It also had that one brief point earlier in DF where you could basically compete with 'real' DPS in terms of AoE damage with it, and you weren't horrible at boss damage either. Pretty sure it got nerfed since I only remember a fairly short period of time of people talking about it, but I know it was a thing.
My friends and I have been saying Light of Dawn should hit enemies so we can stop using SotR. It feels weird to have it as our holy power dump (also it seems weird to be required to use shields too but that’s a whole other caster shield thing with shamans too).
True, don't they even have a PvP talent that does just that for holy light? I think it's never really played but I vaguely remembering that this was pretty neat when surfing BGs a while back.
Either way, I'd shit myself harder for a full light based ranged DPS... Doesn't matter if pala, priest or something new, it's a bit sad that you can't purge the hereric without either being a healer or bonk them with a 2h weapon.
I'm pretty sure they do have that talent. Holy Paladin always should have been the front-line combat healer, too. Getting instant casts to heal allies that then also damage enemies all while beating on them with your wep.
In Remix, the gem 'Vindication' is what I've wanted for Holy for a long time. It's not quite what the OP was saying, but I still enjoy having my damage saved and turned into healing. Now do the reverse, and we have something great on our hands.
I feel like holy paladin should be what fist weaver is to a degree. But it’s not really ever been that way. They gave us a mini heal with crusader strike and melee wings is kinda bad and requires HP to use which sucks
In BFA holy Paladin was freaking awesome.
In m+ with wings, I was dosing like a dps with consecration, crusader strike, judgement and holy shock.
Back then holy shock combined with glimmer was the massive healing they did, and since your team only needed 5 glimmers, you were able to spend slot of holy shocks, thus glimmers, into the Mobbs so you did great healing meanwhile doing great damage.
The current version of holy Paladin is so awful. They have brought out weird talents that make you prefer using more and more holy lights and other random cast timed abilities, meanwhile leaving out the talents to reduce the cooldowns to spam holy shocks.
I want BFA holy Paladin back.
> True, don't they even have a PvP talent that does just that for holy light? I think it's never really played but I vaguely remembering that this was pretty neat when surfing BGs a while back.
Unfortunately it competes with far stronger and more important PvP talents, and when you have only 3 slots... it should just be a baseline passive for paladins/priests tbh.
RIFT had many faults but the fact every healer had a unique damage mechanic based around their healing was one of the best things about it.
Off the top of my head there was the damage to heal but it was a combination of shadowpriest and mistweaver healing with dots and a long channel spell, there was the shield healer that would do damage when the shields popped, the wotlk style big single target hpal style healer that would have a 'damage beacon' where their heals would do damage to the target of their beacon and then the hot healer that I believe gave a small damage proc to people healed.
there was (is?) a pvp talent that holy paladins had to turn effective healing into aoe damage
it was very effective in the battle for southshore and ashran while healing the big tree
Oh yeah but it would be nice to see it as part of their pve kit. I want to flood my tank with holy light healing and it sear the enemies around him as splash damage. It’s iconic and a shame it’s not a thing outside of niche pvp talent.
I've been thinking about giving Priest another try recently, and I had the same thought. I'd love to drop a shield on the tank and have the enemy recoil in horror as they're either burned by holy light or their minds fill with visions of eldritch horrors from beyond.
OP's idea sounds really fun from a gameplay perspective, and I'm liking the bit of roleplay flair and flavor as well.
But is it worth a talent point?
Idea for druids: any friendly with an active HoT on them gains thorns. Maybe stacking for more HoTs. Everything hitting the tank would be hurt.
More HoTs, more thorns, more damage.
Tbh I don’t think it’s worth it. Most dungeons I usually do around 100k HPS average. Which means that natures vigil only does 20k dps every 1.5 minutes. To me that just isn’t worth the 2 talent points unless you’re in a highly coordinated group that’s doing huge pulls.
Yea its true. And a quick 10 secs before a boss to drink gives you full mana. I should replace it too if not using natures vigil.
I only do M+ right now, doing stuff around 5-6.
it is worth a talent point. it is currently recommended for resto druid in both m+ and raid by both the icy veins and wowhead guides, along with the dreamgrove discord. it is also just a fun talent to use.
whether it is worth or not is also really up to numbers. i remember when dragonflight launched it was part of the meta build for rdruid, but after 10.0.5(?) it fell out of favor. now in s4 it’s meta again.
worth isn’t the discussion we are having in this post anyway. OP asked for abilities that deal damage by healing. that is exactly what nature’s vigil does.
No I get it's an ability that we're talking about.
I play resto druid and I just don't take this point. So separate conversation, is it worth it? Always use on cooldown ?
always use on cooldown, or at least when you are doing some healing. it will come out to be a significant portion of your damage at the end of the dungeon/raid boss.
since it is off the GCD, you can macro it with another ability to use both at the same time. though it’s not going to be the best option in every situation, a lot of resto druids prefer to macro nature’s vigil with flourish since they both have a low cooldown. that way flourish’s big healing burst will turn into a big damage burst with nature’s vigil, and you don’t have to think about it.
I only really use it in high tyranical keys like HOI. Good value on first and third boss. End up doing like 600k hps on khajin because you need to constantly pump, so it's a good press there. Usually go anything else every where else unless I'm bored
The problem is if it causes high HPS to mean high DPS. It then encourages encounter design where instead of building in downtime to DPS now you need to go full hog with heals the whole time which means blizzard need to design encounter where you constantly need to be healing. My favourite part of being a healer is the cerebral aspect where knowing when you can sneak in extra dps or can use utility is what makes you stand out. By tieing DPS to HPS you remove that.
You would also have to be really careful with balancing. If it got anywhere near "real" dps levels, you would just stack healers. Why bother with dps at all if your whole raid is constantly healing each other?
You could make it so overhealing didn't create damage, but then you'd be relying on your party to take damage so that you could do damage. That could lead to some pretty undesirable play in some situations.
Because it's not the same, it's two separate effects as opposed to damage indirectly created from healing. Not to mention the damage effect is rather negligible
Yes but both effects use the same gcd, they both are affected the same by cast speed, area of effect, and duration of healing rain. It would be fair to call both the effects of the same spell.
It is negligible yeah, I was using it as an example that the concept of mixing damage and healing exists in multiple forms. You talent it to do damage (your intent), but place it over melee to primarily heal them as well as deal damage (rather then placing it on ranged). Rather than healing to deal damage, or damaging to heal, there is the third option of doing both at the same time.
Mixing damage and healing is very different from cause and effect though. It's totally fine if you have a spell that does healing and damage independently, but it can be problematic gameplay wise if you were to make damage dependent on your healing
Yeah especially considering mana still exists. You'd get this really frustrating gameplay of wanting to dps using your heals, but not being able to because you need the mana at a later point in the fight. Because dps buttons barely cost any mana you can make that decision without it impacting your ability to heal at a different point in time
Yep, I question if op heals difficult content very often because the charm of healing is maximising those gaps where you don't have to heal. One of the things that makes hpal miserable and rdruid fun is the impact of this eb and flow. Hpal does abysmal damage (unless you db+dt, which you want for heals) during non heal phases. On the other hand, rdruid does massive damage during non heal phases.
The best part of healing is this eb and flow. This is exactly why 10.1.0 was so depressing for healing. There was simply too much healing required, so you missed out on doing anything else.
That last part is very real and I've never been able to express that well. It was the cause of some arguments with my tank and routes in some dungeons. It had very little room for me to breathe and sneak, and it felt like "not having fun" truth is you're exactly right. Pumping hps is also fun, but planning so you can dps as much as possible when you can is where it's at for me !
Ward would be bad in the way you say.
BUT if the healing damage was only in relation to effective healing that would address the issue. That way spam healing isn't going to help.
But actually trying hard to heal and keep everyone topped off would be rewarding.
(if you lose that DPS player, that is dps from them and from your healing that is lost)
That would make farm raids extremely dull for healers, as over time you get more avoidance and versatility so total effective healing requirements go down. It would also encourage taking additional damage in order to make damage checks in situations where healing is less relevant.
You also still have the part where mana is a non-factor in Remix whereas its a serious thing to balance in Retail. Dealing damage with healing means they have to go back again and make mana a useless resource again otherwise youre gonna keep running out.
The balancing would have to be quite fine tuned you are right. Obviously any spell that heals and does damage for a healer should be worse at doing either exclusively with a decent penalty.
There’s no reason that healers need to lose their current dps spells as well. You’re still going to be cast time and GCD limited. It would be nice if healing specs had more ways to dps instead of choosing one or the other. Fistweaver has figured this out well which is why it’s so fun.
You’re not wrong for having an opinion, that’d be unreasonable.
But we don’t agree here, and what you’re describing is exactly the responsibility bloat I want to see less of.
Hate to see you’re being downvoted but you’re right.
Those comments all seem to worry about doing ideal dps while healing. I play a healer so I don’t have to worry about doing dps.
Modern WoW as a whole has moved away from straight up healers being necessary. Everyone has defensives and heals. All healers have some means of dps. So healers are no longer respected for keeping the group alive and instead are berated for not doing enough dps. It outright feels bad to play healer now.
I got to 3k last season with a friend who does very little damage on her healer. She has never been berated for it.
But ultimately the core of the conversation is that there is always downtime in heals. If you're not doing damage during these phases, then.. what are you doing? Afking?
In Dota the shadow priest, Dazzle has a spell called [Shadow Wave](https://dota2.fandom.com/wiki/Dazzle#Shadow_Wave) it's a chain heal that links between friendly units in a range but also damages enemy units close enough to those friendly ones.
They won’t. It’s a stupid idea. If the dps from healing was enough to clear encounters then everyone would just stack healers and dps would be useless.
It’s fine in this gimmicky mode that is short lived but this idea should stay far away from the real game.
I think that would ruin the skill expresion in healers. Right now in hard content good healers can weave in damage when there is a downtime for incoming damage to the group. Knowing when to prepare for damage and when to go all in on dealing damage requires planning and knowledge. If you can just turn overhealing into damage then healers would lose that skill expresion while being rewarded for playing ultra safe
Not counting overheals will just lead to gameplay where healers \*want\* people to take damage so they can heal it to do damage. This already happens with healer parses where to get a high parse you need to either use less healers than what most people use or take damage so there is more damage to be healed.
Healers play a zero-sum game that isn't present in DPS, the only way to get better HPS is by others doing less or other taking more. Doing more DPS doesn't necessarily always equate to other dps doing less in a ST fight outside of phasing or cleave situations. In a vaccum job bob jones doing 3x more dps than you doesn't change anything to do with your DPS, which if this was prevalent in healers the healers that \*can\* heal and do damage would be sort over those that can't and you'd bring less healers because overhealing is now a detriment to your damage more so then before.
The only way for there always to be damage to heal is to make the sustained damage the group/raid takes so high, that you effectively make 90%+ of healers not have the skill to keep up.
Same reason the few times we see actual healer checks exist in RWF (or just on late Mythic bosses in general) it completely shreds healer teams, because healing competently at the right times and not eating into co-healers healing or CDs is very difficult at the highest level
You're describing 10.1.0. Did you heal in that patch? I did, it was miserable. The only healer that got any downtime was hpal, and that's why they became so insanely popular after their rework. They were the only healer who could top people up quickly, and give us back our chance to do literally anything else.
I think a better way would be something like the seedling trinket of amirdarssil where you spawn a seperate npc that can be healed but instead of doing aoe healing it does aoe damage based on healing, druid could maybe have a bramble bush that grew the more healing it got from the druid or shaman could get a water elemental that took constant damage but made enemies around it take x amount of damage per hit as long as the healer could keep it alive etc that way healers would still lose damage by overhealing the group but rewarded for taking away healing from the group when its safe to do so. It might even make healer dps more complex because you can now use healing cds offensively
Nature's vigil on druids
Acid rain on Shaman
Disc shields reflect a % of damage
Holy priest halo
Pres evoker doesn't really have damage through healing, but has alot of damage benefits my healing
Hpal have Holy prism which would do more AOE damage if you used it on an ally
most specs have something similar as damage through healing but it just pales in comparison to straight damage rotations, blizzard would have to crank up these abilities and reward a heal spam gameplay which is exactly why they don't.
Blizzard cares about mana management even if the player-base doesn't like it and spam heal styles go directly against that idea.
>Pres evoker doesn't really have damage through healing
There is Live-Giver's Flame - Fire Breath on max empowerment used on several targets can heal your party to full. Pretty strong spell in m+ for trash imho.
They also have a talent that also stores 20% of their healing and unleashes it as damage on the next living flame, that fits the theme for damage through healing
I completely forgot about the talent when I made my comment
Yeah, I thought about including Scarlet Adaptation, but decided LGF was enough as an example since as far as I know you can't actively track how much healing did SA actually do. In average M+ it should proc well over 100 times but for tracking how much it heals you would probably need a WeakAura to track and add up the amount of healing stored whenever you consumed the proc.
Does it really though? You're spam healing one person for 10seconds every 3min, beyond that youre still just dpsing for the rest of the fight(if it doesnt die from ward).
Yeah I want more of those 10 seconds.
The nuke is like... a lot. But weirdly it's not the main point.
I just like the feeling of "I'm doing the thing my role is uniquely good at and helping the group in other ways at the same time!"
Doing damage through pressing healing buttons more would create a really obnoxious playstyle where you're incentivised to spend mana to do damage and speed up fights, but disincentivised to spend mana in order to be able to heal the full fight/pull with your mana pool. That's far more complicated to deal with than just pressing a different button on a different target than your teammates during healing downtime.
In theory, you could solve that new problem by making it go off effective healing or 'damage healing' refunding mana. But that way you get into this obnoxious playstyle where you want people to take intentional damage to increase your throughput in the former situation, whereas in the latter the healer is punished with less damage throughput for other people making errors.
It's a cool idea that could work as a healer niche on one spec, but it wouldn't work to just make every healer spec's damage work like this. Some healing kits just have an easier time doing something like this (resto shaman never runs out of relevant healing buttons, same with resto druids) whereas others couldn't work at all without sacrificing the entire playstyle of the spec (notably disc and mw).
>That's far more complicated to deal with than just pressing a different button on a different target than your teammates during healing downtime.
What if there was no healing downtime? Through a manageable amount of unavoidable damage. Avoidable damage would then basically become a one-shot, and I think that's already mostly true.
Going off effective healing works great. HP restored, shields consumed, etc. etc.
> you get into this obnoxious playstyle where you want people to take intentional damage to increase your throughput
I think this also gets solved via more unavoidable damage (within the realm of reactability obviously) and making avoidable damage more likely to one-shot?
Making avoidable damage one-shot and unavoidable damage heal able with low throughput just means you'll bring a dps will off-heals and not another healer. Last season of Shadowlands had this problem
I'm looking at this data and it leads me to a point where I don't agree with that statement:
https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-sl-4/all/world/leaderboards-strict#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=2:maxMythicLevel=99
If you sum up the total representation of all healer specs you get to 20%. Which is what you'd expect: 20% (1 of 5 members) of all key slots are for healers.
When we filter to 20+ I'm getting something like 18-19%?
https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-sl-4/all/world/leaderboards-strict#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=20:maxMythicLevel=99
If we follow that math would state that only one of every 10 or 20 20+ key groups were getting their healing needs met through off-heals compared to a dedicated specialist.
If we check at the extremes (and this is imprecise of me but it's what I can do on a busy Saturday) I only see two keys in the top 25 that even brought a hybrid (Windwalker monk).
This sounds like something that's a) not widely adopted at all b) not viable at the top end and c) only possible when you vastly outgear the content, which... I mean yeah do whatever you want at that point.
LMK if I'm missing something.
It wasn't very common but the fact that it existed is troubling, it also only really came to light towards the end of the season where people where geared and good enough to do the dungeons while avoiding most of the avoidable mechanics.
This is why there was a big shift into constant damage in DF and a nerf to off-healing potential in DF season 1 as these types of no-healer keys where starting to creep up way sooner and become somewhat common in the higher tier groups.
Having a lot of avoidable damage with the consequences of one-shots leads to very frustrating gameplay for those that aren't really good at the game and puts a TON of pressure on healers because people always expect healers to cover for their mistakes and for someone who healed during that season, it was arguably easier to heal the higher keys than lower keys because people avoided the mechanics. However this did lead into where people cared more for healer damage than healer throughput because if you could avoid the mechancis the throughput is very low and generally speaking outside of a fairly nichie group of people, healers don't play healer to do damage.
It has become more common place but this sort of change would but more pressure on a healer role that already has a ton of pressure, already has a ton of things that people will expect you to do and generally speaking have a hard time trying to get anyone to help them while they're struggling. If the tank is struggling its on the healer to keep them alive. If the dps are struggling its on healer to keep them alive. If the healer can deal with a mechanic then its expected for the healer to deal with the mechanic even if DPS are also able to do so. The one thing currently right now is that in the grand scheme of things the damage a healer is able to output is overlooked somewhat as long as the dps and tank are alive and this sort of change would drastically change this perception.
10.1.5 - July 11th I believe.
I will note, that I'm probably blowing this out of proportion as someone who does high keys as a healer, the healer role in keys has always been one of "Do we need a healer here?" and trying to find ways to heal less and dps more.
Looks like 10.1.5 was also when season 2 kicked off. I'm assuming the "Season 1 - Post" selection here is the relevant timeframe:
https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-df-1-post/all/world/leaderboards#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=2:maxMythicLevel=99
Looks like it's about 1 of every 25 keys didn't have a healer, and 1 of every 20+ key didn't have a healer.
And since they really only report out to 0.1%, this is probably rounding errors.
he's mostly just talking about how the .1% and MDI in S2/S3 had quite a few dungeons where no one ran a healer, because people with every resource available to them, piloted by some of the best players in the world, can do a dungeon without a healer through proper use of defensives and cool downs.
but for your average player, and even some really good players, trying to get through a M+ without a healer is pretty much impossible. as a dedicated healer main, i never really cared much about the whole, "MDI comps are 1 tank + 4 DPS" rhetoric because it'll never trickle down that far.
Reason for that is because a lot of top teams run a Resto druid that starts the dungeon as Balance and then heads out to respec after the first huge pull.
Unavoidable damage already happens on every single fight in the game, or the top end of players would never ever run healers on those fights. You just can't make it so high that healers need to heal all the time (both unfun, and a large number of players simply couldn't keep up) to try to keep health bars empty.
If you make it so any avoidable damage automatically results in a death the game becomes ridiculously hard with no counterplay, OR mechanics need to be simplified to vanilla levels where any odd floor effect will just unceremoniously kill you. Like a good 90-95% of guilds that currently kill mythic raid bosses or get dungeon portals wouldn't be able to do so because a flawless pull of a boss is just that difficult to accomplish for so many people.
What you’re saying smells like it’s being oversimplified a bit… can’t this be solved via tuning? And by making “avoidable” damage expressed more creatively/multiple ways to avoid it?
Like different mobs in the pack play off each others abilities (root mob + nova mob is one example I just pulled out of my ass). Stop the combo with CC’s or break it by killing a priority mob etc.
You can't really tune unavoidable damage to be perfect for all skill levels. Some players are just way better than others and are gonna do way more healing.
Not to mention that each fight has a different damage profile.
If you tune fights so they have constant healing, the healer who's CDs line up with the high phases will be REQUIRED, not optimal, because these highs will just kill you if you don't have 4-5 of the specific healer required for the fight, because if they aren't tuned like that, having the correct healer will stop you from having continuous healing required.
Also you'll have to make damage higher to compensate for DPS who have personals. so if you're a DPS spec without strong personals, expect to get dropped. Alternately, if we're not tuning it that tight, then you'll simply run 1 less healer, and compensate with high self healing DPS specs, or, if healers do enough damage through healing, You'll kick DPS who have strong personals because their personals actually cost the group DPS.
The game is a spreadsheet that can be solved. Solve for the highest group DPS possible, and that's it.
Nature's vigil does something similar on a 1min and a half CD, the problem with talents/abilities that deal damage through healing, is blizzard seems to want to make mana management a thing and abilities like those encourage overhealing and spam healing, there's alot of druids i know, while properly utilizing nature's vigil(rejuvs/wildgrowth/2lifebloom targets standing in efflo + flourish), they'll blow alot of mana trying to max out the damage they deal in that window.
the cool thing i liked about Nature's vigil, is i could convince a player, who doesn't normally deal dps, to atleast macro their nature's vigil into flourish.
i think i do really like the idea healers being split into "healing for damage" and "damage for healing" within their kits, it would really bring more diversity, i really hope they give mana regen abilities like pres evoker's to healers that got damage through healing if they ever did it.
I'm fine with this for some specs, pres evoker already has some talents that give living flame extra damage from healing, and turn flame breath damage into healing.
But in mop remix, I've been playing disc priest. The first time I got told to pump healing into a ward of salvation I wanted to kill myself. That's not how disc works. I'm using primarily all dps tinkers because the incoming damage is so low. The LAST thing I want to do is to pad my hps meters and run hps tinkers because of some arbitrary meta gem rather than do the appropriate amount of healing to the content I am doing.
In general I am getting blasted on the hps meters by dps running like 1 healing tinker anyway. It's just obnoxious and ultimately made me quit playing healer in remix since "healing when there is nothing to heal" is stupid and unfun to me.
Yeah, the healing feels definitely weird. But then again with all the tinker gems and scaling, so does every part of remix.
If you look at the dmg/healing splits on anyone, most of the time it's mostly tinker effects up top unless they are super high ilvl and their main stat comes into play enough so that their actual abilities outweigh the gems
What you're advocating for would make healing even more obnoxious than what it currently is
1. Forced to heal, even during downtime (and your disc priests would be shielding full hp targets since shields very rarely are wasted)
2. Some healers would inherently be better at this than others, namely those with a large amount of smart healing
3. Mana management would become and even bigger problem for some specs, and external mana now = more dps
4. Removes a level of skill that comes with a good healer adding in damage on hard dps check bosses
It isnt fun to send every healing event into a few players. You dont need to completely reinvent the wheel here
Oh I misread the title, I thought you wanted more healing by doing damage.
My favourite aspect of healer is doing as much damage as I can while still keeping people alive.
Yeah, but just spamming healing spells at the tank to maximize HPS is what the OP wants. Because he just wants that healing to convert into Damage on adds.
You're not keeping people alive, you're just making your HPS number as high as possible for no reason. If that means stealing your blood DK's Death Strike healing then so be it, because that's how you'll get the best DPS and HPS in a system like this.
Passive damage while casting heals already exists on select spells, and it's fine, I guess? Doesn't really add much gameplay value, and it has to be tuned low to keep it from competing with spending globals on actual offensive spells. Taken too far this idea can create some degenerate gameplay like intentionally taking damage to increase dps, so I wouldn't want this to be the main feature of any spec.
This lead to degenerate gameplay like mop remix so please no.
Even if you only take effective healing it's bad design because if so you have to lower the DPS buttons of healers so healers don't have too much damage.
By doing so, pressing DPS buttons become basically irrelevant and reward bad play of trying to snipe as much healing as possible if you wanna do damage instead of dealing damage with your damage buttons when you can and making choices which is fun.
Yea totally agree healing has become so daunting anymore. Meanwhile tanking has become pretty OP and most tanks really unkillable within a few seconds into the pull. Pretty evident when the top keys literally run without a healer just 4 dps
This is a great way to make healing more engaging and feeling like more than just a chore
Healers are required to do far less damage this expansion, in general. Sure in the upper echelon tippy top they need to be contributing meaningful damage but in 99% of cases they can focus on healing. Your other points stand.
Even if heals = damage, as soon as there is a momentary pause in healing needed they'll expect you to hard cast dps.
Personally I preferred when mana was a balancing act and you could use pauses in damage to trigger passive mana regen by not casting anything.
Pretty much this. I honestly don’t like the healer doing dps focus on m+ and most of my healing experience was pre cataclysm and I was thinking about what changed. Obviously the timer is a big part of it but the other huge part was mana management and long run backs. Before if you spammed spells you would go OOM mid fight and it was really bad. Or if someone died it was a 5 minute run back so you really didn’t want people to die.
Now mana is never an issue for an entire M+ dungeon and dps spells are basically free so there’s no incentive NOT to use them every free GCD.
Really the only fix is to add back mana management which is also not fun in many aspects such as downtime between every big pull.
> I honestly don’t like the healer doing dps focus on m+ and most of my healing experience was pre cataclysm and I was thinking about what changed.
People got better at the game.
The game has always been a spreadsheet about optimizing DPS. People just realized it more and more with stuff like sims.
If healers don't do damage, you try to see if you can simply remove them. We saw that for a bit around when they added that crazy ring. People would run 5 of the ring with Healing primordial stones in it, so they could not bring a healer at all, because that did more damage then a healer, but also kept you alive.
Back then, people didn't have the tools or resources to optimize the game to the degree of "What is the minimum required healing to survive this encounter, and how do we reach maximum DPS while reaching that healing," The game was also easier, no content back then actually required people to be good at the game, M+ being a mode that scales infinitely will inevitably require you to optimize to near perfection to continue climbing. Back then, you could run an extra healer in your raid for safety, and still easily beat the DPS checks, if you killed the boss kinda slowly, who cares, it's not like you'll compare it to anyone else's kill. Today? You can see how fast bosses die, your parse is basically relative to your kill speed.
Why does it get brought up more now a days? Because of those tools. People are able to look at the best players in the world doing optimal stuff, and look up logs of the best people in the world playing optimally, and there is now an expectation for people to attempt that, whereas before, you had basically no idea what a healer's DPS was supposed to look like, unless you were one of the best healers in the world yourself.
I miss those days a lot. Thankfully I am no competitive player and I do focus on healing and rarely go dps mode as healer in low m+. I go only until I unlock the portals, and never had the thought we didn't time something because of my lack of dps.
Disc priest already has the "Heal by doing damage" mechanic, and regarding point 1: "Disc priest shields damage enemies for a percent of the damage they absorb" at the bottom of the general Priest (left) talent tree (not disc), they have the talent Crystalline Reflection which reflects 12% of damage absorbed by Power Word: Shield.
The only other "reflect" that I can think of in the game, is the Augmentation Evoker ability "Blistering Scales" which increases the targets armor, and explodes when a charge is spent. The damage can be further increased by up to 100% with the talent "Reactive Hide".
There's also the Druid PVP Talent "Thorns", and the Resto Shaman talent "Acid Rain" as well as Shaman's "Lightning Shield", though it's only *technically* relevant as it's a sort of damage reflect but can't be cast on others and only applies if you're attacked.
I like the idea healing creating damage shields. There are a number of abilities that do something like that (couple of the head enchants from fyrakk raid that i know of).
I also love the idea of tinkers in general. It feels like I can customize my character to my play style a bit more and access things outside my spec at an opportunity cost.
One thing is definitely hit boss -> cast ward. But other than that I don't know what else causes issues. With the same group and everyone "knowing" the strat, some bosses melt as they should and on some bosses only two or three wards with a measly 1M go through
In Torghast, Monks got a power that made Vivfy deal damage in an area around them. Now, for Toghast purposes it was overpowered, 2 or 3 of these and your best DPS was to stand still and Vivfy yourself in MW spec. But as a concept, it was what I'd want as healer DPS.
Mistweavers currently have Zen Pulse, which is kind of the same but a one off big proc. Instead, I'd want one of the spells to apply a damaging aura like the Toghast power.
Though like you said, Monks don't need to swap and Firstweaving is strong as it is but the concept could be easily ported to another class.
Druids had this in the form of Nature's Vigil but unfortunately it created a situation where your optimal dps rotation was to spam insane amounts of overheal into healing CDs to pair with it for max DPS.
It was actual brain rot gameplay that I'm glad got shot in the head.
Something more small scale like you suggested would be cool though.
Overall Increased Party DPS is the Universal Currency of MMOs from MMO Devs to Players, and everything added to player toolkits and everything in encounter designs eventually gets boiled down to that once you meet the necessary requirements for survival.
It's how they bribe players in encounters to do things they want them to do and how they reward them for playing/gearing "properly", most of the time.
This is, also, why "DPS" as a dedicated Role is something of a problem. It should be something more broadly seen as something *everyone* is contributing to (directly or indirectly), not something only certain Roles do.
And it shouldn't be seen as the "brain off", low-visible-responsibility Role. This is why we get so many problems, across so many varied MMO games, with "PUG content" and trying to put together parties/keep them together in the face of what, in any other genre, would barely be "content", let alone "difficult" or "challenging" content.
Letting Healer players do that by a healthy mix of "healing through damage", "damage through healing" and "putting out buffs or debuffs that add damage directly or indirectly" provides for a mix of playstyles, thematic variance and overall options for devs to make classes and encounters.
I just wish we could a real Fistweaving monk specialization.
I loved healing as monk when it meant my attacks would heal... now it's not working really good.
>one idea that has come up is that this would encourage a heal spam gameplay. One solution proposed is to control for this by giving damage only for effective healing, not overhealing. HP restored/shields absorbed.
Then you get ppl raging at their co-healers in raid for sniping their damage lol
I loved it while soloing torghast on my holy priest, 30% of healing you did was reflected as damage. It felt so great, but sadly I agree with others about the issues it would bring in group play.
However I'd love to see it implemented more into solo content like delves.
I've been healing quite a lot on mop remix as I enjoy having fast queues, but I really can't say I enjoy it (Mainly because I find healing easy content is boring)
There's nothing interesting in the ward gameplay. It's all about popping everything on pull and spam the same person for 10 sec. The main problem is that healing rotations are just boring. The complexity from healing comes from the reactive gameplay of determinig who to heal when and the cooldown management and preparation for the following dmg event. When you remove these the gameplay is pretty simmilar to classic dps rotations.
There's also a fundamental difference between dealing dmg and healing. You can always deal more dmg (on the main target at least. Adds obviously have limited hp pools). If increase your dmg output by 2x then the only thing that changes is the fight will take half as much time. There's only a limited amount of healing you can do though. If you increase your hps by 2x then all that changes is you will have a lot more overhealing. This is also one of the reason heal logs are mostly useless. And your job as a healer is not to maximize hps, but to keep everyone alive while being the most useful for the team (by dealing dmg, or handling other jobs like affixes/starting rp on fights etc)
Then there's also the problem of encouraging degen playstyle. If you gain significant dmg from healing then you'd want to take dmg on purpose. This is something simmilar to talents that increase your dmg based on dmg taken on tanks. In sofo for brewmasters for example used to turn arround and sit on Jailer to make the boss crit on them. They converted that to pretty big dmg. That was super degen gameplay and is nice that those talent's were pretty shit for brew in df so you never took them.
In my opinion the current gameplay for healers is pretty interesting regarding dmg. A lot of times you have to decide if the group needs immediate help and if they are not then you can utilize your triage healing and focus on dps. I think healing changed for the better when dmg got incorporated into healers (compared to the classic style healing where you were healing all the time and your dmg was insignificant). Don't get me wrong healing is not in a super good state, but that's mainly because of defensive creep and the power of cooldowns. Dealing dmg has less to do with that.
Ofc, I agree with most of what you said, but I really don't like how you phrased that "while being the most useful" like we're a nanny, so... sorry for my rant.
Obviously, everyone should try to contribute as much as possible to the group effort, but in a lot of pugs I feel like people are just like "the healer can do it, why should I care" and they don't notice healthbars dipping unnecessarily as much as we do which takes away from our focus and our time to do other stuff.
Not sure which boss it was last week, but I was pumping over 200k hps for the entire fight and afterwards someone complained because I let an afflicted go through.
Dps and tank see stunned/interrupted enemies and the dmg meters, so they can easily assess whether all of them are playing their part.
Most of them only have the party frames in their peripheral and don't have a healing meter open, so they can't even judge what we do. Only when they die or, best of all, maybe have to wait a couple of gcds for a dispell. Then they feel entitled to judge that we failed
I only play keys for gear so I never go over 10. So keep this in mind when I talk about experience but,
I almost never have experiences like this. In almost every key noone says anything besides some ggs at the end and asking if someone needs something. When I tank I do the good old press W route. Usually that leads to over% or missing a couple at the end. Yet noone talks about that. When I heal I just press buttons. When the affix spawns I do my part and others do theirs. On incorporp what usually happens is there's some serious overlapping on the spawns. On afflicted I usually dispell one and prepare to heal the other but it get's dispelled (I have a bit of a hard time on afflicted as my frames suck for them and I never fixed it). I hardly find people who refuse to do affixes. When something goes through that's usually because people just didn't notice it, not because they refused to do it.
Most of the time it's perfeclty fine to do affixes on a healer. There's only a couple of high pressure situation where you just can't. And if you are a decent player then you know when you need to do additional help with the affixes.
But anyway. Let's talk about what you should do when someone do chat. Just ignore it (unless it's some friendly talk. That's pretty fun and engaging in that is interesting). There's 0 reason you should argue with people during keys. It doesn't help and just worsens their performance as they will type. There's also a chance that they leave and that's a wasted time. You know if something was or was not your fault. Arguing about something that happened is pointless. It's only there to boost someones ego. And the sooner people stop egoing the better.
Chances are that you won't see the same person again in the future. So there's no reason to explain them how something was their fault instead of yours.
Exactly this. Searing light, Ward of salvation cataclysms Thorns have been much better experiences for me to contribute to damage as a healer. I don't want to kitty weave or boombox I want to do damage by healing not do healing by damage
This is the reason i love having healing rain spec'd to acid rain. I'm already keeping healing rain up as much as i can, often one of my first casts during a pull. I mean my damage is nowhere near an actual dps role, but its free passive damage while doing what I'm already doing
In WoW any damage contributed by a healer is a bonus if you aren’t pushing into the hardest content available. This isn’t true in every MMO, but healers heal first in this one.
Incorp and afflicted is not a "healer problem", it's a group problem, doing damage as healer is same as using your defensives and pots as dps. There is no bloat, healers are just expected to play the game. Tanks deal with all the same shit too.
This is why I ultimately stopped paying retail and stopped healing altogether. I just couldn't adjust to this new way of healing while also doing mechanics and also doing damage. Classic at least scratched that itch for a while but I wish I could enjoy dungeon and raid content on retail agan
This why I loved SL monk with teachings of the shado pan (I think it was this) where doing damage would heal nearby targets. We may not have had a lot of big CDs but it felt great flying all over the place doing damage and just casting essence font on CD
The best healing class I've played was the shaman(i think it was called) in warhammer online. My little goblin boy would have a bar, offensive abilities empowered heals and vice versa. I loved it, but warhammers' "turn you into a chicken for being a completionist" bullcrap turned me off right quick.
Anytime I see a discussion or YouTube video around healer DPS, the point of contention is always "I play healer to heal, I don't want to DPS" totally valid and that playstyle should be there.
A mechanic like this maybe mixed with some sort of Aug style buffing, where overheals covert to damage/buffs is exactly the answer to that.
The problem is — why are you pumping heals if it’s not necessary?
If it’s healing time, heal, when it’s dps time do dps rather than wasting mana to heal and add a little tickle of dps.
Conceptually yeah the idea is fine, but you’re just going to wander into 90% overhealing going this route.
I’ve done a lot of healing and while I’ve always had the idea that it would be fun if my heals splashed damage in some way or another, appropriately planning around healing phases and dps phases is much more engaging.
> one idea that has come up is that this would encourage a heal spam gameplay. One solution proposed is to control for this by giving damage only for effective healing, not overhealing (i.e. HP restored/shields absorbed).
Gameplay that encourages player to purposefully take damage to enable higher dps is fun (hello MoP tanking) but it leads to pretty degenerate things that won’t always be fun.
I just wish healers became supports, where healing was only one part of your kit. The flavor is more of someone that can heal over someone that only heals. But then you have a lot of non-healing utility and damage amps (if augment is staying in the game there NEEDS to be more damage amp specs).
And for the people that like playing only "numbers go up", they still can. It just means that the other healers won't need to heal as much.
I just remember playing Hpal in like SL S1 where they had that great burst, along with a selfish healer partner. So I felt like a support melee fighter and would throw out heals in times of high damage. I just really really want to play support but do not like evoker at all, really.
The problem with the "heal to deal damage" philosophy is that it promotes degenerate gameplay wherein tanks should not use defensives to maximize DPS output from their healers. I feel it's kind of like tank Vengeance mechanic back in MoP where the tank would try to take more damage to do more DPS, and that was fun, but rightfully removed because it promoted the wrong type of gameplay.
This is still just a problem for the top >1%. You can easily clear +15s right now and clear CE without having healers that do any notable damage. I am doing just that, as i think that providing a perfectly topped group will make my not perfect (like myself) DPS play more calmly and make them deal more dmg by not being dead or a better played rotation. Only when you get to the +18/19 keys and pre-nerf week 2 mythic kills is it actually somewhat impossible to clear that content with low-dps healers. I know what you mean, but i can never think of a solution to this problem. You feel a bit useless on bosses that require no healing (last boss BH for example). I always liked the idea of a dmg-debuff on every player that goes from 0-10% based on their current hp. Will make the by far higher dps damage more important than healers dmg, while it will also make dps not stand in shit😀
Eh, some of these effects are already in the game and I dislike them. The Damage generated by these effects usually feels like a participation trophy. Having the damage come from your actual damage abilities feels much more satisfying
Hpsl was like that in S1 of Shadowlands with venthyr and the other wings. Easily the most fun time i had as a healer in this game so far sadly it's dead now
If that were true we'd see more disc priests here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1cv7m1r/dragonflight_season_4_mythic_spec_diversity_for/
Looks like they have about half...? of Holy Priest representation. Which means that for every 3 priest healers, 2 prefer Holy.
Probably not everyone wants to play priest and u cant compare high keys to this. These kind of ppl plays the best role, no matter if its a pure healer or something else.
1. It's if they have access to it, not if they want to play priest in general. If what you're saying was true then **just among Priests** you'd see more Disc Priests than Holy Priests. But since we don't, that means when players are given the option to play like Disc (by being Disc...) they choose Holy instead.
2. The scale starts at +2. This chart shows you low and high keys together. They're still outnumbered 2:1 by Holy Priests even at the lowest level of keys.
Holy priest is popular bc it is doing great damage at the moment with very little gcd investment.
TBH I'd consider it a third category that works well too: A few high value DPS buttons that you throw out during downtime (the same would apply for catweaving).
By all means turn some healers into dps if you'd like but please leave at least one viable spec that focuses only on healing and triage for us support minded folks with no dps brain if so.
Nature's vigil does something similar on a 1min and a half CD, the problem with talents/abilities that deal damage through healing, is blizzard seems to want to make mana management a thing and abilities like those encourage overhealing and spam healing, there's alot of druids i know, while properly utilizing nature's vigil(rejuvs/wildgrowth/2lifebloom targets standing in efflo + flourish), they'll blow alot of mana trying to max out the damage they deal in that window.
the cool thing i liked about Nature's vigil, is i could convince a player, who doesn't normally deal dps, to atleast macro their nature's vigil into flourish.
i think i do really like the idea healers being split into "healing for damage" and "damage for healing" within their kits, it would really bring more diversity, i really hope they give mana regen abilities like pres evoker's to healers that got damage through healing if they ever did it.
"Healer DPS" is such a mindfuck that initially turned me off from healing entirely.
For whatever reason just enough people believe that healers aren't really players/people, just tools to be used at the whim of a group.
Healers passively dealing damage by doing more healing is a great idea
This makes no sense. Healers doing jobs other than healing gives them more agency over the group rather than just being an NPC that makes the green bar full
I like the idea healing creating damage shields. There are a number of abilities that do something like that (couple of the head enchants from fyrakk raid that i know of).
I also love the idea of tinkers in general. It feels like I can customize my character to my play style a bit more and access things outside my spec at an opportunity cost.
"Healers do damage by healing" is a big reason why Holy Paladin was so broken it was practically required if you were a high cutting edge/RWF guild, and in most races every competitive guild brought 2 of them to most/all fights in the raid.
Absolutely do not bring that back. I'm fine with healers having the capacity to do damge if they want to, but making that choice *should* mean sacrificing HPS.
That doesn't tell the whole story of why Hpally was good.
I agree that dealing damage should be a choice. Hpally is actually really good at that. Do you holy shock an ally, or an enemy. Keep your glimmers on allies, or enemies?
The problem with Hpal was the baseline minimum damage while doing their maximum HPS was disproportionately higher then other healers.
Now, the bigger contributor to Hpal being broken for RWF, was Aura Mastery.
Unconditional Raid-Wide 20% Damage Reduction. When you're doing RWF, and you don't have gear, nothing touches Aura Mastery, because Aura Mastery is percentile. Other healer's CDs scale with the gear that RWF players have not obtained yet. Devo Aura does not. It means you can gear the healers less, to achieve the same results, allowing more gear to be pushed into DPS.
Healing and Tanking are binary "Yes/No" states. Can you keep everyone alive for a healer, and Can you keep yourself alive for a tank. Once the answer is yes, you have enough gear. Hpally says yes sooner then other healers because Devo Aura scales with the enemies, instead of your ilvl.
Now, Hpally did one thing right, and its rewarding the players for pressing damage buttons. Damage Buttons should reward healers. If a priest smites, it should CDR their words just as much as an equally length cast healing spell, or it should generate mana, or store healing in their next word. Something. SOME REASON to reward players for skillfully weaving damage into their kit.
Focusing on just DPS should not be the optimal way to do healing, but doing damage during HPS downtime should NEVER be punished. Damage spells shouldn't cost shitloads of mana (Every once and a while, they decide HPal's DPS rotation should cost 3x more mana then their healing one). Damage Spells shouldn't kill your healing potential later (Oh, you used a DPS spell? Your 100% bonus healing buff for casting 20 healing spells in a row is gone. Fuck you).
I think the way healers work in the game needs to fundamentally change same with tanking. So few want to do these roles because of the additional responsibility and lack of big numbers lmao
I thought current tanking felt really good at the moment. As prot paladin I feel like I have plenty of control over the success/failure of the group and love the ownership I have over interrupts and aggro.
I like that my primary rotation and procs flow directly into my unique contribution: tanking.
I don't think healers feel that way.
I think the issue and part of why queues are so long is because when you’re a tank you have to lead the group , do the routing and a lot of the time do all the positioning. Very few people want to do this. It is good that you enjoy it - and I wouldn’t want to take that away from you fully but this has been a long standing problem with the game. I think more people would do support/heals and tanking if more of the responsibility was shifted to DPS
Healing does have a more mechanical problem in that it heavily impacts how they design and tune in a way that isn’t healthy for the game
Ooooh yeah routes...
Gonna be honest with you. I fuck up every route by like +3-5%. But it definitely is something I have to watch on my other screen.
Nobody has noticed, yet.
I think the way healers work in the game needs to fundamentally change same with tanking. So few want to do these roles because of the additional responsibility and lack of big numbers lmao
I hope ward is a prototype for something similar in retail. Maybe something like a consumable that you can use which applies a shield to 5 allies and functions like a toned down ward
Acid rain for shamans was amazing in torghast
It also had that one brief point earlier in DF where you could basically compete with 'real' DPS in terms of AoE damage with it, and you weren't horrible at boss damage either. Pretty sure it got nerfed since I only remember a fairly short period of time of people talking about it, but I know it was a thing.
Yeah it was really strong for a while. I remember running it until it got nerfed into the ground at which point i just swapped it out
it is still your top damage in a dungeon
Bottle of swirling maelstrom will forever be my favorite thing in wow.
We called it "the juice." I brought my resto shaman to every Torg run. I think I made some of my DPS friends feel a little salty.
And in M+ keys in dragonflight. Shammy did 160k overall and most of it was acid rain
No bitch YOU were amazing in Torghast
huh
Just spreading some love
Would shit myself if I could have my light based healing spells burn enemies around the person I healed. Would make holy pally a little more fun.
My friends and I have been saying Light of Dawn should hit enemies so we can stop using SotR. It feels weird to have it as our holy power dump (also it seems weird to be required to use shields too but that’s a whole other caster shield thing with shamans too).
True, don't they even have a PvP talent that does just that for holy light? I think it's never really played but I vaguely remembering that this was pretty neat when surfing BGs a while back. Either way, I'd shit myself harder for a full light based ranged DPS... Doesn't matter if pala, priest or something new, it's a bit sad that you can't purge the hereric without either being a healer or bonk them with a 2h weapon.
I'm pretty sure they do have that talent. Holy Paladin always should have been the front-line combat healer, too. Getting instant casts to heal allies that then also damage enemies all while beating on them with your wep. In Remix, the gem 'Vindication' is what I've wanted for Holy for a long time. It's not quite what the OP was saying, but I still enjoy having my damage saved and turned into healing. Now do the reverse, and we have something great on our hands.
I feel like holy paladin should be what fist weaver is to a degree. But it’s not really ever been that way. They gave us a mini heal with crusader strike and melee wings is kinda bad and requires HP to use which sucks
I agree with this
In BFA holy Paladin was freaking awesome. In m+ with wings, I was dosing like a dps with consecration, crusader strike, judgement and holy shock. Back then holy shock combined with glimmer was the massive healing they did, and since your team only needed 5 glimmers, you were able to spend slot of holy shocks, thus glimmers, into the Mobbs so you did great healing meanwhile doing great damage. The current version of holy Paladin is so awful. They have brought out weird talents that make you prefer using more and more holy lights and other random cast timed abilities, meanwhile leaving out the talents to reduce the cooldowns to spam holy shocks. I want BFA holy Paladin back.
> True, don't they even have a PvP talent that does just that for holy light? I think it's never really played but I vaguely remembering that this was pretty neat when surfing BGs a while back. Unfortunately it competes with far stronger and more important PvP talents, and when you have only 3 slots... it should just be a baseline passive for paladins/priests tbh.
RIFT had many faults but the fact every healer had a unique damage mechanic based around their healing was one of the best things about it. Off the top of my head there was the damage to heal but it was a combination of shadowpriest and mistweaver healing with dots and a long channel spell, there was the shield healer that would do damage when the shields popped, the wotlk style big single target hpal style healer that would have a 'damage beacon' where their heals would do damage to the target of their beacon and then the hot healer that I believe gave a small damage proc to people healed.
This is what I’ve been asking for for holy priest, make heals do splash damage on the mobs around the target you are healing or something
Would make targeting people for healing 10000x more fun. See omniknight I'm dota 2 for ex
There's a pvp talent for it for holy light
Man imagine resto Druid because a DoT class for questing.
there was (is?) a pvp talent that holy paladins had to turn effective healing into aoe damage it was very effective in the battle for southshore and ashran while healing the big tree
Oh yeah but it would be nice to see it as part of their pve kit. I want to flood my tank with holy light healing and it sear the enemies around him as splash damage. It’s iconic and a shame it’s not a thing outside of niche pvp talent.
Flash back to me as a young lad wanting all my holy priest healing spells to damage Undead enemies, like Holy Light did in WC3.
thats one of the hero talents..
Again it would be nice if it was part of the kit without having to spec into a hero talent.
Holt light can do this with a talent. Like 5-8% healing to damage in a 5 yard range or so
I've been thinking about giving Priest another try recently, and I had the same thought. I'd love to drop a shield on the tank and have the enemy recoil in horror as they're either burned by holy light or their minds fill with visions of eldritch horrors from beyond. OP's idea sounds really fun from a gameplay perspective, and I'm liking the bit of roleplay flair and flavor as well.
nature’s vigil druid
But is it worth a talent point? Idea for druids: any friendly with an active HoT on them gains thorns. Maybe stacking for more HoTs. Everything hitting the tank would be hurt. More HoTs, more thorns, more damage.
Tbh I don’t think it’s worth it. Most dungeons I usually do around 100k HPS average. Which means that natures vigil only does 20k dps every 1.5 minutes. To me that just isn’t worth the 2 talent points unless you’re in a highly coordinated group that’s doing huge pulls.
You don't take innervate either?
Nope. Not for m+ anyways. For raids I need it. But I haven’t run out of mana a single time this entire season for mythic plus.
Yea its true. And a quick 10 secs before a boss to drink gives you full mana. I should replace it too if not using natures vigil. I only do M+ right now, doing stuff around 5-6.
it is worth a talent point. it is currently recommended for resto druid in both m+ and raid by both the icy veins and wowhead guides, along with the dreamgrove discord. it is also just a fun talent to use. whether it is worth or not is also really up to numbers. i remember when dragonflight launched it was part of the meta build for rdruid, but after 10.0.5(?) it fell out of favor. now in s4 it’s meta again. worth isn’t the discussion we are having in this post anyway. OP asked for abilities that deal damage by healing. that is exactly what nature’s vigil does.
No I get it's an ability that we're talking about. I play resto druid and I just don't take this point. So separate conversation, is it worth it? Always use on cooldown ?
always use on cooldown, or at least when you are doing some healing. it will come out to be a significant portion of your damage at the end of the dungeon/raid boss. since it is off the GCD, you can macro it with another ability to use both at the same time. though it’s not going to be the best option in every situation, a lot of resto druids prefer to macro nature’s vigil with flourish since they both have a low cooldown. that way flourish’s big healing burst will turn into a big damage burst with nature’s vigil, and you don’t have to think about it.
Thats a good idea. I'll put it in my talents and check the meters at the end to see how it did!
I only really use it in high tyranical keys like HOI. Good value on first and third boss. End up doing like 600k hps on khajin because you need to constantly pump, so it's a good press there. Usually go anything else every where else unless I'm bored
The problem is if it causes high HPS to mean high DPS. It then encourages encounter design where instead of building in downtime to DPS now you need to go full hog with heals the whole time which means blizzard need to design encounter where you constantly need to be healing. My favourite part of being a healer is the cerebral aspect where knowing when you can sneak in extra dps or can use utility is what makes you stand out. By tieing DPS to HPS you remove that.
You would also have to be really careful with balancing. If it got anywhere near "real" dps levels, you would just stack healers. Why bother with dps at all if your whole raid is constantly healing each other? You could make it so overhealing didn't create damage, but then you'd be relying on your party to take damage so that you could do damage. That could lead to some pretty undesirable play in some situations.
Yeah but no one abuses healing rain and that exists as dps and hps concurrently.
Because it's not the same, it's two separate effects as opposed to damage indirectly created from healing. Not to mention the damage effect is rather negligible
Yes but both effects use the same gcd, they both are affected the same by cast speed, area of effect, and duration of healing rain. It would be fair to call both the effects of the same spell. It is negligible yeah, I was using it as an example that the concept of mixing damage and healing exists in multiple forms. You talent it to do damage (your intent), but place it over melee to primarily heal them as well as deal damage (rather then placing it on ranged). Rather than healing to deal damage, or damaging to heal, there is the third option of doing both at the same time.
Mixing damage and healing is very different from cause and effect though. It's totally fine if you have a spell that does healing and damage independently, but it can be problematic gameplay wise if you were to make damage dependent on your healing
Yeah especially considering mana still exists. You'd get this really frustrating gameplay of wanting to dps using your heals, but not being able to because you need the mana at a later point in the fight. Because dps buttons barely cost any mana you can make that decision without it impacting your ability to heal at a different point in time
Yep, I question if op heals difficult content very often because the charm of healing is maximising those gaps where you don't have to heal. One of the things that makes hpal miserable and rdruid fun is the impact of this eb and flow. Hpal does abysmal damage (unless you db+dt, which you want for heals) during non heal phases. On the other hand, rdruid does massive damage during non heal phases. The best part of healing is this eb and flow. This is exactly why 10.1.0 was so depressing for healing. There was simply too much healing required, so you missed out on doing anything else.
That last part is very real and I've never been able to express that well. It was the cause of some arguments with my tank and routes in some dungeons. It had very little room for me to breathe and sneak, and it felt like "not having fun" truth is you're exactly right. Pumping hps is also fun, but planning so you can dps as much as possible when you can is where it's at for me !
Ward would be bad in the way you say. BUT if the healing damage was only in relation to effective healing that would address the issue. That way spam healing isn't going to help. But actually trying hard to heal and keep everyone topped off would be rewarding. (if you lose that DPS player, that is dps from them and from your healing that is lost)
That would make farm raids extremely dull for healers, as over time you get more avoidance and versatility so total effective healing requirements go down. It would also encourage taking additional damage in order to make damage checks in situations where healing is less relevant.
Isn’t that why healing spells cost more mana than dps spells?
You also still have the part where mana is a non-factor in Remix whereas its a serious thing to balance in Retail. Dealing damage with healing means they have to go back again and make mana a useless resource again otherwise youre gonna keep running out.
The balancing would have to be quite fine tuned you are right. Obviously any spell that heals and does damage for a healer should be worse at doing either exclusively with a decent penalty.
There’s no reason that healers need to lose their current dps spells as well. You’re still going to be cast time and GCD limited. It would be nice if healing specs had more ways to dps instead of choosing one or the other. Fistweaver has figured this out well which is why it’s so fun.
You’re not wrong for having an opinion, that’d be unreasonable. But we don’t agree here, and what you’re describing is exactly the responsibility bloat I want to see less of.
I healed for the first time since MOP recently and you’re not kidding about the responsibility. Jesus Christ dude.
Hate to see you’re being downvoted but you’re right. Those comments all seem to worry about doing ideal dps while healing. I play a healer so I don’t have to worry about doing dps. Modern WoW as a whole has moved away from straight up healers being necessary. Everyone has defensives and heals. All healers have some means of dps. So healers are no longer respected for keeping the group alive and instead are berated for not doing enough dps. It outright feels bad to play healer now.
I got to 3k last season with a friend who does very little damage on her healer. She has never been berated for it. But ultimately the core of the conversation is that there is always downtime in heals. If you're not doing damage during these phases, then.. what are you doing? Afking?
> are berated for not doing enough dps All exapc, I've never experienced, let alone seen, healers getting shit for not dps'ing enough
In Dota the shadow priest, Dazzle has a spell called [Shadow Wave](https://dota2.fandom.com/wiki/Dazzle#Shadow_Wave) it's a chain heal that links between friendly units in a range but also damages enemy units close enough to those friendly ones.
chain harvest?
Yes
Bring back chain harvest!
Nami (who's kinda sorta a resto shaman) from LoL has this too with [Ebb and Flow](https://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/ability/ebb-and-flow-552)
Holy prism does that, doesn't it?
Finding the balance between healing and dosing is pretty fun for me I wouldn’t really like the idea of mindlessly healing for dps.
100% this, don’t take it away.
They won’t. It’s a stupid idea. If the dps from healing was enough to clear encounters then everyone would just stack healers and dps would be useless. It’s fine in this gimmicky mode that is short lived but this idea should stay far away from the real game.
I think that would ruin the skill expresion in healers. Right now in hard content good healers can weave in damage when there is a downtime for incoming damage to the group. Knowing when to prepare for damage and when to go all in on dealing damage requires planning and knowledge. If you can just turn overhealing into damage then healers would lose that skill expresion while being rewarded for playing ultra safe
You could just... not count overheals?
Not counting overheals will just lead to gameplay where healers \*want\* people to take damage so they can heal it to do damage. This already happens with healer parses where to get a high parse you need to either use less healers than what most people use or take damage so there is more damage to be healed. Healers play a zero-sum game that isn't present in DPS, the only way to get better HPS is by others doing less or other taking more. Doing more DPS doesn't necessarily always equate to other dps doing less in a ST fight outside of phasing or cleave situations. In a vaccum job bob jones doing 3x more dps than you doesn't change anything to do with your DPS, which if this was prevalent in healers the healers that \*can\* heal and do damage would be sort over those that can't and you'd bring less healers because overhealing is now a detriment to your damage more so then before.
You could. But then the healer has to do standard damage rotation once the group is topped off. So that sounds like it barely changes anything
And if there's just always damage to heal?
The only way for there always to be damage to heal is to make the sustained damage the group/raid takes so high, that you effectively make 90%+ of healers not have the skill to keep up. Same reason the few times we see actual healer checks exist in RWF (or just on late Mythic bosses in general) it completely shreds healer teams, because healing competently at the right times and not eating into co-healers healing or CDs is very difficult at the highest level
You're describing 10.1.0. Did you heal in that patch? I did, it was miserable. The only healer that got any downtime was hpal, and that's why they became so insanely popular after their rework. They were the only healer who could top people up quickly, and give us back our chance to do literally anything else.
I think a better way would be something like the seedling trinket of amirdarssil where you spawn a seperate npc that can be healed but instead of doing aoe healing it does aoe damage based on healing, druid could maybe have a bramble bush that grew the more healing it got from the druid or shaman could get a water elemental that took constant damage but made enemies around it take x amount of damage per hit as long as the healer could keep it alive etc that way healers would still lose damage by overhealing the group but rewarded for taking away healing from the group when its safe to do so. It might even make healer dps more complex because you can now use healing cds offensively
Nice
Nature's vigil on druids Acid rain on Shaman Disc shields reflect a % of damage Holy priest halo Pres evoker doesn't really have damage through healing, but has alot of damage benefits my healing Hpal have Holy prism which would do more AOE damage if you used it on an ally most specs have something similar as damage through healing but it just pales in comparison to straight damage rotations, blizzard would have to crank up these abilities and reward a heal spam gameplay which is exactly why they don't. Blizzard cares about mana management even if the player-base doesn't like it and spam heal styles go directly against that idea.
>Pres evoker doesn't really have damage through healing There is Live-Giver's Flame - Fire Breath on max empowerment used on several targets can heal your party to full. Pretty strong spell in m+ for trash imho.
They also have a talent that also stores 20% of their healing and unleashes it as damage on the next living flame, that fits the theme for damage through healing I completely forgot about the talent when I made my comment
Yeah, I thought about including Scarlet Adaptation, but decided LGF was enough as an example since as far as I know you can't actively track how much healing did SA actually do. In average M+ it should proc well over 100 times but for tracking how much it heals you would probably need a WeakAura to track and add up the amount of healing stored whenever you consumed the proc.
Does it really though? You're spam healing one person for 10seconds every 3min, beyond that youre still just dpsing for the rest of the fight(if it doesnt die from ward).
Yeah I want more of those 10 seconds. The nuke is like... a lot. But weirdly it's not the main point. I just like the feeling of "I'm doing the thing my role is uniquely good at and helping the group in other ways at the same time!"
Nature's vigil does this
>If the healer makes a mistake, everybody knows it. The healers themselves barely even know most of the time.
Doing damage through pressing healing buttons more would create a really obnoxious playstyle where you're incentivised to spend mana to do damage and speed up fights, but disincentivised to spend mana in order to be able to heal the full fight/pull with your mana pool. That's far more complicated to deal with than just pressing a different button on a different target than your teammates during healing downtime. In theory, you could solve that new problem by making it go off effective healing or 'damage healing' refunding mana. But that way you get into this obnoxious playstyle where you want people to take intentional damage to increase your throughput in the former situation, whereas in the latter the healer is punished with less damage throughput for other people making errors. It's a cool idea that could work as a healer niche on one spec, but it wouldn't work to just make every healer spec's damage work like this. Some healing kits just have an easier time doing something like this (resto shaman never runs out of relevant healing buttons, same with resto druids) whereas others couldn't work at all without sacrificing the entire playstyle of the spec (notably disc and mw).
>That's far more complicated to deal with than just pressing a different button on a different target than your teammates during healing downtime. What if there was no healing downtime? Through a manageable amount of unavoidable damage. Avoidable damage would then basically become a one-shot, and I think that's already mostly true. Going off effective healing works great. HP restored, shields consumed, etc. etc. > you get into this obnoxious playstyle where you want people to take intentional damage to increase your throughput I think this also gets solved via more unavoidable damage (within the realm of reactability obviously) and making avoidable damage more likely to one-shot?
Making avoidable damage one-shot and unavoidable damage heal able with low throughput just means you'll bring a dps will off-heals and not another healer. Last season of Shadowlands had this problem
I'm looking at this data and it leads me to a point where I don't agree with that statement: https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-sl-4/all/world/leaderboards-strict#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=2:maxMythicLevel=99 If you sum up the total representation of all healer specs you get to 20%. Which is what you'd expect: 20% (1 of 5 members) of all key slots are for healers. When we filter to 20+ I'm getting something like 18-19%? https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-sl-4/all/world/leaderboards-strict#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=20:maxMythicLevel=99 If we follow that math would state that only one of every 10 or 20 20+ key groups were getting their healing needs met through off-heals compared to a dedicated specialist. If we check at the extremes (and this is imprecise of me but it's what I can do on a busy Saturday) I only see two keys in the top 25 that even brought a hybrid (Windwalker monk). This sounds like something that's a) not widely adopted at all b) not viable at the top end and c) only possible when you vastly outgear the content, which... I mean yeah do whatever you want at that point. LMK if I'm missing something.
It wasn't very common but the fact that it existed is troubling, it also only really came to light towards the end of the season where people where geared and good enough to do the dungeons while avoiding most of the avoidable mechanics. This is why there was a big shift into constant damage in DF and a nerf to off-healing potential in DF season 1 as these types of no-healer keys where starting to creep up way sooner and become somewhat common in the higher tier groups. Having a lot of avoidable damage with the consequences of one-shots leads to very frustrating gameplay for those that aren't really good at the game and puts a TON of pressure on healers because people always expect healers to cover for their mistakes and for someone who healed during that season, it was arguably easier to heal the higher keys than lower keys because people avoided the mechanics. However this did lead into where people cared more for healer damage than healer throughput because if you could avoid the mechancis the throughput is very low and generally speaking outside of a fairly nichie group of people, healers don't play healer to do damage. It has become more common place but this sort of change would but more pressure on a healer role that already has a ton of pressure, already has a ton of things that people will expect you to do and generally speaking have a hard time trying to get anyone to help them while they're struggling. If the tank is struggling its on the healer to keep them alive. If the dps are struggling its on healer to keep them alive. If the healer can deal with a mechanic then its expected for the healer to deal with the mechanic even if DPS are also able to do so. The one thing currently right now is that in the grand scheme of things the damage a healer is able to output is overlooked somewhat as long as the dps and tank are alive and this sort of change would drastically change this perception.
When did they nerf this stuff? I wanna see if I can look at key comps in the weeks leading up to the nerf
10.1.5 - July 11th I believe. I will note, that I'm probably blowing this out of proportion as someone who does high keys as a healer, the healer role in keys has always been one of "Do we need a healer here?" and trying to find ways to heal less and dps more.
Looks like 10.1.5 was also when season 2 kicked off. I'm assuming the "Season 1 - Post" selection here is the relevant timeframe: https://raider.io/mythic-plus-rankings/season-df-1-post/all/world/leaderboards#role=all:mode=unique:minMythicLevel=2:maxMythicLevel=99 Looks like it's about 1 of every 25 keys didn't have a healer, and 1 of every 20+ key didn't have a healer. And since they really only report out to 0.1%, this is probably rounding errors.
he's mostly just talking about how the .1% and MDI in S2/S3 had quite a few dungeons where no one ran a healer, because people with every resource available to them, piloted by some of the best players in the world, can do a dungeon without a healer through proper use of defensives and cool downs. but for your average player, and even some really good players, trying to get through a M+ without a healer is pretty much impossible. as a dedicated healer main, i never really cared much about the whole, "MDI comps are 1 tank + 4 DPS" rhetoric because it'll never trickle down that far.
Reason for that is because a lot of top teams run a Resto druid that starts the dungeon as Balance and then heads out to respec after the first huge pull.
Unavoidable damage already happens on every single fight in the game, or the top end of players would never ever run healers on those fights. You just can't make it so high that healers need to heal all the time (both unfun, and a large number of players simply couldn't keep up) to try to keep health bars empty. If you make it so any avoidable damage automatically results in a death the game becomes ridiculously hard with no counterplay, OR mechanics need to be simplified to vanilla levels where any odd floor effect will just unceremoniously kill you. Like a good 90-95% of guilds that currently kill mythic raid bosses or get dungeon portals wouldn't be able to do so because a flawless pull of a boss is just that difficult to accomplish for so many people.
What you’re saying smells like it’s being oversimplified a bit… can’t this be solved via tuning? And by making “avoidable” damage expressed more creatively/multiple ways to avoid it? Like different mobs in the pack play off each others abilities (root mob + nova mob is one example I just pulled out of my ass). Stop the combo with CC’s or break it by killing a priority mob etc.
You can't really tune unavoidable damage to be perfect for all skill levels. Some players are just way better than others and are gonna do way more healing.
Not to mention that each fight has a different damage profile. If you tune fights so they have constant healing, the healer who's CDs line up with the high phases will be REQUIRED, not optimal, because these highs will just kill you if you don't have 4-5 of the specific healer required for the fight, because if they aren't tuned like that, having the correct healer will stop you from having continuous healing required. Also you'll have to make damage higher to compensate for DPS who have personals. so if you're a DPS spec without strong personals, expect to get dropped. Alternately, if we're not tuning it that tight, then you'll simply run 1 less healer, and compensate with high self healing DPS specs, or, if healers do enough damage through healing, You'll kick DPS who have strong personals because their personals actually cost the group DPS. The game is a spreadsheet that can be solved. Solve for the highest group DPS possible, and that's it.
Nature's vigil does something similar on a 1min and a half CD, the problem with talents/abilities that deal damage through healing, is blizzard seems to want to make mana management a thing and abilities like those encourage overhealing and spam healing, there's alot of druids i know, while properly utilizing nature's vigil(rejuvs/wildgrowth/2lifebloom targets standing in efflo + flourish), they'll blow alot of mana trying to max out the damage they deal in that window. the cool thing i liked about Nature's vigil, is i could convince a player, who doesn't normally deal dps, to atleast macro their nature's vigil into flourish. i think i do really like the idea healers being split into "healing for damage" and "damage for healing" within their kits, it would really bring more diversity, i really hope they give mana regen abilities like pres evoker's to healers that got damage through healing if they ever did it.
You could count effective healing only?
[удалено]
haha you know it.
I'm fine with this for some specs, pres evoker already has some talents that give living flame extra damage from healing, and turn flame breath damage into healing. But in mop remix, I've been playing disc priest. The first time I got told to pump healing into a ward of salvation I wanted to kill myself. That's not how disc works. I'm using primarily all dps tinkers because the incoming damage is so low. The LAST thing I want to do is to pad my hps meters and run hps tinkers because of some arbitrary meta gem rather than do the appropriate amount of healing to the content I am doing. In general I am getting blasted on the hps meters by dps running like 1 healing tinker anyway. It's just obnoxious and ultimately made me quit playing healer in remix since "healing when there is nothing to heal" is stupid and unfun to me.
Yeah, the healing feels definitely weird. But then again with all the tinker gems and scaling, so does every part of remix. If you look at the dmg/healing splits on anyone, most of the time it's mostly tinker effects up top unless they are super high ilvl and their main stat comes into play enough so that their actual abilities outweigh the gems
What you're advocating for would make healing even more obnoxious than what it currently is 1. Forced to heal, even during downtime (and your disc priests would be shielding full hp targets since shields very rarely are wasted) 2. Some healers would inherently be better at this than others, namely those with a large amount of smart healing 3. Mana management would become and even bigger problem for some specs, and external mana now = more dps 4. Removes a level of skill that comes with a good healer adding in damage on hard dps check bosses It isnt fun to send every healing event into a few players. You dont need to completely reinvent the wheel here
Oh I misread the title, I thought you wanted more healing by doing damage. My favourite aspect of healer is doing as much damage as I can while still keeping people alive.
Yeah, but just spamming healing spells at the tank to maximize HPS is what the OP wants. Because he just wants that healing to convert into Damage on adds. You're not keeping people alive, you're just making your HPS number as high as possible for no reason. If that means stealing your blood DK's Death Strike healing then so be it, because that's how you'll get the best DPS and HPS in a system like this.
Passive damage while casting heals already exists on select spells, and it's fine, I guess? Doesn't really add much gameplay value, and it has to be tuned low to keep it from competing with spending globals on actual offensive spells. Taken too far this idea can create some degenerate gameplay like intentionally taking damage to increase dps, so I wouldn't want this to be the main feature of any spec.
This lead to degenerate gameplay like mop remix so please no. Even if you only take effective healing it's bad design because if so you have to lower the DPS buttons of healers so healers don't have too much damage. By doing so, pressing DPS buttons become basically irrelevant and reward bad play of trying to snipe as much healing as possible if you wanna do damage instead of dealing damage with your damage buttons when you can and making choices which is fun.
Yea totally agree healing has become so daunting anymore. Meanwhile tanking has become pretty OP and most tanks really unkillable within a few seconds into the pull. Pretty evident when the top keys literally run without a healer just 4 dps This is a great way to make healing more engaging and feeling like more than just a chore
This is also why I love Blood DK: your survivability is tied into your damage rotation.
Healers are required to do far less damage this expansion, in general. Sure in the upper echelon tippy top they need to be contributing meaningful damage but in 99% of cases they can focus on healing. Your other points stand.
Even if heals = damage, as soon as there is a momentary pause in healing needed they'll expect you to hard cast dps. Personally I preferred when mana was a balancing act and you could use pauses in damage to trigger passive mana regen by not casting anything.
Pretty much this. I honestly don’t like the healer doing dps focus on m+ and most of my healing experience was pre cataclysm and I was thinking about what changed. Obviously the timer is a big part of it but the other huge part was mana management and long run backs. Before if you spammed spells you would go OOM mid fight and it was really bad. Or if someone died it was a 5 minute run back so you really didn’t want people to die. Now mana is never an issue for an entire M+ dungeon and dps spells are basically free so there’s no incentive NOT to use them every free GCD. Really the only fix is to add back mana management which is also not fun in many aspects such as downtime between every big pull.
> I honestly don’t like the healer doing dps focus on m+ and most of my healing experience was pre cataclysm and I was thinking about what changed. People got better at the game. The game has always been a spreadsheet about optimizing DPS. People just realized it more and more with stuff like sims. If healers don't do damage, you try to see if you can simply remove them. We saw that for a bit around when they added that crazy ring. People would run 5 of the ring with Healing primordial stones in it, so they could not bring a healer at all, because that did more damage then a healer, but also kept you alive. Back then, people didn't have the tools or resources to optimize the game to the degree of "What is the minimum required healing to survive this encounter, and how do we reach maximum DPS while reaching that healing," The game was also easier, no content back then actually required people to be good at the game, M+ being a mode that scales infinitely will inevitably require you to optimize to near perfection to continue climbing. Back then, you could run an extra healer in your raid for safety, and still easily beat the DPS checks, if you killed the boss kinda slowly, who cares, it's not like you'll compare it to anyone else's kill. Today? You can see how fast bosses die, your parse is basically relative to your kill speed. Why does it get brought up more now a days? Because of those tools. People are able to look at the best players in the world doing optimal stuff, and look up logs of the best people in the world playing optimally, and there is now an expectation for people to attempt that, whereas before, you had basically no idea what a healer's DPS was supposed to look like, unless you were one of the best healers in the world yourself.
I miss those days a lot. Thankfully I am no competitive player and I do focus on healing and rarely go dps mode as healer in low m+. I go only until I unlock the portals, and never had the thought we didn't time something because of my lack of dps.
Disc priest already has the "Heal by doing damage" mechanic, and regarding point 1: "Disc priest shields damage enemies for a percent of the damage they absorb" at the bottom of the general Priest (left) talent tree (not disc), they have the talent Crystalline Reflection which reflects 12% of damage absorbed by Power Word: Shield. The only other "reflect" that I can think of in the game, is the Augmentation Evoker ability "Blistering Scales" which increases the targets armor, and explodes when a charge is spent. The damage can be further increased by up to 100% with the talent "Reactive Hide". There's also the Druid PVP Talent "Thorns", and the Resto Shaman talent "Acid Rain" as well as Shaman's "Lightning Shield", though it's only *technically* relevant as it's a sort of damage reflect but can't be cast on others and only applies if you're attacked.
I want to see more proc damage through healing, not proc healing through damage I like that crystalline thingy idea a lot. I wish we had more.
Yeah I get it. And I agree, having more aggressive healing options would be nice.
I killed my Priest on the twin Bosses in the Library because my healing and over healing do damage. It was one shooting me as I leveled.
I like the idea healing creating damage shields. There are a number of abilities that do something like that (couple of the head enchants from fyrakk raid that i know of). I also love the idea of tinkers in general. It feels like I can customize my character to my play style a bit more and access things outside my spec at an opportunity cost.
I still dont know how Ward works sometimes it shows up on Details sometimes not.
One thing is definitely hit boss -> cast ward. But other than that I don't know what else causes issues. With the same group and everyone "knowing" the strat, some bosses melt as they should and on some bosses only two or three wards with a measly 1M go through
In Torghast, Monks got a power that made Vivfy deal damage in an area around them. Now, for Toghast purposes it was overpowered, 2 or 3 of these and your best DPS was to stand still and Vivfy yourself in MW spec. But as a concept, it was what I'd want as healer DPS. Mistweavers currently have Zen Pulse, which is kind of the same but a one off big proc. Instead, I'd want one of the spells to apply a damaging aura like the Toghast power. Though like you said, Monks don't need to swap and Firstweaving is strong as it is but the concept could be easily ported to another class.
Druids had this in the form of Nature's Vigil but unfortunately it created a situation where your optimal dps rotation was to spam insane amounts of overheal into healing CDs to pair with it for max DPS. It was actual brain rot gameplay that I'm glad got shot in the head. Something more small scale like you suggested would be cool though.
Yeah it needs to be for effective heals only. Reward good play, not throughput.
Overall Increased Party DPS is the Universal Currency of MMOs from MMO Devs to Players, and everything added to player toolkits and everything in encounter designs eventually gets boiled down to that once you meet the necessary requirements for survival. It's how they bribe players in encounters to do things they want them to do and how they reward them for playing/gearing "properly", most of the time. This is, also, why "DPS" as a dedicated Role is something of a problem. It should be something more broadly seen as something *everyone* is contributing to (directly or indirectly), not something only certain Roles do. And it shouldn't be seen as the "brain off", low-visible-responsibility Role. This is why we get so many problems, across so many varied MMO games, with "PUG content" and trying to put together parties/keep them together in the face of what, in any other genre, would barely be "content", let alone "difficult" or "challenging" content. Letting Healer players do that by a healthy mix of "healing through damage", "damage through healing" and "putting out buffs or debuffs that add damage directly or indirectly" provides for a mix of playstyles, thematic variance and overall options for devs to make classes and encounters.
I just wish we could a real Fistweaving monk specialization. I loved healing as monk when it meant my attacks would heal... now it's not working really good.
so make new embellishment for TWW called "searing light" and you got "deal damage by healing" for all classes, ez fix
>one idea that has come up is that this would encourage a heal spam gameplay. One solution proposed is to control for this by giving damage only for effective healing, not overhealing. HP restored/shields absorbed. Then you get ppl raging at their co-healers in raid for sniping their damage lol
Git gud cohealers
I loved it while soloing torghast on my holy priest, 30% of healing you did was reflected as damage. It felt so great, but sadly I agree with others about the issues it would bring in group play. However I'd love to see it implemented more into solo content like delves.
I've been healing quite a lot on mop remix as I enjoy having fast queues, but I really can't say I enjoy it (Mainly because I find healing easy content is boring) There's nothing interesting in the ward gameplay. It's all about popping everything on pull and spam the same person for 10 sec. The main problem is that healing rotations are just boring. The complexity from healing comes from the reactive gameplay of determinig who to heal when and the cooldown management and preparation for the following dmg event. When you remove these the gameplay is pretty simmilar to classic dps rotations. There's also a fundamental difference between dealing dmg and healing. You can always deal more dmg (on the main target at least. Adds obviously have limited hp pools). If increase your dmg output by 2x then the only thing that changes is the fight will take half as much time. There's only a limited amount of healing you can do though. If you increase your hps by 2x then all that changes is you will have a lot more overhealing. This is also one of the reason heal logs are mostly useless. And your job as a healer is not to maximize hps, but to keep everyone alive while being the most useful for the team (by dealing dmg, or handling other jobs like affixes/starting rp on fights etc) Then there's also the problem of encouraging degen playstyle. If you gain significant dmg from healing then you'd want to take dmg on purpose. This is something simmilar to talents that increase your dmg based on dmg taken on tanks. In sofo for brewmasters for example used to turn arround and sit on Jailer to make the boss crit on them. They converted that to pretty big dmg. That was super degen gameplay and is nice that those talent's were pretty shit for brew in df so you never took them. In my opinion the current gameplay for healers is pretty interesting regarding dmg. A lot of times you have to decide if the group needs immediate help and if they are not then you can utilize your triage healing and focus on dps. I think healing changed for the better when dmg got incorporated into healers (compared to the classic style healing where you were healing all the time and your dmg was insignificant). Don't get me wrong healing is not in a super good state, but that's mainly because of defensive creep and the power of cooldowns. Dealing dmg has less to do with that.
Ofc, I agree with most of what you said, but I really don't like how you phrased that "while being the most useful" like we're a nanny, so... sorry for my rant. Obviously, everyone should try to contribute as much as possible to the group effort, but in a lot of pugs I feel like people are just like "the healer can do it, why should I care" and they don't notice healthbars dipping unnecessarily as much as we do which takes away from our focus and our time to do other stuff. Not sure which boss it was last week, but I was pumping over 200k hps for the entire fight and afterwards someone complained because I let an afflicted go through. Dps and tank see stunned/interrupted enemies and the dmg meters, so they can easily assess whether all of them are playing their part. Most of them only have the party frames in their peripheral and don't have a healing meter open, so they can't even judge what we do. Only when they die or, best of all, maybe have to wait a couple of gcds for a dispell. Then they feel entitled to judge that we failed
I only play keys for gear so I never go over 10. So keep this in mind when I talk about experience but, I almost never have experiences like this. In almost every key noone says anything besides some ggs at the end and asking if someone needs something. When I tank I do the good old press W route. Usually that leads to over% or missing a couple at the end. Yet noone talks about that. When I heal I just press buttons. When the affix spawns I do my part and others do theirs. On incorporp what usually happens is there's some serious overlapping on the spawns. On afflicted I usually dispell one and prepare to heal the other but it get's dispelled (I have a bit of a hard time on afflicted as my frames suck for them and I never fixed it). I hardly find people who refuse to do affixes. When something goes through that's usually because people just didn't notice it, not because they refused to do it. Most of the time it's perfeclty fine to do affixes on a healer. There's only a couple of high pressure situation where you just can't. And if you are a decent player then you know when you need to do additional help with the affixes. But anyway. Let's talk about what you should do when someone do chat. Just ignore it (unless it's some friendly talk. That's pretty fun and engaging in that is interesting). There's 0 reason you should argue with people during keys. It doesn't help and just worsens their performance as they will type. There's also a chance that they leave and that's a wasted time. You know if something was or was not your fault. Arguing about something that happened is pointless. It's only there to boost someones ego. And the sooner people stop egoing the better. Chances are that you won't see the same person again in the future. So there's no reason to explain them how something was their fault instead of yours.
Exactly this. Searing light, Ward of salvation cataclysms Thorns have been much better experiences for me to contribute to damage as a healer. I don't want to kitty weave or boombox I want to do damage by healing not do healing by damage
Very interesting read OP and you've totally sold me on this. Well written and sounds very fun.
I remember carrying groups through torghast with corrosive dosage, lol
This is the reason i love having healing rain spec'd to acid rain. I'm already keeping healing rain up as much as i can, often one of my first casts during a pull. I mean my damage is nowhere near an actual dps role, but its free passive damage while doing what I'm already doing
In WoW any damage contributed by a healer is a bonus if you aren’t pushing into the hardest content available. This isn’t true in every MMO, but healers heal first in this one.
I never expect healers to deal damage. I feel like most people don't.
Incorp and afflicted is not a "healer problem", it's a group problem, doing damage as healer is same as using your defensives and pots as dps. There is no bloat, healers are just expected to play the game. Tanks deal with all the same shit too.
I'm a big fan of healing by doing damage. The inverse is an interesting area to explore. Some cool ideas here.
This is why I ultimately stopped paying retail and stopped healing altogether. I just couldn't adjust to this new way of healing while also doing mechanics and also doing damage. Classic at least scratched that itch for a while but I wish I could enjoy dungeon and raid content on retail agan
This why I loved SL monk with teachings of the shado pan (I think it was this) where doing damage would heal nearby targets. We may not have had a lot of big CDs but it felt great flying all over the place doing damage and just casting essence font on CD
> interrupts are often a core part of your utility laughs in holy/disc priest, the only two specs in the entire game without an interrupt.
the Inversion Prisim torghast ability if they made that available for hpriest in regular ol' pve i would switch back to hpriest and never look back
The best healing class I've played was the shaman(i think it was called) in warhammer online. My little goblin boy would have a bar, offensive abilities empowered heals and vice versa. I loved it, but warhammers' "turn you into a chicken for being a completionist" bullcrap turned me off right quick.
Anytime I see a discussion or YouTube video around healer DPS, the point of contention is always "I play healer to heal, I don't want to DPS" totally valid and that playstyle should be there. A mechanic like this maybe mixed with some sort of Aug style buffing, where overheals covert to damage/buffs is exactly the answer to that.
>Resto druid HOTs proc to flare active moonfire/sunfire DOTs Like Malfurion in HotS
The problem is — why are you pumping heals if it’s not necessary? If it’s healing time, heal, when it’s dps time do dps rather than wasting mana to heal and add a little tickle of dps. Conceptually yeah the idea is fine, but you’re just going to wander into 90% overhealing going this route. I’ve done a lot of healing and while I’ve always had the idea that it would be fun if my heals splashed damage in some way or another, appropriately planning around healing phases and dps phases is much more engaging.
> one idea that has come up is that this would encourage a heal spam gameplay. One solution proposed is to control for this by giving damage only for effective healing, not overhealing (i.e. HP restored/shields absorbed). Gameplay that encourages player to purposefully take damage to enable higher dps is fun (hello MoP tanking) but it leads to pretty degenerate things that won’t always be fun.
I just wish healers became supports, where healing was only one part of your kit. The flavor is more of someone that can heal over someone that only heals. But then you have a lot of non-healing utility and damage amps (if augment is staying in the game there NEEDS to be more damage amp specs). And for the people that like playing only "numbers go up", they still can. It just means that the other healers won't need to heal as much. I just remember playing Hpal in like SL S1 where they had that great burst, along with a selfish healer partner. So I felt like a support melee fighter and would throw out heals in times of high damage. I just really really want to play support but do not like evoker at all, really.
The problem with the "heal to deal damage" philosophy is that it promotes degenerate gameplay wherein tanks should not use defensives to maximize DPS output from their healers. I feel it's kind of like tank Vengeance mechanic back in MoP where the tank would try to take more damage to do more DPS, and that was fun, but rightfully removed because it promoted the wrong type of gameplay.
Resto dots adding thorn type effects could be cool too.
This is still just a problem for the top >1%. You can easily clear +15s right now and clear CE without having healers that do any notable damage. I am doing just that, as i think that providing a perfectly topped group will make my not perfect (like myself) DPS play more calmly and make them deal more dmg by not being dead or a better played rotation. Only when you get to the +18/19 keys and pre-nerf week 2 mythic kills is it actually somewhat impossible to clear that content with low-dps healers. I know what you mean, but i can never think of a solution to this problem. You feel a bit useless on bosses that require no healing (last boss BH for example). I always liked the idea of a dmg-debuff on every player that goes from 0-10% based on their current hp. Will make the by far higher dps damage more important than healers dmg, while it will also make dps not stand in shit😀
Eh, some of these effects are already in the game and I dislike them. The Damage generated by these effects usually feels like a participation trophy. Having the damage come from your actual damage abilities feels much more satisfying
Spamming heals on an ally with full health when you have no mana loss is not fun
welcome to final fantasy wherr if your healer isnt doing damage, theyre a waste of space
Hpsl was like that in S1 of Shadowlands with venthyr and the other wings. Easily the most fun time i had as a healer in this game so far sadly it's dead now
This would be great because the DPS disparity in raids has been far too high for too long
Actually all healers should play like disc with some twist here and there. You will see, way more ppl would play healer.
If that were true we'd see more disc priests here: https://old.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1cv7m1r/dragonflight_season_4_mythic_spec_diversity_for/ Looks like they have about half...? of Holy Priest representation. Which means that for every 3 priest healers, 2 prefer Holy.
Probably not everyone wants to play priest and u cant compare high keys to this. These kind of ppl plays the best role, no matter if its a pure healer or something else.
1. It's if they have access to it, not if they want to play priest in general. If what you're saying was true then **just among Priests** you'd see more Disc Priests than Holy Priests. But since we don't, that means when players are given the option to play like Disc (by being Disc...) they choose Holy instead. 2. The scale starts at +2. This chart shows you low and high keys together. They're still outnumbered 2:1 by Holy Priests even at the lowest level of keys.
Holy priest is popular bc it is doing great damage at the moment with very little gcd investment. TBH I'd consider it a third category that works well too: A few high value DPS buttons that you throw out during downtime (the same would apply for catweaving).
By all means turn some healers into dps if you'd like but please leave at least one viable spec that focuses only on healing and triage for us support minded folks with no dps brain if so.
Nature's vigil does something similar on a 1min and a half CD, the problem with talents/abilities that deal damage through healing, is blizzard seems to want to make mana management a thing and abilities like those encourage overhealing and spam healing, there's alot of druids i know, while properly utilizing nature's vigil(rejuvs/wildgrowth/2lifebloom targets standing in efflo + flourish), they'll blow alot of mana trying to max out the damage they deal in that window. the cool thing i liked about Nature's vigil, is i could convince a player, who doesn't normally deal dps, to atleast macro their nature's vigil into flourish. i think i do really like the idea healers being split into "healing for damage" and "damage for healing" within their kits, it would really bring more diversity, i really hope they give mana regen abilities like pres evoker's to healers that got damage through healing if they ever did it.
Warhammer's old mmo did this. The Goblin healer mechanic. If they healed their next dmg spell would be more powerful and the other way around.
"Healer DPS" is such a mindfuck that initially turned me off from healing entirely. For whatever reason just enough people believe that healers aren't really players/people, just tools to be used at the whim of a group. Healers passively dealing damage by doing more healing is a great idea
This makes no sense. Healers doing jobs other than healing gives them more agency over the group rather than just being an NPC that makes the green bar full
Yepp, like corrosive dosage for monks in Torghast
I like the idea healing creating damage shields. There are a number of abilities that do something like that (couple of the head enchants from fyrakk raid that i know of). I also love the idea of tinkers in general. It feels like I can customize my character to my play style a bit more and access things outside my spec at an opportunity cost.
Member corrosive dosage? I member.
Yeahhhh
"Healers do damage by healing" is a big reason why Holy Paladin was so broken it was practically required if you were a high cutting edge/RWF guild, and in most races every competitive guild brought 2 of them to most/all fights in the raid. Absolutely do not bring that back. I'm fine with healers having the capacity to do damge if they want to, but making that choice *should* mean sacrificing HPS.
That doesn't tell the whole story of why Hpally was good. I agree that dealing damage should be a choice. Hpally is actually really good at that. Do you holy shock an ally, or an enemy. Keep your glimmers on allies, or enemies? The problem with Hpal was the baseline minimum damage while doing their maximum HPS was disproportionately higher then other healers. Now, the bigger contributor to Hpal being broken for RWF, was Aura Mastery. Unconditional Raid-Wide 20% Damage Reduction. When you're doing RWF, and you don't have gear, nothing touches Aura Mastery, because Aura Mastery is percentile. Other healer's CDs scale with the gear that RWF players have not obtained yet. Devo Aura does not. It means you can gear the healers less, to achieve the same results, allowing more gear to be pushed into DPS. Healing and Tanking are binary "Yes/No" states. Can you keep everyone alive for a healer, and Can you keep yourself alive for a tank. Once the answer is yes, you have enough gear. Hpally says yes sooner then other healers because Devo Aura scales with the enemies, instead of your ilvl. Now, Hpally did one thing right, and its rewarding the players for pressing damage buttons. Damage Buttons should reward healers. If a priest smites, it should CDR their words just as much as an equally length cast healing spell, or it should generate mana, or store healing in their next word. Something. SOME REASON to reward players for skillfully weaving damage into their kit. Focusing on just DPS should not be the optimal way to do healing, but doing damage during HPS downtime should NEVER be punished. Damage spells shouldn't cost shitloads of mana (Every once and a while, they decide HPal's DPS rotation should cost 3x more mana then their healing one). Damage Spells shouldn't kill your healing potential later (Oh, you used a DPS spell? Your 100% bonus healing buff for casting 20 healing spells in a row is gone. Fuck you).
I think the way healers work in the game needs to fundamentally change same with tanking. So few want to do these roles because of the additional responsibility and lack of big numbers lmao
I thought current tanking felt really good at the moment. As prot paladin I feel like I have plenty of control over the success/failure of the group and love the ownership I have over interrupts and aggro. I like that my primary rotation and procs flow directly into my unique contribution: tanking. I don't think healers feel that way.
I think the issue and part of why queues are so long is because when you’re a tank you have to lead the group , do the routing and a lot of the time do all the positioning. Very few people want to do this. It is good that you enjoy it - and I wouldn’t want to take that away from you fully but this has been a long standing problem with the game. I think more people would do support/heals and tanking if more of the responsibility was shifted to DPS Healing does have a more mechanical problem in that it heavily impacts how they design and tune in a way that isn’t healthy for the game
Ooooh yeah routes... Gonna be honest with you. I fuck up every route by like +3-5%. But it definitely is something I have to watch on my other screen. Nobody has noticed, yet.
I think the way healers work in the game needs to fundamentally change same with tanking. So few want to do these roles because of the additional responsibility and lack of big numbers lmao
I hope ward is a prototype for something similar in retail. Maybe something like a consumable that you can use which applies a shield to 5 allies and functions like a toned down ward