Healers in PVP

Lajex

Member
What is wrong with healers in bg-pvp?

You know a game is broken when a healer can easily kill a dps.

The best geared healer should'nt be abble to kill even a medium geared dps.

What is wrong Blizzard?




(Due to my inability to post this in the Blizzard foruns as i'm now a F2P, i decided to post my rant here)
 
Lajex said:
game is broken
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I believe since at least BFA started, healing specs all receive bonus damage to compensate for damage at end game (and likely boost questing as a healer).

blizz has been really upping healer spec damage probably since at least WOD with the biggest blatant change being that flat % increase in BFA. The trickle down effect is apparent in our low level brackets.

obviously this benefits certain classes more than others based on available offensive spells, sorry paladins.
 
Still that don't make sense to me. Even the priest class have shadow spec to leveling.
All they have to do is choose loot specialization.
 
Healer Class design has shifted wildly over the years.


During early and mid Wod, the idea was that Healing should be about mana efficiency and planning. Healers would have to take their time using long casts spells to save mana for the critical moments. In fact, during WoD beta there was an effort to add active mana regeneration mechanics to healers (similar to tanks' active mitigation), but it didn't work out! This idea can be traced back to early MoP, with how Mistweaver Monks have mana teas and etc.


During late WoD (at Hellfire Citadel tier), Disc Priests and Holy Paladins could almost prevent all damage in raids since their mastery applied big absorption shields, leaving no room for other healers to heal and making mana almost irrelevant. I believe this started the need for Healers DPS'ing, to compensate their downtime (even if not required in boss fights, but at least to make the gameplay fun).


At Legion, the strong absorptions were removed and the mana mini-game was heavily changed, with spirit and many other mana-regen effects being removed for Versatility, because of how they became overpowered or useless at the last tier - (thus, beginning Foamspittle's tale).


Also, since Legion's core design involved Artifacts, everyone should be able to level up by themselves to some extend - and the very very early artifact power was a buff that you gained automatically to your equipped weapon, meaning that you could only level up the one in current use. This lead to healer damage being increased and new damage rotations being added.


I believe this design choice really peaked during Battle for Azeroth, when Mythic Dungeons became most popular. In a dungeon, there isn't consistent damage to heal and since there's only 5 people, a healer's damage is way more impactful and becomes part of their toolkit.


In the last BfA patch (8.3), the newly added corruptions made the gameplay incredibly fast and topping a person could be easily done. That increased the pressure for even more healer damage in the PvE meta, while the PvP meta was even build around healers using DPS trinkets and tempo plays were they'd switch for DPS rotations to secure a kill.


Personally, I haven't play Shadowlands endgame so far. But as a Healer I found this playstyle or DPS'ing when possible really engaging and creates a cool skill curve that allows good players to really shine. Unfortunately, this playstyles requires Healer damage to be at least somewhat threatening and might never be balanced in low level, non-ranked PvP.
 
Eleannor i understand your point of view as a healer.

But when i play a tank in cata expansion was pretty fun also. But now pvp tanking is nerfed and i had to delete my tank chars and play only dps.

Nerfing should also be applied to healers in pvp (only the healers dps, not healing).

Blizzard should keep the game fair to all classes in pvp, DPSers dps, healers heal and tanks tank.

I play shadowlands for a month and it's the same, nerfed tanks, healers are to op. They heal and dps, not fair.

That's only my opinion.
 
It’s been a day 1 gripe for me since those WOD changes.

why should healers enjoy op low level pvp when tanks are literally irrelevant.

just unintended consequences of the tuning and shifts in endgame mentality/roles/balance

perhaps an interesting dynamic would be enabling these buffs/nerfs incrementally as one levels.

Ex if healers are supposed to get 50% bonus damage at endgame, they get a few% each level. Or if tanks are supposed to suffer bonus damage in endgame pvp then that would get applied incrementally as one levels up.

that would probably shift other metas at low level/ leveling but could be an interesting thought
 
I get your point @Lajex, but I reckon that tanks in Cataclysm were really busted due to the Vengeance mechanic ("damage taken increases damage done and the potency of damage reduction effects"), so we can't really compare. It was so busted that it gave headaches even in PvE until it was completely removed, after a secondary attack power bonus was added to all tanks in their mastery stat.

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I'd suggest the following changes for a better overall PvP experience, if Wowdevs ever read this:

1. Add ways to prevent an imbalanced number of Healers in the same Battlegrounds:

(a) teams should never have more than 1/3 (one third) of its maximum size as healers;
(b) the difference between the number of healers in teams should never be higher than 2;
(c) a pop-up could appear to stimulate players queued as healers to chance specs to DPS, if the restrictions ever make the queue times lower.​

Commentary: It might be impossible to balance healers in a way were they are naturally squishy enough to be solo'ed, but can survive even when focused by multiple people if played at higher skill level (Before being impossible, this design is likely undesired by Blizzard, as it would refrain many from ever playing a PvP healer).

Since the Healing function is by design too powerful, the balance would be in form of reducing its availability in random matches. The limitation of 1/3 is based on the most common composition for Ranked Battlegrounds: 3 healers and 7 DPS.

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2. Tanks should perform the role of an utility defensive bruiser in PvP, which seems impossible right now due them taking artificially take more damage than others. I believe damage taken and damage done should be reduced and, to some extend, off-healing as well (maybe not by the same %, as it is part of utility).

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3. The slow debuffs related to carrying flags for too much time should reduce movement damage, as well as the distance some tank skills move your character, similar to and specially https://www.wowhead.com/spell=189110/infernal-strike.

Commentary: Ever since PvP talents were introduced, Tanks became the mobile flag carriers at max level. Unfortunately, some of them are way ahead of others, simply because their movement toolkit involves "raw movement", rather than speed increases (I even believe this was one important reason to the revamp of Deepwind Gorge, as the map's mechanic heavily favored Demon Hunter Tanks, since carrying the cart nullified all kinds of speed increases).
 
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Eleannor said:
Healer Class design has shifted wildly over the years.


During early and mid Wod, the idea was that Healing should be about mana efficiency and planning. Healers would have to take their time using long casts spells to save mana for the critical moments. In fact, during WoD beta there was an effort to add active mana regeneration mechanics to healers (similar to tanks' active mitigation), but it didn't work out! This idea can be traced back to early MoP, with how Mistweaver Monks have mana teas and etc.
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Uhh, MP5 Enchants & Food, Mana restore Set Bonuses + Meta Gems while actively Casting lower Ranked Spells to conserve Mana from WAAAY back in the day (Vanilla/TBC) would like to challenge the notion that Mana efficiency came from MoP.

Also, beginning of Cata Healers got fucked and ran OOM constantly until Blizz fixed it.
 
Thanks, @DeLindsay !

I think there isn't anywhere that says what active mana regeneration is, but I usually understand that as using spells to restore mana.

The "5 seconds rule" - while used to restore mana - wouldn't count as active regeneration, mostly because the player simply stops spending mana. I also think that MP5 effects and Spirit would be more like "gearing options" than active regeneration.

Using lower rank spells is a way to actively save mana, but doesn't seem like a conscious dev design choice, even more so because it was later removed.
 
really not getting the "healers are overpowered" line anyway. Seems like healers are in a decent place? They can be bursted down, they arent doing impressive dmg, the heals are substantial compared to damage output but having to actually pay attention to mana now is forces decisions.

Im not sure I understand the problem here.
 
To add to @Eleannor 's excellent historical summary, Blizzard's design philosophy fundamentally changed in TBC 2.4, when they combined spell damage and spell healing into spell power, so that healers could do more damage. Blizzard attempted to regress this a little in MoP with the introduction of PvP Power, a PvP-only stat that augmented the damage of dps and the heals of healers, but then "removed" the stat in WoD, and cleaned up most of the remnants by the time Legion rolled around.

Before 2.4, a battleground healer primarily kept themselves and teammates alive and offered battleground utility (slows, CCs, DoTs to keep rogues from re-stealthing, etc.). After the change, healers could more easily wear down a single opponent, but still struggled mightily in 2v1s. That made the most sense to me -- a battleground healer should always be able to 1v1 a dps given enough time, and it's on the dps to either lockdown the heals, or coordinate with a teammate.

If a single dps can easily kill a healer, then there's no point to playing a healer -- you'll do your team a better service by playing a dps, which was exactly the problem with 19s and 29s in Wrath. Likewise, if your healer can come close to doing dps-level damage, then there's no point to playing a dps -- you'll do your team a better service by playing a healer, which arguably was an issue in BfA.

I haven't played in ShadowLands yet (fix the daggone L/R macro problem, Blizz! It's been three months!) so I can't speak to current healer power, but I get the sentiment behind the original post. While I don't agree that a fully geared healer should struggle against a single mediocre-geared dps, I do agree that more distinctive roles in battlegrounds made instanced PvP more fun.
 
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Chops said:
Im not sure I understand the problem here.
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Chops, let me put it that way: If two perfect builded lvl 20 twinks, an healer and a dps fight the healer easily win by killing the dpser, not by outhealing his damage.
 
Did the DPS attempt to CC/Silence/Interrupt the Healer? Did the DPS have any self-Heals/Defensive CD's that they actually used? Just saying you saw it happen twice is irrelevant unless we know everything about both Classes/Specs/Builds/Gear/Ability usage/etc.

Also, were both those DPS derpstains that have no concept of how to play their Class, or against certain Classes? And were those 2 Healers pro at their Class? Lots to unpack besides "this isn't fair, NERF IT BLIZZ"
 
My priest selen who is pretty much bis with gf artifact weapons can straight up lose to hunters with ilvl33 weapons in a 1v1. Can i win? yes but I can also easily lose. Same with warrior and ww monks as well. I ama ctually pretty happy with how healers are in slands, its way better then bfa.
 
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