Why is healing so hard in cataclysm

Since Cata, Blizz really made the quest chains linear, and ever since Cata, the quest zones feels so clustered together; with flying mount, each maps feels like a big theme park where all the playground features are put together. Going forward, I really really hope that Blizz can make much much bigger maps, considering the existence of flying mount, with the same number of quests and etc.

What made Cataclysm bad Community General Discussion. Lot of reasons. Mostly, a lot of the changes broke the MMO feel. They destroyed the old world. Quest phasing made it hard to play with friends. Sill does.

Party sync is a joke. Dungeons pivoted from easy to brutally hard. Part of the difficulty was through making healing punishing, and healers burned out in droves me included. Progression lost all meaning. About half the dungeons have trash or bosses with random damage like that. Disc can still push high Moad but they require their group to keep themselves alive more than the Disc to heal them.

Raid healing is our strong suit. We shine in burst healing for raids. PW: Radiance is one of the only fully smart heal left in the game… it will hit the lowest health players in range…. Did quite a bit of testing last night, seems to apply to the closest 5 targets, even reapplying itself to targets that already have atonement active. Then that is a bug and should be reported.

It is supposed to heal the lowest 4 members near the target you selected the initial heal with that do not have atonement. Nearly every aspect of the changes discussed in the Dev Watercooler on healing is good. Worries about past experiences are fair, but they are being accounted for, and many of them are being directly improved by their changes. The only fair complaint is that it will be a short term adjustment… in the long term, it will only be a great thing for the game in all areas.

I personally loved the Cataclysm healing model and was disappointed when I realized how much everyone else seemed to hate it and the expansion generally. It felt slower and more thoughtful. I had to watch my mana, the group needed to CC, we needed to pull carefully and not take unnecessary damage. I feel silly watching my raid frames, all alert and ready for someone to take damage so I can use my Holy Shock or Riptide or whatever efficiently, only for the damage to be instantly healed by Healing Stream Totem or Atonement or something else, with impeccable efficiency, without the healer even having to so much as target the injured player.

When it comes to the bosses I stick with that for the most part, but toss in a few Penance and Prayer of Healing spells in as well. Of course just about any time i use a targeted spell like Penance, or PoH the targets are back to full before I finish casting. Other players just manage to get there first either with smart heals, or with more powerful instant heals. I also look forward to more linear damage.

Good and informative post. I totally agree with you both. There is little difference in the team today except that a craptastic dev has returned to the team from Titan. I trust them to do what they say they will. Game design especially at Blizzard needs to be iterative, so what their goals are can change as time passes.

A lot of the time, they accomplish exactly what they set out to do, but there are unintended, unforeseen, or unexpected side effects. CC stopped being used, healers all used a rotation instead of adjusting their spell selection for different scenarios, dungeons became an AoE fest. So along comes 4. All of a sudden healers take their usual early-expansion mana hit and all content is difficult, requiring a measure of CC and coordination.

This difficulty manifested itself in healers running out of mana, as difficulty in early expansion content always has. Mana was just an easy target for player ire. Early Cata healers had poor regen. Early Cata content was really hard. Solved by making LFR easier and allowing a significant increase in character progression from non-heroic dungeons. The jarring transition from one expansion to the next solved by the impact of gear upgrades being shifted to amount healed rather than mana pool size, which is, again, made possible by an increase in base mana regen that will increase as your mana costs and mana pool do.

Thank you! Difficulty was the primary thing people were complaining about. Also, thank Celestion retweeting your blog post. Yeah, I saw that, was kind of amusing seeing page hits jump by a factor of 10 immediately afterward. This is the same company that did Cataclysm and MoP. My opinion is that you would have to be ignorant of the past or quite naive to not be worried at the moment. I liked early Cata healing.

Even when the majority of Druids were crying, I was having a great time. Who am I kdding, some people live to be miserable in this game. Thank you, this makes so much more sense to me now! I wish the original article had used these graphs and explained it like this. You can design something around the majority then the bottom minority will screw it up which is my experience with Cata heroics and tuning.

When Blizzard says too hard for average, is it specifically the player in the middle with no other factors influencing them or too hard for the average person to deal with the random bottom minority? With WoD heroics it seems Blizzard is pointing to the latter.

Pingback: Monday Roundup — March 10th, I welcome the changes in the next expansion. I have always felt though that everyone expects the tank to know how to tank and the healer to keep everyone alive. Not sure they ever learned to use their CDs and stay out of stuff. Healers not being able to keep up an entire group as they pull extra mobs and ignore fire is something the player base would need time to adjust to. As we approached launch if became increasingly clear how poorly tuned it was.

There were some incredibly well sourced, insightful and reasonable critiques of healing on the beta forums. The kind Blizzard always encourages. They were ignored. The volume of posts near the end was staggering. It took about months after the expac went live for the problems that were discussed in beta to be addressed.

Maybe this is a good thing. It seems to be that if you want to succeed at a Heroic you should bring people you know and trust. As for the point about the hordes of clueless people out there, yeah, PuGs suck. But other than the last paragraph, the whole thing was pretty much aimed at a raid environment where everyone is expected to do their job well. Interesting article :D makes alot of sense really. I have to say im quilty of passing items which dont have spirit on, However, as what i normally do is plan every item for each slot it doesnt really matter.

I play a Dps Mage and I have such an easy rotation that I like knowing what everyone else is doing. First Cataclysm private server free Play with an goblin or an Worgen character right now! I agree with you on some things. Ive been a holy priest for about several years raiding pre bc, bc, wrath and in cata.

Yes we do get technical about healing, just like any other class and healing has made a significant change over the past years. I remember when paladins all they were good for was offhealing and hammer.

Ohh how things have change. But one thing I do have to disagree with you on with is the fact that you over prioritize intellect over spirit. I think intell is very important to have, of course, but spirit is something that is just as important.

If you look at every piece of healing armor out there youll see that intel is always over spirit in every piece, so if you dont balance accordingly 1 will dominate the other and your mp5 will not be as efficient as someone that added a intel gem when he should have put up his spirit this time, its linear and needs to be balanced with intell moderately stacked over spirit.

If you constantly prioritize your intel you will greatly thin out your mp5, even with our big buff from holy concentration. I think it has something to do with you were a mage before and if you ever healed as a disc priest. Intell will be greatly prioritized in those classes. I wish i had the link to the latest chart for this, but I wouldnt want to post it up because alot of the people in here are haters. Ohh and good for calling out that we cant keep everyone topped off anymore as fast as we can.

Fast Heals including Flash and topping Off will be saved for the tank always and most never really used. Flash Heal has become waaay to expensive and you will certainly oom and wipe. And remember all DPS Lightwell is your friend now, if you dont get heals go get em yourself. Its a click away. This article is stupid. Healing is, and always has been, the most difficult aspect of the game and requires the most attention.

Being a tank is easy. Stand there and hold agro, simple, while healers keep you alive. DPS is stupid easy, all you need to do is shoot the bad guy, while healers keep you alive. And when a tank or DPS dies is the healers fault. Well we are very busy watching everyone else and keeping them alive while all the dps and tank does is watch the boss.

I played a tank, boring as hell. Played dps, just as boring. It sucks. Healing requires all your attention and this dumb-ass rant of an article from a DPS telling healers how to play is ridiculous.

When i want easy valor points, i go as a dps, not healer and I watch how much shit the healer takes from others in the group. Hell yes, cata got harder on healers, alot harder, while dps and tanks got tons more health and benefits, there jobs got easier and the healers got harder.