We still have a 2 week wait until Cataclysm goes live. And so it is time to keep up the blogging, this time we’ll talk about one of the most controversial changes implemented on this expansion: Healing.

For over two years, you could say we got spoiled with a really bad healing model. For the most part every single class depended on a couple of spells. Because mana pools and regeneration got out of control and because health pools and healing numbers just didn’t match at all.

Healing on World of Warcraft became a game of who could watch the green bars go down, and heal them the quickest. Haste got so ridiculously high that you would always use your most expensive spell, with a really short (if not instant) cast and get away with it every single time. Restoration druids became rejuvenation machines, disc priests forgot about everything but shields, and so on.

A good healer was the one who could move away from bad stuff while topping people off right away. And if you screwed up your job, people would die in a second, maybe two. Because in order to challenge the high amounts of healing going on, blizzard simply had to make us take that much damage instead. That is how we went from easy Naxxramas on 3.0, to Enraged Shamblers one shotting tanks with 90k health on heroic lich king.

However things change. And in my opinion, this time blizzard changed things for the better in regards to healing. Health pools have massively inflated. From having about 40k health average on tier 10, players have about 110k health on tier 11 gear (that’s more than 100% if you’re bad at math like I am). However the healing numbers have barely changed.

AoE healing really was nerfed hard. Those spells are now cost inefficient to spam, and if you play anything like you do right now on live, you will go out of mana within less than 30 seconds on Cataclysm.  Haste is no longer out of control, so we have a lot of long casts. And you can forget about instantly topping people off. It takes time.

It looks pretty bad doesn’t it? I have to be pretty honest… my first 2 weeks healing on beta I felt like things were out of control. Healing was dead. How could they possibly screw up healing so much? Rejuv spamming was dead, I could not even keep my party at full health during an encounter. Most of the time they were hovering in between 20 and 80% health. It felt like a very slow race against impending doom, because no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to keep people at full health. I felt like I was drowning.

But then I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. It took me a few weeks to adjust, but now Im absolutely in love with the new healing model. You have to know what spell to cast, and when to cast it. I was actually using most of the spells on my hand, I had to manage my mana really carefully, and rather than complain, it makes me sad when I play live as a healer, because all I do is spam rejuvenation and wild growth on cooldown. It feels dumb…. and boring. I do sincerely wonder how the hell we managed to not get bored after 2 years of mashing those 2 buttons every single raid.

With the new massive health pools, and the new healing coheficients, raid damage has been adjusted properly. Your raid members will not die because you casted your spell .2 seconds later. Your raid members will die because you did a poor desicion, and you used your mana efficient spell, rather than your quick inefficient spell. Your raid members might die because you spammed your quick inefficient spell the first minute of the fight and now you have no more mana, or similar reasons.

I have to be honest, it will take some time to adjust. Healing will feel much slower, because you won’t be able to fill up those green bars instantly like you have been doing the past 2 years, and you will feel severely punished because mana matters now. But if you give it some time, you will learn that a good player will always manage to adjust and learn how to take advantage of things. Mana will still be a resource you have to manage, but if you play properly, and put some thought behind your spell desicions, you should not run out of mana, at least not because you did something wrong.

Bad healers will no longer be able to hide under infinite mana pools like they have for the past 2 years. Good healers will shine more than ever… in 2 weeks. Until then, have fun with the shattering!

Sadly due to the nature of our class, we don’t really get as many new tools as other pure classes, since the love has to spread out among all of our 3 speccs. At level 81 we get trash, another AoE move that leaves a short duration DoT on all of our targets. Initially I enjoyed this change, as the dot was supposed to increase our swipe damage, and give us additional Savage Defense (SD) up time. However with the recent nerf, SD no longer procs off DoTs, and trash has turned into Swipe 2.0.

Another new ability is Pulverize, which is talented. Pulverize consumes lacerate DoTs and increases your critical strike rating by 3% per lacerate application that was consumed. A good bear will want to maintain this 9% crit buff on at all times. Having the combat ratings decline so much on cata means we will be running with about 30% crit on tier 11 gear, so that any crit we can get will greatly increase our mitigation with SD. This is good stuff.

Besides Trash and Pulverize we also get Stampeding Roar and Skull Bash. A 10 second talented interrupt off the global cooldown is simply awesome, there’s no denying that. It gives us a very much needed extra tool on PvP, and it is very nice to have for PvE as well. This is one of those talents I consider mandatory, it’s full of awesomeness.

Stampeding Roar on the other hand is a very disappointing ability. 40% extra speed for 6 seconds, on a 2 minute CD is an extremely lackluster new spell. On PvP this can very easily be countered with a cheap snare or some crowd control, not to mention the range is incredibly low, so the use is even more limited. On PvE it’s just not gonna make any difference. It might help on the rare occasion that one of your raid members is slow moving out of something, but for the most part I expect Stampeding Roar to become one of those buttons you put on the very corner of your action bars and use every other full moon.

But that’s enough of our new abilities, there’s also some very awesome changes going on. Bears got some awesome revamped cooldowns, such as Survival Instincts providing 50% reduction every 3 minutes, Frenzied Regeneration boosting health pool 30% (and increasing healing received 20% if glyphed), and good old barkskin. Combining these 3 with trinkets we’ll have a wide variety of options to prevent deaths on a lot of different situations. This is a very nice change.

Cat DPS rotation remains roughly the same, but DoTs are our number 1 priority now. Our mastery for DPS is really good, and in terms of status it is only beat by agility. Then again the basic status (agi, str, int) are the best for nearly every single class since the latest change on 4.0. Kitties should look to maintain 5 combo point rip and rake on their targets at all times, and prioritize Rip over Savage Roar.

The timers on Rip and Savage Roar were buffed as well. So it is considerably easier to maintain an almost perfect cycle on our rotation. If you like to get the best of your class, that also means more time to squeeze in Ferocious Bites without risking Rip Downtime, for the most part, being able to use Ferocious Bite more often without sacrificing DoT uptime (and savage roar) will mark the difference between a good and a bad player.

There’s still way too many changes we can talk about such as speccs, glyphs, stats priority, rotations, utility and even the new worgen forms (which I personally hate). But for now we’ll leave it at that. If you want a more detailed guide, or just my personal opinion be sure to drop a comment down below and I’ll bring those up. All in all I believe that ferals are in a good place right now. Perhaps I would like to see some minor tweaks on bears, to increase our mitigation slightly, and possibly our stamina pools, as we are lagging behind other tanks, but it is nothing major, and I’m sure blizzard will sort it out before december 7.

Well that’s interesting….

I loved the down ranking / mana management play style for healers which became necessity in Vanilla.  I think that down ranking developed an unfair reputation as being too easy while the mana management naysayers would always complain about having to stand around not casting to gain mana.  To counter the first argument of down ranking being “easy”, it was only easy in the fact that you could choose the spell/tool which best fit the requirements of the situation.  I had three ranks of Heal (1,2,3), two ranks of Flash Heal (4,7), and three ranks of Greater Heal (1,3,5) on my bar  … wow I did those ranks by memory.  Each spell gave me varied levels of healing and speed.  This definitely made healing easier, but only in the same way using a screwdriver on a screw is easy than using a hammer for a carpenter.  Down ranking allowed you to use the most appropriate tool for the situation.

Mana management and the five second rule allowed for someone to stop casting and regen mana.  This was a “boring” play style because it “promotes doing nothing”, that’s as far from the truth as you can get.  Any good healer in Vanilla used stop casting macros or stopped casts on their own when they were unneeded.  So when I spent 15-20s regenning mana out of the 5 second rule it wasn’t because I wasn’t casting any spells or engaged in the encounter, it was because I had strung together a number of cancelled casts and/or used inner focus and clear casting procs.  In fact I’d venture to say that I cast MORE spells and was MORE honed in on the incoming damage and healing requirements of an encounter because I was constantly casting and stop casting spells, lettings casts complete when necessary and cancelling when the healing wasn’t needed.

This was an engaging system which gave you multiple tools and a very healthy set of risk/reward choices which ultimately required intense concentration and understanding of the encounter mechanics.

Sure, you could mindlessly spam Heal rank 2 and never go OOM, but spamming a 1k slow heal wasn’t always best for every situation.  You could also platoon healers and heal in “waves”, spending half your time afk regenning mana, but practicing constant casting with cancelling would result in a much more successful and fun play experience

You could do either of those things, but if you did you really didn’t heal as well as you could have.  That’s a fact.  And it’s the misconceptions spread by those “bad” play styles which led to Blizzard killing down ranking in the first place.

I look forward to a system and philosophy which attempts to mimic down ranking.  However I wonder whether simply introducing one spell will accomplish this.

The best spell in Vanilla was Heal rank 2.  This was the smallest/slowest spell which still benefited 100% from spell power on gear, back then blizzard used a funky system based on the level you learned the spell and your current level to calculate how each spell scaled with SP.

Here is a post I made almost 4 years ago about down ranking and Heal 2.

Matron – Jun 12 2006 LoD Priest Boards

“What is a second worth to you?

In WoW a second as a healer is sometimes all it takes to watch your tank go from full health to zero health. It’s scary how fast it happens sometimes.

However, on most occasions there are multiple healers on the MT, so they’ll be getting heals from a number of people. It’s in these cases where you really have to ask yourself how much a second is worth to you as a priest?

My point is as follows. Priests have two spells that they cast, at least two lengths of spells. 1.5 seconds and 2.5 seconds. Recently I’ve become quite enamored with the 2.5 second spells for a number of reasons.

My main goal as a healer is to fire off as many 1,000 point heals as I can. 1,000 is a decent goal and about what the max rank flash heal will do. So I needed to find a 2.5 second spell that heals for about the same. You won’t find it under the greater heals, they’re much too big. But if you look all the way back to your “Heal” spell you’ll find that around rank 2 you’ll start healing for 1,000 hp again. You learned this spell around level 20, but it’s a most useful tool at level 60 as well.

The difference between rank 2 Heal and rank 7 Flash heal? One second and 206 mana.

Rank 2 Heal – 174 mana – 2.5 seconds
Flash Heal 7 – 380 mana – 1.5 seconds

So here’s what you’re doing when you cast flash heal, you’re paying over double the mana cost for 1 second off your heal time. Now this is appropriate in certain situations, such as a crit on the main tank, but for 90% of the healing you’ll be doing in MC or BWL that one second is not needed.

I mean, how many times has a rogue pulled agro and taken a single shot from a mob and then the tank regains control? In this situation the rogue isn’t going to be taking any more damage for a while, it was a freak occurrence that they pulled agro at all. Why pay double mana to heal them one second faster?

My point is this… there are many times where one second doesn’t matter at all for healers. There isn’t any reason to pay TWICE the mana cost for the same amount of healing. You’re paying for the quickness of flash heal when you don’t need it.

If you start using Heal rank 2, you’ll see that your mana pool goes a lot farther than it once did, especially on boss fights that are long. Geddon, Golemagg, Domo, Rags, Kurinaxx, Rajaxx, the Drakes, Chrom, Nef…. All very long fights where going oom early is a really bad thing. Instead of holding back on healing, to save mana, instead switch methods. It’ll allow you to heal and conserve mana.”

Here is the problem I see with introduction of a 2.5s Heal spell… combined with haste and the upcoming slowing of raid damage, it is going to murder Flash Heal.  Heal2 murdered FH in Vanilla, why heal the same amount for more than twice the mana cost?  Damage didn’t come fast enough that 1s mattered.

Given haste levels the difference between FH and Heal is going to be LESS than one second.  In what meaningful situation will you require a 1s heal rather than a 1.6s heal which costs far less mana?  Never!

So by introducing a slower smaller spell Blizzard is going to kill Flash Heal.  I’m of the GH school of thought, I prefer a slightly slower but more powerful/efficient spell to expensive and “quick” spells, so I don’t really mind our focus moving away from flash heal.

But if Blizzard really wants to make healing more dynamic and interesting introducing this one spell is not the way to do it.  What made Vanilla interesting was that I had 8 single target spells of varying levels of healing, mana efficiency, and speed on my bar.  Often times damage would become more intense as a boss soft enraged or healers died and I’d simply move up a few ranks of a spell, sacrificing mana/efficiency for larger HPS.  Other times I’d get a good string of regen/rng and be able to amp up my rank usage to get rid of some excess mana.  When I was low on mana I could down rank even further, continuing to cast spells, but maintaining a steady mana pace which would last me til the end of an encounter.  I wouldn’t ever STOP casting, I’d only just shift gears a bid depending on the damage and mana situations.

In Cata I fear we’ll only really be using 3 spells in GH, Heal and maaaybe Flash Heal rather than the 3 Heals, 7 Flash heals, and 5 Greater Heals we could choose from in Vanilla.  Three spells does not offer the same flexibility and pacing opportunities which 15 spells do and I don’t believe that single target-wise we’ll really be gaining a new “tool” in Heal, we’ll just be replacing FH entirely.

More thoughts on Cata changes later in the week as my cynicism subsides.