Main healing problem is that you have to do DPS.In keys, or on Arena, I'm have to spend ~40% of my time on doing damage.But I dont want to do that. I want to play as pure heal!
You cannot solve the healer population or the fun factor. It is human. You can make it appealing, you can make it challenging but you cannot make people love healing. Do not try to solve it, you will end up solving nothing and create more problems because the issue is not the role it is the human behind the screen. MMORPGs and RPG experience or part of it is coordination with 4 other members for a party and atleast 9 other for raids. If the tank pulls according to the composition it has in m+, the dps players will love their class and the tank, if the dps and the tank crowd controlls and the healers would heal only the unavoidable damage alot more would play it. This is a human issue, a community issue, and as long as you have multiple type of players playing the same game mode but only some of them respect other players they play with this issue will persist. You can gatekeep it but you will eventually run out of people to play with. I can speak only from my PoV when it comes to healing. I have not mained a healer since TBC, and it was HPala. Far simplier than it is now. Currently, healing is frustrating because the damage is spikey. You can anticipate it if you open your eyes and see that mob casting a potentially 1-shot aoe mechanic in DOTI but no matter how hard you anticipate it because of the spike damage someone or all will die. It does not matter why that cast went off, it should not have. It can be due to the keyholder incompetence inviting no meele or a comp out of SP-Bdruid-DemoLock-BRM-H/DPriest or it can be lack of coordination or focus (I tried to set a kick priority multiple times). What matters is that you cannot fulfill the role of the life saver that WoW's Healer role has always had. Yes, you can solve this but not the healer population.
Gonna chime in on the pvp side.I'm a multi-CE dps main who casually heals arenas as a side hobby. I always get a few elite sets every season (i also LOVE solo shuffle).From what I've seen from an 1800-2100 healer's perspective:
I know everyone hates dps players, but personally I detest the need to do a sub-tank defensive rotation as a dps just to live generic mechanics or even degen gameplay like tossing a power word shield (as shadow) on every flame shock target for tyrannical Mindbender Ghur'sha because the dot ticks for 600k each hit in only a 26 and it buys enough time for our healer to actually get through the GCD.I feel for healers and tanks, tbh I feel for everyone. Rubber banding HP bars is sad AF. Especially when survival walls are coming before dps walls in keys on the timer.
The healing issues I see this season are mostly as follows, focusing on M+ because I don't raid heal all that much, but some things apply there:Mana economy Some specs virtually never run out of mana, other specs can run out of mana halfway through a boss fight unless they're extremely careful to use every possible mana-generating resource available or stack the right stats. The disparity is just way too wide and literally NO healer thinks running out of mana by playing normally (i.e. not exclusively spamming the expensive spells) should be a thing they have to worry about. Resto shaman should not have virtually their entire mana economy defined by how much crit they stack, with low crit being basically completely unplayable. If nothing else, Resurgence should restore the same amount of mana for Healing Surge as it does for Healing Wave, or for all spells covered really. But I would really love it if I wasn't almost required to stack like 5000 crit literally only because the mana economy is so unstable without it that high.Resto druid needs similar help in raid, most likely by reducing the cost of Rejuvenation. I almost never notice my mana going down in dungeons unless I've had to dump an awkward number of Regrowths to save people from silly mistakes, but in raid I'm just on a rapid decline to empty by doing exactly what I should be doing. Doesn't make sense.10.3 Spot-Healing ChangesWhile I appreciate that many single target spells were boosted in 10.3, there were some obvious spells that got left behind that should not have been. I won't get into every spell that was left out, but the main standouts are Word of Glory and Light of Dawn, and Rejuvenation. Holy Paladin basically stopped spending Holy Power unless they have enough buffs stacked together to make it worthwhile to cast, and I think everyone can safely agree the spec shouldn't play that way. Rejuvenation is seeing a buff this week, though, so it should be mostly better.Defensive DisparityOften one of the most noticeable differences I feel when going from dungeon to dungeon is not so much how different the dungeons feel from each other, but how different they feel depending on what specs I'm playing with in those dungeons. Doing a dungeon with a Ret Paladin and a Warlock that are basically passively unkillable and still have great defensives on top of that built-in sturdiness feels great, especially when the Ret takes Healing Hands and is really smart about tossing an easy Word of Glory or Lay on Hands when someone else is in danger, or recognizes when they could Blessing of Sacrifice someone else who would be in danger. But then you turn around and do a dungeon with a Boomie, Hunter and a Mage that thinks Frost Barrier is their only defensive, and you feel like you're working 12 times as hard to keep people from dying. Granted, Hunter and Mage and Rogue have some pretty solid defensive abilities for most situations and can survive a lot if they just hit something, but it still feels really dumb when they die to something and the Ret next to them who hit nothing still has like 40% health from the same attack. Druid needs an actual Stamina node somewhere in the talent tree and another defensive option that isn't "Go Bear." Shaman needs a % Max HP defensive that is NOT tied to Earth Elemental. Priest's DR from Fade needs to be at least 15% if not 20%.Asinine AOE Attributes & AvoidanceSeveral abilities in M+ and possibly quite a few in raid that are CLEARLY, UNDENIABLY AOE abilities are not flagged as AOE abilities because they send out bolts instead of hitting like a circle or whatever. Some of the most notable examples being Cinderbolt Storm, Focused Tempest, Shadowbolt Volley. These abilities have weird attributes where they send out one bolt, a varying number of bolts, or a chain lightning at players, and basically every player in the party takes damage, so common sense says, "This is an AOE," but the game says, "No this is just a bunch of smaller spells happening at the same time that happen to hit multiple players," and thus things like Avoidance, Zephyr, and Feint (the base part, not the Elusiveness part) don't work when they obviously should. I'm so sick and tired of needing to guess and check logs to see if my defenses actually do what they say they do, or if I'm going to have literally no defense against something if I try it. If a spell can or will hit multiple players, whether all at once or over the duration of the channel, it is AOE. Stop making it unnecessarily complicated.Damage Incoming vs Time To React and FrequencyI know one of the problems right now is how many classes/specs have too strong of defensives available, but one of the major problems this season in M+ is the number of targeted abilities that do one-shot or nearly one-shot damage at a sufficient key level, yet give players virtually no time to see them coming or react to them. Key example being something like the Berserkers in Everbloom doing Bounding Whirl, where the only real way to know when it's coming and prevent it is to go out of your way to pick up an addon or WA that tells you when it's coming because the game gives you, quite literally, no indication that one of the range is about to simply die if you don't prevent it (not to mention it gives you no indication which player is going to be targeted because they just do it instantaneously, and might target someone slightly outside of melee range). Juggernauts in AD have a similar problem, where at least you can see that they are doing it and who they look at, but the activation time is way too short and they cast it far, far too frequently, so the recourse players have taken to is finding even more new ways to make sure they simply don't do the ability. If they ever finally figure out how to completely prevent players from cheesing this charge, then they need to actually take a step back and change the ability as well, so it isn't just killing someone every 6 seconds. And one that catches people by surprise a lot is the maggots in Waycrest, where they can simply gang up on the first person to enter combat with them that isn't the tank and all hit the same target with spit, which isn't lethal when it's just one, but they like to do 3-4 at a time on the same player, at the exact same time. The cast time is way too short to react to this kind of pain coming your way, so it's way too common for that one player to just get globaled.Speaking of Waycrest, all of the witches in this dungeon are examples where the cast time is fine, but the frequency is just way too much. These witches basically all have bolts that nearly one-shot every player they hit, and they fire them out like machine guns. Pulling more than a few of these witches is usually an express ticket to wipe city.Blatant BugsI really can't complain about things in M+, especially healing, without bringing up the bugs with Chronofade from Manifested Timeways. Any player standing within melee range of someone who gets dispelled is probably going to get double-tapped and instantly die, and anyone moving when dispelled can hit themselves. NEITHER of these things are supposed to happen, and never should have been allowed to exist in the game this long.
I honestly don’t understand why people don’t enjoy tanking or healing right now. I have 3 tanks and 4 healers at or above 2700 and 9/9H, it’s honestly not that bad. Tanks are unkillable if you know your class and healers are all relatively strong as long as you don’t play evoker. Learn how to save mana depending on your class and when to use your cds, all healers can do the current raid fights
Healing is so gg, the fact we can do mythics 20+ without a healer means something is not fully balanced, I think selfhealing should be nerf.
S1 M+ was hell to heal on both fortified and tyrannical.In S2 they toned it down a bit, but they added in pulsing AOE bosses, debuffs that required mass dispel, and also the bosses in a lot of the dungeons were really tough to heal. Uldaman, Halls, and Neltharion's Lair were pretty rough..In S3 they buffed everyone's single target healing, but then they made most of the trash not even really do much unavoidable group damage. Most of the damage you'll take is from missing kicks, standing in the wrong spot, or from mobs that like to jump around. If you chain CC everything you won't even take any damage. With the bosses: they made a lot them just defensive cooldown checkboxes. Every 20-30s the boss will do large group damage and nothing else.So it's just weird and an inconsistent pattern. S1 and S2 had bosses where the healer needed to pump through the damage, but in S3 you're just AFK on most of the bosses.
I quite listening to the video when he said, "Healer's are too powerful, that's why we we have a healer shortage." The only scenario in which I can think of that this statement would be even remotely accurate is if he goes on to further reference burst damage to try and offset the speed at which a healer can replenish a health bar. I don't necessarily care for wack-a-mole healing, but I have thoroughly enjoyed healing in M+ and Raids all of Dragonflight. In fact, I took a break from healing in most of BFA because I hated how it felt in BFA. An infinitely scaling system like M+ will always wind up with one-shots and that's just how it is. I haven't enjoyed healing in PVP, which is very rare for me, so I haven't PVP'd this expansion. It is in large part to people getting nuked faster than health bars can go up, and also because of the constant micro-CC's. It's just annoying. I have consistently gotten every healer to KSM (except this season, where I haven't done monk but that's cause I don't like fistweaving) this expansion at the minimum (sometimes even multiple to KSH if I'm really enjoying it), and I've done more raiding this expansion than I have in the last 3. If anything they should just have more rot mechanics or something. But overall, I am enjoying healing right now. Really, really hoping Blizzard doesn't screw it up listening to nonsense.
I don't know about other specs, but the hpal rework and emphasis on casts instead of the melee instants of SL killed the spec for me. That and having to watch my mana way more.
I'm really sick of mechanics in Heroic that bring people to half health when I have to spend 5 globals to heal them back up before the next hit comes.That garbage needs to be in Mythic raiding only. I'm loving SoD... my heals actually hit for something. I feel impactful instead of helpless. In retail I can press my big raidwide CD and watch as people still die. It makes me feel like.... "what's the point?"DPS hit their CD and watch their damage spike like a boss.Tanks hit their CD and can solo soak something like a boss. A geared out purple parsing healer hits their big raid CD during seeds on on Tindral...... aaaaand watch as players die anyway. Feelsbadman
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