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.

Bringing Stats In Line

Warriors love crit. I mean that they LOVE it. Crit is so important to Warriors that an upgrade piece from a new raid may not, in fact, actually be better if it does not have this holiest of stats (well, not Holy, that's Paladins. Most Brutal?)

Warriors are designed around critical strikes. In addition to the obvious benefit of the crit - doubling the damage of any attack - Warriors are also fueled by crit through Enrage, a passive that causes their major abilities to increase their damage and grant them a bit of Rage every time they crit. Currently, tanks favor dodge and parry, but only because Riposte gives them crit from those stats on top of the benefit of avoidance.

The three Mage specs are each built to focus on a particular stat. Much like Warriors, Fire gets a lot of benefit from crit, as it fuels the Hot Streak proc that really forms the central mechanic of the spec. Arcane is built entirely around its Mastery, which makes the management of Mana not only about having enough to cast your next spell, but also just making sure that you're staying as topped up as you can. Frost, admittedly, has less of a special reason to favor Haste, but the point here is that Blizzard clearly designs these specs around favoring a different secondary stat - it's reflected even in the various Armor spells that they use. The Arcane-flavored Mage Armor increases Mastery, the Fire-flavored Molten Armor grants Crit, and Frost Armor grants Haste.

These days, through enchanting, gemming, and reforging, there's basically an expectation for us to try to squeeze absolutely as much out of that one secondary stat we want as we can.

But this can't really be sustained in the face of the changes coming to us in 6.0. Reforging is going away completely. Likewise, gem sockets will be rarer (though the gems that fill them will be more powerful, so it could balance out.)

Hit and Expertise are going away, but DPS will simply replace them with Readiness and Multistrike (barring further cuts.) Dodge and Parry are also going away, and tanks will start using the same stats as DPS.

Now granted, gear will be more commonly available to us. There will be more gear we can use than there used to be. Really, armor will only be divided between the four armor classes. Rogues will be able to use any kind of Leather. Warriors will be able to use any kind of Plate.

And given that wider availability (and the likelihood of expansion of the LFR-style of loot assignment making competition a non-issue, at least in any automatically-matchmade group,) we may simply have more gear to pick and choose from, and more easily be able to put together a set of gear that emphasizes our preferred secondary stats.

Yet I also feel like this is an opportunity to really look at the value of these stats to various specs and classes. Sure, crit is great for Warriors, but why not make the other stats interesting? For instance, Haste does relatively little for a DPS Warrior, and even less for a Tank - it increases the speed of their auto-attacks, which grants a little Rage (in Battle or Berserker stance,) and might make their Deep Wounds tick more frequently, but it's not nearly enough to compete.

Honestly, though, I'm not a theory crafter, and I realize that in many of these cases, Blizzard doesn't go out of their way to make a stat better or worse. Indeed, Frost Death Knights seem like they ought to like Crit the least, given how Killing Machine devalues it, yet the math (apparently) says that crit's the way to go - even gemming pure crit instead of emphasizing Strength (though one of my upcoming experiments is to switch around my DK's gems to go the strength route and see what effect that has on his DPS, if only because I just don't get how crit is supposed to be so good for them.)

Still, with somewhat less customization in our gear (which is fine, if you ask me,) it would, I think, behoove Blizzard to work on bringing things in line.

Cooldowns and Ability Pruning

The first of the long-awaited "Dev Watercooler" articles is up, and they're discussing the mechanics of the item squish as well as the philosophy behind the pruning our spell books will be getting, as well as a little word on bringing racial abilities into balance.

We also got several tweets about various specific class abilities.

First off, it appears that Amplify and Cleave are both getting nixed after the experiments in SoO (I always thought Cleave would be shunted off to the tertiary level, but either way, it's nice not to have one more way you can accidentally hit more than you wanted to (though these days CC in PvE is pretty rare.)

Amplify I always thought was a little uninteresting as a stat, as it only affected your other stats (though boosting crit and multi strike damage was maybe more interesting?) I'm not shedding a tear.

On the subject of abilities, it looks like one of their goals is to reduce the number of redundant cool downs, either by eliminating some or merging some (I believe the crit damage bonus of Skull Banner might get rolled into Recklessness, for example.) Likewise, Bloodlust/Heroism/Time Warp/Ancient Hysteria is going to stand alone as the one major raid damage cool down, with Skull Banner and Stormlash Totem going away.

There's little on cutting down rotational abilities, but I'm hoping that we get a little of that (the hunter level 90 tier is a little frustrating. It might not be so bad if those replaced other abilities, but as it is, it's easy to be playing and say "crap! I forgot Glaive Toss again!)

Perhaps of more interest to the PvPers, the various diminishing-return categories of crowd control are getting slimmed down a lot to allow the DR effect to truly help. Likewise, they're significantly cutting back on pet-based CC and cutting back on instant-cast CC.

In terms of racial abilities, one of the biggest blanket effects is that weapon racials are all going out the window, and getting compensated with new abilities. So long, my Paladin's preference for Swords and Maces. One of the nice effects that this, and other racial redesigns will have is that they should make the racial abilities more generally applicable. Right now, the Human Spirit does jack for me as a tank, but the idea they're having is that you'll be able to select two secondary stats to boost by a small amount. Racial damage cool downs, like Berserking, are going to get nerfed to be more in line with the other abilities. One ability that seems pretty interesting is for Night Elves, which gives them 1% haste at night and 1% crit during the day.

Pretty exciting revelations, and I'm pretty happy with all of them (though it'll still look weird for my Paladin to wield an axe, which I've actually managed to avoid for the vast majority of my time playing him.)

However, I don't think we'll be able to get the real picture until the Beta is out, which Blizzard claims is "Soon (TM.)"

The Role of the Warlords

Warlords of Draenor obviously has a big rogue's gallery of major figures who will play an important part in the game's story. I wrote an article not long after the announcement of the expansion speculating on the roles each Warlord would play, and while the flood of information I was hoping for last weekend has been more of a light shower, we do know a little more about some of them:

Blackhand, who in our timeline was the first Warchief of the Horde, will be the final boss of Blackrock Foundry. Blackhand was never really any more than a puppet of Gul'dan, and seems to be basically a dumb brute. That said, the Blackrock Clan has essentially become the industrial wing of the Iron Horde, quickly transforming their native Gorgrond into the Iron Horde's arms-making factory.

Just as an aside here, many of the famous members of the Horde are Blackrocks, such as Varok Saurfang, Eitrigg, and Orgrim Doomhammer. If we encounter any of these, I'm skeptical any except perhaps Eitrigg would be all that friendly. Saurfang and Eitrigg lived long enough to regret the brutality of the old Horde, but this would be the time of their youth. Doomhammer was free of demonic corruption, but like Garrosh, this did not stop him from leading the Horde in brutal conquest.

Onto the other confirmed leaders:

Ner'zhul will be the primary antagonist of Shadowmoon Valley's quests, and will be the final boss of the Shadowmoon Burial Grounds, one of Warlords' dungeons, where he retreats after a shocking event that I will not get into here for the spoiler conscious (it's also pre-Beta, and some might recall how there were sound files in 5.1's PTR where Anduin was killed by Garrosh, so... nothing's set in stone yet.)

It's unclear whether Ner'zhul's alternate fate of becoming the original Lich King will be touched on here, but they seem to be playing up his "speaker to the dead" angle, and given that we face him in something called "Burial Grounds," I could imagine dealing with some kind of necromancy.

Gul'dan is the most intriguing. In fact, my previous article describes how he may not even be an enemy (or at least we might not fight him.) Frankly, there are two ways I would go with Gul'dan, and they are not mutually exclusive. First is that he takes the place of Wrathion as the expansion-spanning Legendary chain guy. Sure, that establishes a weird pattern of having only the sketchiest people doing Legendaries (though arguably, with Wrathion having two legendary chains and everything about Shadowmourne being a bit unsettling, this isn't really anything new.)

The other option would be to have Gul'dan as the final boss of the expansion. If the Iron Horde falls apart, Gul'dan stands to benefit, and the Orcs of alternate Draenor - at least some of them - might turn to the blood of Mannoroth out of desperation, much as they did in Ashenvale during the Third War.

Finally, Durotan is going to be playing the role of the leader of the Frostwolves, who will be the main Horde faction. While I won't rule out some twist where he turns bad, I think it's most likely that Durotan will simply be the "good Warlord" out of the headlining seven.

So that leaves Kilrogg, Kargath, and Grommash.

This is pure speculation, but I could imagine Kilrogg and Kargath as being antagonists in Tanaan Jungle and Spires of Arakk, respectively. They could wind up as dungeon bosses (which would make Kargath's second, after Shattered Halls) or we might even defeat them in solo questing (or solo scenarios) at the end of major quest chains.

And of course, then there's Grommash. Admittedly, if you just watch the trailer, Grom seems like the obvious final boss, but given that his son, another G. Hellscream was the final boss of Mists, I hope that they do something different with him. What that is, I really can't imagine.

My Enemy's Enemy is... Still a Horrifying Person - Alternate Gul'dan

I had theorized that the most powerful mortal warlock in Warcraft might play an unusual role in this expansion, and guess what?

Well, nothing's confirmed, but in a recent interview, Ion Hazzikostas mentioned that Gul'dan is decidedly not with the Iron Horde, and may in fact prove to be something of an ally against them.

Obviously, this is problematic for both Alliance and Horde.

Gul'dan may not have meant anything all that specific to the races of the Alliance. He was the shadowy man behind the throne of the original Horde, and as such is certainly responsible for the genocide of the Draenei and the First and Second wars. Yet the original Gul'dan was mostly an external threat. We know that even in this alternate Draenor, Gul'dan has a direct line to Kil'jaeden, and as such represents just about everything the Alliance stands against. Yet as an enemy of the Iron Horde, some of the more reckless members of the Alliance (read: us) might reach out to him, or far more likely, the Grand Master of the Shadow Council might reach out to us.

In the case of the Horde, things get a lot weirder and a lot trickier. Make no mistake, the Iron Horde is a menace, and we all saw that Garrosh's vision for the Horde is a horrifying, essentially fascistic war machine. Yet the Horde from our original timeline was that and more. On top of the insane militarism and brutality, the old Horde was run by warlocks, and happily tampered with dark magics to defile the very nature of its people.

Our Horde, in that sense, was worse than the Iron Horde.

Yet our Horde has gone through an incredible transformation. First by cutting off the flow of demon blood, and then integrating such benevolent races as the Tauren, Blood Elves (once Kael'thas was gone) and the Darkspear Trolls (definitely the nicest of troll tribes,) the current Horde has had to at least settle into some kind of stable state that isn't all about constant conquest. Yes, our Horde was bad, but it has spent the last 30-40 years learning from the past, and the recent civil war essentially settled that the old ways were being put behind them. The Iron Horde, on the other hand, is too young to have learned these lessons.

Yet here is Gul'dan. Gul'dan represents everything that the Horde has left behind - the cruelty and barbarism, and the callous apathy toward morals and ethics (setting aside the Forsaken - that's the big asterisk in all of this.)

By teaming up with Gul'dan, would the Horde be proving Garrosh right? That they had become too weak, and too willing to compromise themselves in order to gain power?

And beside all that, there's another big question:

If we ally with Gul'dan against the Iron Horde, what does he get out of the deal? There is no way in hell (or the twisting nether) that anything good will come of it.

Proving Grounds as a Requirement for Random Matchmaking

Blizzard has announced a new prerequisite for queueing in the dungeon finder for heroic dungeons. In order to be put in a group (NOTE: This ONLY applies to randomly-assigned matchmaking groups. Premade groups don't have to worry about this,) you must first beat the silver-level Proving Grounds challenge for your given role.

So, if I want to tank Heroic Auchindoun (random example, it's the only Warlords dungeon I could name off the top of my head,) I first have to get through the silver-level tank challenge.

Two big things here have not been confirmed:

We don't know if success in the Mists of Pandaria challenges will count toward this. I have silver in DPS and Tanking, so I'm mostly set. However, there will be an updated version of proving grounds, so these may not carry over. No word yet.

We also don't know if this will be per-character or per-account. Currently the Proving Grounds achievements are account-wide, but while there has been no such announcement, it stands to reason they might require you to do it on each class or character on whom you plan to run.

A couple other notes:

Given that this will no be a requirement, Blizzard says that they will try much harder to make sure that Proving Grounds is balanced between classes and specs.

Quest gear should get you into level 100 normal dungeons and scenarios, and the gear from that is should get you into heroic dungeons (not that this is news. This has been the case pretty much since heroic dungeons first existed.)

This will not be a requirement for LFR, and in fact, gear from those normal dungeons and scenarios is meant to get you into LFR (no word on if heroic dungeon gear will actually be better than LFR.)

Heroics are going to be more of a challenge than normal dungeons (obviously,) and likely more difficult than Mists heroics, but the hope is that they will not be "brutally difficult" (I'm looking at you, Cataclysm.)

After quickly running over and doing the tank silver challenge on Jarsus, I think that this could, potentially, be quite nice. So often I come across people queued as tanks or healers that clearly don't know what they're doing, so it should be quite nice to set the bar a little higher for entry. Just knowing that, say, a tank cannot pass that test without being able to pay attention to multiple mobs, and be able to position and taunt, it forces everyone to at least learn the very basics.

Admittedly, there will be situations where those basic skills need to be combined in unusual ways, and I'm sure Proving Grounds won't work perfectly, but given that it's a reasonable challenge - not face roll, but not Kanrethad Ebonlocke level - it seems like an exciting solution.

Big Flood of Warlords Info Incoming

There was recently a press event held in Korea for World of Warcraft, with several people given the opportunity to play the latest version of the game, starting in either Shadowmoon Valley or Frostfire Ridge. So far, the Orc (male at least,) Dwarf (both!) and Gnome (not sure about female) are all playable in their new models.

This appears to be a far more complete version. According to MMO-Champion (where I've gotten this information,) Shadowmoon Valley apparently feels more or less finished, including a climactic event that occurs at the end of the zone's main quests (there are spoilers in that link, so beware if you're worried about ruining something for yourself.)

Additionally, there appears to be an option to toggle new and old racial models. So if you can't stand the new ones for some reason, you can revert to the old ones. While we'll have to wait and see if this goes live, I think this is a great way of swiping away any complaints people might have about the character revamps.

As of yet, it does still appear that there is only one facial option per new model, but I fully expect this will be fixed. Given that they don't seem to be offering recustomizations (at least that's the plan right now,) I think that at the very least we can expect that Blizzard will give us updated versions of each of the current face options.

In the linked videos (and if you're like me, try to suppress how much it bothers you that the person playing is just randomly hitting various abilities and choosing talents at random. They must have had limited time, or something) we get glimpses of the siege of Karabor, where the Alliance hero is accompanied by a Draenei Paladin named Y'rel, who we've been told will be a central figure. The Horde character meets up with our Thrall and alternate-universe Drek'thar and goes to meet with Durotan, but I don't remember seeing much else that was all that exciting. Most notable thing about the Horde video is that Thrall is back in the old black doomplate.

Anyway, I think that we can expect a lot of new information over the next few days or even hours. Likewise, this bodes well for an oncoming Beta. Bring it on, Blizzard!