Does anyone find it funny that...
by Bôôbles | 15/03/2009 17:38:49 Blizzard nerfs the crap out of healer regen so we are forced to bring more healers come Uldar, yet the don't do anything to force us to bring more tanks? I wish we could have all the mana regen we possible could be given. Get thrown actual hard content (not hard because lolwegotnerfed), put some RNG damage everywhere, have enough crap to have five tanks constantly busy, and that be that. |
by Ghostcrawler | 15/03/2009 17:58:32 You don't generally bring more healers because the healers you have are OOM. You generally bring more healers because the healing per second you need to achieve can't be managed by the number of healers you have. (There are exceptions of course.) Look, it's in your (as healers) best interest for groups to want to have many healers. You are in a bad place when the guild starts to say "You know, we could probably clear Naxx faster with just 2 healers because we could bring another dps." It might be a peaceful utopia if 25-player raids scaled directly from 5-player groups, meaning that you had 5 tanks and 5 healers and 15 dps. We just don't think the encounters are as fun with that setup, and they certainly start to have a sameness after awhile (lots of adds or tank rotations on every fight for example). You have to do a lot of crazy things to enforce only 5 healers, because as soon as the group brings 7 or 8 healers, the content might get a lot easier. |
by Ghostcrawler | 15/03/2009 19:12:38
That was partially because OFSR was so potent back then. Honestly, we're not trying to recreate the MC days or healer rotations, though I can understand if some of you are nostalgic for them. In Ulduar, you should run out of mana if... 1) You don't have enough gear for the instance. 2) You aren't playing the encounter well enough. If you have good enough gear and good enough skill and aren't standing in fires and are kiting adds correctly and doing all the right things, then you aren't designed to run OOM. The reason we wanted to nerf regen is that having infinite mana was allowing too much of a buffer on those two factors (it allowed for too much "slop" in organization and execution). Take Saphiron as an example. When mana regen is very high, the dps can sit in the blizzards for a little while because the healers can just heal through it and make up enough mana when they get a clearcasting proc or are running for ice blocks (because OFSR regen was so good). In previous tiers of content, the guild probably would have had to farm the earlier bosses for several weeks to get enough gear to have a chance at the final few. Now Naxx was designed to be easy, and Ulduar isn't going to be a lot harder. Hard modes on the bosses though are designed to be very hard. That means being inefficient with mana has to be a liability instead of a tool used to make the content less challenging. |
by Ghostcrawler | 16/03/2009 04:27:50
Do not run with bad players, IMO. While we like the idea of sometimes nerfing dps if they stand in the fire, overall you have to understand that when you are signing to up to be a healer you are signing up for the primary responsibility of keeping the raid alive. And no we aren’t going to make that incredibly easy to do. :)
To be fair, we nerfed tanking and dps a lot in this patch too. Still, if the idiots stand in the fire, guild kick them. If you don’t have that power, then find a better guild. “Blaming the healer” is to some extent a social problem. There are plenty of healers who thought Naxx was way too easy and are eager for more of a challenge. They will find it in Ulduar, at least in the hard modes. They will find the deck stacked against them. They are not good encounters for people who stand in fires.
You know, if you don’t enjoy healing and you don’t enjoy tanking, I’m kind of at a loss for why you raid. I’m not saying we can’t improve those aspects of the game – we absolutely can. But you act as if a great many players are telling us how much they hate going on our raids, or that the current raid content is way too taxing. |
by Ghostcrawler | 16/03/2009 04:54:54
There have been several posts in various threads that try to tackle that subject. I do read them. The reason I am often hesitant to launch the kind of feedback thread you are describing (even though they sometimes yield good results) is in the long-term it seems to hurt us. You see a lot of "They didn't listen to any of our ideas" or "Why did they host that big thread just to ignore it?" I'm not saying our feelings will be hurt, because let's face it, you can't do this job for more than five minutes if you have thin skin. But I do think there is a risk that if you make players feel too involved in the design process that they stop giving feedback altogether if and when they feel burned because their idea didn't make it into the game. It's challenging sometimes to succesfully harness the energy of such a passionate player base. We'll continue to explore more effective methods of letting you offer your two cents though. |
by Ghostcrawler | 17 hours, 41 minutes ago.
If that was true, I wouldn’t be on these forums. But yes, we do tend to take very seriously the feedback from expert players. Theirs is not the only voice though.
Right, The question at hand was what to do when the dps essentially play bad and then blame the healer for running OOM, and the insinuation was that Blizzard shouldn’t let healers run out of mana in order to prevent that. I was saying stand up for yourself a little bit. If you are wiping on challenging content, then you need to step it up a notch. If you feel abused by your raiding group, and can’t get that behavior turned around, then by all means, find some better friends. I don’t think that is Blizzard’s problem to fix, though.
Quoting Angua here. They should not be running out of mana in Ulduar if they play well. In Naxx you can do things like stand in fires, overheal like mad, bring players in green gear to get geared up, or not even explain the fights to pugs because you can brute force your way through them. One the mechanics that allows you to brute force is having so much mana regen. Now all of that is appropriate for the first raid tier. Things will start to get a little more difficult now, and a lot more difficult if you want to do the hardest fights. Naxx = play bad and win. Ulduar = play good and win.
Vs
You can see the awkward spot blue posters are often in. :( |
by Ghostcrawler | 17 hours, 40 minutes ago.
It isn’t. We had to fix some problems, and very rapid mana regeneration was one of them. Another big one was amazing tank cooldowns (mostly from the DK). However we stepped up the difficulty on the encounters too. There is no “just burn him down” boss like Noth. The trash will require crowd control on some pulls. Ulduar is not Sunwell. It is not a huge leap up in difficulty from Naxx, but it is a step up. If that isn’t enough of a challenge for you, then I suggest you try the hard modes and pay a visit to Algalon.
The content is not balanced to a point where if one player gets hit by a blizzard you will wipe. If that was true, you wouldn’t see groups clearing Naxx with 2 healers (in 10-player mode). Yes the responsibility of healing the raid is yours. The responsibility of doing things that let you do your job is that of the dps and the tanks. If the tank doesn’t blow her cooldowns and then blames her death on you, she is a bad tank. Giving you more mana isn’t going to fix that.
Marxalot is correct. By the same token, we don’t expect every player to come to a consensus before we make a change. That would be silly. So we read as much feedback as we can and try and make informed decisions. Some players want content to be harder and some want it to be easier. We can’t satisfy both extremes, and we don’t really try to. Our solution for this patch is to make the standard content more difficult, but not soul-crushing. However, if you like soul-crushing, you should be able to find that too. [ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ] |
by Ghostcrawler | 17 hours, 40 minutes ago.
You understand that the theory I lacked Y chromosomes was disproven, right? Just making sure.
If you have one paladin, you are getting Kings or Wisdom, and probably Kings. You can add a second paladin for Wisdom, or you can get a Resto shaman and get “Wisdom” plus other nice things like Bloodlust. If you have that covered too, then maybe the last slot is up for grabs, and you can take whoever you want.
This is how we see it for those guilds who are thinking about Twilight Zone and similar achievements. We have to make sure it is possible to go OOM to make some of the Ulduar hard modes actually hard.
I absolutely understand that feedback. It is of great concern to us. However we also have to balance that with the players who feel like their Holy paladin can’t heal 5-player heroics or their druid can’t repair an OT after a Patch hateful strike. If you are referring strictly to Lifebloom, the nerf there was to hit its efficiency, not scare you away from casting hots.
That isn’t our intent at all. Lich King’s first tier of raiding and all the heroic content is much easier than it was in Burning Crusade in order to make it more approachable for players not interested in hardcore raiding. I think there is a lot of focus on hardcore raiding because 3.1 brings a gigantic raid with it, however there is non-raid content too and not every patch will have those in the same skewed proportion.
Totally. But players at that level should not have problems with mana, even with this change. But you will have to kick it up a notch to raid Ulduar. You won’t have to become a hardcore guild, but it will be more challenging. You will have to CC some trash for instance. The elite should also note how many players here are worried about Ulduar shutting them out. You can call it srs bzns and all that, but yet a lot of players who are sophisticated enough to post on forums (true casuals don't do that) are worried that Ulduar may be too much. This is the kind of thing we have to balance. [ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ] |
by Ghostcrawler | 11 hours, 27 minutes ago.
That was the idea, however the previews also spawned quite a few “broken promises” threads all the way to a few who said “I wish they wouldn’t announce anything until they’re 100% sure.” It’s easy to dismiss those comments, but at some point you have to justify to yourself why you are dismissing player comments. We’re not sure how we’ll handle previews the next time.
We can try to do some tests to make sure healers don’t go OOM on their earlier heroics.
That is our stance. I think it would have been harder for us to advocate that stance in the Sunwell era, but we are getting closer now.
The fires typically do a lot more damage than Seal of Blood. What is the most you have ever been bled for on a Judgement crit? Maybe 10K? And that’s a crit. No offense, but your healers probably laugh at the kind of damage you are inflicting on yourself. The tank is getting hit for much more, much faster and the fires or big AE sprays generally do more. A stray PoM or CL can probably top you off. I know you don’t want to use Command, but if you’re sitting at 10% of your health or you know the dragon is about to breathe, it may be an attractive option until you get healed back up again. I know the self-damage is a concern of the paladins though, and we’ll keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t feel like too much of a liability in raids. |
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