Ya fights to the finish cause you eats me spinach
There’s a really interesting conversation going on over on the official healing forum right now about how to make healing more interesting. The gist of Ghostcrawler’s position is that healing becomes boring when the content becomes outgeared or healing mechanics become too powerful. Whereas DPS can still have fun by trying to bring a boss down as quickly as possible, and tanks can have fun by trying to add damage or dropping gear or trying for the highest mitigation, healers are able to either do laughable DPS or just sit back on their heals and pick their nose in these situations. He suggests that he’d like to see the healing mechanics change for Cataclysm as follows:
…higher health pools but also lower heals (and tank avoidance) overall. Hopefully everyone won’t be on the verge of almost dying, yet the risk of overhealing will be more real such that you can’t just madly spam all of the time if you want to make it to the end of the encounter.
While this would certainly make healing more challenging in every situation, not just when the party outgears the interest, it isn’t exactly a radical shift. It’s very similar, in fact, to what we’ve already seen many times. We get too powerful, they nerf our spells, ,we get more gear and get too powerful again. It seems like if Blizzard really wanted to make healing more interesting they should get out of the box and get a new perspective on things. I know that’s not easy to do in any case, but I was thinking about it today and I had an idea. Don’t know if it would work… at all… but it seemed like it would be fun and add a whole new dynamic to the game…
What if our overheals actually increased group success in some way, but there was some cost to be paid for it?
For example, what if overheals began to add a stacking buff to the target that enhanced what they were doing? Tanks could get an increased threat buff (or increased damage), DPS would get increased damage, healers would get increased healing or spell power. If you use a medical analogy for healing, the actual healing would be like taking the needed dose of medicine. The overhealing would be like taking medicine plus vitamins and supplements, like Popeye eating his spinach.The benefit could be balanced against the shifted threat mechanics (if DPS buff gets too high they’ll pull aggro from the tanks so healers would want to carefully choose how much to overheal DPS). Or perhaps the healer’s mana cost for spells could begin to increase incrementally for each overhealing buff stack that was out there on their party or raid. Or there could be a limited number of buffs any healer could cause to be up at one time. Or maybe having a buff from overhealing would also decrease the effectiveness of further incoming heals on the target by a percentage, causing healers to need to weigh the costs. It’s kind of fun to think about possibilities.
This may not be a tenable idea. What I know about video game design you could fit in a thimble. But it does seem an interesting solution to the problem that the contribution of healers to an encounter can only reach a certain level before it just becomes waste. DPS getting better and better is omfg awesome, dropping bosses like flies. Tanks getting better and better may not have impact scalable to DPS, but the bosses will still go down quicker. Once you reach a threshold where everyone is healed, though… there’s just nowhere else for that to go. Especially for druids who heal in tree form and cannot do any damage at all. At the very least, my little idea made something useful out of healers going above and beyond. Their overhealing would contribute to the increased efficiency of completing the encounter, but would have some type of limits or ramifications that made the mechanic interesting.
I don’t know if I would enjoy this if it were in place, mind you. It might be a huge pain in the ass, totally unwieldy. But it IS interesting, isn’t it, to think about us having the ability to affect the fight in some way other than keeping mana bars to 100%? I wish that Blizzard would do some thinking along THOSE lines. Not necessarily adopting my own idea, but looking for others that lie outside of the box they seem to be in. If not, we’re in for more of the same. OP healers>healing nerfs>nerfed healers getting better gear>OP healers. After a while that cycle seems to just be a spiral down into nowhere.
There are 9 Comments to "Ya fights to the finish cause you eats me spinach"
Maybe instead of buffing damage/etc, healers could do interesting and varied things, such as:
1) Power Infusion (haste/lower casts)
2) Replenish (the Druid talent)
3) Other ways to influence the raid’s output rather than just damage increases, such as ways to give Death Knights RP. If healers could do this, you could partner healers with DPS classes to increase raid DPS. Could be interesting.
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Hmmm, I do like this idea. Perhaps rather than it being something that is specifically overhealing, it could just be a separate spell altogether that provides mini-buffs of some kind. Then, rather than just spamming heals, we would have to divide our attention between our normal healing (boring in the easy fights we’re talking about) and spreading around these buffs as much as possible. Of course, this could just be annoying rather than more interesting
But it’s something to think about!
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I’m still confused where people are thinking this change is anything like what they’ve done in the past. The statement “It’s very similar, in fact, to what we’ve already seen many times.” is completely untrue. Its very similar to what they’ve *said* they’ll do in the past, but as yet they’ve failed to ever live up to the promise.
This change will only work not by your terms of 60% down to 35%, but 60% down to 10%.
If I have HT that does 20K health, and the tank has 150K, then the boss can hit for 30K every 2 secs and I can’t solo heal them, nor can I keep spamming my highest without mana issues, but it takes a good 10 secs of no healing before they die. It returns it back to where vanilla was in that tanks took a number of hits before dying, but keeping them alive solo on fights like Chromaggus would drain your mana too fast.
We need the time to chose HPM spells over HPS spells, and we need the incentive to manage our mana. As it is, I don’t know of any single non-HM fight where I’ve heard a healer go “Fully OOM, regenning for a bit, take over on X” during Wrath or late BC. Healers can’t race the DPS meters, and the current “Heart Attack every 5 secs” style is not a ‘fun’ one, not because it isn’t challenging to keep them up, but because a single misstep or half-second pause can wipe the group in an environment where counting wipes is directly affecting your loot. Healers are generally group-oriented, definitely smarter than DPS and we’re constantly running on Triage Mode, so we need challenges involving decision making instead of competition.
Triage Mode – What I mean by this is like the First Aid quest at 225 skill. You have a number of dying people at various stages and you need to prioritise what you can save, and what’s most important to save, and what you use to save them, based on their role, the upcoming damage, your mana pool, and your spells available, plus whatever other healers are around you.
Its that kind of situation that got me into healing in the first place, and as time has gone by we’ve gotten further and further away from it. This change *if implemented properly this time* will hopefully return us more towards that situation.
Brent, I guess that I misunderstood the scope of the change. Regardless, however, it still seems very unimaginative to me. /shrug
Maybe the problem is that since you have to be a good player to be a healer or tank, we breed bad DPS. We are good at what we do so we can heal the morons with no situational awareness and keep alive those that stand in the fire/blizzard/void zone, etc. This allows them to continue to be morons because they know they don’t have to react as quick and also because its not their responsibility to monitor theitr health.
It would be nice mechanic for us healers where the game would recognize when someone dies during an encounter (in the way failbot can identify those idiots) and then it would translate to increased stam or something to the rest of the group. Not enough to make up the loss of DPS but maybe like a 2 min buff. To avoid people dying on purpose and then getting a battle rez you can make the person have an option to give the buff to the group and be ineligible for a battle rez or not give the buff and be eligible.
They should make everyone take a mandatory 6 month break from the game. I healed 25-man VoA today, after just recently coming back from such a break. I was healing my ass off, it was crazy, I had no idea what was going on, it was fun and exciting and quite challenging!
That is not what spinach looks like by the way.