Spacehunter wrote:
I think Cata has brought it back and amplified it. The result is its hurting healers more than anything, which goes to what Tuhl is saying. The main mechanical change here is making the faceroll heals so horribly expensive. But this i don't view as being a direct "make healing hard" kind of deal. I view it more as a "do this fight properly or your healer will hate you".
This then comes back to the strategy and definitely social aspect. If people cannot do it properly your healer is gonna get ass raped as he will be forced to use inefficient heals. Likewise if people dont want to do it properly you will get the same result.
Take a very very simply example: the first trash pack in Stonecore, even on Regular. This pack is fairly brutal. Those aoe spinny earth guys do a lot of damage, Millhouse has that aoe spam thing, and there's about 5-6 mobs total. Ideally you would CC some of them, nuke millhouse, and focus down a couple of others 1 by 1. Instead tanks charge in, no marking, no cc, DPS aoe, and the healer expends his entire mana bar on a single trash pack when if he'd done it 'properly' i wager at least half the healers, and almost all % of the ones who understand the mana costs of their spells now would end the fight on 90% mana.
WotLK told us we didn't have to do it properly. Cata says we have to. One extreme to the other. Quite neat really.
This sums it up well. I was a shadow priest in the last few months of Wrath, leveled to 85 as shadow, and have since been doing dungeons and heroics as holy to avoid hour long queues. Most of the mana QQ I'm reading (from holy priests at least) is from players who either continue to spam flash heal, prayer of healing, or greater heal while trying to keep the group topped off. I'll admit, for my first Cata dungeon I did the same thing. Then I noticed the insane mana costs for each spell, and how mana costs seem to have increased exponentially for each level since 81. Comparing the growth of mana costs with that of mana pools, it's easy to see why it can be problematic without a playstyle adjustment.
So I started thinking, in Wrath mana wasn't a problem at all. Overhealing didn't matter at all because you could regen faster than you could cast. With this no longer being the case, I started looking at the overhealing meter on recount, and figured every point of overheal is wasted mana. I started focusing on using smaller, more efficient heals, and larger and/or faster heals situationally, and really dove into holy as a spec, and I'm absolutely loving it. I'm at a point now where I can clear heroic trash without drinking while maintaining overheal under 1.5% for the entire dungeon. I've learned how to properly use Chakra with heal to keep renews rolling on tanks, get free instant flash heals, and holy word: serenity for a stupidly efficient instant cast 10k heal. Or for group damage, Chakra with PoM to turn holy word: chastise into a ground effect AoE heal. And oh yeah- lightwell is fuxing amazing now.
So it's not that making faceroll heals expensive makes it hard, it's using the right combination of 12 or 13 spells, knowing which to use at what time, and what to do in "oh shit" moments that makes it "hard" (which to me makes it fun and interesting, not so much hard).
Seriously, healing as a holy priest has so much depth now, I've used virtually every ability more than a few times in each dungeon. Going OOM hasn't been a problem since I figured how how to properly use everything as well, and while some fights drop me to 5% mana by the end, it's still awesome.
My only hope is that Blizzard doesn't cave to the QQ and nerf everything to the ground. It's nice to see people running around in blues and greens again, like the early days of vanilla (except now the greens aren't terrible). And while there are still some welfare epics, they're much more difficult to earn now- you can't AFK through instances for an hour to earn tier. It takes a few days to grind rep, and much longer for valor points.
