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Q u o t e:
I feel that this crusade against Paladin Healers is unjust and if you could take another step back, take your dev team, and run Ulduar on some premades (given everyone knows how to play correctly, but honestly I sometimes wonder with some of the patches you guys roll out) then you will see that each class has a specific role. While not all roles are quite as pigeon-holed as a Holy Paladin, I do believe that this is as about even as you will let us become.

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Oh, come on. All of these "If you'd just play my class, you'd understand" comments are a bit silly. We designed your class. We know how it works.

The issue that started all this was paladins saying "We don't want MP5 on our gear." The designers designed you assuming you'd have MP5 on your gear -- I know; I was there. If you are effective without having MP5 then it probably means you are going to be too powerful at some point because you are able to replace a less-powerful stat with a more powerful one without missing the loss of the less-powerful one.

Imagine you could prune every less-useful stat off your gear. Imagine you could trade in armor, Stamina and everything else for just spell power and crit. Do you think you'd blow away the other healers? I do. That's more extreme than giving up MP5 for more crit, but carries similar risks from a game-balance perspective.

Healers should care about Spirit (druids and priests) and MP5 (paladins and shamans). It's fine to care about Int and crit too, but if you're ignoring Spirit and MP5 and aren't missing them, then something isn't working right.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

Forgive the long response. This thread generated a lot of questions and comments.

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Q u o t e:
If we were designed to have MP5 on our gear, who dropped the ball in t7 & forgot to put it on there?

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We nerfed a lot of regen mechanics in between T7 and T8. Players were worried about regen being too low so we made sure the stats were there. It appears that players aren't having mana problems on the normal encounters but are having to be more careful on the hard modes. So we need to get some more hard mode data.

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Q u o t e:
Holy pallies are working the way you designed them to. We have a very narrowly defined role in raids: we heal the tank, and pretty much nothing else. When we have asked to expand into other roles, we have been gently brushed off. We have our niche.

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This reads as "Because we don't have AEs or hots, we should never run OOM on single targets." Do you think that's a smart design? Why have mana at all? Should / could Holy paladins just work like Ret and Prot where mana is a formality?

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Q u o t e:
If your going to make Paladins want Mp5 again then you've also got to make FoL useful again. Atm there is absolutely no reaso to use it, and its not just because Regen is just too high. The amount of healing power required + glyphs means in every level of content Pallies live and die by Holy Light.

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To be clear, we think that's a problem. When the toolbox isn't large, it's important that every tool does something. The solution is just a little tricky. Nerfing HL won't go over well, but buffing FoL just risks making paladins overpowered. To fix this, which we might do, we have to tweak carefully.

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Q u o t e:
Otherwise there'd be no sense in countless FAA tests on airplanes before they're approved for commercial use, countless crash tests on cars before they are deemed road-worthy or even "Beta Tests" on software before it goes fully public. You should know the process better than everyone.

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A thing needing testing is not the same as the implementers not understanding it or having a goal for how it should work. What the FAA does not do is throw a bunch of parts on an airplane and let the passengers sort out how best to make them work. If passengers said "No, it's cool. We feel safer walking around the cabin instead of being buckled in," that doesn't mean the FAA should let them. You also don't have passengers in the cabin telling the pilots how to fly. You *do* have customers providing feedback on what they liked and didn't like about the flight experience and then the airline can choose to take that feedback seriously or disregard it at their peril.

Analogies can always be stretched to the breaking point though. Mostly I want to say please don't over-interpet my original comment. I wasn't saying our players aren't enormously creative and I have little doubt some of them could outplay me even on my best class. What I was cautioning against were the "You should go play this class in PvE / PvP sometime, because then you'd understand how it works." That, I hope you agree, is a bit of a silly thing to say.

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Q u o t e:
Mp5 off our gear, or change us to care about it. We suck as healers in Ulduar and you're not helping us by saying our garbage gear is that way on purpose.

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I am saying, and have consistently said, we would do the latter and not the former. Let's lay off the use of "stupid" shall we?

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Q u o t e:
But you've made intellect a better regen stat than spirit, even for the spirit-based healers! Doesn't that seem wrong to you?

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You are rarely choosing between just Int and Spirit. It's also fine if you prefer Int to Spirit. The danger comes when you say "My gear is junk because it has Spirit on it." That is what paladins are saying about MP5. Our stance is that's not a problem with the gear -- it's a problem with the stat not being attractive enough. We already run the risk of PvE gear being as homogenized and well, boring, as PvP gear. We need to use all of the stats we have available or every tier of healing plates is going to be "Your previous tier, plus 10% more Int and Crit."

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Q u o t e:
If all I had was SP and crit I would have an infinite mana pool. Awesome. I'd still only be healing one target and I'd still have the majority of my throughput go to overhealing. Because of the pigeonholed nature of healadins, nothing would change.

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Having a limited role does not allow you to be overpowered in that role. Are you arguing that Holy priests should not run OOM on PoH or druids should not run OOM on hots because that is a strong niche for them?

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
Q u o t e:
GC, I'm going to be very honest with you. I was stacking MP5 in Burning Crusade. I never liked the idea of having to cast in order to regen mana from crits. It seemed silly to me. We got through Black Temple, downing Illidan, and I was a very effective healer with a reasonable amount of crit and a high MP5 value..


mp5 WAS good in tbc. With the introduction of DP is became underwhelming.

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Agreed. We want paladins to want MP5. The game works better, in our opinion, when that happens.

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Q u o t e:
We don't want things handed to us on a silver platter. But on the flip side, we don't want our play experience so neutered and watered down to the point where we may as well just be reading a strategy guide and following it letter for letter with no room for experimentation or interesting builds.

But I guess what I have to say will fall on deaf ears again. You want to know what's sad? I'm not even really angry anymore. I'm simply depressed. Games are supposed to be fun, not depressing.

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What you are missing, IMO, is that a lot of players didn't think it was fun for JC and Engineering to be overpowered in PvP. They didn't like that they felt outplayed just because they chose not to reroll to those tradeskills. What is your answer to them? That they are sucking the fun out of the game and need to L2P? I know it's not fun to be nerfed (and let's be clear - we have not announced any paladin healing regen nerfs), but you seem to be arguing that being overpowered is fun so what's the harm?

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Q u o t e:
I'm convinced the best option for Blizzard to make MP5 matter would be to:

- Change Replenishment to restore mana every second based on your MP5. 1% of your casting MP5 returned per second.

-Change Illumination to restore mana on crits based on your MP5. 35% of your casting MP5 returned per HL crit, 20% per FoL/Shock crit.

This makes Intellect less of a godly stat due to replenishment (solves that problem for Priests and Druids too,) it makes MP5 scale significantly better (for paladins at least - shamans still need to be addressed,) and crit continues to be a valuable stat. Haven't done any math or anything to support my numbers, it's just an idea off the top of my head, and to go along with it I'm sure FoL would need a throughput buff (even if it went along with a mana cost increase.) My holy paladin isn't geared very well at all, but even with a mixture of blues and naxx gear, I'm finding FoL to be pretty much entirely inferior to both HL and Shock for emergencies in smaller groups.

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Yes. Changes like that would make MP5 more meaningful without removing potentially fun mechanics like Illumination or DP.

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Q u o t e:
Hey blizz, stop screwing over regen for everyone that is not in top tier, thanks.

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The top tier are on Ulduar hard modes and they ARE running out of mana. :)

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Q u o t e:
P.S. It was nice getting some feedback on this so thanks for stopping by for once in a blue moon. I'll see you sometime next year GC, since you don't like to reply to any intellectual remarks or even witty, sarcastic comments.

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We are often faced with comments like this. What would your solution to them be? That I spend 8 hours a day on the forums? That I pay more attention to paladin issues and ignore the less deserving classes? That I someohow figure out which are the posts it's okay for me to respond to? This seems like a losing proposition for us. Our standard operating procedure is just to ban players who keep making a fuss about where we do or don't post. Better yet, just don't do it. :)

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Q u o t e:
You totally missed the point. It's possible to function as a healer without having talents related to your regen stat, Disc priests and Shaman do it just fine.

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Quoting this for truth. "Scales less" is not the same as "doesn't scale at all." "Less useful than another stat" is not the same as "junk."

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Q u o t e:
I'm not sure what to believe anymore with how little they've proven themselves to know about Shamans. At this point, i'm half-expecting a nerf to Healing Stream Totem because on WWS parses it's accounting for such a high % of our healing(because of the bug with wws)

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And here we do again. Does saying things like this actually make you think we are more likely to listen to you? :)

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Q u o t e:
The fact that you honestly believe this makes your previous statement, about knowing our class, completely moot. Even if we had 6000 spell power and 70% crit in a raid, you think honestly most of that still wont be overheal and our EHPS might go up a bit but we will still be sniped by aoe heals and hots.

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You are honestly arguing that paladins are so far behind that giving you absurdly high spell power and crit wouldn't create a balance problem?

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
What can we do to make them understand this? If our spells costed zero mana, we would still be unable to match the effective healing of the other three classes.

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I am fairly certain the other classes would disagree.

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Q u o t e:
First of all, you're arguing that "If paladins remove mp/5 from their gear, they'll remove stamina and they'll remove armor from their gear and then they'd be over powered." This is a terrible argument and having it influence any thought process is horrible. Paladins may pick other stats over mp/5 but they do not, and cannot pick these stats over stamina and armor. There are no raid drops that have 0 armor and 400 spell power.

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I was trying to make a point. Players were trying to argue that it's okay for them to stack crit because it can't make paladins too effective at healing. The argument is apparently that paladins are so far behind and so narrow in focus that the actual amounts by which their spells heal are irrelevant. That argument seems lacking, IMO.

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Q u o t e:
Secondly, Paladins are already the weakest healer simply due to the fact that they have no raid heals. It's like a knife in a gun fight: you can give them a sword but they'll still lose to the healers hitting 4+ people at once.

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I have seen plenty of healers claim they are the weakest healer. Resto shamans are saying it a lot right now. What makes you think they will agree that you are already the weakest healer?

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Q u o t e:
The class was tuned around the assumption that Paladins would more willingly accept mp/5 on their gear. Other stats weren't meant to be so overwhelmingly better at returning mana, and paladins certainly aren't supposed to have near indefinite mana pools in the very first tier of raiding in the expansion. That's what he's getting at. There is clearly something wrong here that needs to be fixed, and the devs realize that. They understand the class just fine.

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Kaeldin gets it, or at least understands our POV.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
If paladins lose their niche as the superior tank healer what would be the point of bringing a holy paladin to a 25 man raid?

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There is no reason paladins need to lose their niche. What I was questioning was the logic some players offered that because Holy paladins have a healing niche it was okay for mana to be irrelevant for them.

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Q u o t e:
This question could easily be answered if we knew a little more about the design behind these resource systems Protection and Retribution abilities are always tuned around the concept of infinite resources and are limited only by their cooldowns.

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Agreed. Our general design is that tanks and damage-dealing specs don’t run out of resources (providing they manage the tools they have). Healers on the other hand need to run out of resources if your group is not playing as well as it should be or you’re in over your head. Healer mana is one of the few ways we have to end a fight (though it’s not the only way). If you have Holy paladins healing a tank and they are never going to run out of mana, then most likely the tank is never going to die. We have to put in even more brutal ways to wipe a raid – such as one-shotting damage-dealers or healer, or silencing the paladins or making them run.

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Q u o t e:
it is stupid that all classes have near infinite mana at this point (except resto shaman) and only paladins come up because you can actually show a paladins mana gains. priests and druids are both expending huge amounts of mana while topping healing meters but you can't see how much mana they get back on meters. a paladin expending every bit of mana he or she has will not come close to either class in most fights in terms of effective HPS. the only thing a paladin owns right now is overhealing.

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I’m not sure it’s the case that Holy priests and Resto druids never run out of mana. In any case, they do generally care about Spirit, while the problem with paladins is they have MP5 on their Ulduar gear that the community dismisses, understandably, as useless. The community and developers both perceive that as a problem. The community’s answer seems to be to change the gear while the developers are more likely to make a stat that we want to put on your gear more useful to you.

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Q u o t e:
I work on aircraft. I build, fix and make them flyable.
I also fly them. Guess what, they are two completely different things.

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Yes, and I bet if you found out people were flying the aircraft by sitting in the lavatory you might want to change a few things. :)

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
What do you view the role of each healing class to be? Are there specific roles each class should play? Currently it seems that Resto Shamans and Disc Priests are very well suited for MT healing and raid healing, druids are very well suited for raiding healing (and also healing the MT I'm sure), while Holy Pallies are seen as single target tank healers.

You have pretty clearly pigeonholed Holy pallies to be the single target tank healers. They are pretty good at this right now, mainly since they can spam their largest heal in early raiding content. This is required because tanks in early raiding content tend to have lower HP and bosses hit for a lot harder, requiring almost constant spamming. PLEASE note I am talking about a raid that is geared in blues and epics from heroics, not anything from naxx.

If you guys nerf Holy Pally mana regen from illumination etc, you are going to be cutting the legs out from any holy pally trying to currently progress through the lower level raiding content with their guild. They will be forced to pug higher tier raids to get the mp5 gear you are suddenly requiring them to have, in order to last longer than a few minutes in a boss fight and compete with other healers on an even footing.

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Those are reasonable descriptions, though the community tends to view the roles more narrowly than we do. (For example, when you look at raid stats, you generally see a lot of paladin healing on non-tanks too). If we did anything to Illumination, we could go back and re-itemize old tier sets if we thought it was going to be a problem. I don’t think the answer can be “Someone, somewhere might have a problem so we can’t dare change anything.” I’m not dismissing the concern, but changing the Ulduar gear to match the Naxx gear is not the only answer.

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Q u o t e:
GC, I have yet again to apologize for saying this, but after all of these posts, all of these responses, and your attempt to play spin doctor on the topic, not only did you misinterpret the original focus of my post, but you either lost sight, or chose to ignore the point of most of the nerfs you originally made...

I by no means have infinite mana, but I don't think MP5 is the solution, Divine Plea is not a solution, Illumination is only a relief, but still not a solution, the solution is in my hands, and that of my raid, we coordinate when to use cooldowns for maximum effect. It RIGHT NOW is as you were talking about it previously, if I spam heals without care for mana, I will go OOM, if I time my heals according to swing timers and ability casts, my blue bar will last longer(but still only proportional to what cooldowns are being used). Isn't that what you wanted from us?

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Yes, that is what we want. The problem we have is paladins are now telling us “This MP5 on our gear is useless. Give us a better stat instead.” We don’t think that will result in a balanced outcome for the reasons I have mentioned. We’re not talking about nerfing paladins for no good reason. We’re talking about shifting the sources of your regen so that the Ulduar gear is perceived as an upgrade. I don’t accept the logic that it’s impossible to make paladins care about MP5 or that denying paladins more crit and Int will get them gkicked.

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Q u o t e:
Mp5 is also way overbudget, for the reasons you gave (it gives no other benefit BUT mana regen, unlike spirit which serves multiple purposes!). I still don't understand why GC doesn't address the budgeting issue of MP5. If he just doubled the mp5 on current gear and left all other stats alone everyone would be happy and gladly take the item.

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That may be the answer. We just want to make sure the result of that wouldn’t be paladins telling us “I didn’t have mana problems before. What makes you think I want a regen stat now?”

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
p.p.s. these are exactly the type of threads that don't need your input, the kinds of threads YOU complain about. are you more focused about the job of media director or on, what should be, a personal goal of making this game as good as it can be?

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Most of the time, I am addressing a post because of the topic, not necessarily because I’m trying to celebrate the writing of the original poster. In another thread about gear I had said we think that paladins not wanting MP5 is a problem. I figured the conversation would move over to the healing forum, so I picked a thread on the topic to answer. Perhaps you would have chosen a different thread to answer. I can’t very well consult with the community every time about which is the best thread to answer, nor am I always going to spend the effort to “grade” them all before “rewarding” someone. I wish the community would stop focusing on blue posts as some kind of reward and just focus on the discussion. A lot of players have taken this conversation in different directions. You can add your two cents too.

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Q u o t e:
1) If you just can't stand paladins hating mp5, then make DP/Illumination benefit from mp5 in a slightly better way than crit (crit gives more, if unreliable, throughput, so mp5 would have to be more attractive with these talents to get paladins to itemize for mp5 over crit with said scaling). Then we would have to decide between regen and crit. You DO want us to make choices, right?

2) And you should buff FoL so it costs more and heals more, or give paladins some inbetween FoL and HL spell. Pushing more than HL and HS would be awesome. You DO want us to make choices, right?

3) I know you hate the idea, but healadins need some sort of group heal that allows them to be worst in slot for raid healing. Giving healadins nothing in this department makes them extremely defensive when you start talking about nerfing their single-target heal role. Again, you DO want us to make choices, right?

Bottom line, you need to give every healer something they do better than any other healer. Druids have hots, disc priests have shields, holy priests have AoE heals, shamys have smart group heals, and paladins have single-target heals. The last trick is to make each of these roles important at some point in a raid encounter.

By going after paladins spamming HL, you're basically saying paladins shouldn't be the best single-target healers. OK - but what is our nitch going to be then? Because without HL spam and with current mechanics there are 4 other healer specs that could do our job better.

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I don’t disagree with anything you said up until the last point. Many paladins would like something to cast besides HL, and you seem too as well. Secondly, we have this problem of MP5 on the Ulduar gear, yet we are very reluctant to replace it with Int, spellpower or crit.

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Q u o t e:
What raids are YOU looking at? Do. Not. Run. OOM. Ever.

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Zaroua, you had no mana problems while healing hard Yogg etc.? (Everyone else, don’t jump down the dwarf’s throat just because you think if he says no, that you’ll get nerfed.) Edit: Same question to Ggx and other hard-mode healadins.

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Q u o t e:
Ulduar holy paladin loot is so bad that a lot of paladins aren't taking any at all. My guild has downed Vezax twice now and working on Yogg, and I have rolled on loot twice--both times for the Ignis dps caster ring. This isn't just any old QQ--I think a lot of paladins were very disheartened when, with all the anticipation we had for Ulduar, we found that there wasn't any loot we wanted. Raiding is fun, but it's more fun when there's a chance you will see an upgrade drop for you. This hasn't been happening to me in Ulduar, and it's starting to get old.

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Yes, we totally agree this is a problem. We just don’t like the solution of replacing the MP5 with throughput stats.

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Q u o t e:
The problem here is that the Dev. Team thinks we don't know how to play. That's basically what this translates to - if the designers are assuming Paladins will strive to have MP5 on their gear, they are assuming that Paladins as a whole do not understand how to gear themselves. (This is especially ironic because of all the posts recently about how Ghostcrawler thinks it's important players know how to gear themselves.)

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No, that’s not true TBH. I have no doubt paladins are taking the best gear for them. The problem is they don’t want gear that we intend to be an upgrade. The solutions are to change the gear or change the class mechanics, unless someone has another idea.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
It'd be really, really nice to see either mp5 or spirit removed. It makes no sense, from a player perspective, to have two stats that do exactly the same thing.

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Agreed. As I have suggested in other threads, we’d like to consolidate those long-term and I don’t think anyone is going to argue that MP5 is the more interesting, better scaling or more intuitive stat. It’s an acronym for crying out loud. :)

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Q u o t e:
Right now Paladins have no choice, no freedom so to speak in the gear and the style of Play that we have. At this very moment we have one spell. One Spell! This makes it that the average paladin wants a certain type of gear because we have no other choice. You present design of the class has pigeonholed us into one style of healing because we only have one spell.

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I have said we totally agree that is a problem. We are definitely about giving players a choice. We do want to keep the feel of paladin healing however, and not just throw up our hands and give them Renew and Prayer of Healing. A lot of players are concerned about homogenization of abilities, so we want to be cautious.

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Q u o t e:
So really, how many holy paladins are out there in that pool of 11 million WoW subscribers? Because if there are enough of us and we all quit, Blizzard has to listen to us. There is no other way.

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That will never happen and it’s not the right solution anyway. You have a developer here posting in this thread. Why squander that opportunity and resort to threats?

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Q u o t e:
This game's so-called "balance" is a joke. Blizz has tried to turn the best pve game out there into a festering pile of horse crap because theyre constantly breaking things to "balance" out pvp and arenas. After a few years, where has that gotten us, the long term customer? The loyal subscriber? A game so unbalanced you want to scream. And most do scream on here. Im not even going to get into the technical side of things, because I could be here another 4 hours yelling at Blizz's for their, shall we say, lack of up to date tech.

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I’m not quite sure what your issue is here. Nearly all of the discussion in this thread is about PvE healing. I find the standard attack of “PvP balance is ruining my PvE” to be misplaced in this case. I’ll also put the current PvE balance in the game up against any at a point in WoW’s history. It’s not perfect, but there are a lot more viable tanks, healers and dps options than ever before.

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Q u o t e:
Reading the blue posts and issues brought up here seem to suggest that the devs want Paladins to be on the same level of throughput and regen as other healers.

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That might be overstating things a wee bit. Mostly what I am reacting to is the notion from some paladins in this thread that they aren’t supposed to have to worry about mana. Yes, you are. The regen mechanics among the healers are somewhat different, so it isn’t always easy to compare them. However that doesn’t mean we want there to be a healer whose role is “never runs out of mana.”

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer