4701

The healer? Huh? DPS and Tanks fuck up fights just as bad.

“Blame”. When people die they tend to blame the healer. That’s Blizzard’s point.

4702

I’d love to see tabards removed as inventory items in the game and instead selectable from a combo-box in the character screen (a la title) or handled like keys are.

4703

That’s a great idea. Seconded.

4704

Actually, this quote is one that I couldn’t agree more with:

…although it’s not unique to WoW by any stretch of the imagination. The “sample size of one proves my case” is something you see in almost every video game conversation.

4705

I think that’s his point. Right now, the game doesn’t provide information as to why a group wiped, so players tend to blame the healer. In most cases, the real reason is mishandling of adds, standing (or not standing) in glowy stuff or ignoring other mechanics. From his post here and others on the forums, it’s clear they want to implement better feedback for the player to understand why a fight failed.

In the 548540543 wipes I have experienced via LFD since returning, I can only recall one where it was dead obvious the healer was terrible (a shaman who used Chain Heal exclusively). In the other cases, it would be nice if the game provided data such as “Ernie the rogue stood in fire, Bert the Hunter is doing 4k DPS and nobody picked up the adds.”

4706

Built in Failbot is either brilliant or the worst idea ever.

James, do you ever stop and think that posting a wall of SCREEEEEEE in response to a long, thoughtful post on design philosophy by a dev makes you part of the problem?

Also: Magmaw is very cool. And I hope that anyone bitching about heroic difficulty never sets foot inside BWD. Headsplosion!

4707

Built in Failbot is either brilliant or the worst idea ever.

I’m siding with brilliant. I think the biggest problem with bad players is that they don’t realize they’re bad players. That is, if they die, it was clearly the healer’s fault for failing to top up their health, not their own fault for standing in the fire. Maybe I’m giving people too much credit, but I like to think most players would make an effort to improve if they knew specifically that they were at fault and what they were doing wrong. If Blizzard added Failbot-like functionality to the base UI (although without the snarky “Player X is Captain of the Failboat” reporting), I think people would realize their mistakes and improve in a hurry.

You won’t be able to correct terrible dpsers who don’t know how to properly play their class or healers who don’t know how to triage and what spells to cast (like the Shaman who used nothing but Chain Heal mentioned above), but it would likely do wonders at improving the ability of people to move out of the fire, use their interrupt skills, not break CC, etc.

4708

I believe this is being worked on, but the code is proving to be complex.

4709

Blood Boil (once you spread diseases with Pestilence) is great AoE damage, with or without Scarlet Fever. Of course, we’re not supposed to be AoEing anymore…

4710

Unrelated to the current conversation, but maybe others can help me out here.

I created a “panic button” macro to self-heal my healadin in an emergency that looks like this:

/cast [target=player] Lay on Hands

I bound it to my fifth mouse button. It works when out of combat. But I’ve tried several times to use it in combat and it never seems to fire. At first I thought I was just not hitting the button correctly in the heat of the moment (button 5 is out of the way, that’s the point). But last night I clearly pressed and nothing happened.

I’m gonna try to bind to a keyboard key next, but has anyone else seen something similar like this happening with Lay on Hands or other spells? My macro knowledge is rudimentary at best.

4711

Only if you’re specced into Crimson Scourge, which is typically a bad choice in a raiding tank spec. Even with CS, though, BB only out-damages Heart Strike on 5+ targets, making it pretty darn niche.

Personally, I’m in love with the PTR Scarlet Fever change. It won’t make a noticeable difference in my threat output or survivability, but having to worry about keeping one less debuff on will be a nice quality of life improvement for me.

4712

sinnick: Odd that wouldn’t work in combat…try the new macro targeting instead and see if that works?

/cast [@player] Lay on hands

4713

Thanks Adam, I’ll give that a shot.

4714

Earlier in the essay, Ghostcrawler wrote, “We don’t want healers to be able to make up for all of the mistakes on the part of the other players.”

That went on all the time in Wrath, so there is an expectation now that it will continue to go on, but it can’t yet. Often now I find myself too busy keeping the tank alive, or just lacking the mana, to throw a lot of heals on the group. Melee DPS is used to dying sometimes, so they generally take it in stride, but ranged DPS are not & so have a greater tendency to rage at me.

It is enough of a problem that I’m now reluctant to queue at the end of a long day, since the game is not serving its purpose as relaxation for me. I’ve neither the patience nor the desire to take abuse from strangers, so I go off & play the leveling game instead. Since GC spent some time talking about healer blame in his essay, I’m guessing this is a frequent pattern they are seeing.

4715

Were you able to manually cast Lay on Hands? You may have been under the effect of Forbearance, which I believe prevents you from casting LoH on yourself. Divine Shield and Hand of Protection can also cause it.

4716

I used GTFO last night in Stonecore and it worked great for warning me of standing in bad stuff. Sometimes for me at least I’m in the middle of a cast and am thinking so hard about when to recast stuff I don’t pay enough attention. GTFO makes it pretty clear by sound that something is seriously wrong.

4717

A big change I’ve noticed in Cataclysm is that (as a melee dps) I need to accept the fact that my health will frequently remain low for extended periods. In Wrath (and also TBC and vanilla), if I took any non-lethal damage, I could expect to be topped up to 100% within a few seconds. Now, I often spend the majority of several fights at or below 50% health. I frequently feel like I’m on the verge of dying at any moment, but this has forced me to become a better player and do more to help my healers. In addition to the usual stuff I’ve always done like moving out of the fire, Cata has trained me to start using Feint on every cooldown during fights that have unavoidable damage components (Feint reduces all incoming damage from AoE sources by 50% for 6s, the ability is on a 10s cooldown and has no energy cost if it’s glyphed).

4718

Well, sure, I suppose for Blood spec it’s not that useful. I’ve barely even played with the post 4.0.1 Blood spec, so I’m speaking from an Unholy perspective here. (I’m not sure if Scarlet Fever is something I was ever meant to care about as DPS, but I’m not nearly raid ready yet so I’ll worry about spec finetuning later.)

4719

Scarlet Fever is the DK’s equivalent of Demo Shout (a debuff that reduces physical damage dealt). In a usual raiding situation, it is something the tank will handle.

4720

I’ve only played my healer alt a little at 85, but interestingly I’ve noticed that DPS tends to take more damage while at high health than at low health.

The same psychology seems to be at work here, players take more chances when their health is high, but play more conservatively when it starts to dip low. I am probably occasionally guilty of this while DPSing too.