Nightbane

[Bolty]

It really does suck to not have a paladin or a shaman or a shadow priest in your raid group Bolty and not seeing the fight yet, I can't help with specific tips, but having "only 23% overheal" on a shaman in a raid is nothing to be pleased about. You can expect a jump in overheal from five mans to raids, but that much?!

Well, yeah.

I don't really know what my overhealing was during the short set of Nightbane attempts (about 2 hours) before we realized it just couldn't be done with our raid makeup. But the healing game has really changed in TBC.

Originally I had thought that Cleoboltra would be semi-powerful in PvP with people as fresh 70's until itemization once again started diminishing her power. This was completely and utterly wrong, as damage has continued to outpace healing by ever-increasing margins even with poorly geared 70's. The new Stamina itemization was supposed to help correct this, but it doesn't.

In heroics and raids, bosses will routinely smack around tanks for large chunks of their hit points, which is impressive considering how many more hit points they have compared to pre-expansion. Nightbane can and does smack poor Shalandrax around to the tune of 7,000 to 9,000-point crushing blows. As a result, you need several healers spamming max-rank large heals on the target to keep him vertical. You obviously can't wait for the tank to take damage and then heal him; two crushing blows in a row can kill him in 2.0 seconds. Don't even get me started on Prince Malchezaar, where he has a move that allows him to score 3 hits on a main tank in less than one second - I forget what the move is called, something like "Thrash" - which can obliterate 16,000 hit points in a flash.

As a result, you will occasionally drop a 6k healing bomb on your main tank, with 100% of it being overheal. That can seriously skew your numbers.

Healing just hasn't scaled well. You need to heal for a heck of a lot more than you had to pre-expansion. When I'm using max-rank greater heals on a rogue, something's up - pre-expansion, that would only ever be even considered if a rogue was at 10% life, since it would be gross overheal otherwise.

One of the nasty side effects of all this is that healers generate a lot more aggro than ever before. This is readily apparent in heroic mode dungeons, as tanks on some pulls will need 5,000 or more healing within seconds of a pull. Blizzard buffed Fade on Priests for exactly this reason - it just wasn't good enough - but with the incredible fragility of a Priest in the expansion, I find myself hitting the pavement time and time again. What am I going to do, not heal? When heroic trash hits as hard as raid bosses, having a tank lose aggro to me is an instant wipe.

It's stimulating, and more challenging, yes, but ultimately it's less fun. Pre-expansion, if I pulled aggro off a tank in an instance, it was an "ok, Fade, that didn't work, shield, self-heal until he taunts it off, I'm good" situation. Now it's "ok, Fade, that didn't work, oops I'm dead". It was amusing to get crit by a trash mob in heroic Slave Pens for 11,280 yesterday. I guess. Think of what 4-5 of those do to your main tank in the first 2 seconds of a pull and explain how he can hold aggro against the 8,000 healing I need to dish out to keep him alive in the first 10 seconds. Either your tank is superman, or you wipe.

In a raid environment, you have healers stepping over each other to keep the tank alive while you watch his 13-17,000 hit point bar fly back and forth like Einstein using an abacus. Overheal's the end result.

-Bolty