The new lifebloom

Recently in the testing platform for new WoW patches, a major change was made to Lifebloom. This has been a troubled spell since it's inception in The Burning Crusade, an attempt to create a very different type of spell that would make druid healing unique. What makes it unique is that it can stack up to 3 times, and provided you can refresh it before it falls off, it continues to tick at triple power, for a fraction of the price. It's a really cool idea but the stacking aspect made it so potentially powerful in the hands of skilled druids that it was nerfed several times since then. Even right up to 3.0 and a final truly killing nerf, it was still druids main heal, able to be rolled on 3-4 tanks to produce a tremendous amount of pure healing per second.

The change note that appeared on the testing realm was:

Lifebloom: Mana cost of all ranks doubled. When Lifebloom blooms or is dispelled, it now refunds half the base mana cost of the spell per application of Lifebloom, and the heal effect is multiplied by the number of applications.

Naturally the druid community was immediately up in arms about touching a spell so sacred and iconic of the resto druid class. I wasn't so concerned because like I say, 3.0 put a nail in its coffin by making it heal for much less than before. It seemed to be the only way Blizzard could think of to make it so it wasn't so powerful when stacked 3 times. A single stack was worthless, and even rolling a triple stack was only really useful in specific situations. Most druids were using it far less than before. But when mana becomes much more scarce in 3.1, lifebloom stacking would begin to look attractive again, because its so incredibly efficient. Rivven can keep a stack going while gaining mana. I haven't tried but I suspect I could keep 2 or 3 up while still breaking even. Each stack is about 1400 healing every second and we have plenty of time to cast other heals on top of those stacks.

So Blizzard has decided to try something completely different. By making it refund mana for only the first 3 applications, it's essentially putting a tax on druids who try to maintain a triple stack. This is the part that got druids upset because it appears to hit us in our bread and butter. Rolling stacks is what defines us.

But few people stopped to talk about the other big change here: the bloom. No one ever thinks about the bloom, because the bloom is... failure. The bloom means your timing was off and you let the stack die. The bloom is the joke of a consolation prize. Except now the bloom stacks as well. So if a double stack falls off it gets a double bloom. And a triple stack causes a triple bloom. A single bloom is upwards of 3k healing, which can crit for closer to 5k. A triple bloom becomes a formidable heal, about as large as any heal a druid has. And Blizzard pointed this out to the crowd of booing druids, saying now you can make the choice of letting the stack bloom. Not all is lost.

Which seemed like a joke to some. What good is a big heal if you have to predict it 10 seconds in the future? But I think what Blizzard is trying to do is make the bloom a useful decision you make. Each time a lifebloom is about to expire, a druid could now look at the tank health and just as they're about to refresh it, if the tank suddenly takes a drop in health, they could do the unthinkable: nothing. Letting the stack bloom would be an immediate heal, just when its needed. The cost of refreshing the stack is relatively minor if you continue to let it bloom whenever the tank could use it. In fact it becomes more expensive to keep it going now. It seems like the ideal situation is to cast it and refresh it only if the tank is topped up, hoping to let it bloom after about 3 applications, give or take. I posted some numbers I came up with on elitistjerks to try and get a handle on it, if anyone is interested in specifics.

I think it's an interesting design change. It's understandable that people get upset when a core ability is nerfed. But in this case it's hard to call it a nerf, because it's really changing the spell completely. I expect the numbers will be tweaked shortly anyways, so rather than worry about the exact healing per second or healing per mana, I think a more interesting question is this. Which takes more skill? Keeping multiple stacks going or accurately deciding when to let a stack expire? Whether it's a nerf or not it's still a unique and interesting type of heal that defines the druid.

P.S. The graphic above is taken from a great comic from Smoosh that gives you an idea where Lifebloom was before all the nerfs.

UI Layout

Every now and again, I get the urge to rethink the UI I use for WoW. I do this partly because I take the UI pretty seriously, and partly because I find tweaking the UI a lot of fun. It's like a whole little mini-game inside the game! WoW UI designers have a lot going for them. Like with most all Blizzard games, WoW features a very good API for introducing new features. And since there is such a ridiculously large player base, there are a lot of people out there producing UI mods and libraries to use. You can combine, and configure and even modify other peoples work to produce exactly what you personally like.

Initially when the collection of UI mods available was less extensive, I would find things that were similar to what I wanted and then crack open the scripts and edit them to my taste. I was able to get some pretty cool functionality very early before it became a standard part of most any UI nowadays, like player frames that smoothly changed color as health dropped, or spell school indications on the scrolling combat text. But hand-rolling scripts is pretty unnecessary now, and it's a lot of work to try and maintain your scripts through all the patches. Now I just gravitate towards very good mods that feature tons of configuration options as a raw base to work off of. Mods like Pitbull, Grid, and Satrina's Buff Frames are good examples.

My current UI layout is the product of lots of tweaks and trial and error. I've basically followed these principles:

• make sure your character and immediate surroundings are always clear and in focus
  
• put more important UI elements nearer the center of the screen
  
• as much as possible, have one consistent UI that works for all characters and all roles
  
• keep the screen clean and have elements disappear when they have no immediate value
  

I've spent a lot of time on keybinds and on finding good mods that meet my needs. But I realize that my basic layout could also use a bit of work. So I decided to really sit down and analyze how the UI is laid out on the screen. First I looked at my first principle: keep your character and surroundings clear. I created a mock-up of the screen showing about where the character would be and then tried to decide exactly where the most important parts of his 'surroundings' were.



Here I've decided that you want to see out in front and to the sides of your character. Whats behind you is not really important, so long as you can see your feet clearly. Remembering that my zoom level can vary a lot, I tried to give some play to the bottom so that where my 'feet' are could vary.

Next I took the second principle: place important elements near the center of the screen. I laid out all the basic elements that I have in my layout using nondescript boxes that I could move around just like a floor plan. I needed a lot more boxes to get everything than I would've imagined when I started! I didn't even try to get things like combat text, extra action bars, or status bars, and it still took 24 boxes to layout the basic elements. I tried to let the color and thickness of the outlines indicate the relative importance of each box. The layout below is the one I am currently using.



Looking at this I realize I've followed a few conventions that people have just gotten used to that don't make much sense. My combat log still sits where it is by default, taking up a lot of space even though I rarely look at it. I have Recount and various log analysis tools for that. I still need to see it, but I could make it a lot smaller. Castbars sit under the frame of the player they're attached to, just as they are in all player frame mods by default. However, they're a little hard to see since they are pushed right up against the target frames, and because I need to make them pretty thin to squeeze them in. These are way more important than I've given them credit my their placement.

What's going on over on the left is a bit of a problem too. The raid frames overlap the pet bars and target debuffs. The reason for this is that only my healer needs raid frames in this central position. And healers can't have pets and don't put debuffs up... except when they do. Sometimes I throw in a bit of DPS while healing and it's annoying not being able to see how long I have on moonfire or faerie fire. And in WotLK vehicles abound, which use the pet frames. So for example in Malygos phase 3, I can't see or target my dragon. I actually have to quickly grab and move my raid frames out of the way at the end of phase 2 to do so. I realize that my healer is going to need raid frames in a more prominent place than other characters, but I wanted a more elegant approach. So I tried to think of what elements would be more important to a non-healer that should take this real estate. There are two such elements: target debuffs and threat meters. Both tanks and DPS characters need to keep a constant eye on these, whereas healers only need to glance at them occasionally. So I should layout these in such a way that I can swap them. This is my only concession to my third principle: keep the UI consistent for all characters. Everything else is generic enough that it has about the same importance to all characters.

The area marked "important cooldowns" is actually a combination of Bartender and Satrina's Buff Frames that show the most important cooldowns and buff timers. It actually takes up more space than this since it can grow, but I realize that it is not laid out very efficiently and wastes some of the space at the bottom that isn't really used.

Debuffs I've placed right beside my character because I wanted them to be prominent. However in practice I hardly notice them and I think it's because the area I'm usually focused on is to the left and below my character, and these are on the opposite side. So i decided to move these over and make them grow upwards so I would be more likely to spot them as they appear. I'd even like to improve on this and make new debuffs pulse or flash or something, but I don't know of any mod that can do that. Any suggestions?

Moving blocks around my little example layout like this made me realize why a lot of people tend towards what I call a letterbox layout where they black out the entire bottom or top of the screen and fill the area with UI elements. Once you have a lot of blocks you want to fit efficiently in to a small space you start to tile them out. However I don't like the letterbox style because it violates my fourth principle: free up space when you don't need it. When I enter or leave combat, or join or leave a raid, I have various UI elements appear or disappear as I need and free up space to see the game world. I like it like this so I have tried to tile my UI elements out but leave it so they can fade out or disappear and still look decent. The finished product does look kind of letterboxy, but while just hanging out in Dalaran, nearly all those boxes disappear or fade out to leave the game world visible.

So here's what I ended up with.



It's not a huge change. Like I say, my UI has gone through a lot of iterations so what I have I basically like. But there were a lot of tweaks made to try and improve it. By laying out the elements directly below my character a bit better I was able to free up just a bit more valuable space directly below my character's feet. I was able to get more stuff out of the way up top to get a clearer view into the distance. I've given castbars prime real estate. It should be much more recognizable when a boss starts a cast. I may even put focus target castbars up there somewhere if I find I need them.

When I actually tried to put the layout into effect, I found that by clearing up some space, I was even able to make important elements a little larger, or put a little more information on than I had before.

Next I'll try it out and see how I like it and if I need to tweak it bit. Then I'll get some screenshots up to see how the entire design process plays out.

Healing in first person view

A couple nights ago I had a dream. Like a lot of people often do I'm sure, I had a gaming dream. I was playing WoW and doing a raid on some boss I'd never seen before. I was healing and the rest of the raid was spread out around the boss in various positions. I woke up and had the dream fresh in my mind, so I was quick to notice something unusual about it.

I wasn't using raid frames.

In the dream, the HP of each raid member was clearly visible in the game display, and each player's nameplates was perfectly easy to click. I had previously considered Ghostcrawler's comments about improving nameplates for healing and decided that try as Blizzard might, no serious healer would ever use the nameplates for healing. They simply lacked precision. Suddenly I began to doubt that position. In the dream, the nameplates didn't jump around the screen when players got close to each other. It occurred to me that it would not be hard to code the nameplates to have a little more 'weight' as it were, so they could not simply blink around the screen when they ran out of space, but instead would slide out of the way at a fixed max speed when they needed to. Players that were behind me or off to the side still had their nameplates on the game window, with little arrows to indicate the direction they were.

Yes, I thought, that could all work in such a way that healers could look up from the raid UI and see the actual fight. I started adding buff icons, MT indicators and out-of-range styles in my imaginary setup. But the sober light of morning quickly revealed the problem with this model. In a first-person game, the direction you are facing is always 'forward'. When you turn, as you will inevitably need to in a fight of any complexity at all, the entire set of name plates would spin around with you. It wouldn't be good as a healer to have to quickly turn around to avoid a Bad Thing™ and then let the tank die because you couldn't locate his spinning nameplate fast enough.

Nameplate targeting only makes sense if you have some control over which way is forward. You could have a view mode that fixes your camera in a certain direction. (Just like it does in WoW if you hold the left mouse button while keyboard turning.) But it would immediately become confusing to use movement keys where 'forward' was no longer forward. You could then replace the typical WASD style key meanings with keys that move up, down, left, and right with respect to the camera, rather than to your character. Then the whole thing might make sense. But at this point, you no longer have a first person view game. You have a standard third person, three-quarter view. (Think Mario64.) And I just think that's too much of a change, even if it were a temporary camera mode you could switch in and out of.

So I'm back to giving up on the idea of getting rid of raid frames. However what I notice interesting in GC's original post now was that better nameplates was not the primary way he suggested freeing healers from the UI. The first thing he mentioned was "throwing larger heals more rarely". I hadn't really understood where he was going with this until I re-read the thread this week where he expounded on the regen nerf in 3.1. I was so focused on the numbers he provided, I hadn't noticed the reasoning (actually explained better by Thorene halfway down.) If heals hit less often, then priests and druids would never run out of mana because we could exploit our various OOFSR tricks to regen infinite mana. So it's less of an overall nerf as it is a preemptive balance change to make shamans and paladins viable in future encounters that feature "larger heals more rarely". I still don't understand how druids are supposed to be competitive in this new world though. Nothing could describe the opposite of druids better than "rare large heals."

Mana regen changes for 3.1 = Druid nerf

Amongst all the class change previews for WoW patch 3.1 was a lengthy post explaining the changes being made to mana regen to help make mana conservation more important.

* Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.

Ouch. This hits me right where it hurts. It's difficult to imagine a paragraph that says 'druids are OP' more strongly without actually using the word 'druid'. While it's true that priests also have HoTs and clearcasting, the style of healing that uses clearcasting to get outside the FSR seems to have gone out of style for priests back at 70. The druid alone has the means to really exploit clearcasting (Omen of Clarity in our case) and multiple stacking HoTs to produce non-stop healing while outside the FSR. On top of that we already had strong incentive to stack spirit because of the tree's conversion of spirit into spellpower and innervate working off of spirit. So all that spirit really kicks in if we dance around OoC to get outside the FSR.

On one hand, it's something of a vindication for me. I had been reading EJ resto druid threads and was surprised not to see more discussion of this style of healing and explaining why I thought it was so powerful. I know that the current content is so easy that it doesn't really matter what style of healing you use, but back when I tried Malygos or Sartharion for the first few times, I leaned heavily on this technique and fully expected to again in 3.1 once content became harder. I had been amassing spirit gear, gemming and enchanting spirit, and collecting spirit consumables. So it's sort of nice to see that the technique that I had thought was so powerful that it was semi-exploitative was apparently at the top of Blizzard's list of things that were too powerful. Of course on the other hand... damn. I will need to redo a lot of my gear now.

* To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.

Bam. And there's the other shoe. Huge nerf to me and my chosen way of life.

* The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.

Interesting that most of these talents are for DPS casters. Only two of these abilities are healing talents: Intensity for druids and Meditation for holy priests. Note carefully that this does not mean priests and druids are being buffed. These buffs are compensations for the fact that we have a lot of spirit on our gear that's getting nerfed. But note as well that the grand-daddy of all regen-while-casting abilities is not mentioned here: Innervate. Phaelia points out that this is a big nerf to Innervate and hopes that it's only not mentioned here as an oversight, an opinion which is sheer naïveté. This is a druid nerf.

* Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.

Interesting that paladins are singled out here. There's another class that 'relies less on Spirit' that isn't mentioned here at all: Resto shamans. You guys are relatively untouched by these changes, a net buff. I guess you've had about as much punishment as you had coming to you for your god-like status at the end of TBC. Look forward to seeing shamans catch back up in Ulduar. Also discipline priests are sort of on the outside of all this. They do not favour spirit and have fewer clearcasting procs (no Surge of Light). Expect to see even more priests take a trip on the Discipline side.

* In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.

That's interesting. I wouldn't have thought of that as being a noticeable amount of regen.

* We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.

Interesting... Umm... so it's like Innervate instead of out-of-casting regen. But Innervate is out-of-casting regen. I assume this means it will be like Innervate in the sense of multiplying your regen, but not in the sense of letting your spirit kick in. If so, this is aimed squarely at spirit-stacking druids. What really bothers me about this change is not the nerf so much as the fact that clearcast proccing was a very fun style of healing and required a lot of skill. You had to carefully watch your procs on top of everything else you had to watch and make split-second decisions on how to use each proc and to determine if you could safely get out of the FSR or not, and for how long. To really get the most out of it, it also meant that you had strong incentive to melee something in between casts. And you can't tell me there's anything much more fun than hitting a boss with tree branches.

* We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.

So far Replenishment has been additionally given to frost mages and warlocks (practically all specs I believe). This should mean that almost any group of 10 or 25 will have near 100% replenishment uptime. If the basic mechanic isn't changing, I expect this will create a strong shift from spirit to int for regen stats for priests and druids. Of course, priests get an additional benefit from int that druids do not. You may however see a resurrection of the nearly dead Dreamstate build, though I doubt it will be more than a passing fad.

* These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

Without directly saying it, I interpret "more in line" to mean "nerf druids, buff shamans". What will raid encounters look like now for healing? If we see them move more towards Blizzard's suggestion of fewer, larger hits as seems to be implied here, then druids will be the big losers since we have no competitive way to deal with large spikes of damage.

Healing overhaul Part 2

Last week in Part 1, I wrote some ideas about how to address two commonly cited problems with the healing game in WoW: Healers are too focused to their UI, and not enough on the game world. There are a few other issues that seem to come up a lot. Tobold recently summarized one well, making probably the shortest post he's ever made, saying only the following:

The fundamental problem of healing

* If I heal 1 second too early, my spell is wasted.
* If I heal 1 second too late, we wipe.

It's an interesting statement, rife with implications. It's a bit of an exaggeration of course. Tanks don't normally go from full HP to dead in 2 seconds. But healers are in a unique situation here, and the need for such careful timing and vigilance are part of what make healing less enjoyable for some. A possible solution is also immediately implied: some way to make a heal that lands early still count for something. Before getting into that, I'd like to point out another fundamental problem with healing in MMOs that's somewhat related.

When working on new content, a raid must carefully balance its healing, damage and tanking to achieve the best result, because their second-to-best effort will be a wipe. Just a bit short on healing means the tank goes down or too much DPS dies to beat the timer. Too little DPS means the same thing. Of course once the encounter is beaten and the same group picks up more gear the fight becomes much easier. The healers that struggled to keep everyone up initially now find it easier because they have better longevity and throughput. But the tank also has better gear, meaning they have to heal less. And the DPS also has better gear, shortening the fight and meaning they have to heal for a shorter period. So they have the gear to heal for greater and greater amounts and longer and longer periods, but need to heal for less and less. The result is that the top end guilds usually bring extra healers initially and drop them as they move into farm mode. This is frustrating if you're one of the extra healers. But it's also frustrating to get better and better gear as a healer and to not really get to make use of it until the next tier of content. Note that tanks had the same problem in TBC, before Blizzard's "tanking overhaul" fixed it. Their best gear gave too much mitigation and not enough threat to use on farm content. It's frustrating to get new gear and not get to use it 95% of the time. DPS gets to feel their progression with each new upgrade. They get to slap each other on the ass with each new record crit they land. But healers pass a threshold and then are kind of just doing risk management. Healers almost never talk about record crit heals, because by the time we get the gear for them, we are almost never in a situation where they get to land.

So here's an idea. Let's make overheals count for something. If we give each player some buffer health, an overheal can get saved up even if it takes them above 100%, sort of like Living Seed. We have to make this count for less than a regular heal tho, or else we're just moving the problem further down. So let's make the buffer health over 100% decay over time, bringing them back to 100%. The higher you save up HP, the faster it decays. We could say that characters have a hard cap of 200%, over which any heals truly are overheals. But at 190%, it's practically on overheal too, because the health drop from 200% to 190% would be almost instant. At 110%, health would drop towards 100% in a few seconds, enough time to be a useful buffer against the next hit but not so useful that you'd want to try and keep everyone way up above 100% constantly. Unless you overgear the content and have such good regen as a healer that you have lots of excess mana and can afford to keep everyone up above 100%. And here's where your over-geared healers can feel useful again. Besides providing everyone with extra buffer health, let's also make all that additional health count for extra damage. If you have enough mana regen to keep your star mage up above 150% health during Heroism, he will get a 50% boost to his damage. Now the freak 15k crit heals actually mean something. Your mage will notice some huge hit land at the same time, and now the healer gets to partake in the ass-slapping as well.

Healing overhaul

Blizzard design representative Ghostcrawler has made several comments beginning from around the WotLK beta about overhauling the healing mechanics in some fundamental way similar to how tanking was changed with WotLK.

To help illustrate what I think needs to change with healing, let me describe the following hypothetical encounter:

Your party enters a room with a dragon lying injured in the middle of the room. It is a powerful dragon with near god-like abilities, but near death. When you talk to him, you begin the encounter. Ghouls are raised from corpses lying littered around the entire room. They appear in random places, lots and lots of them. Most of them have very little health and immediately begin consuming the corpses around them to regain health. If any of them reach 100% health, they cast corpse explosion on a single player, instantly killing them. This is the only damage the raid takes. DPS must quickly run around killing them off before any of them gain full health. Occasionally an elite ghoul will also appear among them that starts with more health, regains health faster and also has a larger total health bar, requiring heavy single-target DPS. Meanwhile the dragon in the middle of the room must be healed to regain his powers. He has several million HP though and must be healed to full before 5 minutes or the ghouls begin spawning too fast to deal with. Once the dragon reaches 100% health he casts a powerful spell that destroys all the ghouls, ending the encounter.

Does this encounter sound familiar? It should. Does it sound fun? In particular does the DPS or healing sound fun? (For simplicity's sake, I've left tanking out of it.) Now imagine a variation that involves making some mechanical changes.

All DPS abilities for this encounter become 40-yard omni-directional abilities. Even rogues can target practically any mob they want and 1-1-1-1-1-2 away without moving or turning. Also the Blizzard UI allows any enemy mob to register as a target bar on the UI (sort of like Proximo) something which is currently not possible with the API. This means that the DPS doesn't need to target the mobs from the game screen, but can target them from the UI. To compensate for the ease and speed with which DPS can dish out damage this way, we will also scale up the difficulty, making the ghouls spawn faster and gain health much faster. Now does the DPS sound more or less fun in this variation? Much less in my opinion. I no longer need to move very much or be aware of the game screen.

Now what's the point of this hypothetical encounter? This is actually just a basic tank and spank encounter, similar to countless encounters in many MMOs. All I've done is turned it on its head. Damage is healing and healing is damage. The healers need to heal a single boss mod to 100% rather than DPSing it down to zero. Conversely the DPS need to deal with small and large amounts of health gains on multiple targets, preventing any from reaching 100%. This is exactly what the healers do in a typical encounter, but in reverse. The second variation used mechanics changes to make the DPS role match more exactly what a healer currently does. But the first version actually sounds more fun, zipping around catching ghouls as they spawn, alternating between AoE and single-target damage depending on the situation. It's a bit like the adds in Vashj, commonly cited as one of the best encounters of all time.

Every player that rolls a healer learns pretty early that heals are omni-directional and long range, and that it is much quicker to target using the party or raid interface than to target in the game screen. They might think it's a good thing when they discover this, imagining how frustrating it would be to have to find and manually target people taking damage. But I think this would only be a frustrating mechanic because people take enough damage that healers need to react almost instantly to prevent casualties. If the typical damage received was much smaller it obviously wouldn't be as hard.

I think TBC actually took the healing a bit in the wrong direction. I think the same thinking that led to long-distance, omni-directional as a fun mechanic that eases frustration further led to so-called 'smart' heals that target multiple players and heal based on who needs it the most. The problem is that the UI makes healing so easy that in order to make it challenging the damage needs to be ramped up to ridiculous proportions. Instead of freeing the healer up from his UI, the damage levels require them to be glued to the UI, spamming their beloved smart heals. I think maybe Blizzard is starting to turn around on this issue, as evidenced by the new 6 second cooldown on CoH and WG.

I think it might be interesting to go even further with the changes. Imagine removing and/or heavily nerfing most of the 40-yard omni-directional heals and giving healers some new powerful heals that require specific positioning. Some might require melee range. Some might be PBAoE, like holy nova and tranquility, but with much smaller ranges. Some might be short-range frontal cone heals. Would it be much harder and more frustrating to heal? Sure. But now tone down the damage and on top of that give healers some more ways to zip around like nearly all the DPS classes have and I think you've got an interesting new healing paradigm. Healers would be watching the game more than the UI. Healers would need to move constantly. My favourite fights have been the ones that require me to heal and move a lot (Archimonde might be the best example) and I've seem many people agree. Healers would feel closer to their charges, and less attached to the symbols on a raid frame. It might be a small thing too, but for me less damage feels a bit more realistic. The tank's health bar constantly going up and down from near-full to near-death every second with me magically repairing damage by watching all these bars kinda breaks immersion a little bit for me.

Now there are a few reasons that this would not be a simple change. For example, it's impossible to quickly target a single player on the game screen when many players can overlap each other in space. But it's possible to imagine game design changes to overcome them. It will be interesting to see what new directions the WoW healing overhaul takes us.

Healing meters

Are healing meters useless? Ulkesshern seems to think so. I think he's taken a pet peeve here and overdone it. I agree that meters can be misleading, especially in the hands of someone unfamiliar with healing who glances at the meters after the fight and uses them as a barometer of skill. But he seems to be saying that the meters are completely useless and should never be looked at, except perhaps in extreme situations.

Now I deal with numbers a lot professionally and often come up against these 2 extremes of thought. One side looks at numbers and sees "big" and thinks "good" then sees "bigger" and thinks "better", without taking any context into account. A little information is dangerous, as they say. But the other extreme is to acknowledge that numbers in isolation are difficult to interpret, but then to basically throw ones hands up and say "well those could mean anything" and dismiss them as useless. Numbers are what they are. If you're unsure of the context, then yes they're meaningless. But the proper response should not be to dismiss them but to try and understand the context and use that to divine their meaning. Both extremes are the easy ways out and the path to true understanding, as usual, involves effort.

What do you think? Are meters ever useful? How much and when? I'd like to address his 4 reasons why healing meters are useless and offer my thoughts on the other side of the issue.

More Healing does not equal Better Healers
This is kind of a scarecrow argument. It's a very good point that healing needs scale inversely and very quickly with your raid's gear level and this will probably be the subject of a future post. But I don't think anyone looks at healing done on a fight and compares it to healing done in previous weeks and says "Our healers are doing less healing and are therefore getting worse." In fact I'll bet hardly anyone remembers the numerical amount of healing from fight to fight. In pretty much all cases, people are looking at the comparitive healing amounts from person to person.

Situational Situations are Situational
This is very true. Different healers can be assigned to different targets and types of damage and this will probably be a bigger factor in the meters than their individual skill. But that doesn't mean the meters are useless. At the very least, we can compare healers of the same class in the same situation and make meaningful comparisons. But even in differing situations, we learn a lot from healing done. Say you have 2 healers each healing a different tank and Healer A is doing twice the healing of Healer B. Assuming neither tank was at risk, we can safely say that Healer B should probably be assisting somewhere else in addition to his tank, either with another tank or with some extra raid healing. Every single class has a way to spread heals to more than one target without losing efficiency (gaining efficiency actually in nearly all cases). At this point if I were really interested in improving the healing group, I might even go into the breakdown of heals by target and see if someone was being too restrictive in who they healed. It's true that certain fights require healers be separated by too much distance to really heal anyone else. And perhaps all the meters can tell you then is how to better allocate your zone coverage.

Or, say you have 2 healers both on raid healing and Healer A is doing twice the healing of Healer B. Assuming no one was at serious risk of dying, this usually tells me that Healer A has got a consistently faster reaction time than Healer B. Looking at the overhealing and the breakdown might tell you if Healer B is coming in 0.1 sec too late every time, or if they simply got frustrated that Healer A was beating them to the punch every time and gave up, or even if Healer B was simply choosing the wrong types of heals with which to 'beat' Healer A. Incidentally, this is probably also telling you that you have more healers than necessary. This is usually a necessary evil for most guilds at some point, but it's still useful information if say next week, one of your healers and can't make it and you need to decide whether to replace them with another healer or a DPS class. You can bet however, that later when you do a harder fight that does need lots of healing, the fact that one of your healers is a little slower than the others will be important. A good raid leader will put them in a less critical position for the fight, and perhaps even look for a replacement in the future.

Some Classes outclass Classes
This is a similar argument to the previous. Just as situations give healers an advantage, so do class abilities. This is very true. But it's no reason to throw up your hands and discard the numbers. Again, at the very least we can compare healers of the same class to our benefit. We can also try and understand why some classes are better than others on the meters and use that knowledge to our benefit. Classes with healers that land on several players for small amounts over time should always do more healing that healers that tend to hit single players with large heals, because pound for pound HoTs are less useful than direct heals. As a druid healer, I should be doing more healing than the paladins because my heals are much less likely to save someone from a sudden damage spike than theirs are. Sure, I could switch to a glyphed Healing Touch druid and try to compete at that style of healing, but I've decided my strength as a druid is to lay a blank of HoTs out that will free up the paladins from having to sweat the small stuff so they can land there big tank-saving heals. The most useful type of healing, even better than direct healing, is a kind that doesn't show up as healing at all: absorbed damage. Pound for pound, 10k damage absorption is way more useful than a 10k heal. This is why discipline priests are always low on the meters. But digging a little deeper into the report, you can probably find the PW:S casts and come to a better understanding of what the numbers are really saying.

I will say this: If every healer is firing on all cylinders and playing to their strengths then in a reasonably difficult fight the healing meters should not show a huge variation between the top and bottom healers.

I'm going to add another "objection" here to healing meters that I think is a much better argument against them that he surprisingly did not bring up.

Meters can be padded
A skilled player who decides he wants to "beat" the meters can do tricks to bring his total healing higher. Some of the common things you can do are: using fast blanket heals way more than is efficient or necessary; pre-healing or pre-hotting someone who might be about to take damage; learning the habits of your fellow healers and trying to beat them to the punch on whoever you predict that they're about to heal. There are other sneaky tricks, some more devious or downright dangerous. But during trash or easy fights, its fun for healers to play these little game of trying to outdo each other. And I'll tell you why. Each of these little skills that lets you pad the numbers artificially in an easy fight will potentially save you in a truly wipe-threatening situation. So you've learned to hot up everyone that might take damage to pad the meters? Well guess what. Now it's Sapphiron time, and everyone is taking damage and you had better know which kinds of hots and how many you can most efficiently spread around. You've learned to predict what your fellow healers are about to do? Great, because the DPS just pulled 2 extra trash groups and now the shit's about to hit the fan, and if you guess what everyone around you is about to do, you might just come out of this alive.

Trash and easy fights are when good healers hone their skills and reaction times, playing little games with themselves and each other. When push comes to shove, those skills will save the raid.

Meters are not infallible
More hand-waving. "I've seen variations in meters before so how can anyone say if they're correct? Might as well ignore them." No. If the meters don't look right to you, pull up the underlying numbers until you find out where they're wrong. WWS allows to actually inspect the entire log the report was built from, and Recount allows a good deal of drilling. If something is out of whack, there's an explanation. These numbers aren't just pulled out of the ether. I agree, things go wrong all the time. A log file could be corrupted and missing pieces, or the logger may have been absent for part of the fight. But better to learn how to get a better quality of logs than decide that since quality varies, all logging is useless.

On healers and tanks

I've often thought of publishing a gaming blog, generally having much to say, and appreciating the structure that writing imposes on one's thoughts. Seeing as this is the first post (and therefore statistically speaking, the only post) of my fledgling blog, it will be somewhat general and unfocused. In the hopes that I continue to publish, that will mean that I can lay out some of the general groundwork upon which to build and focus. So here's a quick overview of what I've been up to in WoW.

For WotLK, I decided to reverse the roles of my two main characters. My Protection warrior, long time guild main tank, is now my alt. My resto druid became my main raiding character, and was therefore the first to level to 80. This decision was based primarily on guild needs. A large number of people had decided to switch to a tanking character, due to the new Death Knight class and the general changes made to the tanking role to make it a little more enjoyable. Conversely a number of healers decided to switch out of a healing role, which seems to be pretty common. Healers tend to burn out faster and want to try something else. So we were left with an over-abundance of tanks and a shortage of healers. I enjoy playing both characters and decided I wouldn't mind at all being a primary healer for a while. The promised upcoming dual spec feature meant I would also be able to try a completely different role, probably as balance, without a large investment in gear.

So far I've enjoyed the druid and have healed every raid encounter in the game in 10 and 25 mans. The druid is a very strong healer right now, with an impressive arsenal of heals added to their kit. There are very few fights where I do not end up with the largest amount of healing done, usually by a fair margin. Some fights where there is very little damage are hard to stay on top, since other classes have faster blanket heals (CoH primarily) but since these fights are trivially easy to heal, I'm not really too concerned with who has the most through-put. On harder fights, primarily Malygos, Sapphiron, and Kel'Thuzad, I pull way ahead due to sheer length of the fight and the amount of incoming damage. I have incredible regen capabalities and can churn out a lot of healing without worrying about mana. I give my innervate out to the mana-hogging priests on these fights, and rarely need even a pot for myself.

Healing is a challenging role. I tend to think the most challenging. Tanking I really believe is pretty easy. The hardest part of tanking is done before you ever log in, researching various statistics on gear and stats to determine optimal avoidance and EH and threat for each fight. WotLK has even simplified these elements, making it a pretty simple matter of picking your best gear, then managing your cooldowns. In this respect its pretty similar to the role of DPSer, with just a little added vigilance needed in reacting to damage spikes. The hardest part of tanking is actually nothing to do with tanking per se. The tank ultimately decides every pull, and controls the flow of the raid. It usually falls on the tank to be familiar with every pull, every mob, and every boss. Not only from a tanking perspective but a holistic one. It's possible to raid lead as a healer or DPSer, but one of two things will happen. You will slow the entire raid down a great deal communicating strategy to your tanks or you will find your tanks naturally picking up the mantle of leadership in all the moment-to-moment decisions, leaving the raid leader with only overall strategy decisions or leadership decisions with respect to their role of either healing or DPS, which is really how it should ideally be, with decision-making and leadership the shared responsibilty of about 3 people.