In those pre-Cataclysm fights – the healers typically had the ability to heal that extra damage. It was OK if a fight was harder, even brutally harder, on melee (or ranged) in a fight since the capability to heal the damage was there.
Now, it’s a much closer thing. A fight where your DPS is taking huge amounts of damage risks having the healer run out of mana. Right now, those fights tend to be the ones that punish melee the most.
I can understand that arrangement if we’re talking about 10/25 man hard modes, but in 5-man dungeons it is too much and ends up being not fun for a lot of people.
That’s my perspective as a resto druid anyway. The priests have it worse (although this may have become a touch better with their latest fix). Paladin healers still appear to be cruising a little bit.
Not that I want to put words in Blizzards’s mouth but I think what they’re saying is that they want to design encounters so that people can be successful if they pay attention, perform their chosen roles decently, and work together, as opposed to “we need fire damage here or this encounter is unwinnable.”
Of course, requiring all of that from pugs is sometimes too much to ask for (not to mention that I’m sure there are encounters where they don’t hit their design goals).
Well, it’s a spectrum. I think.
At one point in WOTLK, a number of raid bosses were easier, almost absurdly easier, with a DK as the main tank. They had the best damage mitigation and defensive cooldowns. So the non-DK tanks found themselves on the sidelines at times. This was corrected eventually. I think something similar is happening with DPS. And now it’s the fact that ranged DPS eat less of the healer’s mana in most encounters as compared to melee DPS.
I don’t care if certain classes are favored by an encounter to an extent. But, the balance is out of whack. The ability to heal damage has been gimped to such an amount that classes that are the best damage avoiders are much better to have in a group. Right now, that’s ranged DPS because there are fewer dungeons that test the “situational awareness” of ranged as severely as those that test the melee DPS.
If healers were more able to rescue their group it wouldn’t matter. Or if the punishment on melee wasn’t as severe.
Maybe but do people get this message?
Yesterday I had this experience in Mount Hijal:
There is a quest where you have to kill a turtle boss as part of the quest chain. The NPC gives you a totem saying that the mob will do some nasty aoe damage and once he starts channeling it you should use your totem.
to absorb it. Straight forward. Fine.
I go to the place where the boss spawns and 1 ally already waiting.
Ok let’s “queue” then.
Ally shammy comes and I assume those 2 will group and kill together (as Horde I can’t talk with them). Anyways fair enough they kill it.
Now shammy stays and the other guy leaves. Alright they probably didn’t share whatever.
It’s clear that shammy jumped the “queue” and will try to kill the boss at respawn before it’s my turn. Ok he is 80 I’m 85 and only doing the quest chain to finish Hijal for Loremaster so I will not try to get the boss faster.
Now the interesting part:
Boss spawns, shammy engages.
Boss starts channeling a big aoe spell (which hit me and I was standing at least 40 yards away). Shammy not using totem is down to 35% health. Heals up. Alright.
Boss starts channeling again. Shammy again no totem down to 35%.
He finally kills the boss at 20% health (I told myself I will not help this idiot).
My turn:
Boss channels his aoe, I use totem, totem puts a bubble over myself and warlock pet = 0 damage. Cooldown of totem is a bit faster than AOE so easy mode. Boss dies without me taking any damage.
So what did the shammy learn? Nothing.
Blizzard should have one-shot him with 200k damage if he ate the first AOE but then probably forums would be aflame…
I see people grouping up instead for bosses that ask you to kite over runes etc. to damage them.
They will be quite rude when you tell them that all quests in Cataclysm apart from Crucible of Carnage can be solo’d with a brain…
I shelved my rogue because of that just like when I quit due to this in BC for 6 months.
Playing my lock now and ranged is much easier just like it was in BC.
Shame that Blizzard didn’t seem to have learned something (in the end they nerfed the 360 aoe shit in BC).
I really have no problem with dying / taking damage if it’s my fault but right now I have the “choice” to stay in melee to dps and eat aoe or stay out of melee but doing zero dps which makes me dead weight in a group.
Crazy. I was in a Heroic SFK run last night with 3 other guild members and one random Hunter. I wonder if it was some sort strange Qt3 Fate that could have been you.
As a healer, I have not been queuing up for heroics unless I’m with a guild tank, or at least a couple of guild DPS. There is no way I am willing to subject myself to insults from bad random players.
It’s bad enough when I jump in to run a Normal. There have been several times when I had to stop and think if I really want to heal bad players through their bad habits or let them die. I generally choose to heal, since I just want the run to be over, but there have been a few times…
Crystal Barrage is the main thing. It randomly targets a group member, so in a ranged group with everyone spread out, it warrants respect but it can be handled. But, in a melee group, it can mean that more than one person is going eat some big damage.
If the crystal mines explodes on a ranged player, that’s recoverable for a healer. But, if multiple melees are getting hit by the mine AOE, it’s going to be hugely taxing and probably a wipe.
So, I’m probably exaggerating a little bit by saying it’s impossible for an all melee group, but this encounter is 100x harder with an all melee group. The more melee you have the greater the chances are for a mine to explode and that’s going to hit all the melee. A PUG melee group is going to have a really hard time with this, a PUG ranged can do it much simply.
Pro-tip: tell the melee to spread apart.
In a typical fight, the melee dps will normally stack on top of each other directly behind the boss (dragons with tail swipes or similar excepted), but in cases like this, you want your melee dps to spread out as much as possible. If you have one melee plus the tank, the same formation still works; if you have two melee dps, have them setup in a triangle formation so they’re at their maximum distance both from the tank and each other. Executed properly, only one of them should get hit by the crystal barrage.
It should look something like this. T is the tank, B is the boss, and M is the melee.
T
B
M M
Also, make sure they’re standing at the maximum possible melee range. Most bosses have hit boxes that are quite a bit larger than they appear. Standing at maximum range will give you greater separation between players.
idrisz
4008
I don’t believe getting hit by multiple crystals on heroic is actually survivable, it’s 30k a crystal, and there are a shit ton of them.
It doesn’t require a brain. It requires reading the quest description. I can pretty much assure you the behavior you’ve seen is them simply not reading the quest text (with the possible exception of a couple of the Sarlacc Pit quests in TH, where, at least alliance side, the directions are more than a little poorly written).
The crystal adds apply a debuff that increases damage taken too. It’s safe to say that that fight is quite impossible without a ranged with decent AoE. I can’t say I mind that so much since that’s exactly what I play as a Surv hunter, but the boss can definitely be a brick wall for some groups.
With more than a couple melee I find it nearly impossible to spread out enough on fights like that. Two melee and a tank I guess is barely viable, but still tricky. (The times I’ve run Kel’thuzad spring readily to mind - unless most of the raid was ranged, multiple people were gonna get hit. I could not possibly get out of range of everyone else and still stay within melee range of KT.)
In 10 man it was possible as long as no fissure (blue shit on the ground) was formed directly under one melee given you had not more than 3 melee in the raid (one left, middle, right of Kel).
If the fissure was there 2 melee had to stack until it was gone.
We were in heroic Grim Batol last night with four guild members and one non-guild tank. We get to the first boss and this god’s gift to tanking doesn’t pick up any adds and we wipe. He starts cursing at us and we point out that maybe he should try picking up the right adds. Second attempt he picks up ALL the adds, including the one that enrages the boss, and he then calls us blind idiots and quits the group. We re-queu, get a different tank that knows how to play, and clear the instance.
The good thing about Cata is that idiots like our first tank are being exposed for the weak players they are, heroic instance by heroic instance. They could rely on healers and dps saving them in LK, but no more.
Yeah, I think that’s it. You still need tanks, DPS, and heals, but they want those roles to be more generic.
They want the end game to be accessible to players who aren’t in raiding guilds. It’s a good goal, but tricky to manage and keep everyone happy.
The dungeon finder was great for me. I got to see a lot of content I normally wouldn’t see because I find raiding guilds to be a real pain. My end game goal still is to simply be competitive in PvP. I enjoy the battlegrounds and Wintergrasp.
This is where I am now – after the jousting stuff, my log is empty. I have no idea where I might have missed a quest, though.
And I can’t say I think it’s a great design to make me quest to the point that if I miss I quest giver I’m hosed. I do like to quest, but it would be nice to have some more flexibility.
And it’s starting to make sense to me now why Blizzard reduced XP on mob kills once you hit certain levels. If you hang around too long before moving on, you’ll be 82 once you start the Cata quests, and before you know it you’ll be capped and still have dozens of quests you have to complete in sequence to get to whatever quest rewards you might want at the end of Cata.
Once I get a character capped, I don’t do much questing. I would probably find it tedious to run through another 50 quests just to get to some quest reward I wanted.
Go back to the Shrine of Goldrinn and see if Yseria is there, otherwise go to The building under the world tree at the start.
I did a flyby over the world tree, but I didn’t see any quest markers on my mini-map. In fact, I know every hub I left no longer had quest markers displayed. I may have missed a quest, but it’s not because I ignored a quest marker.
And there are the two new races and dozen of revamped zones.
In short, I have more fun leveling my goblin shaman than playing my main at lv 85. And I am probably the type of player you would least expect saying such words.
Athryn
4019
Go talk to Ysera herself, she will tell you what’s not done in Hyjal, as opposed to actually give a quest.
Well, my Shaman is pretty much raid ready (I have zero pre-raid item upgrades that aren’t world-drop BoEs) and it looks like we’re going to be a 10man raiding Guild… with about 20 “Raiders” who are expected to show up hoping for a slot.
Fuck that. If that’s actually the GM’s intention, I’m sure an ilevel 351 Elemental Shaman can find a Guild which wants him.
