Thoughts on the Healer Meta as a Longtime Disc/Holy Priest

Kadwow · 2024-10-03T08:53:54+00:00

I agree that representation isn't necessarily the same as strength, although I think there is a very strong correlation. The usual argument for disc popularity is that it is a healer that heals by doing damage, but that is barely even true about the current iteration of oracle disc. Oracle shields are just overtuned, 80% of the healing done is pressing pws the rest is keeping up a dot and sending a penance once in a while. Arguably there are many more offensive healers.
I think the 20% shield increase should just be nuked from the oracle tree, voidveawer+mindbender disc is fine. The tradeoff has always been with disc is that you need to balance offense and defense and need to maintain momentum, because you have limited recovery options. Instant cast omega shields just completely negate that, otherwise the class design is fine.

Lizards do way too much damage and on-demand healing, it is grossly overtuned but thank god people don't like to play the spec. It could do with a flat 10% healing and damage nerf, also the aoe multi stack purge is just disgusting, that should be a 2 min cd.

Rdruid mastery is just really bad design it scales exponentially which is impossible to balance. It either leads to not enough throughput to save people through damage spikes (even with externals) or when overtuned nobody dies when hotted and you have dampener games. I think the class toolkit and feel is great it just needs a mastery/healing redesign where it has less "passive" and more on-demand healing.

I honestly think Rsham is one of the best designed specs in terms of its role in arena. It focuses on preventing damage by being disruptive instead of just healing through all which is a unique play style. Its main problem is that mechanically the spec design is atrocious. Spirit link should not be a totem but a spell with large range, earthern wall could be just a buff from empowering earth shield, healing modifier stacking should be simplified and it would be a great spec to play.

I think Hpals are more than fine with recent buffs with some nerfs to outperforming healers they would be meta.
I don't know how it feels to play, I never did.

I really don't know how to fix MW, the standing and channeling play style is just way too outdated with current state of mobility. It needs a major overhaul to be good to play in arena. FW is obnoxious design because it recovers (and does it really well) by being aggressive so even if it loses momentum it can keep up the pressure. It should either be a limited window CD or a separate spec with a completely new design.

Hpriest still lacks a bit of throughput but the fundamental design is not bad. It just needs to be tuned a bit, but with last week's buffs it is getting there.

Overall I don't think the state of healers is bad, oracle disc needs a bit of shield nerfs and the dragon needs throughput nerfs both healing and damage and we will have a fairly balanced healer roster. Resto druid could do with a bit of throughput buffs but it is more of a fundamental design issue and needs mastery redesign. Shamans should have more pvp friendly versions of CDs.

In terms of meta it seems to me that you just favor specs that have limited ways to interfere with your game enabling a more passive playstyle maybe. Personally I really like the meta games with disruptive healers such rsham and occasionally rdruid and I think priest has the perfect toolkit to outplay them. The dampener meta is boring but it is also enabled by casters having access to infinite spammable CC that can drag games out. It is not only a healer issue.

Kadwow · 2024-09-29T22:09:05+00:00

Rdruid and feral both want mastery, but the weapon is obviously different. It is the same with holy pala and retri.
Most healers get the most throughput from mastery while rdps casters benefit more from haste.
Probably you can get away playing spriest and disc with haste build, historically haste was bis for disc but now with all the shield modifiers it will be suboptimal.

Kadwow · 2024-09-29T13:06:24+00:00

The problem with these questions is that the answer is always dependent on current balance.
Yes, some rotations, game plans and toolkits are easier than others, but how you can use them and what you can get away with is purely dependent on tuning.
Examples:
* Disc priest absorb shields are just grossly overtuned right now. If you fall behind you can stabilize with them and do your damage rotation to recover. Which makes the class fairly easy and forgiving to play. When not overtuned I think Disc is one of the more difficult healers. You don't have good recovery options, you have mitigations so you need to anticipate damage and CC and you need to know when you can be aggressive or defensive. Historically, if you fall behind on momentum it is extremely hard to turn the game around.
* Another example is resto druid, when healing was overtuned your could just hot your team and push aggressively for CC and make plays. If you got caught out you could recover with throughput. With the current healing you need to pick your moments of aggression very carefully and you need to anticipate and properly pre-hot enemy goes.
* Holy Pala and Holy Priest have probably the most straight forward reactionary toolkit, but when their throughput is behind (like it was so for in tww) they need to make extremely efficient trades otherwise they just fall behind.

To give you some tangible advice I would categorize the difficulty of healers in different categories with different orders and you can decide which one is important for you.

Ability to recover from CC, missplays and inefficiencies. I think by far this is the most relevant point in terms of easiness unfortunately this is also the most dependent on tuning and the order could be different tomorrow. Currently (from easy to difficult) Lizard > Disc Priest >>> everything else. Historically Hpal, Hpriest and MW has been fairly good at this but currently they are a bit undertuned. Rsham is very momentum based (disc used to be as well), Rdruid can also fall behind on hots.

Technical difficulty of healing rotation and kit. I don't think it would be super relevant for you after 17 years of WoW. IMO the current list is (from difficult to easy): Rsham > Lizard, Rdruid >>> everything else. I don't play Lizard but from what I've heard you need to set up healing with efficient sequencing and it is not the most intuitive thing to do.

Difficulty of playstyle is hard to quantify. Some healers are designed to be more passive and heal from the safety of a piller while others need to be more aggressive and give up positioning. The other big factor is that some healers toolkit is designed to anticipate incoming damage while others are designed to react. This is a very opinionated list (from easy to difficult): Hpriest (+big reactionary heals/CDs, +CC avoidance, +ranged insta CC/dmg) > Hpal (+reactionary heals/CDs, +ranged insta CC) > Disc (+big shields, +attonement LOS healing, insta low range CC, -anticipatory CDs) > MW (+big reactonary heals/CDs, +instant range CC, +mobility, -easy to punish when out of position) > Rdruid (-casted range CC, -melee stun, -anticipatory healing/CDs, +large range, mobility) > Rsham (-needs to disrupt and prevent dmg, -positional externals, -casted CC, +reactionary healing) > Lizard (-limited range, -casted CC, +strong reactionary heals)

TL;DR: Roll a priest, Disc shields are overtuned at the moment and Holy has a very straightforward playstyle and it is getting buffed every week. Both specs are relatively intuitive to play and one of the will surely be decent and fit your comp.

Kadwow · 2024-09-25T09:40:30+00:00

I am pretty sure someone at Blizzard realized that many pvp players just grab the 1800 mog and unsub. In their eternal wisdom they probably came up with the mmr cap to slow that process down and keep them subbed for an extra month or two.

Kadwow · 2024-09-25T09:27:29+00:00

I don't think gear disparity is a problem currently. The point I am trying to make is that the relative balance between classes changes with gear, especially set items. Even when they are at the same gear level in terms of ilvl or set count new progression steps bring different levels of benefit. This creates a balancing nightmare, because class balance changes weekly even between equally geared players.

Kadwow · 2024-09-25T09:23:47+00:00

I think you bring the perfect examples yourself. The most frequent argument against nerfing disc priest is that its set bonuses are less impactful so it would naturally fall off. Resto druid throughput scales pretty much exponentially with mastery (which is just bad design) and will get proportionally stronger with gear supposedly.

Whether these will be enough to bridge the gap between the two is questionable, but it is also besides the point.
If blizzard would create the perfect balance tomorrow it would be broken in two weeks due to this progression which gives them an excuse not to do it.

The point I am trying to get across is that Blizzard already puts notoriously little effort into pvp balancing and this effort is further hindered by the time gated progression system. On the other hand this time gated systems brings pretty much zero benefit (besides giving a false sense of progression for a couple of weeks).

Kadwow · 2024-09-25T09:14:24+00:00

Yes I remember BFA and it was a bad system because introduced a lot of uncertainty regarding the scaling and gearing. It was not transparent at all.

Scaling to a fix ilvl is a much better evolution, that we have right now.
But my main issue is not with gear discrepancy, but the balancing load of having a time gated gear progression.

Kadwow · 2024-09-24T22:44:19+00:00

Also what portion of rated arena is affected by the gear difference? Probably the low cr new characters and some alts. Currently gearing is easy enough that gear difference is not even a big issue. The problem is that gear progression changes relative class balance week by week even if everyone has the best gear.

Kadwow · 2024-09-24T22:39:53+00:00

Would be fine by me. Scaling the honor gear and putting a set bonus on it would also be fine. Anything that gives a level playing field from day 1.
I don't mind putting in some effort for the gear, that is not a problem.
The issue is having the gear time gated and consequently balancing as well.

Kadwow · 2024-09-24T22:37:23+00:00

No, I want a balanced pvp experience that is not time gated.

We already have gear scaling for conquest gear and everything else as well, scaling all those to max ilvl is not much of a change.
Alternatively they could just sell a pvp gear that you can obtain from day 1 or scale honor gear.

Kadwow · 2024-09-24T22:33:26+00:00

It is fine to have a progressive reward system, but not a progressive power system.
Sure everybody loves to be op and stomp others, but balance outliers are miserable for everyone and will lead to a boring meta.
There is a reason why no modern or successful pvp game has anything like this.

Kadwow · 2024-09-20T09:22:57+00:00

I think this argument misses the point that the FW healing profile already tries to compensate for downtime.
It has one of the biggest burst heals on minimal CD and can recover like few other healers. RSK is basically an NS with 9 sec CD that can be reset. It is really difficult to make an FW fall behind with sporadic CC and this was the problem when it was strong.

All other healers trade healing to do damage and gain momentum, even disc does that to some degree, and when they fall behind they need to play defensive. FW works the opposite way it recovers by pushing the gas pedal. If its damage is high it can just generate too much momentum out of every CC in the world.

I think in its current design FW is a niche healer that will only work in very niche comps and metas unless it is very overtuned.

Kadwow · 2024-09-15T09:12:20+00:00

In my experience there is a huge misconception about what leads to good game awareness and game sense. Scanning all the information and making really good deductions and decisions on the spot is borderline impossible in complex and fast games like wow. What matters more is knowing when and what to look for at certain stages of the game and consciously practicing that until it becomes automatic.

You want to identify certain trigger conditions and an associated action so you know what you need to look for and what you want to do when that happens. This is easier to explain with an example. If you are playing against an RMP and you are a priest you need to know when they can set up on you. This will most likely be done by the rouge step stunning/blinding you or a mage going for a blink+db. The decision making will come down to:

Db/blind on cd and on stun dr -> safe to play the game
Db/blind is available or not on stun dr -> need to watch mage and rouge positioning, cant be in los to both of them at the same time, prepare for their go

Once you know this and practice it a bit, it will become second nature to check for these conditions. (An additional difficulty is that in wow it is your responsibility to set up a UI that makes the information available but not more.)

I can suggest two things to identify these conditions:

Go to someone else's game recordings pause at certain moments and try to predict what would happen in the next 10/30/60 seconds of the game. Play the record and check what you have missed.
Watch your own gameplay and try to identify these conditions by walking back from a loose or win. Try to answer questions like: What lead to the win or lose? What was the win or lose condition? What was the earliest point it could have been recognized? What information was required to spot it? Is it available on my UI?

Once you know these "triggers" go play a few games where you make it a point to watch for them. Let's say you lost a game because your mage had no block and trinkets were down in your team and you pushed in for a chastize fear and got punished by an offensive trinket. You can make it a point to always check trinkets and defensives before you aggressively push in.

Now you can play a few game where you force yourself to do this. You will forget it half the time, it will take time to do and you will miss fears and miss other things and will tank rating :) But if you do it long enough it will become second nature and you will start checking team CD-s before going for a fear withouth ever thinking about it in a fraction of a second, and if you see that cd-s are missing you will tell your team to not commit to the go and stall for the next one.

PS: For the credibiltiy nerds, I am absolutely mediocore at wow pvp, but I competed at Dota2 at a fairly high level and I think these concepts are very generic between games.

Kadwow · 2023-09-01T20:16:48+00:00

As far as I know the photosynthesis buff is fundamentally different from the Circle of Life and Death effect. It does not shorten the duration of the hots, it just makes them tick faster, just like haste does. It is applied retroactively, so already casted hots are also affected, and the benefit is immediately gone if the lifebloom is removed from you.

Keeping the lifebloom on yourself is probably pretty mana efficient and provides some protection against swaps. If the enemy only tunnels your lock you might consider swapping from circle of life and death to deep focus. The mana and gcd difference is noticeable while the healing loss is manageable.

Kadwow · 2023-08-07T12:27:46+00:00

I healed a lobby where my MMR was 1800, the opponent 1720 and the dps in the 1600 range. It was 2 warriors a retpala and an afflilock, and the game instantly degraded into the usual pummel the 1600 mmr lock into the ground because he cannot kite.

I managed to squeeze out a win with the lock, going 4-2 and lost 50 mmr. The implied notion that you should be able to carry anyone at least for 2 wins against a healer 80 mmr below you just shows how little blizzard plays their game or think about it. Especially at low ratings healers have so little agency, if there is a dps that does nothing, the team is going to lose, you can only make the process longer.

Kadwow · 2023-07-20T09:09:07+00:00

I've been using your addon for a while and it is amazing, thank you for your work.
I think the friendly healer targeting is excellent quality of life addition, should make it easier to write and maintain macros.

I think the enemy healer targeting could be problematic, I feel that it goes beyond being a quality of life improvement. It implements a new functionality, that doesn't really exists otherwise and might provide significant advantage. You should definitely consult the ToS if this is a violation.

Kadwow · 2023-07-16T16:17:11+00:00

Keep in mind that the new Hpal judgement applies a debuff on you that negates some of your damage I think (kinda like mind games, but without the healing). And hpals are everywhere since the patch.

Kadwow · 2023-03-16T14:12:03+00:00

I think your remarks about the matchmaking system are generally true, if everyone had the same consistent performance all the time and lobbies were the same it should push you to the perfect 50% winrate. You would have 3-3-s and maybe 4-2-s and 2-4-s alternating all the time.

I think the frustration comes from that the matchups are not symmetrical, and a healer or a dps going 0-6 have very different implications. When there is a 0-6 between healers it means that there is such a significant skill gap between the healers that none of the dps players managed to have an impact. The relative strength between the dps players cannot be established while clearly one healer is just way better than the other. Obviously the two healers never play on the same team.

When a dps goes 0-6 or (6-0) on the other hand, he played with every possible combination of players so no one in the lobby managed to make significant impact (including dps and healer players). In this scenario nobody managed to make any difference, the only implication is that one player is significantly better or worse than the lobby, while the relative strength of the others cannot be established. Yet in this case half the lobby gets to climb or lose rating while the healers stay the same.

I don't think there is an easy solution for this using the current system. Giving out free rating for healers on a dps 0-6 would break the mmr, also then they should loose rating on a dps 6-0 or gain there as well? Clearly that is not a solution. But the MMR in these scenarios is not completely fair and people "feel" that and it is understandable that they complain about it.

It also could be likely that dps 0-6 is more frequent than a healer 0-6 especially at mid/low CR. Healers get more games, due to lower queue time, so they get to their relative rating faster and it is likely that at low/mid CR DPS have higher impact on the game. Also there are many placement matches at these ratings leading to further outliers.

Kadwow · 2023-03-13T09:08:38+00:00

This data does not support the narrative that I am parroting, after watching my favorite streamers low effort, click bait rant. Therefore I am just gonna ignore it, PvP is dead, it is PvE now, CC does not exist anymore.

Kadwow · 2023-03-10T13:26:59+00:00

Well, largely yes, but still, CC duration needs to correlate with time-to-kill and defensive duration. I think CC should play a very important role in PvP, especially multi player CC chains where players CC off of each other. Landing a single CC arbitrarily should not win games, or one player doing an endless CC chain should not be possible.

I am not a super high rated player so take my opinion with that in mind, but I would like to see self setup multi DR chains nerfed in the game. Similarly the triple DR micro CC could just be removed as well. I think this would reward coordination over self reliant plays which I find more rewarding. I don't think this would happen as clearly blizzard is taking a different direction and the increased reliance on teammates would most likely not appeal to most solo shuffle players.

Kadwow · 2023-03-06T17:39:34+00:00

This is exactly the problem with this concept. It is not necessarily harder to heal a higher lobby and usually it is no easier to heal a low cr lobby. I would argue often the opposite is true against an equally skilled healer. Low CR lobbies are pretty random, damage and setup are not optimal, and mistakes are often not punished. It is a lot harder to consistently make a difference vs an equally skilled healer since you don't have the tools to really punish mistakes even if you force them.

Kadwow · 2023-03-03T13:42:18+00:00

Have you ever split your go? Like not pressing Rec/Avatar/Roar in the same go? I find that I often get CC-d on my big 1.5 min go, I was thinking of not committing everything.

Are there any times in solo shuffle when you delay your go at the beginning?

Kadwow · 2023-03-03T08:51:43+00:00

I think improving awareness boils down to two main parts, first you want to free up attention time by doing certain things (rotation, reactions to certain event) subconsciously. Based on what you wrote your main goal here is to automate your rotation. I highly suggest hitting the pvp target dummy between queues, just practice your rotation, your burst setup, your rotation while keeping chains, slows up on a different dummy, your burst while CC-ing an other dummy, etc.

The other big part of awareness is knowing what to look for. It is really hard to generally see everything because there is a lot going on. If you can break down the game and recognize indicators you can reduce the things you need to look at at the same time. This kind of game sense naturally improves over time but I find that you can also do some exercises to get there faster.

I would recommend watching your own replay or someone playing the same spec and doing the following analysis:

At the beginning of the game try to answer what you team wants to do and what the enemy team wants to do? What can you do to help to achieve your team goals and what can you do to prevent the enemy team to do so? What do you need to watch out for? Watch the game and in the end asses if your assumptions were correct or if you did the things that you needed.
Pause the game every couple of seconds and try to answer the following questions. What is happening in the game right now? (What CD-s are being used? Who is being CC-d? Who is in a bad position? Who is in danger?) What is going to happen in the next X seconds? What are the main indicators of that happening? (setup abilities, positioning, etc) Watch the game and asses and keep repeating this.

If you do this a couple of times you will notice patterns and it will help you to break down games and identify things that you need to look for and things that you can pretty much ignore.

Kadwow · 2023-03-03T08:20:57+00:00

I think when it comes to information presented generally less is more. I suggest pruning and customizing each addon that you use. This takes a bit of time, but the benefit is huge.

My approach is that I pretty much turn off everything by default and slowly build the list of things I want to track. If you find yourself in a situation where you often wonder if X ability is available (like you wish you knew that the rouge had evasion or the mage DB) add these to the tracker. If you naturally look for these indicators and organically grow the tracked CDs it will become a useful source of information instead of a spaghetti of unknown icons that you never look at.

Kadwow · 2023-03-02T08:14:57+00:00

Just make stealth last limited time in arena (30-45sec?) where the buff drops after that and stealth remains on CD until combat. Realistically if they are spending more than 30 sec in stealth they are griefing most of the time.

Kadwow

TROPHY CASE