Tanks… Tanks have been treated very well in this expansion. That’s my take on it and I’m sticking to it. Are we still kind of reactionary? Yeah in a way, but overall, the struggles we went through in Burning Crusade are largely gone. We can happily trundle out there and tank our merry hearts out and not feel like we’re screwed… or under powered. Blizzard went a long way toward making tanking FUN. Yes… Fun I said.
Yes.. I tank with my face. My job is to beat my face on the bad man’s big left toe repeatedly till he says… “Ouch… a hang nail” and proceeds to try to pick my off his toe. Healers though… somehow their problem seems more dramatic.
Wrath Burnout
I’ve talked with several friends and the story always seems to be the same.
“Oh… we had a full set of healers… then so and so got burned out.”
“We had to have our top DPS/tank swap to healing because our healer went DPS/tank.”
Consistently the desire is to find a healer who can heal their way out of a paper bag, but Blizzard keeps making encounters challenging by making the fight SUCK for healers.
Lets look at Hodir… there’s a section of the fight during frozen blows where your raid will take 32k damage to each person (unresisted). Um… ok so every so often you’re gonna make the healers want to hate themselves? Yeah.. that’s a plan.
Mimiron has a consistent long fight with lots of damage spread in every possible way. In phase 1, you basically have massive ZOMG damage going on the tank. In phase 2, you have consistently high damage going on the raid all the time. In phase 3 you’re juggling a person getting hit by bomb bots as well as a ranged DPS who is now tanking and taking massive damage and a third tank rounding up mobs. In phase 4, we’ll throw all THREE of those things at you and see if you break AND throw in the need to almost constantly move in case you needed something else to do.
We go into General Vezak and Yogg Saron and the picture is the same…. oh.. you don’t regen mana… oh you have to watch santity… oh you’re going to be dodging tentacles…. and diving through portals… and.. and … and…
Losing the Touch with the DPS
I think the part that frustrates me most about it is that healer seem to be burning out a lot more frequently in this expansion. Just about the time I think I’ve got two solid healers lined up and ready to rock, we hit a snag and suddenly one of them needs a break. So now we’re down to one healer who is covering the bulk and two people filling in.
Hell at this point I’d have an entire team of people doing 3500 to 4k+ DPS if I didn’t have to keep making my top DPS heal to cover our slack. More DPS = less length of fight which means…… less stress on healers!!!!
But spreading people out means….. People not on their mains… not getting the gear they need meaning their progress slows down…. meaning? We don’t clear as much.
Bring Back the Fun
I’ve talked to some of the long time healers. I think it takes a certain person to consistently heal. Just like it takes a certain person to get consistently GOOD at tanking. There are plenty of what I’d deem “passable” tanks, but really good ones are kind of a special breed.
Healers are kind of similar. Its hard to come up with consistently good healers. Its also largely a very challenging mental exercise. You have to in some ways be able to do what I call “predictive analysis” if you are to be really good as a healer. You have to be able to know a fight well enough to know when the damage is going to land and then when you need to spin up your heals ahead of it.
Overall its not particularly fun in my opinion. I understand Blizzard’s problem. If they make healing too easy, suddenly, anyone can heal and the only way to balance a fight is to make it so that if you don’t execute “X” at the right time, you just die.. period end of story. That’s not particularly fun either. Or every fight becomes a tank and spank with a timer.
Then the fights transform from being healing limited to DPS limited. So now… you shift your emphasis. Which honestly I would like to see a bit more of. What I’ve seen in this expansion especially with Ulduar and beyond is that they put consistently high pressure on the healers to execute and execute perfectly. It seems to me that pressure on DPS is light. Yes… standing in bad stuff is bad, but so frequently the fights are built around large sums of environmental damage that’s just consistently pelting the raid.
That just doesn’t seem fun. Blizzard can you bring the fun back to healing in some way so I can stop burning them out???
Don’t mind me… I’ll be off in the corner…. looking for another healer.
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As a DPS rerolled to heals I am not looking forward to this… yet, I am looking forward to the challenge.
As you say, DPS’ greatest challenge is staying out of the fire/green/(insert some bio-hazard that the healers will have to clean up anyway), while perfecting their shot/cast/stabby rotation. OK as a DPS I know that this isn’t the only challenge.. but…
Adding more and more damage doesn’t necessarily make the encounters more interesting, it just makes life harder on the healers and tanks.
Mechanics like polarity shifts, anyi-magic/melee shields etc, spread the challenge around the whole party/raid.
Challenges of CC – producing it or getting away from it, make the encounters more interesting.
Dealing 99% damage to everyone in the raid and giving the healer 3 seconds to clean it up… well that’s a frustration not a challenge
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As a healer for all of BC and Wrath I get where you are coming from.
Look at our recent trip to TOC 10 man heroic. Basically the tanks getting the hell beaten out of them as ususal. But hey guess what you can only have 2 healers to beat the timer and also now the firebombs have a big dot on them as well requiring much more raid healing from you. But what to do as the tank is getting the hell kicked out of him needing your full attention.
Healing is becoming less about movement and staying out of fire while getting heals off as staying out of fire, getting heals off AND healing constant unavoidable raid damage.
Zetter
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I had had the thought that Wrath, or more accurately most of the content beyond T7, seemed particularly demanding on healers. Granted I don’t have a healer, so my perception is a bit different, but still. Look even at XT-002, in the tantrum phase he deals 80% total-health damage to the raid. No, that’s not a challenge for the healing team, not in the least. We’ve finally gotten too the point where we’ve managed to 2-healer that fight a couple times, trying to get the speed-kill, but we need a little refinement. Not to mention Hodir, where you have to constantly move (and try and stand in buffs as well), get away from this, but stay close to this, etc. Jaraxxus is another one, all kinds of raid damage effects, some of it very spikey, along with occasional focused need for massive healing… Or Iron Council on 10-man, you only have about 8 things that you have to have someone specificly watching to do, which leaves alot less people able to just burn out the DPS, to make things shorter, to get less things that have to be watched for, to allow ….
To be honest, from a DPS perspective, a lot of the movement that’s being required now is sort of fun in a way, I mean, ok, it’s kinda annoying, I like a stand there and burn-em-down fight as much as anyone for the pure bench-mark of it, but frankly it would get kinda boring if all the fights were like Patch or Archavon. Thinking on it, from a purely DPS pov, I’d probably have to say that fights like Grob, IC, and Thorim (I usually get to be on the tunnel team) are probably favorites of mine, even though I don’t really look forward to them. Some aspects are a pain, but that’s also what makes them a challenge, and a challenge is what really makes it fun.
I think that essentially, it was a different place to put a focus on, plus it’s the one they’ll hear the least about (sorta). I mean, if you put the stress on the tanks, everyone whines, if it’s on the DPS, well we can QQ like absolutely no one else in the game, and there’s more of us than everyone else usually. Healers, well they’re their own little pack, and more often than not they’re going to get blamed, not get sympathy. If the healers are having issues, the only ones that really understand it are them, and some of the raid-leaders. Everyone else just cries that they’re not staying alive, and the healers get frustrated because they’re doing the best they can, but they’ve gotta be damn near perfect to have a chance…
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As a pally healer, I can say that I thoroughly enjoy healing. However, I have to agree with Wiredude that healers don’t get the respect or sympathy that we sometimes need. With the advent of new tanking mechanics, tanking has become more accessible. With the rise of tankspot.com, maintankadin.com, etc., tanking has gained more prestige. The tank is assumed to have the most responsibility, gear min-maxing, raid leading etc. Using a football analogy, I see the tank as the quarterback, the off-tank and dps as skill positions, and the healers as the offensive line. If a play goes well, then the skill positions get the praise. If the play fails (for whatever reason), the line gets blamed. No one talks about the exceptional blocking of the line (except perhaps a former lineman) which allowed the big play, and rarely are the skill positions blamed for making a mistake unless it’s too obvious to cover (fumble or drop a pass i.e. stand in the flames). I like being a support player. I like helping others and staying out of the limelight. However, I want mistakes to be corrected and not blamed on healing. I also would like aomse praise when we doing something great.
As a healer who has recently made the transition to raid healing, I can say that there is a learning curve between 5-man and raid healing. You have to learn how to reconfigure you UI. I just added grid and had to watch a video on youtube so I had some inkling of how to configure it. You often need to know how to use and configure clique in addition. I’m not sure if you can hotkey everyone in a 10-man raid, but I know you can’t in a 25-man. You have to learn how to use grid and/or clique while using you hotkeys to use your various heals and move in various fights. That’s quite a bit to learn how to do! Also, mana management is a new issue to which you have to become accustomed. You also have to trust your other healers on their assigments. You usually need a few attempts with other healers just to understand their style and understand each other’s rolls. I’m not QQ’ing, I’m just highlighting the differences. If you’re a dps, you just click on a bigger boss. Your rotation doesn’t change; you only need to max your DPS. A tank may have to off-taunt or round up some adds, but I don’t the learning curve is as steep. Imagine having to shift targets between each GCD, and use a different attack depending on the situation. You also have to watch all the targets to make sure no target gets above a certain health as you DPS them.
Also, all the hard modes involed removing a healer. Going from 3 to 2 healers is huge. Try going from 6 to 5 dps and needing to do more dps!
I agree that having a crew of 3.5k+ dps makes a fight easier. However it makes it easier by duration, not intensity. Hordir is still a nigtmare for a pally whether it goes 3 or 5 minutes. We really appreciate the quicker burn, but that doesn’t reduce the mechanics of the fight. If the dps reduced the amount of frozed blows from 32k to 25k, then that would be a tangible reward.
For me, the challenge of the fight isn’t as bad as the comments and attitude of fellow raid members. I’ve only started raiding recently, and only in pugs. People aren’t always mean about it, but it is usually assumed that a healer wiped the raid. It’s never discussed whether a tank missed a cooldown and/or dps did something. I think my new healers are intimidated by the raid environment. I’ve only been playing since Wrath, but I try to read forums/watch videos to prepare for fights. It still took all my courage to heal for a pug because of the expecation set for healers. It seems futile to want to heal when everyone wants 2 leet heals for hardmodes. I have trouble in some regular fights, let alone hard modes. I think that encouraging healers would go a long way. I think putting blame where it needs to go would help. I just think some patience and understanding would help foster a better community of healers. This whole post was just an attempt to help understand healers a little better
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As a new healer for lich king, I can’t say for sure that it has gotten harder but I really suspect it has, especially for pally and shammy healers.
Even with the chain heal buff, I still find that I can’t effectively include it in my rotation without someone dying. I’m using a pretty haste heavy set with a Riptide -> LHW, LHW rotation to be able to try to cover the spike damage as much as possible.
I think the real problem was the addition of a smart heal component to the game (Circle of Healing, Wild Growth) that basically made it too easy to heal through normal damage (as a team). After that, the only way that Blizzard can challenge us healers is spike damage, either on tanks or the raid, and requiring movement.
And I do get burned out. After three nights of raiding as a healer in Ulduar and CC, I need some downtime in 5 mans and levelling. Jaraxxus is the worst for it. OMG is the spike damage awful on that fight. CC10 last night with two shammies and a priest healing, we just squeeked through on our 2nd attempt. (from a healing PoV, I think our main problem is that the other shammy was using a Chain Heal rotation).
A good example for me on this was last night we did Thor on hard mode in Ulduar 10. There were two healer myself as a druid and a pally.
Now for phase 2 the raid damage is mental as well as the tanks getting a good kicking we wiped all night on it making steady improvments and best shot was a 1% wipe.
But I found it mad as a healer the pally was running full out on the tanks with me trying to A) keep hots on the tanks for when the pally had to move out of AOE and B) heal all the raid damage from frost bolts ect. I didnt run out of mana but I was wishing to god my global cooldown was faster.
By the end of the evening I was shattered I can see why healers reroll dps a lot because of burnout especially if you are raiding 3-4 nights a week.
Zetter
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The problem with healing is the massive barriers to entry. (at least to be a “good” healer)
At first, you need a person who is ok with carrying a massive responsibility without the glory dance at the end. Second, you need a deep knowledge of your class. There are likely dozen’s of acceptable builds/stat priorities for each DPS class. Most healers have 1 or maybe 2 options. They have to know it biblically and execute it without faulter. A healer must run certain mods ( I know some “old school” don’t) like Healbot or Grid. They (like the tanks) have to know everyone’s job in every encounter in order to do their job right.
On top of all of these personality/mentality restraints there is also the hardware barrier. End game healers simply can’t be pinging +250 Lat, or running <25-30 fps. If you aren't running a "Gaming" machine, on a cable connection of some kind, you likely can't keep up…no matter how skilled you are. The split second decisions and executions are critical to the success of a healer. So often the failure of a healer is somthing beyond their control. A good healer also needs to have a 5+ button mouse, and knowledge of keybinding/macro building.
To sum it up, a healer has to be better than everyone else…period. This is why they burn out, and why there aren't 10 people lined up to take thier spot.