Nobody Really Wants To Heal

[JunkhogMakison]

Your research is clearly lacking. I loved Vanilla WoW.

Already been covered but a world of no to this.

Ahahahahahahahahahahaha xD

Replying to multiple people is a pain lol I want to thank the 3 of you for actually supplying educated and professional statements to this thread. I actually have learned a thing or two and now I'm more informed on the subject matter.

In short, if done correctly, an all healing class COULD work, but I'll need to see for myself to form my opinions.

Also in regards to WoW I wasnt really referring to the logistics of the actual combat itself but rather the plethora of options that were granted to you during play. Essentially skill/spell tables were infinitely bigger back then than they are now lol

[Jojoya]

If you don't enjoy a particular job or healing in general, then don't play that particular job or heal.

Is that really so difficult to understand?

Personally, I plan to be healing a bunch as WHM in ShB because the changes don't scare me. I will do what I always do - focus on making sure people are healed then toss in some DPS if I have the open GCD.

Did you ever actually play classic WoW? If you didn't match the specified cookie-cutter build, you'd be laughed out of parties all day. Take off the rose-tinted glasses and it's a terrible mess.

And there would be other parties that had no problem inviting you as long as you were competent at playing your class. It's only a small vocal percentage of the player base that obsesses over things like metas and cookie cutter builds.

[TalithaSolarien]

Healer DPS really isn't getting as gutted as people think.

WHM is losing one DoT. Potency is made up for in other skills.
SCH is losing a lot of superfluous buttons.
AST hasn't lost a damned thing.

If you play AST, you have nothing to worry about (except for cards, but that's another matter)

WHM is losing it's AOE DoT, so is SCH, which also lost his other DoT and the method the spread the DoTs (Bane). So basically all Healers get one single-target DoT, one single-target attack and one group attack spell. Sound really fun ...

As a SCH healer I'm really not looking forward to all those changes.

[Sylve]

Did you ever actually play classic WoW? If you didn't match the specified cookie-cutter build, you'd be laughed out of parties all day. Take off the rose-tinted glasses and it's a terrible mess.

As someone who played actual vanilla WoW when it was a thing, what people like about Classic are the same things as what we enjoyed when it first came out. That being the slow paced and more tactical nature of combat, the long journeys to get anywhere. Longass dungeons that forced communication and general social interaction (RIP Blackrock Depths, looking forward to that 3 hour 5 man in August, lol) etc.
Most specs were viable in regular play, it was only top tier raiding that excluded specs, but usually for reasonable (at the time) reasons. Things like Raid buffs since they were restricted to the party and not the Raid as a whole. Paladins didn't excluded from Molten Core though! They got to come along to Bless everyone and stay out of combat to Raise the DPS that stood in fire … >_>

I loved healing back then and I hate how healing devolved over the years.
The reason I enjoyed healing back in vanilla was because of the multiple spell ranks and resource management. We didn't have mana to spare on wasteful DPS spells and the majority of a Healers gameplay was selecting the correct rank of the correct healing spell to apply to a given situation. That and ensuring spell casts around the mp5 rule.
Although, with proper gearing and skilled play, you DID have spare mana to throw the odd damage spell in the right content, but because Hit Chance was a thing .. There was a good chance you'd be pissing your mana into the void for your effort. So we tended to conserve and observe instead.

As to the OP, the game hard limited you because talents were incredibly impactful. Could you make some whacky 17/17/17 build? Sure. But it'd be eclipsed in every single way by a proper spec. You also didn't really have much room to make a custom spec, since a lot of non-required Talents were obsoleted through gearing.
You weren't a special snowflake if you were an Arms Warrior and didn't take Sweeping Strikes and Mortal Strike. It just made you bad at your intended role. The cookie cutter builds existed for a reason, they were mathematically superior. Its part of the reason why Talents went away entirely in favor of that weird "Everything on this line is supposedly equal in value, but 2 of them are actually garbage" Talent system the game has now.
The other part was that the trees would get kind of ridiculously long or would allow some specs access to certain skills they shouldn't have for their roles if they kept adding onto those trees.

Oh btw, the itemization in vanilla WoW was so utterly bad, they had plate gear with STR+AGI+Spirit. Hell, after BC they made a point of punishing players for not wearing full sets of their Class's intended armor. Which put paid to my Resto Druids Primal Mooncloth set that I busted my ass to make because that Cloth was actually BiS for me for two raid tiers ...
Even the Developers admit they had no idea what they were doing with itemization back then.

WoW became as prosperous as it was for 2 main reasons. The first being the massive fanbase behind Warcraft in general and Blizzards habit at the time of stealing features from competing MMOs, polishing them up and putting them in WoW. They weren't even shy about outright stealing Mods and turning them into basic game features.

Add to that the fact that most every MMO that followed WoW was a clone of WoW to start with, usually with some unique feature (That as discussed above, Blizzard stole) and most everyone was asking "why should I go play your game when I can get the same experience in the game I already play?". Thus, the 'WoWkillers' tended to flop after over hyping themselves.
WoW was basically the king of MMOs because they were damned good at stealing from other games to enrich their own.

Also, Yes. WoW Classic is 'clunky' as hell compared to BfA and XIV.

Go watch Preach leveling his Warrior Tank. Then come back and compare it to Tanking in XIV.

I'm looking forward to the Healer changes in Shadowbringers. They wont change how I play, since ill still be weaving DPS spells between my heal casts. And if the devs actually amp the party damage in general, great. Just means more GCDs on healing my party rather than throwing rocks.

WHM is losing it's AOE DoT, so is SCH, which also lost his other DoT and the method the spread the DoTs (Bane). So basically all Healers get one single-target DoT, one single-target attack and one group attack spell. Sound really fun ...

As a SCH healer I'm really not looking forward to all those changes.

I've been levelling my Red Mage lately, and do you wanna know what I'm doing for 80% of those Dungeons?
ScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatterScatter

Ohnoes. My SCH lost one DoT cast on single target bosses. The horror. Because the old rotation of Bio>Miasma>Broilx10>repeat with ED and SF whenever they weren't on cooldown was such complexity. Ironically, WHM had this exact rotation … A2>A3>Stonex10>Repeat. Literally the only difference was ED/SF, but we had Assize for that extra oGCD nuke anyways.
AoE for SCH was virtually identical to single target, just sub the first ED for a Bane instead and drop Miasma II between Broil casts. The new Art of War being spammable is better, in my opinion.

The only thing I can understand SCHs being upset at was Energy Drain. Though it was likely removed because 90% of SCH's ignored healing spells in order to use it, that and they tied ED to Summoners for their AF stacks.
Perhaps they should have reworked it to be a straight MP Drain with no damage so SCH's could at least dump AF stacks into MP Regen. Different name of course.

[Kaethra]

As for WoW yeeah. Vanilla was notorious for the meme class specs. Lot of illusion of choice, but in the end the choices we're usually very limited by their performance and split by PvE / PvP.

Alot of that wasn't by design. As much as people like to rag on some of the difficulties in Vanilla WoW (and it did have its issues), class specs were not as bad as people believed. For example, I had a very success shadow priest spec. As I indicated before, I was raiding just fine with it. It was a challenge to be sure to heal and DPS. Back then we had ONE hotbar. It took addons to give us other hotbars. So what I had to do was put my heals on one hotbar, and damage spells on the other. This let me shift 1 and shift 2 back and forth. Playing in PVP also helped give the proper reflexes for that as well.

To give another example, a friend of mine played a Rogue that was a dagger spec. The common theme was that daggers under performed. His didn't. He had two felstrikers and his spec while mostly tailored for PVP burst, also had great PVE DPS. Enough that the guild we were in was recommending him to tone down his agro a bit by not executing the combos as often.

There were several specs that could be used. But too many people thought that you needed dedicated this or that. As I said I came from EQ where often times when you put together a party, you assigned roles after you got 4-6 people together. You saw what you had and you worked it out. You only needed specific classes in specific roles if you were in 1. Very high end content and 2. You were in a progression style run (meaning you didn't have requisite gear). Many of us handled WoW in very much the same way and it worked fine.

WoW was by no means perfect with its class and spec balance (never really ever did), but the issues many people had were caused by the players themselves.

[Seraphor]

WHM is losing it's AOE DoT, so is SCH, which also lost his other DoT and the method the spread the DoTs (Bane). So basically all Healers get one single-target DoT, one single-target attack and one group attack spell. Sound really fun ...

As a SCH healer I'm really not looking forward to all those changes.

But did all of those buttons on SCH give you much more DPS than other healers? ...no?

[Ilyrian]

Alot of that wasn't by design. As much as people like to rag on some of the difficulties in Vanilla WoW (and it did have its issues), class specs were not as bad as people believed. For example, I had a very success shadow priest spec. As I indicated before, I was raiding just fine with it. It was a challenge to be sure to heal and DPS. Back then we had ONE hotbar. It took addons to give us other hotbars. So what I had to do was put my heals on one hotbar, and damage spells on the other. This let me shift 1 and shift 2 back and forth. Playing in PVP also helped give the proper reflexes for that as well.

To give another example, a friend of mine played a Rogue that was a dagger spec. The common theme was that daggers under performed. His didn't. He had two felstrikers and his spec while mostly tailored for PVP burst, also had great PVE DPS. Enough that the guild we were in was recommending him to tone down his agro a bit by not executing the combos as often.

There were several specs that could be used. But too many people thought that you needed dedicated this or that. As I said I came from EQ where often times when you put together a party, you assigned roles after you got 4-6 people together. You saw what you had and you worked it out. You only needed specific classes in specific roles if you were in 1. Very high end content and 2. You were in a progression style run (meaning you didn't have requisite gear). Many of us handled WoW in very much the same way and it worked fine.

WoW was by no means perfect with its class and spec balance (never really ever did), but the issues many people had were caused by the players themselves.

Out of interest - do you remember your build?
And were you taken as a Shadow Priest - or a did you actually take the spot of a healer.
Cause an Spriest was useful as the mana battery, obviously, but in no way had the mana to sustain the role of a full healer.

Of course in a 40 like MC you can take 15-20 people who know what to do and they can more or less drag the Ret Pallies and Balance Druids etc through it... but it wasn't not just optimal it was deliberately going against the (bad) game design.

But of course if it worked and nobody cared then fair play.

[Sylve]

Out of interest - do you remember your build?
And were you taken as a Shadow Priest - or a did you actually take the spot of a healer.
Cause an Spriest was useful as the mana battery, obviously, but in no way had the mana to sustain the role of a full healer.

Of course in a 40 like MC you can take 15-20 people who know what to do and they can more or less drag the Ret Pallies and Balance Druids etc through it... but it wasn't not just optimal it was deliberately going against the (bad) game design.

But of course if it worked and nobody cared then fair play.

Generally speaking, Raid Leaders only cared if you were good at what you did regardless of Class.
Much like Savage Raiding in XIV, it was only the 'World First' raiders or hardcore progress guilds that excluded Classes, usually because they were doing what XIV players do, and take only the classes with the mathematically superior numbers. Even if it was as small as 5%, if there was an advantage to taking one class over another, they did that.

[Eriane_Elis]

I've only seen people complaining in these forums. As a WHM main, I really am excited about focusing my time on healing and my entire FC seems to share the same sentiments. Please stop complaining, if you want to DPS then become a DPS. Healers should be focusing on keeping the HP bars up, while DPS focus on making the enemy's HP bars down.

[Lersayil]

snip

I really cant pull exact numbers by memory, but I was around a lot of large (pretty elitist now that I think about it) raiding guilds back then, and when I say "meme", "bad" or "unbalanced" I usually mean like 20-30% dps difference. It actually wasn't that great of an impact if you had a few of these builds (lol 40 man raids), and some of the PvP builds were decently tankier but it does add up if you have a lot of them.

I mained priest back then, and I did experiment quite a fair bit both in PvE and PvP, but in the end, if you ran the numbers there was quite the noticable difference and a clear winner in most scenarios.

That being said, my best vanilla memories were discing it up in BGs, and actually succeeding (also laughing at fire mages between MC runs, but thats a different kind of enjoyment).