzard / Hurricane / Mind Sear, etc.
In Cataclysm, there will be more threat to the tank of dying if you try to just AE tank every pull. Likewise, AE damage won't be quite as awesome so that single targeting things will probably be a better strategy when there are say 3-5 adds. If it's a dozen twilight whelps, then sure, AE away.
But the goal is not "tank maintains aggro no matter what." The goal is the tank can control the situation enough for you to complete the content.
Your other arguments were that other tanks can AE better than warriors, which I agreed was a problem. That doesn't mean warriors need a new ability to fill the gaps though.
Then all you're saying here is "tanking is too hard," aren't you? Imagine the warrior was the only tank in the game. Would you be making these same claims? In an absolute sense, is AE tanking too hard? Or is it only relative to say paladins and druids (which again, might be a problem, but the solution isn't to make warrior AE tanking trivial)?
Bingo.
I'm trying to separate a few different arguments here:
1) The paladin can tank better than I can.
2) I need another tool to tank.
3) AE tanking is too challenging.
All three are kind of getting munged up in this thread.
This was definitely my assumption. Some posters here seem to be arguing that AE tanking is too challenging and just needs to be made easier.
Then adding new tanking tools is probably not the right solution to that problem.
I understand that is why it's playing out, but from the perspective of a designer trying to fix problems with the game, it doesn't help to have issues that are so conflated. If nerfing paladin AE tanking threat or buffing warrior AE tanking threat fixes the problem, then great. It AE tanking is too challenging for warriors even in that world, then we need to consider other options.
Q u o t e:
I choose #2
I already said why, but to reiterate:
X reason=We don't have tools beyond thunderclap, shockwave and cleave. And cleave is no longer off the global, which is a nerf to our aoe capability. How is this being addressed?
Q u o t e:
Also #3, how does Heroic Leap help realize that goal? It seems far too limited and situational to be of much use beyond an occasional pulling tactic when the stars align and mobs are close together & stunnable.
Q u o t e:
i am ambivalent about that goal, but i dont see every fight in cataclysm never featuring staggered adds that will need to be tanked. i dont see how giving warriors nothing to fill in this hole in their design will improve their gameplay in those situations.
Q u o t e:
The problem is that your preview simply didn't provide enough information to instill confidence that warriors aren't going to be dealing with the same issues aoe tanking that we have now.
Q u o t e:
Not everyone has to be exactly as good at everything as everyone else. Its ok for certain classes to have a bit more difficulty with something than another.
The warrior AoE model doesn't lend itself to staggered adds (well, it might, depending on cleave). But that is ok.
With some savvy skill use, and a minimum of support from the raid, the warrior can manage anyway.
Do they never design encounters where gap closers are helpful, because it would be unfair to the non-warriors/druids? I make use of charge, intercept, and intervene in raids quite a bit.
The gaps between thunderclap and shockwave aren't that difficult to deal with. I don't feel there is much reason to try to plug those gaps.
Q u o t e:
However, all of your comments suggest that the reason we won't be AE tanking is because we won't be able to take the damage, rather than not having the opportunity to AE tank. I distinctly remember the exact same logic used before WoTLK came out: "Players should be able to hold agro on the mobs, we want the real threat to be the mobs killing the tank"
Q u o t e:
This is an odd comment. The answer is No, but not because the warrior was sufficient. It's because the mobs happened to do so little damage that the DPS were able to tank them (or you had another tank with you).
Q u o t e:
I'm sorry ghostcrawler, but the parts I underlined are ridiculous; many warriors reading it will shudder instinctively. You cannot save thunderclap on staggered adds or the initial wave is going to run rampant; we have to use it to get them on us so we can use shockwave (we almost never can use just shockwave because of it's wonky direction/range). On pretty much any aoe encounter in a raid, challenging shout=I just grabbed the boss in addition to the adds I wanted, or I just grabbed the other tank's adds too and now have waaaayyyyy to much stuff on me.
Q u o t e:
Asking for another AoE tool is just like asking TC to not have a cooldown from GC's PoV
Q u o t e:
1) The Paladin and Bears (and possibly DKs) can all AoE tank better than I can.
2) I don't need another tool to tank; assuming other tank's AoE threat is being significantly nerfed (though the class previews seem to indicate the opposite is true).
3) AE tanking is not too challenging.
Q u o t e:
3) AE tanking is not challenging in certain circumstances, unless you look at it relative to the other tanking classes.
Q u o t e:
Don't you see GC that the above list IS the reason why this thread is playing out the way it is. As long as #1 is true, as far as aoe tanking goes, then some warrior tanks will agree with #2 and #3. If a paladin has to expend as much effort to aoe tank as a warrior then #2 is removed from the equation and number #3 becomes a separate debate (one that the designers of the game are at the discretion of setting the bar for).
Other
Because we're not ready to release a female worgen model yet...
The answer has been right in front of you this whole time! Logistics!
Q u o t e:
Seriously, how can you release female versions of the Goblin, and not the female version of the Worgen?
On a sidenote, Terogaxu hits the nail pretty spot on with his statement about playing what you enjoy the most being the "best" class for you!
It's clear that players enjoy (find entertainment from) gaining aesthetic items, such as the mount or the pets, by both earning them in-game and through an on-line purchase. If they deem the purchase of a vanity item like this valuable to them, then we'll provide them. Some of you feel it absurd that someone would want to purchase an item that serves no purpose other than to look great, and that's fine - we understand that - and we're in no way making them mandatory. They offer no in-game benefit other than simply looking nice. :) If you're one of those who dislike the idea of these items, then having one run past you or stood beside you shouldn't impact your game play in any way, you can just 'tut' and move on should you so wish, or just ignore them. They're enjoying their new riding experience (in the case of the mount) and you're there with an extra 20 bucks in your pocket. Each to their own really. One thing is certain, we want to avoid selling something that offers a direct advantage in-game, and we will continue to ensure this is the case.This one is something where we can agree to disagree, I think. Achievements are not always something that fit the dictionary definition of an 'achievement' - such as 'Grouping with X players through the LFD tool' - but we stuck with the name 'Achievements' over 'Achievements and other notable things that aren't really achievements but an indication of what a character has done in their time'. The former rolls of the tongue much better. ;-) Ok, so I'm sure there are shorter ways to say that, but Achievements are what they're called in the various gaming platforms, and it's what people can relate to.Ads are something that are often seen as a point of controversy. We're always reviewing how ads should be handled within the forums.This sentence alone is impacting enough. :) Feedback, however large or small, positive or negative, targeted or otherwise, is valuable stuff, and we love it. Thanks!
Q u o t e:
The main issue, and to my mind the most prominent and worrying, is the recent addition of "pay to use" mounts and pets: the celestial mount, the pet LK, and so on. Now I fully support paying for addons, the monthly fee and the game itself. The amount of work that has gone into the game itself, the post-addon content (usually the large patches), and the cost of maintaining such a game and the servers account for the conventional costs charged. However, to add a fee for exclusive digital content I definitely do not agree with. Yes charging for server changes, race and, character changes I can appreciate as a way to regulate what should be a rare, yet occasionally helpful, change. However "in game content", in my opinion, should be paid for exclusively in game. We all know of the "free to play" MMORPGs, making their money from selling gold, armour or similar character boosts – this seems uncomfortably close to blizzard's digital store. Yes, nothing sold is going to change your character's performance, but it should not cost cold, hard cash to get any in-game item. A "cool" item should be regulated by in game accomplishments, be it downing a boss on hard mode, a rare drop, PvP accomplishments, or even a stupidly long and pointless quest only a minority would attempt. Real-world money seems to add a level of segregation, and begins to remove the "anything that is possible in-game can be done by anyone" aspect. The same is true of the KT pet, and any other in-game item only available through the blizzard store.
Q u o t e:
Achievements. Like marmite, some people are in love, some people have a burning hatred, but we can all agree they are here to stay. While I am in the latter group, I am also able to recognise that they are beneficial to WoW as a game, and a lot of people take great pleasure in, well, achievement whoring. However, I believe achievements should be as the name suggests; something notable you have achieved. Be it a milestone in honourable kills, a hard mode boss kill, something "pointless" to the less achievement focused of us (such as collecting a number of mounts/tabards/pets, raising an obscure rep, the list can go on). However, what I do not recognise as a worthy achievement is "earning any variety of emblem", or "grouping with 10 random players". I mean honestly, is getting boosted through a dungeon really something you've achieved? Using the normal tool to run a few dungeons, is that an achievement? It feels a little like getting an achievement for "washing the dishes". Why not add "used jump" or "turned left" to the achievement list. If it's supposed to help players learn the WoW world, where's my achievement for "been reported for leeching AV" and "trolled 5 noobs on trade"? Keep achievements as something meaningful in the game, giving me a cookie and a clap for picking my nose feels insulting.
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A minor point, advertising on the WoW website. Seriously? While the type of adverts have seemed to improve from the "random unrelated blatant-sellout-for-revenue" adverts to the "could-possibly-be-convinced-blizzard-is-helping-a-small-WoW-related-company-in-an-altruistic-manner" (wow am I glad I don't have to say that) type of adverts, the fact that it's still a support website for our well funded game being exploited for revenue troubles me. While it is a large step (possibly a leap) away from in-game advertising, it is still wrong for the same reasons. As with the first issue, it reeks of tackiness and unprofessionalism. The image that comes to mind is of a car manufacturer sticking adverts over the interior of my brand new car.
Q u o t e:
Anyway, despite the rant, I am still happy with the direction WoW has taken in WoTLK. I could write just as long a post thanking the developers (and perhaps less recognised contributors) for combining such skill and passion in creating a wonderful game. However, that may have to come another day.
