Speculation on the Cataclysm damage/healing dynamic
This is all speculation, so take it all with a grain of salt, but these are some ideas that have popped into my head from time to time (usually when I should be going to sleep).
For me the defining change to game play for the new WoW expansion is how they change the damage/healing dynamic. These ideas are all based on players having large health pools and spending more time with some health loss. From what i’ve read about the expansion raid tanks with health pools around 250-300k will normal and non-tanks will have about 40-50k health. There will also be less one-shot/two-shot spike damage. So here are a few thoughts.
Guardian Spirit going to be very powerful. +40% to healing is going to be very powerful when healers are struggling to maintain health levels rather than fighting to top someone off. It will allow healing teams to potentially run a tanks health pool down more than they normally would and then power heal during Guardian Spirit. They will be doing this because healing per mana will be the defining healing relationship rather than the healing per second one that exists in Wrath. +40% healing will be a big boost to healing per mana.
50% healing when GS triggers could be a 150k heal! Letting tanks die for this huge heal could be a viable, although somewhat risky, strategy. It would allow healers to take a break and regen some mana plus effectively deliver a heal with a huge healing per mana ratio.
Druids are going to be even more over powered. Druids are already close to the most powerful healers in game. The main reason they aren’t more OP is many of their HoT ticks land when the target is at full health. If raiders spend lots of their time with less than 100% health then druids healing is going to increase significantly.
I suspect holy pallies will me similarly advantaged although it depends on what happens with mana regen.
Smart heals are going to be less useful. They are awesome now as they heal those that are damaged and ignore those on full health. If everyone is damaged then their usefulness is decreased. I’m not saying they are going to be useless, but they are less advantaged than they are currently.
Discipline priests, from what i’ve seen to date, are going to be disadvantaged in such an environment. Our heals are relatively small and our shields will be less useful when there is less spike damage. I realise the game designers have said they want to give Disc priests options other than shield spamming, but i’m yet to see this in the changes made to date. Sadly, if I even continue playing WoW post Cataclysm, I’ll almost certainly be moving from a priest main to my druid.
Anyway some ideas. Feel free comment and tell me what you think.
Gobble gobble.
Filed under: Blogging 
