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Global Chat: Die, DPS meters, die!
Hey you! Yes, you! Are you sick of damage meters ruining your life? Do you rebel against the virtual man by questioning such long-established gaming tropes as levels? Then have we got the column for you! In our last community blog round-up of the year, we've collected some fine pieces of discussion, debate, and introspection -- not to mention a first impression or two to tide you over until 2015. We've also got an essay about the joy of healing, what it's like to play an MMO as a bear, going back to the Isle of Refuge, and more!
The Repopulation tweaks healing, creates viable Combat Medics
Sandbox healers, listen up! The Repopulation released a new featurette this week titled Healing and You. "Gone is the idea of an unengaged, rear-guard healer with zero choice," the diary explains, before mentioning a new healing ability set, First Aid ability enhancements, and some "support and damage abilities for Medics who want to pack a punch." These and other tweaks lead to "an expansive system that creates viable Combat Medics," according to the post, which also says that these CMs are necessary in both PvE and PvP.
Warlords of Draenor: Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas on healing in dungeons
Dungeons can be tricky to balance. Too easy, and everything turns into a 'go go go' zergdown. Too hard, and no one wants to run them. This is of course subject to change as gear and skill and familiarity all increase, of course. But it's a topic that Ion Hazzikostas recently took up on the forums. One of the things people have been concerned about is the change to how healing works, and Ion discussed it and why they made the changes. Basically, it came down to the idea that with mana regen effectively not a factor in Mists, the only way to kill players in raids was with massive spikes of damage that required immediate reaction from healers to survive. Our goal is not to make healing more difficult. Note that nowhere in the above did I say that a problem with Mists healing is that it was too "easy." We want to slow down the pace a bit, and for the challenge in healing to lie more in making decisions about spell usage and targeting, and less in twitch-reaction and sustaining a DPS-style rotation. This also means that the cost of a mistake is not a dead player, but rather a more injured one, giving you a chance to fix your error. So what does this have to do with dungeon tuning? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Dungeons are being tested on the beta now (I've recently gotten to run Auchindoun and Shadowmoon Burial Grounds) and when they're tested, your level is adjusted to the bare minimum necessary to run said dungeons. This of course means that players are testing the content at its lowest possible threshold, because it has to function for players in the minimum gear to get into the door. And this leads to issues with healing, because the dungeons aren't final yet. It's an interesting job, beta testing. Often, stuff doesn't work - that's why you test it. We've reproduced Watcher's post in full after the cut. For the most part, I'm interested to see if Blizzard actually succeeds with their goal of slowing down healing.
Warlords of Draenor: What is the future of mana regeneration?
One of the biggest changes to the Alpha Patch Notes for Warlords of Draenor has been the removal of the entire Active Mana Generation section of said notes. That's a pretty big change, and what's bigger is, we at present have no idea of what's going to replace this paradigm, or even if it is to be replaced - it's possible that there will still be an active mana generation system at play, but that current ability pruning (classes like druids and shaman saw significant pruning changes) means that there's a need to figure out which abilities will remain first before deciding which abilities will return mana actively. What's interesting, however, is that the entire section was removed, including its header paragraph. Another part of the changes to healing is providing a way for them to better manage their mana. There are ways to spend more mana for more healing but we're also adding methods for healers to trade extra time, healing, or more mana to use later in a fight when they really need it. Why remove this entire paragraph, and the section as a whole, rather than simply remove the abilities that weren't in play? It's possible that testing has shown a flaw in this design paradigm - that some particular aspect of the design isn't working as desired. Whatever the reason, however, it does leave us wondering what we're going to see for healers in Warlords? Mana is the 'soft enrage' of a healer - it's as their tanks run empty that fights become unwinnable. They need some method to regenerate mana to keep in the fight. And clearly Celestalon is aware of this, based on today's forum posting.
Switching roles
It's officially the end of the expansion, because I'm tanking again. Every expansion, this happens. I start off tanking, something happens and I switch to DPS, and then by the end of the expansion I'm tanking again. The best part is that it usually happens in the middle of working on heroic progression, meaning that I'm suddenly tanking the hardest fights in the game. Usually without having ever tanked them before, in fact. Last night for instance I found out that I am much better at doing Heroic Norushen if I go down to kill the big add with some Vengeance built up, for how much it helps with Shield Barrier if I mis-time and get hit by the big attack. My gear is adequate - about ilevel 566, with quite a few heroic pieces - but it's still a learning curve and one that's sometimes fairly hard to adjust to, and not just for me. This is a raid we've been clearing weekly, and suddenly here's a new tank who doesn't know what's going on as well as the previous tanks did. Combine that with my general sense of perfectionism (I do not like making even the most understandable mistake) and it can be pretty stressful. But sometimes it's necessary -- your group has all the healers it needs, and you volunteer to DPS. You've been playing a hunter, now you're on your priest healing instead. (Hi, Final.) You're a tank but you're burned out and you need a change of pace. So, how can you deal with this, both as a player and as a group with a player switch? While I'm not pretending to having any sort of universal answer, here's a few things I've noticed.
Interview: Technical Game Designer Chadd "Celestalon" Nervig talks Warlords of Draenor
I was lucky enough to head over to Blizzard Campus this week to talk to Technical Game Designer Chadd "Celestalon" Nervig. Chadd is a huge part of the class design team, key to a lot of the changes we saw in the recent Warlords of Draenor patch notes, which is just what we discussed. We were also joined by Senior Community Representatives Zarhym and Lore. You can also find a much-abbreviated summary on Wowhead. Olivia: First up, is there anything you really wanted to clarify and get out there? Celestalon: I've tweeted about pretty much everything. This was the first version of the patch notes, there have been more changes since then, those patch notes are about a week old or so? Zarhym: Yeah it's like, tons of changes. [Rygarius] said he had a huge list of changes. Celestalon: There's another five thousand words that aren't up there yet, which [Rygarius] is working on now. There have been different amounts of patch notes released for different classes. Paladins have been complaining that they haven't got enough, rogues have been really happy that not much has changed. Is it safe to assume there's more to come? This is just step one? There's definitely more coming. Like, for example, paladins had relatively few patch notes, and a lot of that is we were relatively happy with how things played out, at least for ret and prot, with the exception of a few things we can solve with tuning – changing numbers. So a lot of what you see in the patch notes now is what we call design changes, so the mechanics that we want to change so we can get to some design that we like.
Wowhead introduces class guides
Wowhead has just launched a new feature for players new to the game, and players new to a different class as well -- class guides written for virtually every class and spec in the game. The guides act as a brief overview of what you'll need for the class you play, covering spells, talents, glyphs, enchanting, gemming, reforging, and even topics like tackling the Proving Grounds and Challenge Modes. Some guides also include basic DPS rotations for each spec as well. Written by familiar faces from around the WoW community, the guides themselves are fairly basic -- you won't see any number crunching or theorycrafting. Instead, they act as a quick reference for players wondering what they should be doing with the character they play. That said, it's a wealth of quick-reference information that I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep bookmarked. Check out the class guides for yourself over on Wowhead.
Age of Wushu expansion to feature 'a proper healing class'
Age of Wushu's Tempest of Strife expansion is introducing "a proper healing class," according to the game's latest website update. Players walking the Golden Needle Sect path can bring back the dead, or at least the wounded, by using a skill set that "focuses on healing and defense [and that] works both in melee and from range." Snail Games has released a class teaser video which you can view after the break.
What will raiding be like in Warlords?
When discussing how the changes coming in Warlords of Draenor will affect raiding, we're of course looking at an incomplete picture. We don't know what new spells and abilities might come, we just know to an extent what won't be there - abilities like Skull Banner will be gone, as well many CC abilities, and healing will be greatly changed - casting on the move will also see a significant decrease. What we therefore need to consider is that raiding itself will have to change to embody these changing philosophies. It would be a disaster to alter class abilities and leave raids designed around the same high damage, high mobility kit we see in modern raiding. But what will raid design entail? Well, I'm not a raid designer. If I was, I'd be super busy designing some raids. What I am is a guy who raids a lot, so I can give you my perspective as a dude who has seen every fight in the game at this point. What are we in for in Warlords, based on what Blizzard has said is changing, and what they intend to try and do?
What the Dev Watercooler says about the future of PvE
This week's Dev Watercooler post served up a lot of changes for healers. But just because the article -- and the follow up conversations on Twitter -- is dense with healing talk doesn't mean that the tanks and DPSers out there can just ignore it, because these healing notes offer some tantalizing hints at what PvE group content in Warlords might be like. Of course we're missing a lot of details with Blizzard's bit-by-bit announcements, but we can make some leaps based on what we've been told so far. We already knew that the game would be changing significantly in Warlords. Stats are being reduced (squished) across the board, but Blizzard has already said that while stats will be going down, your relative power won't -- back in September Ghostcrawler assured us that mobs will still take the same time to kill, even though the numbers involved will be different. And in this update, Blizzard let us know that they're still on track for that relative power idea... that is, unless you're a healer, specifically saying, "we're buffing heals less than we're increasing creature damage." So just what does this mean for future PvE encounters? Let's take a look.
World of Warcraft monkeys with health and heals in Warlords of Draenor
World of Warcraft has another dev watercooler out today, this time talking about health (your character's, not your own), healing, and what the team will be doing to improve related systems come Warlords of Draenor. For starters, the devs will be doubling player health in the expansion to make characters more durable in PvP. "The net result of these changes is that individual attacks will knock a smaller chunk off of a player's health pool in PvP, but your survivability in PvE won't be affected," Blizzard posted. Other upcoming changes include reducting base resilience and battle fatigue to practically nil, increasing creature damage, increasing the effectiveness of heals, reducing the power of aborbs, and "making smart heals a little less smart." Some smaller, cheaper healing skills will also be removed from the game, and a few instant-cast heals are on the chopping block as well.
Black Gold shows off the Geomancer
Do you like healing people? Do you like drawing strength from the land? Do you hate pants? Then Black Gold's Geomancer might just be for you. (You might have access to pants in the game, though.) The Geomancer is meant purely as a support class, focused on healing and supporting team members. While the class is weak in one-on-one combat, it excels at supporting a group and healing injuries. Many Geomancer abilities pull double-duty as they both harm nearby enemies and heal and buff nearby allies. In lore terms, the class was originally unknown to the Kosh despite their knowledge of magic, as working with Earth was problematic and required a great deal of practice. Only the great mage Damerhyn was successful, leading to the order of Geomancers that will be available to Yutonian and Kosh players in the game. For more details, take a look at the official preview page.
Oops, I queued as tank again
I've tanked a few LFR's lately. The thing is, I didn't mean to. I don't mean I pulled aggro. I mean that when I queued, I forgot that I had tank selected alongside DPS. I do this in five man heroics I'm running for justice points as well. When I find myself selected to tank the dungeon (often only noticing after I get in and no one else is the tank) I usually shrug and put on my tank set and do it. It's not the group's fault I keep forgetting to uncheck that box, after all. And there's a bit of an up side. The other day my wife and I were talking in game and I said "I think I'm going to ride my blue dragonhawk" which surprised her, because I am not a mount collector. "Wait, you have a blue dragonhawk?" Well, yes I do, and I can thank forgetting to uncheck that tanking box for it. I'm under the impression that I'm fairly rare in this regard. I don't know how true that is, because I've really only talked to a few people about it, and some of them don't play hybrids, so there is no other box for them to check. I'm sure all the warlocks I know would select tank if they could, for instance. But at least some folks seem to do this from time to time. Being an opinionated cuss, I have some thoughts on this whole phenomenon I'd like to share.
Healer representation in Mists of Pandaria
Dedralie at Healiocentric has started a series examining how the 6 healer specs fared in Mists of Pandaria, and the first installment starts with a look at representation in raids. It's a fascinating article on the rise, fall, and sometimes stagnation of class fortunes, and toward the end there's a pretty cogent prediction on what mythic raids in Warlords of Draenor are probably going to look like if current trends continue. This is a quick summary, but I'll provide more details past the cut. As Dedralie writes, while we're not really talking about healer balance or throughput here, there are a few obvious trends you can track from the Mists launch in September 2012 all the way to heroic Garrosh kills in January 2014: Discipline priests and holy paladins ruled the expansion. The absorption effects brought by these two healers is a huge advantage in heroic content (even more so in 10-man), and it may be too valuable as a mechanic. Tier 15 (Throne of Thunder) was the most balanced with respect to representation. Tier 14 saw significant gulfs between class popularity that unfortunately returned with a vengeance in Tier 16 (Siege of Orgrimmar). While monks and holy priests are still struggling for representation, it's instructive to look at the fights where they were significantly more popular. Mythics will probably look like the "under-healed" heroics of MoP, which will prejudice heal teams toward synergies between absorption healers and those with strong throughput-based cooldowns.
Does WoW need a training dummy for healers?
You've just gotten a new piece of gear and you want to see what swapping it in will do for your gameplay. So you head to the nearest major city and find a training dummy to hit while you keep an eye on how you're performing. This seems like a good plan until you realize that training dummies really only help measure your DPS -- there's no easy way for a tank or healer to gauge how new gear helps them without jumping into a raid or dungeon and seeing how it performs. While that certainly works, it means those classes don't have an easy measuring stick. This is exactly why Healer CDs has argued that healers need their own healing dummy -- and on Twitter, Celestalon has chimed in saying he sees the value in the idea... but isn't sure if it will be included in Warlords. We'll just keep our fingers crossed.
The quick guide to mistweaving
I didn't start my monk journey as many others did at MoP's release, but switched mains during tier 15 due to raid needs. My confidence was at an all-time low because monk healing felt so foreign, compared to other healing classes. After some time, I completely fell for my monk and want to share what I've learned along the way. I'd like to get it out of the way now - this guide isn't meant for the advanced mistweaver. It's a quick guide to get you healing, stat. I'd like to cover in-depth mistweaver topics in the future, so don't worry! This is a resource meant for monks hitting level 90 and are interested in trying their hand at healing. It's meant for brewmasters or windwalkers curious about healing or even for those being thrown into a new off-spec.
The Stream Team: Healing heroics in World of Warcraft
Massively's Mike Foster has finally hit level 90 in World of Warcraft, and thanks to some savvy viewers he also managed to secure a few epic items from the Timeless Isle. This means, of course, that it's time for him to rush blindly into healing heroic dungeons. Can his heals keep up with the damage his foes are dishing out, or will he be doomed to sit in the normal dungeon queue for the rest of eternity? Tune in at 7:00 p.m. EST to find out. Game: World of Warcraft Host: Mike Foster Date: Wednesday, December 11th, 2013 Time: 7:00 p.m. EST Enjoy our Steam Team video below.
Infinite Crisis shows off Harley Quinn
Harley Quinn has gone from being a simple sidekick for the Joker to being a respected villain in her own right, albeit one that's generally seen as something of an airhead. It's easy to forget that she was a psychiatrist assigned to take care of the Joker in the first place. So it kind of makes sense that she'd be more than just another pretty smash-happy character in Infinite Crisis, instead taking a more subtle role as a healer and support. Harley's passive ability buffs movement and attack speed for all nearby allies, while her activated abilities consist of a direct heal, a ranged attack, a knockback, and a knockup. The net result is that Harley works as support for teammates, knocking away certain enemies while keeping her immediate team healed and buffed. Check out the video preview past the break for more details on how to make the most of Harley's specific arsenal.
Totem Talk: Immersing yourself into the Siege of Orgrimmar
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and content creation at InternetDragons.TV), shows you how. I don't know about you, but for the last couple of weeks I've been super excited. I love new content patches, and this one I think is one of my favorites. Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I love lore, and this patch is pretty full or some tantalizing story bits. It's made all the cooler, at least for me now being horde and all, seeing all the nifty tie-ins inside and around Orgrimmar. To see the awesomeness that is the Siege of Orgrimmar, well, you're actually going to have to get in there at some point. Be it LFR, Flex raiding or normal raiding, there are so many ways for you to get in and experience what I think is one of the best raid zones to date. To do that, you're going to need to get in and get past the first set of challenges that await you. This is not a full step by step healing guide, instead it is my own observations and the sharing of information that I found useful as a resto shaman in these encounters.
The right and the wrong ways to use healing meters
Meters are a sticky topic. My esteemed colleagues Dawn Moore and Matt Low have both touched on them and their use in the past, but it's time for a few lessons. Some home truths, if you will. Healing meters are something of a problem. Why are they an issue? Well, healing isn't measurable in the same way as DPS is. A while back, in my guild, we had a paladin healer who bragged constantly about his HPS -- yes, healing per second. Now, DPS isn't even the optimal way to measure damage. HPS is far from the optimal way to measure healing. Why not? Well, there's so much more to healing than just raw numbers. If the paladin in question blindly blasted out his max HPS in a short fight, he might accidentally be efficient, but on longer fights, where triage healing was needed and DPS was tight, he went out of mana immediately. He was using healing meters the wrong way. He was using them like damage meters, looking at hard numbers and thinking that was the measure of a good healer. So how should you use them? And what are the pitfalls to avoid?
