It's not just healers, it's tanks also that are in short demand because of changes to their own self-healing.DPS who don't heal or tank don't really know what the fuss is about, you have to play either role to know exactly what is going on, unless you play something like paladin with off healing.I main paladin and even the changes that have been made to WoG are hurting, I can only off heal so much in both ret and prot spec so I need to be careful and manage my mana and I am not even the healer.When they made that change along with all the other main healing changes it really changed how the game was played for the majority of us, all just to try and make the game harder and stop players from running M25 with no healer, well that didn't work, the better players still are doing that and the rest of us are suffering for it.
What's a Healer? Everyone I know focuses on DPS'ing more than anything.
honestly unless the rework the defensives on the tanky dps roles(mages, warlock, etc.) cause there are squishy roles(Druids), but the problem is if you make all dps roles squishy than you put even more pressure on the healers, if anything make the dps roles naturally tanky through passive like some classes are, and get rid of one of there good def cd. i know there are probably better ways but im not a balance guru either lol.
Healing sucks.I can tell because healers don't sign up for my groups.Neither do tanks.There's a reason nobody is playing these roles.Cause they suck and are not fun to play.The game has become way too focused on damage. So people that like healing don't feel like the role is for them anymore. Cause they spend 90% of their time doing damage anyways so why not just play a DPS instead?Blizzard has focused on "E-sportsing" their game so much that it's no longer fun to play. It's a chore.
I think they realize healing is archaic and are phasing out the healer role and moving to 1 tank 1 support 3 DPS.
As a healer myself, I see a few problems with healers in Dragonflight (and recent expansions in general).- Certain specs have an enormous emphasis on damage prevention/healing set up in their general rotation, leading to frustration for inexperienced players who don't know the mechanics and timers of a dungeon/raid by heart, but also frustration when a more reactive spec beats you in healing, only because they have 1 button to press to achieve the same result you need to set up in 4/5 globals (typically, dealing with raid wide damage as an evoker, druid or disc requires a lot more set up than a paladin, monk or shaman).EDIT : For the sake of precision, I'm not against anticipation being core to some specs. But imo there should be a balance to strike. Anticipating fights you know well should be the most effective way to play those specs, not the only way. You shouldn't feel powerless when you're caught off guard as ANY spec. For a specific example, every group wide heal as an evoker is based on set up (with the echo duplication mechanic or the Stasis cooldown), or a very long cast (spiritbloom heals more people with more charging, dream breath needs more charging to heal more upfront, dream flight has a travel time, Emerald Blossom is only worth casting when fully charged by the Ouroboros talent). The only "reaction" spell you can use when there's an unexpected wave of damage is Rewind, but in most encounters it's a spell you DON'T use reactionally, you plan it out in advance to cancel a big damage event from a boss.- Ressource management is generally just a burden and misses an obvious opportunity to add a fun gameplay loop. It's not a minigame, it's just choosing when it's worth it to spend your mana and when it's better to save it. If you're running a key or a raid with people who are a bit under-geared, make a bit too many mistakes, you can't "manage your mana" better. You'll heal what you need to heal and run out of mana if the fight lasts too long or players make too many mistakes. It would be great if healers had a miniature gameplay loop to sacrifice gcds to regain mana, instead of just passive regeneration. We have a little bit of that with paladins' daybreak or monks' mana tea, but it's abilities you basically use once every minute and don't think about it otherwise. Maybe shamans could receive a percentage of mana back based on missing health of the target (to keep with the concept of their mastery). Maybe paladins could have their seal of wisdom back, and have to manage small periods of melee attacks to regain a bit of mana. Evokers could have a charge ability, which gives you mana back and a healing bonus (charging more would grant the most amount of mana, but the smallest bonus to healing, so that in low-damage periods you could charge longer to get more mana, and in high-intensity healing scenarios, you'd sacrifice the mana gain to gain a greater healing bonus).Currently, a healer has two "modes" : healing when necessary (and risking going oom if there's too much going on or you overheal too much), and dealing damage because there's nothing else to do. With a mana-regen element added to their gameplay, you'd have a better choice to make : either deal damage when there's nothing to heal, or use that downtime to generate more ressources if you feel you'll need it. It would be more engaging, less frustrating/restricting, and it would keep you busy without having to do "pity damage" to compensate.- This point is tied to the mana issue, but recently, it feels like every encounter is designed this way : big bursts of damage with downtime in between where there's little to heal (because if you did have soemthing to heal in between, you'd run out of mana). In this design, there's only one way to increase the difficulty of healing over an expansion : making the damage bigger, on a shorter period. But because it makes you pump out more healing, and mana bars don't increase over an expansion, you spend more mana during those damage windows. So downtime has to increase to compensate, giving you more time to passively regenerate mana. It's ridiculous. I want to have more to do during a fight than healing for 20% of the fight and spending the rest of my time hitting the boss like a wet noodle. Big healing windows are good but we also need to have constant, lighter pressure during a fight. But of course, we can't have that until the mana situation is dealt with.- As mentioned in the article, more and more of damage sources are preventable by the "victim", which is great for dps and tanks having more agenda in the damage they receive, but it takes away from the role of healers. It's a difficult balance to strike. Too much unpreventable damage and people feel like they're at the mercy of the healer. Too little and the healer has nothing to do during an encounter (it's what we saw in this week's MDI, with 4 dps comps, and even more during the first season of dragonflight). Right now, the balance is a little skewed towards "too much damage is preventable". But there's not other solution than feeling the waters and trying to balance the game accordingly.- Small pet peeve but honestly fmu everytime I heal on my paladin or evoker. Sort out the friendly healthbars UI so we can toggle them ONLY on allies below 100% health. Many abilities (light's hammer, dream breath, cone of light, emerald blossom, holy word: sanctify, faeline stomp) do healing in a direction or in a targettable area. Since it's arguably necessary for healers to hit enemies/cc them in the current design of the game, you need to have enemy nameplates on, but because of those abilities, you also want friendly nameplates on. The problem emerges when you have EVERYTHING on, all the time, independantly of friendlies' health. In a raid environment, you end up with so many nameplates, models and spell effects, you can't even figure out who's injured and who's not. I don't know if mythic pros have a "method" to this, but every healer I've talked to tell me they basically aim with those aoe spells blindly, and just hope for the best. It's a silly and unintuitive design. Let us have an option to toggle friendly nameplates specifically when they're injured (or have the nameplate color go from green to red base on health%), so we KNOW where and when to use our aimed spells. Thanks.
I do not enjoy the wack-a-mole that healing has become. I still heal in both M+/Raid/PvP and this expansion is the worst that healing has felt in a long time. Thing is, the healing is not hard, it is just annoying and not fun. I don't need to watch mana, I don't need to worry about groups being CC'd. All I do as a healer is deal with the huge spikes in damage, then go back to my DPS rotation. The annoying thing wit the spikes in damage though is the 1 shots. That is not fun to heal through.
Defensives really have gotten out of control. If the key is low a healer can carry people through war crimes. But at the same time in those situations, the healer who is saving these people knows they are working so hard because this person is too incompetent to hit one of their 3-7 defensives, on top of getting hit by the unnecessary amount of avoidable damage that is present in current wow expansions. There is just too many mechanics on raid bosses, way too many stops necessary for m+ trash, and dps/healers have way too many defensives.
I think his take is kind of tunnel visioned on his own experience. He admits in the video that healers are regularly getting overwhelmed in the lower end because people aren't pressing defensives and in the sludgefist fight you had only 10 seconds to top off the raid after a major damage event or people died which is easy for an experienced top-end raid healer but a struggle for newer players. He should probably frame his arguments that they are intended for high-difficulty play and not talking to the other parts of the game. After the damage/health adjustments that came during season 2 a lot of healers in the middle tier and lower tier just stopped playing and it became very hard to find anyone but then we have theun here talking about how we have too many tools and options for extreme throughput. unless his argument is to bake more of the healing into the base kit I don't know if his arguments will really benefit anyone besides high-end healers.
i think shaman should not have such a long cast spells and should have also single target spell that allow him to be cast insta with small cooldown , plus Healing over time from shaman is very weak and pointess replace this and some usless healing from talent with some healing overtime while being maybe protected ? some wind healing spells ?
Healing should be the braindead, easy af role that anyone can do ie. new UI updates to make it easy to pick up since literally no one wants to play it and there's always a shortage. Tuning around high end m+ is pointless...the recent M+ event was maxing out at 10k viewers lol.
The thing I think makes healing boring currently is that so much has become a yo-yo scenario. Health goes up and down as fast as a yo-yo and that is just not fun, I think.There are so many things that can one-shot you and there is little you can do about it other than immunities, strong defensives or the like. Making a single mistake, even if its just a toe too close to a circle on the ground, just annhielate someone. I have many times thought that if the brewmasters good old stagger was given to everyone, it would make things a lot more fun. I don't actually think that is specifically a good idea. But the point is, make damage a high overtime throughput rather than massive spikes. This gives healers and others a chance to react, spend cooldowns and dump mana in to saving people instead of just watching someone implode instantly.I really enjoy healing in general, and at some point you get to keys so high things simply do too much damage to avoid spikes, but I still wish they would do something to minimize or remove spike damage to instead replace it to higher overtime damage. Kinda like bursting, in some ways. Bursting is survivable, even if you screw it up and get too many stacks by popping cooldowns and defensives and expending your toolkit because it gives you a little bit of time to react at least. I think that would be more fun in general since it gives you a better chances to actually do your job of healing. Although I have no real good suggestions on how.