Outdated—no longer relevant.
Blizzard recently announced a big change being made to World of Warcraft when the Burning Crusade is released (regardless of if you purchase the expansion). There is a lot of hysteria about this change. I hope to clarify below exactly what you can expect.
Macros and add-ons will still be able to use abilities or target someone, but they will not be able to make a decision about what ability is used, what rank of spell to use, who it is used on, or who you target. You will always be required to specify, whether by pressing a specific key or clicking a specific button, exactly what you want to happen.
This is currently accomplished by forcing a key or button to trigger a specific action—casting a spell or changing to a specific target—and forbidding the interface to alter the behavior of any key binding or action button while in combat. The UI will allow for certain, very specific, automatic behavior modifications—for example, allowing a button to cast a different spell depending on if your target is friendly or hostile, or depending on if you are pressing a modifier key. You will also still be able to switch action bars—so warriors will be able to have different buttons depending on stance, druids different buttons depending on current form, and rogues different buttons depending on if you are in stealth or not. You will remain able to switch action bars manually while in combat, if you want certain abilities to be available in different situations.
Add-ons that allow you to pick a target and cast a spell at the same time (click-casting) will still be available. It will also be possible to differentiate between left-click and right-click (up to five mouse buttons, actually) as well as shift-click, alt-click, and control-click.
There will be a feature that allows a key or a button to open up a menu of actions, which can keep you from needing all your abilities on the screen at once. Making the key bindings automatically associate with items in a menu while the menu is open (for example, pressing 3 to open a menu, and then 4 to select an item in the menu, even though 4 means something else while the menu is closed) is not currently implemented, but it is on the list of features that will be added if there is enough time.
Because you can change key bindings and button actions out of combat, it is likely that add-ons such as Whispercast which automate buffing will continue to work, but only out-of-combat.
Any part of the visual interface that uses an ability or changes your target will not be able to move, appear, or disappear while you are in combat. This prevents add-ons from conditionally moving certain buttons under your cursor, for example. However, there will be no restrictions on what information the UI will be able to present to you. An add-on can highlight raid members' frames depending on if they have a debuff you can remove, or if they're badly hurt, or they want you to cast a certain spell on them, and so on. It will be possible to create a prioritized list of raid members (like the Emergency Monitor of CT_RaidAssist), but the list will not be directly interactive; you won't be able to click on a name and target/cast a spell on that player. The add-on would, however, be able to indicate when anyone on your static list of raid members is in dire need in any way it likes: a noticeable highlight, a large animated red arrow, whatever. You would then need to click on the list of raid members or press a key corresponding to that specific raid member to heal them. It will be able to advise you very overtly, but you'll have to make the final decision.
Any "main tank targets" add-on you have will remain nearly unscathed—you will not be able to customize the list of main tanks while you are in combat, but clicking to target or cast a spell on either the main tank or his target will be unaffected.
Any macro that uses slash commands only will mostly be unaffected. Any macro that uses a /script command to target a unit or cast a spell will not work, but many macros which do so without making conditional statements (if this is true, then do this) will be able to be rewritten in slash commands. You will still be able to use macros which consist of a series of /cast commands (which allows a button to use a different action if it is clicked and the first action is unusable for any reason).
Anyone who foresees the game turning into some sort of "whack-a-mole," remember that it was entirely possible before to make the UI into a whack-a-mole with only a single mole. It's also important not to judge anything by the status quo. There will be very little raiding of the current raid instances once the expansion comes out—and remember the new raid size is 25, which greatly reduces the number of people to keep track of. This change could easily be awful if the wrong types of raid bosses are implemented in the Burning Crusade. But this change was pushed for by the raid designers so that they don't have to consider add-ons like Decursive—which means that we will only get mass-debuff fights if the fight is designed to be monotonous (unlikely, to say the least). Also remember that if there is an inadvertent side effect of these changes, you can bet that it will at least be looked at.
I will update this post whenever I think or have my attention brought to something that needs to be mentioned or clarified. Don't hesitate to add a comment if there's something I'm missing, something that I'm wrong about, a question that you have, or if you hate my guts.
Last updated on October 11, 2006 at 5:00 PM.
313 comments:
1 – 200 of 313 Newer› Newest»I haven't logged on since learning about this change. I have no desire. The prospect of advancing more for this? Hell no.
I'm a priest and I'm not going back to headaches, shoulder pain and whatnot from that game of beat-the-clock for hours on end. Forget it. Give it up. Someone taught me about those mods because they knew I was ready to quit from bad eye strain.
Addons kept me in this game. The lack of them will pull me out.
It's no fun the way they had it without mods. Why bother? So someone can say, "Oh look at that uber priest!" Yeah, I could do it, but what the hell for? I could care less what people think, especially if I'm not even there to care about it.
Have fun with your tinkering Blizzard. Count me out, though. I'm not interested in whack-a-mole in today's technology. There's better then this. Keep it. You've just gone backwards and that's why you put it in an expansion bundle. Because you knew if they tried it beforehand they'd say, "Hey, this sucks!" And it does. If that leaves nothing but a bunch of "uber" players with no life, that's fine by me. I have one. I played this because I had fun and for no other reason. When it stops being fun and becomes a matter of who can click the fastest, I'm out of here. That forum can keep deleting complaints and leaving the "YOU MUST do it this way or you are CHEATING" bs to someone who cares. I don't.
I think it's hypocritical with all the exploits they've never fixed in that game that suddenly they're so concerned about the "spirit of the game".
My gaming sig now reads: "I like Hello Kiddie Island Adventures a lot better than yer stuff!"
I bet Brad McQuaid is smiling right about now though. ;)
I don't understand your comment about putting this into the expansion—it'll affect the core game too. Also, it wasn't just now that they're "so concerned about the 'spirit of the game'." They've had the "smarter players, not smarter buttons" philosophy for a while, but a sweeping change like this takes a good amount of time to implement.
Real-time games have always been about the player reacting and making decisions in real time. It doesn't have much to do with "today's technology," really.
But I don't have any ill will towards people who want to quit because of this. If the game is not for you, it's not for you. But this isn't a bolt of lighting from a blue sky.
Think he means that they had open source for years and now take it out when the expansion goes live. That's always an indication in previous games that it's not going to be a big hit with the customers, so they do things like that during a major addition. I'm sure they could try it out now but they'd suffer revenue when people realized they didn't like it as much as what they had. Marketing strategy and they know this.
And what do you mean 'smarter players'? Some of these people don't even use the button when it is automated, don't tell me that they're going to be fiddling with bringing up a menu, binding a key to an action too. They won't. They aren't that 'smart' and don't wanna be.
If a mod can't get them to click a button because it's too tiring and others are already picking up their slack with mods, this isn't going to work either.
Blizzard is out of touch with how the smart players were compensating for the lazy ones and all this is doing is making smart player's jobs that much more difficult.
I don't blame them for seeing it a no-win proposition because you have too many slackers who get tired 30 minutes into the raid and the parsers show it. They don't click a thing after the first boss AND they have the mods installed. They just think it's someone else's job to use kill the thing.
Bottom line is we lose the decent SMART healers who enabled everything they could to get the job done, then we lose and Blizz better come up with something better then this to give them.
Zophiel wrote: "This needs stickied so that all the crybabies will read it and stop all the damn threads saying the same rubbish. " - (referring to this blog)
I'll be glad to stop playing with people like her. This change gives me a great excuse.
Well, removing any functionality is always going to cause a ruckus of some sort. But another reason for doing it with a major update is that not as many people are surprised when their add-ons need to be updated.
By "smarter players," I mean players who have to make an intelligent guess about what they need to cast. I'm paraphrasing a post of Slouken.
Fires of Heaven covers the debate in depth from what I've been reading here: http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/25140-mods-make-wow-ezmode-idiots-rejoice.html
Healers are bitching up a storm there, too. The Emergency Monitor seems to be what they conclude is lacking in a UI that already has too much clicking going on.
Interesting because that forum was started by Furor who is now a Blizzard raid designer. It will be interesting to see if he does anything about what his posters suggest. This is supposed to be the hardcore group after all and if they're complaining, there's a credible point to it.
Quit? Why quit? I'll just reroll mage to get that classic "one-button whack-a-mole."
The healing classes (particularly the priests) are already the least mechanical classes in the game. The fact is evidenced by classic priest burnout (which this will accelerate). The difficulty and skill of healing as a priest comes from aggro management and staying alive/survivability. Making the entire process more whack-a-mole doesn't solve any real problem except the creativity of the raid designers. Yet it will make the process of playing a priest that much less enjoyable.
Gimmick fights ftl.
Wouldn't the smartest players be the ones using "smart buttons"?
If people are consistently trying to avoid some aspects of the game by creating smarter buttons, that isn't a problem created by the players, it's a problem with the design of the game.
For example, mods that make it easier for a mage to summon and distribute water before a raid will no longer work after this change (addons will no longer be able to accept/close a trade window, or intelligently cast spells). Summoning and distributing water without an addon doesn't somehow lead to "smarter players," it just means more clicking. Smarter players don't get carpel tunnel syndrome from having to summon/distrbute water for 1/2 hour every night, they write or use an addon that does the busy work for them. A smarter Blizzard would be doing something on their end to reduce repetitive tasks such as summoning water. They haven't so players have used the tools available to them to work around Blizzard's poor design.
'mods-make-wow-ezmode-idiots-rejoice'?
The idiots are the problem why we needed mods in the first place. Rejoice now all you want but the idiots are going to wipe. They never did their job anyway.
Not giving the healers anything better with this change is only going to frustrate the smart players out of the game and you're going to be left with nothing but idiots. That's what Blizzard doesn't get.
This is going to be a nightmare. Not sure I want to be there for it either unless they announce some compensation with that hideous UI.
The fact is evidenced by classic priest burnout (which this will accelerate).
BINGO! QFT!!!
Thanks for the Fires of Heaven link.
I disagree that players trying to create automation means that there is a problem in the design of the game. I agree in your conjuring food and water scenario, but there will always be people who take the automation as far as possible. Is it really a problem in the game's design to have multiple spells that you need to choose from? Yet that's one of the most common things automated.
Healer burnout may well accelerate. That's something we won't know until these changes have been live for a while.
I disagree with your assertion that all the "smart" healers will leave. But that's one more thing we'll have to wait and see about.
I'm just glad I'm on the monthly subscription plan! :)
No way I'm going back to staring at health bars and frantically clicking. Nope, nope, nope! Not this priest!
I'm curious as to how much different highlighting wounded players will be from staring at the health bars. Considering that it will be possible to nearly make the unwounded people's frames invisible, only showing the people who need healing, I can't see it being too different. Comments?
John, I've played since beta and I know what it was like before the mods. I can and have won using the before and after.
But I have to tell you, I wouldn't have lasted as long without the mods that could give me a break from all that.
Do you have a priest? Have you raided with one? Talk to any of them and I'm sure they'll tell you, this is a major concern.
And yes, it's true. There are many lazy healers out there who stop functioning shortly after the raid begins. The parses are very telling. Do a time parse on them and you can see how long it takes for them to stop clicking on anyone. Pathetic, really.
These are scenarios that Blizzard can't test or know unless they've grouped with these people. It just shows that being a healer isn't the most fun class but someone has to do it. Why they have to mess with them and not give them something along with this change, is suicide IMHO.
Blizzard just doesn't have a clue what the real player base is like from the view of their secluded testing rooms but the rest of us do know.
Next time you go into a BG, please count the number of priests you see in your raid group. It's because when they don't heal, they get no points so why bother with that? Seriously, count them.
I know that healing is a job that no one likes to do, and it's not common to have someone who enjoys it. I know that these kind of mods make it tolerable for many people.
No, I've never gotten a healer high enough to raid with. Which is basically why I'm asking everyone how much different they think it would be with an add-on which could basically act like an emergency monitor but 1. doesn't sort the list, but only shows the people who are hurt, and 2. has gaps in the list where other raid members would be.
Also, I'm not convinced that "Blizzard just doesn't have a clue what the real player base is like." I am very, very unconvinced that they made this change without thinking it over.
John said, "I'm curious as to how much different highlighting wounded players will be from staring at the health bars. Considering that it will be possible to nearly make the unwounded people's frames invisible, only showing the people who need healing, I can't see it being too different. Comments?"
I just got done browsing the Fires of Heaven link and I have the same set up at least 2 of them are talking about. They seem to know exactly what is needed here.
If Blizzard added an Emergency Monitor feature, clearing their screens from anyone they didn't wish to view, and allowed them to click on that person within the monitor and heal them with a key binding, I think that would make them happy.
It's an excellent suggestion and obviously those people know what they are looking for that will keep healers happy. I know I for one would be among them!
If that answers your question?
Question:
Based on what we currently know, could:
1) A CT Emergency Monitor Mod be made so that it has 3-5 static bars that show the top 5 most injured raid members - even if the bars weren't targetable upon clicking them (like today)?
2) If so, could those bars be referencable, like todays are, through a /target CT_EM_Monitor Target1 type keyboard macro command? It's not a logical macro, just wondering if it can target a target determined by a mod.....
Thanks.
The following will be perfectly possible after the changes:
Noninteractive list of priority targets
A list of people badly hurt, needing decurses or dispels, sorted in any way you like, but not interactive. You would be able to reference this from a macro, but it wouldn't help at all: macros can't dynamically target or cast spells, period.
Interactive list of all raid members, with priority targets highlighted
Basically your current raid frames, with filtering. Any player who is a priority target would show up very obviously in any way you like (making all the other players nearly invisible, big red arrows, a glow around the players, etc.).
From what I understand, the CTRAID monitor will continue to function visibly and that is all. You may not cause any action from clicking on it. It's strictly for visual purposes only after these changes.
Therefore, you must then find the person in need of a heal from that monitor listing and go to the raid list, click them and heal them.
In my opinion, you may as well not even use it at all because the mess on your screen would not be worth it. You are still going to have to search for the player or type /target player and throw the heal.
The complaint here is it's too much searching and typing and clicking in a game that already has a healer-burnout problem.
I definitely agree that the emergency monitor in its current state will not be used. But I don't think much searching will be needed. Add-ons will be able to, say, highlight the four most wounded people in a very obvious way—for example, only seeing the four most wounded people on your list of raid members, with all the rest faded out extremely. It would be very obvious who needs healing. The main differences would be that the icons would not be prioritized (the most wounded is at the top, next is in position 2, etc.) and that there would be visual gaps in between the frames, instead of a single contiguous list.
Is it really a problem in the game's design to have multiple spells that you need to choose from? Yet that's one of the most common things automated.
Mods like Benecast, CastParty and GroupHeal do two desirable things: 1) make it easier to target a specific unit with a heal, either with click casting, or buttons attached to the unit frame, and 2) calculating the contribution of +healing and using that information to select the most efficient heal in the given situation.
1) Click casting and targeting in general will be improved, thanks to some of the changes announced on Friday. That is a great thing, and mollifies a usability problem that up to now has been addressed by very popular addons such as GroupButtons and Clique.
2) It's usually not the case that the addon is choosing between spells, but rather that it is selecting the most efficient rank of a given spell such as heal or flash heal. The total amount contributed by +healing equipment, spirit buffs, etc is not available to the player anywhere from within the game. Sure, you can look through your equipment and at your buffs and calculate it on the back of an envelope, but Blizzard doesn't provide the information in your character profile, or spell tooltips. To me, that is indeed a design problem, and one that addons such as Theorycraft try to address. Give the players better information, and I think the demand for automatic down-ranking would go away. An experienced player can look ahead and heal proactively. Mods can't. That's a huge difference, especially when learning end game content -- and in PvP. You chose which spell to cast based no just on how much healing your target currently needs, but based on what your experience tells you he/she will need by the time the spell lands. Even the most sophisticated healing mods are only reactive. The advantage that down-ranking mods have, is they are working with more information than the player usually has access to.
So, I see two design problems, one addressed by the changes, and one that is not.
That is a good point. Having easy access to a simple display that gives you good information about your spells would be very helpful, but it is probably also something that add-ons can do fairly well. The feasibility of those add-ons isn't altered.
I think we will see more of these kinds of add-ons in the future.
John, Blizzard programmers couldn't be less talented then the script programmers we have now doing this on their own time. At least I HOPE not. They should be able to come up with something not only TRUE to CTRA monitor but even BETTER then exists right now.
With all the money they've been making, there's just no excuse not to hire the guy who wrote it (if they seriously can't handle it themselves) and work this into the expansion before all hell breaks lose.
I want my healers happy and not in physical pain or frustration. I want them to have fun. They deserve it. They already endure tremendous amounts of stress from trying to adjust to a weak UI system.
If Blizzard can't provide that much for them, I'll take my guild to another game. This has been the talk of the guild since it started and no one is happy with they are hearing and it's getting worse.
Slousek needs to make a clarification solely on the healer's behalf but I don't see him doing it. Not in English anyway. He's well aware that healers are in a major conundrum right now.
I'm waiting Slousek. Make a statement about what you're going to do about this nerf without the programming/script language embedded into every sentence you've been writing. Thank you!
It's the designer's choice, not Slouken's, if an Emergency Monitor-esque feature is added. If they hire the CTMod people or not doesn't change much—if they don't want an Emergency Monitor they won't add one. It's a topic for the suggestions forum, really.
Zukuth on the forums also put the situation in a very concise clarification,
"Here's a situation:
Someone's name pops up on my Emergency Monitor, and I decide I want to cast Holy Light on them.
In the game right now, I can press my Holy Light key and click on their health bar in Emergency Monitor.
In BC, I will have to find their name in my raid bars and click; the delay of having to look will probably get them killed.
Please explain to me how I was not deciding what to cast and on whom in the game as it is now, and how BC will force me to make a decision I wasn't already making instead of adding pointless delay and tedium to the game. "
That's about where we're at!
Oh well, it WAS a good game.
Not really, John. Slousek has a list going that he intends to hand the designers. He's never mentioned once that a monitor would be one of his suggestions and countless people here and everywhere else have been asking them for this in lieu of the changes.
Myrial, Zukuth doesn't really address the fact that it will be pretty easy to see who needs healing.
Mordread, as far as I know, Slouken's "list" is things he wants to add, that he doesn't need the designers' approval for. I believe that adding support for stuff like the Emergency Monitor, which was fairly specifically removed, needs to go past the designers.
"In BC, I will have to find their name in my raid bars and click; the delay of having to look will probably get them killed."
I think this is really the heart of the problem. Emergency Monitor significantly changed the way healers experience raids. You didn't have to concentrate solely on those 40 green bars anymore, you can actually look up and watch the encounters. With Emergency Monitor gone, healers will have to return to the days when they had to focus solely on those 40 (or now 25) bars. I'm not looking forward to it. I love raid healing, but maybe it's time for a break.
May as well get used to hearing this now:
http://www.axiomfiles.com/Files/50463/blizzmacronerf.wav
Okay, take the emergency monitor. Right now you can select what groups to see (think of raids split in halves / quarters, Nef / four horsement) and your emergency monitor will only show those groups. If someone is moved between groups mid-fight, the list changes and works. This will break horribly in TBC.
The issue at stake isn't about selecting ranks for me, it's about hitting the right slot with my mouse. Having tried to heal via CTRA frames and totally given up, I don't know a better way to illustrate it than to ask you to play a healer for six hours in an instance. If you haven't, please, you have no idea. It doesn't *matter* if they blink red when then need help, I have to move and hit that frame, toss the spell, and move my mouse to the next frame. Imagine doing this constant mouse-moving for hours on end. Five nights a week. Burnout? Hell yeah.
Today I have a list of 5-6 people I have to take care of, and a tank I watch next to it. It's fairly easy but horribly boring at times. The reason I stick it out is because it's feasable to do, it's just boring as hell at times. In TBC it's not only *exactly* as boring, it's *worse* on my hands to get it done.
Add to this that I will have to do this not only for healing, but decursing *and* buffing, and hello insanity. I'll be spending my entire night whacking moles where I could previously at least occasionally do something else. Instead of having 5-6 slots to hit with my spells, all organized neatly, I now have 25 slots to hit, with no organisation and no order. I wonder how many more miles my mouse will travel over the course of a night...
Is assigning a specific group to a specific healer completely unfeasible?
I'd really expect anything to get boring if you're doing it for hours five nights a week.
"Is assigning a specific group to a specific healer completely unfeasible?
I'd really expect anything to get boring if you're doing it for hours five nights a week."
Nah, they do that now and I'm still picking up tons of slack due to mana problems, poor aggro management, etc.
You really need that monitor or you're playing whack-a-mole. The word is repeated for a reason. It's because without a monitor, you're scanning lists over and over and over, ad nauseum.
And with a monitor you aren't playing whack-a-mole, you're just hitting a single mole that consistently comes out of the same hole.
"And with a monitor you aren't playing whack-a-mole, you're just hitting a single mole that consistently comes out of the same hole."
and your point is?
Whacking 25 moles as they come out of 25 holes is very different from 1 mole and one hole.
My point is that if World of Warcraft was whack-a-mole, then the designers want 25-hole whack-a-mole. That's basically all I'm saying.
You can happily tie groups to healers and just say that the rest of the raid is SoL if their healer dies. Fully feasable, kinda annoying when that healer DCs though. It is however getting more and more obvious that Blizzard wants groups to be more self-sufficient and remove raid-wide healing / buffing / decursing. I've done both and one is a *lot* more stable than the other.
Even when I was assigned to a group (or two), I'd use the emergency monitor so I could catch a glimpse of the fight. And decursive would mean I didn't need buttons next to every player frame with the correct cure icon at the ready. Oh, and the right buff icon -- for all my buffs applicable for that character. Seriously, how much micromanagement is enough?
And I raid 4-6 nights a week, the current addons make it a *lot* more feasable to do that then how it was with manual decursing, buffing and healing in the first trips into MC. The changes to remove mana conserve were annyoing, but we had the mana to spare, so it was okay, it didn't require me to whack more moles at least. This change, well, it only wants me to move my mouse around more and click more buttons. Is it doable? Sure. It just sucks horribly. Imagine having to retarget your DPS target every time you made a special attack -- and the target would be a random set of five boxes (to be nice) that popped up. That's what we're talking about here. Of course it's doable. You'll just get RSI and hate yourself for spending the time on it.
And the design sucks, defending it just because it is 'what the designers want' is slavish.
"And with a monitor you aren't playing whack-a-mole, you're just hitting a single mole that consistently comes out of the same hole. "
Then you truly don't understand what a priest does if you believe that.
With a monitor and a macro, it doesn't allow you to choose the type of needed heal. You have to set that up yourself, using various macros and click the one that's needed. You have renew, flash, greater, lesser heals and all different ranks within those. Add to that shields that don't use a macro, you just must know when it's needed and do it. Let's not even get into cures, which is also your job and buffing and trinkets if you want to save mana and free mana casts that require a prerequisite click before casting.
Then there's when to know how to fear, mana drain, mind control etc., that don't even involve any macro or addon "cheat" at all. You're just supposed to know when to use them.
In other words, our job as priests are a LOT more then just clicking a button to heal. It requires thinking and a lot of it, which is why you have poor priests or a lack of them, because not a lot of people are cut out for it or can endure all that's expected of them and still have fun.
I'm sorry, but your comment just showed me that you don't understand the full capacity of the priest role and where a monitor makes their lives that much more satisfying. We DO get the blame when you die. Just don't expect us to perform miracles when the UI is set up in such a way that it's going to be impossible to get everything you want when you want it.
I know this already. That's why if they don't provide that in their nerf, I won't be there for it. I'll just save myself the aggravation I know is coming.
Imagine yourself constantly being forced into clicking on your target, repeatedly, in order to hit or do ANYTHING to it at all. Go ahead and try it and tell me how much fun the game is then because that's what healers are going to be forced to do.
"It is however getting more and more obvious that Blizzard wants groups to be more self-sufficient and remove raid-wide healing / buffing / decursing."
That's the most retarded thinking I've ever seen put to words, if in fact that is Blizzard's intention. So much for having a raid. That's laughable ideology that Blizzard would now take the stance that they no longer wish groups to work together in a raid situation. Utterly ridiculous!
I'm not going to be able to write out a full response now, I'm sorry—getting seriously tired.
I'm not sure the analogy of "clicking on your target, repeatedly" is the best one—heck, I did that in Diablo II. I think the difference you're trying to get across is how many things you need to keep track of.
Again, apologies, but I'll write out a bigger response tomorrow.
Is assigning a specific group to a specific healer completely unfeasible?
Yes. You need to crossheal to cover for the undergeared priests you'll invariably have due to burnouts/server xfer replacements. If you have strict per-group healing, which is what you're implying with your suggestion, groups will die when healers still have mana in other groups.
Hello there;
Just my 2 cents on this topic.
I am a raid priest, I actually enjoy it, but yes it does actually strain your eyes. I currently only use serenity for buffing and decursive for decursing. (I do not use any emergency heal-o-meter things)
Right now I just click the name and cast a spell. It has been good for me from zg, aq 20, ony, mc, and I am sure I will live with it this way beyond. Yes, I even pick which spell I am going to cast manually.
With that said, I am NOT the typical priest. Most people ask what mods I use then quickly brown their pants. This change is not going to hurt my healing ability, but it will hurt my ability to decurse people. Yes, decursing in this game is horrible. It is the worst mechanic I have ever faced in any game. In fact, I did not install decursive until I started raiding, where I quickly browned my pants.
Simply put, current fights that rely on you quickly dispelling / decursing 40 people of various debuffs will be insane. Yes, there will be an AE dispell, but not for poison/disease/curses. people are simply not going to click on every name, one by one, and cast a spell to remove the poison/curse/disease.
We already focus 80% on people's health bars, I only get to see 20% of my screen in a raid. telling me to manually click a name and cast a spell for 40 people in a row, so that when I am done I can do it all over again, because lets face it- all the boss's spam that crap, is stupid.
I feel sorry for the classes not getting an AE disease/poison/curse removal.
Maligator, after you do it that way for a few years, you will go blind, take my word for it. It's not worth your health to put up with a UI that should have been changed a long time ago.
There are medical documents that I could give you that warn against games like this, but for Blizzard to purposely make it worse, demonstrates a complete lack of giving a crap about their customers.
True, I wonder if you could sue them for doing that to people on purpose. I could use some of their money. LOL!
I find the loss of Emergency Meter more detrimental than decursive.
I think it will bring many of the highly active Priests back to the pack, essentially lowering the water so the "rocks" appear again - by that I mean your worst healers.
If you've ever been in a guild where you lost your 2 most active healers, I think you know what I mean.
On BWL runs with no wipes, I've done 2.2 million Net healing (after overhealing deducted) and that was done with a combination of Emergency Meter, Group Buttons and MT Targets. Moving to a hunt and peck method I think will reduce that total by about 10% and probably have me die more often since I won't be able to follow the action as well.
I know other healers do this today (hunt and peck), but there are a ton of healers using other methods as well. I've found that the Top 6 healers in a raid heal for more than the next 12 usually. This will put more burden on the 12 worst, which isn't good when guilds are already losing top healers to burnout.
I'll adjust, it's just unfortunate as I'm not sure Blizzard truly knows the net impact of this change.
Losing the emergency monitor hits me harder than decursive or clickcasting. As others have said, the screen real estate saved by having a monitor made me *see* the game. So many of you non healing classes take this for granted. I didn't even get a good look at Ragnaros at my first Rags kill because of the 40 bars cluttering my screen. That was the time I started messing around with my UI.
The other reason is my carpal tunnel, as I stated in another thread, I wore wrist braces because moving the mouse across a line of 40 bars made it worse. I'm hoping 25 won't be that large. I can't make the unit frames any smaller, because then I'd get eyestrain staring at teeny tiny debuff symbols so I know who to dispel or cure disease.
What irks me the most is I don't even use macros of any sort. The biggest thing I used was Squishy's emergency monitor. I didn't use clickcasting mods, I clicked the person from monitor and manually healed--*I* made the decision on who to click on and what to cast, by pushing keybinds. All I ever wanted was a smaller, more concise real estate footprint.
I could care less about decursive or clickcasting. And now with all this talk of drop down and radial menus, it's just going to be one huge mess of menus everywhere, increased amount of button pushes and mouse clicks.
What a pain in the ass. At least my warlock is almost 60.
This news comes as a complete shock to me. I never thought Blizz would slap me this hard after all my patronage.
I'm just sick when I think of playing now I can't even play.
I thought this of people like SOE and I stay away from anything they touch.
I found myself looking up new games tonight. I'm that resigned to believing it's over. Just like that, too. Wow. I guess it had to end sometime. I just wasn't ready for the slap that came with it.
Insanity wrote: "Things change... adapt or get left behind, such is life. "
He's from a defunct guild called Entropy on Undermine that caused more drama on a new server then anything I've ever seen before.
Funny how a person who talks like this is the same person who couldn't cut it on their last server so ran to the first new one that opened and started telling everyone the way everything was going to be.
That guild got laughed off the server and now he's in the UI forum starting more drama there.
Ban his ass already! He's nothing but a troublemaker who bought level 60 using a leveling service and defectors of the guild ratted him out for bragging about it.
I agree. I'm tired of the patches breaking mods and now just breaking it altogether.
I asked myself if I'd have fun going back to furious clicking and my brain told me it was time to get out of this addiction.
I'm gonna heed that advice because I don't care anymore. Which is a great time to quit. When you just don't care because Blizzard didn't care enough to leave it be. No, they had to go ahead and try to make my gaming life more miserable then they have been with their patches.
enough is enough. 3 years. cyas! i'm done and i don't care and that feels good that i don't.
Insanity sounds like a stuck-up jerk in there. I always did wonder about those people who switched to new servers and then leveled to 60 in a week. Thanks for letting me know. Makes a lot of sense now. What an ass!
Blizzard, don't you have better things to do like look into power-levelers that cheated before you go whacking us honest players over the head?
I think the whole thing sucks and lost interest in playing tonight. Why bother? I have nothing to look forward to but going backwards. :(
Ehh..maybe I'll try GuildWars.
60 Priest
60 Druid
Malfurion Server
The outrage just keeps pouring in everywhere. From the WoW Forums to the blogs to the websites to AIM to /gu chat. This is NOT good!
Has anyone informed the stockholders yet?
really good post by Healin that I'm reprinting here before it gets deleted by Blizz. They deleted a bunch already, so hope you don't mind Healin.
I will quit if they go through as stated. We discussed this on our guild site too, here's my problem with the changes:
Why keep playing a healer if all they are going to do is continue to take functionality away from me? Previously they took away the advantage of casting lower rank decurses and rez's, raised the cost of decursing, and prevented heal-stop in the UI. So now they want to again raise the cost of decursing (indirectly by making it harder and forcing wasted mana by group decursing), and take away the UI functionality to target/help save mana. Wow, that's so FUN!! No wait it's not.
I don't see any BC notes where it's now going to be harder to cast curses or bolts or shoot a bow or swing a sword. I don't see where it will be harder to target the boss or change melee targets. And finally I don't see where it will will cost more rage/energy/mana to do attacks. Remind me again why I will enjoy this change for healing?
I'm tired of the dev team saying "this mod is too powerful and that mod is too powerful" and every single time it seems it's one that affects me as a healer. You know guys, if it really is that overpowered, why'd you let it sit in the game for 2 years? Why change things so greatly now? Some of us really like the modding ability you gave us previously and would like to keep it. I healed without mods for fifty some odd levels. When I hit instances that didn't cut it and I found the beauty of click to cast, auto-heal select, and one key decursing. Now I lose all that but I'm going to keep playing? Sadly I don't think so. To be honest, that should all be in the game in the first place. Your default UI sucks for healing. There, I said it, it's out in the open.
Well said!
You know, one other thing that bothers me is how capricious this all is.
I found someone who was botting on my server -- he/it was online 24/7 always running around the same path, killing the same things. I reported him several times but nothing ever happened. It was not until I made a frustrated post in the tech support forum that they did anything -- a full month after I first made Bliz aware of the problem.
Botters, gold buyers, and gold sellers operate with impunity in WoW, and instead of trying to fix that problem, Bliz is clamping down on add-ons that work around their poorly designed user interface. What are they thinking: Healers already are the least popular classes, so lets make their play experience even worse than it already is? It doesn't make any sense, but that looks like where things are headed.
Yeah, it's a real slap in the face.
Yeah I hear ya! I see the botters all the time too and I've reported it as well. Nothing is ever done but I didn't think to put it on the forums.
I do know of people described here, like this Insanity person, who paid to have someone else level their characters and that's been posted on blizzard forums with ss's of them admitting it and the people are still running around with that holier-than-thou attitude like she is on the UI forum.
It makes no sense, indeed!
She can't even level her character to 60 herself but has the audacity to come into a disaster thread and basically tell everyone else to deal with it or get out. What nerve!
Looks like Big Rent Brent went on a mission with this one:
http://dzrealms.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=660
A major side effect of this change is that spot healing via a keyboard won't really be possible. While now you can use a more or less intelligent emergency/priority monitor (I'm the author of Squishy and Detox) to smart-target a unit in the raid that is not in your subgroup, you'll need 40 seperate keybindings in BC to target units.
Now while people now might say "wtf, go buy a mouse", let me tell you that not everyone likes to use a mouse, and some people can't even use a mouse because of an impairment.
I've been playing a priest in wow since closed beta, and I enjoyed spot-healing in the past 2.5 years. Addons like Squishy also made it possible to have a clean UI without 40 fully fleshed unit frames (and even if new instances will be 25man, I havent done AQ and Naxx yet, so I planned to spend another 6-8months 40manning content).
Now I can either roll a mage or quit. It might be the latter.
I couldn't get your wav (http://www.axiomfiles.com/Files/50463/blizzmacronerf.wav )
file to work because I think the date/time here cut it off on the screen but finally copied it the way it works for you by cutting out the time.
That doesn't work either. Ok let me try two pieces of it:
http://www.axiomfiles.com/Files/
50463/blizzmacronerf.wav
Very strange that it has to be cut that way in order to see it but I was able to copy it.
Anyway, I heard it. lol
I think I'll take the word from an actual author of Squishy posting here that this is going to be a nitemare!
Gonna go check out Big's link too.
Man, I'm so pissed about this now!
John,
Thanks for the blog on this. I hope the Blizz guys will read it.
I was the "Healin" referenced above with the statement that I don't understand why they are making things less fun for me as a healer. The point of the mods I use is, right now, removing a LOT of the tedium of their default UI. Casting buffs, rezzing, decursing, healing off the emergency monitor, having a button to target the person who's hurt the most, healing off the main tank target window, decursing quickly so people don't die .... all these things made me enjoy my job as a healer more. They made me happy because the raid kept going. They made me happy because people bitched at me less.
These changes will make my job more tedious and to be honest, I wanted to buy the expansion to have more fun. Now, it really seems like I won't. Not only that, the core game is changing too, why would they do something this drastic and not expect to hurt their playerbase?
I'm outraged. I used a custom one touch healing macro, that used smart selection scripts to heal my raid via emergency monitor style, but better.
I liked the fact that wow was the only game where I didn't have to use my mouse to play a healer. And screw those small life bars! That pisses me off. I mean, I guess I could probably code my macro scheduler to do some pixel recognition on the targeting symbols, it wasn't to hard to get it to auto cast when my cooldowns were up, and I could just sit back and watch the fight, without much worry. But now I'll have to have my raid windows up too. That'll take so much more space, I mean I LOVED being able to Alt-Z and sit back and watch it like a movie. I didn't even have to have my interface up, it was awesome.
I mean, wow looks sooooooo much better when it's not cluttered up with 8 party windows, hot bars, bags, buff icons, targeting, and you just sit back like your at the movies. Screw it, I'm looking for a new game.
You mean you hit ONE button ONLY to heal the entire raid and clicked Alt-Z, sat back and did nothing else?
No way. I'm not believing this.
.AVI or it didn't happen buddy. I think you're just posting this to make healer's annoyance with having to click more a justified unhack by Blizzard.
I play a raid-level priest, doing up to Naxx.
I use CTRA, but I don't use the Emergency Health Monitor, as I BG'd early on and got very sick of seeing 1800 people in my emergency monitor, so I tweaked it to only show practically near-dead people that I couldn't save anyway -- basically it goes untouched.
I guess you could say I hunt and peck and use CastParty to use Mouse-click + keyboard combos to cast the heal/buff that I want.
This is my second level 60 priest at a raiding level ( one when WoW released and one after taking about a year off ).
The problem I see is what it's always been when you compare the WoW Priest class healing-wise to say EQ's Cleric class ( played EQ for 5 years ): We have reactionary heals and really no diversity of heals.
This whole whack-a-mole issue stems from a lack of healing dynamic diversity. In EQ you had a ton of different heals that you could employ, and I'm not saying it was perfect but we sure as hell didn't whack-a-mole ( no it wasn't always exciting doing CH rotations, staring at walls, etc ). I think if they took a look as a whole on what types of heals they're allowing and design some new spells it might take care of this issue.
Right now in a major fight, my heals rarely land intelligently. I'm sure some of you have setups for raiding that allow for some semblence of order that optimizes mana, but for me I'm lucky to land a greater heal without it completely landing as an overheal. To me that is a major problem.
I don't even get to see the raid going on usually, so making something even more hunt and peck than it already is will probably drive me to quit my 2nd level 60 raiding priest for something more desirable.
It's not Decursive that's the problem. It's the removal of functionality such as CTRaid's Emergency Monitor - the forcing of healers to pick through a list of up to 40 people, find the person who needs healing most at that point in time, select a heal and cast.
If you've not played a healing class you probably won't get the point of what I'm saying, but the proposed changes will make playing one intolerable cumbersome and painful. I for one will find it hard to continue as a healer post expansion if these changes take place. It will be just too much pain for bugger all reward - after all, the priest itemisation still blows goats.
I've enjoyed raid healing, raiding and kicking arse in the instances, but I have to tell you that I may well pull the plug on the game if this travesty goes through. Perhaps if enough of us give it up the collective outcry will be enough for Blizzard to get the point.
On their past record though, I won't be holding my breath. Screw you Blizzard.
As an author of a healer-buffer addon (Panza), I'm sad to see my baby die. The only reason it was developed to begin with was to enhance my own play. I continued to develop Panza with things I wanted. I never wanted to cheat Blizzard, and the addon wasn't developed as so. I sure hope they recode encounters, and change the way buffs work because I hated targeting someone, looking at their level, selecting the correct spell for their class, and then figuring out their right rank. Then after casting the buff, trying to remember when I needed to cast it again. /sigh. All I wanted was to buff that person.
This is just buffing, healing in battle is a whole different story. If I have to be a bar watcher, then even at only 25 people, watching bars is boring. I'd rather hit heal, and watch the battle.
I'll try the new game, but I have already started playing eq2 again, and leveled my character to 51 from 45 in about a week. I had a blast doing it too. Using SoE's stock interface.
If Blizzard can make the game fun without me having to search for the right button to press, then I'm all for this change. Otherwise, I'll save my money and play Eq2.
Oh I'll add something else. It's one thing to never have some ability. It's something else to have it for years, then have it taken away. I'm sure Blizzard put a lot of thought into this. At least I hope they did.
I have just a few more observations.
Obviously taking out functionality is never going to be extremely popular. But if they never had this functionality—what then? Would you have played the game at all? Is it a good or bad thing that this wasn't implemented from the start?
There is also at least two months' warning, it wasn't pulled from you in a .1 patch.
There will really only be one way to tell if the game will survive this change, and that's by watching after the Burning Crusade comes out. There will be people who leave, there will be people who adapt (may be eased along by useful add-ons, and possibly better-designed raids), and there will be people who join.
In response to the people who keep saying that they are going to quit and find a new game, fair warning - you will be hard-pressed to find anything else out there with this level of customization and player-controlled modding. Believe me, I have played a lot (most 2-3 months so I could get a feel for them).
The fact is, even with the proposed changes that will gimp add-on functionality, there will still be add-ons. There will be smart add-on authors who will find ways to incorporate things into the game in new (and perhaps unexpected to the game designers) ways. With teams like Ace, CT, and others they have an even better chance because they will have more than one person looking at the same problem from multiple points of view.
Yes, this will dishearten people who play .... yes, healers are feeling the brunt of it .... yes, it has not come into effect yet. Things in the game, as it is in life, are fluid and always changing. The way it is now doesn't mean that it will be that way come release. Rally your voices and push for what is right, but expect things to be different and at least try to adapt before you give up entirely.
If, in the end you do decide to leave the game without ever having seen the changes, well ..... I do wish you luck in finding something that you find as both challenging and fun. After all, that is why we play the game, yes?
There is also at least two months' warning, it wasn't pulled from you in a .1 patch.
Ah, but that wasn't Blizzard's doing. Outraged players and mod authors who knew about the change began posting about it on Blizzard's boards Friday morning. All of their posts were deleted. By Friday evening, they were forced to make a (very poorly worded) official announcement.
Who knows how long Blizzard wanted to keep this secret. Based on the number of API changes Slouken announced, it looks like it's something they have been working on for weeks, if not months.
I don't think that any task which the computer can do better than me is one which requires skill.
The computer is extremely good at repetitive tasks which can be explained in very simple terms. It is extremely quick and will never get bored at them. Targetting the first available person in the raid with a debuff and then curing it is an example of a task at which the computer excels. But I don't think this can be considered skill.
Skill is much harder to define which is why it can't be automated. Skill in the game comes from avoiding aggro from heals, what to do when aggro does happen, choosing between healing, nuking and shackling.
Raid fights which I think require a lot of skill are C'thun, Thaddius and Heigan and others like it. These aren't fights which I could be replaced by a computer.
I would much rather see WoW going down the route of requiring the correct tactics and execution to win the fight, rather than whether the healers can react fast enough to land their heals within a fraction of a second.
All the mods can ever do it remove tedious and simple activities from the game. If the designers have to design around these to make encounters require real skill then so much the better. WoW will be a richer game because of it.
Ah, but that wasn't Blizzard's doing. Outraged players and mod authors who knew about the change began posting about it on Blizzard's boards Friday morning. All of their posts were deleted. By Friday evening, they were forced to make a (very poorly worded) official announcement.
I'm sorry, I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories. Leaking information does not force that information to be revealed. I saw a leaked post that was basically word-for-word what was posted. I don't believe that would've been possible if they hadn't been getting that post ready.
I'm far more inclined to believe that they were waiting for the techinical details before they made the announcement. There was a lull in information about UI changes for a while prior to this announcement.
I don't think that any task which the computer can do better than me is one which requires skill.
I assume this isn't a general statement—for example, a good computer can probably play chess better than you, but chess requires skill.
An add-on is perfectly capable and in fact quite good at performing logical analysis of the rank of heal you need, based on how hurt the player is, if they currently have aggro, and how much damage they're likely to take by the time the heal goes off. Does this not require a certain degree of skill, if done by hand?
The folks at blizzard make me sick. They give us a command set to program mods, and then dislike the mods that are made. I, for one, like the current level of functionality. I am paying for it, and quite frankly do not care if it goes against blizzard's philosophy. Every patch that comes along, blizzard screws with our mods making it harder and harder the mod writers to give us the functionality we want and need. This is pushing A LOT of us to a place blizzard does not want us to go. Making something more difficult does not necessary make someone more inclined to spend more time trying. After all it is just a game. Make it more difficult and you are more apt to make us quit. There is already many compelling reasons to give in to the pressures, of spending five to six days or more of every spare moment playing, and stop. Many of the changes that have been made so far has caused myself and many others I know to play less. Many are struggling with the functionality we have now.
After reading this news, I am canceling my pre-ordered copy of BC. And I am sure most of my 200+ member Guild will do the same. I am VERY disappointed by this news. But I am not surprised. I should have seen this coming. I wonder if philosophy will keep the wolves from blizzard's door.
DISCLAIMER: I'm a healer, I raid and I enjoy the current state of things. I use Decurse and CTraid as my mods when it comes to healing in raids. The rest of my addon/mods are Bongos, Perl, some Rogue addons, and several profession addons.
Like many of healers, as soon as I heard this news about Decurse and CT, my first thought was "WTF?". I use those 2 addons in raids for one purpose. I want to be able to enjoy the game and not sit for 4 hours a night playing "Wack-a-Mole" with people's health bars. I consider myself to be a considerate healer - if I'm having trouble keeping you up, I'll get help or find someone who can. I don't like being the cause of people's massive repair bills.
Perhaps in 40man runs, one person (or 2) could be dedicated to casting Dispell/Decurse/Depoison/Cure. However, this startegy will fail in 20mans and even in the 40mans if the 2 people aren't fast enough.
I really want to know why Slouken and the others think this is a good idea - that I spend all my time desperatly clicking decurse one player at a time, letting my raid members down by not healing? If you can't answer me that, then please, find someone who can. Healing is stressful enough without a wrench being thrown into the works.
I honestly don't like the Standard UI for the either version of the game. It's cluttered and I often have to hunt for things. I greatly enjoy the current status of being able to modify the UI - it's one of the things that attracted me to WoW and one of the things the Devs of this game were said to be highly proud of. When the game came out, we were told that Blizz had learned from SWG's and Sony and everyone else's mistakes and that this game wasn't going to repeat them. Up until now, despite everything this has held true. Don't screw your playerbase over because you feel it will stop or at least hinder Farmers. It won't. They pride themselves on finding ways around you.
I am currently having a blast healing - more so then I did as a rogue. But this change? It makes me wonder about what I'm going to do. If you're going to pigeon hole one type...do it to all types.
I have carpal tunnel. I also used to have a screen so full of bars, buttons, unit frames and chat boxes that even on my 17" widescreen lcd monitor I only had maybe a 9" square to see my character and her surroundings clearly. And that was with things made as small as possible but still readable.
Now, I get to look forward to that once again since most likely my addon LazyHunter and HunterSpam are going to die. Having a bajillion buttons just to play a hunter is not what I call fun. I feel for the healers, they have it worse than me but it still sucks for everyone.
They say that we will be allowed to do keybindings for spells directly. I know that I for one cannot remember every keybinding I have now let alone when this change occurs. Blizzard is gonna reduce the game down to who can read a slip of paper with keybindings written on it faster than the next guy. I have bought the BC:CE but I am going to not open it until I see if I can even function with this new load of crap they are handing us.
And here I was thinking lol that hunters were not gonna get nerfed this time, I was wrong.
I guess I don't think this is that big of a deal, at least for new content. It's the biggest problem for dungeons that were designed knowing decursive and EM were possibilities, but I think we can get around that.
Decursive: Blizzard has hated this mod since it came out, and has tried to break it a couple times. The raid dungeons that currently exist are filled with encounters that debuff the entire raid, or large portions thereof, making it preferable for a mod that can pick through 40 people. These encounters may suck after the expansion, but they may also not matter as much, since we'll all have 35% more stamina and can more easily survive the debuffs until someone gets around to clearing them.
Emergency Monitor: I agree, picking through 40 people to heal would be bad. For maintenance healing, I would cry if I had to do that. But, as someone pointed out above, you can shade out your raid people based on health, which turns your raid windows into an emergency monitor of a kind, with spaces. Someone also mentioned fights where they can only heal part of the raid (twin emps, thaddius, 4 horsemen)...there are already add-ons that will tell you who is in range of your heals- fluctuating raid windows aren't strictly necessary for that.
this makes me glad that i learned to play without any kind of mods or add-ons. granted they make the game easier but i cant see sitting in a raid half asleep clicking one button the whole time and then waking up to move my char a bit.... but i wouldnt totally count out the mods that most people use yet. nessesity is the mother of invention and im sure we will have many people out there looking for the loopholes in the program that will be of help to all those "zomg! press 5!" people out there. :-)
The folks at blizzard make me sick. They give us a command set to program mods, and then dislike the mods that are made. I, for one, like the current level of functionality. I am paying for it, and quite frankly do not care if it goes against blizzard's philosophy.
So, er, um, yeah. It turns out you can do more with the scripting system than originally intended. It's been two years, or will be soon. Two years where they haven't considered locking-down the interface a #1 priority. Two years where you can not care about Blizzard's philosophy all you like.
Every patch that comes along, blizzard screws with our mods making it harder and harder the mod writers to give us the functionality we want and need.
There has been a hell of a lot of functionality added to the scripting system. It just doesn't get anywhere near the publicity of the changes.
I've both PvPed and raided as a hunter, using no add-ons but CT_RaidAssist. There weren't a huge number of buttons to keep track of. Granted, I don't have carpal tunnel.
So you have never raided/pvp'd as a healer/decurse class..interesting..good to know your perspective regarding healers is worthless.
So you have never raided/pvp'd as a healer/decurse class..interesting..good to know your perspective regarding healers is worthless.
I love you too.
Would you agree with me if I had raided or PvPed as a healer? Attack the argument, not the person, please.
But, as someone pointed out above, you can shade out your raid people based on health, which turns your raid windows into an emergency monitor of a kind, with spaces.
And isn't that the most hideous looking mess for a company who has already made billions of dollars off of a game?
I think it's embarrassing for Blizzard when a guy on his own time can come up with something better then they did and when they try to duplicate it, they come up with a mess.
If this is any indication of Blizzard's incompetent expertise, just log out now because they demonstrate they don't know what the hell they are doing.
I don't know about other healers but I cast different ranks of each heal spell, depending on the situation--I use heal rank 1, heal rank 3, greater heal rank 1, greater heal rank 2, renew rank 10, renew rank 6, prayer of healing rank 2 and prayer of healing rank 4, flash heal rank 6 and flash heal rank 7. Then there's also shield, dispel, cure disease, fade. These are the spells I use actively--not just having them sit there looking pretty. It's a lot of buttons to keep track of.
I have to watch my assigned people, as well as watch if anyone is in dire need of a heal is in range. I have to be situationally aware on where I should be, where the assigned people I need to heal are, and where the mobs are. I have to do damage when on occasion as well. And I have to watch my mana efficiency, I need to conserve mana when appropriate--an oom priest is useless and priests have no autoshot unfortunately.
This is just a priest, which I consider less complex to play than a druid (forms omg ;) ). Healer burnout happens because you need to do this each and every raid.
I sometimes ponder if guilds that make their dps roll healer types so that the main priests get a break on the "old" dungeons is on the right track.
The addons and macros were added to lessen the stress, and have the person enjoy the fight more. Some macros toed the line between automation and "real" playing--and I agree that some of them need to go. Unfortunately, a lot of addons are going to be collateral damage.
As someone said (on another board), the healing game is based around the UI instead of the game environment. Here's hoping the UI changes aren't drastic enough to make the healing game even more tedious.
What I want to know, is if the people violently opposing this change, even know why it is going in. There is a huge outcry over Blizzard nerfing you, but do you even know what's going on? Or have you just focused solely on what this change means to you, and your class, and how your gameplay will change your time in a massively MULTIPLAYER online roleplaying game.
Blizzard did not just wake up one day, and have their lead designer say. "I have a great idea... let's just completely hose all those MOD people, because we can. HA HA! WE ARE MIGHTY PRICKS! BOW BEFORE US!"
The scripting functionalities that they put into the game allowed for a degree of automization that they did not intend, nor design for.
Star Wars Galaxies had EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEM, with their highly customizable in-game macro and scripting system, and their combat action queue. You could literally set your computer up to play the game itself with no mods, just the in-game scripting and macro interface.
Blizzard is just now facing this situation. Each time they've improved scripting and mod performance, they took a step closer to fully automating gameplay. They've reached a point where they have decided that fully or even majorly automated gameplay is not the direction that they want to go in. To combat the 5-20% of their population that are the core reason for this change, they're making drastic changes that will affect 100% of the population. Even thouh 80+% percent of the population does not significantly abuse the system.
There are probably various ways that they could deal with those 5-20% seperately, but I'm fairly sure that someone in Blizzard who makes more money than me, has a job where they analyze the costs of doing this, versus the costs of other options. And they looked up and said, "Hey, you know, if we just rewrote the scripting functionality, we could make it much much harder, to do the stuff we don't want them to do. Without having to invest hundreds of manhours in redesigning content, which may or may not work."
It's an easy out for them. "Oh but they're shipping the cost of that out onto us, the subscriber. They could have spent the time and money to fix this in a manner that did not screw over everyone else."
Since when has any US company, or even the majority of US citizens been about taking the high moral road that may be more work and effort with less profit? The diet pill industry is a MULTI BILLION dollar industry because people want cheap and easy fixes. This situation, is a Cheap and Easy fix for Blizzard to get rid of it's unsightly bulge of AFK Playing "Fat".
This is the way the world works. Sitting there with your carpal tunnel, writing huge comments like this isn't going to change that. The most EFFECTIVE way to tell Blizzard you do not like this change is to simply quit. Period. EOF
Reactive scripts give a huge advantage to those that have them. The ability to determine if you need to do X if the target has Y on him or is about to do Y is huge.
Do I like the change no, but it does bring everyone back to the same lvl.
Example - I have an addon that will kick if my target is casting. If your a mage forget about casting anything but insta-cast spells. What does this do, forces me to react and have 30 binds setup. No big deal, but it does mean on more wtfpwn for a lot of classes.
I just hope they'll be able to get rid of KLHThreatmeter or such addons.
Knowing information on threat is great, but having access to threat values in realtime of every other people is clearly cheating to me.
Player's experience should help him evaluate the decision and decide by himself if he can take more risk or not, i.e. threat should stay a "vague" information. With KLHT it's like playing in god mode, or in slow mode in arcade games, you take absolutely no risk in your actions.
"And isn't that the most hideous looking mess for a company who has already made billions of dollars off of a game?"
I absolutely loathe this line of thought. It is a complete fabrication that only appears to carry weight because it 'sounds plausible'.
Do you balance blizzards books? Probably not, because if you did, you'd probably know that the majority of their subscription fee base is not paid to them. That 15 bucks a month? Doesn't go to blizzard, it goes to Vivendi.
Those phantom 'billions' you see in revenue, aren't funding development because blizzard made a horrible financial decision during the inception of the game that cost them millions, not billions.
To further illustrate the difference between perception and reality, the average US citizen makes more money per hour than 90% of the world population, yet the US Government is Trillions (not billions) in debt. With all those citizens making all that much money, how come the US can't simply get itself out of debt? If they upped the taxes on each citizen by 10% they could easily pay off their debt in a few years. So what's the problem?
Consider this, come BC with these changes, several other healing changes will come into being.
All HOT spells will stack.
Priests will get a reactive heal that jumps.
Priests will get a heal that targets both themselves and their target.
Priests will have access to an AOE Heal.
Druids will get a HOT with a medium heal at the end of its duration or dispel.
Both sides will gain access to Paladins and Shamans, who's healing totem, Judgement of Light will stack.
Alliance will gain Chain Heal from Shamans.
Horde will gain Blessings of Kings/Sanctuary/Wisdom/Might/Salvation/etc . from Paladins.
I think the amount of single target healing aside from the main tank, with the 'hunt and peck' method is going to at least be minimized due to the amount of multi-healing, hot stacking that's going to come into the game.
And paladins can cleanse and heal easier how? Oh yeah, Blizzard doesn't play paladins.
"Do you balance blizzards books? Probably not, because if you did, you'd probably know that the majority of their subscription fee base is not paid to them. That 15 bucks a month? Doesn't go to blizzard, it goes to Vivendi."
And your point is? Who cares what problems they have due to their own incompetence. The point is, here's a guy who can come up with a much better UI implementation then they can and he wrote it for free. They can't even come up with something of equal value by hiring programmers.
"Priests will get a reactive heal that jumps."
That made about as much sense to the average lay-player then greek does to portugese monkey.
I think it's embarrassing for Blizzard when a guy on his own time can come up with something better then they did and when they try to duplicate it, they come up with a mess.
No, I'm just saying what would be possible. Nothing is actually built into the default UI.
Unfortunately, a lot of addons are going to be collateral damage.
We're going to get more ways to reduce collateral damage. We can only hope we get enough.
And they looked up and said, "Hey, you know, if we just rewrote the scripting functionality, we could make it much much harder, to do the stuff we don't want them to do. Without having to invest hundreds of manhours in redesigning content, which may or may not work."
I'm curious how you think redesigning content would go about getting rid of the problem.
The point is, here's a guy who can come up with a much better UI implementation then they can and he wrote it for free.
Add-on authors are in a different playing field from the UI programmers. Specifically, they did not have to lay out the scripting groundwork and write an intuitive base UI for the game.
There are 90,000 lines of code in 1.12.1, just on the scripting side, not counting the interface code on the inside of the program itself. But even 90,000 lines of code can't meet everyone's needs. You say "there's an add-on out there that does this better than Blizzard's implementation" like it's a bad thing and completely unexpected.
This once simple game has now become more complex with no statments from Blizzard for us clueless people.
You know what? If they don't care enough to explain it to people like me and are off enjoying their weekend without a care in the world, then it dawned on me the same. I don't care. I'm going to enjoy my weekend and go out and buy Guild Wars where I don't have to deal with players who think my every concern deserves a L2P reply.
Play by yourself! I can't stomach being AROUND you anymore! Keep it up and I predict they will leave enmasse like they did in EQ and EQ2 and people said THAT would never happen either. It did. You're next.
When I have to deal with elite snobs for my answers because Blizzard is out playing golf and could care less, that's it, I'm done!
It's Sunday. Do you think it's possible that they have families? Maybe World of Warcraft isn't the most important thing in their lives?
We have all the time until the expansion comes out. One weekend is a drop in the bucket.
"I'm curious how you think redesigning content would go about getting rid of the problem."
It's a reactive argument to the idea that 'The mods were developed because the currently designed content necessitated them.'
I don't buy the idea that the game design necessitated the EZmode mods to play, and that the removal of the EZmode mods will make the game unplayable.
Assuming that their argument does hold water, and that the mods are necessary by current design, the alternative would be to redesign the content to fix the issue.
*shrug* I'm playing blizzard's game, the way that they made, and created. When I go over to my friends house to play monopoly, I expect to play monopoly the way the instructions on the box say to play. I roll dice, and it irks me when he pulls out his automated number generator because his wrist hurts from the shaking, the number generator which apparently never rolls a 3-5, and is constantly rolling doubles. Screw that.
" "Priests will get a reactive heal that jumps."
That made about as much sense to the average lay-player then greek does to portugese monkey."
Aite, you figure out a better way to summarize this into one line.
"Prayer of Mending - Rank 1
Requires Level 68
976 Mana30 yd range
Instant cast
Places a spell on the target that heals them for 702 to 858 the next time they take damage. When the heal occurs, Prayer of Mending jumps to a nearby raid target. Jumps up to 5 times and lasts 1 min after each jump. This spell can only be placed on one target at a time."
I have an suspicion that Lynette just read the UI forums and some jerk just gave her a Learn2Play snobby reply.
This happened with EQ2's revamp. I saw it happening then. You had the pro-fans going off on anyone with a concern and the worst forum was healers. The moderators of course sided with the fans of their new design and ousted the complainers; rather brutally I might add. Deleted posts and bans were prevalent.
The players wound up leaving, there was a severe lack of healers and the server mergers were proof of that and mass guild recruit begging going on and still is.
Blizzard needs to talk at the level of the average customer and do it fast. Because getting people fed up from even reading about the changes is NOT in their best interest.
Zargon
Level 60 Paladin
The interesting thing is I haven't seen a large complaint in any place that Blizzard usually pays attention to. A (relatively large) ruckus on the UI & Macros forum isn't much in the overall scheme of things.
Well they better start paying attention then, because it's all over the net, chats and the games. I even heard it in Eve Online this morning when I logged in there.
Zargon
Level 60 Paladin
Well, after scrolling through the comments here, I have to say that THIS conclusion, if true, is what bothers me the most. It said,
Anonymous said...
Imagine yourself constantly being forced into clicking on your target, repeatedly, in order to hit or do ANYTHING to it at all. Go ahead and try it and tell me how much fun the game is then because that's what healers are going to be forced to do.
This is the problem people are in an uproar about. The prospect of click/action, click again/next action, click some more/another action. When you have to take care of 40 or even 25 people, that becomes a headache.
I like this analogy because it asks the question, "What would this game be like if melee had to click on the mob, take a swing, click on the mob again, take the next swing, click on the mob again, sunder, click/eviscerate and so on.
This is the problem healers face and with today's technology, there is no reason for it to have NOT been addressed for so long.
You cannot have a change this big and NOT compensate for the clicking, which is why they use mods to begin with.
I'm afraid if Blizzard believes that people will just adapt, they will find themselves with a severe shortage of a class that their game requires to function.
Sure, you will have people who adapt to click/cast, rinse/repeat mentality, but you will probably see a lot more that find no fun in that.
Changing classes would not be the solution either since this game requires a good balance of each.
SOE did see the demise of a majority of their "cleric" class after their nerf to it and it caused a severe impact on that game. Everquest 2 is now almost dead and has never recovered from the fiasco their revamp caused. That's a fact from Bruce's and other analysts subscription charts.
SWG saw the same demise for similar reasons.
Blizzard would be stupid to not consider the past mistakes of other companies. While a company may have their reasons, when a customer is used to a certain type of gameplay, you never tell them it's over because in the end, they will tell you it's over as well.
Tell me I'm wrong but history says I'm right.
With that said, let the designers be held accountable and the game fall where it does.
I'm sure I didn't have to remind them of this, but sometimes it needs to be said anyway.
Why play WOW when you can automate your role into a handful of buttons? Using scientific logic to play your character for you is total BS looked at from every angle expect those in the role of healers/decursers who think a majority function of the game is being removed. You honestly think it should be a feature to let programmed UI add-ons with logic do the thinking and casting for your characters? That is absurd thinking of spoiled players who have had an easy ride IMNSHO.
And please dont begin to go on about the number of buttons your particular character class has to keep track of - my eyes cross in instances playing a resto build shaman with the heals, cures, totems, etc that has to be done but that is the character I chose to play because it is fun and a challenge. WOW is a game I play it as such. If some people would stop treating WOW and the raids that go along with it as some "job" that people "work hard at" they wouldn't be of such sour mood because of these changes (like playing a video game is anything remotely resembling a job). If your roll as a healer/decurser is so hard on you roll a different class, take a night or two off, or just get away from the computer and get a life - World of Warcraft is not a priority event in anyone's life (and if it is, please, seek help).
And for those individuals ready to quit because EZmode got turned off good luck finding that next game that has the quality, polish, and consideration that World of Warcraft offers. As a video game developer who keeps tabs on MMORPGs across the board I can assure you that few games have it as good for the players as WOW. Every game has it problems, every game has its issues with customers and administrators (and game masters), and none of them address things as quickly and throughly as players want them done. Good luck finding that utopian game with everything "just right".
In the meantime! We gamers who have L2P without the mods that play the game for us will be gleefully waving our hands goodbye to those whom leave for so many reasons. With you gone there is less competition, with you gone their is less resources poured into patting you on the head to make you feel better and more work done on the game, with you gone there will be a definitive rebalancing of population across Azeroth of places filled and emptied according to how people who remain enjoy the game (meaning if there is a sudden and sharp decline of guilds farming Molten Core because of the changes they will revamp something to make it balance out), and so on and so forth.
Yes, I am pro-Blizzard.
Yes, I have learned to play and play a healer (well).
Yes, I am here to stay.
Matt, it's players like him that have had me questioning why I play this game anyway, honestly.
I'm tired of the bravado and elitist attitudes most of them have over a silly little game I only play for entertainment.
He speaks of having issues, yet look at him. He sits their gloating over being #1 and nothing else crosses his mind.
That's the problem with this game and will be pre-and-post the expansion, changes or not. People like HIM and it's why I posted my original comment the way I did.
There is a certain arrogance in both camps, honestly: "Those kinds of add-ons are a crutch, learn to play"; "Blizzard's philosophy is wrong and this change will ruin the game"; yadda yadda yadda.
Please stop with the personal attacks. That's not what this is for.
He's posing as a game designer and gloating over these changes because he believes that will make him #1 and you find that equally arrogant as everyone else's thoughts?
That's amazing, John.
What is this blog for exactly? Obviously you wished to bring this to the attention of others and they will naturally decide whether they like it and stay or dislike it and leave.
Your blog is giving them a direct invitation to make those decisions and offering a space for them to voice why they will chose the path they take.
However, that guy has a serious self-esteem problem if he has to belittle others to make himself feel better.
Would you agree with me if I had raided or PvPed as a healer? Attack the argument, not the person, please.
I you had raided as a healer there is every likelihood that you would be taking our position.
You don't know, you can't know how badly this change is going to ruin our game experience. To be brutally frank, your defensive pontificating has no leg to stand on.
Walk a mile in our shoes, then come back and tell us our concerns aren't justified. It's not just Blizzard's game any more - when they took our money it became our game as well. Mass resignations by the healers will have a flow on effect - when the rest of the raid can't raid get ready for a massive storm of protest.
In the meantime, I suggest that you level that healer to 60, get raiding and try to understand why we are so anggry about these changes.
"I've both PvPed and raided as a hunter, using no add-ons but CT_RaidAssist. There weren't a huge number of buttons to keep track of. Granted, I don't have carpal tunnel."
"Would you agree with me if I had raided or PvPed as a healer? Attack the argument, not the person, please."
I'm not going to jump on you for this, but you really don't understand just what raiding as a healer entails, because you have never played as one. Hunters have virtually the least amount of worries in a raiding situation.
This is the equivalent of making you reclick auto-shot every time you shoot an arrow, or dragging arrows out of your bag and onto your ammo slot every time you fire. Would that frustrate you and make you not want to play a hunter?
The real issue behind all of these changes is that while raid healing/cleansing might require skill, it DOESN'T require any real choices to be made. There's no such thing as "good damage" and very few "good debuffs" that you'd want to make a decision to leave on.
The whole reason that you can totally automate most healing is because there are no choices to make (at least in current content), and encounters like Shazzrah and Lucifron were introduced that created a need for decursive, while dealing with 40 mans made spot healing a pain, which made Emergency Monitor a total relief.
You can't begin to understand how much less frustrating spot healing was after Emergency Monitor was introduced. It was wonderful - I no longer had to squint at 40 bars to see who was damaged enough to be worth spot healing, I could filter them all into one collection.
My UI has since gotten more and more focused at making healing less of a pain. I use macros that start a heal, and then on a second press, cancel it if the MT isn't missing 1000 health. I still have to hit the button twice, but it takes out the frustration of doing subtraction on a constantly changing value.
As it stands, I've already retired from raiding with my Naxx raiding group. Healing in Naxx was too frustrating to do WITH ALL THE MACROS AND UIs I HAVE NOW. If they take out the convenience and ease-of-use of my current UI, I see no reason to even go back to raiding at all. It's just not worth the frustration for the minimal rewards it gives, especially to healers.
60 Druid
As others have said, if you have never played a healing or debuff removing class (mages can remove curses as well), you really can't say this is a good change.
Here are examples of my UI in raids:
20 man: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v230/unclethursday/ScreenShot_100506_234805.jpg
40 man: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v230/unclethursday/ScreenShot_100706_224725.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v230/unclethursday/ScreenShot_100706_222107.jpg
I only use the Emergency monitor to see if someone falls dangerously low extremely fast, I use the health bars of the raid to choose targets otherwise.
Anyone who hasn't played a healer can't attest to how cluttered their screen must be, because almost every single DPS class can have the bare minimum on their screen at all times.
And Blizzard's use of stupidly annoying mass debuff encounters in 40 mans is no one's fault but their own, hence why Decursive was made. I never needed it before I started raiding... and you will hear lots of healers/decursers say the exact same thing. Ever wonder why that is?
Defending Blizzard's actions on this simply shows you have no clue what it is like for us healers in raids, and you just need to shut up.
What Skye wrote reminds me of my old Everquest Ranger.
Skye pointed out, "This is the equivalent of making you reclick auto-shot every time you shoot an arrow, or dragging arrows out of your bag and onto your ammo slot every time you fire. Would that frustrate you and make you not want to play a hunter?"
I have to laugh because we had a mod for that which would allow the means to auto-shoot. It was called, IIRC, Auto-Shot. Hell, this was way back over 6 years now! PLUS, the program was hosted on non-other then Moorgard's old Hunter site for EQ Rangers. Anyone who knows of him knows him and Tigole were buddy EQ players before obtaining gainful employment through Sony Online Entertainment and Blizzard, respectively.
The point is, even back then, these guys were the ones who hosted a program that took out the tedium for arrow-shooting rangers.
It didn't take a genius to figure out that even back then, repetitive tedium wasn't fun. And these guys were so smart in noticing that, they got a job with gaming companies.
Get on it, Tigole! Remember where you came from?
He's posing as a game designer and gloating over these changes because he believes that will make him #1 and you find that equally arrogant as everyone else's thoughts?
Being a game developer is not central to his point; I never said equally arrogant; it's irrelevant anyway.
What is this blog for exactly? Obviously you wished to bring this to the attention of others and they will naturally decide whether they like it and stay or dislike it and leave.
It was originally designed to clarify exactly what the change entails—there's still a fair amount of confusion. It's not intended to be a commentary on the reason or the effect of the change.
I you had raided as a healer there is every likelihood that you would be taking our position.
It's possible. But allow me to make generalization of the statement you seem to be making: these changes make it much harder to avoid burnout as a healer. I can agree with that to an extent. I believe that if I was faced with healer burnout I wouldn't quit, I'd play alts sometimes or maybe just scale back on my raiding.
In the meantime, I suggest that you level that healer to 60, get raiding and try to understand why we are so anggry about these changes.
I most definitely would if I could. I've been wanting to for a while. But I recently entered college and have a lot less time than I used to.
I'm not going to jump on you for this, but you really don't understand just what raiding as a healer entails, because you have never played as one. Hunters have virtually the least amount of worries in a raiding situation.
I was responding to a post specifically mentioning hunters. I was not attempting to make my experience in that regard sound in any way all-encompassing. I understand that spot healers need to select both who they need to heal and what spell to use, versus the vast majority of fights where damage classes have only a single target.
The real issue behind all of these changes is that while raid healing/cleansing might require skill, it DOESN'T require any real choices to be made. There's no such thing as "good damage" and very few "good debuffs" that you'd want to make a decision to leave on.
There are many things in this game that do not require "real choices" to be made, and healing is only one of them. There is always a best sequence of spells for damage classes; it's not a "choice" to use one or the other. Here we get into the design philosophy thing again.
Here are examples of my UI in raids:
Is that 800x600? Clutter doesn't horribly surprise me at that resolution, to be honest.
WARNING: irrelevant personal opinion: I usually find that clutter is a result of add-on combinations that have never been optimized (not really a fault of either the authors or the users). I don't see why all that information needs to be displayed like that.
And Blizzard's use of stupidly annoying mass debuff encounters in 40 mans is no one's fault but their own, hence why Decursive was made. I never needed it before I started raiding... and you will hear lots of healers/decursers say the exact same thing. Ever wonder why that is?
If decurse-heavy fights continue to be prelevant in the Burning Crusade (or enough people do not buy the expansion, keeping the current tier raids commonly done), you will have a point.
if I was faced with healer burnout I wouldn't quit, I'd play alts sometimes or maybe just scale back on my raiding.
Priests are hard enough to find as it is. I'm required to raid with my priest, as we barely have enough. I don't play a class that every Tom, Dick and Harry plays (hunter) - we don't have priests waiting in the wings should I decide I want to scale back or play an alt. Once gain John, I'm afraid you are demonstrating profound ignorance about what us healers have to put up with.
Ignorance isn't a bad thing - we all start out that way, but you don't seem to want to learn yet here you are going into bat about changes that will impact us most of all. It's like a politician talking about the stresses of the working poor.
Blizzard will no doubt go ahead with these changes - they've never been inclined to listen to us in the past (Lolwell anyone), and their customer service ethos would do Stalinist Russia proud. Just don't be surprised when the healers wuit, the raid groups fall apart and a righteous storm of anger hits the forums, customer service inboxes and industry blogs.
Don't say we didn't warn you.
"If decurse-heavy fights continue to be prelevant in the Burning Crusade (or enough people do not buy the expansion, keeping the current tier raids commonly done), you will have a point."
I suspect that spot healing encounters will still be fairly prevalent, if not the new paradigm of encounters, given all the new mass healing spells that have been introduced.
"Priests are hard enough to find as it is. I'm required to raid with my priest, as we barely have enough. I don't play a class that every Tom, Dick and Harry plays (hunter) - we don't have priests waiting in the wings should I decide I want to scale back or play an alt."
This is the sad truth of things: we regularly had to cancel raids because druids simply gave up. Naxx has 1 piece of real great for a druid non-set items: Ghoul Hide Tunic. That's it. Non-healing focused druids pretty much gave up and quit, leaving the minority of resto-specced druids not enough to cover the gap.
Making healing MORE of a hassle means even fewer non-resto spec druids will take up the healing mantle on weekends: they'll PVP to get their gear instead, probably, or just quit and play their warrior, hunter, and rogue alts in PVP.
"There are many things in this game that do not require "real choices" to be made, and healing is only one of them. There is always a best sequence of spells for damage classes; it's not a "choice" to use one or the other. Here we get into the design philosophy thing again."
Except that for most fights before Naxx's DPS checks, DPSers can scale forward and back their DPS without any damage occuring to the raid. Healers' output is decided by the raid's mitigation and the opponent's DPS - we have to put out exactly (not more or less) of the healing that the encounter needs, or everyone dies when we run OOM or they run out of health. This means constant pressing of one button or another - we can't go AFK during a trash fight while auto-shot or auto-attack keep firing at the mob. Even with our most Uber healing gear, it's still a matter of staring intently at 40 (or 25, or 20) little green bars and health perecentages.
Our output isn't a choice, whether it be decursing or healing, in the way that DPSing is. I've raided with both, and healing is an entirely different animal than DPSing in raids, involving far more focus and far less room for error.
John said, "It was originally designed to clarify exactly what the change entails—there's still a fair amount of confusion. It's not intended to be a commentary on the reason or the effect of the change."
Then you should make this an editorial based on what you assume yourself right now and block comments from users who have experience.
No offense, but I'm about 20 years older then you based on the average college age. I've been a casual gamer for 8 years and maintain a family, house and job, which is why I play WoW since it doesn't pressure me like other hobbies. From my post-college perch if you will, I noticed you have challenged every protest to these changes, albeit rather congenially most of the time.
However, the majority of opinions here and on the boards don't seem to coincide with a welcome attitude.
In would therefore be in Warcraft's best interest to start weighing the majority and coming up with a viable solution instead of silence.
For you to solicit a blog from a main game's forum, welcoming comments in your post and then because you don't agree with the majority posting, to step in and say this wasn't put here as an intent to disagree with you, is rather immature.
Sky is right.
"they'll PVP to get their gear instead"
That was my first thought if I planned on sticking with the game after reading of these changes.
And we know how old PvP gets after time.
If there is a sudden lack of healers/decursers, then, well, there's a sudden lack of healers/decursers. It may change the status quo; it may kill the game (or at least the raiding game). We'll find out, I guess.
I understand that priests are already fairly rare. I do know that healing is generally under-appreciated, harder, and rarer. But when you say "I'm required to raid with my priest, as we barely have enough," I wonder. Required? I understand that with an ideal design, the requirement would be unnecessary, but… what's keeping people in your situation playing?
About my "profound ignorance": I think I generally understand what you are saying. I'm just not reacting to it in the same way. This may be caused by the fact that I have not raided as a healer; it may also be caused by my temperament. It could mean that I am not in the majority (if the majority is the outraged one, in this case, which I am not certain about; minorities are extremely vocal).
Our output isn't a choice, whether it be decursing or healing, in the way that DPSing is. I've raided with both, and healing is an entirely different animal than DPSing in raids, involving far more focus and far less room for error.
Fair enough, but not really related to the point I was making.
However, the majority of opinions here and on the boards don't seem to coincide with a welcome attitude.
In would therefore be in Warcraft's best interest to start weighing the majority and coming up with a viable solution instead of silence.
I don't believe that this post and the forums are an accurate reflection of the actual playerbase. Satisfied people are generally less vocal than unsatisfied people.
For you to solicit a blog from a main game's forum, welcoming comments in your post and then because you don't agree with the majority posting, to step in and say this wasn't put here as an intent to disagree with you, is rather immature.
My original post was meant to be an explication of the changes in non-technical language. I have no problems any opinions someone wishes to express in the comments, I just would rather have them expressed in a, as you say, congenial way.
And we know how old PvP gets after time.
PvP gets old to some, raiding gets old to some.
I've said it before - I play this game to have *fun*. I got into this game because I was promised that this game was going to be different the EQ and SWG. You can Customize your UI and Mod it too, I was told. It attracted me.
This new way? It's not going to do anything to stop the farmers - alls they'll do is write longer, more complicated and more in-depth programs to do their business. It does however hurt the player base - and severely. It takes away an essential part of this game, something that up til now has been unique to the game - the sheer level of customization possible.
I play a Druid (Peneth of Dalaran) and yes, I use mods to help make my raiding experince more fun.
"I'm required to raid with my priest, as we barely have enough," I wonder. Required? I understand that with an ideal design, the requirement would be unnecessary, but… what's keeping people in your situation playing?
Maybe the fact that there are 39 other people depending on me to show up and play The Healer Spreadsheet Game twice a week?
It sounds like the concept of keeping other people happy, or at least not letting them down time and time again is foreign to both yourself and Blizzard.
But you've already made your collective minds up, and there's nothing we can say to change your minds.
I disagree with the assumption that players who are for the changes don't post, therefore the posting majority should not be polled.
From what I've gathered in the game, 90% of the people I've met in over a year and a half, don't read the forums or post on them due to a severe lack of maturity to be found there.
So my conclusion is, many people don't know yet. Of those that do, most don't like it. Of those that like the changes, if the changes didn't go through, it really wouldn't affect them one way or the other.
I read the most critical of gamers on Fires of Heaven. I have to admit I was completely surprised to see the majority there against these changes. Especially among such a pro-WOW community that it's now known to be.
Interestingly enough, the Emergency Monitor is coming out on top as to what the healers want as compensation to this change. This is said in the game, on the WoW forums, here and at Fires of Heaven.
Now the question remains: What is so bad about giving the healers a lousy monitor that Blizz builds into their UI themselves? Seriously! Can't be that hard and you're done with this and back to anticipating the expansion with joy instead of dread!
To the guy who says I would be hard-pressed to find a game out there that's better then WoW, eh, maybe that's true. But you know what?
I'm like Mike Bailey here. I have to play an alt priest most of the time because my guild needs it and can't do the run without it. So I shelve the warrior yet again and do what's in the best interest of my guild when I can.
But my true love is in tanking. That's where the action is and that's where I get my thrill. I have no feeling like that playing the priest. I'm detached and the purples don't phase me.
Healers that actually LIKE to heal are a rare breed. There's never enough of them. You just don't go and hamper a system by directing your attack at the weakest link. It's just stupidity!
Maybe WoW is one of the best games going, but it won't be with these changes IMO. And it won't be the worst that happened for me to quit either. In fact, this is the perfect excuse to go play ball instead and I would be better off, I'm sure. In other words, WoW isn't the only thing in the world that could possibly entertain our minds and if you think so, you've missed the boat of what a hobby is.
Peneth, I doubt this change was intended to work against farmers, at least not in the "omg Chinese farmer" sense that infests the boards.
It sounds like the concept of keeping other people happy, or at least not letting them down time and time again is foreign to both yourself and Blizzard.
Not really. It's just that whenever I hear "they force me" or "they require me," I wonder what form of obligation is keeping you there—obviously I don't have any knowledge of your specific situation. Just like you don't really know if "keeping other people happy, or at least not letting them down" is really something I concern myself with. Just to let you know, with no offense meant, that's one of the more absurd things that's been attributed to me in these comments.
Slater: good post. I think this change will be hardest on the people who want to stay playing the game and feel a sense of obligation to switch and play a healer, even if their heart isn't really in it.
Just to let you know, with no offense meant, that's one of the more absurd things that's been attributed to me in these comments.
As long as you're not the one responsible for Lolwell, I'll happily exclude you. Blizzard remains guilty as charged.
The obligation is the commitment I made to my friends to help them raid succesfully. We have tanks aplenty, DPS classes coming out of several unlikely orifices and two thirds of bugger all healers.
I have a clarification question for you:
I currently use Clique/Watchdog/CTRaid to raid heal. I don't let any addon select my spells for me, but I do have different spells bound to different mouse/keyboard combos. For example, alt-right click on a WatchDog or CTRaid frame = Flash Heal, right click = Shield, left click = Greater Heal etc etc
Will I keep the ability to use those combo's on on-screen frames, or will Blizz force me to click the frame, then select the spell on the keyboard?
I currently use Clique/Watchdog/CTRaid to raid heal. I don't let any addon select my spells for me, but I do have different spells bound to different mouse/keyboard combos. For example, alt-right click on a WatchDog or CTRaid frame = Flash Heal, right click = Shield, left click = Greater Heal etc etc
Will I keep the ability to use those combo's on on-screen frames, or will Blizz force me to click the frame, then select the spell on the keyboard?
I don't see anything in the official list of changes that indicates that this is currently possible, but it doesn't seem to be against the spirit of the change, so if it is not currently possible it's extremely likely to become possible.
Also, I may be missing something—someone else in the UI & Macros forum asserted very specifically that this is still possible, and displayed very specific code showing how it would be done.
Hopefully once Slouken is up and about again we can get this clarified.
Thank John,
A 'yes' to that question would move me from the queue marked 'incandescent with rage' to the one marked 'moderately to highly annoyed'. Perhaps one or two other people as well, but I've never claimed to speak for anyone other than myself. Not seriously anyways. Or perhaps I did.
I think what would get me most annoyed about this change is if there is a large amount of significant collateral damage, which there "isn't time" to fix. But I'm holding out hope. We've got about two months at the least.
michael bailey:
Will I keep the ability to use those combo's on on-screen frames, or will Blizz force me to click the frame, then select the spell on the keyboard?
This has been one of the main things I've been trying to discover, and as far as I can see, the modifier+click on a frame to cast differing spells will be enabled through their "clickcasting" features they are adding.
http://tinyurl.com/gturp
Okay this example might seem off-topic, but remember when Blizzard gave wands auto-shot? That's the kind of change that made the game more fun for the classes it impacted. Why can't the healers get more of that kind of love for the type of job they have in parties and raids?
The changes announced are more like having "halls of suck" before every boss of every instance. Does anyone enjoy those respawn rooms of hell in BWL, AQ40, and Naxx? No! They just make the raiding more tedious.
This change will make all buffing more annoying, but particularly for Pallies having to do different buffs based on class every 15 minutes or after a wipe.
What this means for me though is that I'm probably done raiding. Whether there will be enough to do with 5 mans in BC I don't know. I assume not and I'm no longer particularly excited about getting BC or playing WoW as the end-game won't be worth the effort. Good luck finding dedicated guilds without the healing for the encounters.
Next and hopfully final question to take to 'em: now that Decursive functionality is being borked will they reset the cost of Dispell/Decurse/etc etc to what it used to be?
As a paladin, in raids I'm a manual HoT for the raid. I spam tiny little efficient heals at anything that needs it.
It's painful.
It's annoying.
It's tedious.
But it works, and it keeps things rolling.
Paladins are also cleansebots. Because having 5 people having to cleanse 8 (40/5) in 10 seconds is not possible (7 is, with no lag), we're already under stress. If you slow us down more, encounters like Luci just become unjustifably difficult.
But ignore that for a second. Let's ignore the mechanics of the encounters and look at how it changes how a class plays.
Paladins' main "strength" is the ability to do everything at once. Swing for kitten damage while healing, all at the same time. The role description is to paraphrase "field generals, keeping an eye on the ebb and flow of the battle".
We can do that with decursive, because while we're using "game-engine" time, aka global cooldowns, when we use it, we're not using up focus. We can pay attention to things going on around us.
Without it (and with locks UA), I imagine you'll only have two types of paladins. Those that don't cleanse anyone but themselves. And thoses that are full fledged "cleansebots", and do nothing else.
Fun.
Just reading through all these comments got me to thinking about the kind of encounters we may expect in burning crusade. As a mage, i dont have to deal with HEaling, though i do need to keep an eye on Curses. one of my favorite Encounters that im lucky enough to do weely is the Chrommagus encounter in BWL
now the Beauty of a mod like Decursive, is that i can Be afflicted by Bronze affliction, and stunned, theres 5 seconds till an immolate or ignite flesh or some such other breath, and im supposed ot run in the back and hide( im assigned ot rogue decursing and we tank him in the doorway) but right when theres a few seconds till the breath he drops a brood affliction that i can cure, some Players already have 4 on them.... i KNOW for a fact im going to cast Remov lesser curse Rank 2 on all the players ive been assigned to watch. whats so hard about allowing that to stay one button so i can high tail it the hell out of there while spamming it?
ive made the decission when i showed up to the raid tht i would be casting decurse on those players when ever they were afflicted. thats not making any decission for me its just the only recourse.
Our healers arent so upset about emergency monitor, and for one reason, we have druids and Priest on Particular groups/Tanks then pallies are given the job of raid healing a particular, or 2 particular classes each, then they can just drag out those classes from the default blizz raid ui. i havent raided as a healer as i said and have no intention of it, people who heal and heal well are a rare breed. and i for one enjoy staying alive ;)
My opinion is that Blizzard would be mad to make this change and then Make Curing a major part of encounters in the expansion. as much as they may dislike the idea of one click decursing and ability to at a glance see who is getting low and top them up, they have Beta/Alpha teting for a reason. if its unplayable it wont be released.
for the first few weeks while we level up, BWL, AQ40 and naxx may indeed be nightmares, but we probably wont want to raid for those crappy epics anymore anyway, and more engaging content, that isnt so reliant on mass spamming of cures, hopefully gives us better gear anyway.
my 2 cents worth, not trying to agree nor disagree with anyone. i subscribe to the Train of thought that if i didnt see it, it didnt happen. :)
Unitus
Divinity Mage CLass Leader - Silvermoon
.... posting an arrogant post about someone being arrogant is the trophy wife of forum/blog hypocracy. Covering a lack of arguement by pointing a finger like a child and crying "I dont like you" in what means come to you is doubly humorous.
But if John wants to stop attacks on persons then I will leave that statement just as onfocused and vague as it is. Blizzard is doing what they think is right for their game and with 6.5 million signing into their game frequently even after the rise of supposed "WOW killers" I think they might know what they are doing. I see nothing wrong with what they are doing by eliminating automation of the processes that keep a raid raiding, it is what makes the game what it is supposed to be.
If you dont like healing because of so-called "whack-a-mole" then stop going to those raids, simple as that. No reason to get hyper about it, one day Blizzard will pull the plug on the database to WOW servers and all of your "hard work", "dedication", "macro programming", "whack a mole", and whatever else people want to quantify will be irrecoverably eliminated at their whim and people will have to go on with life. BFD (and I dont mean Blackfathom).
Hm... I've read through most of this blog and some of the posts in the Blizz forums... here's my 2 cents:
I play a 60 warlock, a 60 priest and a 60 shaman, all on 40 man raiding level, so I think I know what I'm talking about...
1. Bots
Bots should be shut down at all cost and this I support fully. However, the more advanced bots work by directly modifying the game's memory and/or protocol, so where's the point in changing the scripting language to avoid that?
2. Decursive
Some encounters are built in a way that really requires Decursive. Of course this might be different for 25 man instances, but keep in mind that most people will NOT be raiding in BC with level 70, they will still be doing MC, BWL, AQ. So unless these encounters are massively changed on the area-curse stuff, many Guilds will not get past Lucifron anymore...
3. Emergency Monitor / CTRaid
Blizzard has so far not been able to build a decent Raid interface. The attempt made by adopting some CTRA-like functions is rather limited. I have the frames from CTRA on my screen, not the Blizz ones, because I have way more control over the look and feel and the functionality than with the Blizz-"Crap". Ok, I might be able to have automatic highlighting of the raidmembers with the most pressing health problem, but unlike the emergency monitor, I will have a lot more searching to do and will have less chances of being on time.
4. Playing a healer
I personally think that healers in Raids can be fun. Getting everybody through an instance without a big repair bill is gratifying. But with the upcoming change, I see three things happening:
a) More mana is going to be wasted
b) More healers are going to quit
c) More people are going to die during raids
Now, this might be intended or not and I can understand uberpriest who say that they don't need all these addons and crutches, but... 2 uberpriests are not going to be able to keep a raid alive unless there are also some normal priests as well. So making the life of average priests/druids/palas/... harder is not going to be a good solution.
Good thing I have my warlock (hoping that there will be enough priests left to actually play raid instances)...
I'm going to be really sad to see Decursive go quietly into the night. As a Mage, I used this heavily to help in boss fights during the MC raids. Now I will have to frantically stare at my 40 raid members to see who is cursed and hope to God I'm quick enough with the massive amount of clicking and clicking and clicking.
I see a lot of breakage with Discord Mods, since the use of floaters and show/hide won't be working now, especially while in combat.
Blizzard really is taking a step back from offering expansive game play and changing play dynamics to something more static. Eventually allowing the use of mods will be turned off completely.
A mage really doesnt have a say in this, if only for the few fights where decursing is done by them instead of pala/druids..
poooor mage must stare at healthbar?
/pat
Rotanimod 60 priest haomarush EU
Thanners, you are interpreting that post correctly—I'd forgotten about it. Click-casting which can differentiate between modifier keys/specific mouse buttons is most definitely possible.
Next and hopfully final question to take to 'em: now that Decursive functionality is being borked will they reset the cost of Dispell/Decurse/etc etc to what it used to be?
One can only hope. My guess is that kind of tuning will be done in late beta.
My opinion is that Blizzard would be mad to make this change and then Make Curing a major part of encounters in the expansion.
I agree, in general. More specifically, major decursing in places where AoE dispells/etc. won't help.
But if John wants to stop attacks on persons then I will leave that statement just as onfocused and vague as it is.
If you see a personal attack, it wasn't intended. It was generalization of the many arguments, primarily on the forums.
Bots should be shut down at all cost and this I support fully. However, the more advanced bots work by directly modifying the game's memory and/or protocol, so where's the point in changing the scripting language to avoid that?
I don't believe this was exactly designed to prevent bots. The UI system already couldn't intelligently move players, which is essential to bots. The only kind of "bot" this change addresses is a method of generating endless keystrokes and keeping a lot of logic in the add-on code.
Huh? Since when does a Priest have the only thing to lose in this massive change? How naive.
Every class will potentially have something to lose. Those Priests who don't solely rely lazy-mods to help with their class will continue to excell. Those who rely completely on mods to help facilitate their actions will soon realize what a poor Priest they really are.
I'm more concerned about the countless mods which help improve the customizing of the UI itself, not just helping with actions. Lots of ActionBar mods which toggle upon variables will be screwed.
John: Then why is the change going through? The complaint is that you can script a macro to do it all for you - more or less what the botters do. If this is true, then why doesn't Blizz actually pay attention to all the botter reports and do something that way instead of making the healing part of the game utter hell?
I enjoy healing - I love it far more then I do DPS'ing. But if everyone had to DPS like we're going to have heal? WoW wouldn't last very long. I hold to the "Do it me - do it to them too" idea.
I agree Bots=Bad, but does are they honestly so terrible and evil that you have to penalize an already rare breed?
-Peneth
John: Then why is the change going through? The complaint is that you can script a macro to do it all for you - more or less what the botters do.
I'm going to define "bot" as someone who is AFK constantly and using third-party programs to play their character. This change makes very little difference to these people—at the most it makes them move some logic code from an add-on or macro to the third-party program.
There is a huge difference between AFK-botting and just spamming a single key on your keyboard during raids.
Not Using technology for repetitive tasks is foolish.
Technology is meant to be used to make life easier... Why blizzard believes that we need to get carpal tunnel & go blind is beyond me. Perhaps someone will sue blizzard for carpal tunnel/eye problems from eye strain.
If you can win a law suit because you poored hot coffee on yourself you can win anything. Blizzard also has the money to pay out so someone please make an example of them.
There's alot of crap going on here. Talk about 'new' functionality. Which is just a marketing ploy to say they're throwing a bunch of nice features out, and what they do decide to keep will be incredibly more limited than it is now and highly controlled with restrictive coding, not so refreshingly called 'secure.' More accurately called less functionality with less actual...functionality; unfortunately, my experience in life has led me to believe people in business actively seek out ways to communicate in obtuse and misleading language, so to see it characterized as OMG BRAND NEW! MORE OPTIONS THAN **EVER** BEFORE!! isn't too surprising.
Having said that, however, I do tend to sleep in bed with the crowd saying the degree of automation possible in the game is out of control. The number of completely automated hunters I've encountered in WoW doing nothing but farming gold or stuff to sell on the Auction House is proof enough of that. As has been said before though, these changes probably have nothing to do with eliminating those types of people.
You see, this is more about healing. About healers.
Restoring hitpoints isn't as automatic as taking hitpoints. You don't simply turn healing on as you do with auto-attack. You can't let it run the duration of the fight, you don't have an automatic supply of restorative hitpoints simply flowing toward whatever you have targeted. Healing is manual. Damage is automatic. And basically infinite, as long as you have auto-attack turned on. It flows at a given rate depending on your weapons and gear, and it flows forever.
I suppose it could be argued that doing damage for warlocks and mages isn't automatic, and yet in a vast majority of situations they are relegated to the casting of 1 or 2 spells. Well, maybe not warlocks. Those poor sobs. And they have to carry soulstones. Only a sucker would play a warlock. I digress.
As I was saying, this whole situation has come about because of how healing in general is designed. In how healing is perceived as needing to be designed. Playing a healer in every mmog I have played (EQ and WoW) is like a job. It sucks. Removing automation from it removes alot of a healer's ability to actually play the game. To realize they are even in a game that's more than anxiously keeping track of rising and falling health meters. A pitiful two-dimensional game where the objective is horrifyingly like Pong; hit the healthbar bouncing left, and make it head to the right.
And it isn't like just finding someone who needs healing and throwing your most powerful mojo their way. It all needs to be carefully regulated, efficiently handled. Manpower needs to be effectively distributed, healing tasks well organized and delegated to maximise the amount of actual healing taking place versus overhealing. What goes into good healing is in a completely different universe from doing melee damage.
Maybe taking hitpoints away is just as simplistic. But at least while doing it you can SEE the thing you're fighting. You can watch it closely and the surrounding environment for any visual cues, can anticipate changes in the flow of combat, can move around to see it from all angles. And do it all without having to stress over the survival of everyone alongside.
At any rate, maybe I've been rambling. I know I do that and yet I can't make myself stop even though its a trait I hate in others.
So let's boil it down: so far Blizzard has admitted they don't want to have to design around Decursive anymore. I'm not sure about Emergency Monitor and things like it. That says all anyone needs to know. They don't want healing and support classes to enjoy the game. They don't want healers to help raid groups beat content they design without suffering through it. Manual healing. Manual curing. Clicking on every..single..person... over and over again. Its unhealthy, but they don't care. Remember encounters like Lucifron and Shazzrah were in the game before Decursive even existed. Its nearly impossible to manually cure at that rate on a regular basis and do anything else additionally. They more than likely WANT healers to quit so people don't progress as quickly.
It will mean their content lasts longer, and makes more money for them before they have to design new content. Or as another person said, maybe they don't even get that much money from the game they help design. Maybe they don't care BECAUSE they don't get much money and these changes are the result of that. Either way, they won't have to think up new content as quickly. That will make their jobs easier in the long run, at the expense of healers' ease of play, overall enjoyment level, and a healer's ability to realize more of the game than just intensively using mana to restore hitpoints, night after night, on some fights probably unable to even take the time to type out anything in chat due to the severity of intensive healing/curing needed per increment of time.
All I can say is, ever since I caught my first glimpse of Freeport nearly 7 years ago, I'm pretty disgusted with the evolution of healing.
As someone with RSS/Carpal Tunnel, I'm pretty sure this will end my days of healing. I cant physically use a mouse at all, and only use a touchpad for looting. I am arguably the best healer of my class on the server, which I manage thru a combination of party F1-5 keys, party targets in CTRA set to F6-F10 and then using EM style addons for targetting the ret of the raid.
Basically forcing us to use a pointer in combat is a horrible idea. The only classes this really affects is healers, so I just dont see why Blizzard needs to make it even harder for us burnout-wise anyway. Hell, if there is some other use for targetting addons other than healing, then only let the healing ones work thru Cast*() scripts. But no one who has been a healer for a long time is going to last long with this...Why? Because even if some of the healers do adjust, some won't or will quit or won't be quite as effective, and all of a sudden they have to work that much harder to maintain even the status quo.
Well as a tank in a Naxx guild, who also has a 60 Priest and a 60 Shaman who I consicuously do not raid with for the very reason that I like to look at and concentrate on the battle, not a list of names with little icons next to them. I can agree with those that say this is a bad move.
I mean Blizzard has taken MANY of what used to be "mod features" and added them into the game as built in features. I simply do not understand why they would do something so obviously designed to take away a few specific classes ability to play and enjoy the game.
If they make it so you have to specifically click a players name, identify the affliction, THEN find teh spell icon for the appropriate removal spell...what happens to the other 15 people that you were responsible for doing the same thing to?
If they do require more work to cast teh spell, they should conversely reduce the choices of spells to cast, like make a single ranked "cure disease/remove poison/remove curse" all purpose spell, I know they won't but thats the only way I can see this working out well for the healers.
The argument that 40 man raiding will cease once the exp comes out is silly IMHO, you miss a HUGE part of the game if you attempt to jump from ZG/AQ20 to something in TBC. There will still be thousands of people that want their Tier 1/2/3 sets and itesm, myself included.
What it comes down to is Blizzard's creative is now out the window, and we now need make the UI harder to use in order to make encounters tougher.
Why don't they release their expansion on 3 1/2 inch floppies too?
How many people have to express similar sentiments before they are taken seriously?
Bottom line: Blizzard is taking the game experience away from Healers and turning into health bar watching. How is THIS keeping in the spirit of the game? This game is supposed to be a RICH experience. They can't impart smell or taste in the game, but the visuals and the sounds are amazing. You can move and adjust your strategy and your heals as a priest when you can SEE what is happening around you. You are part of the battle. When you are reduced to staring at health bars, you are no longer experiencing the game. You are pointing and clicking on some bars so that others can.
Defending this move by saying, "but you'll be able to customize the raid bars so that they blink and have arrows and scream bloody murder at you when something is wrong" doesn't change the fact that we'll be stuck staring at those raid bars waiting for them to blink and sprout arrows and scream bloody murder at us. We might as well be playing Tetris.
"No reason to get hyper about it, one day Blizzard will pull the plug on the database to WOW servers and all of your "hard work", "dedication", "macro programming", "whack a mole", and whatever else people want to quantify will be irrecoverably eliminated at their whim and people will have to go on with life. "
Well no shit, Sherlock! Tell us something we don't know.
I could give a crap. I HATE having to play the priest. I enjoy the warrior but in this game, everyone wants to play the warrior, if they can get past being a hunter. It's a perfect time for me to say, "You know what guys? I can't handle the change so maybe we'll meet up in another time, game or space." Then it's Blizz that takes the blame, not me. Heh, about time huh?
Then it's logout and go play ball. I'm not hyper one bit with whatever the hell they decide to do.
Whatever made you think that WoW was the only interest people could manage to have by reading this, I have no clue. The Bears are hella more interesting then priests.
We're all gonna die someday too. Then it's really game over, huh?
Blizz, do what ya want. Life is too short. Your changes will most definitely, without a doubt, change my life for the better. I really mean that! Thank you!
... its not an arguement to stop 40-mans, it is a way to send a very clear message to Blizzard that thanks to changing UI and logic conditions they effectively have an area of the game that is too rough for anyone but the hardcore (and argueably, the perfectly healthy) and turns the game from something enjoyable to something much more like a unenjoyable hassle. But just like you meantioned this wont be the case - those people you speak of that have to have that phat loot who hide behind the veil of "I want to see all of the game's content" will contniue to go to those instances, will continue tthe fight to adapt to the new playing conditions, and will disregard the new difficulty in favor of loot. Only those few brave people who actually stop playing the content (or the game entirely) to send a clear message to Blizzard have any room to gripe. Those people who gripe yet throw themselves into something they dont like fot loot is getting absolutely everything they asked for IMNSHO.
... it is really interesting to see people's reation to having to watch health bars.
Have you played or seen Ultima Online played ?
Have you played or seen Everquest played ?
You wanna talk about games where it is a real pain in the butt to play a healer go play one of them in a serious environment. Everquest comes to particular mind, at least World of Warcraft shows everyone's health at the same time on screen; Everquest healers get the charming job of having to hotkey-cycle through the entire 72-man raid when there are multiple pulls to isolate who needs what. That is why there are so many healers per raid in EQ, there is a total lack of automation and UI assistance, and to top that off every spell in their aresenal not only has casting times (up to ten seconds) but also can completely fail upon cast (doubly frustrating when you hit a pocket of lag and the fail alert happens 2 seconds after you begin casting)
And the arguement that Blizzard should allow technology to automate healing jobs because that is what technology is for is totally unsubstantial. If that is the case then take away healers completely and give us all healbots that follow around the raid and heal and decurse. Fairly certain in the eyes of Blizzard that is what is happening right now it just requires the healbot to be played by a player and tap a couple of buttons here and there. In no other MMO that I know of is there such a vast amount of resources and player-friendly options to do the job of the healer, and certainly never one that allowed automation in any regard.
Take all of these arguements about removing automation to an Everquest forum and the Everquesters will laugh you out of the room thinking that you got it rough on World of Warcraft. They will tell you horror stories about being in complete heal rotations on a single player character for up to 30 minutes at a time and still be expected to have enough mana to last that long and get done spot healing here and there to keep everyone (like off tanks) alive. ALL while not being able to see everyone at the same time, only the same people in their groups.
And that doesnt include those people who are two-boxing healers in a 72-man raid because of healer burnout that happens in every other modern MMO out there in the world...
So uh, because it was such a horror show in EQ, WoW made it better, we should go back to the EQ/UO model?
Have fun and enjoy your game. I'll be long gone and not missing the carpal pains.
I agree with slater. Are there so many addicted gamers in WOW that you can't pull yourself away when you realize it's not going to be any fun for you anymore?
Is loot the only driving factor that you play that game? I'm betting Blizzard hopes so.
When I stopped playing for 3 months, I realized I could live without it. I began playing again because a friend did and we have fun, but I know I could easily walk away again. I did it before. It hasn't been as much fun for me as the first time around anyhow honestly.
I don't think I'm cut out for this healing bit. I don't like searching for a healer all the time either when I'm on my rogue.
I blame the game design. It's not all that. It's a good game but it's prejudiced against healers and the rest suffer, so it's no fun. Now that they will nerf healers, I can get rid of it without thinking twice.
That's my opinion.
Well this makes it easy. I came from Everquest 2, left to try WoW. Got my subs for both. Played both.
Guess who just won?
In Everquest 2 at least the healers are fighting over who gets the spots. You can have WoW now. ha!
I'm glad too because maybe some more people will come back and play since soe fixed their stuff and blizz just broke theirs. This is too funny! and ironic that the company who stole sony's customers is now going to have the same thing done back to them.
I'll adapt fine, over there. :0) cya, suckers!
Don't forget that Vanguard comes out about the same time as TBC with Warhammer not too far behind that.
I saw the video of VG's battlepriest. The guy healed maybe 4x the entire fight and he fought like a killer! Now that's some priest!
Oh and I just read the forums linked to here. All of those people claiming to design games are hilarious. Notice they say what they designed? What liars! This is getting to be a huge epeen joke now.
It was always about their epeens, got news for you. Why do you think they like the changes?
I like the changes. Now I can pull out my hunter and do BG's full time. I won't have to heal raids. PUGS suck and I'm free to pvp. It's not like there was any healing going on in Arathi Basin anyway.
Cogwheel and Malreth are a joke. Malreth complaining about complaints clogging up a forum that people need to ask questions about using macros that will no longer work in a few months. LOLOLOL
Cogwheel posting in every thread that has a complaint with his complaints about people complaining.
There's some weird people in these games. Talk about needing a life! Bah, I read enough of this crap. The bottom line is who needs a game where it welcomed openUI, got the ideas they wanted and now shut the ones they don't? You can't trust a company like that. Tomorrow they'll change it again and customers don't like inconsistency.
So much for the long-awaited Burning Crusade!
I'll never buy it now.
There's alot of crap going on here. Talk about 'new' functionality. Which is just a marketing ploy to say they're throwing a bunch of nice features out, and what they do decide to keep will be incredibly more limited than it is now and highly controlled with restrictive coding, not so refreshingly called 'secure.'
I honestly haven't seen anywhere that Blizzard touted actual new features which aren't replacements. Besides a focused unit. That's new. But not touted.
"The bottom line is who needs a game where it welcomed openUI, got the ideas they wanted and now shut the ones they don't? You can't trust a company like that. Tomorrow they'll change it again and customers don't like inconsistency."
You should have left loooooooong ago, and never play an MMORPG again if that's your line of reasoning.
Patches change stuff ALL the time, something may be uber one day, crap the next. Go watch the video's of Paladin's soloing Kazzak (or other bosses) with recokoning bombs.
Yeah, they changed that REAL quick. Can't trust 'em, and their inconsistency. No way. They have to get it perfect, each time, every time.
Why should I pay for a game that might be wrong, that might make mistakes, that might decide that what they have is not what they intended to create. I'm going to go play the game that's perfect, every time, and never has to patch anything. Change is weakness, and boy do I hate weakness.
I can understand his point, why can't you?
If I buy a product this week and I like, then I like it. If next week they change it but call it the same thing, I may not like it.
So what? That's just stupid what you just said. You have to like it because otherwise you're afraid of change? It's call preferences.
He doesn't prefer this way, so what? That's HIS choice.
This change ruins WoW for players like myself. I have bad tendonitis, and while mods and macros never let me get fully up to par with the most skilled players, I could at least play and have fun, without having to deal with wrist pain. Now I have no choice but to quit WoW. :(
Ah hell, what's the damn difference if I use CTRA or use their cheesy version of menus that bind spell actions to keys?
Get that CRAP off my damn screen!
This is the dumbest argument I've ever seen Blizzard make for forcing people to heal THEIR way!
I went into the forums to say something, but I think it's all been said.
Now all that's left is watching the players kill each other over this.
Which I'm sure Blizz thinks is better then killing their devs.
Seriously though, just quit if you really hate it that much. It's the only message SWG learned. They won't change anything until you do. Did you think they didn't expect a riot? What would be the reason they didn't bother telling you in the first place and someone had to leak it? Uh, because maybe people would be ANNOYED???
This is proof that word of mouth opinion has a better effect then millions spent in the advertising world.
Blizzard better get in there and do some damage control fast.
They already deleted posts right and left in there. How much more damage control do you expect them to do?
Their fingers hurt from all that clicking! It's like taking care of a raid party without mods, geez! What's wrong with you!
The bottom line is who needs a game where it welcomed openUI, got the ideas they wanted and now shut the ones they don't? You can't trust a company like that. Tomorrow they'll change it again and customers don't like inconsistency.
This is the underlying issue which gnaws at me. Bliz is entirely comfortable to have mod authors work their butts off for years so they can take the best ideas and kill the one which don't fit their "vision".
The flexibly UI and freedom to play the game how I want is what has kept me with WOW. No longer. It is an issue of trust and I no longer trust WOW to provide an enjoyable experience for my monthly fee. What is fun today, may be "fixed" tomorrow.
To quote a previous post:
I have a clarification question for you:
I currently use Clique/Watchdog/CTRaid to raid heal. I don't let any addon select my spells for me, but I do have different spells bound to different mouse/keyboard combos. For example, alt-right click on a WatchDog or CTRaid frame = Flash Heal, right click = Shield, left click = Greater Heal etc etc
Will I keep the ability to use those combo's on on-screen frames, or will Blizz force me to click the frame, then select the spell on the keyboard?
According to Blizzard, you will have to click on THEIR raid frames. Your mod frames will be able to display anything you want in any manner you please, but will not be able to actually change your target or cause any effect to trigger. So if you click on your WatchDog frame, nothing at all will happen. You'll have to open the Blizzard raid interface, find the name of the injured party in the list, click them to target them, and then deploy your heal. Alternatively, you could have the raid window open already, cast the spell without target, and then find the name in the list and click it to deploy the heal.
According to the Blizzard posts in the UI forum, everything besides Blizzard frames become static "information only" displays in combat; you cannot hide or show them or use them for targeting or casting purposes.
I was thinking of starting a Priest... no thats a lie I did start a priest with the view in mind of getting her to 60/70 so that I could help in raids...
While I might still level her it will be for my own use and I won't spec of gear her for raids.
Just glad I haven't pre-ordered yet as this is a good way of putting me off.
hmm.. playing priest for long time, and after 4-5h raids mostly feel damn tired and empty, even with all emergency monitors and decursives.
So probly time to switch to my alt (mage).
This is proof that word of mouth opinion has a better effect then millions spent in the advertising world.
We don't have anything that could be labeled "proof" in any form at all. Blizzard might know how many cancelled their accounts, but no one will know the state of the game after these changes until next year. Hardly proof.
This is the underlying issue which gnaws at me. Bliz is entirely comfortable to have mod authors work their butts off for years so they can take the best ideas and kill the one which don't fit their "vision".
I'm not quite sure what the problem here is. If by "take the best ideas" you mean integrate them into the default UI, then that's a topic for another day. As for killing them off—you believe that because it was let rest for (soon to be) two years and many add-ons were built around these possibilities, it should not be changed? I can kind of see your point, but… meh, I can't articulate my reasoning at the moment.
According to the Blizzard posts in the UI forum, everything besides Blizzard frames become static "information only" displays in combat; you cannot hide or show them or use them for targeting or casting purposes.
Not true. Any custom frame is perfectly capable of being used for targeting or casting purposes. It is merely that what unit they target or what spell they cast is fixed while you are in combat. It is actually uncertain whether arbitrary Blizzard UI code will have more flexibility than custom code.
You may have been confused over the fact that any dynamic list that actually reorders itself (like the Emergency Monitor) will not be usable for targeting and casting purposes.
Was this not explained enough in my original post? I'd be happy to update it.
Please do update a clarification then, John.
I don't know what the code is in CTRA that allows it to basically generate that list which gives you only the main 5 people losing health, but the way I read Tyren/Slouken's sticky was that:
"AddOns and macros can't make decisions on who to target or what spells to cast."
CTRA's monitor makes the decision on who to target in a way because it decides who is losing health the most and puts them at the top of this monitor so you don't have to view your entire raid party on your screen.
You then click on that person's name from within the monitor layout and cast your applicable healing spell or you used a macro that would take the person from the list, target them and heal with the specified heal in that macro, all in one step.
I'm not so sure you could even get to the part of healing them if you couldn't click on them from that monitor.
Tyren specifically said, "AddOns and macros can't make decisions on who to target". If that's true, CTRA's monitor is doing that now and would be obsolete.
Then Slouken goes on to add, "Just to clarify, AddOns and macros will still be able to cast spells (with user interaction of course), they just won't be able to use logic to intelligently pick spells or targets."
So I think this issue is clear, at least as far as I've read it. I know many people on the forums are saying otherwise, but this is not what Tyren or Slouken wrote and I think the clarification needs to come from them since they said this. Or at least by someone who got their information straight from them.
In other words, one way to read it is that CTRA's monitor is picking people off the raid list intelligently and those people are targets for the healers.
One way to think of it is that the Emergency Monitor has a list of five (or so) frames, and that it constantly changes which players the frames point to, depending on how hurt they are. It's that "constantly changes" part that won't work in the expansion.
What would work is using the list of 25 players, and instead of changing what each frame points to, just make the ones who would not be on the emergency monitor completely transparent.
I'll update my main post soon.
All I can say is OUCH. Personally I do not use emergency monitor for healing, so - no biggy there. But, I do like to have bar swaps for stances, stealth, etc. I do like to have things show or hide based upon target type - ie: Can I MC or not.
Not having those things are what I find the Most annoying (and I play a 60 raid priest). As long as I can have some sort of functional Click-Cast (and some of the posts indicate I will be able to), then I can heal. The biggest things I will miss:
*show/hide of actions based on target type - I guess I will just give up on using some of those actions - reacting to the tooltip, etc.. just always caused me to miss the opportunity.
*Decursive - this is gonna really, really hurt. In a 20 man (not even 25-40) I cannot tell an exact debuff of a raid memeber by sight quickly enough to cast it any time within a decent reaction. There is just NOT enough screen real-estate to see all of that, let alone react to it.
At least there are indications that buff spells will auto-rank within the game by target anyways. Without that, I would just no longer even try to buff random chars.
Honestly any more I just do not know - the default UI sucks for a priest, and if that is the most functionality I can get - well, I will just have to hang up the priest. At least my mage or warrior I can play that way. If I end up having to target a raid member (click), then click a button after that to cast a heal - YUCK. Choosing the spell to cast, no problem. Mana Conserve with heal calculations - meh, never liked that much myself as it always depended on the target staying at that level.
I suppose the thing that hurts the most is: These functions have been here and have been in use for years. If they did not like them that much, they should have pulled them within a month (not years later when most of their players are using them).
One option is to have all your MTs on whatever keys you wish (for me it would be 1-5) and bind each of those keys to a dynamic menu (IE you hit 1 and it targets MT1 and then opens your menu of actions). This way, you can do everything via keyboard and would not have to use the mouse. If you wanted to manually target someone, you do /tar "XXX" with "XXX" being the first three letters of their character's name and then use the alternate keybindings (shift-1 etc) to cast your heal etc. on them.
I support this change as it will make skilled players valuable again.
In the old system, any 12 year old with decursive, emergency monitors, and EmerHeal can be a priest/druid/paladin and get a raid spot.
In this new system, you will have to be smart about your UI and your healing options. Also, you will have to LISTEN to your Raid Leaders which, in my experience, most 12 year olds can't do.
Wake up Blizz! :)
It is a game and let people to choose their style of playing! If some hardcore priest have fun of fast and crazy clicking and typing in instance - he can disable addons anytime. But if somebody prefer to take more fun from talking in /ra or TS and have on screen something else then 40 health bars + 150 action buttons - it is his choice. Let him live in game in his own style! Don't "force" people to do something or game is going to loose loads of paid players.
One comment about Blizzard's timing of this change. They will lose subscribers. This will happen. There are too many upset people and they KNEW they would be upset.
By bundling it with the release of the expansion, they can hide the lost subscriber revenue with new software sales. Shareholders look at revenue and the revenue will be up despite losing even a million subscribers because of the gazillion copies of the expansion that will be sold.
Blizzard will also likely get people that ALREADY left the game to return and try the expansion.
However, long term, it's a bad financial decision for them. They will lose loyal subscribers as they begin trying alternative products.
Unfortunately for Blizzard, the UI interface is the only thing that makes WoW unique. There are better graphical games and better content games on the market who are chompping at the bit to get a chance to compete for this consumer base.
Its short-sighted thinking from the business executives at Blizzard and makes for a far less enjoyable game for a large group of the population.
It is a game and let people to choose their style of playing! If some hardcore priest have fun of fast and crazy clicking and typing in instance - he can disable addons anytime. But if somebody prefer to take more fun from talking in /ra or TS and have on screen something else then 40 health bars + 150 action buttons - it is his choice. Let him live in game in his own style! Don't "force" people to do something or game is going to loose loads of paid players.
Carrying this a bit further: is it a person's play style if, for example, a method was created that allowed an AI to farm honor to get to rank 14?
Unfortunately for Blizzard, the UI interface is the only thing that makes WoW unique. There are better graphical games and better content games on the market who are chompping at the bit to get a chance to compete for this consumer base.
I disagree. An interface that is intuitive and customizable if I need is only icing on the cake. I would hazard a guess that the main reason for most people to play World of Warcraft is not an interface that can automate targeting/spellcasting.
Good Point I suppose Justin,
But, the problem is: Priests seem to already be in short supply, as the people that enjoy sitting there watching health bars and debuff icons versus watching the game graphics and game play are in short supply.
If you make the job even harder (though, long as I have click cast, not too much harder) some of them are going to leave or play something else.
Sheesh, when I am not playing my priest it is hard enough as it is to find an instance healer. This could just make it harder.
Do not get me wrong, personally I did not like the one button, click to heal the most damaged target add-ons. I did like being able to show/hide a button based on if the action was usable or not (ie: Shackle, Sheep, etc) as a quick check of : Yep, got the correct target when clicking on a cluster of mobs, etc... and that is what I will miss the most.
The one thing to really Note with your suggestion of a button to target and bring up said menu - that functionality is stated to NOT be implemented yet, and they HOPE it will get in before release. Other than that, interesting idea.
Still, when it comes to removing curses, with the large number of bosses that use AoE curses, etc... well, these fights just got a lot longer. Using decursive it can take long enough now to where some get missed, without it... And that one does not just affect the healers, it will slow the mages down and reduce DPS as well.
I for one want to be able to get through BWL and NAXX (currently in MC). These being 40 man, well... I sure hope they adjust the AoE mob curses with this change - I mean, these debuffs are the reason that Decursive, etc... came about in the first place (ie: How can we do it ?).
I am just hoping that there will still be something flexible enough to allow a priest to heal a raid, and still get to enjoy the raid istelf (instead of just watching health bars). The unfortunate fact is, a lot of the more experienced healers have gone to addons to remove or limit the tedium and allow them to see the instance/fight/etc.
The real thing that I think annoys people the most is: A lot of players turn to the Addons to make some of these tasks less tedious so that they can enjoy the game and game play more. Every time a change comes out that makes things more tedious again... well why ???
There must be things they could do to more selectively controll the cases where the automation is too much (ie: 1 button to determine correct heal spell, target, etc.. and then cast it) that do not ruin some of the useful and time saving features. I mean, why turn off the ability for auto-trade accept ? What was automating the water/food trade really hurting ? It is not as if that really takes any skill to do in the first place.
John :)
Nothing personal, but if you say that you don't see difference between "Mana conserve" mods and "Honor farming" bots, I don't trust you :) I think that everybody understand that Blizz posted such news after getting final decision that they are not able to filter "china farming" bots or "honor farming" bots from mods that make game more friendly to not-super-hardcore-players why can't spend in game 20+ hours every week and prefer to have some real life outside WoW. And as they can't filter, they start disabling features. Nothing more and nothing else. Clearly understanding that they saying to all not so hardcore players "You are unwanted in this game! Free some space for our real fans because we can't maintain well that much servers with that much players". And all old Euro servers players will understand why it is "not well"..
According to the Blizzard posts in the UI forum, everything besides Blizzard frames become static "information only" displays in combat; you cannot hide or show them or use them for targeting or casting purposes.
No. Clickcasting will still work great, they're even making it easier to do. You cannot click on a frame that can hide/show/move in combat, though, so you can clickcast on your raid frame of choice, but not on your emergency monitor.
I play the game to fight monsters and player, not the UI. Clickable lists from mods bridge the stumulous/response gap caused by havign to search for the right person to click in a mass of them and then look for the right button to click to get the desired effect.
Ever play any Warcraft RTS game? The reason the AI could put up a fight was not because it had any ability to emulate 'smart' - it was because you had to take time to clikc multiple times to issue orders to your units, where the computer didn't.
You're adding in a deliberate slowdown to a player's decision/reaction chain, which isn't something that enhances the play value of the game.
I did like being able to show/hide a button based on if the action was usable or not (ie: Shackle, Sheep, etc) as a quick check of : Yep, got the correct target when clicking on a cluster of mobs, etc... and that is what I will miss the most.
This specific example will actually get better with the changes. They're adding a "focus" concept, which will allow you to mark a single unit, and instantly switch to targeting that, or even cast a spell on it without losing your current target.
The one thing to really Note with your suggestion of a button to target and bring up said menu - that functionality is stated to NOT be implemented yet, and they HOPE it will get in before release. Other than that, interesting idea.
Clarification: The menu functionality is certain to be in by release (as far as I know). Using keys to activate menu items is less certain.
Nothing personal, but if you say that you don't see difference between "Mana conserve" mods and "Honor farming" bots, I don't trust you :)
I do understand the difference between those things. I was using it as an illustration. I'm going to assume you'd agree that that's not a valid game choice.
Then you get add-ons that can do certain tasks nearly as well as a player, with the only interaction (apart from moving the characer) being spamming a single key. Add a key repeater and that vanishes too. That kind of thing is what this change was designed to deal with. Is that a valid playstyle?
OK John,
Then maybe I will not loose everything that I like. The focus concept might work, or it might not. - will not help on the show/hide action buttons though. I liked them hidden most of the time to reduce UI clutter (so I could see the game better), now I will just have to keep them visible at all times.
The menu's could be interesting, and I am looking forward to seeing how they work out.
I just Hope they adjust some of the AoE curse/debuffs in the current 40 man instances. Decursing in them is difficult enough with addons, manually it could easily turn into a major frustration.
Emergency Monitor won't work as it's being used now to target players to heal. You need to use Blizzard's frames or type /target xxx player, which I would get sick of after a week and is noted the same by many other healers.
This is a matter of many people using CTRA's graphical style to avoid keystrokes. It's not a matter of their lack of skill. The spin that some are putting on it is that they lack skill and that's not fair to say and only stems from their uber side of the fence. I don't care for that type of elitist spin, for several reasons.
I can do either of these methods, but my concern is that most people will not find fun in it and stop raiding as a result.
This leaves the farmers taking advantage of instances others won't bother going to and selling the stuff that's in there and/or using the gear they reap to farm other sources easier.
I think there's a great motive some of you have for saying L2P. It's intimidation hoping they don't play at your "level of expertise" and just buy your spoils. You get paid money, either in game or out, for their unwillingness or inability to find someone who heal.
This is a great day for gold farmers and resellers.
John said...
Is it really a problem in the game's design to have multiple spells that you need to choose from? Yet that's one of the most common things automated.
Hm, let me see.. I have 11 ranks of Healing Touch, 11 ranks of Rejuvenation, 9 ranks of Regrowth, 4 ranks of Tranquility, 5 ranks of Rebirth = 40 buttons. I don't know about you but it's not that easy set key-bindings for 40 buttons so that each are quick and easy to cast during combat. You wonder why you die during boss-fight? It's because healers run out of mana. To be a good healer you really need to shift between all those ranks, although the bottom 1-2 _may_ be skipped.
Thus the problem with the design is not that there are muliple spells and ranks to chose from; this makes it interesting! The problem lay in how cumbersome it is to use all of them properly. Not because I can't select between them, but because I don't have 40 fingers, more like 10 thumbs :)
Come addons. They bind these spells to clicks which are much more available then keybindings, and make it available on the unit frames. You still have to make the decisions yourself if you want to be effective and conserve mana, but casting the spell is much easier.
Actually, I'm getting annoyed having to keep reading all this speculation and still no real clarification to the questions being asked by a Blue.
I imagine they are sitting in a closed room all day, pondering how to deal with this leak and what they should tell the customers.
I'm getting the impression the answer is, "Just say nothing. They'll shut up after awhile."
I fear the real thing that's going on is, people are pounding on the door for answers and when they shut up, it will be because they left for good.
I noticed people were missing from a signup raid last night, 6 of them. That's never happened before. I don't know if this is the reason but the guild chat the night before was robust with chatter denouncing these changes.
Word of mouth is already having a detrimental impact here for sure.
I see a lot of healer angst, but to me and a number of other disabled players this is the death of wow totally. I lost an arm a number of years ago in a motor accident and rely heavily on mods to help me out, without a mod to make choices on what ability to use I am stuck with at most using two abilities. If you want to see what this will do to my game play try playing with just your left hand to do everything.
Try moving around in combat and clicking any ability or spell at the same time. Things like Lazyrogue made this game playable for me, without it I cannot function at all.
Now you might say thats tough and it won't effect most players, well think again with millions of subscribers to Wow there will be a small percentage (roughly 3%) that are disabled and some of them will have limited use of upper limbs.
The game isn't broken why do they need to fix it? Addons that help me will never be as good as having two hands, I am limited to a simple addon chosing what is best for me, an able bodied player can react to all situations with inteligence, a mod can't do that.
I will always be beaten in PVP by players with equal equipment and never be the highest dps in a raid regardless of my gear because I cannot react inteligently to changes. This change is an overreaction to things that do not take away any gameplay from others. I suspect that Blizzard will lose a number of players like me who will search out more tollerant mmorpg's to play.
I'd just like to say that none of my raid team's healers use the emergency monitor -- at least, the top four or five don't. I could see how it's useful but I've never just never enjoyed it -- it puts me to sleep faster.
And while I agree there are a lot of available healing options, personally, I've never used anything but the top ranks. Yeah, yeah, I know, I could be down-ranking my FH or GHeals...but I don't. Now I'm sure some of you are sneering at me and thinking I'm some kind of n00b, but the truth is I do just fine. I'm pretty much in the top 3 for Healing every raid, and I'm always far, far down the list in Overhealing. I use many less mana pots than the other healers and I don't get innervates very often.
I'm not trying to say you have to play it my way -- I'm a big believer in do whatever works best for you -- but anyone who thinks that you can't do the job with some kind of auto-ranking mod, or the emergency monitor is just plain wrong. You can make do. Whether you should have to or not isn't my call to make though.
Just posted by Drysc, the first post in a long silence:
The official thread, which in turn links to an MVP thread listing affected mods, can be found here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=32184244&sid=1
The general run-down is that we don't want UI mods to be making combat decisions for a player, it should be in their hands and their responsibility to choose who and when to interact with the game. It borders on automation of gameplay, which is something we're obviously very opposed to. Aside from that moral separation it ends up defeating the purpose of the challenges we're implementing. With the release of the expansion and the game changing in some huge ways, it was the best opportunity to remove specific UI mod abilities.
Translation:
It's back to hunt and peck, point and click or don't play the game.
Players, make your decisions because the final statement comes down to they aren't going to put this back in, period.
It's back to hunt and peck, point and click or don't play the game.
Get rid of "hunt" and I'll agree with that statement. There need be no more hunting than there is now.
Players, make your decisions because the final statement comes down to they aren't going to put this back in, period.
You honestly thought there was a chance of them reversing the decision in four days? Four days with absolutely no play-testing by a large community?
Yeah...
I can't stress enough the difference between "decision making" mods and "assist" mods.
A decision making mod is one that puts all of the decision process into logical computer code and binds it all to one or two buttons.
Assist mods are the mods like click-cast, GroupButtons, Flex-bind, and QuikTarget that AID you in your game experience.
Click-cast doesn't chose what spell you cast. You do! It just makes it so that when you want to cast that spell, it is easy to do because you can click on the EXACT rank that you want. GroupButtons follows the same philosophy
Flex-bind is good because it allows you to set up a primary and secondary target so that you can go back to the secondary target whenever you need to. Great for warlock banishes or emergency MT healing. QuikTarget is an addon similar to this, but with the ability to cycle through multiple primary and secondary targets.
Rememeber, Blizzard is NOT trying to remove automation... just decision making.
You honestly thought there was a chance of them reversing the decision in four days? Four days with absolutely no play-testing by a large community?
No John, we were waiting for a confirmation and this was posted in the decursive thread quite succinctly, yet unamibiguously.
They've made their intentions clear and there's no more reason for anyone to speculate.
Now it just becomes a matter of deciding if this change is for your game-style or not.
These changes will be implemented and the tone given was that there would be no reconsideration.
Don't use healbot mods as so far I haven't needed them... I definitely rely upon Decursive though for fast & efficient poison/disease/magic cleansing.
So at the moment, what options are there?
1) By fiddling with things, Decursive or a Decursive-like mod will still be a possibility.
2) Blizzard will back down. If they make raid-wide debuffs then expect us to make it easy to remove them.
3) Someone will make a proper bot that does what Decursive did and people will use that.
4) I'll get strained eyes, repetitive strain injury and a high blood pressure from repeated MC wipes.
5) Blizzard won't back down but raid-wide debuffs will become extremely rare and easier to deal with.
Funny that with such options I find myself tempted from a perfectly legal addon (Decursive) that Blizzard happened to dislike to a proper bot program. Strange that, don't you think :P ?
Blizzard (via various inermediaries) has been saying for months (though not for a while now) that we shouldn't get used to Decursive -- that they would, at some point, give it the heave-ho. This is not news.
Now as a priest this could be considered terrible news...except really, we don't know anything. Not a thing. Who's going to be running the Core come TBC? Who's going to be running AQ40? Anyone who is will be doing so on level 70 characters with much, much, MUCH more life (they're scaling health to a greater degree from 60-70). So a little slow on the decursing probably won't matter. And if it does...they'll nerf it.
For 70+ encounters, presumably they won't hit us with CTS-inducing clease-fests. I mean, they might, but they'd be stupid to do so. The point is, every person who kvetches about Decursive being drop-kicked is looking at TODAY'S raids and applying that reasoning.
Personally I think the very fact they're waiting until TBC to do it is a strong indicator that they don't plan on killing our wrists. After all, there's nothing at all to stop them from banning Decursive RIGHT NOW. Why haven't they? Because they recognize that for the current raids, it's pretty much a requirement.
As a priest, I can see myself adjusting by organizing raid bars by class and watching certain classes during certain situations. Doing this I think things are going to, for the most part work out ok. I'm betting that hybrids and rogues are going to start dying a bit more though.
This is absurd. The population of healers is going to plummet because no one willl be able to heal. Mods are the only thing that is keeping healing feasible for the casual player. This change will be fine if your a flash heal spammer but healing as a druid will become hell. THe only thing that is calming my nerves is that Slouken is usually on our side and that is a great asset. I'm sure if the population ratios shift too greatly Blizzard will charge their minds but we'll just have to see how this pans out.
- CT Raid Frames Up -
/Click player1/grp2 > FHeal > Renew
/Click player3/grp2 > FHeal > FHeal > Gheal > Renew
/Click PoH
/Click Shield on self
/Fade
/Player 4 dies >insert rogue/mage name here<
Oh well, I'll rez you when I figure out wtf's going on with Grp 3's heals lol.
Deal with it, Live with it... or not,L2Play...kthnxbai
~Kanaloa
A clarifying question -
"Any part of the visual interface that uses an ability or changes your target will not be able to move, appear, or disappear while you are in combat."
"Any "main tank targets" add-on you have will remain nearly unscathed—you will not be able to customize the list of main tanks while you are in combat, but clicking to target or cast a spell on either the main tank or his target will be unaffected."
So its not that the targeting ability is being disabled, its that the targets seen during combat can no longer be dynamic?
If that's the case, then what Bliz is really saying is that they don't want to make it easy on healers to identify targets. I have no problems getting rid of auto-spell functions, but why exactly do I have to monitor the raid using their horribly eye-straining frames? Its disappointing.
You know, I read a few things a lot, and I want to address them, paraphrased:
"After TBC comes out, who will be running the old raids?"
Blizzards lives and dies by new blood. Some people will leave, others have to come in. Currently, I'm in a mid-level guild, where most of our guild is on first or second characters, but very few are alts. We haven't reached level 60 yet. We haven't seen Tier 0 gear, let alone the Tier 3 gear. We still have MONTHS of leveling and raiding left to get the gear we need, beyond the time TBC comes out. Will the encounters be rebalanced to support all the new players that will lack veteran help, because veterans are all in Outlands?
"Removing Decursive/Emergency Monitor just puts priests back on the same level..."
I don't know about you, but even at my level, I know that I rarely have to worry about anything other than what I'm hitting, and where I am on the aggro chart. I can keep track of my own aggro and hit the 2-3 spell buttons on my keyboard through tough battles with little difficulty. A priest will have to pour through 25-40 users health bars, all while keeping track of each persons aggro as well, so they aren't poking people and forcing too much aggro on them. Does your non-priest have to do that?
"This was a designer choice."
So fire the designers. I'm sorry, but WoW isn't ART, it's COMMODITY. I'm sorry if your designers have a grand vision of the way the game should be, but that's not the game people have been playing for 2 years. And as far as I can tell, it's not the changes that people like. What good is removing "fun" from the game just to mold it to some designer concept? Does it not make more sense to mold the game and content around the way that people prefer to play the game? If that means taking 3rd party mods, and pulling them into the game so you can write content based on them, then it seems like that's a better road to travel.
It seems like Blizzard has some sort of list of things that aren't broken that they need to fix. I don't remember a single user complaint that priests were too efficient at clearing debuffs and healing. Were you angry that people beat Kel'thuzad so quickly? Are developers just angry that people aren't being wiped for months at a time before finally winning encounters? I'm not sure what the logic behind it was.
This strikes me like the mage threat reduction. Sure, some people don't like it when mages are at the top of the DPS list, but it's a minority, and I don't remember the last time I read a post saying "Man, I wish mages would aggro and wipe the party more".
It feels like a lot of these changes are being made to balance higher level abilities, to prevent those from becoming unbalanced. But some of us won't be level 60 for months, let alone level 65-70, so we've been left in the dust so that the 'big boys' can play.
I'm just not sure where Blizzard is going with these changes. I realize they need an expansion to line their gilded pockets, but for the most part, it appears that the character class changes were poorly thought out, despite the people who seem to claim that Blizzard MUST have thought it out and can do no wrong.
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