A Look At Cata Healing, Part 1: General Design

I couldn't think of an appropriate image, so here's an adorable kitty.

 So I've finally had time to actually play with (almost) all my healing characters now fairly extensively in an instance setting on beta, and I must say, It's quite different. Not that I've had the chance to play with it, it's time for me to pontificate about the new system's ups and downs. This will be split into two parts, this first part dealing with general design of the healing system, and a second part dealing with individual classes and my thoughts on the changes to them. The second part will be posted in a few days.



Healing in General Throughout Time

I love healing, and if you're reading this, chances are you do too. I've been healing on one toon or another since vanilla, and it's seen some interesting flows. Way back when, priests were THE healer, druids were healing touch spamming and innervate fuel, paladins were buff bots, and shaman spammed frost shock or something; I didn't play Horde until BC so I don't know about them.

Anyhoo, with Burning Crusade we saw a shift. 4 specs could solidly heal, but we still had some issues. As a paladin, I actually broke a mouse button spamming Flash of Light. As a priest, I never had to use a heal higher than Greater Heal Rank 1. Druid, Lifebloom was all you needed to win. And again, didn't have a shaman then, sorry guys. Anyways, my point is, we all had these exciting spells that we never used. The toolbox was large but we only needed to use a hammer.

Wrath saw some more changes. Disc was added as another viable healer. Mana was no longer an issue and overhealing meters became a thing of the past. Spamming hard and spikey damage became the norm. And throughout the course of the expansion, each healing spec has fallen deeper and deeper into it's own specialized role. Is this a good thing? Is it fun? I mean, I've enjoyed it alright, but could it be better? Blizzard says yes, and I'm inclined to agree.


Problems

All that being said, there are some big problems with the current healing model, and it's time to change it. Healing is a core element of being able to make interesting encounters. It affects how damage is dealt, how we deal with hazards, how fast things need to die, and much more. Not to mention, it's a dated system that's falling, and it's time for an upgrade. Let's look at some of the biggest issues right now.

The Toolkit

Every healing spec has a rather large amount of heals, many of which get ignored. If Blizzard wants to give us new tools to play with, they have to make sure we need them. The system needs to be changed in order to make us use everything we've got. One reason I've always enjoyed holy priest is because of the sheer amount of spells to deal with the situation. Healing is getting to a point where you might only use 1/3 of your given toolkit and it's perfectly ok. While there of course needs to be some ceiling, in general, making use of more spells and making more decisions is more fun.


Healing Affects Encounter Design

I can't stress this enough. Look at current encounter design. For lack of a better term, it sucks. The biggest problem I have with it is the spiky damage and the giant amount that the random number generator has to factor in in order to make something difficult. Just as one example, an achievement like A Tribute to Immortality factors in a great deal more than player skill. You're fighting the random generator a ton on a fight like Faction Champions. By scaling back healing, and making us care about mana and forcing us to choose the right spells, Blizzard is opening a door for themselves to scale back burst damage and have fights rely less on RNG, and more on proper management of the encounter. Boss fights have much more potential to be interesting, and fun, rather than frustrating.

Spamming Sucks

Pretty self explanatory. As a holy paladin, my job is usually to spam holy light the whole fight, whether or not the tank needs it, just to deal with any sudden bursts. As a tree, I'm rolling rejuvs to deal with damage that might take barely half the heal. This just isn't fun. Scaling back damage and forcing us to manage resources should allow them to design encounters so that not only do we not have to do this, but we will be punished for it. It will give us more time to watch our positioning, dps if we so choose, or use more utility spells to help the group.

"Bring the Player, Not the Class"

With a further emphasis on 10 mans, healers cannot be so specifically role oriented as they are now for this to work. Currently, you'd be laughed at for trying to dual heal Lich King with paladins. Yes, it's possible, but most groups won't do it. In order to make it easier for groups to form up and get things done, and to further rely on player skill, they need to bring us out of our niches slightly. The new design does this quite well.

Potential Problems With The Cataclysm Design

All that being said, there's some things I'm still a little worried about, having messed around quite a bit with the new system. To me, the pros of changing it outweigh the cons, but they're still worth mentioning.

It's More Difficult

The new system takes more thought than the current one. If you aren't careful, you'll oom, or you'll let someone die. Currently, there's very little penalty for being bad, or, it's easy for a better healer to carry the weight of a poor healer in a group. From what I've played so far, it's quite a bit more difficult to manage things if your gear is slightly under. Maybe it's just me not having faith in the general populous, but I'm a bit worried about pugging.

Tree Form Is A Cooldown

Obligatory QQ. (I actually love the cooldown, more on that in part 2, but I was a fan of broccoli tree)


Teamwork Isn't Happening Now

As I've stated before, teamwork is a large part of healing. However, at the moment you can get by with very little of it. It used to be bad to peel from your target, and ok if the tank was sitting at 80%. You didn't want to top him off because he didn't need it. It's moving more in that direction, but with how large and diverse this game's community is now, and how frequent pugs are, I just don't see the necessary teamwork happening right away.


Is The Design Change A Good Thing?

Overall, I'd say it's an incredibly good thing. Being able to fix poor encounter design alone is enough of a reason to sway me, but throw in a reason to use all my spells, and having to think rather than abuse my poor mouse, and you have me sold. I'll get into specific class design changes more in part 2, but I think things are going the right direction. At the very least, it's not worth preaching the end of the world (of warcraft) like some folks have been. I'm trying to stay optimistic.

/bubblehearth