Nightbane

[Kevin]

It's a gear differential thing. Healing gear hasn't scaled well with the amount needing to be healed.

In AQ40, the Twin Emps would hit for, what, 10k? At that time, my Druid had 950 +heal.

Queue TBC. Nightbane is hitting for 16k in the same time the Twin Emps were hitting for 10k. Sirreal/Bolty's gear is sitting around, say, 1400 +heal. That's a 37.5% increase in damage taken but only a 32% increase in healing. In fact, it's even worse, since that increase in gear is tacked on to a base heal value. But, I just got out of an exam and am too tired to punch numbers.

Oh, but guess what, we're talking 10-man raids instead of 40-man!. Now, we have 2-3 healers trying to take care of that 37.5% increase in damage output on the tank with their sub-par 32% increase in gear and also heal everyone else.

Whereas, in AQ40, we had 3-4 healers on one tank, a couple healers dedicated to keeping DPS alive, etc.

See how the problem compounds?

Yes, but I was directing at mana conserving when possible. Paying attention to overheal can still matter.

And yes damage is worse, not as bad you are making it out though. That +1400 heal is more than 1400 since healing talents now apply after +heal instead of before so it should be at least 1540 for a holy priest and maybe even more depending on talents. Sirreal and Bolty can both have a renew running on the tank when they could only have one before, PoM gives some non cast time chewing reactive healing. I'm not saying it's keeping up with everything but it's obviously kept up with everything up to Nightbane since they've killed all that. I'm aware that healing gear hasn't kept pace with damage, but some of that is because healing gear was getting way too far ahead, it still may very well need to be adjusted. But some of the other changes mitigate some of the claims you are making about how far back it has fallen

I'm not saying that OMG you should be able to do Nightbane with 4 healers (only 2 heal spec'd) what's wrong with you!!!?one!! I was mostly addressing this whole "it's radically different". I ran MC before ZG/AQ20 or Dungeon 2 were in the game. I remember when we felt we needed 2 healers per tank on the domo guards, and then looking at the fact that raid overheal was pushing 35% on that fight and thinking no, we don't need that many per tank, we need to heal better. And healer gear didn't drop for us in the early days of MC. I also ran MC when we were so overgeared that one priest probably could have healed domo on his own. I fully believe that mana usage is as tight as possible for the people running Kara in that group.


I also don't disagree that the encounter itself may be designed poorly in that you might need 5 healers with 3 or 4 of them heal spec'd to get through it. But I also think Kara was designed a bit more with the 1 of every class + whatever idea behind it so the group Bolty is discussing isn't exactly ideal. As the quotes he mentioned elude to, that group doesn't really have any of the group mana returning classes, no paladin for the blessings or judgements (not that the judgement looks like it could be used) no shadow priest for VE/VT, no resto shaman for mana tide/mana stream. Mana tide = 24% of the parties mana every 5 minutes. Mana spring = 37.5 mana/5 the rest of the time (since the shaman would have the talent to get mana tide). Blessing of Wisdom without talents is 41 mana / 5. Those are all significant additions. The shadow priest cuts the amount of healing the decidated healers may need to do and can get mana back for them. The paladin helps get mana back and has less mana issues from being healed by others. The shaman provides a little bit more AoE healing, some fire and forget reactive (earth shield). You lose an innervate caster.

It's disheartening to hear that a group that isn't exactly ideal may be screwed. However I'm still not convinced that the healing game has changed all that much. Sure I've only healed a few of the early regular instances on my enhancement shaman, but I have still solo healed in TBC. I fully expect that to main heal a raid or heroic you need to be heal spec, that was something you didn't necessarily have to be before hand at least for the earlier raid instances (and you don't need to be for most of the non heroic 5 mans either in TBC). I'm just not sure the sky is falling or that healing is that radically different.

Oh well I'm not adding any value to this discussion. It'll be a month or more at best before I even see the encounter in question.