Friday, March 7, 2014

Healing in Warlords: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Cataclysm

So here's the big old grain of salt with all of this: I have never played a healer seriously at max level. While I do have my Horde Monk (who is level 87,) I have never healed in a raid, or a heroic dungeon for that matter. So all of this commentary will be in the context of theory and concept. Healing is, of course, also relevant to tanks, so I will approach the subject from that perspective as well.

Blizzard is once again looking at changing healing to address some of the concerns they have with the way it works now. Currently, mana regeneration and throughput are so high that players tend to spam powerful heals, and as a result, they have had to tune the damage of bosses and other enemies to be far more powerful relative to players' health.

Essentially, the situation is fairly similar to how it was in Wrath of the Lich King. During 3.1, there was a term called "the Ulduar Splat," which meant that a tank's health would bounce up and down from the massive hits they were taking and the massive heals they were receiving. Basically, if you didn't dodge, block, or parry two hits in a row, you might be dead. Tanks during Wrath ignored avoidance stats and focused almost entirely on stacking stamina and bonus armor where they could to increase the number of hits they could take before they went splat. Icecrown Citadel, when it came out, had a zone-wide debuff that reduced dodge chance by 20% so that they could tune the damage dealt by bosses lower, and all because healers were spamming too much. (In case you couldn't tell, WoW is a complicated game.)

The attempt to remedy this in Cataclysm was to nerf mana regeneration. Healers who had been used to spamming their most expensive heals now had to cut that out, lest they go out of mana. Unfortunately, this was a real crash for a lot of experienced healers. Indeed, this may be the single biggest contributor to my guild's fall from regular raiding in the beginning of Cataclysm, as many of our veteran healers refused to play the role anymore.

As the expansion progressed, and healers gained more spirit, healing became less painful, but the damage was done.

However, Blizzard still wants healers to have to use their full toolkit, and spamming powerful heals is not the way to do that. So now they are taking a different approach.

First of all, health pools relative to damage and healing will be roughly doubling. Obviously, it won't look like we have more health because of the item squish, but the idea is that with twice as much health, the healer has more time to figure out what the best heal for the situation is, and has more time to get the player healed up to full, but pays for that by having to work harder to get that person to full health.

In a way, really what this is doing is slowing down the healing game. This means that there's less likelihood that a HoT will wind up over healing. If your Paladin tank hits his 5-Bastion-stack Word of Glory right after you throw a Riptide on him, it will now be more likely that there is still healing to be done, and thus the Riptide is not a waste.

One of the reasons that the mana regeneration nerf in Cataclysm was so painful was the transition of gear. Players who had spent a year in ICC-quality epics at level 80 were suddenly reintroduced to being in low-powered greens and blues, and the spells they used to spam were now draining them of mana. This was also back when Intellect increased mana pools, so they also had to deal with the fact that a spell that once cost 2% of their total mana was now costing 8% (numbers are made up, but you get the idea.)

In a way, the static mana pool (and the fact that heals have to balanced around that percentage of your total mana regardless of your gear) has already done its part in solving this problem.

But Blizzard is going farther by increasing baseline mana regeneration and reducing the amount of Spirit one has on one's gear. The idea here is to flatten the difference in mana regeneration between a fresh 100 healer versus a tier 19 (one assumes that's the final tier for Warlords) raider.

With mana pools static and the delta in mana regeneration narrowed, what, then, does a healer gear for? Throughput. With bigger health pools relative to damage and healing, the best thing a healer can work on is maximizing their throughput.

The solution does have some potential pitfalls - for example, if it gets to a point where you can cast your expensive spells without going out of mana, we may return to spammy gameplay. But I think that this solution seems like it will be easier to adjust to than the Cataclysm changes.

One little note for tanks: we're not exempt here. Self-healing is going to be less powerful than it has been relative to our health pools, but again, we'll have more time to react. I suspect that active mitigation abilities will still be powerful. Indeed, this might make Shield Block and Savage Defense more attractive compared to Shield Barrier and Enraged Regeneration. The one tank healing ability I doubt will be affected is Death Strike, as it is already proportional to damage taken, and seeing as that will be nerfed equally with allies' healing, it will be appropriately nerfed by default. I do suspect that Death Strike's minimum healing, which is based on the Death Knight's health, might be the one aspect of that ability that gets a true nerf.

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