Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

World of Warcraft: Dragon Desperation

Late Bloomer

Scholar
Joined
Apr 7, 2022
Messages
2,820
I played some Legion dungeons during timewalking and they suck.
I don't understand why do some people praise it so much.
Even WoD has more enjoyable dungeons.

Timewalking and sucks go hand in hand. I dont recall people praising Legion dungeons all that much. I felt the dungeoneering in Legion was hit or miss. Here are some I liked

Black Rook Hold
Darkheart Thicket
Halls of Valor
Maw of Souls

Not sure if those are on Timewalkings rotation or not as Shadowlands turned me off to the game quite drastically
 

Sarathiour

Cipher
Joined
Jun 7, 2020
Messages
3,262
Healing Touch Rank 4 has a 3 second cast time and still gets a normal healing coefficient. Talented it becomes 2.5. With Idol of Health (ranged slot, which Druids can only use for Idols), it becomes 2.35 (while still retaining the coefficient of a 3 sec heal). If you throw Wushulaay's Charm of Nature on top of that (40% faster and 5% cheaper Healing Touches for 15 sec, 3 min cd), it drops all the way down to 1.68 seconds per cast. There is also Swiftmend, Regrowth, and NS+Healing Touch, of course. Regrowth has a trash coefficient on the instant heal portion, but it does heal over 1000 points base.

Don't take it personally, but your post was such a throwback in time of druid coping that I could not help but laugh. My question was more akin to what are qualifying as an effective healer in raid.

The common answers is to go by recount of effecient heal, and drood suck at it. The baseline of flash heal is 1,5 sec and that's how most of the healing is done in vanilla, because it's very rarely an attrition battle, and more often a reflex question. You have to resort to a fucking trinket and you're still slower than a pal and a priest.

I don't know your experience about the game, but i'm gonna give you mine if we want to argue in good faith what a raid group looked like.
I played vanilla only on private (I was obviously too young for the realease), so that mean that tool were already existing regarding UI and theorycraft. I cleaned the whole game as an officier in a casual guild, which was raiding around 3 time per week. The difficulty never rally came from the encounter, but from the logistic of gathering at least 30 non-retarde people thric a week. In such group, the effective healing is going to be done mostly by three people, the other are here for back up and softening aoe and fuckup. You're traditionally bringing around 8 healer.

I also played a bit with a more serious formation on the server later. Skill gap was obviously more restrained, but that just mostly mean they took less healer and you're still not taking more than two drood at best, and one of them was an autist who was trying to max the dps of feral drood in PvE.
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
If you want 1.5 second heal spam, it's usually Flash Heal by Priests or LHW by Shamans. Nothing stops you from having 2 Druids spam R4 Healing Touch and staggering it (which can be enforced with some addon/macro code, iirc) if you want rapid heal spam, and R4 Healing Touch at least has the benefit of a monster +healing coefficient relative to its cast time. For reflexive heals, there is Swiftmend, NS+Healing Touch, and Recombobulator trinkets (which adds 100% of +healing to its effect), which are all real options. Most of the time though, as a Druid you start casting your heal before anything that looks like a big hit comes in, so that the heal lands right after. That's the classic way a lot of big damage blows were healed: Druid began casting his biggest heal before the attack even lands so that it immediately goes off right after the damage and heals the tank for a giant number. Sometimes there's freak damage spikes, and you use emergency options for those.

As for Paladins, Flash of Light is a 1.5 second heal, yes, but it's also got very crappy base heal size, but at least as a Paladin you can instantly follow your 1.5 sec Flash of Light heal with a Holy Shock and/or use Divine Favor for guaranteed crit heal. So if you need to pump out a reflexive heal in 1.5+ seconds Paladins can probably cover it, but if it's naked Flash of Light it's a pretty crappy heal. With +2000 healing a Paladin will output around a 1350 size Flash of Light. FoL+HS=2688 size. Throw in Divine Favor and it reaches 4k.

With +800 healing, a pre-timed (or NS) max Healing Touch does 3800, and a Regrowth+Swiftmend does over 2900. Trinketed high speed R4 Touch + Swiftmend on Rejuv = 3k.

In short, if the Druid is a good healer he can smoke a Paladin. If he mindlessly spams max heals he's probably trash, randomly overhealing the tank and missing all the emergency windows, not to mention developing bigger mana issues.

Paladins mainly have the benefit of being a more low-skill healer that doesn't require gear to get going. For every Paladin heal there is, though, there is a Priest heal that does it better, aside from Lay on Hands.
 
Last edited:

Sarathiour

Cipher
Joined
Jun 7, 2020
Messages
3,262
Recombobulator trinkets
real options
Come on.

You have a view of the healing gameplay completely centered around healing the MT. The thing is that every fucking healer in this game can do this job, precasting is the ABC of healing in vanilla. You don't even need a lot of stuff to be able to top the MT tank after an heavy blow, it's mostly a question of timing. And besides, there is only an handful of encounter where the MT is taking any kind of dangerous damage.

The heal that matter is mostly done on the raid, and druid just does not fight on equal footing against paladin and priest. Thing are a bit different (and generally more interesting) on the horde side because healing wave is something more chaotic. Healing 3k on your average raider is mostly going to end up in OH.
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
Somehow I have the sneaking suspicion that if my last post were exclusively about raid healing your post would be claiming that we need to address MT healing. Anyway, I already explained that you have R4 Healing Touch and Regrowth, maybe Swiftmend if they already have a Regrowth or Rejuvenation on them. The point I just made regarding the Paladin's heals healing a tiny amount of damage also still applies. If you're super thirsty for faster instant heals, you can even cast R3 Healing Touch, which will lose you 30% of your +healing for being a level 14 spell, but you still end up with 50% of +healing (before multipliers) on a 1.85 second cast because it's originally the coefficient of a 2.5 second cast. Roughly comparable to Flash of Light heals if you're both over 1000 +healing, although here the Paladin pulls out ahead slightly in total heal (and cast speed) unless you're both at over +2000 healing. You can also AoE heal with Tranquility, which is a great way to get /gkicked. Seriously though, R4 Healing Touch, Regrowth, and Swiftmend are your friends here. But for the most part, this is the Priest's department more than the Druid's.

Horde side if you're healing random members of the raid, the Shaman tops with his Chain Heals.

Any which way you slice it, you don't really need a Paladin's heals. You use them because he can heal, but not because his healing is so good. LoH aside, the Paladin gets outperformed at his healing job pretty easily once the Priest and Druid solve their mana issues and the tank solves his threat generation issues. He's more a utility pickup.
 
Last edited:

Sarathiour

Cipher
Joined
Jun 7, 2020
Messages
3,262
Somehow I have the sneaking suspicion that if my last post were exclusively about raid healing suddenly you'd claim that we need to address MT healing.

recount of effecient heal

Come on, that's why I asked and tried to be explicit on my view.


maybe Swiftmend if they already have a Regrowth or Rejuvenation on them.
No way in hell you're going to upkeep regrowth/rejuv on even 10 raider.

The point I just made regarding the Paladin's heals healing a tiny amount of damage also still applies
Most of the heal you do on raider need to be around 500-1000 hp. Just check the log, or prove me wrong. Caster and fury warrior have a shitty hp pool, you're rarely going to be over 3k hp. An no, we're not going to pretend that everybody is playing under titan flask,, heart of hakkar and whatnot.

but you still end up with 50% of +healing (before multipliers) on a 1.85 second cast because it's originally the coefficient of a 2.5 second cast.
As I said, I did not play with the current blizzard version of vanilla, but if that's true, something is very wrong , it should not even be 20% of healing power.

I'm not saying that you can't have fun and play druid, vanilla is quite easy, you don't even need to bring 40 retard to clean the PvE. Druid is a decent heal, and probably way more fun to play than a paladin. If you're good, you can absolutely cover the same role as a priest or pal, and even best them if they're not that good themselves. But you are , and always will be (as long as vanilla is concerned) a challenger, you just don't have the same busted tool as your counterpart.
Which can be cool in itself, we don't need to autisticly min-max everything.

edit: by the way drood also have a few niche fight tailored for them, such as chromaggus and maexna
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
Somehow I have the sneaking suspicion that if my last post were exclusively about raid healing suddenly you'd claim that we need to address MT healing.

recount of effecient heal

Come on, that's why I asked and tried to be explicit on my view.
I'm not really sure which healing role you were talking about with efficient heals, but sure. Let's chalk this down to miscommunication/misreading.

maybe Swiftmend if they already have a Regrowth or Rejuvenation on them.
No way in hell you're going to upkeep regrowth/rejuv on even 10 raider.
You're right. You don't. The main scenario for Rejuv is a Warlock maybe, and the main scenario for a Regrowth isn't that you were doing upkeep but that within the past 20 seconds you (or another Druid) had used Regrowth as a quick instant heal and now he needs another instant heal so you just Swiftmend. It isn't something you try to keep on raid members, but something you take advantage of if it was already on them. It is possible to Rejuv+GCD+Swiftmend though. That gets you a solid heal in 1.5 seconds, but then you still have another GCD to go before you can heal anyone else. If you want to give someone a big heal in 1.5 seconds flat though, it works.

The point I just made regarding the Paladin's heals healing a tiny amount of damage also still applies
Most of the heal you do on raider need to be around 500-1000 hp. Just check the log, or prove me wrong. Caster and fury warrior have a shitty hp pool, you're rarely going to be over 3k hp. An no, we're not going to pretend that everybody is playing under titan flask,, heart of hakkar and whatnot.
Wtf? Everyone should be on a Well Fed buff + Prayer of Fortitude + Gift of the Wild + Greater Blessing of Kings. Possibly an Imp's Blood Pact buff too, if you have SM/Ruin Warlocks in raid. Maybe add Elixirs of Fortitude while you're at it (just +120 max health for 1 hour, but cheap and stacks with all the other buffs). If they have sub-3k health with all those buffs, something is wrong.

but you still end up with 50% of +healing (before multipliers) on a 1.85 second cast because it's originally the coefficient of a 2.5 second cast.
As I said, I did not play with the current blizzard version of vanilla, but if that's true, something is very wrong , it should not even be 20% of healing power.
Downranking coefficients were introduced in Burning Crusade. In vanilla the only penalty coefficient is the 3.75% penalty per level requirement beneath 20. That's why Rank 4 Healing Touch is a thing. However, I did miscalculate the penalty, so it turns out that the Druid actually gets 55.357% of +healing with R3 Healing Touch (pre-multiplier). That means that at 1150 +healing the R3 Healing Touch already outputs a bigger heal than a Paladin's Flash of Light with the same coefficient. So, you can do that also, if you've got a burning need for a high speed heal. R3 Healing Touch with its penalty still comes out to a higher +healing coefficient per second than the Paladin gets with Flash of Light.

The other appeal of spamming Rank 3 Healing Touch is that with 5/5 Tranquil Spirit it comes to 99 mana which IIRC means that if you use a Burst of Knowledge trinket it should cost zero mana. That gives you around 10 seconds of 0 mana cost casting, which should let you trigger the 5 second rule without stopping with casting heals. It also helps you trigger Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon, but that trinket is only worth contemplating if you plan on spending most of the encounter spamming high speed heals, and when you downrank that aggressively that consistently, probably mana is not your issue.

I'm not saying that you can't have fun and play druid, vanilla is quite easy, you don't even need to bring 40 retard to clean the PvE.
I'm firmly of the opinion that if you can clear that raid with 20, you should clear it with 20. The fewer raiders per raid, the more loot per raider, and the fewer repetitions of that raid. It also means that the raid becomes a bit more challenging and a bit less braindead.

Druid is a decent heal, and probably way more fun to play than a paladin. If you're good, you can absolutely cover the same role as a priest or pal, and even best them if they're not that good themselves. But you are , and always will be (as long as vanilla is concerned) a challenger, you just don't have the same busted tool as your counterpart.
The point I'm making is that if you're all good and geared, the Paladin's healing capabilities simply fall behind the rest. Ultimately Paladins are the weakest healer and more of a utility pickup.

Which can be cool in itself, we don't need to autisticly min-max everything.
Since you're discussing offbeat playstyles, meme spec viability, and the like, I should probably point out that any time you try meme spec shit you should get ready to min-max and optimally play the fuck out of it. That's generally the only way you make those things even semi-viable.
 
Last edited:

Keshik

Arcane
Joined
Mar 22, 2012
Messages
2,115
Preorders are up, claiming it'll be released this year, a lot sooner than I'd expected but probably will get delayed.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
Preorders are up, claiming it'll be released this year, a lot sooner than I'd expected but probably will get delayed.
They cut and ran from Shadowlands even before it launched, which is why patches were 9+ months apart. They will likely disappoint, but they have had adaquet time and resources for an expansion that doesn't introduce any major new systems. (I don't consider a UI rework or different mount physics to be major systems. And Blizzard hasn't considered crafting as a major system since Wrath.)
 
Last edited:

TedNugent

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2013
Messages
6,334
Major systems?

What qualifies for this?

There was an abundance of superfluous, shitty systems in Shadowlands. Then you had Azerite and the visions in Battle. Legendaries in Legion, and M+. Ashran Valley and so forth. Warfronts or whatever they were called in bofa.

If M+ doesn't qualify as a system, what the hell does? How about the entire Covenant progression system, or Mage Tower, or Torghast? Or pet battling? Or garrisons?

Christ, the fewer of these systems, the better, I think. That's been the major problem. What their development team seems to be good at is core class design and raid encounter design. And what people seem to desire is content, not systems. If the game is fundamentally fun to play, and it usually is, where is the need for extraneous bullshit, like a "system?" The reason these things usually fail and are discarded at the end of each expansion pack or patch cycle is because most of it isn't good enough to stick. It effectively becomes a testing ground.

In fact I think the only thing they've introduced lately that has actually stuck has been mythic+. And pet battling, I think, was a big hit. And for some asinine reason, mission tables are still a thing.

The reason they use so little resources to develop or integrate crafting is that it's dreadfully boring. Painful, at times. Mission tables are retarded gameplay but at least it doesn't take a lot to manage outside of logging in daily.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
If they were willing to take some risks, raiding wouldn't be the defacto preferred endgame PvE content for all expansions past and present.

I also think it's crazy that they slap 12 bosses in one environment and expect people to be playing that for 9-12 months. I would much rather see a raid tier where your helm comes from something like the Chromie instance and there's a couple of raid instances with 4 or 5 bosses.

Maybe even get to a point where players trust them to make something like islands or warfronts that don't suck and those can be primary content for a patch once in a while.
 
Last edited:

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
Attrition and interviewing is going so poorly that Blizzard just bought another studio to bulk hire people to work on WoW patches.

There was a time when you needed years of industry experience and shipped projects to get past the initial HR resume sifting.
 

Kem0sabe

Arcane
Joined
Mar 7, 2011
Messages
13,076
Location
Azores Islands
Attrition and interviewing is going so poorly that Blizzard just bought another studio to bulk hire people to work on WoW patches.

There was a time when you needed years of industry experience and shipped projects to get past the initial HR resume sifting.

Not sure the game can survive another shit expansion, survive as in having AAA resources from Activision, with each failed expansion and subscription downturn, the head office must be thinking "not worth it".
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
There was a time when you needed years of industry experience and shipped projects to get past the initial HR resume sifting.
this is the reason current blizzard is the way it is fyi
too hard to get hired = only friends + family get hired
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
There was a time when you needed years of industry experience and shipped projects to get past the initial HR resume sifting.
this is the reason current blizzard is the way it is fyi
too hard to get hired = only friends + family get hired
There's a subtlety there though. When they started out this strategy worked really well. The friends that were hired had a shared vision for the end product and a mindset of personal improvement to go from janitor to game artist.

After they were forced to rapidly scale hiring due to the success of WoW's launch, it was a poison pill because the referrals were coming from people who cared more about activism than games.
 
Joined
Feb 3, 2022
Messages
944
Here's your Dracthyr body customization:

Swjq0LD.gif
 

Reever

Scholar
Patron
Joined
Jul 4, 2018
Messages
534
Hey, man. Leave Blizzard alone. Last time they added this level of customization they marketed it as a new race.
maxresdefault.jpg
 

Delterius

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2012
Messages
15,956
Location
Entre a serra e o mar.
i was having a good time on legion until the holy light priest space ship showed up and i remembered this universe is kinda dumb

suramar was still comfy though and that's the absolute best you can hope for in modern wow
 

copebot

Learned
Joined
Dec 27, 2020
Messages
387
I skipped all of Shadowlands after raiding mythic for legion/BFA because the corruptions patch was just such a terrible experience, on top of the awful grinds for benthic gear and all the islands. By the previews alone it was obvious that the covenants would be miserable. I have no idea if SL was grindier or not, but I got the impression from what little I read was that it was actually quite a bit tougher to keep up and that the mythic population is lower than it's been before.

Seeing the new talent system makes me a little bit interested in this expansion, but I don't think there's any way I'd go back to raiding. The actual raids were always fun, and doing 100+ pulls on hard bosses is something that I have some good memories of, but I definitely do not have good memories of the many hours of chores in some of the later patches needed to stay current. I'm not totally sure why they decided that raid logging was bad and had to be crushed.
 

RaggleFraggle

Ask me about VTM
Joined
Mar 23, 2022
Messages
990
My goodwill evaporated long ago. Terrible writing, greedy corporate malfeasance, sex offenses… it’s too much.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom