This was very well said.


As was this.

We didn't wake up one day and decide to beat up healers. We reacted to feedback that we heard consistently through the end of Lich King. Now that we've decided to change it, it's not too surprising that the other side is now speaking out, but that doesn't make the original concerns that a lot of players had invalid.

We see the sentiment expressed often that making healing more challenging might drive players away. That is a risk, but the flip side is that making healing more engaging might attract some players who find it boring today.

While it has always been a goal to make World of Warcraft approachable to a lot of different kinds of players, including those who found traditional MMOs too hardcore, we'd rather retain players because the gameplay is fun than because the gameplay is easy.

Taking your argument to a probably illogical conclusion, if we made healing even easier, we might get even more players to heal. Is that really good for the game as a whole though?

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"I'm just going to AE tank everything" doesn't work in Cataclysm. So yeah, we are trying to make tanking more engaging too.

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Look at what you're saying though. In a nutshell:

Do I want to just spam Rejuv? No. But why are you changing all these other spells so that I have to consider the right situation to use each of them? :)

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Players played WoW for six years without Dungeon Finder though. Dungeon Finder is awesome, don't get me wrong, and I spent a lot of time personally working on it. But the intent is not to be able farm dungeons as fast as you possibly can.

Healing (and tanking as well) isn't for everyone. It takes the right kind of mindset. I know there are players who want to make healing and tanking super easy in an attempt to adjust the ratios of dps to tanking and healing. There are also some who just want to get rid of the healing role completely.

None of those are our goals though. We want to make healing fun for healers, not make healing so easy that anyone can jump in without any fear of failure.

I remember looking for Scholomance or Shadow Labs pugs for literally 2-3 hours. There is almost no chance of that ever happening again now that we have Dungeon Finder, even if tanking and healing require a little more finesse.

So to answer your question, I think having more healers available at any cost is bad for the game. We want healing to be fun for people who like healing. If that means the mages and rouges have to wait 15 minutes for Dungeon Finder instead of 5 minutes, I think we can live with that. If nothing else, fast Dungeon Finder queues (or ease in finding a raid slot, etc.) remain attractive benefits of tanking and healing.

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If that was the case, druids would literally be casting one spell, Healing Touch, and they aren't doing that. They are using a variety of heals, and that will only improve as we get things adjusted so that say Regrowth spam or efficient over-use of Nourish doesn't dominate.

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No, that's not the intent. We made those heals very cheap so that healers wouldn't be in constant terror of running out of mana. We also are making the normal modes easier than the heroic modes. You'll have to pair the right heal for the right situation to a greater degree in heroic modes. I think part of what you're seeing is that healers are using the base heal because they can get away with it. It's also possible that in our effort to distinguish them from the more expensive heals that we made the base heals too cheap or efficient.

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Let's assume for the moment that you were 100% effective with this breakdown. (I'm not going to take the time to do dig through the log.) The Heal percentage is a lot higher than we would want it to be, and Flash Heal and Penance in particular are too low. Penance is your unique spell, so the intent is that you get some mileage out of it. If you were playing perfectly, then this suggests that Heal is too cheap for what it does.

We did. We just changed the base pushback resistance so that we didn't have to duplicate the same passive bonus in every tree.


This is the kind of QQ likely to get you banned.


Perhaps you missed all of the Holy paladins posting about how overpowered the Eternal Glory talent was for Holy.


Exactly. We can tune the spellpower and attack power coefficients independently. Exorcism should be a good button if you have Denounce. You're not going to do high damage if you're interested in skipping the talents that buff that damage.


This is a very common line of argument we see from players, especially healers. It runs something like "I use all my heals. I seem to be a pretty good healer. Therefore only using a few heals makes you a bad healer." It should make you a bad healer (if our numbers are appropriate) but often it does not. Often those 1-2 spells can take you 90% of the way there and the additional heals used my more savvy players only adds 10% or so optimization on top of that. You might have been a better paladin for using all of your toolbox, but the fact is that even very mediocre paladins could heal just fine using only those two buttons. That's not what we are going for. If you're used to using a variety of spells, then this change won't affect you much.

Also, you might try not dismissing points with which you disagree (or perhaps don't understand) as "garbage."


Eloderung, I used to appreciate the posts you made, but crossing over to ranting mode is more likely to get your points dismissed as just another angry player with an axe to grind.

If you read a lot of posts, you'd see that we are nerfing non-healer healing quite a bit in order to make what the healer is doing count for more. There are also videos of DKs running around who have used to Dark Simulacrum to get Shadowform and a Felguard. That shouldn't be used as a basis for comparison to how weak or not weak healers are.

One of the reasons we start the beta population so small is to try and keep control over the strange perceptions players can sometimes get of seeing the game in a state where a lot of things are in a broken or half-implemented state. The most valuable posters are those who can see past this "noise" instead of dwelling on it. If any of you want a better chance at having your feedback considered by the developers, you should try to do just that. After reading through this particular thread today, I don't have high hopes that it is going to improve much from the new "woe is me" trajectory that it's on.


I'm not sure if you're just trying to be silly or playing gotcha, but you're talking apples and oranges here.

I used the "noise" to talk about numbers not being finalized yet. The player that advocates doing nothing but spamming Flash of Light, because that seems to work for them, is discounting our stated goal of that not being the way we want healing to work. (Now if we fail on that goal and you find something that works better than what we intended, go for it, but it's too early to make that determination yet.)

The poster was using "same old garbage" or something like that because he was annoyed at being nerfed. Presumably he'd rather us buff all the numbers up to the level of the highest one, no matter how ridiculous that made the final numbers. We describe this as "Oh no, I changed from one arbitrary number to another arbitrary number!" It's a nerf if you feel your character on live heal for less after a patch than you did before the patch. If we accidentally put an extra zero in a healing number and players decry that as a massive nerf, it's hard for us to take that seriously.


Then you've probably reached the limits of being able to offer us useful feedback on the beta environment. If it's frustrating for you, then stop playing. Using the forums for the digital equivalent of kicking the dog when you had a rough day at the office isn't benefiting us or other players.

Now if you have concrete feedback, by all means offer it. If you've offered all the feedback you've got and you still haven't seen any change because of it, then chances are we disagree with you or, just as likely, we haven't gotten around to making any changes yet.

If Resto druids reroll because the only thing they enjoyed about playing a druid was being overpowered, then so be it. If they reroll because they like healing when it's easy but not when they have to think, well, then they're collateral damage to some extent, but they'll *still* be able to heal normal dungeons just fine. If they reroll because they're convinced we're going to let Resto druids remain weak while the other 4 healers are powerful, then they're just being silly. We had all 5 healers participate in every LK dungeon and raid and the new combat mechanics and talent trees are only going to make it easier to balance for Cataclysm.

Granted.

Ghostcrawler's stated idea to make such things really low drop rates is still a real possibility. Whether or not this change will take effect with patch 4.0.1 is to be determined.

Most likely not. We'll be evaluating the way players are performing in content on the 4.0.1 test realms, but keep in mind the class changes are balanced around level 85 gameplay. It's almost more likely we'd end up taking away the Icecrown Citadel buff (I'm only saying this is a possibility), as in many cases healing, tanking, and damage dealing may stand to benefit a lot from these changes at level 80.

Things will be a little bit interesting since these changes are being applied while players are still actively working through the current Wrath of the Lich King content. Bear with us and provide as much feedback as you can about your experiences with these changes under the current content, but keep in perspective that the new class design is meant to be balanced around the upcoming Cataclysm content. We're more interested in ironing out bugs and polishing the systems than attempting to balance them intricately for level 80 gameplay.


I know what you mean. It's really just something we're going to have to evaluate as we see players testing Wrath of the Lich King content with the 4.0.1 changes. We don't want to make it harder to kill the Lich King after 4.0.1 is released, so I don't mean to imply that. But, if we find that the Cataclysm systems changes coupled with the 30% buff greatly trivializes some of the boss fights, we'll consider adjusting the buff accordingly.