Dear Healing Druids and Priests…
Dear Healing Druids and Priests,
I am a Resto Shaman. Yes, one of the persons to whom you’ve been directing your antipathy these past few weeks and months – ever since you heard of ‘The Nerf’ which was to come. You’ve wailed and cried and, perhaps, you’ve come to terms with it or, hell, maybe you’re still fighting and trying to overthrow ‘the man’ to keep your beloved, non-nerfed circles of healing and wild growths.
Well, I support you. No, really, I’m not being facetious, or mocking – I really wish priests and druids were not getting this nerf – especially priests. Why? Because I’m sick and tired, to be honest, of what I see being the case once the patch comes out:
That I’ll be:
- Sick of being ‘forced’ to AoE heal because I’ll be the ‘best’ class at it.
- Sick of being called a one-button healer and it being true (again).
- Sick of being told I only hit the top of the meters due to said easymode healing.
- Sick of people complaining about how they’ll never get a raidspot versus shamans when we currently (and likely will continue to) run with over four priests in every raid (in TBC we ran with as many as 6 in one raid) and very few other guilds will change their setups either.
- Sick of the dps/tanks blaming CoH nerf and not their own ability to get out of fire on them dying.*
- Sick of priests whining about not being amazing uber imba healers who can do everything better than every other healing class when they drop a tiny bit on the healing meters.**
I don’t mind things being harder, I applaud it and I understand their reasoning for the nerf. I also know how it is to have one of your tools which seemed so cool and all-purpose being changed into something completely different (look at how many of the new shaman talents don’t actually affect chain heal).
But I am also concerned that it’ll negatively impact raids – we run with one priest who actually has done (and frequently does) the fabled 70%(+) CoH on some boss fights (without running oom) and whilst it does make the content fairly trivial I’m concerned people are not prepared to ‘tough it out’ until priests (and druids) learn to cope with their modified healing tools.
I know a lot of you will disagree with me on this but these truly are my feelings on the issue. I don’t want to see the nerf going through because it’ll take away the enjoyment I have at being able to be a single-target healer – I don’t want to go back to the days of spamming chain-heal because, well, it’s dull.
However…
I also know that with two CoH priests in the raid I, currently, might as well go afk on trash – the only thing I can do is throw an earthshield on the tank and the occassional riptide, anything else will be healed by the time my heals land. Another shammy in my guild (not naming names) was on a pug Naxx with a group who had a CoH priest who was being chain innervated and just spammed CoH doing 70% of the entire raid healing whilst gleefully announcing how awesome a healer they were; said shammy also mentioned how utterly boring it is to be in a raid at the moment with any priest of that ilk.
If there’s one thing I’d like you both to understand it’s that I don’t care if I’m 1st on the meter so long as I’m keeping people alive and doing reasonably versus others of my class who’re in similar gear, and I know you probably don’t either. What I do care about is the fact that if we bring 2 CoH priests to a raid it makes me so ineffectual that I can dps 99% on some bosses – but when it comes to bosses which require a lot of single-target healing or widely spread AoE damage, the same priests and druids have trouble keeping people up.
I really wish I could propose a middle ground but I know that, at this point, it’s a ‘deal with it’ sort of issue. I’m only hoping that it turns out to be like the ‘zomg mana regen nerf’ worries of pre-wrath in that it changes gameplay less than is imagined.
* I know there’s been a lot of ‘dps hate’ recently and I know that not all dps are awful but I also know that many of them tend to be blinkered when it comes to healing – “I never received a heal for ages” when they were being spam healed…
** I also know not all priests are like this but I’ve met too many for my tastes. We’re all in the same boat, stop asking for a bigger oar.
Excuse the lack of imagery in this post, but I’ve not managed to get around to reistalling photoshop yet. Oops!
Oh and sorry disc priests, you’re being slightly shunned in an effort to make the post shorter and not have to include ‘except disc priests’ every third line.
7 comments7 Comments so far
Leave a reply
See, the only nerf I’m aware of as far as resto druids are concerned is the cooldown being applied to Wild Growth. While I’ve complained about it in the past, I don’t actually use Wild Growth that much (it’s positioned towards the end of my action bar, and I kind of forget about it unless I’m specifically told to AoE heal or Tranquility’s on CD).
However, reading your post you don’t actually mention any other nerfs! And boy you have a beef with Priests! xD
But yes, as long as we’re keeping people comfortably alive, anything’s good :)
I completely understand where you’re coming from. While I do play a priest, I’ve never been deep holy and have enough discipline in my life that I’ve never taken Circle of Healing for any longer than a week. (Testing a spec – didn’t hardly use CoH, so I dropped it.) Since I never got used to using it, I didn’t use it as often as some (most?) deep holy priests do. I just had no idea how some depended on it. I was shocked when a holy priest I know was just livid about the changes, ranting about it for such a long time, threatening to respec discipline in protest, or even change mains… now, hopefully he’s on the far end of the spectrum there, but…
I’m with you. As long as my groupmates are alive… I’m happy.
/hug Aurik
It makes me happy to see you not want my tree nerfed for ANY reason /giggle
Seriously the wild growth nerf only bugs me on principal. FIRSt they gives us this 51 point talent AoE HoT that is really kinda…meh to start with, and before we even had a REAL chance in beta to see it’s effect they nerfed the healing of it. Making it even less attractive. NOW a 6 second CD because people are spamming it. Sure it’s ok on trash and light splash damage but heavy splash damage I’m better off tossing rejuvs around. I’ll admit we druids have an advantage here. We haven’t had this spell near as long as priests had CoH, we lived without it for how many years? I wouldn’t even have a point there if that one point would be a big help anywhere else.
A few guildies and I were testing out our heals the other day, and our shammy was consitantly hitting me for 11k. I want to see you guys get to show that off!!
Rosi, Jess: Yeah, I’m aware that for lot of druids now it’s not as big a nerf as some priests see it to be but that means I’m especially unhappy about seeing Wild Growth nerfed – I played about with druid healing on beta and Wild Growth felt ‘about right’ – you wouldn’t spam it in a 5-man or you’d go oom / your party would end up dead but it was a nice clutch heal for wide, but light, AoE.
Anea: /hug Disc always felt to me like it would be the more interesting spec and I feel that it’d likely be the spec for me if I ever level my priest. I was surprised, too, by the mount of antipathy towards the changes from some holy priests – saying they’d spec out of CoH or go disc which, to me, seems a bit extreme.
In general, no, but when I’d spent most of TBC being mocked by priests for being a one-spell-healer who only topped the meters due to that superbly efficient spell and now see priests lording it over other classes whilst spamming one heal I get antsy ;P
I know not all priests are like that, though <3
I’ve never been a raid healer so never had CoH and now I’m disc for levelling and liking it so much, I’ll probably stay that way. What you’ve never had, you never miss :) With all the nerfs flying about (Druids, Priests, Hunters) it makes me wonder what Blizzard did during the beta test….did no-one play? Did all the testers spend their time exploring Dalaran?
I’d long since resigned myself to while the meters are useful for some things, the point is that if your heal target is staying alive, you are doing your job and everyone wins.
We raid 10-man with holy priest, resto shammie, and resto druid (me). :) And while I’m not thrilled with the CD on Wild Growth, its not going to affect me greatly. In fact, I’ve been preparing for it by waiting until one WG has run its course before applying another (if needed). But Wild Growth has been limited in usefulness since it went live, so I’m no where near weeping on my knees. Its an annoyance, nothing more.
I am grateful for our shammie’s awesome chain heal because it means I can do my job, which is heal either the tank or the off-tank with great confidence that our dps will still be pouring out damage until the boss dies. I can even trust my own life bar to him with all confidence that all of us will be fine.
Minutes from now I will be experiencing the CoH nerf in the actual realm. To people who never loved CoH (or the druid’s AoE equivalent which happens to be nerfed also), you just couldn’t begin to appreciate its importance unless you are on an aoe-damage-intensive fight like Malygos 25-man. With priests and druids healing the raid it’s so amazing how easily you can counter the raid damage. Now that it is nerfed, I wonder how the fight will turn out. But looking on the bright side… there’s going to be an added challenge to it. To the topic starter who lost self esteem when running with priests/druids, I don’t really share your negative emotions about shammies. They are awesome multi-target healers. For goodness’s sake, we never spam CoH just to top the meters. It is a very expensive spell as far as mana is concerned so we are using it wisely. Do you know what happens to priests who spam CoH like crazy? They also top the overhealing meters. Meaning the figure from topping the healing meter is full of crap and that majority of the heals are actually wasted.