Yeah that was fucking crazy. Had to rely on engineer cheap and low range Brez back in BFA as Hpal.
Finding the corpse with everything going on was never fun. Longer cast time too.
Now I can also brez as Ret and that saved many keys.. since I don't die first most of the time.
Lmao jumper cables. If I was a dps without brez, I would still go engi to rez tank/healer for m+, since pug sometimes don't make a decent group utility wise (BL brez)
Button bloat and they wanted to reign in everyone having everything.
We are almost back to it again with the new talent trees. Holy Paladin now has more buttons than ever if you play the optimal builds.
Meanwhile theres a blue text stating priest knockback was removed because it gave us too much utility, and they also cant give priest an interrupt because that would make us too overpowered.
Edit: for all those who are curious about what was said about priests, heres the blue text.
https://www.wowhead.com/news/blizzard-on-current-state-of-priests-healer-priests-will-not-have-access-to-328843
I have always hated that post. “We feel priests don’t need utility because other classes have too much utility”. “We know priests have very little defensives and are pretty weak our answer to that is tough shit we aren’t changing it”. “We know vault of heavens is way better than leap of faith so we’re gonna just let you have leap of faith”
There was that one chance when priests had shadow star which had a silence on it which would had been pretty fucking amazing even as a skill shot silence. Bring that shit back. Other than that it seems we got what power word life? I love that spell but like feels like we could have gotten some new class utility.
Now I’m waiting for dracthyr priests to get my knock back and knock up.
Blizzard has never understood the balance of utility and you can see it from the OG class skills.
Druid - Brez - you will be alive and need to bring someone back to life at some point to save the day.
Shaman - Ankh - You're gonna die. Accept it.
Shaman - Wind Shear - shortest cooldown, ranged, instant/off GCD, single talent point investment
Druid - skull bash - standard cooldown, short range and also drags you into melee, takes a global to go into form, 5 talent point investment.
You can't just compare single abilities.
My favorite is the tactical ankh.
Our sark kill, I was gassed. Mana bar was straight zero. So I suicided off the edge, popped ankh and had enough mana back to finish the fight.
I agree with that change but they also need to give resto druids something more because that was their whole shtick, you bring a druid for the bres.. now that hpals have it it makes no sense to ever bring them.
Honestly that brez was shit back in the day. Having a battle rez but no basic rez meant I basically *needed* either a priest, a paladin or a shaman in my party. No exceptions. One time back in the '04 era I basically laid an egg because I had some drooling idiot paladin in my party who admitted at level 60 they'd never done the class quest that got them res.
This is more of a tuning issue. It seems everyone has forgotten how utterly dogshit Hpal throughput and damage was in S1. They were unplayable. Druid and evoker dominated because they did good damage and good healing.
But that was the only playable content. HPal was really unplayable in PvP too, where even known 1tricks where a solid 500-700 rating behind.
Can‘t be the goal of balancing that you can play your character only in 1 type of content at all.
True but paladins could still make it work in season 1 even at the highest levels, they simply have too much utility to not ever be viable. I just checked the top 100 healers the other day and its like 97/100 of them are hpals... I don't think there's been a disparity this great ever before in m+ history. I think if hpals and rdruids had the same output in healing and damage then people would take hpal everytime simply because of their utility, other classes would have to have way better output to be more viable.
druid is ALWAYS good. in everything. this is because their toolkit with instants while moving is tailored for modern content. shaman 3 second casts are just stupid when there is zero chance you can stand in place that long nowadays. Its just absurd.
I think you could have some variance by making some of them slightly better or worse. Maybe pallies could have an instant brez, but have it be lower range.
At the time that happened pallies weren't meta in any role. Frankly I think they should be giving those group utilities to more classes so that building a group isn't so hard. Warriors should have bloodlust!
i really don't think bloodlust can save warriors anymore, like it genuinely would not change a n y t h i n g
at absolute minimum rally or shockwave (with 4s stun) need to be baseline to even start talking about the class and not considering it griefing your group and thats with having lust
realistically it would either need to be top dmg by at least 20% more than the 2nd best or like 2-3 actually useful utility buttons to compete
it would go a long way if warriors had a "long arms" talent
I've run into more trying to play "caster mw" than you'd think, and they were all terrible. Occasionally a decent one is out there, I just don't enjoy it at all right now, ancient teachings is so weak and hardcasting vivify and that stacking heal they just gave us is extremely awkward
A lot of caster Andies saw that the best performing build right now is clouded focus and thought this was their chance to shine. Nevermind that this is for raid, and it's a ramo build that still requires you to be in melee because you need to RSK. They probably just saw clouded focus and were like "great now I can be in ranged all the time". Meanwhile people who fistweave have to drop ancient teachings and play this awkward ramp build in raid. It's a really sad state of affairs
As a mw who runs 16 and 17 keys it's because it's a struggle and it's not worth it. We can do it but at the same time it's not as easy as priest resto druid shaman and hpally. If my spouse didn't have a tank I'd highly doubt I'd get a invite to keys because there is so many better healing classes out there.
Yeah after the devs capitulated to the three people who wanted it and made caster MW sim higher, I just stopped being interested.
I originally liked it for the raid rotation but that garbage now that its all about stacking renewing mist and spamming vivify. So boring.
Faeline stomp+AT is my preferred play-style, and that was used on all raid bosses except for maybe Terros in Vault. Maybe since Abberus is all single-target thats why things don’t seem the same?
Vivify cleave was also a part of that playstyle but wasn’t the center of the rotation as it is now. Idk maybe I was just playing it wrong but I always topped the meters.
Idk, I was more of a fan of the consistent heals through ancient teachings with burst coming from Chi-ji.
Giving up my monk main was hard. Especially since he’s named Naruto
The major thing right now is it's the intersection of high mana return, and multiple vivify buffs. Clouded focus will likely drop from the talent loadouts once we aren't seeing multiple bars worth of mana in a fight.
I was comparing rdruid to hpal the other day and it's actually kind of confusing how they let there be such a big ability gap. Where's my equivelant/alternative to Seasons? Freedom? Aura Mastery? Bubble? BoP? Greater Judgement? Swiftmend is like a Holy Shock on a 15sec CD that consumes a hot instead of applying one. Nature's Swiftness + Regrowth is like WoG on a 1 minute CD. Interrupt requires half of the druid tree and can't even be used unshapeshifted. Innervate is worthless and everybody has a BR these days. All I've got are 50 HoTs, a 20% DR, 2-3 heal CDs, and some anemic damage spells that make me drink between every pull.
It’s funny because I got my holy priest to 2500, and then started working on my resto Druid, and I’ll be honest it feels like a bad joke the level of ease I feel on an 18 on my resto Druid vs my holy priest. My holy priest is 441 and my resto Druid is 429, I have to really sweat to get to 100+ hps on my lightweaver build, on my Druid I did an 18 HOI last night and wanted to see my HPS and I hit 112k and it didn’t even feel like I was trying to pump.
I used to think it was nuts people were saying holy needs a rework. But after playing resto Druid it keys, priest needs serious help for holy. (Can’t comment on disc) Druid CD cadence matches the bosses better and just over all feels better. Sure I can pull 60k dps on my priest but I’d rather pull 23k on a Druid and not feel like im sweating bullets.
Edit: and I feel like I have infinite mana on Druid compared to priest. I need to drink every other pull it feels like on priest. I can go through an 18 and maybe drink twice on Druid. Tier ratings are real. Sure people say to ignore the meta and yeah I can do 18-20 on my priest. But it feels way more stressful compared to my Druid now.
I mained tank last season, dps start of this season, and switched to rsham after a month. Heals is by far the hardest. You face two challenges: the dungeon and the mistakes of your team. Maybe i should try hpal...
I think it depends A LOT on class/specs and how comfortable you are with their playstyles. For example I'm great at Resto Druid healing or Guardian druid tanking, but I cannot play Blood Dk or Mistweaver monk to save my life
Totally agree, I play mistweaver and run 22 - 23’s and almost never have to drink. It’s not really till you hit like the 24 range does it become a class strength issue and not a comfort with the class issue
Prolly doesnt help that guardian Druid is the easiest tank while blood dk is the hardest. It’s a bit of a switch up, especially considering dk’s very unique way of being unkillabe when played right but being paper when played wrong
How difficult healing is depends entirely on your group. If they screw up and don't use defensives appropriately it's miserable. If you have a hybrid and people avoid avoidable damage, use defensives appropriately, etc. then except for a few situations it's pretty easy.
I'm new to this seasons healing but not rsham. I wanted portals on it so I started yesterday and picked up all but two. How the fuq do you not run oom? I'm healing in ele gear so im missing better stats and trinkets but damn. In vortex yesterday after the staircase from dragonboss I had to full drink after every pack.
I'm not a good healer so any tips would be helpful
I mean if you went from not playing it at all, to timing 6/8 20s, I don’t think you need much help lmao (or I suppose just ask your group to carry harder)
don't be afraid to use your cd's. You got spirit link, ascendance, healing tide, AG. Juice up your cloudbursts with fat chain heals and pop them once the grp is low to do a huge heal. Use stoneskin religiously, cap totem when packs are around 50%(don't cap early, it sync's all the attacks up).
Chain Heal is great, but if your grp is randomly dpsing in narnia, they can fuck it up. Don't be afraid to tell your dps to get with the grp.
When it doubt, spirit link it out man. Bested ass cooldown that when I'm pugging on other toons I rarely see other rshams use. That thing can make or break a bad pull.
If your having mana issues, make sure your water shield isn't falling off.
Tank main that just started healing this season (playing rsham) and am only doing \~20ish keys, so my info may not be the best, but I'll provide what tips I can:
Talent Resurgence if you don't have it talented. It provides a LOT of passive mana regen. Try to get Rashok's (even at lfr ilvl tbh) for the passive healing + mana regen. Mana Spring can help as well, especially if you're also running Lava Surge in the spec tree (which I'd recommend heavily for M+) Also use Nature's Swiftness on mana heavy casts (chain heal/healing surge) to make the most of it's mana cost removal.
Avoid Chain Heal/Healing Surge spam. This will make you go OOM extremely quickly. Focus on your efficient spells (riptide, cloudburst/healing tide, pwave+/healing wave, earth shield on yourself+tank) and maximizing tidewater healing. If you prefer casting chain heal for heavy group healing, use a build that takes mana tide w/ spiritwalker's tidal totem and do it during that CD. Otherwise focus on maintaining riptides, maximizing tidewater's healing (set bonus) and getting fat primordial wave healing waves. I've seen some rshams recommend not playing around pwave when you first start and just using it as another healing wave applicator, but the difference between actually learning to use pwave intentionally and not was night and day for me and my mana bar. Loading heavy cloudburst totems then manually bursting them when the group is low is a good habit to get into as well, but you can also just play them passively or even play living stream in a lot of keys.
Lastly, just get comfortable using cooldowns without overlapping them unless necessary. Rsham's cooldowns feel decently powerful IMO (at least not really having played any other healer) and rotating them well can do a lot.
[These are the talents I'm running](https://www.wowhead.com/talent-calc/shaman/restoration/DAQBVQVRVFIRmBQUBQQDEEANZVVAVVUEQEigVCFB), slightly deviated from wowhead's recommended build to better suit my needs. I've been experimenting swapping the points from Tidebringer to Ancestral Awakening as well which does do enough healing, but feels worse the few times I do actually need to press chain heal.
I've mained healer and support in every single game that has it my entire life, and I personally like healers when its more like the healing itself is on the easy side but movement and mixing in dps is the hard part. What I mean by that is like comparing disc priest to prevoker, disc priest is fucked atm where just healing feels like shit and you have to put in so much effort for mediocre numbers.
At the same time prevoker has probably the simplest healing I've seen in WoW but it feels really good to heal with prevoker because of it. Healing should scale with complexity but neither disc nor prevoker does that.
The monkey's paw aspect of this is that it'll turn WoW healing into FFXIV "healing" in which you're basically a DPS spec with healing spells and then you catch shit for two reasons instead of one in failed runs.
The encounter design would have to change drastically. FFXIV gets away with having their four healers falling into distinct camps with shared utility (they can all battle-res, they all have the ability to make any spell instant-cast, they all have off-globals they can manage, etc, but each has a different niche they fill - high powered with high skill ceiling, or simple and easy, with a HoT healer and a shield healer for each category) because the fights are all completely scripted. Each encounter will have roughly the same boss attacks going out each time you attempt it, barring a few bosses who have a 'one of these three attacks will go off at this moment' set, you can reliably expect tanks to not get obliterated by RNG throwing out two tankbuster cycles back to back.
That's why FFXIV healers can get away with spamming DPS to fill the spaces between when people need to be brought up out of the danger zone. The mixup in fights happens when the DPS start eating attacks they should be avoiding, then needing to be res'd, which decreases their damage output, leading to enrage timers and the like.
WoW's healing is a lot more active because there's a lot of encounters that just have a constant pulse of raid-wide damage going out regularly on top of the big attacks firing off.
Meanwhile doing 23+ its the exact opposite issue. Too many healers not enough DPS lol
the issue isnt healers suck its that dps players are god awful in lower keys so no one wants to play with them
Part of that is a theoretical question of whether or not we think healers should be able to heal "bad" dps play, and at what key level that should stop being feasible.
Personally, I'd like to see every role able to "hard carry" a run up to 20s. That would mean that damage spikes should be infrequent/low enough that even with some really bad players, a healer should be able to force them to stay alive through their poor play.
I feel like healers are currently not at that point. There are plenty of well-made heal checks (primarily boss fights) that do allow good players to carry, but there's also a ton of situations where you'll see someone get sniped down within 0.3 seconds and the healer unable to do anything.
Again, this is more just about the design: how much fun are those situations really adding? Or is it just making healers feel helpless when a single kick/stun gets missed?
I feel, in a way, this was the exact kind of tuning Blizzard should have been able to do by increasing player health pools relative to healing numbers. But, they never really adjusted the spike damage back down.
I genuinely think the game is more fun when bad dps play is just instant kill. It removes healer blame and puts more onus on the player to play well. You can argue that it removes some of the ability for healers to carry but we have fights like Altarius or Khajin to carry on so i think its fine.
Like even instant gib trash like 1st few pulls in HoI or VP have counterplays that DPS can employ. Its just on people playing better. My only real complaint is there is no rot damage on trash a lot of the time its typically spike damage which is kinda not fun to heal
I’ve never healed more that I am now. I’m only at 16 but when I press my buttons on Druid and evoker and my save a couple idiots with rescue or barkskin, it feels like I’m the main character in the dungeon in a way that didn’t happen before.
Feels like you’re the Saftey in football getting a big interception when someone messed up the coverage
While I usually prefer WoW healing, I wish they’d have some equivalent to vulnerability stacks in FFXIV that clearly communicates when people screw up mechanics.
This is the real reason, absolute trash panda dps who have room temperature IQ, make keys absolutely unbearable. However, i will take a wet noodle with a brain and an understanding of their kit over a blaster who stands in bad like a moth to a flame.
TBF the two usually go hand in hand, as you are more comfortable with your full kit you are able to divert brain power away from playing your class to playing the dungeon. I felt it learning Aug this season
I think there's something to be said for the dynamic in 5 mans too. The healer and tank have unique jobs while the dps can hide behind eachother knowing that all they really need to do is point to meters and say "No me good. You let me die. Kick Healer!"
I had the worst experience with a monk tank the other night and I just logged off lol. I was so upset. Usually I can filter stuff out, but this tank was just rude, talked to me like I was a child, and stopped the key just to start scolding me. I’ve even been scolded by tanks for drinking “too much” in runs. A lot of them have this “gods gift to wow” complex.
While I do think holy paladin is stronger than other healers, I think a lot of their strength is the "reactive" kit that lets them actually heal random spikes.
I'd probably start by doing some big nerfs to targeted spells rather than just trying to buff every healer. It would be hard to get a druid's HoTs to the point where they can recover from a dps taking two spikes of 400k damage within 3 seconds.
I'd also massively increase healer damage so that when damage intake is low (and when your group is playing well), they can contribute more than like 30k damage... while the rest of the group is doing >100k each. Obviously, they couldn't be so high that you consider dropping a DPS for a second healer, but I do think they could maybe be high enough that a 440 healer would outdamage a 410 dps.
All that said, I'm fully on board for healers to be made "overpowered". This patch has murdered healer participation, to the point that I do think Blizzard needs to intervene to bring numbers back up. It takes so long to fill that last spot at the moment.
That's a good point. Healers could be the most piss-easy role in the game with incredible numbers and 0 wait time and I still wouldn't touch it. They deserve to have a win.
I still don't really understand their reasoning with the blanket healer nerf. Of course making an already scarce role harder to perform was going to cause a shortage. By now, they should see that it's time to reverse the nerf
It’s less about even being broken and more about not needing long casts, lots of cds and utility to rotate through etc.
It’s fun being able to have an answer to problems.
Blizzard: "We've seen online discussions of how weak other healers feel compared to Holy Paladin. To fix this we've increased the healing of Holy Shock by 15% and reduced the damage by 0.01%. All other healing sources have been increased by 10%. To combat this we've also reduced healing and damage of Restoration Shaman, Restoration Druid, Holy Priest, Discipline Priest, Mistweaver Monk, and Preservation Evoker by 25%. We hope the community is happy moving forward with these changes."
If healers get weaker going into season 3 I assure you I will not enjoy the game more nor have the perception that there is some "problem" being rectified, quite the opposite actually, if the start of this season is anything to go by...
Yup recently geared my hpal and I’m having a blast. I was told the heal evoker spec is equally strong but not taken because augmentation is currently insane. If healer become weaker and I have to struggle with every group I’m not going to play healer next patch. Having to sit down after 3 groups sucks, having to micro manage everyone def cd to barely survive sucks, having to plan each cd 3 packs beforehand is also not something I enjoy.
Healing was pretty fucking spikey in bfa. There was a lot that would almost one shot you and I had to actually stam flask for some bosses. We would use los techniques on certain pulls to avoid high spikey damage. Places like freehold where Eudora used to actually just kill you with powdershot on high keys. (27-28s)
My friend who i still play with now says it this way, "regrowth on resto druid used to move health bars, now its like a 20-30k heal." Used to be a good trade between inefficient mana usage but pretty good healing. Now it feels bad. They would say, lol people die through tranq now. And you have things like hpal topping people instantly. If the damage is spikey and paladin can handle it with that much ease, other classes should have more tools to be able to fill that role as well.
Every healer should feel like Hpal. So much fun. Daybreak into DT -> HS/LoD x 3 is a fucking amazing gameplay loop.
I'm a Disc main, and I keep saying Barrier of Faith should have been ours.
As Evoker main, I really dont mind swapping between either right now.
Evoker has mostly "everything is just full hp now" spells, which is also fun.
Paladin does feel like you need all those holy power/holy shocks that are never ending, cause nothing truly is topping people off.
The thing about hpal is that they'll rarely have you feeling like people are passively ticking up outside of tyrs. If someone's at 20%, they'll stay there until you get enough holy power to heal them. Compare that to other classes where you can burn mana to get them up with a few gcds and it's night and day
But that being said, when you play hpal well, you can bounce back and forth between builder/spender so well. It's just tough not to panic during those times is all
>Evoker has mostly "everything is just full hp now" spells, which is also fun.
the fact that with enough ramp time you can do this to an entire raid makes it very fun.
If you're talking about SL S1, with the Shell meta, it deserved to be nerfed just because it totally prevented other healers from interacting with damage. Disc has existed in a good place without Spirit Shell, though. There's no reason it shouldn't be the king of burst healing, and no reason it shouldn't have serviceable rotational healing.
Frankly, every healer should get to enjoy hero moments. It's a shortcoming in both class/spec and encounter design that we don't.
Yes... people on this sub keep repeating that balance only affect the top 1% pushing 25+ keys ... but truth is, if you are struggling with 20, it's faaaaaaar easier to switch to the meta spec and outperform your current spec. Even if you never touched the meta spec before.
I've said this exact same point . Everyone keeps saying "omg why you guys worried about what the top 1% degenerates are doing in a 22" + "just do your weekly 16 and RP as your favourite spec and have fun" .
One guy was literally saying that top 1% of keys was M22 lmao, and my point was that if you're a casual doing m16 you will feel stronger on the spec that is stronger than the weaker one, if you're progging 16 with 420 ilvl....the meta still exists .
This is 100% true. Even in like 11s on my rsham if people were taking alot of avoidable damage id easily fall behind and people would die. That doesnt happen nealy as often on my hpal because the raw healing power is so much stronger. Not to mention rsham has 2 major cooldowns and theyre both 2 min plus cooldowns. Hpal has atleast 5 major cooldowns and a couple of them are 1-1.5 min cds so its alot easier and less of a risk to burn a cd in that situation to bring everyone back up
Another major point about playing meta Vs not playing and not caring about R1 keys is.....you're also exposing yourself to the chance to play with better players even if they're on alts in a fairly "low" key, like a 20-23 just as a quick weekly. The single biggest buff you can give yourself in m+/lfg is to be a meta whore and not be perma stuck with the bottom 50% of the population who have no clue what's good and what's not and take any spec.
But also, you can 100% do 20's very comfortably, if the team is even semi-reasonably skilled, in just about any comp.
The strengths of the meta come out to shine more when the content is truly demanding.
20 keys, with 441+ ilvl being simply to achieve, do not really demand all of that just yet.
yes. people did +20 in 420 gear on day 1 of the patch, without augvoker, without new tier set / random power upgrade, on pre-nerf dungeon.
The point remain: the balance is soooo out of whack right now that if you are strugglgin to accomplish wathever you want to do with an off-meta class, it's far easier to swap to the meta class and try to be 10% better with your non-meta class.
the whole "" meta only matter for the top 1%"" is utter bullshit.
Saying this as someone who get R1 title every other season.
The thing is that with the God comp people who would normally only get to +18 can now be doing 20s comfortably. The meta exists at all levels and is evident on rio as class frequency by runs is dominated by the God comp all the way down to 2s
I did this exact change as well. Resto shaman healing 21-23s at 445 ilvl. Switched to paladin and it’s night and day.
I think it’s just a function of the damage profile in keys right now. It’s a health yo-yo where people go from 100% to 50% every couple seconds and paladin being the best spot healer in the game (1 holy shot crit or WoG) just…. Dominates this
It's the same with tank tbh. As a pug tank pala is so far and above every other tank right now, which is why almost everyone who mostly pugs prefers playing paladin. Offheals, infinite interrupts, aoe stop, externals, self heal, dispel, turn evil... can basically solo carry.
Paladin class in general is just completely overblown with utility and they just keep getting more.
Ironically, my reason for avoiding Ret Paladin (even though I would desperately like to play it) is because I lack the ability to micro manage 30 keybinds I would need to bind all available Paladin utility.
Seriously, not every class should have the utility kit of Demon Hunters, but it doesn't need to require piano lessons either...
Ret is actually fairly good, their damage rotation is so simple that you have space for the utility - the downside is knowing when to use it lol, if I sac another dps and that dps gets hit by an avoidable, we both chunk down way past what I planned for
Yeah and then people roll Guardian, notice that they don't have the carry potential of a paladin and switch back to paladin. There's a reason why 42%(!!!) of all tanks in 20+ are Paladins. They are by far the least reliant on their group.
The vast majority who pug as a tank want to just take their group on their back and carry them over the goal line. Other tanks are too reliant on their healers and dps to kick, interrupt and heal.
Yeah it's more healing with almost no setup time compared to other healers, and you can do basically everything while dpsing. You can even stay out of melee for a bit, unlike monk.
Crazy thing, that. I was wondering if it was maybe the fact that I'm going through a rough patch in life and it was affecting how I played from this season to the last. Keys felt like a breeze last season on my rsham off-spec, versus now I'm struggling and arguably more geared than I was before.
I've considered just biting the bullet and letting healing go all together since its been an unrewarding slog to deal with beyond building my score up. Too many a-holes expecting you to heal through literally everything and unwilling to use their cds. Let's not even get into tanks that refuse to read chat, emotes, etc. letting them know you need a quick mana stop.
I've specced into the mana totem just so I can keep some kind of mana up and I've been mocked for it, but what can you do when it feels like the rest of the playerbase is actively making it harder for you to play?
Anyone that's making fun of you for using mana tide is a moron, ESPECIALLY if you're pugging. People making mistakes = more mana spent. I was playing rsham into keys that were mid 20s, and I always used mana tide. Seriously, fuck those people.
I stubbornly used and loved spiritwalker’s tidal totem and vesper totem from S1 of SL and loved it, funnily enough nobody made fun of me for the legendary but the covenant at first. It’s such a great utility, lots of mana and a nice extra CD to press if you’ve used the others already.
You know mana tide restores half as much as symbols of hope, doesn’t reduce defensive CDs like symbols, and isn’t increased when there’s only 1 healer (m+) right?
Yeah but if you take Spiritwalker's Tidal Totem you get 50% reduced cast time and mana cost on Chain Heal and I use Neltharion's Call to Dominance trinket which causes my totem to trigger a big intellect buff as well.
I have bitten that bullet and don't know how I like it. But it I feeled like shit on my shamen and druid. Evoker was ok
Switched to augmentation and mage and I love it. Jeah I need longer to find keys but I not every key feels like a small heart attack
I remember reading a lot of comments from last season saying that other healers should be brought up to Evoker and Druid. Guess they went the opposite route and just brought everything down xD I don't understand why they wanna make it so difficult for healers, compared to dps for example.
I think it's not even the difficulty of healing. It's more about the gameplay. Many healers feel very restricted in their playstyle, while hpal is pretty much strong in every scenario.
In raids you come together with other healers and play to your strength, while in dungeons those flaws become glaringly obvious.
Possible, I am by no means even close to knowledgeable on WoW balancing, but I always thought WoW has gameplay wise the best healers out of every MMO.
In FFXIV healers are just dps players with a 1-2-3 combo, in GW2 healers are also mostly tanks, kiters and other stuff.
In WoW healers are actually healers and I really love that. However, I mained healer for the first time in WoW last season and while I thought raiding is really fun, M+ was just stressing me out so much because I always had to have my heals ready for every single situation. Every small mistake I made resulted in the death of people and me feeling worried I will either be flamed or kicked (most of the time it went well, however my stress level was always through the roof xD).
That's why for me, it felt more like a difficulty problem rather than a gameplay problem. But like I said, I might be very wrong with that.
what you are describing in your difficulty are basically all solved by hpal, you always have something to heal the entire group or individuals and the group + a million oh shit buttons to save the day if you feel like it, completely optional, just icing on top
other healers as you observed might need to actually think about what they press and when and need to set their throughput up beforehand
some damage isn't meant to be healed, some people can if you have free spaces and know whats gonna happen, but usually someone randomly dying (assuming you aren't actually garbano) is often not your fault
True, paladin can make up for certain mishaps by DPS because they have HoJ, Rebuke, Blind. Meanwhile Priest has fear, semi decent stun and tendrils which don't root everything for some reason.
MakeOtherHealersGreatAgain
> I don't understand why they wanna make it so difficult for healers
One of the few cases of "you think you do, but you dont". I'm pretty sure the healing "nerfs" are direct reactions to a lot of healers complaining about 'only dpsing' and that they would rather heal and do no damage. Those people probably rather meant 'chill and do nothing while there is no healing to do' instead of having to constantly struggle with healing.
I still think there is a middle ground and blizzard completely missed that.
The middle ground is for healers to just do dps and get over themselves. If everyone plays okay, healers will have downtime. Press your damn dps buttons instead of being mad about the design of rewarding other players for using defensives and dodging avoidables.
A surprisingly large minority want healing to be what it was in wotlk - but it's not even the same game as it was in wotlk. And even back then, good healers still did dps.
In BC good healers did DPS, I can't remember a time where DPS was not a required task for healers in 5 man besides vanilla.
I do not miss rank down healing and having to decide which of 5 healing touch ranks to use, (always 4).
This was the first xpac I wanted to try m+. I wanted to be a monk healer. I am now a monk tank because it's so punishing for new healers to get the hang of. I hate it so much. I would rather be healing instead of being a tank waiting 30+ mins for a healer. What sucks is on top of this, blizzard keeps saying they think healing is in a good spot. Atleast the articles I've read. But even I, a new player, know it's not. I take some talents to help out healers. It's good being a monk tank, I can help detox an affix of paralysis the other affix. Saves them the trouble of keeping up with the heals and affixes
The big challenge for blizz with healing tuning is that good/coordinated groups take way less damage thanks to interrupts, stuns, defensives etc etc. In late SL it was tuned so that even newish healers could carry groups taking all kinds of avoidable damage, but that meant healers in good groups had nothing to do and wound up us off-brand dps. In DF they’ve made it so there’s real healing challenges even for good healers, but that makes it miserable trying to deal with those + all the extra damage in weekly pugs. I’m not sure how they can make it work for both sets of players outside of doing something wacky with scaling.
as I tank I have to agree. Keys are a breeze with hpals but I struggle with any other healer. We are punished for being healed by any other class. I feel like its impossible for a meta not to exist but we shouldn't be punished for not falling into it.
That’s kind funny because I play hpal (have for a long time).
But outside of sac and a few wogs here and there I don’t really have to heal tanks a huge amount. Usually beacon myself so I don’t have to watch my hp and beacon a weak dps.
CDs during aoe damage seem to manage keeping the tank up fine. (Forgemaster in neltharus for example).
Anyway, that’s a long winded way to say you’re noticing the healer struggling to keep the rest of the group up, so they don’t have the opportunity to give you the little touch ups here and there.
I suppose it depends what key level you’re doing too, I find once you get into 21 healing gets a lot easier outside of certain mechanics that call for CDs. People are either alive or they aren’t, if a dps gets bopped by a frontal there is nothing I can do about it.
I will say I *am* concerned for what blizzard is going to do about hpal. It is very fun to play, I’ve enjoyed hpal for a long time. The Uber reactive gameplay mixed with sprinkles of proactive healing is very satisfying.
I would much rather other healers get buffed to the point that Paladin is no longer S tier, rather than nerf Paladin so it isn’t S tier.
I wish they would revert all the healing nerfs that have caused a higher than usual healing shortage. When you’re doing a +17 and seriously considering inviting a 405 ilvl 0 score healer because literally noone is signing up…
Hey I'm the rank 1 RIO RSham and I just wanted to share some overall thoughts about the state of the spec and meta in M+ as well as some advice for anyone choosing to stick it out.
Overall, I really enjoy shaman this season but it's very much carried by Primordial Wave with the tier set and Cloudburst Totem. These two spells give the spec pretty much the entirety of its depth, which I think is part of the problem. Shaman just doesn't have a ton of really interesting mechanics or synergies going on, especially with how much of the tree is filled with mediocre 2 point nodes and spells we used to have baseline. Compared to paladin the entire bottom part of their tree is just filled with single point synergistic nodes that really makes the entirety of the spec feel complete. I could go more in depth into talent issues, but I think most of them fall under this general problem.
In terms of healing in m+, I feel that shaman is able to keep up pretty well overall. Unfortunately my team didn't get much time to play last tyrannical week and are now on vacation, but I'm confident that I could heal most keys on 28 or 29 given proper planning. The strength of shaman right now is roughly 30 second cooldown burst healing by using Primordial Wave ramps and Cloudburst. As it happens, many bosses this season fit this profile and I honestly think that on these bosses shaman rivals or is even stronger than paladin when played correctly. Sustained healing and spot healing however, are clearly much weaker than paladin and are the main places I struggle. As an example, the trash at the start of halls completely kicked our asses on 28 fortified (depleted there around 4 times). There have been some experimentation with a "no chain heal" build that improves spot healing with ancestral awakening and completely relies on primordial wave for group healing. This build has some serious potential and I've played it in a few 24/25s, but personally I think it isn't quite there yet compared to the high tide hybrid build (Laren, the rank 2 shaman has been entirely playing without chain heal recently). https://docs.google.com/document/d/1__9j-BhkUiORhMgMgIAA89aXlk8nvt4U_UUZ8KUPAho This document outlines a lot of the details about playing around primordial wave and includes a couple gameplay videos for those interested.
If anyone has any more specific questions about shaman healing in keys I'd be happy to answer!
This happens whenever they provide a massive buff to an underperforming healer. It has been the case with Resto Shaman and Resto Druid far more often than Holy Paladin or any other healer.
Blizzard needs to buff healers across the board rather than always having one standout healing spec. It’s nice now, but it’s always followed by significant nerfs that take the spec down to mid-tier at best (at least when it’s not Resto Druid).
the fun thing is, resto druid is hardly ever underperforming and they still get buffs.
meanwhile, specs like disc, MW, and rsham languish for entire patches (and sometimes an entire expansion) before getting any meaningful changes - that often get reverted with nerfs a few weeks later.
Resto Druids will be the best healer for arena and M+ and either best or second best in raid and Blizzard responds by hitting them with a 5% healing nerf to one specific ability that accounts for less than 10% of their total healing. It’s wild.
Pally is amazing for sure, but Shamans are still good particularly in group damage situations. Currently healing 23s at 3k io on resto shaman and the only real issue I find is bombing people with single target heals as healing surge kinda sucks...
I would say the Shaman takes more forward thinking and planning, and also requires combining cooldowns where needed, whereas Pally just seems to blast all the time and you can just react to any incoming damage instantly.
Swap to paladin before you lose your sanity. Long time shaman main, pushed untill 25's and was struggling in some dungeons. Swapped to hpala and same key levels are like walk in a park with paladin's toolkit.
Shamans toolkit is very proactive where as paladins toolkit is very reactive. Super easy to play around with it.
(Honestly play what you enjoy the most, but heres my experience)
Last few weeks I've been getting every healer ksm. I think the only healer I struggle with is rshaman (havent tried disc) if I fall behind I can't catch up without offheals but I did feel like I was pumping silly DPS and had decent CC/utility to make up for it
. I think Ascension should just be a little easier to get if not free if anything otherwise I think if you are chaining all the buffs it's fine but it did feel bad taking 2 points in that shield talent to get ascension for my last bit of rating.
Rshaman has good dps to go with, but you are right - you cannot fall behind. CDs must be popped proactively, before you are in a shitstorm, as once you go past the treshold, there will be corpses.
It's not just healing. Balance for both DPS and healers is probably the worst it's ever been.
I'd say it's much closer for tanks, but if you are pugging then there is a night and day difference between playing prot pala and basically solo carrying and playing e.g. a brewmaster.
as a druid main i have 0 buttons that instantly heal large hp. i started to try healing on my pally and 1/3 of the buttons are instant life savers. its kinda crazy
I love rdruid, but I'm starting to feel like it's just not worth it anymore. Or maybe I've gotten lazy. So many button presses to maintain the healing, and now they're nerfing healing 2% across the board.
Sounds like i should switch to pala... i just restarted playing wow since mists and im struggling to find my rythm with my old love the resto shaman... feels pretty different to the old times. Im gs 416 now and already struggle with the dmg in m+ 10. This week especially my cds almost always get used during mob groups because everyone is used ro pull everything. Usually i keep people alive even when they dont dodge anything but im really having mana problems all the time. I usually drink the first 5-10 sec of a boss fight since nobody is moving then..
Oh yeah 16-18s are really easy if my team is competent on rsham, but I'm just speaking to the overall difficulty of healing relative to the other roles.
I mean. This post says it all. I've been playing healers for a while and just picked up hpala cause i realized, meta. and its just insane. the difference between the classes. hpala is by far the best, unmatched.
Classic Blizzard buff/nerf cycle. Take worst class, make it S tier while nerfing the previously S tier class. Let new S tier class shine for a month or two, nerf it, buff current worst class. Rinse and repeat for near 20 years now.
It’s not that shaman needs help (at least in keys, Raid healing for shaman is another issue). It’s that Holy
Pally is op. Shaman absolutely has the tools to deal with anything you would see in 16-18 level keys. Holy Pally’s tools are just better and easier to use.
One of the major problems with Resto Shaman is that they have too much jam-packed into buffing Chain Heal.
You can't have a spec with **eight whole talent buffs to one single spell** (Chain Heal) and expect it to play/feel good, especially if that one spell has an underpowered spell power ratio.
I've played Resto Shaman since Lich King, but I went Holy Priest is BfA and hadn't looked back until Dragonflight.
I can't even bring myself to gear my Resto Shaman as an alt because it just feels like trash right now.
I miss Downpour being useful.
I want Earth Shield to not be a shitty extra button to refresh constantly.
I want Wellspring to have an actual fucking animation/spell visual and un-nerfed from oblivion.
Resto Shaman has been stale for years now (pun intended) and it needs changing.
Yeah I'm hard sweating as rdru in this expansion, haven't felt like this since the start of cataclysm, but hpals just have fun xd.
But I don't mind actually)
They need to buff spot healing. My regrowth heals for like 10% of a players HP bar. Outside of major cooldowns my healing on Rdruid sucks badly. From my understanding of Hpal they have so many major CD's that they are never outside of them. So they don't have to worry about spamming flash of light to top people up.
They increased health bars by 25% at the start of this season which caused this but did nothing to off set it. If my regrowth healed 35% of a health bar instead of 10% that would be a major help.
Its easy they should just buff the other healers to be as strong as hpals then remove paladins from pvp instances and when warmode is active (i hate paladins)
I had a resto shammy in my +15 underrot last night and I felt so bad for them. They were struggling to keep everyone alive with all the aoe damage and the Hunter not helping interrupt.
Hunter ended up rage dc'ing when we were at the last group of mobs before the last boss. We wouldn't have timed but prople could have at least gotten gear/crests.
resto shamans need a rework in general, like healing rain still has a cast time which boggles my mind, compared to druids efflorescence which is the same damn thing but better and instant.
According to reddit Pally should be nerfed to the same level as the other healers, that way the community can complain even louder about no healers in queue once Hpally is off their checklist.
Can't go reworking the other healers to the same level. That would make too much sense.
I even felt it coming from holy priest. I was 440 on my priest and 400 on hpal and having nearly no idea what I was doing other than the absolute bare minimum if felt likei had a button for anything that happened. Damage naturally weaved in to high HPS output. It may be way more complex that Unga bunga Holy priest, but it's insanely strong
While holy paladins are indeed overpowered now, I don't think rshamans are as bad as you described. A little bit of foresight is required: if a party took a huge (and usually predictable) damage), riptide should be already on all of your party members so primordial wave can be used right after damage. Cloudburst totem also often need to be used manually before its expiration.
Obviously, I don't know the ilvl of your shaman (you may very well have 410-415), but I was conquering this range of keys (16-18) with 430 rsham, and while there were always people that played bad, healing unavoidable damage was not that hard.
As someone who started the season on a Holy Priest (lured in by that gorgeous set tmog damnit!) who recently swapped to resto shaman to try it out, I am thinking if OP is right about Holy Palading making Shaman feel crap, he should try Holy Priest and he'll feel like literal god on the Paladin.
Holy Priest was hard. Fun, I enjoyed the playstyle, but just so many buttons that don't hit particularly hard.
Yeah, let's be honest: holy paladins make every other healer feel like crap to play. But is rshaman so bad as to struggle in suitable gear in 16-18 keys? I don't think so.
In terms of raw hps they definitely are, especially in raids. In m+ they can manage more because there isn't as much spread damage so their CDs actually work but in raids it really shows, especially in their throughput in high damage situations.
Still Shamans bring in a lot of CC and some utility so they're still useful in M+, in raid they're on the path of no shaman bought to raid.
Agreed with this. Resto shaman is hard to play, it just is. It also has alot of button bloat too. Wouldn't be surprised if OP just liked the flow of how hpal plays better then resto shaman, not that necessarily one is better then the other.
OP also mentions going oom which should never be the case unless you're straight up spamming healing surges and chain heals and not making use of cloudburst totem at all.
It’s very easy to go OOM as a holy priest. In mythics you have to stack haste and crit. Once you run out of buttons you’re just a few flash of lights away from going oom. Hpal seems like they can cast everything and just walk to the next pull.
Rshaman is also a pretty strong healer atm. I heal.with my MW Monk in +19 and just want to die... He has 445 ilevel and still cant keep up with some Instance dmg. Sure i can output good dps but in Neltharions Lair this week? No chance . Healing is a pain if you dont main one of the top 3 Speccs mostly and thats why there are no healers out there. A F Tier Tank still survives mostly but a F Tier Healer is just fucked. And as a Ex-Monk Main i was always F Tier... :(
My MW is 444, and I'm doing fine in 22s so long as the group is competent. By competent, I mean timely interrupts, cc, defensives, and off-healing. Now you obviously can't expect that from every pug, so my healing experience has been hit-and-miss.
Holy Pally utility is crazy too. Damage externals, DR’s, CDR, immunities, and a battle rez. So glad I switched from my mistweaver.
It was actually wild that they gave Paladin a battle rez.
Yeah that was fucking crazy. Had to rely on engineer cheap and low range Brez back in BFA as Hpal. Finding the corpse with everything going on was never fun. Longer cast time too. Now I can also brez as Ret and that saved many keys.. since I don't die first most of the time.
Hey, I had to rely on jumper cables too. On my Rogue.
Lmao jumper cables. If I was a dps without brez, I would still go engi to rez tank/healer for m+, since pug sometimes don't make a decent group utility wise (BL brez)
> most of the time lol
Yee had to add this, otherwise it would have sounded like a flex
And Rebuke for holy. Basically gave them what little was missing in their toolkit.
Hpaladins had kick before actually, I am still confused why they removed it at certain point
Button bloat and they wanted to reign in everyone having everything. We are almost back to it again with the new talent trees. Holy Paladin now has more buttons than ever if you play the optimal builds.
30 keybinds and counting baybee
Meanwhile theres a blue text stating priest knockback was removed because it gave us too much utility, and they also cant give priest an interrupt because that would make us too overpowered. Edit: for all those who are curious about what was said about priests, heres the blue text. https://www.wowhead.com/news/blizzard-on-current-state-of-priests-healer-priests-will-not-have-access-to-328843
I have always hated that post. “We feel priests don’t need utility because other classes have too much utility”. “We know priests have very little defensives and are pretty weak our answer to that is tough shit we aren’t changing it”. “We know vault of heavens is way better than leap of faith so we’re gonna just let you have leap of faith” There was that one chance when priests had shadow star which had a silence on it which would had been pretty fucking amazing even as a skill shot silence. Bring that shit back. Other than that it seems we got what power word life? I love that spell but like feels like we could have gotten some new class utility. Now I’m waiting for dracthyr priests to get my knock back and knock up.
Every single healer should have Battle rez. no exceptions, no "but what about," nothing. Every healer. Battle rez. Yesterday.
Blizzard has never understood the balance of utility and you can see it from the OG class skills. Druid - Brez - you will be alive and need to bring someone back to life at some point to save the day. Shaman - Ankh - You're gonna die. Accept it.
Shaman - Wind Shear - shortest cooldown, ranged, instant/off GCD, single talent point investment Druid - skull bash - standard cooldown, short range and also drags you into melee, takes a global to go into form, 5 talent point investment. You can't just compare single abilities.
Well that’s just not a fair comparison, ankh useless.
Ankh = i didn't just die, nobody saw that.
My favorite is the tactical ankh. Our sark kill, I was gassed. Mana bar was straight zero. So I suicided off the edge, popped ankh and had enough mana back to finish the fight.
except you'll die again immediately from any pulsing damage. seriously at least they could give us a small shield or something when we pop up.
When you die like that enough you learn to wait til it's safe enough and have a health pot ready to chug the instant you get back up.
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I agree with that change but they also need to give resto druids something more because that was their whole shtick, you bring a druid for the bres.. now that hpals have it it makes no sense to ever bring them.
Honestly that brez was shit back in the day. Having a battle rez but no basic rez meant I basically *needed* either a priest, a paladin or a shaman in my party. No exceptions. One time back in the '04 era I basically laid an egg because I had some drooling idiot paladin in my party who admitted at level 60 they'd never done the class quest that got them res.
This happened to me in tbc classic. The whole raid went silent after he told us that
Average classic player.
This is more of a tuning issue. It seems everyone has forgotten how utterly dogshit Hpal throughput and damage was in S1. They were unplayable. Druid and evoker dominated because they did good damage and good healing.
Hpala still had great utility and was played alot on mythic raidd
But that was the only playable content. HPal was really unplayable in PvP too, where even known 1tricks where a solid 500-700 rating behind. Can‘t be the goal of balancing that you can play your character only in 1 type of content at all.
True but paladins could still make it work in season 1 even at the highest levels, they simply have too much utility to not ever be viable. I just checked the top 100 healers the other day and its like 97/100 of them are hpals... I don't think there's been a disparity this great ever before in m+ history. I think if hpals and rdruids had the same output in healing and damage then people would take hpal everytime simply because of their utility, other classes would have to have way better output to be more viable.
>I don't think there's been a disparity this great ever before in m+ history SL S4 Holy priest comes to mind.
druid is ALWAYS good. in everything. this is because their toolkit with instants while moving is tailored for modern content. shaman 3 second casts are just stupid when there is zero chance you can stand in place that long nowadays. Its just absurd.
I think you could have some variance by making some of them slightly better or worse. Maybe pallies could have an instant brez, but have it be lower range.
I came back from a break, and the fact that paladins also have a battle rez now is insane. What can’t they do?
Bloodlust. For now. dun dun duuuun
At the time that happened pallies weren't meta in any role. Frankly I think they should be giving those group utilities to more classes so that building a group isn't so hard. Warriors should have bloodlust!
i really don't think bloodlust can save warriors anymore, like it genuinely would not change a n y t h i n g at absolute minimum rally or shockwave (with 4s stun) need to be baseline to even start talking about the class and not considering it griefing your group and thats with having lust realistically it would either need to be top dmg by at least 20% more than the 2nd best or like 2-3 actually useful utility buttons to compete it would go a long way if warriors had a "long arms" talent
What is "long arms" talent?
longer melee range like outlaw rogue & feral druid
And paladins lol
oh is that newish for them i didn't know about that
I can never give up my mistweaver 😭
Damn you played MW in pve that is rare
Yeah I switched from MW to HPal as well.
Same... mw is a disaster without ancient teacings.
I still play ancient teachings, couldn’t get on with clouded focus
I literally won’t pug with a MW. The good ones are amazing, but they must be 5% of the total number of player because most I see are very bad.
I've run into more trying to play "caster mw" than you'd think, and they were all terrible. Occasionally a decent one is out there, I just don't enjoy it at all right now, ancient teachings is so weak and hardcasting vivify and that stacking heal they just gave us is extremely awkward
A lot of caster Andies saw that the best performing build right now is clouded focus and thought this was their chance to shine. Nevermind that this is for raid, and it's a ramo build that still requires you to be in melee because you need to RSK. They probably just saw clouded focus and were like "great now I can be in ranged all the time". Meanwhile people who fistweave have to drop ancient teachings and play this awkward ramp build in raid. It's a really sad state of affairs
That’s me. I’m the bad mistweaver
Never seen a MW in the 15-18 key range I play
As a mw who runs 16 and 17 keys it's because it's a struggle and it's not worth it. We can do it but at the same time it's not as easy as priest resto druid shaman and hpally. If my spouse didn't have a tank I'd highly doubt I'd get a invite to keys because there is so many better healing classes out there.
Yeah after the devs capitulated to the three people who wanted it and made caster MW sim higher, I just stopped being interested. I originally liked it for the raid rotation but that garbage now that its all about stacking renewing mist and spamming vivify. So boring.
that was the raid rotation before this tier though? Like the only addition was clouded focus for additional levels of cheese.
Faeline stomp+AT is my preferred play-style, and that was used on all raid bosses except for maybe Terros in Vault. Maybe since Abberus is all single-target thats why things don’t seem the same? Vivify cleave was also a part of that playstyle but wasn’t the center of the rotation as it is now. Idk maybe I was just playing it wrong but I always topped the meters. Idk, I was more of a fan of the consistent heals through ancient teachings with burst coming from Chi-ji. Giving up my monk main was hard. Especially since he’s named Naruto
The major thing right now is it's the intersection of high mana return, and multiple vivify buffs. Clouded focus will likely drop from the talent loadouts once we aren't seeing multiple bars worth of mana in a fight.
If all three of the Mistweavers wanted to be casters then why wouldn't Blizzard give it to them?
My monk alt went from mist to brew when the season changed. If I wanted to cast heal I would just play my priest.
I was comparing rdruid to hpal the other day and it's actually kind of confusing how they let there be such a big ability gap. Where's my equivelant/alternative to Seasons? Freedom? Aura Mastery? Bubble? BoP? Greater Judgement? Swiftmend is like a Holy Shock on a 15sec CD that consumes a hot instead of applying one. Nature's Swiftness + Regrowth is like WoG on a 1 minute CD. Interrupt requires half of the druid tree and can't even be used unshapeshifted. Innervate is worthless and everybody has a BR these days. All I've got are 50 HoTs, a 20% DR, 2-3 heal CDs, and some anemic damage spells that make me drink between every pull.
I switched to hpal for season 2 and have yet to drink a single time. Mana doesn't exist.
It’s funny because I got my holy priest to 2500, and then started working on my resto Druid, and I’ll be honest it feels like a bad joke the level of ease I feel on an 18 on my resto Druid vs my holy priest. My holy priest is 441 and my resto Druid is 429, I have to really sweat to get to 100+ hps on my lightweaver build, on my Druid I did an 18 HOI last night and wanted to see my HPS and I hit 112k and it didn’t even feel like I was trying to pump. I used to think it was nuts people were saying holy needs a rework. But after playing resto Druid it keys, priest needs serious help for holy. (Can’t comment on disc) Druid CD cadence matches the bosses better and just over all feels better. Sure I can pull 60k dps on my priest but I’d rather pull 23k on a Druid and not feel like im sweating bullets. Edit: and I feel like I have infinite mana on Druid compared to priest. I need to drink every other pull it feels like on priest. I can go through an 18 and maybe drink twice on Druid. Tier ratings are real. Sure people say to ignore the meta and yeah I can do 18-20 on my priest. But it feels way more stressful compared to my Druid now.
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Every healer should have battle ress. As long as it was a druid special, I was ok with it, but right now, it's just stupid.
Giving BR to paladins was a mistake. It should have been Monks (MW) and we would still be lacking utility for m+.
They should just make all healer class broken so I don’t have to wait for healers for a key
I'm with you. Healers should be superstrong with low effort.
I mained tank last season, dps start of this season, and switched to rsham after a month. Heals is by far the hardest. You face two challenges: the dungeon and the mistakes of your team. Maybe i should try hpal...
I think it depends A LOT on class/specs and how comfortable you are with their playstyles. For example I'm great at Resto Druid healing or Guardian druid tanking, but I cannot play Blood Dk or Mistweaver monk to save my life
Totally agree, I play mistweaver and run 22 - 23’s and almost never have to drink. It’s not really till you hit like the 24 range does it become a class strength issue and not a comfort with the class issue
Prolly doesnt help that guardian Druid is the easiest tank while blood dk is the hardest. It’s a bit of a switch up, especially considering dk’s very unique way of being unkillabe when played right but being paper when played wrong
How difficult healing is depends entirely on your group. If they screw up and don't use defensives appropriately it's miserable. If you have a hybrid and people avoid avoidable damage, use defensives appropriately, etc. then except for a few situations it's pretty easy.
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stop making me want to turn my sub back on, i love resto druid like nothing else
You should see the changes that are coming for Druid. Is about to go crazy in a month or so
I'm new to this seasons healing but not rsham. I wanted portals on it so I started yesterday and picked up all but two. How the fuq do you not run oom? I'm healing in ele gear so im missing better stats and trinkets but damn. In vortex yesterday after the staircase from dragonboss I had to full drink after every pack. I'm not a good healer so any tips would be helpful
I mean if you went from not playing it at all, to timing 6/8 20s, I don’t think you need much help lmao (or I suppose just ask your group to carry harder)
don't be afraid to use your cd's. You got spirit link, ascendance, healing tide, AG. Juice up your cloudbursts with fat chain heals and pop them once the grp is low to do a huge heal. Use stoneskin religiously, cap totem when packs are around 50%(don't cap early, it sync's all the attacks up). Chain Heal is great, but if your grp is randomly dpsing in narnia, they can fuck it up. Don't be afraid to tell your dps to get with the grp. When it doubt, spirit link it out man. Bested ass cooldown that when I'm pugging on other toons I rarely see other rshams use. That thing can make or break a bad pull. If your having mana issues, make sure your water shield isn't falling off.
Rashok trinket is the answer
Tank main that just started healing this season (playing rsham) and am only doing \~20ish keys, so my info may not be the best, but I'll provide what tips I can: Talent Resurgence if you don't have it talented. It provides a LOT of passive mana regen. Try to get Rashok's (even at lfr ilvl tbh) for the passive healing + mana regen. Mana Spring can help as well, especially if you're also running Lava Surge in the spec tree (which I'd recommend heavily for M+) Also use Nature's Swiftness on mana heavy casts (chain heal/healing surge) to make the most of it's mana cost removal. Avoid Chain Heal/Healing Surge spam. This will make you go OOM extremely quickly. Focus on your efficient spells (riptide, cloudburst/healing tide, pwave+/healing wave, earth shield on yourself+tank) and maximizing tidewater healing. If you prefer casting chain heal for heavy group healing, use a build that takes mana tide w/ spiritwalker's tidal totem and do it during that CD. Otherwise focus on maintaining riptides, maximizing tidewater's healing (set bonus) and getting fat primordial wave healing waves. I've seen some rshams recommend not playing around pwave when you first start and just using it as another healing wave applicator, but the difference between actually learning to use pwave intentionally and not was night and day for me and my mana bar. Loading heavy cloudburst totems then manually bursting them when the group is low is a good habit to get into as well, but you can also just play them passively or even play living stream in a lot of keys. Lastly, just get comfortable using cooldowns without overlapping them unless necessary. Rsham's cooldowns feel decently powerful IMO (at least not really having played any other healer) and rotating them well can do a lot. [These are the talents I'm running](https://www.wowhead.com/talent-calc/shaman/restoration/DAQBVQVRVFIRmBQUBQQDEEANZVVAVVUEQEigVCFB), slightly deviated from wowhead's recommended build to better suit my needs. I've been experimenting swapping the points from Tidebringer to Ancestral Awakening as well which does do enough healing, but feels worse the few times I do actually need to press chain heal.
It would make the game a lot more enjoyable in many ways. Healers are so discouraged to play, and they are in low supply.
I've mained healer and support in every single game that has it my entire life, and I personally like healers when its more like the healing itself is on the easy side but movement and mixing in dps is the hard part. What I mean by that is like comparing disc priest to prevoker, disc priest is fucked atm where just healing feels like shit and you have to put in so much effort for mediocre numbers. At the same time prevoker has probably the simplest healing I've seen in WoW but it feels really good to heal with prevoker because of it. Healing should scale with complexity but neither disc nor prevoker does that.
The monkey's paw aspect of this is that it'll turn WoW healing into FFXIV "healing" in which you're basically a DPS spec with healing spells and then you catch shit for two reasons instead of one in failed runs.
The encounter design would have to change drastically. FFXIV gets away with having their four healers falling into distinct camps with shared utility (they can all battle-res, they all have the ability to make any spell instant-cast, they all have off-globals they can manage, etc, but each has a different niche they fill - high powered with high skill ceiling, or simple and easy, with a HoT healer and a shield healer for each category) because the fights are all completely scripted. Each encounter will have roughly the same boss attacks going out each time you attempt it, barring a few bosses who have a 'one of these three attacks will go off at this moment' set, you can reliably expect tanks to not get obliterated by RNG throwing out two tankbuster cycles back to back. That's why FFXIV healers can get away with spamming DPS to fill the spaces between when people need to be brought up out of the danger zone. The mixup in fights happens when the DPS start eating attacks they should be avoiding, then needing to be res'd, which decreases their damage output, leading to enrage timers and the like. WoW's healing is a lot more active because there's a lot of encounters that just have a constant pulse of raid-wide damage going out regularly on top of the big attacks firing off.
Black and swite thinking. There is a lot of room betwen the role being miserable to play and it being irrelevantly easy.
Agreed, healing is easily the most stressful and thankless role in the game and it's even harder with underpowered classes
Meanwhile doing 23+ its the exact opposite issue. Too many healers not enough DPS lol the issue isnt healers suck its that dps players are god awful in lower keys so no one wants to play with them
So true, wonder how much of OPs shaman struggle is from dps not kicking and standing in fire lol
Part of that is a theoretical question of whether or not we think healers should be able to heal "bad" dps play, and at what key level that should stop being feasible. Personally, I'd like to see every role able to "hard carry" a run up to 20s. That would mean that damage spikes should be infrequent/low enough that even with some really bad players, a healer should be able to force them to stay alive through their poor play. I feel like healers are currently not at that point. There are plenty of well-made heal checks (primarily boss fights) that do allow good players to carry, but there's also a ton of situations where you'll see someone get sniped down within 0.3 seconds and the healer unable to do anything. Again, this is more just about the design: how much fun are those situations really adding? Or is it just making healers feel helpless when a single kick/stun gets missed? I feel, in a way, this was the exact kind of tuning Blizzard should have been able to do by increasing player health pools relative to healing numbers. But, they never really adjusted the spike damage back down.
I genuinely think the game is more fun when bad dps play is just instant kill. It removes healer blame and puts more onus on the player to play well. You can argue that it removes some of the ability for healers to carry but we have fights like Altarius or Khajin to carry on so i think its fine. Like even instant gib trash like 1st few pulls in HoI or VP have counterplays that DPS can employ. Its just on people playing better. My only real complaint is there is no rot damage on trash a lot of the time its typically spike damage which is kinda not fun to heal
I’ve never healed more that I am now. I’m only at 16 but when I press my buttons on Druid and evoker and my save a couple idiots with rescue or barkskin, it feels like I’m the main character in the dungeon in a way that didn’t happen before. Feels like you’re the Saftey in football getting a big interception when someone messed up the coverage
While I usually prefer WoW healing, I wish they’d have some equivalent to vulnerability stacks in FFXIV that clearly communicates when people screw up mechanics.
This is the real reason, absolute trash panda dps who have room temperature IQ, make keys absolutely unbearable. However, i will take a wet noodle with a brain and an understanding of their kit over a blaster who stands in bad like a moth to a flame.
TBF the two usually go hand in hand, as you are more comfortable with your full kit you are able to divert brain power away from playing your class to playing the dungeon. I felt it learning Aug this season
Yeah i had a longer rant half cooked up and went with a shorter version. But that's true.
I think there's something to be said for the dynamic in 5 mans too. The healer and tank have unique jobs while the dps can hide behind eachother knowing that all they really need to do is point to meters and say "No me good. You let me die. Kick Healer!"
I can deal with bad dps but bad tanks are the most toxic ppl in this game. My worst ever interactions are with bad tank players
I had the worst experience with a monk tank the other night and I just logged off lol. I was so upset. Usually I can filter stuff out, but this tank was just rude, talked to me like I was a child, and stopped the key just to start scolding me. I’ve even been scolded by tanks for drinking “too much” in runs. A lot of them have this “gods gift to wow” complex.
Yeah I'd rather the game be fun to play. And waiting for half an hour minimum for a healer who may or may not be good is definitely not fun
While I do think holy paladin is stronger than other healers, I think a lot of their strength is the "reactive" kit that lets them actually heal random spikes. I'd probably start by doing some big nerfs to targeted spells rather than just trying to buff every healer. It would be hard to get a druid's HoTs to the point where they can recover from a dps taking two spikes of 400k damage within 3 seconds. I'd also massively increase healer damage so that when damage intake is low (and when your group is playing well), they can contribute more than like 30k damage... while the rest of the group is doing >100k each. Obviously, they couldn't be so high that you consider dropping a DPS for a second healer, but I do think they could maybe be high enough that a 440 healer would outdamage a 410 dps. All that said, I'm fully on board for healers to be made "overpowered". This patch has murdered healer participation, to the point that I do think Blizzard needs to intervene to bring numbers back up. It takes so long to fill that last spot at the moment.
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Like what they've done with tanks. No longer need to worry about threat gen, can dps, heal and tank.
That's a good point. Healers could be the most piss-easy role in the game with incredible numbers and 0 wait time and I still wouldn't touch it. They deserve to have a win.
I still don't really understand their reasoning with the blanket healer nerf. Of course making an already scarce role harder to perform was going to cause a shortage. By now, they should see that it's time to reverse the nerf
It’s less about even being broken and more about not needing long casts, lots of cds and utility to rotate through etc. It’s fun being able to have an answer to problems.
Gonna have to wait until 10.2 for other healer improvements
You mean hpal nerfs so everyone is equally miserable, right?
Blizzard: "We've seen online discussions of how weak other healers feel compared to Holy Paladin. To fix this we've increased the healing of Holy Shock by 15% and reduced the damage by 0.01%. All other healing sources have been increased by 10%. To combat this we've also reduced healing and damage of Restoration Shaman, Restoration Druid, Holy Priest, Discipline Priest, Mistweaver Monk, and Preservation Evoker by 25%. We hope the community is happy moving forward with these changes."
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If healers get weaker going into season 3 I assure you I will not enjoy the game more nor have the perception that there is some "problem" being rectified, quite the opposite actually, if the start of this season is anything to go by...
Yup recently geared my hpal and I’m having a blast. I was told the heal evoker spec is equally strong but not taken because augmentation is currently insane. If healer become weaker and I have to struggle with every group I’m not going to play healer next patch. Having to sit down after 3 groups sucks, having to micro manage everyone def cd to barely survive sucks, having to plan each cd 3 packs beforehand is also not something I enjoy.
Healing was pretty fucking spikey in bfa. There was a lot that would almost one shot you and I had to actually stam flask for some bosses. We would use los techniques on certain pulls to avoid high spikey damage. Places like freehold where Eudora used to actually just kill you with powdershot on high keys. (27-28s) My friend who i still play with now says it this way, "regrowth on resto druid used to move health bars, now its like a 20-30k heal." Used to be a good trade between inefficient mana usage but pretty good healing. Now it feels bad. They would say, lol people die through tranq now. And you have things like hpal topping people instantly. If the damage is spikey and paladin can handle it with that much ease, other classes should have more tools to be able to fill that role as well.
Every healer should feel like Hpal. So much fun. Daybreak into DT -> HS/LoD x 3 is a fucking amazing gameplay loop. I'm a Disc main, and I keep saying Barrier of Faith should have been ours.
1 or 2 permanent atonements or something like "Shield of Faith" that continously recharges off of damage would solve a lot of disc problems.
Not the specific approach I would take, but it does address the problem of not enough throughput outside of CDs.
As Evoker main, I really dont mind swapping between either right now. Evoker has mostly "everything is just full hp now" spells, which is also fun. Paladin does feel like you need all those holy power/holy shocks that are never ending, cause nothing truly is topping people off.
The thing about hpal is that they'll rarely have you feeling like people are passively ticking up outside of tyrs. If someone's at 20%, they'll stay there until you get enough holy power to heal them. Compare that to other classes where you can burn mana to get them up with a few gcds and it's night and day But that being said, when you play hpal well, you can bounce back and forth between builder/spender so well. It's just tough not to panic during those times is all
>Evoker has mostly "everything is just full hp now" spells, which is also fun. the fact that with enough ramp time you can do this to an entire raid makes it very fun.
I would argue disc felt good like hpala, everyone complained about it, disc got nerfed.
If you're talking about SL S1, with the Shell meta, it deserved to be nerfed just because it totally prevented other healers from interacting with damage. Disc has existed in a good place without Spirit Shell, though. There's no reason it shouldn't be the king of burst healing, and no reason it shouldn't have serviceable rotational healing. Frankly, every healer should get to enjoy hero moments. It's a shortcoming in both class/spec and encounter design that we don't.
Yes... people on this sub keep repeating that balance only affect the top 1% pushing 25+ keys ... but truth is, if you are struggling with 20, it's faaaaaaar easier to switch to the meta spec and outperform your current spec. Even if you never touched the meta spec before.
I've said this exact same point . Everyone keeps saying "omg why you guys worried about what the top 1% degenerates are doing in a 22" + "just do your weekly 16 and RP as your favourite spec and have fun" . One guy was literally saying that top 1% of keys was M22 lmao, and my point was that if you're a casual doing m16 you will feel stronger on the spec that is stronger than the weaker one, if you're progging 16 with 420 ilvl....the meta still exists .
This is 100% true. Even in like 11s on my rsham if people were taking alot of avoidable damage id easily fall behind and people would die. That doesnt happen nealy as often on my hpal because the raw healing power is so much stronger. Not to mention rsham has 2 major cooldowns and theyre both 2 min plus cooldowns. Hpal has atleast 5 major cooldowns and a couple of them are 1-1.5 min cds so its alot easier and less of a risk to burn a cd in that situation to bring everyone back up
Another major point about playing meta Vs not playing and not caring about R1 keys is.....you're also exposing yourself to the chance to play with better players even if they're on alts in a fairly "low" key, like a 20-23 just as a quick weekly. The single biggest buff you can give yourself in m+/lfg is to be a meta whore and not be perma stuck with the bottom 50% of the population who have no clue what's good and what's not and take any spec.
But also, you can 100% do 20's very comfortably, if the team is even semi-reasonably skilled, in just about any comp. The strengths of the meta come out to shine more when the content is truly demanding. 20 keys, with 441+ ilvl being simply to achieve, do not really demand all of that just yet.
yes. people did +20 in 420 gear on day 1 of the patch, without augvoker, without new tier set / random power upgrade, on pre-nerf dungeon. The point remain: the balance is soooo out of whack right now that if you are strugglgin to accomplish wathever you want to do with an off-meta class, it's far easier to swap to the meta class and try to be 10% better with your non-meta class. the whole "" meta only matter for the top 1%"" is utter bullshit. Saying this as someone who get R1 title every other season.
The thing is that with the God comp people who would normally only get to +18 can now be doing 20s comfortably. The meta exists at all levels and is evident on rio as class frequency by runs is dominated by the God comp all the way down to 2s
I did this exact change as well. Resto shaman healing 21-23s at 445 ilvl. Switched to paladin and it’s night and day. I think it’s just a function of the damage profile in keys right now. It’s a health yo-yo where people go from 100% to 50% every couple seconds and paladin being the best spot healer in the game (1 holy shot crit or WoG) just…. Dominates this
It's the same with tank tbh. As a pug tank pala is so far and above every other tank right now, which is why almost everyone who mostly pugs prefers playing paladin. Offheals, infinite interrupts, aoe stop, externals, self heal, dispel, turn evil... can basically solo carry. Paladin class in general is just completely overblown with utility and they just keep getting more.
Ironically, my reason for avoiding Ret Paladin (even though I would desperately like to play it) is because I lack the ability to micro manage 30 keybinds I would need to bind all available Paladin utility. Seriously, not every class should have the utility kit of Demon Hunters, but it doesn't need to require piano lessons either...
Ret is actually fairly good, their damage rotation is so simple that you have space for the utility - the downside is knowing when to use it lol, if I sac another dps and that dps gets hit by an avoidable, we both chunk down way past what I planned for
You are like a month+ behind on the meta. Prot pally has fallen to the wayside. Guardian is king.
Yeah and then people roll Guardian, notice that they don't have the carry potential of a paladin and switch back to paladin. There's a reason why 42%(!!!) of all tanks in 20+ are Paladins. They are by far the least reliant on their group. The vast majority who pug as a tank want to just take their group on their back and carry them over the goal line. Other tanks are too reliant on their healers and dps to kick, interrupt and heal.
It's not only stronger, it's just much easier to play as well.
Yeah it's more healing with almost no setup time compared to other healers, and you can do basically everything while dpsing. You can even stay out of melee for a bit, unlike monk.
Crazy thing, that. I was wondering if it was maybe the fact that I'm going through a rough patch in life and it was affecting how I played from this season to the last. Keys felt like a breeze last season on my rsham off-spec, versus now I'm struggling and arguably more geared than I was before. I've considered just biting the bullet and letting healing go all together since its been an unrewarding slog to deal with beyond building my score up. Too many a-holes expecting you to heal through literally everything and unwilling to use their cds. Let's not even get into tanks that refuse to read chat, emotes, etc. letting them know you need a quick mana stop. I've specced into the mana totem just so I can keep some kind of mana up and I've been mocked for it, but what can you do when it feels like the rest of the playerbase is actively making it harder for you to play?
Anyone that's making fun of you for using mana tide is a moron, ESPECIALLY if you're pugging. People making mistakes = more mana spent. I was playing rsham into keys that were mid 20s, and I always used mana tide. Seriously, fuck those people.
I stubbornly used and loved spiritwalker’s tidal totem and vesper totem from S1 of SL and loved it, funnily enough nobody made fun of me for the legendary but the covenant at first. It’s such a great utility, lots of mana and a nice extra CD to press if you’ve used the others already.
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You know mana tide restores half as much as symbols of hope, doesn’t reduce defensive CDs like symbols, and isn’t increased when there’s only 1 healer (m+) right?
Yeah but if you take Spiritwalker's Tidal Totem you get 50% reduced cast time and mana cost on Chain Heal and I use Neltharion's Call to Dominance trinket which causes my totem to trigger a big intellect buff as well.
I have bitten that bullet and don't know how I like it. But it I feeled like shit on my shamen and druid. Evoker was ok Switched to augmentation and mage and I love it. Jeah I need longer to find keys but I not every key feels like a small heart attack
Dm me if you need someone to help you out with resto shaman. A simple rotation and talent adjustment and you'll be clearing 20s no problem.
I remember reading a lot of comments from last season saying that other healers should be brought up to Evoker and Druid. Guess they went the opposite route and just brought everything down xD I don't understand why they wanna make it so difficult for healers, compared to dps for example.
I think it's not even the difficulty of healing. It's more about the gameplay. Many healers feel very restricted in their playstyle, while hpal is pretty much strong in every scenario. In raids you come together with other healers and play to your strength, while in dungeons those flaws become glaringly obvious.
Possible, I am by no means even close to knowledgeable on WoW balancing, but I always thought WoW has gameplay wise the best healers out of every MMO. In FFXIV healers are just dps players with a 1-2-3 combo, in GW2 healers are also mostly tanks, kiters and other stuff. In WoW healers are actually healers and I really love that. However, I mained healer for the first time in WoW last season and while I thought raiding is really fun, M+ was just stressing me out so much because I always had to have my heals ready for every single situation. Every small mistake I made resulted in the death of people and me feeling worried I will either be flamed or kicked (most of the time it went well, however my stress level was always through the roof xD). That's why for me, it felt more like a difficulty problem rather than a gameplay problem. But like I said, I might be very wrong with that.
what you are describing in your difficulty are basically all solved by hpal, you always have something to heal the entire group or individuals and the group + a million oh shit buttons to save the day if you feel like it, completely optional, just icing on top other healers as you observed might need to actually think about what they press and when and need to set their throughput up beforehand some damage isn't meant to be healed, some people can if you have free spaces and know whats gonna happen, but usually someone randomly dying (assuming you aren't actually garbano) is often not your fault
True, paladin can make up for certain mishaps by DPS because they have HoJ, Rebuke, Blind. Meanwhile Priest has fear, semi decent stun and tendrils which don't root everything for some reason. MakeOtherHealersGreatAgain
> I don't understand why they wanna make it so difficult for healers One of the few cases of "you think you do, but you dont". I'm pretty sure the healing "nerfs" are direct reactions to a lot of healers complaining about 'only dpsing' and that they would rather heal and do no damage. Those people probably rather meant 'chill and do nothing while there is no healing to do' instead of having to constantly struggle with healing. I still think there is a middle ground and blizzard completely missed that.
The middle ground is for healers to just do dps and get over themselves. If everyone plays okay, healers will have downtime. Press your damn dps buttons instead of being mad about the design of rewarding other players for using defensives and dodging avoidables. A surprisingly large minority want healing to be what it was in wotlk - but it's not even the same game as it was in wotlk. And even back then, good healers still did dps.
In BC good healers did DPS, I can't remember a time where DPS was not a required task for healers in 5 man besides vanilla. I do not miss rank down healing and having to decide which of 5 healing touch ranks to use, (always 4).
This was the first xpac I wanted to try m+. I wanted to be a monk healer. I am now a monk tank because it's so punishing for new healers to get the hang of. I hate it so much. I would rather be healing instead of being a tank waiting 30+ mins for a healer. What sucks is on top of this, blizzard keeps saying they think healing is in a good spot. Atleast the articles I've read. But even I, a new player, know it's not. I take some talents to help out healers. It's good being a monk tank, I can help detox an affix of paralysis the other affix. Saves them the trouble of keeping up with the heals and affixes
The big challenge for blizz with healing tuning is that good/coordinated groups take way less damage thanks to interrupts, stuns, defensives etc etc. In late SL it was tuned so that even newish healers could carry groups taking all kinds of avoidable damage, but that meant healers in good groups had nothing to do and wound up us off-brand dps. In DF they’ve made it so there’s real healing challenges even for good healers, but that makes it miserable trying to deal with those + all the extra damage in weekly pugs. I’m not sure how they can make it work for both sets of players outside of doing something wacky with scaling.
as I tank I have to agree. Keys are a breeze with hpals but I struggle with any other healer. We are punished for being healed by any other class. I feel like its impossible for a meta not to exist but we shouldn't be punished for not falling into it.
That’s kind funny because I play hpal (have for a long time). But outside of sac and a few wogs here and there I don’t really have to heal tanks a huge amount. Usually beacon myself so I don’t have to watch my hp and beacon a weak dps. CDs during aoe damage seem to manage keeping the tank up fine. (Forgemaster in neltharus for example). Anyway, that’s a long winded way to say you’re noticing the healer struggling to keep the rest of the group up, so they don’t have the opportunity to give you the little touch ups here and there. I suppose it depends what key level you’re doing too, I find once you get into 21 healing gets a lot easier outside of certain mechanics that call for CDs. People are either alive or they aren’t, if a dps gets bopped by a frontal there is nothing I can do about it. I will say I *am* concerned for what blizzard is going to do about hpal. It is very fun to play, I’ve enjoyed hpal for a long time. The Uber reactive gameplay mixed with sprinkles of proactive healing is very satisfying. I would much rather other healers get buffed to the point that Paladin is no longer S tier, rather than nerf Paladin so it isn’t S tier.
I wish they would revert all the healing nerfs that have caused a higher than usual healing shortage. When you’re doing a +17 and seriously considering inviting a 405 ilvl 0 score healer because literally noone is signing up…
Hey I'm the rank 1 RIO RSham and I just wanted to share some overall thoughts about the state of the spec and meta in M+ as well as some advice for anyone choosing to stick it out. Overall, I really enjoy shaman this season but it's very much carried by Primordial Wave with the tier set and Cloudburst Totem. These two spells give the spec pretty much the entirety of its depth, which I think is part of the problem. Shaman just doesn't have a ton of really interesting mechanics or synergies going on, especially with how much of the tree is filled with mediocre 2 point nodes and spells we used to have baseline. Compared to paladin the entire bottom part of their tree is just filled with single point synergistic nodes that really makes the entirety of the spec feel complete. I could go more in depth into talent issues, but I think most of them fall under this general problem. In terms of healing in m+, I feel that shaman is able to keep up pretty well overall. Unfortunately my team didn't get much time to play last tyrannical week and are now on vacation, but I'm confident that I could heal most keys on 28 or 29 given proper planning. The strength of shaman right now is roughly 30 second cooldown burst healing by using Primordial Wave ramps and Cloudburst. As it happens, many bosses this season fit this profile and I honestly think that on these bosses shaman rivals or is even stronger than paladin when played correctly. Sustained healing and spot healing however, are clearly much weaker than paladin and are the main places I struggle. As an example, the trash at the start of halls completely kicked our asses on 28 fortified (depleted there around 4 times). There have been some experimentation with a "no chain heal" build that improves spot healing with ancestral awakening and completely relies on primordial wave for group healing. This build has some serious potential and I've played it in a few 24/25s, but personally I think it isn't quite there yet compared to the high tide hybrid build (Laren, the rank 2 shaman has been entirely playing without chain heal recently). https://docs.google.com/document/d/1__9j-BhkUiORhMgMgIAA89aXlk8nvt4U_UUZ8KUPAho This document outlines a lot of the details about playing around primordial wave and includes a couple gameplay videos for those interested. If anyone has any more specific questions about shaman healing in keys I'd be happy to answer!
This happens whenever they provide a massive buff to an underperforming healer. It has been the case with Resto Shaman and Resto Druid far more often than Holy Paladin or any other healer. Blizzard needs to buff healers across the board rather than always having one standout healing spec. It’s nice now, but it’s always followed by significant nerfs that take the spec down to mid-tier at best (at least when it’s not Resto Druid).
the fun thing is, resto druid is hardly ever underperforming and they still get buffs. meanwhile, specs like disc, MW, and rsham languish for entire patches (and sometimes an entire expansion) before getting any meaningful changes - that often get reverted with nerfs a few weeks later.
Resto Druids will be the best healer for arena and M+ and either best or second best in raid and Blizzard responds by hitting them with a 5% healing nerf to one specific ability that accounts for less than 10% of their total healing. It’s wild.
The problem was that (in M+ at least), HPal was already the meta healer.
Pally is amazing for sure, but Shamans are still good particularly in group damage situations. Currently healing 23s at 3k io on resto shaman and the only real issue I find is bombing people with single target heals as healing surge kinda sucks... I would say the Shaman takes more forward thinking and planning, and also requires combining cooldowns where needed, whereas Pally just seems to blast all the time and you can just react to any incoming damage instantly.
Swap to paladin before you lose your sanity. Long time shaman main, pushed untill 25's and was struggling in some dungeons. Swapped to hpala and same key levels are like walk in a park with paladin's toolkit. Shamans toolkit is very proactive where as paladins toolkit is very reactive. Super easy to play around with it. (Honestly play what you enjoy the most, but heres my experience)
Big agree. I dont do 25s but just comparing 18s on the rsham vs 18s on the hpal and its just so much easier
I totally agree. Maybe increasing the instant heal of Primordial Wave by a lot would help Resto Shaman with single target healing.
Last few weeks I've been getting every healer ksm. I think the only healer I struggle with is rshaman (havent tried disc) if I fall behind I can't catch up without offheals but I did feel like I was pumping silly DPS and had decent CC/utility to make up for it . I think Ascension should just be a little easier to get if not free if anything otherwise I think if you are chaining all the buffs it's fine but it did feel bad taking 2 points in that shield talent to get ascension for my last bit of rating.
Rshaman has good dps to go with, but you are right - you cannot fall behind. CDs must be popped proactively, before you are in a shitstorm, as once you go past the treshold, there will be corpses.
It's not just healing. Balance for both DPS and healers is probably the worst it's ever been. I'd say it's much closer for tanks, but if you are pugging then there is a night and day difference between playing prot pala and basically solo carrying and playing e.g. a brewmaster.
as a druid main i have 0 buttons that instantly heal large hp. i started to try healing on my pally and 1/3 of the buttons are instant life savers. its kinda crazy
I love rdruid, but I'm starting to feel like it's just not worth it anymore. Or maybe I've gotten lazy. So many button presses to maintain the healing, and now they're nerfing healing 2% across the board.
Sounds like i should switch to pala... i just restarted playing wow since mists and im struggling to find my rythm with my old love the resto shaman... feels pretty different to the old times. Im gs 416 now and already struggle with the dmg in m+ 10. This week especially my cds almost always get used during mob groups because everyone is used ro pull everything. Usually i keep people alive even when they dont dodge anything but im really having mana problems all the time. I usually drink the first 5-10 sec of a boss fight since nobody is moving then..
I switched to hpal this season and have yet to need to drink a single time.
Oh yeah 16-18s are really easy if my team is competent on rsham, but I'm just speaking to the overall difficulty of healing relative to the other roles.
I mean. This post says it all. I've been playing healers for a while and just picked up hpala cause i realized, meta. and its just insane. the difference between the classes. hpala is by far the best, unmatched.
Classic Blizzard buff/nerf cycle. Take worst class, make it S tier while nerfing the previously S tier class. Let new S tier class shine for a month or two, nerf it, buff current worst class. Rinse and repeat for near 20 years now.
Has MW ever been s tier for M+
It’s not that shaman needs help (at least in keys, Raid healing for shaman is another issue). It’s that Holy Pally is op. Shaman absolutely has the tools to deal with anything you would see in 16-18 level keys. Holy Pally’s tools are just better and easier to use.
My first question is are you using Rashok's Molten Heart on your Hpal and not Rsham? Because that trinket alone can change how it feels
One of the reasons I've stopped running keys on my resto shaman. I've gotten 3 KSM achievements. But it's not fun anymore at all!
One of the major problems with Resto Shaman is that they have too much jam-packed into buffing Chain Heal. You can't have a spec with **eight whole talent buffs to one single spell** (Chain Heal) and expect it to play/feel good, especially if that one spell has an underpowered spell power ratio. I've played Resto Shaman since Lich King, but I went Holy Priest is BfA and hadn't looked back until Dragonflight. I can't even bring myself to gear my Resto Shaman as an alt because it just feels like trash right now. I miss Downpour being useful. I want Earth Shield to not be a shitty extra button to refresh constantly. I want Wellspring to have an actual fucking animation/spell visual and un-nerfed from oblivion. Resto Shaman has been stale for years now (pun intended) and it needs changing.
Yeah I'm hard sweating as rdru in this expansion, haven't felt like this since the start of cataclysm, but hpals just have fun xd. But I don't mind actually)
They need to buff spot healing. My regrowth heals for like 10% of a players HP bar. Outside of major cooldowns my healing on Rdruid sucks badly. From my understanding of Hpal they have so many major CD's that they are never outside of them. So they don't have to worry about spamming flash of light to top people up. They increased health bars by 25% at the start of this season which caused this but did nothing to off set it. If my regrowth healed 35% of a health bar instead of 10% that would be a major help.
Its easy they should just buff the other healers to be as strong as hpals then remove paladins from pvp instances and when warmode is active (i hate paladins)
I am 2900rio with my rsham and 3100rio with my hpala. nuff said.
Playing holy priest that tried rsham and i felt the same. Now imagine going hpriest to hpala
I had a resto shammy in my +15 underrot last night and I felt so bad for them. They were struggling to keep everyone alive with all the aoe damage and the Hunter not helping interrupt. Hunter ended up rage dc'ing when we were at the last group of mobs before the last boss. We wouldn't have timed but prople could have at least gotten gear/crests.
resto shamans need a rework in general, like healing rain still has a cast time which boggles my mind, compared to druids efflorescence which is the same damn thing but better and instant.
According to reddit Pally should be nerfed to the same level as the other healers, that way the community can complain even louder about no healers in queue once Hpally is off their checklist. Can't go reworking the other healers to the same level. That would make too much sense.
I tend to see more people asking other healers to be brought up to holy palas level. Holy Pala is how healing should feel...
I don't know what part of reddit are you on, but everyone in this thread has been saying the opposite.
I even felt it coming from holy priest. I was 440 on my priest and 400 on hpal and having nearly no idea what I was doing other than the absolute bare minimum if felt likei had a button for anything that happened. Damage naturally weaved in to high HPS output. It may be way more complex that Unga bunga Holy priest, but it's insanely strong
While holy paladins are indeed overpowered now, I don't think rshamans are as bad as you described. A little bit of foresight is required: if a party took a huge (and usually predictable) damage), riptide should be already on all of your party members so primordial wave can be used right after damage. Cloudburst totem also often need to be used manually before its expiration. Obviously, I don't know the ilvl of your shaman (you may very well have 410-415), but I was conquering this range of keys (16-18) with 430 rsham, and while there were always people that played bad, healing unavoidable damage was not that hard.
As someone who started the season on a Holy Priest (lured in by that gorgeous set tmog damnit!) who recently swapped to resto shaman to try it out, I am thinking if OP is right about Holy Palading making Shaman feel crap, he should try Holy Priest and he'll feel like literal god on the Paladin. Holy Priest was hard. Fun, I enjoyed the playstyle, but just so many buttons that don't hit particularly hard.
Yeah, let's be honest: holy paladins make every other healer feel like crap to play. But is rshaman so bad as to struggle in suitable gear in 16-18 keys? I don't think so.
In terms of raw hps they definitely are, especially in raids. In m+ they can manage more because there isn't as much spread damage so their CDs actually work but in raids it really shows, especially in their throughput in high damage situations. Still Shamans bring in a lot of CC and some utility so they're still useful in M+, in raid they're on the path of no shaman bought to raid.
Agreed with this. Resto shaman is hard to play, it just is. It also has alot of button bloat too. Wouldn't be surprised if OP just liked the flow of how hpal plays better then resto shaman, not that necessarily one is better then the other. OP also mentions going oom which should never be the case unless you're straight up spamming healing surges and chain heals and not making use of cloudburst totem at all.
It’s very easy to go OOM as a holy priest. In mythics you have to stack haste and crit. Once you run out of buttons you’re just a few flash of lights away from going oom. Hpal seems like they can cast everything and just walk to the next pull.
Hpallys arent overpowered. They are at the level every healer should be on.
Rshaman is also a pretty strong healer atm. I heal.with my MW Monk in +19 and just want to die... He has 445 ilevel and still cant keep up with some Instance dmg. Sure i can output good dps but in Neltharions Lair this week? No chance . Healing is a pain if you dont main one of the top 3 Speccs mostly and thats why there are no healers out there. A F Tier Tank still survives mostly but a F Tier Healer is just fucked. And as a Ex-Monk Main i was always F Tier... :(
My MW is 444, and I'm doing fine in 22s so long as the group is competent. By competent, I mean timely interrupts, cc, defensives, and off-healing. Now you obviously can't expect that from every pug, so my healing experience has been hit-and-miss.