Monday, December 4, 2006

World of Warcraft patch to remove raid heal options

This week World of Warcraft is going to be patched to version 2.0, bringing a lot of changes, good and bad. For raid healers, especially priests, there are unfortunately more bad changes than good. Not only are we losing Decursive, but the patch also removes one important raid healing option, making it both more boring, and harder. The ability to "downgrade" your healing spells in a meaningful way is being removed.

Previously, playing as a priest in a raid, I used 4 different healing spells. Renew, a heal over time, is a no-brainer, you try to always keep that one up on the tank you are healing. The other three were the spells that gave you a choice, and making the right choice based on the circumstances made the job interesting. Flash Heal is the fastest way to heal your target, but not very mana efficient. Greater Heal is slower, more mana efficient, but heals for a large amount, so often causes overhealing. So I used the third option a lot: Casting a lower level Heal (Rank 4) spell. This is as slow as casting a Greater Heal, but due to this spell receiving the bonus of my +healing gear, it healed as much as my highest level Flash Heal, and was much more mana efficient.

The patch is removing this third option. If I cast a downgraded spell in the future, my +healing bonus from my equipment will not be applied at 100%, but the bonus will be reduced based on the difference between my level and the level where I got that downgraded spell. That turns Heal (Rank 4) into a slow spell that isn't particularly mana efficient and doesn't heal very much. There is no reason to use it any more, I now have one option less to chose from when healing.

I frankly don't understand why Blizzard is doing this. If you don your asbestos suit and visit the official World of Warcraft forums, a horrible experience, you can find lots of people clamoring to nerf this or that class. Warlocks and paladins are the classes where most of that sort of discussion is centered. But you won't find a single "nerf priests, they are overpowered" post. Instead you find posts of people complaining that they can't visit the dungeon they want, because there aren't enough priests available to form a group or raid. In such a situation a wise developer would give some goodies to the priests and other healing classes, to make them more attractive, and to get more people to play a healer. That makes nobody unhappy, and enables a lot more people to find a balanced group. But instead Blizzard is nerfing priests. And the decursive removal, as much as I understand the underlying reasons behind that decision, also hurts priests (and indirectly helps warlocks in PvP).

This is one reason why I don't raid with my priest any more: Raids in World of Warcraft 2.0 are going to be a lot less fun for priests. We gain a lot of added workload with manual decursing, without that bringing any interesting decisions to the gameplay. And we lose one option on how to heal, removing our most mana efficient healing spell. Not a good patch for raid healing priests.

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