Dispelling in Cata

[Khatovar]

This makes me sad face. I really think this may lower some utility of multiple shaman teams. It won't destroy the team, but auto poison / disease cleansing was really handy.

It's an even bigger blow to the Multi-RetPally teams, honestly.

edit 2: Rets will be much different to play since they are totally changing, hell they will have combo points now@?@?

Retribution and Enhancement in Cataclysm are unlikely to ever have to worry about mana much. That part isn't changing. My point was that because they both have cooldown limited gameplay, we need to make sure there are enough decisions going on that the specs A) aren't boring and B) have some variance in performance depending on the skill of the player playing them. I'd agree that Enhance needs less "new stuff" than Ret, and in any case we're talking more about a new talent or two and less that you now have combo points to manage.

OMG, they are totally out to get me! Just me! You're all inconsequential, this is so obviously because they think my team is OP!

*sigh* but seriously, combo points?

[Velassra]

OMG, they are totally out to get me! Just me! You're all inconsequential, this is so obviously because they think my team is OP!

*sigh* but seriously, combo points?

I read somewhere that warlock soulstones were going to be more like DK runes. This I think would be as bad, as all 3 of my dps are locks

[Ualaa]

They said every warlock will have certain abilities which trigger off of soul stones... and that you'll start each fight with so many of them. And will have a spell to replenish them during a fight, but in most encounters you'll be fine with the number you start with.

[Bloodcloud]

They said every warlock will have certain abilities which trigger off of soul stones... and that you'll start each fight with so many of them. And will have a spell to replenish them during a fight, but in most encounters you'll be fine with the number you start with.

so locks get Mana AND soul shards to worry ?? makes things interesting

[Tonuss]

Yeah, but soul shards won't have to be farmed. I think that it will be like DK runes, in that you start a fight with a certain number of soul shards available, and certain spells and abilities will use up one or more shards. They will probably have some sort of way to regen them during a fight that (attempts to) balances the power of those spells and abilities with their availability.

I think that they're trying to replace certain types of boring button-pushing (farming shards, spamming debuffs, spamming heals) with mechanics that are based more around situational awareness. If they succeed, it could make multiboxing harder, but it would make single-character play more exciting and fun.

[Fat Tire]

I will be personally very happy with alot of changes. I have not enjoyed Wotlk as much as I enjoyed BC. Hopefully and its looks like its going back to that type of gameplay I really enjoyed, so I am excited. Looking at this post today by GC, healing is for sure going back to BC style. WIll have to wait to find out if dps changing also, but I would imagine so.

I have found this philosophy to be a tough one to communicate. Painted broadly, we have some players who chose healing because they like to be challenged and we have some players who chose healing because they like to be the hero. In LK, raid healing can definitely be stressful at times, but we're not actually convinced the challenge is there. After a tough fight, whether it was succesful or not, ask yourself what you should have done differently. Did you use the wrong heal in the wrong situation? I'd suspect not since most healers have pretty stringent rotations these days where you use your strongest heals on cooldown and fill in the time left with your next strongest heals and so on. Did you heal the wrong person at the wrong time? Probably not because anyone you failed to heal was probably about to die. You probably overhealed a lot because there is little consequence for overhealing.

Go back and look at a few videos of BC raid encounters. A couple of points may be strking. One, several characters may be at various stages of injury -- the healers could not keep them all topped off. Second, the healers may be at various stages of mana -- in other words, it's not just a matter of having more GCDs before everyone is fine again. It's a matter of triage.

Triage is one of the things missing from today's healing game (even though you likely learned First Aid through a triage quest). Loosely defined, triage is deciding who needs immediate attention (vs. who is stable vs. who is a lost cause). We want healers to be able to make decisions like "The tank is wounded, but she is unlikely to die in the next few hits, and hots are ticking on her, so she's probably okay for a moment and I can heal this Ret paladin over here," vs. "The rogue is wounded, but my big heal would overheal for a ton and I need the mana, so I can use a small heal." We want the dps to likewise be thinking about ways to minimize damage on themselves, not because they'll die in a global (i.e. before they could respond anyway) but because the healers are going to risk running out of mana.

Today, in LK, healing risks feeling even more like whack-a-mole. Injury? Heal. Injury? Heal. You're testing your reflexes more than your decision-making ability. Whack-a-mole can be challenging, but it doesn't have much depth. It's easy to add depth though. Let's start with the notion that there are two hammers. The little hammer can dispatch most of those moles, but sometimes you can use your big hammer too. The big hammer has limited charges or whatever. Now let's have some of the moles pop out a little slower so that you have time to consider which hammer to use. See where I'm going with this?

Running out of mana doesn't have to be, and won't be, the only reason you fail an encounter. But it is a point of failure that we don't have today. Adding it back in will make the encounters feel more distinct from each other and will actually, we believe, make healing more interesting and ultimately more fun. I agree it's going to be a tough sell though. In one of our playtests recently, the healer came back frazzled. "I couldn't keep everyone topped off," she said. "It took me half the dungeon to realize that I didn't have to." Once that clicked, she said she started having fun. Hopefully it will click with other players quickly too.

Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

[Velassra]

I will be personally very happy with alot of changes. I have not enjoyed Wotlk as much as I enjoyed BC. Hopefully and its looks like its going back to that type of gameplay I really enjoyed, so I am excited. Looking at this post today by GC, healing is for sure going back to BC style. WIll have to wait to find out if dps changing also, but I would imagine so.

I have found this philosophy to be a tough one to communicate. Painted broadly, we have some players who chose healing because they like to be challenged and we have some players who chose healing because they like to be the hero. In LK, raid healing can definitely be stressful at times, but we're not actually convinced the challenge is there. After a tough fight, whether it was succesful or not, ask yourself what you should have done differently. Did you use the wrong heal in the wrong situation? I'd suspect not since most healers have pretty stringent rotations these days where you use your strongest heals on cooldown and fill in the time left with your next strongest heals and so on. Did you heal the wrong person at the wrong time? Probably not because anyone you failed to heal was probably about to die. You probably overhealed a lot because there is little consequence for overhealing.

Go back and look at a few videos of BC raid encounters. A couple of points may be strking. One, several characters may be at various stages of injury -- the healers could not keep them all topped off. Second, the healers may be at various stages of mana -- in other words, it's not just a matter of having more GCDs before everyone is fine again. It's a matter of triage.

Triage is one of the things missing from today's healing game (even though you likely learned First Aid through a triage quest). Loosely defined, triage is deciding who needs immediate attention (vs. who is stable vs. who is a lost cause). We want healers to be able to make decisions like "The tank is wounded, but she is unlikely to die in the next few hits, and hots are ticking on her, so she's probably okay for a moment and I can heal this Ret paladin over here," vs. "The rogue is wounded, but my big heal would overheal for a ton and I need the mana, so I can use a small heal." We want the dps to likewise be thinking about ways to minimize damage on themselves, not because they'll die in a global (i.e. before they could respond anyway) but because the healers are going to risk running out of mana.

Today, in LK, healing risks feeling even more like whack-a-mole. Injury? Heal. Injury? Heal. You're testing your reflexes more than your decision-making ability. Whack-a-mole can be challenging, but it doesn't have much depth. It's easy to add depth though. Let's start with the notion that there are two hammers. The little hammer can dispatch most of those moles, but sometimes you can use your big hammer too. The big hammer has limited charges or whatever. Now let's have some of the moles pop out a little slower so that you have time to consider which hammer to use. See where I'm going with this?

Running out of mana doesn't have to be, and won't be, the only reason you fail an encounter. But it is a point of failure that we don't have today. Adding it back in will make the encounters feel more distinct from each other and will actually, we believe, make healing more interesting and ultimately more fun. I agree it's going to be a tough sell though. In one of our playtests recently, the healer came back frazzled. "I couldn't keep everyone topped off," she said. "It took me half the dungeon to realize that I didn't have to." Once that clicked, she said she started having fun. Hopefully it will click with other players quickly too.

Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

So what it sounds like here, is that the healer is going to have to bust ass while the tank tanks everything. Sounds like in vanilla. I stopped healing and went shadow. Fuck whack a mole.

[Ualaa]

I like that mana is a resource which has to be managed.
And that you have more then one tool for a given heal.

In today's game, you go for the biggest heal possible, as often as possible.
And because of the mana pool size and mana regeneration, the costs are not much of an issue.



But as an analogy...
You have 100 mana, for this entire fight.
Your small heal costs 5 mana and heals for 5.
Your medium heal costs 15 mana and heals for 25.
Your big heal costs 25 mana and heals for 50.

You cannot just spam the big heal on everyone; you'll run out of mana.
The DPS will almost never require heals for 50, and its a quarter of your mana.
It is the most efficient heal for the tank, provided the tank will survive for it to land.

[Shodokan]

I'd agree that Enhance needs less "new stuff" than Ret, and in any case we're talking more about a new talent or two and less that you now have combo points to manage.

The way i interpret this is that blizzard is adding new talents to add more variety and options to a ret/enhance shaman's rotation and allow for choices, for example more things like exorcism. the whole "less that you now have combo points to manage" means that they don't want to make them into rogues/druids and rather have them continue their priority rotation but add some flavor to those choices in the priority.

[Khatovar]

Link

Based on a lot of feedback and concerns being raised in this thread and mirrored threads in other regions, we'd like to make a few clarifications in no particular order.

• Shaman will get Cleanse Spirit as a base spell that removes curses. Restoration will have a talent to add magic dispelling (on friends or enemies) to Cleanse Spirit.
  
  
• We recognize this change risks making shaman too vulnerable to rogue and hunter poisons in PvP (and especially mind-numbing), and we might very well offer a talent or mechanic to compensate for that.
  
  
• We also recognize the challenge for magic-based controllers in PvP, say mages, to handle teams with druid healers and we might have to reconsider the druid ability to avoid Polymorph. We think it’s important for PvE reasons for all healers to be able to dispel magic however.
  
  
• For the most part, talents that reduce a chance to be dispelled are going away. We want dispels to be more expensive, but we also want them to be effective when you do choose to use them, so we want to downplay the random aspect. Mechanics such as Unholy Blight granting dispel immunity, or rogues reapplying poisons so quickly will be handled on an individual basis. We’ve had a little bit of an arms race going on because some of those debuffs could be removed so trivially; but on the other hand, death knights and rogues need those debuffs to function. Balancing that will be an ongoing process.
  
  
• We also want to downplay the role of “junk buffs” that protect dispels. Our usual course of action here is to make those buffs undispellable such that you dispel the thing you actually want to dispel.
  
  
• If we didn’t mention a specific dispel mechanic (like Shield Slam), then you can assume it probably isn’t changing, at least for now. A lot may change in beta.
  
  
• We want to stress yet again that one of our goals behind these changes was to help us design 5-player dungeons and 10-player raids. Currently having the ability to remove, say, a poison or disease can make an encounter go from challenging to easy, yet not every group has those abilities. With this new matrix, the encounter designers can make anything that must be dispelled a magical effect, while curses, poisons or diseases would be in the category of helping you win, but not an instant wipe if you lose. In 25-player raids, we have more flexibility to ask you to dispel more types of effects.
  
  
• We understand that in some cases we are making changes that have been core to some classes for a long time (shaman losing poison and disease dispel for instance). While we don’t want to make any beloved classes, or even spells unrecognizable to players who have stuck with that class for years, Cataclysm is also an opportunity for us to fix some of the class systems and mechanic issues we've had for a long time. We have to be careful about having too many sacred cows that keep us from being able to iterate on the design. The dispel matrix we had was somewhat arbitrary and could change a PvE encounter or PvP battle dramatically, almost in a binary manner, depending on what dispels were available to the group involved. When dispelling is trivial, either because it’s too easy or because someone is capable of dispelling too many things, then neither PvE or PvP feel as strategic or tactical as we think they ideally could be.
  
  
• Defensive dispels (say, a shaman removing a debuff from an ally) should always hit. We don’t want healers to have to stack +hit for PvE. When you are dispelling buffs on an enemy, you will still have a chance to miss.