Healing and fun, part 3

Today, the dramatic conclusion. Part 3 of the Healing and Fun series. Weep for the future. And check out part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already.

Idea 3: Damage should be preventable

Discipline Priests are currently the only healing spec able to actively prevent damage. Given how quickly and how tenaciously the Priest player base has embraced the Discipline spec, it is clear that there’s something good there. Steal it.

Priests should still be the kings of countering damage. Those bubbles prevent all damage up to the strength of the shield. What I propose is that any healer should be able to apply temporary immunities to specific damage types. If I know that a strong fire-based attack is coming, like Sartharion’s Flame Breath, I can fling a fire-resist buff on the tank and buffer it, nullifying the attack.

In addition, I think that DPS players should have an active hand in mitigating their own incoming damage. A Rogue, for example, should be able to activate a short-cooldown dodge ability that forces an evade of the next attack. Perhaps a Hunter could activate an Aspect of the Twin that creates a phantom mirror image that will soak an incoming spell. A Warlock might, through force of will, redirect a boss’ Fel Lightning onto his Fel Hunter, grounding it.

All of these abilities should be active, a button you hit when you expect damage, that gives you a short but total resistance. Not only does this give players a new way of interacting with the world, it is one that is more situationally aware than healers and DPS often have. And it is a counter to the otherwise single-note jobs of “raise the green bars” or “press 3 when it is off cooldown.”

Idea 4: Let healers tank

There is a basic sensibility problem inherent in the threat system. Most mobs, if they had any intelligence at all, would make a beeline for the healers and tear them apart. As evidence, look at what happens in an arena fight. A healer might not be the first to die, but they’re a much higher priority than a so-called tank.

If Arthas wanted to win against whatever raids came after him in Ice Crown, he’d simply walk through any tanks in the group (there’s no body collision, after all) and cut down the healers. Healers — I promise you that Arthas can 1-shot you. That he doesn’t is a signal. He wants to lose. He feels terribly guilty about chopping up all those fine people in Stratholme.

Threat is one of the absurdities of the game that we swallow for the sake of solid gameplay systems. Like the impermanence of death, mob spawning, aggro radii, the ability to pass through the bodies of all living things, and the fact that 80% of the pigs you kill in Westfall have no intestines. These aspects of the game are jarring to our sense of simulated reality. They need to be explained. Or explained away, which as the Forteans will tell you, is a very different thing.

I wouldn’t mind mobs coming after me when I’m healing, as long as I had the tools to deal with it. I am a major threat, after all. I won’t kill you myself, but I prevent you from eliminating the people who will. I’d welcome a tussle, even. Provided the designers give me some survivability tools, that is.

Healing aggro was the single worst part of the game for me when I was Priesting. Because most players, “tanks” included, knew nothing about the invisible threat mechanic, any pull with multiple mobs quickly turned into a “Let’s kill the healer” wipe-fest. Having mobs on me led to this awful thought: “Healing myself will just generate more threat.” Then I would die. Being made of paper certainly didn’t help.

Imagine instead if I had the ability to knock mobs away from me. Imagine if the tank was the number one target because he was the most threatening player on the field. Imagine if I could stun mobs in place and run clear of them. Imagine that standing in a formation is strategically significant beyond how much AoE healing you’ll receive. Imagine if mobs had to fight through a swarm of Mages and Rogues to get to me.

If the designers gave survivability tools to more classes and made the raid’s formation matter, the game’s aggro mechanics could be made sensible. As long as I can stand a few seconds of being hit, long enough for the mobs to be literally peeled off me, I would welcome a return to the days of high healing threat.

So those are my ideas. The floor is open. What do you guys think? What would you do to the healing game to change it up? Your thoughts — I want them!

Tanking and fun

Thinking about nebulous promises that Blizzard is trying to make the healing game more fun, a little while ago I asked a Warrior tank friend to write up a couple paragraphs about how Blizzard had improved the game for him in their quest to make tanking fun. A few minutes later, presumably after gathering his thoughts on the subject, he asked “Do I have to stop at 2 paragraphs?” As you will see below, he is quite effusive on the topic. Fustigator is something of a legend on my server. He manages to be both a knowledgable and magnificent tank and a wonderful human being. Now I will get out of the way and let him do his thing.

Fun and Tanking in 3.0.2

by Fustigator of Shandris

Tanking, especially the new redesigned protection warrior tanking, became much more fun in patch 3.02 (the one with the 51-point talents before WotLK). I started playing WoW a couple weeks after The Burning Crusade was launched, so it was all good news for prot warriors after that. I made my warrior a tank because my guild needed one; I quickly became hooked on tanking.

3.0.2 brought less button pushing to warrior tanking. Shield Block was redesigned from a 5-second cooldown to a 60 second (40 talented) cooldown, so instead of spamming it the whole fight we saved it for strategic moments when extra threat, damage, or mitigation was needed. This was more fun because it let us think about what we were doing, making the tradeoff of survival now verses survival later on the fly instead of building a Lego machine to hit our Shield Block key over and over. (NOTE: Using such a robot is against the Terms of Service.) This redesigned Shield Block was only possible because crushing blows were squeezed out of raiding, with (predictable) boss abilities replacing the old RNG burst of a missed key or rage-starvation induced Shield Block.

Stance dancing was all but eliminated for protection warriors, further reducing the need to push 3 buttons to accomplish one task. Warbringer let us move in combat instead of having to change to Berserker Stance, use Bloodrage, cast Intercept, then change back to Defensive Stance. Mocking Blow, our backup to a failed Taunt, finally became useable in Defensive Stance. In 3.0.2 Berserker Rage was given to all stances instead of just Berserker Stance, so to gain immunity to Nightbane’s or Auriaya’s fear we simply activated the appropriate ability. Previously we had to to change to Berserker Stance, activate Berserker Rage, then switch back to Defensive Stance so we could get back to spamming Shield Block before we caught a crushing blow. It now became possible to tank mobs with an instant fear with no threat or survivability loss, since before we had to change to Berserker Stance and risk crushing blows whenever the mob might cast fear.

Tanks could now do many things at once. We could keep up our full threat rotation and still interrupt a boss when needed since interrupts were taken off the global cooldown. On fights like Shade of Aran or Kael’thas in MgT, interrupters were forced to halt all GCD abilities while it was their turn to interrupt. This was less fun because being a good team player and interrupting required us to stop playing the threat and damage minigame and simply wait for a castbar to appear. Concussion Blow was changed to deal a large amount of damage (which caused threat) as well its stun. Thunderclap’s power and cooldown increased slightly, allowing warriors to slip in one more GCD ability into our AOE tanking rotation.

AOE tanking became possible for warriors! Not pretty, and not as good as a paladin’s or deathknight’s, but possible. No longer would warriors be turned down to tank Shattered Halls or Akil’zon trash simply because Thunderclap only hit 4 mobs. This was more fun for protection warriors because we got to play more, instead of sitting on the sidelines or respec’ing Fury for trash-heavy instances. Our new 51-point talent Shockwave gave us the much needed ability to frontload some AOE threat and keep trash packs in one place long enough for us to get down a Thunderclap and some Cleaves. Deep Wounds combined with Damage Shield and the increased incidence of Thunderclap and Cleave critical hits from the Incite talent gave protection warriors a passive armor-piercing bleed that could afflict anything that was near one of us. This scaled with attack power along with the new Thunderclap and Shockwave, allowing warriors to get more AOE threat with better gear. The old Thunderclap did fixed damage per rank.

Tank cooldowns across the board were pulled in line with their use. AOE taunts such as Challenging Shout were lowered to 3 minutes (from 10), Shield Wall and Last Stand lowered to 5 minutes (from 30 and 10 respectively), Mocking Blow was reduced from 2 minutes to 60 seconds, and Improved Taunt was rolled into the base taunt, lowering its cooldown from 10 to 8 seconds. All these lowered cooldowns gave a better incentive to actually use tank abilities, instead of saving them for later. Increased options and power gave tanks more enjoyment from tanking and allowed skilled tanks to really show off their mastery of their class.

All percentage threat increasing talents such as Defiance were integrated into the existing warrior defensive stance, druid Bear Form, and paladin Righteous Fury. This meant that Fury and Arms warriors could tank an instance without having to respec; All they had to do was swap gear. Tanking non-Protection warriors also benefitted from Shield Slam being given to all warriors. This was important because now dps-spec warrior who were tanking could properly use tank gear with block value to increase their threat while tanking with a shield.

3.0.2 protection warriors found ourselves with more rage which in turn let use use our abilities more. Shield Specialization rage gain was doubled from 1 to 2, Shield Block no longer cost us 10 rage every 5 seconds but became free, Sword and Board decreased the average rage usage of Shield Slam, and our outgoing white damage was increased considerably due to the re-itemized tank gear having more Strength. The Enrage effect from Improved Defensive Stance, rage from using (sometimes Improved) Charge in combat, the buffed up Improved Bloodrage, and the new Armored to the Teeth talent all contributed to additional rage gain. I was greatly disappointed to see Justified Killing (it granted 1/2/3 rage per dodge or parry) removed from the PTR version of this patch. A similar rage gain from avoidance is at long last due to be added to patch 3.2’s Shield Specialization talent. Additional rage let us push more buttons instead of staring at our rage bars and cursing at “Need more rage” messages while mobs got loose and killed our healers.

Rage is the heart of warriors and bears. It’s red, starts at 0, and you can never have more than 100 (no matter how hard you just got hit by Patchwerk or what kind of absurd Enraged TotT’d Hysteria-powered Positive Charge-fed slow-weapon white crit you clobbered poor Thaddius with). 25-man protection warriors will always have more rage than their 10-man counterparts in equal gear since 25-man mobs hit harder. As long as warriors, bears, and paladins have to rely on taking damage to generate power we will never be able to put out consistently high threat like deathknights. It’s a systemic problem in the design of defensively generated rage whether your rage bar is red or blue. Having too much rage is why warriors always need fast weapons to Heroic Strike more. The power of Heroic Strike scales up with faster weapons and with more rage per second (not with strength or block value). If protection warriors had a 0.5 second speed mainhand needle, we’d upgrade that Lego robot or just continue as we do now by binding Heroic Strike to the mousewheel and letting it spin while we focus on playing the game.