The Queue: The one where we talk about healing

It’s healing o’clock, people, because we got a couple of healing-related questions today and I like to ramble. Hopefully that sounds like fun to you, because that’s today’s Queue.

Where it comes to leveling healers, I am old school. I have had a healing Priest since the Vanilla days, and a healing Paladin since the Burning Crusade days. Back then, you had two choices: you could stumble through leveling/soloing in your healing spec or you could dump an increasing amount of gold into respeccing every time you went into a dungeon. The practical person would level in DPS spec and switch at end-game. But I am not a practical person. I almost always leveled my healers in healing spec and, while it’s always been slower than a DPS spec, healing often gave you more survivability. It wasn’t like leveling as a tank, but you did alright with some patience.

Because I’ve spent so much time leveling healers as healers, my concern in Legion wasn’t so much the leveling, but the fact that players would be stuck in one spec because of Artifacts. We’ve had painless spec switching for such a long time and the idea of being locked into one spec for most of the leveling experience was worrying. But then it turned out you could pick up your second spec at 102 and swapping specs wasn’t so bad. (Sure, you had to level multiple Artifacts, but it wasn’t any real concern before end-game.) Anyone who wanted to run with a healing spec and a DPS spec could, without any serious drawback.

At present, I have a max level healing Paladin, Shaman, and Monk. The Paladin has leveled in Holy throughout. I’ve always found the Shockadin playstyle — which turns a Paladin into an interesting ranged/melee magical damage-dealer — to be fun, and Legion offers some talents that support the playstyle. (Though Wrath was really the hayday of the Shockadin.) It’s not as fast as playing Retribution, and you have a limited number of damage dealing spells with some gaps in the rotation where you just stare at cooldowns and wait. (And wait. And wait.) But it’s perfectly doable and I’ve enjoyed only having to pay attention to a single Artifact.

The Shaman, too, I’ve leveled in Restoration spec — but that’s really just because I mostly leveled it in a group (shout out to the Blizzard Watch leveling stream team). When playing on my own, Resto felt fragile, with only a few damage dealing abilities.

On my Monk, I really intended to level as Mistweaver to see what healer soloing was like — but I didn’t manage it. I got from 100 to 102 as a Mistweaver, then I got my Windwalker Artifact and haven’t looked back. I just swap specs when I’m soloing and when I’m grouping. Easy.

The snag, with all of these specs, is that they have a scant handful of DPS abilities and Blizzard has removed extra resource costs for healers — Mistweavers no longer have Chi and Holydins no longer have Holy Power. This means you mindlessly cycle through clicking three or four abilities with no strategy or concern for resource cost. It is boring as heck.

But you’ll notice there are a couple of healers I haven’t mentioned, and maybe they’re great!  I do wonder about Discipline Priests, in particular, but I don’t have one at Legion levels to play with. Druid Affinities — which give the spec some extras from other specs — seem like they could make leveling a healer more interesting, too.

Can you level as a healer? Absolutely. Is it any easier than it was before? I don’t think it particularly is. Should you do it? I don’t think so. It’s still so easy to switch specs that there’s no compelling reason to make the game less fun for yourself.

I don’t feel like this is a broken promise from Blizzard, because you absolutely can level and deal damage as a healer. It’s just not very much fun.

In light of today’s conversation about healers, I thought this comment by MoveWoW was interesting… though that could be because I happen to agree with it. I honestly enjoyed healing on my Paladin most in Burning Crusade and Wrath, where we were awful group healers but excellent single-target healers who just couldn’t be beat for mana management. These days mana simply isn’t an issue unless you’re putting out a real effort to run out of it, and every healing class can do a little of everything. It felt really awesome to be the best in the game at something… but now any healer can really jump in and do anything reasonably well.

I do think Blizzard has tried to cut back on homogenization in Legion. With my Holydin, it feels like the spec has taken a step back towards the ideas of Wrath, when we were excellent single target healers. It’s not to the point where single-target tank healing is all a Holydin can do — the class is still fairly flexible — there is a definite single-target bent to their skillset.

And, honestly, I like it. I’d be happy to see Blizzard give each healing spec more focused, defined roles. Make every healer something special, who can do one thing better than anyone else in the game. You’re going to feel pretty awesome doing your one thing really well… and you’ll feel pretty awesome, too, when you manage to pull off something that your class isn’t suited for. To this day, my most memorable game moment was when my Paladin solo-healed Illhoof in Karazhan after our other healer died right off the bat. Someone in the group commented this was going to be a wipe and I just thought “to hell it is” and we came out okay. I felt triumphant after that kill. You don’t get that feeling a lot in the game these days because you don’t run into as many situations like that. (Well, there is the mage tower appearance quest… but I’m just deeming that one impossible. If you say you’ve gotten it on a healer, I’m just going to politely assume you’re lying.)

TLDR: I think getting away from some of this healer homogenization would be good for the game, and fun for us healers. I think Legion has taken some steps in this direction, which has been interesting.

Invasions can be pretty easily done with no group at all. For the last step of the invasion, the game will toss you into a scenario with a couple of other players, but frankly I’ve never even had anyone talk to me during this phase. That’s perfect for introverts.

Mythic+, however, is a different story. I’m sure you could just jump into the custom group finder and find a Mythic+ group without trouble, but I frankly don’t do them unless I’m playing with friends. And while the age-old advice of playing with your friends probably sounds a little tired by now… I think it’s true, especially for challenging content. Running Mythic+ can be challenging, especially as you tackle those higher levels, and you want someone you can rely on in there with you.

And that, unfortunately, isn’t particularly helpful group finding advice. What do you recommend, Queuevians?

We’ve heard very little from Blizzard on the professions front, though they have (in a roundabout way) confirmed that First Aid is going away. So far on the Alpha, other professions look the same as ever… but no word on design plans.

I do have to wonder if this is the first step towards some more sweeping design change for secondary professions, but so far anything you hear is speculation.

This is simply too horrible to contemplate, so I’m going to carry on not contemplating it.