Friday, July 24, 2015

Avoidable mechanics

Spirit spirit everywhere but not a GCD to drink.

Y'know because mana tea is based on spirit now but GCDs are too valuable to spend drinking it. So it's an accurate analogy.

For most of the previous raid tier I felt distinctly regen starved, but having the opposite problem is way more frustrating. Being low on regen at least forces you to play better to compensate. Too much mana will always dumb down healer gameplay, and I have to say I feel pretty dumb running a spam healing rotation on the entire raid at all times because I literally don't have anything else to do with the mana and if I don't overheal I'll end up at the bottom of the numbers.

My raid has been overhealing every single fight. Even progression fights. It's completely ridiculous. I switched to DPS at the beginning of last night's raid (even though I hate melee) because the excess of healing is so obvious that I feel like a dickhead contributing to it. They asked me to switch back to healing on the second boss after a few wipes that of course had zero to do with healing throughput, and we overhealed the rest of the raid.

Is there a way I can point this out without seeming like I'm acting subversively towards the guild? WoW players are a passionate bunch and experience has taught me that their sense of loyalty is very easily offended.

How do players usually figure out an ideal healer/dps ratio? Most people seem to want more healing than they need-- is it a common cognitive bias to think this? Does Blizzard quote any specific ideal ratio? Does the skill level of the group affect healing demand? Should it? I'd hazard a guess that the top ten raiding guilds use fewer healers than most groups.

What I know is that when I heal a challenging 5-man dungeon, I feel like I'm using all the tools of my class as intended, making efficient choices and reacting to dangerous situations. When I heal as part of a team I try to see "around" what all the other healers are doing to fill the gaps, and most of the time it's just really obvious that the gap remaining is far smaller than the throughput that I'm capable of. I feel like I'm spending all my time competing with other healers to fill the limited opportunities for healing in the fight as quickly as possible, since nobody is ever in the danger zone for longer than it takes for five instant heals to land on them.

No amount of healing gear will prevent people from dying stupidly to avoidable mechanics.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Coreus. You asked:
    "How do players usually figure out an ideal healer/dps ratio"

    It varies per boss. Here's an example:

    Boss 1. One-shotted. Means the healer/DPS ratio is perfect.

    Boss 2. Wipe. Why did we wipe? The usual reason is imperfections in our execution of the fight. Fix those imperfections and try again, without changing the healer/DPS ratio.

    If execution is perfect, and we still wiped, what then? If its something as obvious as a hard enrage timer, reduce healer/DPS ratio and try again.

    Sometimes an enrage timer isn't so obvious. Soft enrage timers occur when bosses steadily increase in power over time, or bring more adds and so on. If you die from a soft enrage timer, you need the same solution, though. More DPS.

    If we died because the healers couldn't keep everyone up (and especially if one or several ran out of mana), we need to increase the healer/DPS ratio.

    That covers 95% of wipes.

    Overhealing shows up on meters, so overhealing doesn't put you at the top of my meters (except the overheals meter) Nobody cares if you're overhealing if the boss dies. If it contributed to you running out of mana and thus caused a wipe, I'm sure the raid leader would point this out.

    ReplyDelete