Ghostcrawler has launched the Dev Articles on the new Battle.net blogs and talks about a topic that will sound familiar to many: healing.
There has been a lot of controversy and perhaps too much information about the effects Cataclysm will have on Healing. If you've seen the Caverns of the Blackrock videos we put out recently, you might have an idea of what's to come.
Many people have the impression that the changes are to annoy (to say the least) the Healers but the truth is that as a healer I have enjoyed (and suffered) a lot. I believe that the changes that we will see in the healers not only directly impact the players who manage them but also the rest of the group. If the tank decides to go after a large group of monsters without doing any crowd control, it is very likely that many will die because now the healer will not be able to raise the entire group because: a) does not have enough mana and b) their cures are no longer so fast.
Mr. Ghostcrawler talks about all this. Let's make a brief summary:
- Healers in Wrath had too much mana. This meant that players never had to worry about mana and always used the least efficient spell because mana was never going to run out. This affects the rest of the points.
- Because mana management was not challenging, they had to find alternative methods to challenge players in encounters. This has ended up not being all the fun they expected.
- Neither Spirit, MP5, nor mana recovery abilities have been used in Wrath of the Lich King because players have never run out of mana. Because of that too, no one has bothered to look at the over-healing (hello sorority!)
- It also has an impact on PvP as, since healers can heal without problems, encounters can get really long.
You can read the full article after the jump or in the official website.
You've probably heard that healing in Cataclysm will have a very different feel to it. The role of healer will be more of a challenge, particularly in terms of resource management. This is not fresh news for frequent forum readers, but lately I've seen enough questions on the forum about why I “nerfed” healers to see fit to launch a developer blog on this topic.
Generalizing, healers' mana hasn't been a concern throughout Wrath of the Lich King. Sometimes you could run out of mana, but without it affecting your spell choice as it had before. However, we believe that resources should be very important. Many styles of games are based on managing limited resources: be it vespene gas in an RTS game, ammo in an FPS game, or time in a puzzle game. The best players are the ones who best manage their resources. Not being limited by resources can create a false sense of power for a short period of time, but it is only due to feeling like a rebel who breaks the rules. In other words, you are breaking the rules, but when that short period ends, the game loses its grace very quickly. Invulnerability mode is not as rewarding in the long run as it may first appear.
What is true is that resource management is more important for healers than for other roles. "That's not fair!" it's something you're probably about to whine. I've used this analogy before to good effect, so I'll do it again: Doing damage is like sprinting, you generally want to go as fast as possible. But healing is different, it is not a race, it is like playing darts: you need to be as precise as possible. A big part of playing as a healer is about using the right tool for the right job. What differentiates these tools is the amount of resources they cost. Remove the resource constraint if you lose a dimension that differentiates the tools. Good healers used to brag about keeping everyone on their feet without depleting their mana.
For various reasons, all our fault, Healers enjoyed too much mana regen during Wrath of the Lich King. Let's take a moment to analyze the consequences of an infinite amount of mana ...
First, those expensive but fast healing spells have never been a difficult choice. The "expensive" thing was not being applied in reality, so they were simply quick cures. And why wouldn't you want to do quick cures? The healers' game narrowed along with their options. Instead of picking the right tool, they all chose a spell as Power Word: Shield, Flash of Light, or Rejuvenation, and set about using that one spell. Like this all the time. We believe that a key to good play is making interesting decisions. When your toolbox is so small (because slow or too expensive spells are automatically discarded), you end up making fewer interesting decisions.
Second, because healers weren't running out of mana, we've had to find other ways to challenge raids that have been designed to challenge themselves. That has very often resulted in a lot of damage taken by the tank or the entire raid. So in the end, the healers not only had to limit themselves to using that same spell, but they could not stop using it for an instant without someone dying. This greatly increased the stress of the healers, but without receiving the reward of having made correct decisions. If you've healed the wrong player, hesitated for a moment, or hiccupped your connection, a member of the raid has died.
Third: everything that benefited from mana regeneration, such as talents, spirit, or the use of trinkets, were turned into unwanted items. Also, since mana was not a concern, overheals have not been either, and players have been relentlessly overhealing. When everything turned out to be overdrive, attributes like critical chance were also devalued.
Fourth: the balance in PvP has suffered. When healers could simply heal someone without fear of overhealing or running out of mana, battles turned binary. Either you killed him or you didn't. No one got hurt for too long. The turning of the tables or the sneak attacks were not complemented. Imagine a tennis match in which the result of the first serve decides whether you win or lose the entire match. We could have solved the problem by increasing the amount of health for all players, which is exactly what we did for Cataclysm, but more health with infinite amounts of mana would result in losing all respect for dungeon bosses.
To be clear: we don't want healers to constantly run out of mana, we want them to run out of mana when they're not playing well. We do not want them to always fail, but we want them to feel proud of overcoming challenges, and that they have to overcome them to be successful. When someone is injured, we want healers to decide whether to use a slow and efficient magic (because their risk of dying is not yet imminent) or a fast and expensive spell (because it is). That's called assessing damage, and it's an item whose presence has been remarkably bright for its absence during healing in Wrath of the Lich King. We believe that damage assessment will make healing more fun and rewarding. We're making this change, not to sadden healers by making them worse, but to cheer them up for making the game more fun for them.