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What an awesome article! I always thought it would be cool if Holy Priest had a version of Warcraft III's inner fire (10% damage boost + armor) as a buff to cast on party members (with a cooldown). It could be a neat way to balance the disparity between disc and holy: Disc Priest does damage, Holy Priests boosts party members damage. The skill itself would also have an interesting decision because you could use Inner Fire to boost a damage dealers dps or use it on a tank to boost their armor. I love the holy priest playstyle over disc but I hope the devs have something planned to change up Holy Priest a little. It's cool that we are strong aoe healers, but holy priest doesn't feel like they have anything that really makes them shine especially in mythic keystones or pvp.
Something important to note too is that (presumably) azerite essences and azerite traits will go away once the next expansion rolls around. That'll mean that holy paladins will lose their high throughput build with the expected departure of Glimmer of Light, and all discipline priests and holy paladins will lose access to essences like The Ever-Rising Tide and Vision of Perfection which are accentuating their current strengths.While these two classes have seen prominent use at the high-end of mythic raiding, their advantages aren't as clear for lower level progression. In my opinion it would be foolish of Blizzard to nerf these specs in a big way as a result of (arguably) temporary power imbalances causing a clear difference in performance at the very high end of progression.It's entirely possible that holy paladins might retain Glimmer in some form similar to how some specs retained a version of their artifact ability from Legion, perhaps as a talent with heavier reliance on mana. I still feel like nerfs to either spec would only hurt the healer landscape, so I agree that more should be done to bring other specs into their own.
It's good isn't it? Best thing in the word!Blizzard either purposely or by sheer coincidence made the game better for non 8.1.5 meta classes and gave us a whole new grind that forces us into one class. OK that aside I do have a MAJOR issue with 8.2.It's good to see guilds make it as far as they have, but bad as to how easy they are getting there. It's good to have mechanical fights as well as DPS required fights, but very very bad with how much DPS is needed in downing the first 3 bosses compared to the 4th. And more so than the requirement to look at getting alternate healers or grinding new classes, the pure DPS required to surpass this mark is going to be the down point amongst guilds.My guild is already facing a bit of issues, and with it being so soon in the patch it's not good. We made it as far as Mekka on mythic with 2 weeks remaining in the tier, in EP with 2 more kills we will be up to the same with 5 kills. With how many months left it will get to a point that players will feel they are stuck too much on a boss and with not enough progression, and getting through all the content too fast, players might end up not raiding, those who still want to raid will have no one to raid with, those who are still progressing on our heroic runs may never get a chance to raid mythic, the snowball effect is far too great to get through this much content so fast with both a wall and not much content left.
it is rally funny how one healer is specifical for aoe healing when people are stacked, but all raids in BFA were a lot movement and spread patterns - shaman sucks, we will see with these buffs if he is viable more
Basically: Damage reduction cooldowns > Healing throughput cooldowns.
What an interesting article. Thanks Pelinal and Jaydaa!
I've seen someone post an interesting suggestion somewhere and I'll repost it here: Make damage prevented by barrier, aura mastery (devotion), spirit link and similar damage reduction cooldowns show on logs / healing meters under absorbs (if things like darkness or tank self damage reduction abilities show, like blessed hammer), and then balance healers around these new numbers. We'd probably easily see Shamans are less "worthless" due to link, but Discs are plain overpowered because their cooldowns (both barrier and pain suppression) are damage reduction cooldowns but their value is invisible, contrary to for example life coccoon and revival. The problem with Disc in low tier content is that is hard to play it well, that's why it underperforms among casuals who don't have enough insight and practice with the spec and encounters (timing is everything with Disc, you need to know when to build the biggest bulk of atonements). I'm in a "mid tier" mythic guild (6/8 progress) and we're struggling to recruit a Disc Priest for that specific reason - anyone we took underperformed on that spec and whoever is good enough to play it, is so rare can easily join top 100 guild (especially with the demand outweighing supply and many guilds wanting double Disc setup). Our officers contacted many potential candidates and the usual reply was "already have a better offer". That also means our progress is handicapped in comparison to all the guilds that already have a Disc priest, because of how strong they are. Our only solution is to get someone to reroll Disc and that won't make this player happy. I really hate this "must have x spec to progress mythic" design because everyone else suffers for it.
Nice article, but following the meta is only efficient if you are going to do better than what you were before or at least play as skillfully.. If i could handle burst damage just as well on my resto druid as my disc priest, it would probably make more sense to stay on the resto druid than re-gear and grind AP for the disc priest. It seems that shields are better than just hps from this article, perhaps every class can have a shield like mechanic next expansion and like you said - more balanced utility. Utility being the key for dps meta's as well and I'm sure tanking to.
The comparison of Mythic and Heroic numbers has it's reasoning and is pretty much expected. At least for several valid reasons.First of all, disci priests have the highest skill ceiling, but the punishes for sub-optimal plays are enormous. And paladins? I bet that at least half of the "heroic only" raiders have no idea there is some glimmer build or how to utilize it.. Another reason is, that the good discs and pallys don't have incentive to push hps at heroic, usually pump dps to get the farm over asap and the kills are (usually) clean so there's not much to heal. While pugging or having casual raid group - there is barely any valid healing cd order, therefore disc can't heal up to it's potential when someone else also pops a cd in the same moment.Anyway, to think of a solution - first that came on my mind is adjusting utility across the healers and minor boosts for classes that lack the bit of raw hps potential. BUT the tuning needs to be done for one content only as priority, in this case for raiding. Because in M+ (druid only) and PVP (druid and shammy?) is the meta completely different, so any changes for one segment naturally imbalance the other segments.This has no easy solution.
NO CHANGESoh, wait, wrong thread
If you don’t honestly believe how overpowered paladins are right now, look at the raw healing for mythic orgozoa, 152k over an 8 minute encounter. The best mistweaver I saw was pulling 90k. I understand flavors of the month and with how paladins were in Uldir, they deserve their time at the top too, but when a class is doing 60k hps more than another, while sustaining decent dps, and never ooming, it’s extremely broken.
It's kind of sad that author has plenty ideas how fix all the other specs, but the bottom one from Mythic (after shaman buffs that are coming) - nothing. Mistweaver is always going to be me favorite healer, just based purely on playstyle, but it feels like it's just abandoned by everyone, even author of this post. Top mistweavers are not even doing guides for them anymore, and most of them switched to other healing spec. We are coming back to times when it was a ^&*!ty spec and noone wanted to even fix it.
having class better in something than others isn't badas long all classes are better in something than others
Glad we just do heroic and I can play either my Druid or Shaman and still have a good time.
I still feel like raid encounters shouldn't be so "easily" gamed. To be able to predict precisely what is a good fit means that people will tune around it. I prefer the idea of adapting raids around party composition. Obviously, there will always be a need for tanks and healers. But different types of healers, types of DPS, and types of tanks can contribute to how an encounter plays out. For instance, developers can design a specific set of abilities for mobs appropriately themed, but not necessarily use them all and certainly not use them with predictable cadence. If the make-up of a group contains more of this and that, then different abilities are chosen from that pool of abilities to help counter that specific group. Basically, make the game smarter and not just run on timers with fixed phases and established knowns. I guess I'm asking for AI in the encounters. AI that considers group make up. An AI that can be defeated with most group make-ups provided the skill is there. Have healers or DPS with longer cool downs, then make the phases longer. Have a heavy representation of HOT healers, then make them work and add more DOTs and fewer spikes. I am sure we'll get there at some point, but it would be fun to see something like this sooner than later. AI adaptive encounters and positional combat mechanics where targeting reticules become less important, tab targeting isn't a thing, and physical positioning, LOS, etc, affect the game in a meaningful way and is different than what we experience now.
Great read, this confirmed a few things that I was thinking and some things I had no idea about. Thank you.I've mained disc since legion, and I personally don't like PW:S not having a CD. I would prefer Plea to return.Also I personally think it's too uncomfortable for a lot of healers to weave some meaningful damage into the rotation. But disc isn't bad because it's part of their healing and all of paladins damage abilities are instant making the target switch in the time of a GCD.I'm interested to see how they change the healers moving forward.
