... and healers around the world said "Wtf!?"

[Merusk]

Blizzard Perma-Breaks Decursive & other mods

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.

[stray]

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?

[Trippy]

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

[Strazos]

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

[Merusk]

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.

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. 

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

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[Morfiend]

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.

[Venkman]

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

[Rithrin]

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.

[Ironwood]

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

I remember they went mental at that.

Fuckers.

[SurfD]

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.

[Kageru]

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. 

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.

[Strazos]

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.

[caladein]

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 .

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.

[Venkman]

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.

[Strazos]

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

[Fabricated]

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.

[Azazel]

It's only gonna get worse when you're trying to balance Paladin and Shaman buffs for your key groups.

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.

[Fabricated]

It's only gonna get worse when you're trying to balance Paladin and Shaman buffs for your key groups.

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.

[Phred]

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

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.

[Rithrin]

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.

[Phred]

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.

[Tebonas]

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.

[Zetor]

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.

[Phred]

Lets just say you are not healer material then.

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

[Tebonas]

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.

[SurfD]

It's only gonna get worse when you're trying to balance Paladin and Shaman buffs for your key groups.

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

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.

[Tale]

So are all the healers monitoring everyone?

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.

I can see that leading to a lot of double-targetting by healers.

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.

[Strazos]

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.

[Xanthippe]

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.

[Morfiend]

and I got SO FUCKING SICK of long-term non-healing raiders that DIDN'T EVEN FUCKING KNOW THAT.

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.

[SurfD]

also, it sucks that Blizzard actually designed around a Fucking 3rd Party Mod; the mod should have been killed immediately.

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.

[Strazos]

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.

[Venkman]

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.

[Malathor]

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