The spike damage in mythic plus for healers CAN be extreme. I'm honestly dreading when the mega dungeon comes into the M+ pool, if the damage profiles stay the same that will be a massacre. But I'm having a great time as a healer in general, I have at least KSM on all the healers and KSH on my main. I may not represent the majority as I've been at this for almost 20 years now.
^ problem is it's not about skill, but attitude :( and... can you blame two random people not moving instead of the other? like it isn't anyone's fault, really...although its usually to not lose dps... in which case you are falling to a griefer
Make sure Blizzard balances it around raid and not M+Makes sense you would put your resources into what far less ppl play.
The problem is simple.Healer role is not popular and because it was not popular they made it do dps and gave healers burst healing and, in some cases, trivialize it. This worked and it was a major success. The role has become far more popular with this format. There were sufficient tanks, sufficient healers for every key and there was no excruciating waiting times.For some asinine reason they decided to break that and create huge queue times with less healers and even more players avoiding healing. The healing role was never going to be as popular as dps or as tank but they did manage to balance that out. Yet this expansion they decided to @#$% with it.In order to satisfy individuals that take the healing role as a challenge they !@#$ed the rest of the m+ community. Was it worth it? Not according to me. To them? Probably. As it is the role sucks and it will become less popular than it ever was. The only solution I see is to go back on it because you will not make the healing role popular by making healing a major challenge. It is not "modern" and 99% of players do not like the challenge to be the role but the key. The way it is right now......not only the role is a challenge but on top of it it is the key. For tanks the challenge is the key, for dps the challenge is the key, for healers it is healing AND the key. Before this the challenge was the key for healers, too. So, I am going to repeat myself. You will NOT going to solve the long m+ queue and the healer role more popular by making healing AND the key a challenge. Simple as that.I had a learning curve when I picked up MW. Can I keep the group alive through a 20? Yes! Is it pleasent? ABSOLUTELY @#$%ING NOT. The way healing works right now IT IS THE REASON WHY IT IS NOT POPULAR IN THE FIRST PLACE. And the comments here saying that healing is fine and you need to git gud, that is not the point. The point is that you have a community that, like 99.9% of the gamers DO NOT LIKE THE HEALING ROLE. The only way to have the whole community enjoy m+ is to make heals powerful again, make them what they have been THEIR ENTIRE @#$%ING LIFE IN WOW. LIFE SAVERS. Right now, they are not life savers. Right now, it is just a separate entity from the party you are in where you have 4 npcs and yourself that you hope you have your trigger finger fast enough to not let them die. You guys, that use "git gud" while it is not wrong, do not see the bigger picture or do not care as long as you are satisfied. But this is a game not real life where meritocracy should exist and it is a motivational force for many. It is a game where people want a bit of challenge while enjoying the class they pick regardless of role.Again, I am a Warlock main. I have been for a very long time. I have never trusted healers, so, I was obsessed with taking as little dmg as possible and be self-sufficient....even at the cost of dps. You may think that when a Warlock moves 2-3k dps drops. NO! You lose 10-20k dps, sometimes you lose half of the dps because you have a long ass mechanic or a chain of mechanics (See the dog in UR) that requires you to move and blizzard decided to not only punish you for moving but make sure that if you do move your dps plunges in the deepest, darkest and most obscure places of Azeroth (in PuGs YOU WILL want to sacrifice your dps at the dog because otherwise you risk wipe, you risk people just leave or, worse.......not time the key. If you expect meele to take of it.....nope they wont. I assure you they wont.). We are not hacks like Mages where they have Ice floes AND blink AND Alter time. Mages can go to narnia do HIGHER than Warlock damage when they sit still all the while coming back from Narnia with the dps unaffected or unnoticeable dps drop, having all the mobility in the world all the while having a cheat death and tools to survive burst dmg. We are not that. We are not the favorite of the family. Again, I am talking about PuGs. Do not come to me with Sjele, Kalamazi or premades where you are coordinated because they step only on the worms that are immidiate to them and lose as little dps as possible. You know it is true.
I hope Blizzard reads these posts, there are a lot of good suggestions here and could help round out a great solution for healers. I’ve been healing for more than 10 years myself and am just not having fun any more. A lot of the healing gameplay revolves around RNG too. I have to hope my convoke heals, I have to hope my rejuvenation spreads, I have to hope my group stands in the efflorescence (however this is somewhat under my control, but I can’t be replacing the efflorescence every second). There needs to be an addressing of some sort (not to my problems specifically, but to healing in general) because it’s becoming unplayable for a large majority of players, which can be proven by how much popularity this thread has gotten in such a short amount of time.I also think that a less chaotic kit of healing spells and less interaction between all of your buttons leads to a more enjoyable experience when healing. AKA. I press rejuvenation, it heals a ton - rather than - I press rejuvenation, it’s dog sheet unless I have 5 other hots rolling, I press flourish, AND I am pumping regrowths into the same target. I’m sure there are other similar scenarios for other healers.There are a ton of other solutions too, and this thread does a great job at portraying other people’s issues and they have super valid points. I hope that if anyone from Blizzard is reading, please take these messages to heart - a lot of the players might not be a part of the vocal crowd but definitely share these thoughts and want something to happen. Something needs to happen or your healer count will continue to dwindle. I personally will choose to tank over this because it’s not fun for me anymore, and I’m sure others will do the same but for dps, tanking, or just taking a break from the game.
I'll try to keep my response short and to the point. I'm someone that has healed for well over 18 years in this game. I am one of the few that like this season and last for the challenge it's brought. We can be healers again rather than focus on hurr durr doing as much damage as possible because everyone and their mother has self-healing and the damage profiles are trivial. I've said this since the start of M+ but a lot of people I talk to such as guildies have their own opinions on this. I don't think that healer damage should be something that is meta defining. It should be an added bonus. Were the focus on "is my healer doing damage" rather than "how much damage is my healer doing", I think it'd be a healthier state but that requires a change of public perception. I've no issues with raid tuning. It feels good to drop a healer and push clears faster because raiding does get to a point where you're just doing re-clears and no one wants to spend more time than you need to. That said, raiding also isn't my focus and hasn't been for some time since M+ was created. I've often been one of few in the guilds I've been in to run M+. I both enjoy Dragonflight's tuning for M+ and also think it's a bit too punishing. As another comment stated, the game should be more about execution of mechanics rather than blatant bull$%^& that one shots. I primarily PuG and it's the community that makes or breaks it. Happens much less now but still happens enough where a group will fail and I will be blamed despite having done nothing wrong. Meanwhile, I'm the one that has handled the affixes, I'm the one using CC/interrupts, I am the one doing boss mechanics (when they can be solo'd). No other role has such an external focus and that is by design, but the point I'm trying to make here is that people often don't realize how much good healers do and negativity bias makes them remember the bad ones. And yeah, PuG healers are kinda trash rn as I've seen on my prot pala alt trying to do things. But it's a double-edged problem. Healing is both a massive barrier to entry and even when you are good, you often aren't rewarded for your efforts. So it's no wonder no one besides resident healers like myself even bother. Public perception and meta chasing have really quite ruined this whole delicate balance that used to exist. People just look up on subcreation and see oh, holy pala is S tier... so I'm ONLY going to take a holy pala which in turn skews the stats even more so into Holy pala.
It's almost like having stupid amounts of damage isn't fun to deal with for most players....God I wish we could go back to older design philosophies, where minor heals/defenses actually did something usefull, and where healing was mostly a matter of managing resources well throughout an entire fight, as opposed to the horrific yo-yo healing of modern WoW where you're just spamming your biggest stuff all the time. Plus, it would make minor defenses on DPS feel better as well. Mages just got mass barrier and it's the single most disappointing defensive I've ever seen, it doesn't even stop a single AoE in M+.
Yes, M+ does have spiky damage profiles; however, what a lot of people fail to realize is that numerous mechanics that do high damage can be avoided entirely by using LoS or simply outranging the mechanic. Two quick examples include the spinning bananas cast in Freehold after the first boss; the ability has a 30 yard range and there is no reason for any ranged DPS or ranged healer should ever be affected by that ability. Additionally, the brutes that do the yell can be outranged if you get low. That is much harder for melee than for ranged, but basically, there isn't a reason that ranged should ever die to either of those mechanics.I'm reminded of a PuG HOI 23 I did this past week ... It was bad enough to have an Evoker who refused to use Lust .... and then to get to the last boss knowing that you have a tank, the healer (hpal), and another melee spec in the group, and yet the Evoker wanted to be right on the boss making it nearly impossible for the healer or melee to do damage due to the poor placement of the swirls.Personally, I think the issue isn't as much about healers and their throughput as it is about the players themselves. No one wants to do their own research, no one wants to understand the ins and outs of their spec to know when to take certain talents or why you don't. DPS simply want to zugzug, use no defensives and fail at interrupts. Tanks have no idea how to effectively play their spec yet still want to do these insane MDI pulls without playing builds that allow for those pulls, they can't be self-sufficient and instead rely on the healer to pickup all the slack while also babysitting the DPS.
Raid healing is fine because almost all of it is AOE healing at set times. These abilities are spaced out enough that you can almost always easily coordinate one or two raid healing cooldowns and those damage events are just completely covered without a second thought. Then you mostly twiddle your thumbs and throw in some damage for the next 30 seconds until something else happens that you need to pay attention to.M+ healing is all over the place right now. You have fights where one giant AOE damage event is immediately followed by another giant AOE damage event, and often with a mechanic going on that prevents you from standing still to cast because of instant-kill swirlies at your feet. You have fights where there's non-stop rot damage completely wrecking the group and not every spec has great tools to triage the group between AOE healing cooldowns, or their heals are just too damn expensive to maintain the throughput required without the essential Rashok trinket for mana. You have fights where the difference between an easy kill is whether your DPS use defensives or go full potato and make you spam heal them to remove a massive Grievous dot. You have trash everywhere that can either one shot someone because a single cast didn't get stopped, or several different flavors of mobs that can all decide to destroy the same player at the same time so they die in less than a global. There are so many cases where you need massive spot heals back to back, and yet so many DPS specs do that spot healing faster AND stronger for some reason. I don't understand why the single target heals are so pathetically weak right now for most healers. Or why mana costs are so high that a single trinket is practically the key to being able to go further.M+ still really needs a modest damage nerf across the board, like 5-10% off everything, and some fights really should have seen more obvious adjustments sooner that they still haven't gotten. In almost all cases where problem arise, it's not necessarily that the damage is just too high, but one huge damage event is immediately followed by another, and one of those probably forces you to move so you can't heal anyway. Just tiny adjustments to give small breathers between damage events and fix the pacing of the fights would probably be enough for many of them. And Warlord Sargha needs to have zero swirlies on the field when the shield comes up so you can actually rush down the shield consistently.
I've enjoyed healing m+ in DF so far (only ever do 20s for ports). Overall haven't had issues - early season can be rough when you're under-geared and dungeons can sometimes be over-tuned or a learning curve.There have definitely been specific bosses that have been issues for me as a MW monk due to their damage profiles or certain mechanics. I absolutely HATED the last boss in Ruby Life Pools. It just felt awful and overly punishing for healers. First and third boss in Halls of Infusion can be rough on Tyran although it can also just come down to the dps on how easy those fights are. The bleed boss in Uldaman is an awful healing profile. Harlan isn't difficult but the overlap between the blades damage + the bomb dot + being forced to move due to bombs all happening at once is a lot on higher tyran.TL:DR most of the issues are with Tyran bosses and boss design/damage profiles imo.
Holy Paladin, Holy Paladin and even more Holy Paladin.Still waiting for Mistweaver Monk revamp, Still waiting for Discipline Priest revamp, Still waiting for Resto Druid revamp, Still.