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Healing in Cataclysm: No Fun
TheRegulator
Member Posts: 30
Is there anyone else that finds healing in Cataclysm to be unbearable? I really liked to be a healer, and all my friends counted on my to help them do stuff. Healing stuff in Cataclysm is not fun, so I stopped playing. Now all my friends hate me 
Is there a game I can convince my friends to play with me that has a fun healer? I really liked shadow priest, so maybe one with something like that where you can do damage and heal your friends. I spam my heal in Cataclysm and my friends still die anyways, I don't know how to say it. I don't even get time to use my shadow damage anymore
Comments
Were you trying to heal while shadow spec? What were you trying to heal, regular or heroic? (actually this may not matter as I don't think even in good gear one would be able to heal the 84-85 regulars). You are actually the first person I've heard complain of not being able to heal in their dps spec because most know that won't likely work out for them. I let my sub laps due to burn out myself, but still enjoyed healing on my priest and druid.
Before Cataclysm I had talents in Holy and Shadow spec so I could heal and do damage. I can't spec my character that way anymore because they made it so I can't. In Cataclysm I just use Holy spec, I wasn't having fun healing any of the new stuff. I thought that maybe priest was a bad class, so I made a paladin. Healing groups on paladin was fun; I could attack stuff with my weapon and smite monsters between healing my friends. When I got to the Cataclysm stuff and it was bad again. I don't know, when I get to level 81 stuff all I can do was spam my heal.
Yup, they purposefully made the dungeons more difficult, but regulars aren't that bad, heroics can be a pain until you have high level gear, but they said that was coming before the xpac launched.
If your friends don't like you because you wont heal for them, then they are not your friends.
Beyond that, group content is much harder in wow now. It is a bit to difficult to heal a group and dps at the same time effectively. There are a few talents in shaman, priest and druid that give a little synergy to mixing in dps into your healing role.
Shaman: Casting lightning bolt returns mana and damaing shock spells increase the potency of your next healing spell.
Druids get mana free wrath spells that have a chance to make starfire nstant cast.
Discipline priests heal a player for 100% of the damage of their smite spell.
I'm sure that there is something else I'm missing.
I actually prefer healing in cataclysm now to lich king. Lich king non-raid content was a bit to easy to heal. That isn't the case in cataclysm and everything contributes to a groups success. From smart heal, good tanking and most importantly dps that pay attention to what they are doing.
Ever tell your friends to roll a priest ans see how they like it? They might just be passing the buck to you so they can have fun regardless of what you want. Not really folk I'd want as friends.
Healing in Warhammer Online can be crazy in ways you never dreamed of.
healing in cataclysm is great. the only time i didn't like healing was in wrath because it was far too easy. i think cata healing is best cuz now we have something to do throughout the fight instead of just standing there like dolts, waiting for that heal cast to be worth it.
Hmm.
In Wrath, there was no waiting to cast, and it wasn't about big heal, it was spam casting you're fastest heal. Like really... In Cata, it's still spam casting but it's spam casting a slow comparatively weak heal because it is mana efficient.
In Wrath there was a cry from the tanking community that tanks had to be equal at the cost of flavor if that had to be sacrificed. Players shouldn't be punished because a boss did more magic damage. Guilds/Static raid groups shouldn't be punished because their chosen tank couldn't laugh off a damage type or element of the fight.
In Cataclysm, there was a translation error and healers took the brunt of the homogenization. Now all healers do everything pretty equally well with only slight variance. Blizzard didn't understand the how a tanking team differs so vastly from a healing team.
Tanks tank themselves. If the boss is on me, I'm using short cd's regularly and long cd's as needed. The other tank isn't backing me up because, mechanically, there's typically a reason (read: debuff, or he's tanking something else) he can't taunt just yet. If I die, it's probably a wipe.
Healers heal together. On a one tank at a time fight like Gormok, Festergut, Sindragosa (sorry I didn't raid in Cata.. I tried to casual after burnout--and plus, I'm trying to speak for what was better about being different).
- The Holy Pally is spike healing me via beacon and healing others. He's also using Glyph of Holy Light and doing mostly melee heals to see that splash happen, he's helping how he can. He might not be the highest hps raid healer but he's ready to pop Aura Mastery or DG when raid heals need the help.
- The resto druid is doing raid heals. The tank, because of smart heals, will often get wild growth tics, marginally helping the holy pally. He's also extremely mobile. If the raid comp needs it, he can take a ranged or melee spot and move as needed. He can also hot up the tank when he knows the raid will be on the move.
- The resto shaman isn't mobile but is spoiled (=D) with a fantastic targeted aoe smart heal. She uses Chain Heal and almost it exclusively because it's great. She's got a wide variety of buffs she can do and will drop what's most beneficial to the raid, switching out as might be needed.
- The holy priest is usually a very pro healer because priest has a large toolkit that Holy puts to good use. She has a powerful hot (talented renew), quick mobility if spec'd into Body & Soul and some powerful aoe healing. It's not as easy to define how she succeeds but she's strong.
- The disc priest is almost as mobile as the resto druid. Sure their toolkit may focus on 3 spells (counting PoM) but this is powerhouse has the ability to mitigate expected damage and with powerful tools like Pain Suppression, she can assist the raid, reducing the tank's damage for a hard hit incoming or power infusion to get max benefit from a great caster dps or to assist your strongest healer at a time when they need it (say holy pally at <30% saurfang).
I won't deny healing was too easy (though for most people this notion is skewed by a little thing called 30% buff and the desire to sit at the coolkid's table) but it was a heck of a lot more fun when it was different. Most of the spells still exist in Cataclysm but you better not be casting them because you will be oom, or your target will die. It's a sad state indeed.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
So basically healing was "different" and better in lich king because each class spammed one heal of choice? The game is homogenized now, because each healing class now has a full toolset of abilities to deal with situations in different ways. Each spell has strengths and weaknesses that require some actual choices to be made to defeat content?
I love that each healer uses every tool they have, but have to be smart about their use. They can't simply spam one uber spell and ensure victory as long as they cast it fast enough. DPS classes have to be on their toes, because healers do not have endless mana pools to spam heal their mistakes back to full health. The tanks life isn't almost entirely dependant on healers ability to react to split second spike damage.
It is fun to have to make choices and have every ability be useful again. Having 80% overhealing now means certain failure instead of guarenteed victory. Healing is far more engaging and challenging now than it was in cataclysm.
If you want to do damage while you heal...try the Mage Chloromancer in RIFT !!
He heals in an unique way... and it is very fun
It rocks !!
Healing was better because healers were different. Cataclysm promised us a less spammy model but that's not what it gave us. Yes, in cata, you can use any of a number of spells and you'll regret all but one of them in almost every case.--
Do you heal? You use an expensive spell once or twice and you feel it later in the fight and you know exactly why your mana is hurting--
You are meant to use Heal (priest spell) or the equivalent and as little of everything else as possible.
Healing in Cataclysm is terrible. It has nothing Wrath didn't, I'm still _always casting_ or was til I quite playing, and not really thinking about the next spell to cast. When I see a need to cast another spell, there's a spell that needs to be stopped, or let to finish. The difference now is how boring and slow the spamming is.
It's most crippling to my resto druid and disc priest because the mobility and prep is what I loved about them. It hadn't really changed my holy pally playstyle so I still don't mind it on my holy pally.. But logging on to my priest or druid (or shaman, lol) felt like playing my holy pally.
I rolled all those classes so I could play holy pally--for sure.
Wrath was too much, sure, but it had good synergy. Honestly a healing team of holy priests, provided you have the buffs the other classes provide from other sources--which is easy now, can heal as well as a diverse team and there's something wrong with that. Take a healing team of entirely [x class] to any raid in current-content Wrath and they would fall flat on their face on certain fights but sure, of course there'd be a few they'd dominate at...5~ resto druids and festergut lol.
Things get even closer next patch, the shaman totem--which they deserved another tool, not arguing that--isn't so different from PW:B, or so the description seems. The tranquility talent, which they deserved just shows how blizzards version of balance is making things closer to the same.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Healing was better, because healers were different, but healing now sucks, because it is more spammy?
I just don't see your line of logic. Most healers in lich king spammed 2 heals and almost nothing else. Speed was the key to healing in LK and spamming heals as fast as possible was king until you outgreared the content.
I'll just say this. If you are spamming spells now you are doing something wrong. I hardly use the baseline mana effecient spell that you think is required to spam. Looking at my stats my most frequent spells are the big heal, a hot and then an area effect heal. The baseline heal is a very distant 4-6th depending on the fight.
Like I said there are appropriate times to use each type of spell and if casting 2 big heals puts you out of mana you are doing something wrong. There are synergies now. Learn them and use them. This isn't lich king where you just spamm the same spell and wait to react to some freak damage spike.
I'm not playing anymore so maybe things have changed. When I quit, the mentality was going downhill, people were getting worse and I finally started to hate logging in. All I saw Cataclysm as--after about 1.5-2 months, was a move towards everyone being a holy pally.
What healing class do you play? Yeah I much preferred synergy between classes in Wrath rather than a synergy of spells that all classes mirror. As I've shown before, 3.x's resto druid and resto shaman were very different creatures but could fill the same role. Druid was the most mobile healer and Shaman was the last healer you'd ask to move. Now they both need to be standing still for much of the time. As content became easier with more experience and more gear (and in icc, the buff), I enjoyed literally running circles around people on my druid, or more seriously--volunteering when a healer needed to be mobile.
Wrath 10 man was easier, in most cases, than 25 man--I believe a few fights favored more people but that's just my opinion--but at the same time, Wrath 10 man saw less spammy models. When you're only healing with one or two other people, sometimes you had to break the mold of your class, especially if one wasn't a holy pally for tanks but at any case where a healing team member was incapacitated (bone spike, iceblocked, etc).
I guess long story short, the TL:DR of it all is that I much enjoyed playing my different classes. I stopped enjoying it once they began to feel the same. I enjoyed carrying groups as well, taking more upon myself than I needed to. I rolled disc because I was extremely capable of helping make up for people's weaknesses.. All that is gone now for the sake of healers that can be descibed as White, light-grey, off-yellow, and black inverted.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
I quit too because the healing was horrible. let me count the ways:
1) I did not like the fact healers had to use the longer to cast spells while everyone hovered at 50%. To me this wasn't fun, it was aggravating.
2) As holy a priest, Chakra doesn't work if the tank has to kite the boss. It also does not work if the dps are spread all over hell and back or run from it.
3) No one clicks on the light well.
4) The healer’s spells cost more in mana not at all balancing out with the tank or dps huge hp pool.
5) There is no recovery for mistakes as the instances are too finely tuned.
6) Priests have been nerfed so hard it's to the point where I feel my class is useless.
7) The healing may be challenging but that doesn't mean it's fun.
I would expect these things in a raid and not especially in heroics. When people voiced their opinions, blizzard astro turfers almost always cited the same arguments.
"if your having problems with pugs in heroics then go with your guild"
What if you can't get people to run the heroic with you? How does that work out? or what if they don't have the gear or have no raid awareness, what do you do then?
-"Healing is fine, it's you that can't adapt"
-"your spoiled with WOTLK. You expect free epics"
-"If you don't like it, GTFO! bye! we don't care!"
it is almost like someone from blizzard is running a script because all of the answers are just about the same. But my reasons for quitting healing and the game are mostly stated above.
"Learn your class"
"L2Play"
Every few months they tweek the classes, some more than others. For me, that was a whole new level in aggravation. Not to mention the cata expansion brought out more jerks than I have ever seen before at any other time in my years of playing wow. I got sick of the elitist BS.
"if your having problems raiding you need to find a better guild"
Even if you could get into a guild that does raids, that doesn’t mean they have a raid spot open for you. A lot of people sit on the side line just in case someone can't make it. Then too, with the new guild rewards made it so people from small guilds are jumping ship to the larger ones. IMO ghost crawler ruined the game. It is the same old hamster wheel of a grind for rep, gear and achievements. I don't know how many people quit wow but I was one of those that left. Let the leet peeps have it all to themselves. It will probably come down to just them supporting the game and if that's the way blizzard wants it, well that's just fine by me.
Unfortunately, shadow priests were never meant to be healers. Hell, I never cared about the +1 heal they gave you. It was all about the mana
But no you can't heal dungeons as a shadow priest. That was never intended ^_^ If you like healing play a healer. If you like dps with some healing, shadow priests are fine but I doubt you will be able to main heal
@Boraxe, damn, you sure as hell are pissed off
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
this
Haha, I wasn't trying to sound pissed off. I was just trying to point out why healing was frustrating and when blizzard asks for constructive critisim and we give it, astro turfers return the favor by spouting out the same elitist canned answers. Basically deal with it or leave...so I left. Just by reading the forums on wow's site, a lot of people don't like the changes either. Some here rightly said blizzard needs to figure out who they want to keep as a player base. Right now they perfer the elite players but those people are miserable to be around. I cringed everytime I queued up for a heroic. Then I thought, why bother? Why should I pay for a game to stress me out more than I am? Seems to me they are following the same route as Sony did with Star Wars.
/shrug
Why not just change the topic to "Cataclysm: No fun" :P
They didn't really add anything new, unless f@@king up their own lore counts, so why would it be fun after doing same old same old for 6(or even more, cba to check) years?
"Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted.
Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world."
Hans Margolius
Healing changes were simply a nerf to progression imo. The only class they gave special attention to was the Paladin class and we all saw how OP they were at the beginning of the expansion.
On another note, rest assured what the elitist are saying is completely correct. It's not the so called elitists persuading Blizzard to provide more challenge. It's Blizzard themselves that couldn't keep up with the demands of pumping out content to satisfy more of the masses. Just come back later like the elitists have been preaching or don't. Content will be easier through gear/nerfs so it doesn't require being in a hardcore or highly skilled guild to complete the content.
I'm ok with all of this. Blizzard is working on SC2 , Diablo III, and Titan right now. Something has to give and they can no longer expand their DisneyWorld like they have done in the past. WOW is still and will continue to be a great game but don't expect Blizzard to drop everything anytime soon to give WOW the same attention they have in the past. Cataclysm had great box sales and so did SC2.
Its not fun because its harder?
I hear Rift has easy healing.
Jeremiah 8:21 I weep for the hurt of my people; I stand amazed, silent, dumb with grief.
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This isn't what the OP is saying.
The OP is trying to play his characters in a way that isn't really viable for cataclysm's dungeons/heroics, especially for a healer who is trying to progress through content without being carried by geared and experienced friends. He isn't complaining that healing is no fun because it's hard, he's complaining that healing is no fun because the game isn't letting him play his character the way he wants to (aka mixing his focus between DPSing and healing like he could at lower levels).
Ironically you actually can in Rift.
nom nom nom
The original poster is trying to play a damage dealing class as a healer and complaining about it not working.
It really doesn't need to go any further than that to see where the problem is.
Maybe a shadow priest was viable to heal 5 man dungeons in lich king when most players outgeared the content to the point it was trivial (which was almost day 1) , but cataclysm is a new expansion where most content isn't trivial.
Personally I think it would be a huge problem if brand new content by level/gear appropriate characters could use DPS classes to replace full dedicated healers, but that is just my opinion.
wow Healing sucks so hard it pulls a vaccum.
IMO if the elitist want cata they can keep cata. if they weren't such jerks it would not be all that bad. Either way you look at it, the game is still a hamster wheel of a grind.