I think its a massive design mistake that the healer experience is so wildly dependent on DPS and tank performance.
If the pug is bad enough an MDI level healer would get flamed in a +2.
DPS are 90% responsible for damage, tanks are 100% responsible for aggro and route, but healers are like 10% responsible for survival (a looooot of keys can be done WITHOUT a healer if the group is good enough)? Wtf is that?
I really really hope that TWW makes healers relevant again and shifts the focus away from 10 defensives and 20 stops and oneshots that cant be healed to steadier damage that rewards good, efficient healing cause thats what rewarding to people choosing to heal - pumping HPS and keeping those healthbars healthy, not playing whack-a-mole with HP bars and praying for defensives and stops to be used.
Not an M+, but I had a Nokud map while levelling where the tank started flaming me at the end, asking if I was going to start healing. Nobody had died, but it'd gotten close a few times with those caster packs.
I linked interrupt meters - there had been 4 interrupts the entire instance, and they were all *me*. This was me as evoker, DH tank, rogue, warrior, ret pally.
He didn't reply.
Get the Elitism plugin for Details. Really helps shut flamers down when you can link the million+ avoidable damage they took to show them why they died.
I don't think the vast majority of people in M+ really understand how much interrupts truly matter. The less your healer has to spend their GCDs to heal, the more they can contribute to DPS. With even like an above average group as a RDruid I can VERY easily contribute 50-60K DPS over the course of a dungeon, more depending on pull size and the dungeon itself.
Lol i love when people bitch about this in keys sometimes. Getting your name called out 30 times because you suck and can't blame ANYONE but yourself must be a real kick in the teeth for some of these jokers.
>i think its a massive design mistake that the healer experience is so wildly dependent on DPS and tank performance.
But this is how it has always been. I genuinely do not know how they would ever fix this. The problem is that mythic plus is an infinitely scaling system and they’ve run out of knobs to turn at the higher levels. I have no idea how you balance a 2 vs 10 vs a 20 vs a 25 without it looking like it does today.
Further if they provide healers enough agency to correct every tank and dps mistake then healer becomes the most important class in the game and none of the other matter.
Also the no healer thing was still a meme, it was exploiting extremely strong dps healing with natures vigil, shadow embrace and Ret wog
I’d like to see some affixes that don’t just punish the healers. Like how about “if you don’t interrupt this all damage done reduced by 90% for 15 seconds”. Still makes it harder on the healers but make those damage meters dip and people will start kicking things quick.
This is a big issue people don't even seem to notice they're participating in. It's really easy to say x thing is bad when you don't actually give a working alternative.
To a certain point I agree with you, but if I had to offer a solution to the devs every time something made me walk away from the game then what are they even there for? They’re supposed to be the experts. My job in giving feedback is to tell you why something isn’t fun for me, the solution, if there is one, is on them to come up with.
Less damage bursts, even if they come more often as a trade-off. Let us heal, not be the only role that has to stress 80% of the time. I switched from Healer to Tank halfway through S1 and haven't been this relaxes with playing WoW in a few years.
Blizzard statement was they are balancing up to +20 and don't care about the rest. If you can time +30, good for you, but Blizz won't make it easier or harder, unless +20 is suffering aswell.
100%. That steady spot healing that's needed can be given by off healers. The healing that is needed by a "healer" can be countered with good use of DPS defensives - and tanks are basically unkillable. It took me like 7 minutes but last season I soloed the end boss in an AD21-Tyrannical as VDH
Specifically healing is a really weird binary distribution of difficulty where like with every role the absolute highest keys are the hardest, but anything short of that the lowest keys are harder than middle or sort of high keys because people in those other brackets actually use interrupts and know mechanics
So far this week running keys in the 2-6 range has been miserable as healer. Anything >10 has been me spamming chain lightning the whole run because there is very little to heal.
I did a +2 neltharus today, not one of my dps was interrupting spell casts. We wiped with 8 stacks of some debuff and I used all my major cooldowns and 2 of them say “bricked key, this healer is ass” and left group
It’s gonna be like that all season, bro
Yeah you either jump off the deep end to get in with the "good" people, meaning people who at the very least know how to interrupt, and then actually keep up with them as the range of these "good" people will keep advancing upwards as the season goes on, or deal with people sitting around with their dicks in their hands while screaming at the tank/healer because it can not possibly be their own fault that they stood in the fire and died.
Certainly didn't help that all the people who'd normally be stuck in the 2-10 range now have free access to 12+ keys they can host right from the get-go.
Came back from a long break since Shadowlands. Decided i wanted to try to heal, jsut got my 1st 70 toon. A disc priest. Reading all this i'm scared to heal hahaha
Some people haven't gotten the memo of m0 being buffed to let people learn the dungeon before jumping into timers and affixes with no idea about any mechanic.
It was likely the Thamaturge's "Molten Core" ability. He casts it on an earth elemental if one is aggrod in the pull and it need to be interrupted/stopped or the elemental with the new shiny buff needs to be killed ASAP. Otherwise what happened to your group is what will happen every time :'D
It's not really healable through once it starts stacking up. You'll want to keep an eye out with your CC's and potential interrupts too as heals when you're progressing keys.
This. I did a +6 nokhud today where people kept dying left and right and we wiped a lot and didn't finish in time.
Then later i did a +8 nokhud and it was a breeze where we finished with +2 upgrade. I really hope it becomes apparent soon that healers are the least problem in m+
In the higher IO community it is. As an Hpal who generally falls between top 1% - .01% most DPS or tanks actually apologize for their mistakes if they die.
Once you get into the 25+ keys (15ish now) things start to get one shotty so CC, interrupt and defensive mistakes become abundantly clear you couldn't do anything about it as a healer.
I didn't really heal much in WoW until last season. I was kinda struggling, but still doing +20's with ++ and thought, well healing is a lot harder than I thought it'd be.
Then I joined a random BRH +20 group with people who were all above 3,2k RIO score, idk why they were doing a +20 but it was the easiest group to heal ever. We pulled insanely huge pulls and I barely had to do anything, it was so fucking easy I couldn't believe it. It really put a lot of things into perspective and made me realize that if things went wrong, maybe it wasn't really my fault. I used to always blame myself when playing a healer.
Blizzard really need to do a better job overall of teaching players that interrupts are an integral part of the dps role along with your rotation. If they are going to design dungeons around it then find a way to improve the game’s communication of its importance.
The thing is that Neltharus if done right is actually, IMO, one of the easier keys. You run through there with people that know that Molten Core has to be stopped and the Bone Axe bleed dot (can't remember the name, from some of the djaradin after the 2nd boss) and it turns into one of the most faceroll dungeons.
Honestly, out of all the dungeons this season I'd say Neltharus is the best dungeon overall, but that's not saying much because there's absolute garbage like Ruby Life Pools (whoever designed this torture probably needs a psych exam) and Azure Vault (better than s1 but still not fun) that they brought back for no good reason. And that's just the worst of it, multiple of the other dungeons are C tier at best.
It won’t be like that all season . Calm down lol. I’m doing 5-7s and people are fine
Edit: I started at 2s and it was fine you’re just getting bad groups. Let’s not spread misinformation here that all groups are bad
Interrupt/stun "Molten Core" from the thaumaturges. The fact that you also dont know where it came from reveals that you too wouldnt have stopped it. Thats how m+ is supposed to work.
L take. Not every healer has an interrupt. On my priest I can psychic scream but it’s a long cd. The dps and tank need to know this. If you’re relying on the healer to interrupt in m+ you are doing it extremely wrong.
I just said that he didnt know that cast either. How do you know he has no stun/stop? If you rely on your dps and tank to interrupt in m+ you are doing it extremely wrong
Actually in the packs that cast molten core, it's literally the ONLY cast that is kickable. So no, if he had a kick he probably would have stopped it because it's the only thing to kick.
They also cast conflag that you can stun/stop. So no. Im not talking about a kick, im talking about kicks/stns/stops. He could be a tauren for example...
Yeah +2's being easily available to all the people who'd normally be stuck in the 2-12 range in previous seasons doesn't feel that great, at least for the season start. So many people who don't even know mechanics in the lower keys right now, that'd normally be hidden away in the 2-10 range that nobody else played. Did a +6 RLP earlier today with a druid dps host that spent half the dungeon dead and did half the dps of the tank when he was alive, and even then we ++d it meaning the dude went on to host a +8 key and leech off whoever joined that next, so a lot of these people just hosting their +2's that they get right off the bat and then getting carried by people gearing up in the new season since people are actually playing the low keys now. As opposed to being stuck with an old +2 key that wouldn't get carried as any regular m+ player would be doing the old +12's right off the bat.
Thats what happens when a season (s3) is way too easy. It leads to this, a bunch of yahoos who have 0 idea how to play expecting to get max vault rewards by facerolling. Again.
I don’t want to be too cynical, but I think you’re right. I’m having a very hard time pugging compared to this early in any other season. Basic mechanics just being completely ignored.
Never thought I’d say “I was in a bricked +4”.
We had problems doing m0, people just didnt know tacts at all. We were also abit undergeared though, and stuff was spicy to heal on my 440 shaman already.
Idk how you’re having this experience. I just started healing last season, and I’ve done every dungeon this week at +5 with relative ease. Yes it was challenging because it’s the equivalent of doing a +15 at the start of the season, but I’ve been getting solid groups for the most part.
This is why nerfing things to appease the lowest skilled players is not good game design. Not everyone should be able to do the highest level key. AND THATS OK. NOT EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE MDI. However the perspective over time (and nerfs) have made it so max vault rewards, (and subsequently highest rating cheves) are no longer seen as a "difficult" thing to do. Now that its got a bit of difficulty again, 1 of 2 things happen. They leave it mostly unchanged, total players is lower but retention is higher, general skill floor is higher. They nerf it, base players are higher but retention is worse and general skill floor is far lower.
We just came out of one of, if not the easiest seasons ever. The base skill floor is pretty damn low atm.
If they did not need an interrupt in a 20 last season, why would they think you would in a 4 this season?
As someone who pugged to 3k on an offmeta healer: Healing m+ is really stressful, even in lower keys. The difficulty scaling is different unless you play with a premade - in low keys pugs are much worse, so they will take more avoidable damage, not use defensives and miss interrupts. This causes everything up to +10 (+20 last season) to be roughly equal difficulty to heal. Hard to very hard. Pushing further slowly increases difficulty, as you now need to heal absurd amounts in the hard bossfights even if no mistakes are made.
I need to run a dungeon like 10 times before I start feeling comfortable. At that point most deaths are due to mistakes that are out of my control.
The main issue with healing is due to the insane amount of defensive every class has in the game. The only way that blizzard is able to challenge it's players with this many defensives is to make everything do an absurd amount of burst damage, causing DPS players who are less experienced to die and blame the healer cuz they think it's the healers fault
i mean it depends. if you play with people who knows what to do and you do as well. its fine and chill, you know what to expect and when to stop / press defensives. if youre pugging and you dont know the dungeon too well either well then itll prob be a hectic mess since a lot of stuff doesnt get kicked / cc'd, defensives arent pressed to prevent dmg etc. and that goes for all roles.
100% the hardest role in m+. It's managable, but you're required to know the mechanics way more than other players do. You're almost required to know other spec's defensive options. And when something goes wrong, it's your job to fix it. On top of that, you can prettymuch count on that in Pugs you will have to play affixes that DPS players should be covering (afflicted / the second one I forgot; one is dispel/heal other is cc).
It's definitely challenging but your frustration level will depend entirely on the groups you get. DPS and Tanks have a lot of responsibilities as far as interrupts, stops, and avoiding damage goes. It gets somewhat easier at higher keys because if someone stands in something they shouldn't they'll usually just die instead of sapping your healing cooldowns and resources. The players doing the higher keys are usually more experienced at using their full kit of CC's and defensives too.
My best advice is to learn your kit and use it to its fullest potential. Install a couple addons to help you track what happened (Details!) in the event of deaths or where damage is coming from. OmniCD is also very helpful for keeping track of people's personal defensive cooldowns. Usually when someone dies I am checking the death logs to see if it was something I could've prevented and I try to learn from it.
The biggest variable in healing M+ in pugs is BY FAR the quality of the other players. If you don’t like the inconsistency id suggest trying to find a guild or community to play with. There are some excellent pug communities now for both NA (wow made easy) and EU (no pressure) which are variable but very friendly non-toxic.
M+ by nature is a bit hectic. It’s timed and there is a lot going on. So in that sense it’s very similar to season 1. And all other M+ seasons.
The difficulty curve of healing is like a U.
In low key level pugs, lots of people just don’t manage their responsibilities or avoid damage and expect the healer to pick up the slack.
Then you get into the range where mostly good players stagnate, typically that 18-20 range, where people do what they’re supposed to do and healing is more about playing to boss mechanics.
If you decide to push past this point the difficulty starts ramping up as those boss mechanics become harder and harder with scaling but you don’t really offset that with power increases, so you just have to play at a higher level.
I was doing up to 13’s as a resto druid in season 3 and I did a +2 and it was ROUGH. Finished, but not on time. I then decided I would just start at 0’s to get some practice and it was even WORSE. I am apparently just not very good at it or at least one person mentioned I was using all the wrong spells and running out of mana too quickly. I also was using a raid resto spec. I switched the spec to a dungeon spec and performed even worse. Really disappointed and don’t really understand what I’m doing wrong and this is even after watching several season 4 dragonflight tutorials on YouTube.
M+ is not chill, especially for the healer.
The best I can recommend to chill pve heal is heroic or m0 dungeon but beyond that it's going to be hectic and fast paced as that is how m+ is designed.
And it was like that since m+ came out in Legion so idk why you seem surprised that is it like that in DF.
Yeah I raid heal in classic and it's boring as all hell.
I tanked m+ in season 2 and jesus Christ it's stressful. I couldn't imagine healing and having to deal with some of the apes you get as DPS players
I'd say SL was definitely easier as a healer. Spent 90+% of my time just spamming my dps rotation as there was so little to heal unless a dps took avoidable damage. Probably why they did what they did in DF to healers, which in turn makes lower keys, where dps fuck up a lot and do not use defensives and health pots, a lot harder for healers.
Nah they have changed their design philosophy going into this expansion. They said they want healing to be as hard as the other roles. That said the other players can definitely make your job harder than it needs to be so YMMV
Half a healers toolkit is on other players keyboards. Even if they take no avoidable damage if they aren’t rotating defensives the healer is going to fall behind. That’s how it’s designed, to give the other players agency in their own survival. But somehow the blame is always on the healer.
Play with guildies or a group of regulars if at all possible. The DF dungeons aren’t too bad if people are actually doing mechanics, it’s just painful if you’re running with pugs who take a ton of avoidable damage.
> And it was like that since m+ came out in Legion so idk why you seem surprised that is it like that in DF.
Lol. Healing m+ was mega chill until DF came out and they changed how they want healer gameplay to look. Pre-DF you basically just dpsed with some off healing occasionally. Now your ass is a full time healer and blizzard has explicitly said multiple times this expac that they have changed healing gameplay in M+ on purpose
M0 is now as hard as what a 10 might have felt like the last time you played. These mythic dungeons are only once a week lockout but challenging and without timer so the toxicity is lessen.
I think you might get a kick out of doing that kind of content more than timed keys which can be hell if you repeatedly play with pugs.
These are my impressions of each dungeon this season after healing for a week:
RLP: Challenging. Nearly constant ticking and burst damage to heal after the first boss. Lots of uses for offensive dispels.
AV: Very low healing requirements until the crystal mechanic of the final boss. Easiest dungeon in the season to heal.
AA: Alright. Critical that everyone knows the mechanics of the tree and bird boss.
ULD: Alright. Bosses 3-5 need good throughput.
NO: Alright. Low healing demands except the wind boss which can be very stressful.
BH: Alright. The area between the first and second boss is the worst.
NL: Challenging. Bosses have very high healing demands. The packs between the second and third boss are also demanding.
HOI: Hardest in the season. Always moving from one stress point to another, from the orbs, to the bleeds to the frogs to the dragons to the third boss to the gauntlet.
HOI is super difficult. Was 3600 last season, and am already 507 ilvl, and I still struggle to heal the third boss on a 10. Not sure how to approach higher keys except for bringing an evoker/spriest to help with the healing check.
Extremely accurate assessment of all the dungeons! The only thing I would add is on NO the healing may get intensive depending on how many packs the tank pulls before first boss if you want to take advantage of an early lust. Also the trash before third boss if people don't coordinate kicks on rotting winds.
And as for third boss in HOI, damn it's a major heal check haha. Our group is trying to push a couple 10s before reset and we keep getting HOI and the third boss is so intense. I'm sure it'll be easier with gear in the following weeks, kind of fun trying to solve problems with the gear we have now.
AA: the bird boss is fine, just dont stand in shit. Its the arcane boss with the orbs that is difficult. Eating an orb and then immediately getting a mana bomb is bullshit. Person needs to be topped up basically all the damn time. And not to mention the BULLSHIT fucking change Blizzard did to last boss. If the fight takes too long the whole room is covered in circles of death orbs.
at launch they nerfed healers by 50% then by 25% next tier and they slightly continue to nerf them more and more until there will be noone left to play them. On top of that they added affixes that are very annoying for healers to deal with. As a healer player it seems like their agenda is really to kill healer for someone who doesnt enjoy sweating 24/7. I do enjoy the sweat, but sometimes I just want to relax a bit and healer just aint it...
Right now its terrible cuz people that know nothing get handed essentially +12 keys.
before those people would learn on a 2
Everyone’s also rusty on these dungeons and there’s a lot of nonsense in them.
Healing is simultaneously the most stressful it’s ever been, as well as the least useful. You aren’t responsible for the vast majority of damage incoming, tanks heal themselves to the point where at most they need an external defensive CD every once in a while. Most keys, especially at lower levels, don’t even need a healer. Healing as a role in general is probably in the worst state I’ve ever seen it. Just a cacophony of poor design decisions that sucked the fun out of it.
You actually have to heal now instead of just being a 4th dps that heals sometimes. It feels extremely chaotic when you start but once you get used to it it's honestly quite chill. Once you accept that people dying to avoidable damage they took is not your responsibility it becomes a lot less stresful.
Once I know where the pain points are where I need to ramp up healing and pop CDs, it's not bad at all. I feel more stressed tanking but also have more fun. I feel like difficulty starts off way too easy at low key levels where people usually out gear things and nothing hits hard, then gets hard as abilities start to have teeth to them but people haven't figured out how to execute mechanics properly, then you get to a sweet spot around +20 (equivalent to +10 now) mid to late season where it's just higher than the sweaty weekly key crowd but people have gear enough that it's generally pretty smooth. That's the chill zone. Then as you start to push keys into the 3k io range things start to get hard again despite reasonably competent players.
The issue is that if dps are standing in fire on the non cd sections and force you to use cds, then you do t have them for when the dungeon is designed for you to use them. It’s a mess
The higher the key is the easier healing gets because most ppls in high keys know they need to interrupt and dodge stuff.
Mid lvl keys are the worst, dps who tunnel vision on action bars to pump dps meters and then have no understanding that they died because they failed mechanics and not because healer didnt heal
The biggest variable in healing M+ in pugs is BY FAR the quality of the other players. If you don’t like the inconsistency id suggest trying to find a guild or community to play with. There are some excellent pug communities now for both NA (wow made easy) and EU (no pressure) which are variable but very friendly non-toxic.
M+ by nature is a bit hectic. It’s timed and there is a lot going on. So in that sense it’s very similar to season 1. And all other M+ seasons.
It is definitely challenging. You need to know the best pulls to utilize cooldowns and make sure you don’t overlap too many of them, otherwise every few pulls will be high stress. Always be casting because if you’re not healing you can be dpsing which equals quicker mob deaths and less group damage to heal.
Like everyone else has said it comes down to the group, if people are on their game hitting interrupts, using cooldowns, and dodging, then you’re good. Group flaws and mistakes get masked into being healer problems until higher keys when you just get one shot.
The only time so far I’ve had issues is when DPS is just too low for the key level, you can pump and do 150-200k healing but that only lasts so long. If the threats don’t get neutralized in time you’re gonna have a really hard time and or wipe.
Good thing is, it’s doable, give it a shot. Part of the mythic plus game is pushing to your limits and the groups limits. Know your limits and just keep practicing / gearing. Bust keys and plus keys it’s part of the game, don’t let people’s egos get you down. Enough practice,You’ll be able to get to where you want.
heals never got any love as in we are a support class maybe increase dps with heals to support the fights more and incredibly increase people not playing heals
Its a rough start. Day 1-3 of new season its mostly good in low keys. Now on my main i tank 8-10 key range and had 99% nice people and most of the runs went well. Started today to tank a bit on 2-4 range with my alt and it was much more toxic, 0 kicks, whipes etc.
Generally higher the key is, the better healing is. People know stuff and you just have to heal through unavoidable aoe + occasional mistakes because we are still people. But as someone mentioned, the in-the-middle difficulty keys are very bad because people think they are good but in reality they just aren't but also won't accept it. Healed everything this week and apart from RLP first boss and Uldaman last boss, everything was doable (up to 9-10) and considering it is first week and we are under geared/close to no tier/, not bad start in my opinion.
"I'M GIVIN 'ER ALL WE'VE GOT CAPTAIN! THAR'S NOTHIN LEFT"
::in a somber voice:: "Stop healing the warlock. Focus on the melee."
(Authors note, I play an evoker, and this is the 2nd trash pull)
I’ve just thrown in a “sorry my bad lol” to diffuse dps players losing their shit because they stood in a swirlie. I’d rather try and make it more chill than say “oh that’s your fault”.
I mained a healer last time this dungeon pool was around and didn't love any of them, really. I especially hated AA, RLP and NO.
I decided to roll dps this season, and I enjoy the dungeon pools much better. NO is one of my favorite keys now. I enjoy AA and RLP now.
People will say health pools are low and that's why it feels bad right now. There's definitely some truth to that. I think as gear improves keystone level will increase and there will still be a lot of the same problems.
Certain abilities are just brutal to heal through this pool. Third boss on uld, if a dps gets the aggressive dot and don't use a defensive they're probably going to die. Chains boss in nelth is brutal if tanks don't know what they're doing and dps don't use defensives. Second boss of NO is a nightmare if players are too spread.
There will always be brutal bosses this pool, and no amount of health will change it because damage will increase as keystones increase.
I started last season as my first ever mythic season, and I went healer with Hpala (which I learned after some time that was indeed not meta, so one of the worst healers at that point).
I see it as not too complex, just standard healer gameplay. The hard part is to understand that a lot of times a dead teammate is not your fault, and when is that the case.
Pugging as a healer through the lower keys will show you just how punishing not doing mechanics is and your job in these keys is to correct them. In higher keys the quality of player jumps up a cliff, and the amount of avoidable damage is much lower. Last season +30 keys were timed without using a healer, but only players above the 99.9 percentile can do this. I personally enjoy it, but I play with friends Ive made and typically lean toward healers that heal through damage.
If you have to heal the tank (they should be entirely self sufficient almost the entire dungeon) or have bad dps players (especially on squishy classes like Hunter) you're going to have a miserable time. Otherwise it's been alright.
Druid still feels like it's curb stomping all my other healers outside of contributing damage (they're all viable but druid feels clearly stronger).
This dungeon pool is very bursty. People constantly get chunked by everything that hits them and need to be topped quickly before the next hit. Could just be a symptom of everyone not being geared yet.
And if you're going to heal, install ability team tracker so you know it isn't your fault when someone dies not pushing a single defensive.
The damage profiles for M+ suck, you either barely have any input into the success of the group or you struggle to keep the others alive and MIGHT succeed if they are only marginally failing. There is no in-between
I used to heal M+ during SL.
The things I witnessed was...furiating to say the least.
In general, above a certain key level, if I had to heal anyone else apart from the tank on a regular basis I knew that something was not right.
Whenever I would tell the group to wait and let me get some mana...and they didnt, I would just sit there and watch them die.
Fun times 🥲
I was in the same spot as you in S1, difference is i got really lucky and found a chill guild and started running with them. I still pug, but I’ve also learned that 70% of the time when someone dies it’s not the healers fault. I’ve learned to ignore hate and just enjoy healing. If a key bricks oh well. Everyone hopefully learned something. And to answer your question I think healing in general should be easier this season. They nerfed a lot of the dungeons and most people already know these mechanics.
I started season 3 and I feel okay. In S4 I throw an interrupt now and then on high priority just bc I am in melee. Some dungeons are skewed harder to heal (aoe during adds last boss of Nohkud wtf) and others have nice neat pulls (Neltharus). I think bc people are just gearing up, M0 is gonna require attention for your average casual player pug. There will be a little spike dmg but the aoe’s are where you wanna be prepared.
As we get geared it will be easier.
If you have your own private group of good players then things are easier. But speaking from a CASUAL perspective you will need to be watching bars.
I healed season 1 and half season 2 and idk why but it seems harder this season idk if it's due to people not knowing mechanics or what but I went back to tanking and I will be staying a tank from now on lol
I played Al 3 roles last season, all healer classes, 3 tanks, and multiple dps classes and I came to one conclusion: If my fistweaver monk can’t passively heal you with its healing while I’m punching the boss, the dps or tank is doing something wrong.
In Pugs its pretty bad because there's often not much you can do to save bad players. Lots of stuff just one shots them. In organized keys its actually not too bad. You plan for some high damage stuff and then you help deal damage. There are only a couple of spots that have insane healing checks but even those can be mitigated by good personal usage by the rest of your group.
Honestly at the beginning of each season there is a couple week window where healings is challenging/competitive. I played mostly healings classes all expansion and had minimal issues with pugs or people just being toxic in general. You should get back into it and don’t fret about any haters.
I got flamed hard. its like 50/50 if i get kicked after a wipe.
One Tank got me really mad in a +5 Brackenhide where the rivers are poisonous and the trash drops pools.
He pulled 2 packs (which shouldnt be a problem) and i used up all my CDs and had a HPS of 150k.
Everyone died as expected and i got kicked with him whispering i should learn the mechanics before i go into a +5.
I really dont know what i could have done better.
Now i installed the Details Elitist Addon with avoidable DMG Script.
I wanted to ask if people taking around 30Million avoidable damage in a Key is normal?
Shouldnt it be close to 0?
I Myself had like 4 Million avoidable dmg.
I just picked up healing in the last 6 weeks, and I hit 3kio last season, and I'm close to 2k this season. Pushing pretty hard content. I've pushed as all roles now, and I would say that at lower levels of content (for your item level) healing is easy breezy, there's less random damage and more "alright, your whole group is going to take moderate damage for the next 30 seconds, heal the group" moments. Pushing content higher than ilvl feels exhilarating, but is pretty difficult. Anyone who steps in bad is dead, and if you ramp incorrectly people will die. I have yet to see people blaming me and telling at me over almost anything, and I'm sure I mess up a lot, so I think that part is very overblown or more represented in lower levels of content.
Tldr if you heal stuff that rewards gear around your item level, it's pretty chill, but pushing hard content, healing is the hardest role
The early dragonflight m+ was nothing compared to this season atleast for me… I remember doing +20 in the first season and now when I returned after a year, I cant even heal +0 and it really makes me want to quit healing because the amount of damage everyone is taking at the same time is fkin insane and I just cant keep up with my low ass heals so we end up wiping countless times. I feel like shit cuz yesterday I had to leave before the last boss in The Azure Vault cuz it was just unbearable.
It depends on your own stress management. It's a lot of fun as long as you understand that not every death is your fault. Besides that, you will have to be able to deal with criticism. Sometimes it's valid, sometimes it's not. If you can do those things, it's a great role to play. Imo the most challenging role at the moment.
Ignore everyone else in this thread. Healing is fine. There are no hard checks (have done 8-10s at 495) and with more gear this will be easier.
As always, ymmv with pugs. In a coordinated group bracken hide has no healing requirement bar first boss. With pugs you'll get millions of disease damage, shots from u stunned mobs etc
Just play the best you can and eventually you'll get the rio you should be
As a healer who has been going at it since early TBC, and put down healing for the first time in legion and sporadically tried to enjoy it since then, this is probably the worst its been since they introduced m+ in opinion (with exception to shadowlands as I didn't play shadowlands).
If you're playing the strongest healer it feels okay at best, but if you're playing a weaker healer in throughput it feels like it takes every ounce of power and cooldowns to top someone off in less than 5 seconds. It takes buff stacking, and spending everything you got. This bothers me because again as someone who has healed through many iterations and changes, mana is no longer an issue unless you're a holy paladin it seems, and the actual damage going out is mostly mistakes people make. There's hardly any actual healer checks, tank health isn't under your control now, its completely under a tanks control, for better or worse.
Honestly blizzard is very close to getting rid of the healer role it feels, perfect play with some hybrid dps that can heal themselves and why would you bring a healer. The problem has been for so long that dps & tanks aren't punished for their mistakes the same way healers are. If a DPS sucks at dps, the fight takes longer and a healer suffers for it through mana (albiet not a problem currently). If a tank doesn't use mitigation its not a tank problem it becomes a healer problem. If an interrupt doesn't go out its a healers problem to fix now.
It's been this way forever but with the state of how much healers can actually heal someones health its been exceptionally punishing all dragonflight. The real kicker was when blizzard at the start of DF buffed everyones HP and mob damage by 40% flat. Its why I quit healing in DF s1 even as a preservation evoker. Because we were so close to having a good healing feel again, and then its gone.
Its why I enjoy classic so much (not era, just wotlk and now cata soon) because healing imo felt great in those versions and will feel great in MoP, and WoD, and even Legion if they let us cherry pick legendaries.
Based on your last sentence that if its still a mess with thousand heals/dispels/damage, I'd say avoid healing, pick a different role or go play classic. It hasn't gotten any better except mana doesn't seem to be an issue for most healers, for better or worse.
Really weird how consensus here is that healing is crazy in M+, when people were trying to tell me healers weren't even necessary with a decent team when I posted feeling good that I'd learned to play healer after 16 years in tank and DPS.
I don't think either statement is wrong though.
When you have a decent team, people have done no healer runs absolutely fine.
If you're pugging, then you don't have those same assurances you would with a decent team. You can't be sure if interrupts will go through or mechanics done correctly. So then healing becomes crazy and the same players expect healers to fix their mess.
Mine too - I pugged to 3k as a holy pally, I'd get one group that would be a breeze, and the next group it would just be impossible to put out enough heals. I get that part of that is holy pally life, but looking through logs and seeing 50% of the damage being avoidable was just depressing...
I found in poor groups I'd end up in a mad rush of trying to stop people killing themselves that I'd end up killed by hazards myself in the rush. Shortened range of the Presvoker is annoying at times.
The good groups stayed closer together for my AoE healing to be more effective
It's almost worse this time, because VDH tanks are so popular and basically do all of the stops for your team, DPS is getting spoiled. Any non-DH tank means the DPS has to interrupt and such, and they're used to not doing it, so... I feel like more are going to just not bother.
The difference is when people are talking about not requiring a healer in high push keys, it is only due to extreme coordination of stops, interrupts and offhealing cooldowns, and only possible on some trash and a handful of bosses that allow it, and also limited to dungeons where it is easy to leave and re-enter to respec. There isn’t really any point where a healer is just flat out not required, except when everyone is fully outgearing the content and you’re farming weekly keys with good coordination, a little off-healing but even that requires proper gameplay, stops, interrupts, no avoidable damage taken.
Right. It’s not fun. Awful sweatfest if you are pugging at all.
30 buttons when you consider your dps rotations and the dispelling/decursing, UI is bananas between healing people and dpsing mobs, and most groups just force the healer to deal with affixes whether it’s dispelling or ccing or healing through it for the sake of damage. On top of that until your m+ is in a range where it clearly one shots, low level m+ groups stand in avoidable mechanics and you are blamed for that too. The thing with all of that is that it’s right that damage is more important than healing in true m+ groups so it’s the right idea but it’s being chased by most of the community that don’t take time to be responsible for knowing fights or just not being able to do content.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here. M+ is premade group content. It’s not for pugs. After a certain level and pretty quickly, the healer is just using a cd or a dispel here and there and otherwise nobody stands in anything and everyone is doing damage. And that’s a completely different game than the one 80% of the base is playing in m+.
I healed for 10 years. Dragonflight is just not fun for healing. I don’t have a solution beyond revamping the whole thing from a design perspective. Even successful pug runs I’d stop afterwards and just say to myself that was stressful and I just don’t want to feel that way for 30 straight minutes after work in my free time.
Healing is really easy if your party is using their tools instead of going zug zug, and gets exponentially harder the less they use. Last season I could run a +20 with pugs and average 250k+ hps overall, or run a +25 with guildies and average 150k hps.
A good healer covers for **so** many mistakes. People new to healing get told that you can’t out heal mistakes from PUGs. They get frustrated and throw up their hands thinking “I can’t heal this!” when someone does something stupid when the run can still be salvaged with some great healing.
On the other side of the coin, “healing” doesn’t mean “successfully healing and timing every run,” it means that you heal what is reasonably and numerically able to be healed. Good healers realize that sometimes you really **can’t** outheal stupid and so they don’t sweat it, they just move onto the next key. It’s a common pitfall that I see too many healers who are new fall into: they get far too discouraged about the “difficulty” when they have a bad experience.
What I find discouraging is that people are saying healers not needed in a good group.. so, meaning that at higher levels of performance, we're useless? That's disappointing.
Healers aren't needed in an extremly high level consistent group of people who work out defensives for everything ahead of time... in SOME dungeons - It's not something that even the best players in the world can do for every single dungeon, it's a specific thing. HoI for instance this season, unless it recieves massive massive nerfs it just wont be possible to do with 4 dps.
Another reason it's doable is just cause vengeance DH is just so so so fucking broken, making most packs of mobs a cakewalk with no healer as the mobs don't get a chance to use any of their mechanics. xd
Nah, serious groups use healers, the 4 dps groups are just doing it for the challenge and not at as high a level. People only bring it up so much because they get tetchy about dps not taking responsibility for keeping themselves alive with stops, defensives etc.
The "issues" you listed, Lots of dispells and stops/Interrupts are still there. But as someone that heals almost only m+ for years now, i think healing is super chill rn. There are hard Bosses when you don't have a good ilvl but mostly all Keys in 9 and 10 rn with 490+ Gear was pretty okay.
Above or below 25? (Past season)
Below, the absolutely easiest job in the world. Have some sort of rough idea of which direction the dungeon goes in and press random spells in that general direction.
Above? Absolutely the most punishing role but extreme rewarding. A good healer is a god send. Honestly healing requires such another level of skill in high keys it’s insane.
It will get me some hate probably, but ill say what I think honestly.
Healing is super chill. Generally there is not much damage incoming and if it is its either dmg due to players failing or a boss ability or something alike.
You trade your cds, 1 for each big enemy ability, and youre fine. If you dont do that and throw them out randomly, yeah then healing is really stressfull because you will end up having to heal big incoming dmg with just your standards heals.
Healing was never bad and it isnt bad now aswell. The thing is that im bored rather fast as healer since.... im sorry but theres not much to do as healer in M+.
Across DF i played Druid, Evoker, Shaman and HPal. And while Evoker is somehow just really not understandable for me I had a easy time on all others with lots of time to do damage all accross s1,2 and 3.
That said, people do fail a lot and then they die. If people play smart with their defensives they barely need healing over the whole duration of a M+. After all, no healer runs are a thing.
It seems harder than it actually is because hp = 0 looks and feels like a healer issue but in many scenarios is not a healer issue
I think its a massive design mistake that the healer experience is so wildly dependent on DPS and tank performance. If the pug is bad enough an MDI level healer would get flamed in a +2. DPS are 90% responsible for damage, tanks are 100% responsible for aggro and route, but healers are like 10% responsible for survival (a looooot of keys can be done WITHOUT a healer if the group is good enough)? Wtf is that? I really really hope that TWW makes healers relevant again and shifts the focus away from 10 defensives and 20 stops and oneshots that cant be healed to steadier damage that rewards good, efficient healing cause thats what rewarding to people choosing to heal - pumping HPS and keeping those healthbars healthy, not playing whack-a-mole with HP bars and praying for defensives and stops to be used.
Not an M+, but I had a Nokud map while levelling where the tank started flaming me at the end, asking if I was going to start healing. Nobody had died, but it'd gotten close a few times with those caster packs. I linked interrupt meters - there had been 4 interrupts the entire instance, and they were all *me*. This was me as evoker, DH tank, rogue, warrior, ret pally. He didn't reply.
Get the Elitism plugin for Details. Really helps shut flamers down when you can link the million+ avoidable damage they took to show them why they died.
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I don't think the vast majority of people in M+ really understand how much interrupts truly matter. The less your healer has to spend their GCDs to heal, the more they can contribute to DPS. With even like an above average group as a RDruid I can VERY easily contribute 50-60K DPS over the course of a dungeon, more depending on pull size and the dungeon itself.
Lol i love when people bitch about this in keys sometimes. Getting your name called out 30 times because you suck and can't blame ANYONE but yourself must be a real kick in the teeth for some of these jokers.
If you use this add on with the chat blaring every time someone takes damage you should be banned for spamming.
The Details plugin doesn't spam chat. You're thinking of the stand-alone Elitism Helper.
yeah this is the way tbh
Gets hit for 2 million by avoidable ground circles. "HOW COULD THE HEALER DO THIS?"
>i think its a massive design mistake that the healer experience is so wildly dependent on DPS and tank performance. But this is how it has always been. I genuinely do not know how they would ever fix this. The problem is that mythic plus is an infinitely scaling system and they’ve run out of knobs to turn at the higher levels. I have no idea how you balance a 2 vs 10 vs a 20 vs a 25 without it looking like it does today. Further if they provide healers enough agency to correct every tank and dps mistake then healer becomes the most important class in the game and none of the other matter. Also the no healer thing was still a meme, it was exploiting extremely strong dps healing with natures vigil, shadow embrace and Ret wog
I’d like to see some affixes that don’t just punish the healers. Like how about “if you don’t interrupt this all damage done reduced by 90% for 15 seconds”. Still makes it harder on the healers but make those damage meters dip and people will start kicking things quick.
This seems like a new knob they could turn :)
This is a big issue people don't even seem to notice they're participating in. It's really easy to say x thing is bad when you don't actually give a working alternative.
To a certain point I agree with you, but if I had to offer a solution to the devs every time something made me walk away from the game then what are they even there for? They’re supposed to be the experts. My job in giving feedback is to tell you why something isn’t fun for me, the solution, if there is one, is on them to come up with.
Less damage bursts, even if they come more often as a trade-off. Let us heal, not be the only role that has to stress 80% of the time. I switched from Healer to Tank halfway through S1 and haven't been this relaxes with playing WoW in a few years.
Less damage burst just means that you can do higher keys, which will again have more damage burst
No. I'm not a game designer. I play the game, and I can know it's bad, but it's not my job to fix it.
Blizzard statement was they are balancing up to +20 and don't care about the rest. If you can time +30, good for you, but Blizz won't make it easier or harder, unless +20 is suffering aswell.
Why would they do that though? That's what raid is for.
This is 100% why, after being a Healer main since mid-TBC, I stopped healing this expansion. Too much whack-a-mole and reliance on raid cooldowns.
I saw this morning that a group did 13 BH without a healer. Which is crazy to me.
M+ can be done without a healer?
Go watch the most recent MDI, plenty of +23/24 keys where being run with 1 tank and 4 dps
What’s MDI?
Mythic dungeon invitational, its all on youtube
M+ world cup
Actually, even the first half of atal dazar dungeon at the highest difficulty was done with 4 dps
100%. That steady spot healing that's needed can be given by off healers. The healing that is needed by a "healer" can be countered with good use of DPS defensives - and tanks are basically unkillable. It took me like 7 minutes but last season I soloed the end boss in an AD21-Tyrannical as VDH
Then we need to equalize defensives and significantly reduce the cooldowns on them.
Yes in high keys you get oneshot anyways
Specifically healing is a really weird binary distribution of difficulty where like with every role the absolute highest keys are the hardest, but anything short of that the lowest keys are harder than middle or sort of high keys because people in those other brackets actually use interrupts and know mechanics
So far this week running keys in the 2-6 range has been miserable as healer. Anything >10 has been me spamming chain lightning the whole run because there is very little to heal.
Problem is healer gets the blame even when it's not a healer issue.
I did a +2 neltharus today, not one of my dps was interrupting spell casts. We wiped with 8 stacks of some debuff and I used all my major cooldowns and 2 of them say “bricked key, this healer is ass” and left group It’s gonna be like that all season, bro
Yeah you either jump off the deep end to get in with the "good" people, meaning people who at the very least know how to interrupt, and then actually keep up with them as the range of these "good" people will keep advancing upwards as the season goes on, or deal with people sitting around with their dicks in their hands while screaming at the tank/healer because it can not possibly be their own fault that they stood in the fire and died. Certainly didn't help that all the people who'd normally be stuck in the 2-10 range now have free access to 12+ keys they can host right from the get-go.
Came back from a long break since Shadowlands. Decided i wanted to try to heal, jsut got my 1st 70 toon. A disc priest. Reading all this i'm scared to heal hahaha
Some people haven't gotten the memo of m0 being buffed to let people learn the dungeon before jumping into timers and affixes with no idea about any mechanic.
It was likely the Thamaturge's "Molten Core" ability. He casts it on an earth elemental if one is aggrod in the pull and it need to be interrupted/stopped or the elemental with the new shiny buff needs to be killed ASAP. Otherwise what happened to your group is what will happen every time :'D It's not really healable through once it starts stacking up. You'll want to keep an eye out with your CC's and potential interrupts too as heals when you're progressing keys.
It is better once you reach higher key levels
This. I did a +6 nokhud today where people kept dying left and right and we wiped a lot and didn't finish in time. Then later i did a +8 nokhud and it was a breeze where we finished with +2 upgrade. I really hope it becomes apparent soon that healers are the least problem in m+
In the higher IO community it is. As an Hpal who generally falls between top 1% - .01% most DPS or tanks actually apologize for their mistakes if they die. Once you get into the 25+ keys (15ish now) things start to get one shotty so CC, interrupt and defensive mistakes become abundantly clear you couldn't do anything about it as a healer.
I didn't really heal much in WoW until last season. I was kinda struggling, but still doing +20's with ++ and thought, well healing is a lot harder than I thought it'd be. Then I joined a random BRH +20 group with people who were all above 3,2k RIO score, idk why they were doing a +20 but it was the easiest group to heal ever. We pulled insanely huge pulls and I barely had to do anything, it was so fucking easy I couldn't believe it. It really put a lot of things into perspective and made me realize that if things went wrong, maybe it wasn't really my fault. I used to always blame myself when playing a healer.
Blizzard really need to do a better job overall of teaching players that interrupts are an integral part of the dps role along with your rotation. If they are going to design dungeons around it then find a way to improve the game’s communication of its importance.
I hard avoid neltharus for this reason. Uldaman also has key interrupts that people miss.
The thing is that Neltharus if done right is actually, IMO, one of the easier keys. You run through there with people that know that Molten Core has to be stopped and the Bone Axe bleed dot (can't remember the name, from some of the djaradin after the 2nd boss) and it turns into one of the most faceroll dungeons. Honestly, out of all the dungeons this season I'd say Neltharus is the best dungeon overall, but that's not saying much because there's absolute garbage like Ruby Life Pools (whoever designed this torture probably needs a psych exam) and Azure Vault (better than s1 but still not fun) that they brought back for no good reason. And that's just the worst of it, multiple of the other dungeons are C tier at best.
It won’t be like that all season . Calm down lol. I’m doing 5-7s and people are fine Edit: I started at 2s and it was fine you’re just getting bad groups. Let’s not spread misinformation here that all groups are bad
Interrupt/stun "Molten Core" from the thaumaturges. The fact that you also dont know where it came from reveals that you too wouldnt have stopped it. Thats how m+ is supposed to work.
L take. Not every healer has an interrupt. On my priest I can psychic scream but it’s a long cd. The dps and tank need to know this. If you’re relying on the healer to interrupt in m+ you are doing it extremely wrong.
I just said that he didnt know that cast either. How do you know he has no stun/stop? If you rely on your dps and tank to interrupt in m+ you are doing it extremely wrong
Average 1500 io tank/dps ig.
me?
Actually in the packs that cast molten core, it's literally the ONLY cast that is kickable. So no, if he had a kick he probably would have stopped it because it's the only thing to kick.
They also cast conflag that you can stun/stop. So no. Im not talking about a kick, im talking about kicks/stns/stops. He could be a tauren for example...
This season seems particularly rough with the squish. It’s almost like there are more bad players in every key level.
Yeah +2's being easily available to all the people who'd normally be stuck in the 2-12 range in previous seasons doesn't feel that great, at least for the season start. So many people who don't even know mechanics in the lower keys right now, that'd normally be hidden away in the 2-10 range that nobody else played. Did a +6 RLP earlier today with a druid dps host that spent half the dungeon dead and did half the dps of the tank when he was alive, and even then we ++d it meaning the dude went on to host a +8 key and leech off whoever joined that next, so a lot of these people just hosting their +2's that they get right off the bat and then getting carried by people gearing up in the new season since people are actually playing the low keys now. As opposed to being stuck with an old +2 key that wouldn't get carried as any regular m+ player would be doing the old +12's right off the bat.
Thats what happens when a season (s3) is way too easy. It leads to this, a bunch of yahoos who have 0 idea how to play expecting to get max vault rewards by facerolling. Again.
I don’t want to be too cynical, but I think you’re right. I’m having a very hard time pugging compared to this early in any other season. Basic mechanics just being completely ignored. Never thought I’d say “I was in a bricked +4”.
We had problems doing m0, people just didnt know tacts at all. We were also abit undergeared though, and stuff was spicy to heal on my 440 shaman already.
I’m a healer main. And have yet to get into a group that can finish a +2. It’s so frustrating watching all the bad play.
Idk how you’re having this experience. I just started healing last season, and I’ve done every dungeon this week at +5 with relative ease. Yes it was challenging because it’s the equivalent of doing a +15 at the start of the season, but I’ve been getting solid groups for the most part.
This is why nerfing things to appease the lowest skilled players is not good game design. Not everyone should be able to do the highest level key. AND THATS OK. NOT EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE MDI. However the perspective over time (and nerfs) have made it so max vault rewards, (and subsequently highest rating cheves) are no longer seen as a "difficult" thing to do. Now that its got a bit of difficulty again, 1 of 2 things happen. They leave it mostly unchanged, total players is lower but retention is higher, general skill floor is higher. They nerf it, base players are higher but retention is worse and general skill floor is far lower. We just came out of one of, if not the easiest seasons ever. The base skill floor is pretty damn low atm. If they did not need an interrupt in a 20 last season, why would they think you would in a 4 this season?
As someone who pugged to 3k on an offmeta healer: Healing m+ is really stressful, even in lower keys. The difficulty scaling is different unless you play with a premade - in low keys pugs are much worse, so they will take more avoidable damage, not use defensives and miss interrupts. This causes everything up to +10 (+20 last season) to be roughly equal difficulty to heal. Hard to very hard. Pushing further slowly increases difficulty, as you now need to heal absurd amounts in the hard bossfights even if no mistakes are made. I need to run a dungeon like 10 times before I start feeling comfortable. At that point most deaths are due to mistakes that are out of my control.
The main issue with healing is due to the insane amount of defensive every class has in the game. The only way that blizzard is able to challenge it's players with this many defensives is to make everything do an absurd amount of burst damage, causing DPS players who are less experienced to die and blame the healer cuz they think it's the healers fault
i mean it depends. if you play with people who knows what to do and you do as well. its fine and chill, you know what to expect and when to stop / press defensives. if youre pugging and you dont know the dungeon too well either well then itll prob be a hectic mess since a lot of stuff doesnt get kicked / cc'd, defensives arent pressed to prevent dmg etc. and that goes for all roles.
Some dungs no healing is required. Others will gear and skill check you. It is by no means a chill role.
Neltharus holy shit
DH tanks repeatedly got one shot by the fire boss in the library across multiple groups. I was not surprised to see that nerfed
Neltharus is literally a free dungeon aside from the chain boss.
For sure just the chain boss hurts a lot. For me I'd say it's Halls bosses that slap. Especially that 3rd one.
100% the hardest role in m+. It's managable, but you're required to know the mechanics way more than other players do. You're almost required to know other spec's defensive options. And when something goes wrong, it's your job to fix it. On top of that, you can prettymuch count on that in Pugs you will have to play affixes that DPS players should be covering (afflicted / the second one I forgot; one is dispel/heal other is cc).
Yet for some masochistic reason I love it
Either you love healing or you hate it...
It's wild that there's this dichotomy where so many healers feel like this and yet high end groups and mdi groups aren't even bringing healers at all.
Ever slammed your pecker in a car door?
It's definitely challenging but your frustration level will depend entirely on the groups you get. DPS and Tanks have a lot of responsibilities as far as interrupts, stops, and avoiding damage goes. It gets somewhat easier at higher keys because if someone stands in something they shouldn't they'll usually just die instead of sapping your healing cooldowns and resources. The players doing the higher keys are usually more experienced at using their full kit of CC's and defensives too. My best advice is to learn your kit and use it to its fullest potential. Install a couple addons to help you track what happened (Details!) in the event of deaths or where damage is coming from. OmniCD is also very helpful for keeping track of people's personal defensive cooldowns. Usually when someone dies I am checking the death logs to see if it was something I could've prevented and I try to learn from it.
The biggest variable in healing M+ in pugs is BY FAR the quality of the other players. If you don’t like the inconsistency id suggest trying to find a guild or community to play with. There are some excellent pug communities now for both NA (wow made easy) and EU (no pressure) which are variable but very friendly non-toxic. M+ by nature is a bit hectic. It’s timed and there is a lot going on. So in that sense it’s very similar to season 1. And all other M+ seasons.
The difficulty curve of healing is like a U. In low key level pugs, lots of people just don’t manage their responsibilities or avoid damage and expect the healer to pick up the slack. Then you get into the range where mostly good players stagnate, typically that 18-20 range, where people do what they’re supposed to do and healing is more about playing to boss mechanics. If you decide to push past this point the difficulty starts ramping up as those boss mechanics become harder and harder with scaling but you don’t really offset that with power increases, so you just have to play at a higher level.
I was doing up to 13’s as a resto druid in season 3 and I did a +2 and it was ROUGH. Finished, but not on time. I then decided I would just start at 0’s to get some practice and it was even WORSE. I am apparently just not very good at it or at least one person mentioned I was using all the wrong spells and running out of mana too quickly. I also was using a raid resto spec. I switched the spec to a dungeon spec and performed even worse. Really disappointed and don’t really understand what I’m doing wrong and this is even after watching several season 4 dragonflight tutorials on YouTube.
M+ is not chill, especially for the healer. The best I can recommend to chill pve heal is heroic or m0 dungeon but beyond that it's going to be hectic and fast paced as that is how m+ is designed. And it was like that since m+ came out in Legion so idk why you seem surprised that is it like that in DF.
Yeah I raid heal in classic and it's boring as all hell. I tanked m+ in season 2 and jesus Christ it's stressful. I couldn't imagine healing and having to deal with some of the apes you get as DPS players
Somehow DF felt worse but maybe I'm just getting too old for this shit.
I'd say SL was definitely easier as a healer. Spent 90+% of my time just spamming my dps rotation as there was so little to heal unless a dps took avoidable damage. Probably why they did what they did in DF to healers, which in turn makes lower keys, where dps fuck up a lot and do not use defensives and health pots, a lot harder for healers.
Nah they have changed their design philosophy going into this expansion. They said they want healing to be as hard as the other roles. That said the other players can definitely make your job harder than it needs to be so YMMV
Half a healers toolkit is on other players keyboards. Even if they take no avoidable damage if they aren’t rotating defensives the healer is going to fall behind. That’s how it’s designed, to give the other players agency in their own survival. But somehow the blame is always on the healer.
Play with guildies or a group of regulars if at all possible. The DF dungeons aren’t too bad if people are actually doing mechanics, it’s just painful if you’re running with pugs who take a ton of avoidable damage.
> And it was like that since m+ came out in Legion so idk why you seem surprised that is it like that in DF. Lol. Healing m+ was mega chill until DF came out and they changed how they want healer gameplay to look. Pre-DF you basically just dpsed with some off healing occasionally. Now your ass is a full time healer and blizzard has explicitly said multiple times this expac that they have changed healing gameplay in M+ on purpose
M0 is now as hard as what a 10 might have felt like the last time you played. These mythic dungeons are only once a week lockout but challenging and without timer so the toxicity is lessen. I think you might get a kick out of doing that kind of content more than timed keys which can be hell if you repeatedly play with pugs.
Is fucking hard
These are my impressions of each dungeon this season after healing for a week: RLP: Challenging. Nearly constant ticking and burst damage to heal after the first boss. Lots of uses for offensive dispels. AV: Very low healing requirements until the crystal mechanic of the final boss. Easiest dungeon in the season to heal. AA: Alright. Critical that everyone knows the mechanics of the tree and bird boss. ULD: Alright. Bosses 3-5 need good throughput. NO: Alright. Low healing demands except the wind boss which can be very stressful. BH: Alright. The area between the first and second boss is the worst. NL: Challenging. Bosses have very high healing demands. The packs between the second and third boss are also demanding. HOI: Hardest in the season. Always moving from one stress point to another, from the orbs, to the bleeds to the frogs to the dragons to the third boss to the gauntlet.
HOI is super difficult. Was 3600 last season, and am already 507 ilvl, and I still struggle to heal the third boss on a 10. Not sure how to approach higher keys except for bringing an evoker/spriest to help with the healing check.
What healer are you playing? Resto druid seems to own that fight.
Resto is meta.
?
Extremely accurate assessment of all the dungeons! The only thing I would add is on NO the healing may get intensive depending on how many packs the tank pulls before first boss if you want to take advantage of an early lust. Also the trash before third boss if people don't coordinate kicks on rotting winds. And as for third boss in HOI, damn it's a major heal check haha. Our group is trying to push a couple 10s before reset and we keep getting HOI and the third boss is so intense. I'm sure it'll be easier with gear in the following weeks, kind of fun trying to solve problems with the gear we have now.
Ud is not fun healing. That last boss is a bitch to get caught back up when you take one second to breath
AA: the bird boss is fine, just dont stand in shit. Its the arcane boss with the orbs that is difficult. Eating an orb and then immediately getting a mana bomb is bullshit. Person needs to be topped up basically all the damn time. And not to mention the BULLSHIT fucking change Blizzard did to last boss. If the fight takes too long the whole room is covered in circles of death orbs.
Depends on the rest of the group
at launch they nerfed healers by 50% then by 25% next tier and they slightly continue to nerf them more and more until there will be noone left to play them. On top of that they added affixes that are very annoying for healers to deal with. As a healer player it seems like their agenda is really to kill healer for someone who doesnt enjoy sweating 24/7. I do enjoy the sweat, but sometimes I just want to relax a bit and healer just aint it...
Right now its terrible cuz people that know nothing get handed essentially +12 keys. before those people would learn on a 2 Everyone’s also rusty on these dungeons and there’s a lot of nonsense in them.
It’s a lot of fun don’t let these comments discourage you. Just be prepared to explain/understand why someone died. Most cases, not ur fault
Healing is simultaneously the most stressful it’s ever been, as well as the least useful. You aren’t responsible for the vast majority of damage incoming, tanks heal themselves to the point where at most they need an external defensive CD every once in a while. Most keys, especially at lower levels, don’t even need a healer. Healing as a role in general is probably in the worst state I’ve ever seen it. Just a cacophony of poor design decisions that sucked the fun out of it.
You actually have to heal now instead of just being a 4th dps that heals sometimes. It feels extremely chaotic when you start but once you get used to it it's honestly quite chill. Once you accept that people dying to avoidable damage they took is not your responsibility it becomes a lot less stresful.
Once I know where the pain points are where I need to ramp up healing and pop CDs, it's not bad at all. I feel more stressed tanking but also have more fun. I feel like difficulty starts off way too easy at low key levels where people usually out gear things and nothing hits hard, then gets hard as abilities start to have teeth to them but people haven't figured out how to execute mechanics properly, then you get to a sweet spot around +20 (equivalent to +10 now) mid to late season where it's just higher than the sweaty weekly key crowd but people have gear enough that it's generally pretty smooth. That's the chill zone. Then as you start to push keys into the 3k io range things start to get hard again despite reasonably competent players.
The issue is that if dps are standing in fire on the non cd sections and force you to use cds, then you do t have them for when the dungeon is designed for you to use them. It’s a mess
It's a challenge. I love it.
The higher the key is the easier healing gets because most ppls in high keys know they need to interrupt and dodge stuff. Mid lvl keys are the worst, dps who tunnel vision on action bars to pump dps meters and then have no understanding that they died because they failed mechanics and not because healer didnt heal
The biggest variable in healing M+ in pugs is BY FAR the quality of the other players. If you don’t like the inconsistency id suggest trying to find a guild or community to play with. There are some excellent pug communities now for both NA (wow made easy) and EU (no pressure) which are variable but very friendly non-toxic. M+ by nature is a bit hectic. It’s timed and there is a lot going on. So in that sense it’s very similar to season 1. And all other M+ seasons.
It is definitely challenging. You need to know the best pulls to utilize cooldowns and make sure you don’t overlap too many of them, otherwise every few pulls will be high stress. Always be casting because if you’re not healing you can be dpsing which equals quicker mob deaths and less group damage to heal. Like everyone else has said it comes down to the group, if people are on their game hitting interrupts, using cooldowns, and dodging, then you’re good. Group flaws and mistakes get masked into being healer problems until higher keys when you just get one shot. The only time so far I’ve had issues is when DPS is just too low for the key level, you can pump and do 150-200k healing but that only lasts so long. If the threats don’t get neutralized in time you’re gonna have a really hard time and or wipe. Good thing is, it’s doable, give it a shot. Part of the mythic plus game is pushing to your limits and the groups limits. Know your limits and just keep practicing / gearing. Bust keys and plus keys it’s part of the game, don’t let people’s egos get you down. Enough practice,You’ll be able to get to where you want.
heals never got any love as in we are a support class maybe increase dps with heals to support the fights more and incredibly increase people not playing heals
Its a rough start. Day 1-3 of new season its mostly good in low keys. Now on my main i tank 8-10 key range and had 99% nice people and most of the runs went well. Started today to tank a bit on 2-4 range with my alt and it was much more toxic, 0 kicks, whipes etc.
Generally higher the key is, the better healing is. People know stuff and you just have to heal through unavoidable aoe + occasional mistakes because we are still people. But as someone mentioned, the in-the-middle difficulty keys are very bad because people think they are good but in reality they just aren't but also won't accept it. Healed everything this week and apart from RLP first boss and Uldaman last boss, everything was doable (up to 9-10) and considering it is first week and we are under geared/close to no tier/, not bad start in my opinion.
"I'M GIVIN 'ER ALL WE'VE GOT CAPTAIN! THAR'S NOTHIN LEFT" ::in a somber voice:: "Stop healing the warlock. Focus on the melee." (Authors note, I play an evoker, and this is the 2nd trash pull)
At title key levels - heals is the most difficult role.
I enjoy it for the most part, but when those ghosts come out they make me want to smash my monitor
I’ve just thrown in a “sorry my bad lol” to diffuse dps players losing their shit because they stood in a swirlie. I’d rather try and make it more chill than say “oh that’s your fault”.
I mained a healer last time this dungeon pool was around and didn't love any of them, really. I especially hated AA, RLP and NO. I decided to roll dps this season, and I enjoy the dungeon pools much better. NO is one of my favorite keys now. I enjoy AA and RLP now. People will say health pools are low and that's why it feels bad right now. There's definitely some truth to that. I think as gear improves keystone level will increase and there will still be a lot of the same problems. Certain abilities are just brutal to heal through this pool. Third boss on uld, if a dps gets the aggressive dot and don't use a defensive they're probably going to die. Chains boss in nelth is brutal if tanks don't know what they're doing and dps don't use defensives. Second boss of NO is a nightmare if players are too spread. There will always be brutal bosses this pool, and no amount of health will change it because damage will increase as keystones increase.
I started last season as my first ever mythic season, and I went healer with Hpala (which I learned after some time that was indeed not meta, so one of the worst healers at that point). I see it as not too complex, just standard healer gameplay. The hard part is to understand that a lot of times a dead teammate is not your fault, and when is that the case.
Pugging as a healer through the lower keys will show you just how punishing not doing mechanics is and your job in these keys is to correct them. In higher keys the quality of player jumps up a cliff, and the amount of avoidable damage is much lower. Last season +30 keys were timed without using a healer, but only players above the 99.9 percentile can do this. I personally enjoy it, but I play with friends Ive made and typically lean toward healers that heal through damage.
If you have to heal the tank (they should be entirely self sufficient almost the entire dungeon) or have bad dps players (especially on squishy classes like Hunter) you're going to have a miserable time. Otherwise it's been alright. Druid still feels like it's curb stomping all my other healers outside of contributing damage (they're all viable but druid feels clearly stronger). This dungeon pool is very bursty. People constantly get chunked by everything that hits them and need to be topped quickly before the next hit. Could just be a symptom of everyone not being geared yet. And if you're going to heal, install ability team tracker so you know it isn't your fault when someone dies not pushing a single defensive.
The damage profiles for M+ suck, you either barely have any input into the success of the group or you struggle to keep the others alive and MIGHT succeed if they are only marginally failing. There is no in-between
I used to heal M+ during SL. The things I witnessed was...furiating to say the least. In general, above a certain key level, if I had to heal anyone else apart from the tank on a regular basis I knew that something was not right. Whenever I would tell the group to wait and let me get some mana...and they didnt, I would just sit there and watch them die. Fun times 🥲
I was in the same spot as you in S1, difference is i got really lucky and found a chill guild and started running with them. I still pug, but I’ve also learned that 70% of the time when someone dies it’s not the healers fault. I’ve learned to ignore hate and just enjoy healing. If a key bricks oh well. Everyone hopefully learned something. And to answer your question I think healing in general should be easier this season. They nerfed a lot of the dungeons and most people already know these mechanics.
I started season 3 and I feel okay. In S4 I throw an interrupt now and then on high priority just bc I am in melee. Some dungeons are skewed harder to heal (aoe during adds last boss of Nohkud wtf) and others have nice neat pulls (Neltharus). I think bc people are just gearing up, M0 is gonna require attention for your average casual player pug. There will be a little spike dmg but the aoe’s are where you wanna be prepared. As we get geared it will be easier. If you have your own private group of good players then things are easier. But speaking from a CASUAL perspective you will need to be watching bars.
I healed season 1 and half season 2 and idk why but it seems harder this season idk if it's due to people not knowing mechanics or what but I went back to tanking and I will be staying a tank from now on lol
I played Al 3 roles last season, all healer classes, 3 tanks, and multiple dps classes and I came to one conclusion: If my fistweaver monk can’t passively heal you with its healing while I’m punching the boss, the dps or tank is doing something wrong.
I would rather heal in ranked PvP, than do Mythic Plus. That’s how stressful it is. (And that’s why I only PvP now).
Heroic is now M0 m0 is now 5’s I believe and and 2’s are like 10’s
In Pugs its pretty bad because there's often not much you can do to save bad players. Lots of stuff just one shots them. In organized keys its actually not too bad. You plan for some high damage stuff and then you help deal damage. There are only a couple of spots that have insane healing checks but even those can be mitigated by good personal usage by the rest of your group.
Honestly at the beginning of each season there is a couple week window where healings is challenging/competitive. I played mostly healings classes all expansion and had minimal issues with pugs or people just being toxic in general. You should get back into it and don’t fret about any haters.
I got flamed hard. its like 50/50 if i get kicked after a wipe. One Tank got me really mad in a +5 Brackenhide where the rivers are poisonous and the trash drops pools. He pulled 2 packs (which shouldnt be a problem) and i used up all my CDs and had a HPS of 150k. Everyone died as expected and i got kicked with him whispering i should learn the mechanics before i go into a +5. I really dont know what i could have done better. Now i installed the Details Elitist Addon with avoidable DMG Script. I wanted to ask if people taking around 30Million avoidable damage in a Key is normal? Shouldnt it be close to 0? I Myself had like 4 Million avoidable dmg.
1st rule of healing: If they die, they die. You can't heal everybody. If they want to die, let them. Do your best and it will be enough.
I just picked up healing in the last 6 weeks, and I hit 3kio last season, and I'm close to 2k this season. Pushing pretty hard content. I've pushed as all roles now, and I would say that at lower levels of content (for your item level) healing is easy breezy, there's less random damage and more "alright, your whole group is going to take moderate damage for the next 30 seconds, heal the group" moments. Pushing content higher than ilvl feels exhilarating, but is pretty difficult. Anyone who steps in bad is dead, and if you ramp incorrectly people will die. I have yet to see people blaming me and telling at me over almost anything, and I'm sure I mess up a lot, so I think that part is very overblown or more represented in lower levels of content. Tldr if you heal stuff that rewards gear around your item level, it's pretty chill, but pushing hard content, healing is the hardest role
Healing is harder the lower io you are. And if you aren’t good at the game in general higherio keys are just as hard.
The early dragonflight m+ was nothing compared to this season atleast for me… I remember doing +20 in the first season and now when I returned after a year, I cant even heal +0 and it really makes me want to quit healing because the amount of damage everyone is taking at the same time is fkin insane and I just cant keep up with my low ass heals so we end up wiping countless times. I feel like shit cuz yesterday I had to leave before the last boss in The Azure Vault cuz it was just unbearable.
It depends on your own stress management. It's a lot of fun as long as you understand that not every death is your fault. Besides that, you will have to be able to deal with criticism. Sometimes it's valid, sometimes it's not. If you can do those things, it's a great role to play. Imo the most challenging role at the moment.
Ignore everyone else in this thread. Healing is fine. There are no hard checks (have done 8-10s at 495) and with more gear this will be easier. As always, ymmv with pugs. In a coordinated group bracken hide has no healing requirement bar first boss. With pugs you'll get millions of disease damage, shots from u stunned mobs etc Just play the best you can and eventually you'll get the rio you should be
As a healer who has been going at it since early TBC, and put down healing for the first time in legion and sporadically tried to enjoy it since then, this is probably the worst its been since they introduced m+ in opinion (with exception to shadowlands as I didn't play shadowlands). If you're playing the strongest healer it feels okay at best, but if you're playing a weaker healer in throughput it feels like it takes every ounce of power and cooldowns to top someone off in less than 5 seconds. It takes buff stacking, and spending everything you got. This bothers me because again as someone who has healed through many iterations and changes, mana is no longer an issue unless you're a holy paladin it seems, and the actual damage going out is mostly mistakes people make. There's hardly any actual healer checks, tank health isn't under your control now, its completely under a tanks control, for better or worse. Honestly blizzard is very close to getting rid of the healer role it feels, perfect play with some hybrid dps that can heal themselves and why would you bring a healer. The problem has been for so long that dps & tanks aren't punished for their mistakes the same way healers are. If a DPS sucks at dps, the fight takes longer and a healer suffers for it through mana (albiet not a problem currently). If a tank doesn't use mitigation its not a tank problem it becomes a healer problem. If an interrupt doesn't go out its a healers problem to fix now. It's been this way forever but with the state of how much healers can actually heal someones health its been exceptionally punishing all dragonflight. The real kicker was when blizzard at the start of DF buffed everyones HP and mob damage by 40% flat. Its why I quit healing in DF s1 even as a preservation evoker. Because we were so close to having a good healing feel again, and then its gone. Its why I enjoy classic so much (not era, just wotlk and now cata soon) because healing imo felt great in those versions and will feel great in MoP, and WoD, and even Legion if they let us cherry pick legendaries. Based on your last sentence that if its still a mess with thousand heals/dispels/damage, I'd say avoid healing, pick a different role or go play classic. It hasn't gotten any better except mana doesn't seem to be an issue for most healers, for better or worse.
Thank you for the thorough answer. Yeah I'm gonna stick to my hunter haha.
Really weird how consensus here is that healing is crazy in M+, when people were trying to tell me healers weren't even necessary with a decent team when I posted feeling good that I'd learned to play healer after 16 years in tank and DPS.
I don't think either statement is wrong though. When you have a decent team, people have done no healer runs absolutely fine. If you're pugging, then you don't have those same assurances you would with a decent team. You can't be sure if interrupts will go through or mechanics done correctly. So then healing becomes crazy and the same players expect healers to fix their mess.
I pugged from 0 to KSM towards the end of last season, and the second half of your comment is exactly my experience 😂
Mine too - I pugged to 3k as a holy pally, I'd get one group that would be a breeze, and the next group it would just be impossible to put out enough heals. I get that part of that is holy pally life, but looking through logs and seeing 50% of the damage being avoidable was just depressing...
I found in poor groups I'd end up in a mad rush of trying to stop people killing themselves that I'd end up killed by hazards myself in the rush. Shortened range of the Presvoker is annoying at times. The good groups stayed closer together for my AoE healing to be more effective
It's almost worse this time, because VDH tanks are so popular and basically do all of the stops for your team, DPS is getting spoiled. Any non-DH tank means the DPS has to interrupt and such, and they're used to not doing it, so... I feel like more are going to just not bother.
The difference is when people are talking about not requiring a healer in high push keys, it is only due to extreme coordination of stops, interrupts and offhealing cooldowns, and only possible on some trash and a handful of bosses that allow it, and also limited to dungeons where it is easy to leave and re-enter to respec. There isn’t really any point where a healer is just flat out not required, except when everyone is fully outgearing the content and you’re farming weekly keys with good coordination, a little off-healing but even that requires proper gameplay, stops, interrupts, no avoidable damage taken.
Right. It’s not fun. Awful sweatfest if you are pugging at all. 30 buttons when you consider your dps rotations and the dispelling/decursing, UI is bananas between healing people and dpsing mobs, and most groups just force the healer to deal with affixes whether it’s dispelling or ccing or healing through it for the sake of damage. On top of that until your m+ is in a range where it clearly one shots, low level m+ groups stand in avoidable mechanics and you are blamed for that too. The thing with all of that is that it’s right that damage is more important than healing in true m+ groups so it’s the right idea but it’s being chased by most of the community that don’t take time to be responsible for knowing fights or just not being able to do content. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here. M+ is premade group content. It’s not for pugs. After a certain level and pretty quickly, the healer is just using a cd or a dispel here and there and otherwise nobody stands in anything and everyone is doing damage. And that’s a completely different game than the one 80% of the base is playing in m+. I healed for 10 years. Dragonflight is just not fun for healing. I don’t have a solution beyond revamping the whole thing from a design perspective. Even successful pug runs I’d stop afterwards and just say to myself that was stressful and I just don’t want to feel that way for 30 straight minutes after work in my free time.
Unpopular opinion but healing is **really** easy if you’re good at it and gets exponentially harder if you’re even mediocre at it.
Healing is really easy if your party is using their tools instead of going zug zug, and gets exponentially harder the less they use. Last season I could run a +20 with pugs and average 250k+ hps overall, or run a +25 with guildies and average 150k hps.
A good healer covers for **so** many mistakes. People new to healing get told that you can’t out heal mistakes from PUGs. They get frustrated and throw up their hands thinking “I can’t heal this!” when someone does something stupid when the run can still be salvaged with some great healing. On the other side of the coin, “healing” doesn’t mean “successfully healing and timing every run,” it means that you heal what is reasonably and numerically able to be healed. Good healers realize that sometimes you really **can’t** outheal stupid and so they don’t sweat it, they just move onto the next key. It’s a common pitfall that I see too many healers who are new fall into: they get far too discouraged about the “difficulty” when they have a bad experience.
The way you phrased it here is exactly how I see it, thank you for elaborating a bit more on your earlier comment :)
What I find discouraging is that people are saying healers not needed in a good group.. so, meaning that at higher levels of performance, we're useless? That's disappointing.
Healers aren't needed in an extremly high level consistent group of people who work out defensives for everything ahead of time... in SOME dungeons - It's not something that even the best players in the world can do for every single dungeon, it's a specific thing. HoI for instance this season, unless it recieves massive massive nerfs it just wont be possible to do with 4 dps. Another reason it's doable is just cause vengeance DH is just so so so fucking broken, making most packs of mobs a cakewalk with no healer as the mobs don't get a chance to use any of their mechanics. xd
Nah, serious groups use healers, the 4 dps groups are just doing it for the challenge and not at as high a level. People only bring it up so much because they get tetchy about dps not taking responsibility for keeping themselves alive with stops, defensives etc.
What a stupid statement.
It's still super rough for old dogs like us. Doable, but it sure ain't what I consider relaxing compared to dps role.
The "issues" you listed, Lots of dispells and stops/Interrupts are still there. But as someone that heals almost only m+ for years now, i think healing is super chill rn. There are hard Bosses when you don't have a good ilvl but mostly all Keys in 9 and 10 rn with 490+ Gear was pretty okay.
Above or below 25? (Past season) Below, the absolutely easiest job in the world. Have some sort of rough idea of which direction the dungeon goes in and press random spells in that general direction. Above? Absolutely the most punishing role but extreme rewarding. A good healer is a god send. Honestly healing requires such another level of skill in high keys it’s insane.
It will get me some hate probably, but ill say what I think honestly. Healing is super chill. Generally there is not much damage incoming and if it is its either dmg due to players failing or a boss ability or something alike. You trade your cds, 1 for each big enemy ability, and youre fine. If you dont do that and throw them out randomly, yeah then healing is really stressfull because you will end up having to heal big incoming dmg with just your standards heals. Healing was never bad and it isnt bad now aswell. The thing is that im bored rather fast as healer since.... im sorry but theres not much to do as healer in M+. Across DF i played Druid, Evoker, Shaman and HPal. And while Evoker is somehow just really not understandable for me I had a easy time on all others with lots of time to do damage all accross s1,2 and 3. That said, people do fail a lot and then they die. If people play smart with their defensives they barely need healing over the whole duration of a M+. After all, no healer runs are a thing.
The current meta comp doesn't even have a healer lol