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Blizzard Perma-Breaks Decursive & other mods (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=32185157&pageNo=1)

So Blizzard has decided they hate a lot of the Automation mods.   I can't say I disagree, but some of them were useful for keeping sanity as a healer.  Staring at 40 health bars was enough to get me to finally turn on emergency monitor - which is now out.  Click-cast is rumored to be broken, which blows for my Gl who hates keyboarding (He's got one of those gaming mouse/ button thingys)

   Decursive was very useful for getting the tons of debuffs cleared in a reasonable amount of time, but I know you can do it without it.  It'll just take people paying more attention.

I dunno, I tend to agree that it'll lead to more healer burnout, just because of the lack of emergency monitor. The rest of the stuff being broken just means people will have to change the way they play.  Something that'll be difficult but not impossible.. but I can see a lot of bitching and people giving-up on the raiding thing (or being booted) for not being capable of adjusting.

Pardon my ignorance, but why do you have to stare at 40 health bars? Aren't you mainly responsible for your group anyways? What are all the other healers doing?

Because of raid mods where you can view the health bars of everybody in a raid and easily target them, you don't need to "balance" each group with a combination of tanks, dps, and healing and instead groups are often organized simply by class -- i.e. all priests are in one group, all druids in other, and so on.

Edit: fixed tense

So are all the healers monitoring everyone? I can see that leading to a lot of double-targetting by healers.

We try and make them self-sufficient, but the reality is you don't always wind-up with 8 healers + healers for the MT (usually need 2 at least plus someone to innervate them).  Some boss fights require the paladins (and Shaman Horde Side I'd guess) to focus on purge/ cleansing because the debuff is raid-wide.  Even with Decursive, the debuff goes off often enough that they're spamming that decurse button almost the whole fight so they can only spot-heal at best. 


Well, that's part of the skill as a healer is being able to stop your cast when someone else's heal hits first.  However, there's also mods that'll stop the heal, requireing less focus/ attention/ skill on the healer's part and that's part of what this is trying to break.

Really, in the end these changes are because of PvP.  There's auto-retarget, auto-heal, auto-decurse mods out there that do horrible horrible things to PvP balance.  Unfortunatly the PvE encounters have been developed with them in mind. Supposedly some Nax encounters have debuffs that require the whole raid be cleansed in aabout 8-10 seconds or else everyone dies.  I'm not at that level  and I don't forsee going there after the expansion so I don't know how true this is.  Someone else can illuminate this part.

  One of Blizzard's mentioned goals was getting folks more involved in raiding, but I can only see this having a net cooling effect on that, because frankly there's a lot of sucky players getting by based on mods at this point.   This really made the wack-a-mole healing process a lot less shitty and it seems odd breaking it 2 years into the game.  Healing isn't exactly the most popular role because it's pretty thankless and intensive in bigger groups.   The biggest saving grace is Blizzard's refocus on smaller-group content like 10-man dungeons and the inclusion of group-wide (but not raid-wide) dispells.

You can still monitor everyone's health by pulling the groups to the main window from the raid tab.  It may not be as pretty, but it is there.

I dont play a healer, but I still think this is a good change. I just cant see the roll of spamming decursive very fun. Also this will lead to more people paying attention. Also another thing to remember, in the expansion there are no 40 man raids, only 25 man.

As a Mage, I've found Decursive to be the best tool for decursing. I think it still will be, except I will no longer be able to just spam the /decurse macro. If you remove the ability to do that, and you remove the ability for addons to decide which spell is appropriate, for decursing at least, the /dcrshow window, and the ability to  manually create a priority list based on class or person's name will still be a critical tool.

Doesn't solve the total problem though. Blizzard has said they don't want people playing the UI. Trouble is, how many people recognize, by the spell effect on the player, every single spell there is? People are going to game their UI no matter what Blizzard might think. They're removing the better ways to do it is all.

Unless, of course, 60+ raid content is built more creatively, not allowing a raid take people offline from the main battle just to micromanage decursing and de-magicking

It looks like Blizzard is trying to put the player skill back into their PvP, which is great. Things like instant weapon switching were just too large of an advantage over people who didn't use those types of mods.

Er, that's why they put in the 1 sec cooldown for weapon switchers.

I remember they went mental at that.

Fuckers.

There are some fights where decursive type mods could often spell the difference between wipeing over and over again, and successfully winning a fight.   I have nightmares about trying to do Noth the Plaguebringer in Naxx without decursive (he periodicly drops a curse on the ENTIRE raid, which is a pretty much guraranted wipe if even one person is not decursed within the 8 seconds the curse is live)

As to the whole whack-a-mole healing, a lot of this can be traced to the paladin auras, or more directly, the shaman totem buff system.  It makes no sense to try to evenly balance groups around having main and secondary healer in each group, when DPS / Mana efficiency is rewarded by having Mele DPS groups (often 2 rogues (or a hunter for Trueshot), 2 warriors, 1 shaman) for the Windfury / SoE totems, Magic DPS groups (mages / warlocks / 1 shaman) for Mana Spring, Tranq air, and Healing Groups (priests, druids, shaman) for Mana Tide, Tranq air, etc.

Having specialized groups in a 20 man or greater raid is usually WAY more efficient than the balanced groups of the 5/10 man group.  This is where cross raid healing becomes almost mandatory.

I wish. Shaman's inability to remove debuffs during raids is one of the biggests factional imbalances, and of course puts even more stress on Horde priests for those raid wide debuffs. Trying to do that without assistance (and with the addition of lag) just sounds miserable, and we don't really need more reasons to discourage people from playing priests.

Sounds like a lot of gnashing of teeth because Blizzard is starting to remove easy mode. I've never liked the fact that their UI was so moddable anyway...it just leads to too many problems.

Well... Decursive wasn't something I really used until I got into MC. The large chunk of the 40-man fights would be a pain in the ass without it. The fact that I spend an entire fight pressing one button (be it my Decursive bind, or going through the raid despelling manually) means there is something incredibly dumb with the encounter.

On the auto-healing mods (in terms of selecting targets, not choosing ranks, I the latter love in emergencies/PvP), I've never used them since I'm normally on main Innervate bitch MT duty. They do tend to lead to a lot of overhealing on the MT, so it drives our Priest leader batty, and on the whole, it leads to me covering the DPS groups while the healers in those groups go heal-happy on the tanks :roll:.

I think everyone said enough about the need for cross-healing and the trend towards group specialization versus group self-sufficiency. Especially considering Atiesh and the auras from Hunters, Druids, Pallies, and Shammies, you either waste those abilities/talents or you put the burden on your healers to keep the whole raid up. It's only gonna get worse when you're trying to balance Paladin and Shaman buffs for your key groups. Overall, as long as the encounters aren't as reliant on "OMG DESPELL NOW" to make sure everyone is awake, it won't be as bad.

I'd rather see them drop the stupid every-30-seconds AOE curses altogether. Even WITH decursive it could take three or four mages off-DPS for 20 seconds anyway (if they haven't coordinated players by name that is). It just seems so like SOE for them to leave a stupid un-fun system in the game and prevent players from exploiting it efficiently. This tells me they plan to do even MORE of that Luci-like nonsense in future Raids. Otherwise there'd be no reason to change it. Not like farming MC/BWL et al really is going to be anyone's fulltime job come BC anyway, so no reason to fix that stuff.

Nope, I'd rather they break all the fucking retarded auto-play mods and watch the kids cry.

I'd rather they remove the need for them. Decursive seemed way way too easy IMO however. It feels great to watch it work but you could be replaced by one of bobbing birds sitting at your keyboard.

Paladin buffs are class-based, not group-based.

While I think that it's good to kill off some of the mods that really make the game run on UI autopilot, they should also retune the overly-stupid encouters that brought these things up as a "needed" mod to play so that people can play instead of suffer old-school EQ1-style stupidity.

I'm not 100% sure but from a lot of the posts in that thread it seems that this will coincide with a rebalancing of the current raid encounters. I guess some BWL encounters on up were designed with decursive in mind.

Ya god forbid healers get a chance to try to watch the fight rather than staring at a fridge door full of health bar stickies. Someone should make a game where the melee have 40 copies of the mob's health bar on screen and have to spot a tiny buff icon showing up on one of them, which if they don't do a special move on it in 5 seconds, wipes the raid.

Or they could, you know, design a boss/raid encounter that had more dynamic abilities than just tossing a random incredibly nasty debuff on a random target in the raid. I mean that's the only reason these mods are around to begin with.

And that would help the fridge door sticky effect of keeping 25-40 ppl's hitbars on screen how? Have you ever tried putting 40 heal bars up on your screen and watching them for  a whole fight?  Now tell me how the fight went and what happened during it? Pretty fucking boring and doesn't give you much time to actually see what's going on, like every non healer in the raid get's to do. I don't even play a healers and this pisses me off because I know our healers are going to burn out faster and it's going to be harder to replace them. I originally played a paladin but basically quit him the day I first went to stratholme and had to put up the heal bars all over my screen and watch them. And that was only 15 ppl back then.  I've since played him at a few alt raids and emergency monitor was the only thing that made it even vaguely fun.

Lets just say you are not healer material then.

Keeping those 40 bars filled during a fight is more interesting for me that watching one healthbar go down. I never could care about making damage, ever. I would make a lousy rogue. Plus seeing the damage clowns using their pointy sticks on enemies is an overrated view.

Glad Decursive is gone. Never used it. Regulary got flak for it. But I don't do easy mode mods. If WoW balances encounters with those mods in mind, Blizzard screwed up.

I heal manually in 5-mans... I don't use clickheal or emergency monitor type mods or even decursive. I just select the party member with F1-F5 and hit the appropriate heal or dispell spell hotkey. Much more comfortable for me. But in a raid, there's no getting around the 40-health-bars-on-screen thing -- optimally you'd only heal people in your group, but there's a lot of random crap that needs healers to cross-group heal quite often (like if DPS in the maintank's group is taking sudden spike damage, the MT healer can't just stop healing the tank to patch them up).

Even if there'll be 5-6 decursers for 25 people, having to play whack-a-curse WHILE healing (and having to actually click with the mouse to do that, ugh) is going to suck. Especially if Blizz doesn't get rid of the 'raid-wiping debuff' idea that's been around since Lucifron, manifested in Kazzak (with decursive the fight is trivial; without, it's a royal pain in the ass), kept strong during BWL, and even found its way into Naxx.

Hell, there are curses and debuffs in 5-mans that can wipe the group if not cured asap (mostly talking about the -75% healing curse on the tank here -hi2u alexei barov-, but a sheeped tank/healer is just as bad).


-- Z.

I guess not, though strangely I played, and enjoyed playing a cleric for 5 years in EQ.

Strange indeed, because the first time in EQ somebody told me how a CH-chain worked and wanted to implement it among the Shaman for Offtank healing I knew I would quit the moment they expected us to do that regulary.

You try telling me that the Draeni Paladin, with his +hit aura AND his paladin aura of choice  isnt goign to be in the main tank group with the shaman and his windfury / soe totems.

Sure, blessings are raid wide, but micromanaging the Pallie auras will still be done during group setups.

Yes (except in fights where healers are assigned specific tasks, you're eyeing your group first and then the rest of the raid) and I got SO FUCKING SICK of long-term non-healing raiders that DIDN'T EVEN FUCKING KNOW THAT.


When you cast eleventy bazillion heals for a living, you build up the ability to avoid this as much as possible. A combination of anticipation, knowing the personalities and reliability of your fellow healers, and a finger on a button that interrupts casting (e.g. move forward) means that most of the time, double-targetting isn't a problem. There will often be more than one person in the process of casting a heal, especially if there is not mass carnage in the raid, but only one or two of those will land as the others will cancel their heals. A non-group healer's insta-cast HoT may keep someone alive until their group healer lands something bigger with a longer casting time. Or a non-group healer may have an insta-cast heal ability up where the group healer does not, and use that as a reflex action to save someone who would otherwise die in the 3 second casting time. That sort of thing.

Yes the auto-mods suck. Glad to see them go. But also, it sucks that Blizzard actually designed around a Fucking 3rd Party Mod; the mod should have been killed immediately.

Also, this is very good for PvP. I really could not care less about what happens to raiders.

I don't have any healer mods like this on my healer, which is why I won't raid on her (and maybe why I'm not more successful in pvp).  I learned playing DAOC that healing in a large raid is difficult, stressful and unfun for me.  I don't much enjoy watching the health bars instead of the fight.  I don't want to fuck up, and fucking up as a healer is so much more critical than fucking up as a hunter.

Although I don't raid often, I'm interested in seeing what Blizzard does to fix the problems this will cause.  Lack of priests is a real problem, and this will do nothing but make it worse.

Some people dont run their raids like that. My old guild had assigned healing for all groups, and it worked really well. It also cut down on the healers having the "Fridge door" that is being complained about. Your way is not the only way.

Blizzard never designed around a third party mod.  Decursive and it's ilk were initially designed to alleviate the stress of having to decurse / De Magic / De Poison 40 odd people in a raid without going batshit insane, and were created wayyy back in the good ole MC days.

Lucifron, Ghennas, Baron Geddon, Shazzra in MC all had raid wide deuffs that pretty much have to be decursed or you wipe.
Thankfully Chromaggus is the only boss in BWL with similar issues.
I guarantee you, only the top of the top alliance guilds would EVER be able to kill Viscidus in AQ 40 if this had gone live before they got shamans (poision clensing totem for the win)

There are tonnes of encounters out there designed in such a way that decursive is a great help, and yes, while I realise that its effieiency in PvP was probably an unintended side effect, it was origionally a PvE mod, hands down.

This just reinforces my belief that WoW is not that great, that we've seen practically all of the design before in EQ.

Needing a 3rd party mod just to play the game, essentially? Give me a fucking break - No Thanks.

I'd like to hear from anyone who doesn't think WoW is little more than a better EQ with some cool PvP in it. I thought that was axiom at this point.

You say that like it's a bad thing.  :-D

Blizzard is way better than SOE when it comes to making people happy.  And therein lies the biggest difference.

EQ is a more immersive Diku gameworld. When I play it, I feel part of it. WoW is a very absorbing, entertaining Diku game, but to me it just feels like a game. The world is a little shallower. So I think WoW is the better game, but it's not a better EQ.

So what if it is? WoW is greater than the sum of its parts. It's not the greatest thing I've ever played in any genre but (and here's the secret to their success) it doesn't FEEL like a MMOG. It doesn't have shitass movement, it doesn't look like ass, it has quests to even when you grind it doesn't feel like a grind, it has interesting raid mechanics 9as those things go), and it lets you customize the way the UI feels and plays to an extent.

EQ with PvP? Partly. EQ without feeling like EQ is the big draw.

The biggest difference as far as I'm concerned:  WoW doesn't punish players.

This is a good change, IMO.  I never used any heal mods or decursing/heal mods other than having someone's health bar turn a different color if they were poisoned or diseased.  Even Chromag was easy enough to get by without even that. 

But yah, being a shaman I didn't have the most complex healing routine (1 spell ftw) or debuff removal duties.

Won't matter much for me anyhow, finding a casual raiding guild that can do the 40 man or even 20 man raids independently during my playtime is a damn near impossibility.

Interesting comments about having to see the entire raid party for healing.  When I was a priest in Onxyia and MC - a year ago - it kept me on my feet - I could see when other healers were low on mana or dead - and aid their parties.
 
Healing is easier in wow - overhealing causes no threat - and as a result - there is little incentive for healers in raids to have any healing strategy.  It's great we don't have CH chains in WOW from EQ - but it is not great that most healers just spam healing with massive over healing on the MT to win the day.

Because healing is easier in WOw, coordination among healers has not really developed (as a warrior I notice this in BWL Nef fight).  If it did - having more coordiation might remove the need for healers to see the entire raid party.

More broadly - on healing - the priest threatless AoE that heals and causes damage is a lot of fun - in pve and pvp.  This might be a new direction for the healing class to make it more appealing to a broader base of players.

On the specific topic - dump all healing mods.  It just allows the wrong kind of players to start playing healers who do a shitty job at it.  It also fosters the impression that healers can be botted.  This turns off prospective players - while creating a cesspool of ghetto healers.

Dude the PvP sucks balls atm.

Can we stop with the ezimode arguments please? There have been times after patches where I cbf'd or didn't have time to unfuck all my mods so I raided without them for a day/couple of days (I usually had ctmod updated but didn't know it had an inbuilt decursive, or it wasn't in at the time). Let me tell you that curing a raid is NOT hard. All you do is see the visual for the curse and then start clicking on the coloured healthbars and hitting dispell/whatever until all the colours are gone. You know what it is though? Tedious. Fucking tedious.

Healing is different because there's a timing issue. Hitting the dispell button before the guy goes boom is just maths. Do you have enough global cooldowns to get enough dispells in? Win!

I don't play a healer anymore in raids and let me say thank God for that but it just got a whole lot more tedious. Only times I play a healer is in PVP and this does jack and shit for PVP to me. Decursive is the worst PVP addon ever. Decursive means dispelling some of the shadow vuln off the warrior when you really just want to dispell the mage's fear. The change doesn't affect good PVPers at all, because the only time they'd use decursive is for when they were feeling lazy, otherwise it hinders more than it helps. This coming from someone who's main is a warlock currently.

EDIT: Saving Ironwood's precious, precious eyes from my grievous misspelling.

Can we add Tedious to the spellcheck.

You are assuming people use Spell Check.

I don't use spellcheck to post on forums, so I think I do pretty good considering I'm rarely pulled up on my spelling. Now my grammar deserves much criticism, but I know how to do it properly and don't, simply because it's too much work for me to construct proper sentences and such rather than merely regurgitate words as they come to mind and pop in the punctuation at roughly appropriate times.

You speak as if we have infinite mana pools.  The only fight I can see this argument on is Vael, but at least when my guild was there, overhealing was not the problem at that encounter, "underhealing" was.

Compared to...?

(http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c88/EasyPrey/DontFeedTheTroll.jpg)

Why does it have to be compared to anything? Why can't it just suck out loud?

Maybe he plays alliance?  Compared to horde, and the way we pop mana pots like candy, they might as well have infinate mana pools.  God i cant wait till we get paladins.

You do realize which class this nerf hit's hardest right? Good luck keeping your new paladins playing much.

How so? perhaps the alliance paladins will all bust a nut, since they were probably relegated to decurse bot duty on curse heavy fights, but the horde will leap for joy regardless, since
A: we didnt have the paladin decurse bot crutch to lean on, and
B: getting paladins will give us yet another decurser, depoisoner, and most especially, magic remover, since as horde, we have had to play since DAY ONE with only priests being able to remove magic buffs.

I am also going to laugh at all the paladins who now die a lot more often, since they wont be able to rely on autobuffer mods to auto-cast bubbles for them when they get low health in PvP.

No, he doesn't understand how hard this nerf hits Pallies.  And yes, the abandonment rate on BE Pallies will absolutely be the greatest of any Race/Class combo in WoW's history.

I have a 60 Shaman, and was planning on rerolling a BE pally as my main with BC; if this change goes live (even temporarily), then Blizzard won't even get a BC box sale from me (and I think a lot of healers will quit or reroll over this change, especially PvP-oriented ones).

This was a goddamn fucking retarded nerf implemented by some goddamned fuckstick that never leveled a Paladin to 60, let alone played said Pally in a BG or three.  The change will be bad enough as a Shaman, Priest, or Druid; Paladins will be gimped beyond belief (and most people think most Paladins don't decurse enough during PvP *now*...).

They want healers to play whack-a-mole with their mouse pointers to decurse folks for 4+ hours a night while raiding?  And manual Decursing during PvP... forget it.  Doable, but that will leach the little amount of fun left to Pallies in PvP as it is; at least with auto-decursing they have some time to whack folks between heals once in a while.

Why do game devs always have it in for whatever solutions that playerbases come up with to make playing a healer tolerable?


...

Examine your 2 points for consistency; seriously, holy shit.  Who are the people you think are lining up to play a class as passive, yet-micro-management intensive, as a Paladin is?  The only ones looking forward to it are the ones that don't understand the class, and will abandon their new gimplings before ever even reaching 60, let alone *70*.

If you've never raided or PvP'd as a class that depended on Decursive to be *viable*, let alone optimal (compared to raid-geared Warriors and DPS classes), then maybe you should just stfu; nothing personal, but you have absolutely no goddamned idea what you're talking about.

Wow, lots of sand in that vagina.

Dan Dan DAH !!!

Yet another MMOG dev team shits in its own sandbox, and you think the issue is my sandy mangina?


Well, how many others feel the same way I do?  If even 1% of their playerbase quits, how much lost revenue is that /month?  More than most MMOGs make?  Is there some reason they should throw away money?

Amount of $$$ stands to lose by removing Decursive > Amount of $$$ Blizzard stood to lose by keeping decursive.

So pissed-off healers and less $$$; great move.

Stage a mass protest outside the gates of Stormwind. And set up an online petition. Remember to threaten a lawsuit. It always works, I promise!

However little difference one person's sub/box sale makes, Blizzard needs my $$$ a fuck of a lot more than I need WoW.  Is there something about that you don't understand?

You wankers always wax poetic about voting with your wallet, so stop hassling me for doing what most of you are too goddamned weak to do yourselves.

Don't misunderstand - I for one totally agree with you voting with your wallet.  I applaud you, Sir.  If you follow through.  I doubt you will.  People who play these games are worthless and weak.  I know.  I'm still a recovering addict...

In seriousness, however, the idea that Blizzard is even going to notice your little statistical blip at this stage is taking the drama a little too far.

So, Good Luck and Well Done, but don't expect a Ghandi-like change coming from your protest.

Wow, thats playing out all bad cliches of aggravated fanboy rage. You will buy BC like the little bitch that you are, you will moan about it till you find something else to bitch and moan about. "I bet SoW got slower during the last patch. They nerfed it!".

That coming from somebody who isn't playing WoW for some months now anymore. As long as you still scream about it on message boards you are too passionate about your game to quit.

And even if that snowballs chance in hell comes to pass and you quit - they will survive that. They won't even have to destroy their money hats to pay the rent. They don't need you, they really don't. Enough other people where you came from. Good luck with that mass protest of yours, don't try to do it during raid prime-time or you might be shocked that those healers find their loot and raid points more alluring than your righteous anger.

Edit: Or i could it say nicely like Ironwood.

You never know. Something like this could snowball badly. If enough healers get pissed off playing whack-a-mole with healthbars, the guilds are going to find it harder to raid, which is liable to lead to others quitting from the frustration of calling off raids or even just dungeon groups, due to lack of healers. Not that it's likely given the addictive nature of the game but it could happen.

No, it couldn't.

To jump in on both arguments, not neccesarily in this thread  :

1 - My wife is gorgeous.  And she plays WoW.  So anyone in the other thread can knock off this 'pretty women don't play WoW'.  :)

2 - My wife is one of our best Guild/Raiding Force Priests.  She uses decursive but she hates it.  She can decurse manually and thinks it's part of her job.  She wouldn't even think about quitting because of this change unless they made all encounters NEED massive amounts of decursing.  And, considering the Huuuuuuge changes they're making to instances/encounters that's just not going to happen really.

(Honestly, if you've read Reaper Man, watching my wife manually decurse is like watching Death Take On The Combination Harvester).


Using the 'harder to raid' excuse would only matter if they weren't already revamping raiding hugely to make it not so totally 40-man and asstastic as it is now.

Interesting take on it. I hope you're right and they drop the mass curses completely in the expansion, but Naxx doesn't suggest any change in their thinking, or at least the Nox fight doesn't. He has an ae curse that has to be removed from everyone who gets it in 10 sec or the raid wipes. The grand widow is another fight that is very decursive intensive. You'd think these changes would have influenced their encounter designs in the latest dungeon they did but it doesn't seem to have.

Considering how large Blizzard's gotten, and how long it takes them to develop ANYTHING much less an entire dungeon, I'd call that one case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.    Now I'm sure they've heard about it and are examining it by now, but I wonder if it was known about at the inception. 

 Hell, you could probably talk to the encounter designers and find out that the entire reason it has to be done in 10 seconds is the widespread use of Decursive, and if it IS finally completly broken they'll scale it back.

I do believe this will lead to fewer healers, though.  It takes a special personality to enjoy healing of any sort and to just sit back and be the unsung hero in all encounters.   I did it for long enough in EQ, and I've done it off and on in WoW.  I have no desire to do it in large encounters anymore, after having played a damage-dealing class in the same raids.  I expect the removal of mods that do make it easier for some folks and let them pay attention to the overall picture will cause some to quit. 

 It's far more interesting than squinting at all the health bars for debuffs (I don't use decursive either.) or micromanaging health bars.  Proactive healing/ curse counters would be much better, but hey there you go.

Oh, and there will definatly be more bitching at pallies and burnout there.  As Ratma said, people already bitch at them for not cleansing enough (both in pvp and pve)  add in more tedium to a group that thinks they're a damage class, and you're just going to feel it that much worse.

Once more, it's a good thing the raids are 10-25 man.  That alleviates a lot of the tedium and scramble.

heheheheh.  Screw Pallies.

I do have to admit though, that being a Pally in raids blows dead dogs. I only did it a couple of times before putting my Pally in a box and not even bothering to throw away the key.

This still sounds like a lot of bitching and moaning because Blizzard is starting to disable easy-mode. Oh noes, you can't auto-cleanse and shit in PvP now? Good, maybe those curses and shit will actually be Useful now. No auto-bubble? Can't say I will miss it..

I played a Priest in PvP, and did that shit manually. My friend did the same as a Paladin all the way to 60. Sure, you can't look like a superhuman bot anymore, but it's not hard to contribute, if you have some skill.

Same.  I use my pally as a miner and AH gansta these days.  He's still waiting though.  Still waiting.

I'm really wishing I hadn't have mentioned my quitting; why was that one throw-away line what you guys decided to focus on, instead of the whole 'fucktarded decursive change, after 1 1/2 years' bit?


Like most of us here, I've been around the MMOG scene since UO, and I've never had any problem quitting.  In fact, from a dev standpoint, I'm probably considered a 'bad customer'; I bitch loudly about changes/features I don't care for, and then I don't just talk about leaving... I actually quit, and take as many of my friends as I can with me.  WoW is the first Diku-model MMOG I've ever reached cap and raided in, but that won't stop me; in fact, the whole switch to a raid-focused game after release is just more incentive for me to quit.  WoW is being run by dumbshits too stupid to design the majority of new content for use by the majority of their playerbase, so fuck 'em.



It already has; check out the attrition rate for healers as opposed to DPS classes in raid guilds/conglomerates.

The really sad part?  Blizzard is aware of the 'healer burnout' issue... and many of the changes made to raids were made with healers in mind.  But then they go ahead and take this giant step backwards... fucking stupid.


For PvE raiding, it's more a matter of that whole 'fun' thing, as opposed to 'hard'; no decursive will make raiding less enjoyable for the large majority of healers.  Yes, there are some healers that don't use decursive; I don't care how fast your wife's reflexes are, she'd be a faster, better dispeller w/decursive.

But like I said, the biggest impact will be felt in PvP; not only are healers currently balanced for PvP with decursive in mind, but again, it's the additional tedium/inability to just chill and play the game without micromanaging health bars that's really going to sap the fun out of PvP for healers.  They should have built in additional autotargeting for healers, not removed what was already there.


... Says the fucking dumbshit non-healer that doesn't even consider how these changes will negatively impact his/her own raiding.


If you 'did that shit' manually, then you either did it in exclusion to actually playing the game, or you did it slowly and shittily.

Again, it's not a matter of skill; it's a matter of fun.  But quite frankly, regarding 'skill'; if you play any class but a Warrior and have issues with Paladins in PvP, then you either suck, or need to compare yourself to equally geared Paladins, not the freaks in full Avengers w/Severance.

"Superhuman bot"?  Counterspell shuts down the whole fucking Paladin class for 10 seconds, and that's hardly the only issue Paladins have in PvP (just the worst, by far); making PvP harder/less enjoyable for healers in general, and Paladins specifically, was not the direction Blizzard should have gone.  And it was some goddamn fuckstick devs who, like Strazos, had never played a Paladin that mandated that change.

If they are balanced with a third party Mod in mind then I agree and yes, Blizzard developers are dumbfucks. I have more faith in them until proven otherwise, though.

"She" would do nothing. Its all the Mod playing at that point. Pressing one button over and over and not even deciding what spell to cast yourself? Not playing, but watching.

You are right. It took WAY too long for this change to happen.

In what bizarro universe is manually decursing considered a skill? Is it skill to be able to put up with mind numbing boredom while focusing solely on 40 hit bars and completely missing the fight everyone else is seeing? Is it skill plastering your screen with hp bars so the action is reduced to a 5" square you can actually see through? Get real.

If you begin to argue that way then almost nothing in MMOGs is a skill (not that I disagree). Is casting the same damage spell over and over again a skill? Is watching a health bar and casting a spell once the bar falls under a certain percentage a skill? Is shooting arrows at a target until the target falls down dead a skill?

The fact remains that you reduce the choice of various spells to the choice of one "Cure whatever that poor bloke has" button. Thats (in the Druids case, other healers may vary) a reduction of your choices and therefore possible errors by 2/3.

Nothing in MMOGs is rocket science, but you can dumb it down even more by such mods.

You guys keep responding to Strazos like he 1) has a clue outside of playing a melee class and 2) raids. 

He doesn't on either count.   He's simply parroting other board warriors on this one.


Coincidentally, Straz PvPs with a Warrior.

Notice, Straz, none of us are bitching about auto-bubble bullshit.  Things like that are in fact the mod playing for you.  If Decursive auto-cleansed I'd have the same problem with it.

 The problem is - as has been mentioned- Blizzard's designers have begun to create content with this mod in mind because it's been in place for a year+.  It's a raiding-centric problem.  Yes, decursive is a broken, overpowered mod for PvP, but then reactive dispelling vs proactive anti-buffing is a broken mechanic as well.  The whole scenario stinks.  Hell, they gave Warlocks that "if dispelled, then BOOM" debuff just because of all the cleansing spells tossed about in PvP.  How often do you think that's going to go off for them now?

Your faith is sorely misplaced.  Remember, these are the same fucksticks that lost millions of dollars by refusing to develope any new 5-man dungeons after release (DM was already in the works before the current team took over towards the end of beta, or it never would have seen the light of day).


Welcome to healing in raids.  And do you know what's even worse?  Having to play whack-a-mole with health bars while hitting the same damned button over and over.

At least with Decursive, healers could spare attention to actually check out the zones they're in, and the mobs they're fighting (and, in the case of raid leaders, the performance of other players).

You just don't fucking get it.


Yes, it did.  And by making the change now, without compensating healers for losing an ability they've been balanced with or commiting to less tedious raid mechanics, they're going to lose a lot of money.


Making the tedious parts of the game less tedious is good, even if it means 'dumbing it down'.

Again, unless the goddamned devs actually want to take the time to roll, play to 60, and then raid/pvp with healers in an attempt to actually understand these issues, they should just leave us the fuck alone and not tell us how to fucking play.


What Merusk said.  All Decursive really does in PvP is balance an otherwise unbalanced equation.  And having to watch healthbars and manually click to remove debuffs in PvP = some boring, un-fun shit.

Maybe you should actually play the expansion instead of flipping off the handle over your theorycraft.

Only using one heal regardless of situation? Only gonna happen if your manapool is absolutely irrelevant and/or nobody but the main tank ever takes damage.
But maybe that changes if you use mana conservation mods. Never did that either.

Checking out the zone? Checking out the mobs you are fighting? You sound like raids are a sightseeing tour instead of repeating the same encounters over and over again for months. Maybe I don't get it because I played a different game than you do. Two different games actually. Because in EQ a healer in our raids knew all walls by heart, and little else. Oftentimes they even were summoned to that same wall via a teleport spell directly from the zone entrance. Those poor suckers.

What ability did the healers lose? No ability the game has given them. Your little rant would be true if Decursive was part of the game itself. You are not entitled to abilities third party programs give you.


I'm all for removing tedious parts out of a game. I said more than once in this thread that if an encounter needs Decursive, that encounter is broken and should be fixed. But for me the whole raiding part of the games is a tedious part that I could do without. So take that with a grain of salt.

You can't balance a game for PvE and PvP equally. One will always suffer for the other. You can only pick one favourite.

I wasn't speaking of PvP vs PvE.  I was speaking of "wack a mole" vs "planning and strategy."   One of the best suggestions I've read to improve playing a healing class came from the FOH boards, and they stole it from other RPGs.   Add spells like "Shield" and "Reflection" or "Wall" or "Poison Shield" or whatever, and let the healers micromanage keeping those up while healing/ light DPSing instead of "omgIneedtocast8dispellsin10seconds"   Just don't make them permanent buffs a-la DAoBotsalot.

That would be nice, Merusk; problem is, I think the Blizz devs are simply less talented/creative than most other large MMOG dev teams.  They're basically coasting on the game that the previous dev team had built hand-in-hand with the best artists in the industry (and one of the best IPs available, to boot).

If WoW had launched as the raid-oriented game it is today, no way would it be as popular.


Only Priests and Druids use different heals. Paladins don't need to conserve mana (and yes, they mostly just spam one rank of FoL, depending on their gear), and Shamans use CH 90%+ of the time in raids (unless their raid sucks, or they're nooblets).


Why bring "yeah, EQ sucked' into this?  And yeah, I like to actually look around, even in a zone I've been in 40+ times already; anything's better than staring at the same healing bars I've seen thousands of times.

Oh, and way to dodge the leading-in-raids-as-healer bit.


Who said anything about being entitled?  I'm no more entitled to Decursive than they're entitled to my 15$/month.  And yes; the damn game currently requires Decursive.  If your healers don't have Decursive for learning Chromie and Noth, for example, you fail.


I couldn't agree more... and it's obvious you don't play a healer in raids, so I've taken everything you say with a grain of salt; if you had, you'd see how much more palatable Decursive makes playing one in WoW.  And like I said, forget palatable; healers *need* decursive in PvP to remain balanced with DPS/Warriors.


... while that's been true in MMOG development so far, Decursive actually makes PvP *more* balanced, not less.  Unless, of course, to you balanced PvP means 'everyone PvP with your DPS alt'.

Edit: not worth it.  No need to perpetuate this WoW forum board crap. For those that read it, that last line was ironic (but I used green anyhow).

Ohh, and I said decursive is a cheat. So.. go with that.

Edit#2: Oops sorry with messing up your reply Vel.  I checked to see if anyone was posting before I threw in the edit.  :|

But playing the game the way you're supposed to is so tedious Rasix.  I should be able to have a mod that will auto-assit my main tank and automate my shot rotation for me so I can check out the scenery instead of actually focus on playing.  Maybe throw a Feign Death in there every once in a while too so I don't build up too much agro.  The game is absolutely unfun and unplayable having to push all these buttons but I felt the desire to level a class to 60 that I knew long in advance would be no fun without 3rd party mods to play the game for me.

Edit:  If there's a problem here it's the fact that healing is pretty much broken in all MMO's.  No game that I've played has ever managed to get it to rise above watching health bars and it's the reason that I almost never play a healing class in any MMO, let alone play one in a game with raiding as the main endgame.  Aside from people new to the genre, I'd expect most people to know this long enough in advance to avoid playing a healer if they knew they weren't going to enjoy it.

Might be because Paladins and Shamans arent't main healers and therefore don't have the same variety. Since usually Shaman have other duties beside healing in raids (shortage of healers nonwithstanding), they get their variety in other ways. Don't know about Paladins, only played Horde.

Whats there to dodge? What people do in addition to their raid duties can have no effect whatsoever on raid balance.

You are less entitled to Decursive than they are entitled to your money. You pay for the game, not for specific addons by third parties. Of course you always have the ability to stop paying your 15$/month when the game doesn't suit your gaming needs anymore. Its exactly what I did after Molten Core because I saw no future except raiding in that game for me.

As said above, I quit during Molten Core. Everything up to that was easily manageable without Decursive. When I returned for a quick stint I got dragged to some AQ raids (not the whole zone) which were decidedly harder without Decursive but still doable. Everything above that I'll refer to those better versed in those encounters. If those encounters are indeed undoable without Decursive, one might suspect they were balanced and playtested using Decursive. Which is a big Nono in my eyes. Everything should be doable by playing the game out of the box with the right skills and equipment, or something is really screwed up in a game.

Chromie is easily doable sans decursive. 

I'm going through the top end of Naxx around now.  My decursive mods broke three or four months ago, and I haven't bothered to reinstall them.  It's a joke.  There is no issue.  MC stuff was annoying back in the day, and maybe a few other bosses are bothersome now, but only vaguely.  It isn't any more intensive or mind-destroying than healing the raid.

Heck, I've always found automatic decursing to be as annoying as fuck on Chrom because of all the los issues.  I almost always did it manually.

True, I haven't consistently played non-melee much in that game, besides my priest. This doesn't mean I haven't sat down and watched friends play Every Other Class In The Game. Oh, and watched raids as well.

Also, who the fuck am I parroting? Certainly not the WoW Board drama. I abstain from that clusterfuck, thanks.


I think the actions of both parties suck; Blizzard for 1) designing Stupid encounters, 2) Designing even more stupid encounters in reaction to a 3rd party mod, and 3) for not just breaking the mod when it came out. The players bitching are wrong as well for 1) relying so heavily on a 3rd party mod, and 2) for bitching up a storm when Blizzard finally breaks it, knowing that all along it was well within Blizzard's rights to break the mod.

Also, I think that warlock curse will still be viable. Granted, it might not see the immediate results that it would when you have someone dispelling everything with decursive, but isn't that the spell that triggers whenever it's removed in any way at all, including fading after its duration?

"In addition, if the Unstable Affliction is dispelled it will cause 1575 damage to the dispeller and silence them for 5 sec."

Nope.

Bleh, got that very crossed with Curse of Doom. I've hardly even glanced at the BC stuff.

And besides the skill will not be Useless, as it still does its DoT damage. You're just less likely to get a free hit on a dispeller.

UA is a fairly weak dot with a high mana cost and long casting time. Not really worth it for most pve and pvp encounters, except to make drain life more powerful via soulsiphon, and of course small scale arena pvp (where it can really put the hurt on someone on the business end of your assist train). However, if you take UA, you're not taking ruin, soul link, nether protection, backlash, shadowfury, conflagrate, and any of the other good stuff, so it's a rather significant tradeoff.

About the decursive thing: Some encounters WERE made trivial by decursive. ZG has at least 2 encounters (including the end boss) where you have debuffs that shouldn't be removed (or you basically wipe the raid); AQ40 has some of that too at Huhuran, iirc. Now, you can setup decursive so it doesn't remove these 'good' debuffs, but avoiding the dispel bombs by manual dispelling is a huge pain in the ass, especially when you're supposed to be focusing on healing. This is the one point where I sort of see why they were nerfing it in the expansion.

... however, 99% of the other boss encounters are friggin' atrocious when it came to decursing. I know it's a 25man group with (let's say) 5 decursers of each type, so theoretically you can just keep an eye on your group -- but it just doesn't work in practice. The maintank group's healer probably won't have time to do anything but spam heals, and I doubt raids will be set up with exactly one mage/druid, one paladin/shaman and one priest (in case of shaman) per group. Manual decursing is also freaking dull and tedious... note I didn't say "challenging", as picking out the one blinking red healthbar (which you can still do in BC) and clicking on it isn't any harder than hitting the decursive hotkey, and repeating this every 1.5 seconds (global cooldown).

I'm reserving judgement on the entire nerf until I've heard just what kind of encounters there are in BC. If the first raid will be MC v2.0 with lucifron/geddon/gehennas and mass cursing/debuffing trash mobs, then yeah... screw that, I'm shelving my pally and priest.


-- Z.

Easily doable?  No.  It might be easy for your wife's or Zane0's raids, but only because other healers *are* using Decursive, and taking up their slack.  Try doing Chromie without *any* dispellers using decursive.  Oh, and tell your healers to have fun!

And I was talking about *learning* Noth and Chromie, specifically; easily learnable by a raid that doesn't use Decursive?  Hell no.  I've never even heard of a raid that learned to kill Chromie or Noth without using Decursive; I'd love for you to find an example of that, if you think one exists.


Using a DPS rotation, for any class, *is* as easy as using one macro (in many cases, just one ability/power).  DPS classes, and even tanks and healers in most fights, will still be able to play with one button; only decursing will remain a chore.


So removing Decursive is ok, because healing is supposed to suck so much that... you don't want to do it?  Sorry, but you seem to be championing the 'healing SHOULD be a pain in the ass' point of view.

There are probably literally thousands of people playing healers that never thought they'd have to heal in raids just to remain competitive in PvP, and don't have the time to level a DPS alt to 60, or have friends and family members playing in their raiding guilds that really, really appreciate them continuing to play their unfun-to-raid-with healing class.

Again, WoW only shipped with one raiding zone; even though we knew more would be on the way, the bulk of character progression, even at 60, was found outside of raiding; if Blizzard had stated at ship that WoW would be 'raid or die' within a year, no way in hell would I have played a healer.  Playing a healer in the beginning of the game, though, was actually fun, before raiding 15+ hours a week became necessary to remain competitive in PvP.

...

Tebonas: if you can't see how removing Decursive will make it harder to Healers to lead raids while still doing their job (and keeping track of the job other are doing), then you've neither lead a raid nor played a healer in one.


Problem is that from a PvP perspective, every battle is Luci/Geddon/Chromie, etc.  Regardless of how the raiding situation turns out, Dispellers in general, and Pallies in particular, are getting screwed when it comes to PvP.

I just wish the Blizz devs, and some of the wankers posting here, could see how encouraging people to shelve their healers in favor of Yet_Another_RogueHunterWarlockalt_03 is bad for their raiding game, and the game in general.

Actually, we could not kill Noth until we revamped our curing policy; we had a limited amount of decursers, and could not remove the curse in time using straight Decursive.  The retarded random targetting would collide or get held up on people out of range, and waste time.  As a solution, we had every decurser assume specific individiual decursive class priorities, but at that point, the mod was not exactly being very helpful to anyone.

Its "requirement" in every example that I can think of is exaggerated and in some cases outright misleading.

I'm outta this one.  The guy is not only wrong, but frothing.

And I'm fed up of this SirBrucing Shit.  It hurts my fucking eyes.

I was sure that Blizzard was changing from raiding being 'the point' anyway.

You are hardly impartial enough to make such a claim sir!

As for the issue at hand I doubt many healers would quit over it, it IS a pain in the ass though. Hopefully they also end the need to dispell mass amounts of people and instead make it something like a random occurance on 1 or a couple of people where you need to get the visual cue and jump on it quickly. That kind of dispelling I can tolerate.

Well Elena's looks can't be coming from Ironwood :rimshot:

Hey, here's an idea !

Rather than frothing on for another four pages, let's ask in the NDA thread about how this really affects anything and whether it actually works !

Hey !

Are you purposefully playing retarded Ratama?

The game can't make it its goal that the game is trivial enough for possibly each and every one in 40 people to play his class, lead the raid and audit the performance of all the other raiders at the same time. Chance is if that one player can do THREE THINGS AT ONCE without breaking a sweat that he (and every other person of the same class) are bored beyond reason for doing just one of those three things (playing his class).

How about letting one player lead the raid and other players decide upon the performance of the other players? As a healer you don't have problems seeing how other healers are performing while doing your work by looking how they handle the work in their designated groups and how much crosshealing/crossdecursing you have to do. This informations comes to you while doing your work.

And yes, I healed at raids AND was a class mentor to help out younger members of my class and decide at their performance at the same time. Like most sane people  my guild delegates different tasks to different people though, so NO, I didn't lead the raid at the same time.

I posted a longish reply, but the forum ate it. Grrr.

Anyway, I think in *pvp* you're much much better off by not using mods to heal or cleanse. In my experience, Squishy (pvp-ish emergency monitor, only shows targets in range) and Decursive hurt more than they help... it's a lot better to either heal by nameplates, manual targeting or assisting off an enemy*. The reason is, you need to be able to survey the entire battlefield (friends and enemies) and try to tell who needs healing by the actions of your enemies... if you see a friendly about to get hit by nukes or in a stunlock, casting long/big heals and dispels on them is probably better than slamming the 'flash heal most wounded person in raid' key. None of these mods can make these choices for you.

Now of course, in *pve*, if there are going to be fights like lucifron or chromaggus, I don't forsee playing my healers much (but then, my main is a lock so nyah). Watching for the blinking red nameplate so the priest can click on it and then do it 20 more times in 30 seconds isn't challenging or engaging in any way... imo.


-- Z.
* and then die 3 seconds later to a random undead rogue. Not that I'm bitter or anything :p

I see... ask someone to try a situation on for size themselves before spewing forth ignorant opinions, then get compared to a raging furry?  Gee, thanks.   :roll:  I suppose had I made a car fire reference, I'd have been accused of Booging?

My 'frothing' is solely directed at the current Blizz devs; and yes, I hope they all die in a giant toilet fire at Blizz HQ.

Did you not see the actually knowledgable posts by others in this thread agreeing that this is a problem?  Most healers that know about the upcoming changes feel the same way; and many healers *will* quit or reroll over it.

i'm still waiting to see why you think that's good for the game, or your gameplay in particular.

And you're sure WoW won't remain raid-oriented?  The same way you're sure that Decursive needs to be banninated?  Firsthand knowledge and practical experience with the subject?

...

Zetor: you don't have time to 'survey the field' against good teams in BGs; you have to be removing that sheep from your other healers/flagrunner/whathaveyou before you even know it's there; with PvP as fast paced as it is now, anything slower and you lose.

Annoyingly, none of the naysayers have raised the one single legit issue regarding Decursive in PvP come BC; that with the increase in HPs by virtue of the decreased item budget cost of Stamina, the slower speed of PvP might not necessitate superhuman reflexes to remove CC effects.

But I suppose ignorant ravings by non-healers that have never even installed the mod are much more entertaining to read, anyway.

Goodness.

Look :  It's not going to be the big thing you think it is.  That's all I'm saying.

You've got yourself totally damp at the crotch at this particular change.  I'm sure that feels like there's a special place in heaven for you right about now,  but trust me, it's not that big a deal.  Change happens and yet the sun and the stars still shine on.

I love how you're already saying that there's massive doom and gloom around the priest class and that it'll get so bad and so much worse that the whole dynamic will change. 

It won't.  This thing WON'T snowball, no matter how much you think it will.

I mean, Jesus, I can tell by your posts that you've been lurking for a very, very, very long time (or you're a banned member returned to WREAK YOUR REVENGE) and as such, I can't believe you're taking this shit so very very seriously and thinking that overnight we'll have a clusterfuck of SWG proportions.

It's going to be ok.  Priests will still heal.  They'll still play the game.  The Expansion will still sell numbers that will make your dick bust concrete and for those that have churned or burned out, new members will come who won't have a fucking clue what decursive ever was and won't care.

Seriously, you need to go get laid.  Instead of letting a 3rd party mod do it for you.

(Btw, I just recalled something about SB's postings; he does the 'breaking quotes apart and respond to each one in minute detail' thing as well, doesn't he?  Ok... no more of that... or at least less, I promise.  :-P ).

A CF of SWG proportions?  Well.. that's sort of my point. %-wise, hell no, but from a sheer #s standpoint?  Losing 10% of their healer population probably WOULD lose more money than SWG makes.  Will that happen, or even 1%?  No... but why lose any money at all?  Losing any given % of their players means they lose 10x as much $$$ as any other MMOG ever would have losing that same percentage.

They're trying to get a tick off the dog with a shotgun, that's all I'm saying.

But it's a Big Deal to me personally, yes; I happen to like many of the 3rd party mods I use (even if I don't like the need for them in the first place).  Until I saw Crusader Strike (Oh Mah Gawd; check the BC talent thread), this *was* a dealbreaker for me.

And I'm serious about the healer situation already being in poor shape; raids losing healers is *already* a snowball.  Now, just about everyone with a lvl 60 toon will be back to try BC, but 3-6 months later Healer Burnout is going to be a hot issue with raids guilds again, and the lack of Decursive is going to exacerbate it.

Believe the title of this thread; just about every raiding healer is going to have a big WTF moment when they find out about this, and many are going to quit or reroll.


The Former.  :wink:  My brother and I checked out Lum's religiously when we were just out of highschool (UO was just coming out, and my brother, who's younger, played until we tried EQ; I just couldn't get into it, too boring, and didn't have any concept of where to start in an online community).

Lurked through SND, UP, WT, some of the other smaller splinter sites... pretty much just Corpnews and f13, now.  No alt accounts, btw; as far as I can remember, I've only ever posted under the names Ratama, Ratman, and Rathos at any of these sites, and just Ratama for CN and f13.  Don't usually post much; if someone else posts what I think, I generally just consider that good and keep reading.

And honestly... I only posted because I DO expect better, smarter thoughts 'n writin's from you guys compared to official msg boards (although Whineplay was often a good read, back in the day).

So when I see a bunch of people whose opinions I generally respect start spouting the same ignorance-laced crap I see over on Blizz's boards... got a little over-cranky, I guess.

This Decursive change is something that will, at least slightly, negatively impact my gameplay each and every time I log on.  Reminds me of Alchemy... except in this case, the playerbase, via a mod, came up with a solution to the whole in the gameplay, and now we're being told there wasn't really a problem all along.  And that's bullshit.

Proactive vs Reactive gameplay, just like Merusk said, *can't* be balanced unless it's easier/cheaper to react than act in the first place.

Again, I refer you to the thread's title; my posts have just been this particular healer's 'WTF'.

Oh yeah, that reminds me automatic Assist Trains are busted with these changes as well.  I'm not sorry to see them go at all.


Well, ask around.  I think you'd be surprised by how many of your healers and guildmates in general are on their first MMO in WoW.  Hell, I've had to explain to at least three different guildmates that, yes, you WILL have to buy a copy of BE to remain competitive and yes, that does mean one copy for each account.

 Then there's the folks like me who enjoyed being a healer in other MMOs, but dislike it in WoW because of the pace.  Makes for a very very fun game as a DPS/ Tank/ Utility class, but very very crappy as a reactive healing/ debuff removal class.

A few observations.

I think it's interesting that the fuss is about removing the bot program and not about balancing the raids to make removing curses easier. That speaks loads to me about the entire situation.

I enjoy playing healers. If you don't, then don't play one.

If your guild can't attract them, figure out what you're doing wrong. As an example, maybe tossing vault-esque tantrums based on the fundamental premise that healing is boring isn't creating the kind of social atmosphere that those of us who enjoy healing want to be part of. I've never been part of a guild in any game that had any difficulty finding people to heal.

While glacial in speed, I've also found Blizzard to be pretty good at the "getting it" part of the game. If it makes people miserable, I'm sure they will rebalance things.

I don't see this.  At all.  Our raids are suffering from lack of warriors, if anything.  I'm not coming to the boards here and saying that it's because warriors are broken or stance shifting macros are fucking things up.  I think you are guilty of generalising from your own experiences here.

Provide me hard evidence or stats of the priest loss please.  In percentages to help my tiny mind.



(PS : Ratman.  Aha.  I remember you.)

(PPS :  What's BE ?)

Finally, I hate, hate, hate, hate when people toss out the 'Omg, I hate playing whack a mole, or having my screen filled up and having my job just healing people and checking out bars and decursing and blah and blah and fucking blah.'

Let's be Clear :  A Priest isn't for You.

Christine loves that shit.  LOVES IT.  I personally would rather take a rusty belt sander to my fucking bollocks than play 'her' game, but I realise that it's not because of some fundamental problem with the class, but it's a fundamental problem of a class I DON'T WISH TO PLAY.

The warrior is just as boring as hell, if you look at it like that.  But I love me some tanking.

Sure, if there's a percentage of people who hate with a passion the priest game and it's affecting the whole dynamic, then Blizzard will need to go back and change that game to make it more interesting to people.  At the moment, I don't see it.

Numtini, regarding Blizzard eventually making things right: If it takes them 2 years to make decursing less tedious in raids, and more tenable in PvP, then I really wouldn't have any interest in waiting around that long.  That's just *too slow*.

Ironwood, does your guild have a 'regular raider' rank, or something roughly equivelant?  Compare the numbers of healers vs non-healers that have reached that rank in the last year; the % of turnover should be significantly higher than the DPS classes (Warriors are a bit different, as they can make a legitimate claim to being 'best in game' at two different roles).

As for 'healer burnout' being an issue... I'm surprised you haven't heard the term before; it was a known issue even back in EQ; that job was simply more intensive and higher stress than the other roles, and WoW is pretty much the same way.

In fact, after character transfers became available was when I first really took notice of it in WoW (and then crunched the numbers in the 2 BWL+ raid guilds I'd been in); lots of guild openly recruiting healers from other servers (DPS classes... not a single case, that I recall).

Also, someone brought the subject up in the general forums on the old boards (might still be around, for all I know), and a terse blue response basically said "things will change" in regards to healer/hybrid roles in BC (the response indicated to me that they were aware of the issue).

In fact, I'd surmise that their stated goals of making Paladins more viable tanks and Shamans more viable healers is at least partly due to their wanting to make sure that raids continue to have healers available (I think it's really a sham; there's no doubt in my mind that Shamans and Paladins will still be healing 75%+++ of the time in BC raids).

As far as the 'A Priest isn't for You' bit; I like self-sufficient characters, and that basically means playing a healer.  People like your wife are in the minority of people that play healers at the high-end raiding level; most of us find healing in raid rather tedious, but do it to improve our characters (and I know most raiders feel the same way about raiding, regardless of class).

And I don't think I'm the Ratman you're thinking of; there's a guy that uses that name on Corpnews, Ratmantf or something like that (that's why I stopped using that name in this community; too common).  I don't recall every posting anywhere enough for anyone to remember me.

 :|

I'm suggesting that the burnout is not as pronounced as you're saying it is.  I'm looking to your guidance for figures.  Possibly even a chart.

At least at the moment there is nothing in beta to judge by. There aren't many mods out for beta and the client refuses to load old mods.

Well, actually, I was thinking of asking how the whole 'lotsa curses flying around' situation was.

Beta is capped at L67 for the moment and very few people are even close so it's unlikely anyone is gonna be doing the 25 mans any time soon. And the complaint is about raid decursing, not single group which is trivial for anybody.

No, I'm championing the, 'if you're going to bitch, bitch about the real problem' point of view.  You go on and on acting like it's some kind of shock that Blizzard would expect healers to focus on peoples' health bars during a raid, and now you're adding that you had no idea that WoW would become so raid-focused for the endgame.  For someone who has been playing MMO's since UO you just don't seem to be too good at noticing trends is all.

What he said.

I always end up playing clerics/priests/defenders/whatever. I usually try other classes first, then after a few weeks suddenly think 'bollocks to this for a game of soldiers' and roll a healer. Reasons being....

1) Nobody else actually ever has to make a decision, or predict what is about to happen next, or seriously assess whether people in their own group are capable of taking the beating they are getting for at least a few more seconds while I focus on that guy over there. (possible exceptions can be made for crowd control guy)

2) Player skill in other classes just doesn't (generally) have the same level of impact on outcomes.

3) The whole ball-ache of trying to find a group if you aren't a healer.

4) The even greater ball-ache of finding a healer for my group if I'm not one.

5) If you want something done properly....

6) Being able to stand at the back where I can admire all the shiny properly.

7) Mouthbreathers will more readily listen to simple instructions given by healers than by other classes. (strangely tanks also get this inherent authority - I say strangely because I can't help thinking of tanks in my group as NPC pets with really bad pathing AI)

8) Not having to get involved in all that uncivilised fightin' and killin'.


I wouldn't want healing which doesn't involve having to identify who is getting hurt, or having to squint at 67 separate effect icons stacked against each player name. You go down that road and a tank player could do it.

I don't play WoW, but this whole thread reminds me of spread-heals in daoc. Fed up of having to decide who needs healing the most? Don't worry, we'll have the spell figure it out for you. Oh... er... thanks.

Certainly the change as described would probably mean that it will take a larger number of priests to manage decursing on a raid, but requiring more of a class doesn't have a history of reducing the number of people who play it.

The thing that would suck most about having no decursive would be the need for extra hotkey slots. As a druid you get a spell that removes curses, a spell that cures poison, and a spell that repeatedly checks for poison and cures it (the simple poison cure is more mana efficient, so it's situational). For all I know, the xpack may add more spells to this list. So instead of just hitting a decursive hotkey, you need to find space for all of those.

The "dot" decursers cost the same as their single equivalents and do the same exact thing with the dot added on top. So you only really need the "dot" one. Right now I have both types of dispells and decursive so I'll actually go down in hotkeys. :P

Really? Sorry, it's a few months since I've played WoW. Shows how used to decursive I became.