Thanks to Blizz giving everyone 16 legacy point to play with, I took the 5/5 talent thingy (called Talented), which means that I start getting talent points at level 5, but do not gain extra talent points. As a result of this, I got Holy Shock at level 25.
And then I went healing Stocks. I did record it, but it was just so underwhelming and it’s not a new instance, so I won’t be putting it up on YouTube. The funniest thing about it is that my muscle memory is still there to hit Holy Shock every six seconds or thereabouts and so I was constantly being reminded by my character “I can’t cast that yet”, since the cooldown is ten seconds. Rude. That’s going to take some getting used to.
Anyway, I was looking at some comments on my YouTube channel and there was this one comment that was… well, mean. To be frank, I’ve been online for most of my 40+ years, so I’m used to the odd mean comment or three. The interesting thing about the comment is that it would have been worth discussing if I thought the commenter was actually writing earnestly about what they noticed about my gameplay and healing in Deadmines.
Among other things, the commenter said I was bad, which, okay, whatever. But they did mention that “nobody plays like that anymore”, referring to my constant healing and overhealing.
And this is where a more nuanced view of things, including a nuanced discussion, could be interesting. But the place for that is not in YouTube comments. The place for that is on my blog!
So let’s talk about it a bit.
Specific criticisms:
- too much overhealing
- literally zero damage
- nobody plays like that anymore
- why spam healing spells when they’re at full health?
Let us take these criticisms one at a time, even though a couple of them could be consolidated.
- Too Much Overhealing. Hi. I’m a holy paladin. That’s kind of what we do. Or at least what we have traditionally done. Why? Because we can. Flash of Light is cheap! It’s a cheap, cheap spell! At level 20, it costs 35 mana for Rank 1 Flash of Light. 35 mana! You can almost always cast Flash of Light. Rank 2 is only 50 mana. The highest rank of FoL costs 140 mana, from what I can tell, and you get that at level 58. (Theoretically. We don’t know anything for sure yet, this is still beta.) And we can afford to “waste mana” (or at least we have been able to do so) because of it. Granted, the nerf to illumination (50% of mana back on crits) may affect this a bit, but that’s what you traditionally did as a holy paladin back in the old days. And you didn’t need to step off or otherwise interrupt your cast because it cost so little and because the cast time (1.5 seconds) was so short. It was easier to just let the heals go and it wasn’t terribly inefficient either, especially if you were casting on the tank.
- Literally Zero Damage. Well, I’d argue the claim, but let’s assume Commenter is actually correct. Then, so long as I’m not dropping Holy Light max rank bombs on my tank, if I’m hitting the tank with Flashes of Light and I’m not out of mana, then… I’m winning? Because my tank should be taking some amount of damage, no?
- Nobody Plays Like That Anymore. No, they don’t. But shouldn’t they? This isn’t Classic, but it’s not retail, either. It’s a third, weird thing that is somewhere in between the two. For me, part of Beta is to get used to the functionality. I find that generally, I’m healing more like I did in Classic than I have in retail in years. And I’m pretty sure that’s a decent way to go. In a group situation, I’m likely the only one who’s going to heal anyone. If I don’t keep the tank topped off and then a mage pulls aggro, then I heal the crap out of the mage but the tank taunts and then takes a ton of damage, do we have a dead tank or a nearly dead tank? Probably! Holy Light takes 2.5 seconds to cast! With Infusion of Light, when you crit with Holy Shock or Flash of Light, you can get that down to 1.5 seconds, but that’s only with a crit from IoL or FoL, and since there’s the illumination nerf, I don’t think stacking crit is going to really be the way to go. So by the time we switch our attention to the tank, the tank could be dead halfway through our 2.5s HL cast. (Barring forcing a Divine Favor/Holy Shock to hasted Holy Light combo, but with the GCD, that’s still 2.5 seconds until your Holy Light cast has finished and you’ve only slightly healed the tank.) I find it fascinating that people are just saying things without any experience or facts to back them up. I was there when they changed things in Cataclysm to force us not to keep everyone topped off. It was a difficult change, especially coming out of Wrath when you had tanks taking 40k damage hits in raids. Chimaeron panicked me and my healers in Blackwing Descent. PANICKED us. One of the healers on the first night of attempts was like “all I use is Flash Heal and I am sad” and another was like “I need a pancake”. But lo and behold, we got used to people not being topped off all of the time. And in Mists, they added the 8s cooldown to cleanse/etc. (Well, the 5.0 patch, I guess.) But now we get to go back to a time where maybe it’s not worth it to step out of your heal, and where you might still need to be discerning about what and when you dispell, but we have a lot to learn going forward.
- Why Spam Healing Spells At Full Health. Again, if it’s Flash of Light, it’s currently costing me 50 mana a pop. And the tank will eventually take the damage that the next incoming heal will heal. I do need to be mindful of the 5-second rule for the first time in my life, but I have 0 spirit on anything I wear, so I don’t have a lot of mana regen anyways. So it’s still worth it for the time being. Will it continue to be? We’ll see. I don’t know what my mana pool will be like at 60. I don’t know how challenging Scholomance or Strat Undead will be or if I’ll be panicking in UBRS or laughing my way through BRD. No one knows anything yet. Including me.
So if I don’t know anything yet, why this post?
Because I’m bringing context to my actions. I’m talking about what we used to do 20+ years ago. I’m talking about why we used to do those things 20+ years ago. Priests with their Greater Heal spells? They would step off their casts all the time, but they usually had one winding up in case their tank took a huge hit. Druids would HoT up the tanks and the OTs. And paladins would generally FoL spam and then when enrages hit or what-have-you, would bomb a couple of Holy Lights, hopefully in conjunction with Divine Favor, and then maybe whack on the boss a bit to get some mana back with Seal of Wisdom.
Without more information about Forever, all I have to fall back on is my past experience. But because I knew what I was doing then and, more importantly, why I was doing what I was doing back then, I can adapt to the moment. If I end up with 12235972 spirit on my gear, I won’t be finishing my casts nearly as often to better take advantage of the 5-second rule. But that also depends on which classes I’m healing with, if I’m doing dungeons, etc, etc, etc.
Everything depends on other things. And I kind of love that about WoW and, specifically, how we don’t know most of the things about WoW Forever yet.