Quote Originally Posted by Sylve View Post
WoW went the wrong way and turned healing into an endless session of whack-a-mole. Watch any raid footage and you can see the entire raids HP fluctuating madly for the whole fight.

Bosses don't need to hit harder, they need to hit the party frequently and unpredictably.
Er...but hitting the party frequently and unpredictably is what creates that (fun and engaging, in my experience) whack-a-mole effect? I’m confused how these two statements jive.

Going back to the last time I played seriously (a brief stint with Legion showed me I didn’t like where class mechanics and gameplay had gone) in WotLK, when I mained a resto shaman, I remember the whack-a-mole keeping me laser focused or people died. To me anyway, that’s what healing is about.

In the Anub’Arak fight in ToGC, you had tank damage, unavoidable AoEs, random target DoTs, fight mechanics (dodging/kiting stuff) to do yourself, plus the boss would frequently put a very heavy DoT up on a number of people that would kill them in 1-2 globals. Your job for that mechanic was to almost instantaneously identify which of the raid members under your purview got the debuff and was going to die first, heal them, and as soon as that heal landed, heal the second person you were responsible for. Every healer in the raid had to do this on top of their responsibilities. It created a real sense of urgency and intensity for the entire fight; if you fell behind on your other responsibilities, someone would die while you were healing up people with this DoT. If you were mentally exhausted after doing your own mechanics and didn’t pivot into DoT-healing mode instantly on demand, people died. Your performance mattered from the moment the boss was pulled until the moment he died (much like the performance of the tanks and DPS did).

(Speaking broadly, not to the person I quoted to ask a question of)
Now, I know what I just described there sounds *awful* to a lot of people here. To those people who “play games to relax” and just want to waltz through a dungeon and can feel like a hero without the hard work. I get it, really. You play games in a way that is different to me and to people who like WoW/RIFT/insert-other-GCD-limited-MMO healing.

However, in the game model SE has chosen, in which every player is thrown into the grinder that is expert dungeons, normal mode raids, first 2 fights of savage maybe, it is impossible to please us both. The expert you enjoy is one that makes me want to fall asleep. The one I enjoy is one that stresses you out. But I need tomestones too. For me, who loves Eureka, I had a great alternative for most of the 4.x cycle. But many people didn’t like that and so still had to do experts. We don’t *want* to be there, but game design demands that we pay the expert penance to get our gear for the content we like. That’s the source of this un-fun “can we just clear this and get it over with already?” feeling. It’s not big epeen DPS (although for a time that can be a distraction from the monotony).

How would people feel if game design was shifted so that there were level 70 “normal modes” that gave tomes and gear at a lower rate, and all-new “experts” that were designed for a must-heal-like-a-madman type of gameplay? RIFT had experts like that at launch and a lot of people got the idea that the game had ended for them because it was too hard. WoW today has mythic+ dungeons but I don’t know how broadly received they are. For my two cents, I hate tomestones as a concept and would see them go away, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
This also came right off the back of the Twin Valks fight, where you kind of got to roll your face across your best AoE heals all fight and satisfy yourself with godlike healing numbers for little effort. So not every fight was peak intensity, but you still mattered.