I was reading Gravity’s latest post where he elaborates on a post on the Blue Murder warrior blog talking about how the equalising of gear in 10 and 25-man modes might affect the goal of balancing the raids.

The problem

Summarising briefly, the major premise is that a given tank will have the same avoidance, mitigation and HP in 10-man as in 25-man. Therefore in order to maintain the same time-to-live (TTL) the boss must hit just as hard. Therefore you will require the same number of tank healers in 10-man as 25-man to match the throughput requirement.
Assuming that a 25-man raid currently has a 2:4 ratio of MT healers to raid healers, that translates to a 2:0 or 2:1 ratio in 10-man, which is clearly not something which could be supported.

The thing is, I’m not sure that this problem actually exists in the first place.

Example

This is best illustrated by a hypothetical example. I’ve “borrowed” the example from Kaletri’s comment, so credit where it’s due.

10-man: Boss hits for 20k per second. TTL is 5 seconds. For a dedicated tank healer this is manageable solo.
25-man: Boss now hits for 30k per second. TTL is 3.3s. Now we need two tank healers to cover the damage, which is fine because we have more healers to spare.

The counter-argument is that bigger hits would make 25-man harder, because the tank can now die quicker due to a shorter TTL, thus going against Blizzard’s goal of matching “difficulty” between the two modes.
The thing is, from my point of view as a healer once your tank isn’t going to drop dead from the next swing, it’s more or less a wash how many hits he takes beyond that before he dies. I switch from “how soon can I get a heal to land on him” to “how much HPS can I push out”. Remember the old way of gearing where we aimed for a benchmark of 2.5 hits? Exactly the same reasoning.

Time to live

I also think the numbers given in some of the examples discussed in the OP are misrepresenting the TTL. Going from 5s TTL to 3.3s TTL would undoubtedly make a difference to difficulty, because a large, high-throughput heal will probably come in at 1.5-2s (depending on haste, Light’s Grace, etc), so unfortunate timing of that heal is much more likely to mean death in the 3.3s TTL case than in the 5s TTL case. But is that really the ballpark we’re talking about?

Take, for example, a few current single-target fights: Deathbringer Saurfang, Professor Putricide and Rotface (all Normal mode). Numbers are approximate and taken from our bear tank on 10s and 25s:

[Edit: Thanks to Everblue for prompting me to check my numbers more carefully. I’ve gone through the WoL parses in question in more detail and considered the median hit and swing times rather than the mean, to account for cooldowns and any spellcasts I’ve missed respectively. I’m now a lot happier with the conclusions and with the values below. Where I’ve made changes I’ve left the old values in strikethrough for comparison. Long live peer review!]

	Average mêlée	Swing timer	TTL (at 70kHP, to nearest 0.5s)	TTL (at 60kHP, to nearest 0.5s)
Saurfang-10	6100	1.2s	13.5s 14s	11.5s 12s
Saurfang-25	10300 11000	1.2s	8s 7.5s	7s 6.5s
Putricide-10	10600 11000	1.8s	12s 11.5s	10s
Putricide-25	15200 18000	1.8s	8.5s 7s	7s 6s
Rotface-10	12600 12000	1.8s	10s 10.5s	8.5s 9s
Rotface-25	14800 14000	1.8s	8.5s 9s	7.5s

The thing is, even if we step the tank down by 10k HP (unfortunately neglecting the change in avoidance/armour which goes along with it, I don’t have enough background to simulate this efficiently) the TTL stays well above the 2.5 hits mark. Putricide-25 comes closest at 3.3 hits to kill at 60k, the rest are much higher.

Add to this the aspiration of the developers to slow down the raiding game and you’re looking at some quite manageable TTLs for Cataclysm tanks.

Conclusions

The original proposition was that bosses cannot deal more damage in Cataclysm since tanks will not have any more HP, avoidance or mitigation. Therefore the ratios of tank and raid healers will differ between the modes since you’ll need the same number of tank healers in both modes.

I think this is based on the false premise that stamina limits the damage output of bosses. I would argue that, on the contrary, once you get time-to-live above the 2-3 hits mark the limiting factor on boss damage output becomes healer throughput, and the difficulty for both modes is not reaction time but throughput, based on spell rotation and casting rate.
This is entirely compatible with doubling the number of tank healers as you move from 10s to 25s, without necessarily changing the difficulty of the fight significantly.

You can double the HPS requirement without getting down to a 2-hit death situation, and you don’t need yo-yoing health bars to make healing “interesting”. Watching a health bar creep inexorably downwards despite your best efforts, calling in for support from a fellow healer or blowing a cooldown is every bit as exciting as landing that 20k crit at the last second and saving a wipe.

Possibly Related Posts:

• State of the Cataclysm
• Discipline Healing Tips
• The First Cataclysm Raid

Ah, Blizzard. Just when I’m beginning to despair of my ability to actually complete any of the half-dozen posts sitting in my drafts folder, they drop a magical gift-wrapped present into my lap.

This post isn’t all about healing per se, but I’ll add some healing commentary along the way. As a raider, the recent announced changes to raid progression are of huge interest to me, so I wanted to formulate, record and share my thoughts at this stage.

The Announcement – Annotated

The first of the refinements being made is that we’re combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn’t apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.
We’re designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve.

In essence you get a single lockout per raid per character. 25-player raiders will no longer need, nor will they be able, to also raid the 10-man version on their mains. To support this Blizzard will aim to balance 10- and 25-player content to have equivalent difficulty to each other, rather than the current model where 10-player is designed to be easier.

My first reaction? I love the change, I’m excited almost beyond words (only almost!).

I raid for the challenge, for the teamwork, and for the sense of achievement. 25-man raiding is currently the only place to find the most difficult challenges and it’s where the prestige is located, both in the form of the signature items and the achievements. But I much prefer the sense of teamwork that comes out of a 10-man raid. If this change truly delivers and provides the same challenge in 10-man, and the same achievements (look at the “Kingslayer” title for an example of this in action, it’s the same for 10s as 25s), then it removes a large chunk of the advantage to 25-man raiding from my perspective.

But wait, there’s more!

That closeness in difficulty also means that we’ll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They’ll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.

Dungeon Difficulty and Rewards
10- and 25-player (normal difficulty) — Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop the exact same items as each other.
10- and 25-player (Heroic difficulty) — Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop more powerful versions of the normal-difficulty items.

We of course recognize the logistical realities of organizing larger groups of people, so while the loot quality will not change, 25-player versions will drop a higher quantity of loot per player (items, but also badges, and even gold), making it a more efficient route if you’re able to gather the people. The raid designers are designing encounters with these changes in mind, and the class designers are making class changes to help make 10-person groups easier to build. Running 25-player raids will be a bit more lucrative, as should be expected, but if for a week or two you need to do 10s because half the guild is away on vacation, you can do that and not suffer a dramatic loss to your ability to get the items you want.

There will just be raid achievements, not 10- vs. 25-player versions in most cases. The achievement won’t care if you complete it in 10s or 25s. If we do meta-achievement mounts, it’s possible we’d still have different colors of mounts, or maybe even different mounts; but for some players that might mean that 25s feels mandatory again, which would be a potential problem.

Way back when WotLK information was being drip-fed to the community and the parallel 10-man and 25-man progression paths were being described Blizzard were very clear that they wanted to compensate 25-man raiders for the added complexity of the organisation, and they did this by keeping 25-man raiding a tier above 10-man raiding in terms of difficulty (arguably), gear rewards and badges and by providing separate achievements for each mode. One expansion later, with the 25-player only days a more distant memory, 10-player raiding is a lot more accepted in the community and so the next small step is being taken towards truly equivalent paths.

Now both instances are of equivalent difficulty they can drop the same loot and grant the same achievements. I’m totally fine with 25-man raiders getting some advantage. Organising 25-man raids is harder, and there’s a fair amount more patience required to stay in 25-man raiding long-term, so I don’t mind if they get geared up a bit quicker. We’ll all get the same badges and the same items. In fact, since 10-man teams will probably work together better and have a better shot at taking down content early, 25-player raids might actually need the gear head-start to keep up. It’ll be interesting to watch the ranking sites in the early days.

It’s also nice to see there’ll be further “class changes” with 10-player raiding in mind, which most likely refers to a bit more spreading of Replenishment, Bloodlust and other key buffs.

We recognize that very long raids can be a barrier for some players, but we also want to provide enough encounters for the experience to feel epic. For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid. All of these bosses would drop the same item level gear, but the dungeons themselves being different environments will provide some variety in location and visual style, as well as separate raid lockouts. Think of how you could raid Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep separately, but you might still want to hit both every week.

This is interesting, and shows that they’ve thought quite deeply about this. I think this is a positive change, as long as they don’t go quite as far as Obsidian Sanctum and Eye of Eternity too often.

Looking back, Naxxramas combined with EoE and OS was a strange mix: a 15-boss raid along with two single-boss raids. The trouble with this model in Cataclysm is that you only get once chance to do the content per week; in WotLK if your Naxx-25 PuG had broken up after a wing or two you’d be able to go back on 10-man to at least see the content. In Cataclysm you’d be locked out of raiding for the week.

I’m generally slightly in favour of reigning back the ease of PuGging, insofar as it serves to seriously undermine the concept of a guild, but a change to an even-split multi-instance model is good for the whole game. I don’t want to punish PuGs, just increase the incentive to stick with a guild run.

This also should keep the raids more interesting. I didn’t hate To(G)C as much as some people seemed to, but it did get a bit repetitive fighting the same five battles week after week. Icecrown’s environments are fairly varied, ranging from the cave-like at the beginning to the three main wings, the openness of Deathbringer’s Rise and Sindragosa’s Lair, and of course the Gunship battle, but it’s not the same as being able to swap between Ulduar and Icecrown in a week.

We do like how gating bosses over time allows the community to focus on individual encounters instead of just racing to the end boss, so we’re likely to keep that design moving forward. We don’t plan to impose attempt limitations again though, except maybe in cases of rare optional bosses (like Algalon). Heroic mode may not be open from day one, but will become available after defeating normal mode perhaps as little as once or twice.

I’m pretty neutral on the limited attempts thing. It’s annoying to lose one because someone goes LD, or because the boss decides that a crucial player needs a double dose of Malleable Goo at the same time as the Volatile Ooze decides to single them out, but I’m also strongly in favour of mechanics which encourage people to take a wipe seriously.
I’m a verbal type of learner: I can picture an encounter and plan my approach in advance based on ability descriptions (which is why I tend to prepare my guild’s raid strategies. It was bordering on soul-destroying at times watching people frittering away our attempts by needing not only to see a mechanic but to fail to respond to it before they figured it out.

That said, I don’t mind gating either. Especially since they have said they won’t necessarily require the whole instance to be cleared before you can start on heroic modes. The heroic mode has been a bit of a slippery beast in WotLK when it comes to defining it. Naxxramas didn’t have heroic modes at all; you did things the “hard way” by ticking off achievements, things like speedkills, doing Sapphiron without frost resistance, by pulling extra adds on Kel’Thuzad. Ulduar shifted things slightly by allowing you to change some of the bosses in some way, typically by adding abilities to the fight. Then To(G)C and Icecrown came with fully-fledged heroic modes.

The intention Blizzard seem to be signalling is that normal mode is for most guilds, for PuGs, or if you want or need to pass by a boss more easily to get to the end of an instance; heroic modes are for the top X% of guilds who find normal mode lacking in challenge . I really like the Ulduar/Icecrown model, where difficulty is switchable on a boss-by-boss basis.
Allowing guilds to make the switch earlier, perhaps once you’ve completed a wing, perhaps once you’ve downed a boss, means that those guilds who really ought to be fighting heroic bosses can go straight there without spending weeks farming the normal mode. Our guild spent several weeks working on the Lich King, during which time the first raid of the week was a farm of the first 11 bosses and the other two raids were Lich King attempts. Opening up heroic mode earlier would have been vastly preferable for us.

This would provide a headache for guild ranking sites though. Currently you need to complete 12/12 normal mode, but in Cataclysm the decision will need to be made about how to compare a guild that sticks with normals with a guild that might be 8/12 normal and 6/12 heroic, for example.

In terms of tuning, we want groups to be able to jump into the first raids pretty quickly, but we also don’t want them to overshadow the Heroic 5-player dungeons and more powerful quest rewards. We’ll be designing the first few raid zones assuming that players have accumulated some blue gear from dungeons, crafted equipment, or quest rewards. In general, we want you and your guild members to participate in and enjoy the level up experience.

Interesting. I wasn’t decked out in 8/8 Absolution coming into WotLK, so I needed to run heroics to get suitably geared up for Naxxramas. I remember hours spent farming the Red Sword of Courage from Utgarde Pinnacle for our MT. I got my tailoring high enough to make craftable gear for a few of our raiders, and we got together groups for the 5-man quests in Icecrown for the sweet blues on offer. Happy days.

I don’t want heroics to be a grind like they were in TBC, but I’m encouraged to see them gaining greater prominence again. What seems to go overlooked is that heroic bosses very often use simplified or slightly modified versions of mechanics that you later encounter in raid bosses, so learning to tank, heal or DPS in heroics is a great testbed for raiding. Not to mention everyone will need time to readjust to some quite fundamental changes to your talents and abilities and to game mechanics.

I’ve never been keen to skip content or to be rushed through the levelling process.

The goal with all of these changes is to make it as much of a choice or effect of circumstance whether you raid as a group of 10 or as a group of 25 as possible. Whether you’re a big guild or a small guild the choice won’t be dependent on what items drop, but instead on what you enjoy the most.

/applaud

Analysis

Community response

Needless to say, there’s been something of an explosion in the WoW community lately. If you want it in raw form, you can try the EU or US threads about the changes on the official forums. If you feel like you have nothing left to live for, go read the MMO-Champion forums (I won’t link to them because then I’d have to read them).

Elsewhere on the web, there’s a range of views. Here’s a small selection from my blogroll:

Karatheya at Cold Comfort has got some initial thoughts from a leadership perspective, and I’m sure a more in-depth analysis of the implications will appear in due course.

Avalonna at Tales of a Priest offers a refreshing perspective from someone who is a hardmode raider. She says:

Maybe – just MAYBE – this change won’t be the end of raiding. You want to know what this Elitist prick thinks? I think this change could rock. Yes, you heard me right. Do I have concerns? Yup. But’s look at the possible positives

Larísa at The Pink Pigtail Inn takes the opposite view, worrying about the effect this will have on 25-man raiding, especially if the incentive structure doesn’t support 25s enough.

Pewter, the Mental Shaman, not content with stealing my section title (“the rise of the alt”, I swear I wrote it first, I just post slowly!) also put forward a very measured take on the proposals from the point of view of an officer in a 25-man raiding guild.

 

Difficulty

I’ll illustrate this with a quite from the EU thread:

dear blizzard,

Reading this gave me a bad feeling about the future of wow, casuals and hardcore players will be the same with this change. There will be no reason to do 25 mans because you can get the exact same things from both modes, unless blizzard makes both modes actually hard and the hardmodes would actually be hardmodes.

There’s so many things wrong with this logic, but this (albeit stated more eloquently) is a fairly common sort of feeling, so let’s examine it.

First, there’s an implicit equating of 25-man with “hardcore” and 10-man with “casual”. Go join a 10-man strict guild and tell them they’re “casual”.

There’s then a related implicit assumption that 10-mans are easier. Currently they are, because they’re designed to be run with gear almost a full tier behind the cutting edge, so 25-man guilds are steamrolling the content with more HP, more DPS, and faster, more powerful heals than is ‘required’.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We’ve recently been working through heroic modes in Icecrown, and even with 264 across the board Marrowgar-10H is no joke, while Marrowgar-25H is far, far easier. On the other hand, Saurfang-10H is easier than Saurfang-25H. Different fights scale differently as you increase the number of players available.

Larísa actually captures it nicely, so I’ll quote her again:

If you’re in a 10 man raiding guild you’re likely to say that 10 mans are exactly as challenging as 25 mans – if not more, since the failure of one single player will have bigger impact of the outcome in many fights.

If you’re in a 25 man raiding guild you’ll probably argue that getting 10 people come together and play as a team is a piece of cake comparing to the administrative nightmare of arranging 25 man runs. Apart from that it’s way more likely that one out of 25 will screw up or just get dc:d in an encounter with tight margins, than that someone will fall off when you only have ten people to worry about.

I’m a huge fan of individual responsibility in raids, so I like the 10-man paradigm precisely because one player’s error can be highly significant. 25-man raids feel more anonymous and errors tend to average out; sure they matter, but they get compensated for more easily. One person going LD in a 25-man raid might be more likely but has a smaller impact, weigh those two together and, at least for me, it’s pretty much a wash.
Then raise the relative gear requirements of 10-man raids so that you can’t create yourself an artificial margin by overgearing the place and you have a great environment where everyone gives their best and focuses.

From this healer’s perspective, the big improvement of 10-man raiding over 25-man raiding is that you won’t have one of each type of healer available, so you won’t be able to slot neatly into a standard template, but you need to adapt and work outside your comfort zone a bit.
For example, Saurfang-10H tend to need to be 2-healed. But once you get to 1 Mark of the Fallen Champion you’re already healing two people full-time, and then there’s the raid damage to take care of. 2 Marks is really unpleasant. A Paladin trivialises this a bit with Beacon of Light, but if you don’t have one you need to adapt by stretching yourself and using your multi-target heals as best you can. We have our Shaman Chain Heal the tank through the Marked player(s), for example.

The rise of the alt

More interestingly, this does seem to suggest a subtle shift towards more alt raids. If you’re limited to one raid a week per character, your off-night runs will now need to either be runs to older content, maybe on heroic, or alt runs.

When I was co-leading a guild, particularly after dual-spec was introduced, we enshrined the concept of Substitutes. These were alts or offspecs who gained higher loot priority than regular alts, but agreed in return to maintain their alternative role and to switch to fill that role if we needed it in a given raid. The need for Substitutes was evaluated by the Officers and carefully reviewed, but ended up helping us out a lot when we were short tanks or healers in particular, and provided a more structured approach than letting people develop offspecs as they felt inclined.
Adapting this sort of concept could have strong rewards for either type of guild in Cataclysm, with massively increased flexibility for raid leaders. Taking it further, you could even allow some players to go “dual-main”, although your loot system will need to be flexible enough (or carefully modified) to handle this.

Since I only really play healers, and I prefer to concentrate my achievements on one character, I probably won’t be going dual-main, but the raid leader in me likes the idea.

The death of 25-man raiding?

I’m not convinced the sky really is falling. Will the number of 25-man guilds reduce? I’d bet on it. But the people who leave will be those who do 25s for the loot, the prestige, or the challenge. The 25-man guilds who remain will remain either for the “epic” feeling of a larger raid or role team, because like Pewter they have more than 10 friends, because they have faith in the leadership and want to remain in their guild, or because for whatever other reason they actually like the 25-man format.

If people don’t enjoy 25-man raiding, then allowing them to face the same level of challenge for the same rewards in an environment they prefer can only be a good thing.

Personal Implications

Cataclysm is a long way off, but the changes to guilds were already giving me a hankering to get back into guild and raid leadership again. These proposed changes have pretty much cemented this in my mind.

So I’m giving serious consideration to dusting off <Intent>, updating the policies, finding some more dedicated, professional raiders and forging a 10-man path to Deathwing.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Heroic Madness of Deathwing
• Heroic Spine of Deathwing
• Heroic Hagara the Stormbinder

Now that we’ve seen all four of the healing class previews (Shaman, Priest, Druid and Paladin), what can be inferred from looking at the previews as a whole?

Standardisation

The first and most obvious theme running throughout all of the class previews is the standardisation of the basic toolkit for all of the healers. Once Cataclysm arrives, every healing class will have three direct healing spells: a fast and small but expensive heal like a Priest’s Flash Heal today; an efficient and moderate-sized heal to act as the default “go-to” heal; and a large, expensive heal for when throughput really counts. The classes have had their basic tools reworked or extra heals added to achieve this.

What’s more, the developers have made it clear repeatedly throughout the previews that they intend to move the classes out of the niches that they have been in over the last few expansions. The best example of this is the big boost to the Paladin’s raid and AoE healing potential.

The point of this is to further the goal of “bring the player, not the class”, allowing every healer to be better-suited to both tank healing and raid healing; of course habits, preferences and in some cases just naked prejudices won’t change overnight, but this is a positive direction to be going in.

I’ve not heard many complaints about homogenisation, although I’m sure that is a fear held by many. Homogenisation to the extent that all the classes are the same but with different artwork would be a bad thing for the game, but so is having your class be ineffective in particular instances or encounters. With these previews Blizzard do appear to be trying to retain individuality and allow healers to specialise, while not forcing a specialism on players.

Looking forward to seeing a new wave of raid healing Paladins in Cataclysm!

Positioning

Another common theme in the previews was the apparently increased importance of awareness of your position, the position of the raid, and the position of the damage. From Leap of Faith and Power Word: Barrier to Healing Rain through to Healing Hands and Efflorescence, every class gained a new ability which will require them to target it carefully to get the desired benefit, either by casting on the ground, by positioning themselves near those in need of healing, or by casting on the person in the most advantageous position.

This has the effect of getting healers to look away from their health bars and take stock of who is standing where, and also suggests that raiding in general will be more position-focused than it has been in the past.
Positioning is a key part of many fights in Wrath, particularly hard modes, and it’s something that I see a lot of people struggling with; I hope this works as a way of adding challenge back into the encounters again, making strategy and coordination pay bigger dividends.

“Fun”

When Blizzard talked about the talent tree changes way back in 2009, they told us they wanted to strip out all the passive talents and allow us to pick and choose for utility. Where “cookie-cutter” builds today might say “start with 14/54/0 and spend the last three points however you like”, the aim is that in Cataclysm we will see more of those free points, especially since the trees aren’t becoming any deeper but we are gaining five additional points to spend by the time we reach level 85.

We haven’t seen enough detail to call this one way or the other, we can look at the extra new abilities each class will get to do their job and consider those a step in this direction. The standardisation of the core abilities allows the developers to be a lot more free with the rest of our toolkit, since we won’t need to spend tons of talent points simple to make our baseline abilities up to snuff. I’m very keen to see the new talents when they are revealed.

Reactions

As a final point, I don’t like to end on a low note but I wanted to remark on the amazing amount of cynicism that’s been on display around the web. Not everywhere, but neither do you need to look hard to find it.

First, these are previews, and in some cases fairly obviously preliminary ones at that. If an ability sounds ok but underwhelming, there’s plenty of time for it to be souped up before release. I’d be extremely surprised if everything here made it live in its present form. So don’t panic just yet.

Second, instead of focusing on how much you didn’t get, why not look at what you did get? Instead of looking for the worst case scenario of just how useless and impractical a new ability will be, why not look for the potential, for all the creative and raid-saving used to which you could put these abilities?

Thirdly, “fun” is about as subjective a concept as they come, so what you consider fun is unlikely to be universal. It’s tricky to judge based on three spells and some preliminary thoughts about the future direction how much fun it will be to play a particular class. I often find Paladin tank healing fairly boring, but others get great satisfaction from feeling themselves slotted neatly into the role and being able to hone their throughput or free up GCDs. I love abilities which test my situational awareness, others feel that they are busy enough playing triage with the green bars.

And I love vehicle fights.

…

Well, someone has to!

 

Lastly, remember that Blizzard does play your class, they have plenty of people on the payroll who understand your class, probably better than you do, and they are not out to deliberately break your class.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Cataclysm Class Previews – Paladin
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Druid
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Shaman

Following on from the Shaman, Priest and Druid class previews, here’s the Paladin preview from a healing point of view.

Paladin

Spells and Abilities

Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.

As we’ve seen with Healing Rain, Efflorescence and Power Word: Barrier, this is another healing ability with strong raid awareness and positional requirements. This ability should help a paladin to plug their AoE/group healing weak spot to some extent; a paladin can be assigned to a cluster of people to provide some supporting healing.

The wrinkle with Healing Hands is the duration relative to the cast time, meaning a maximum of 40% uptime. In Wrath that would provide some sticky moments on something like Blood Queen Lana’thel or heroic Val’kyr Twins, but with the larger health pools and slower pace of damage taken this might allow time for the healing to average out.

The size of the heal will determine whether this is simply used on cooldown or saved for a tight spot, much like a Druid’s Swiftmend: too little healing and it might as well be used on cooldown, make it larger and it becomes sensible to save it for a time when it won’t be wasted. Perhaps even a rotation of paladins could be used to counter abilities like Kologarn’s Shockwave which affect the entire raid, or to cover both the melee and ranged.

I like the sound of this ability, especially for 5-mans, since it will allow me to have something other than Glyph of Holy Light splash or frantic Flash of Light spam to heal up my party after AoE or multi-target damage, which can only be a step forward.

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).

Just wow! I’m really excited about this ability, and especially the way it has been adapted to give something useful to all three specs: tanks get a defensive cooldown (although this will be a tricky balancing act), DPS get a boost to their damage output, and healers get a helper to smart-heal at their side for a while. Just the thing to get you through the tricky last 30% or when the raid needs a little extra help.

I honestly can’t see a downside to this, and it will also help with the Paladin’s raid healing along with Healing Hands. I’m impressed that the developers seem to have found good, practical ways to improve Paladin group healing without just giving them a Prayer of Healing or baking in the Glyph of Holy Light.

Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.

Not exactly a revolution for Holy Paladins, although it’s worth noting that as part of the new dispel system Retribution and Protection Paladins will lose the ability to Cleanse.

Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.

Not so much buff streamlining as a quality of life change for the poor junior Paladin who gets to buff 15 times to cover every spec in the raid and their pets. It should also reduce some of the contortions needed to persuade PallyPower to give the right people the right buffs.

It might also help alleviate the headache of trying to figure out what buff to give all the hybrids in your PuGs quickly enough that they don’t start moaning. Or maybe they’ll see “Blessing of Might” and moan anyway. Perhaps it can be renamed to something more spec-agnostic, like Blessing of Power?

Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.

Fair enough. Depending on the level it becomes available this should make healing in instances a lot easier, as well as possibly giving Protection Paladins an easier self-heal.

Talents

We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.

That’s a long duration. 60 seconds felt very short and I’m glad and not surprised that it’s going up, but I didn’t expect more than 5 minutes. I wonder then if the mana cost will go up correspondingly to discourage the Paladin from swapping targets as much as we do at the moment and to keep it on the “MT” (or their assignment, whoever that might be). This does seem superficially to be against the goal of moving the paladin away from tank healing, but might be intended to provide more smoothing or ‘passive’ healing to allow the paladin to do other things in between direct heals.

While I’m pleased to see Paladins gaining some extra group healing in general, I’m really not sure if the “tank healer” label will be so easy to shrug off. Healing Hands will have to be rather good to drag Paladins off the tanks, especially as many will have either rolled the class with tank healing in mind or become accustomed to that as their role over the years.

We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains the expensive, fast heal and Holy Light is the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light will be changed to work with Flash of Light. We like the ability, but want paladins to use it intelligently and not be constantly healing for twice as much.

My first thought on reading this was that I wasn’t aware Flash of Light was the expensive, fast heal at the moment. I suspect this is a clash of tenses, where “remains” should be replaced by “becomes”.

In any case, this seems to position Flash of Light as the “Flash Heal”, moves Holy Light more towards Heal than Greater Heal (although it will need to have its single-target throughput reduced significantly, because currently it has a Heal-like cast time with at least Greater Heal-like output) and leaves the field open for an as-yet-unidentified big slow heal. This really just pulls the basic direct healing toolkit into line with the other three healers and isn’t unexpected, even if the wording could have been checked a bit more carefully.

Some quite big fundamental changes here though. As Rohan at Blessing of Kings points out, currently Paladin heals operate on a different paradigm to the Priest heals that seem to be the new norm: while Priests trade immediacy and casting speed for mana efficiency (fast and expensive vs slow and cheap), Paladins trade throughput for mana efficiency instead.

When I read the Sacred Shield change I rather expected to see an increase in the duration of Beacon of Light as well. However, from what has been said about Beacon of Light it seems almost as if it is being moved away from 100% uptime and more towards situational use, perhaps for times when there is widespread spot-healing to be done with Flash of Light and the Paladin needs to divert themselves away from their assignment temporarily.

That said the impact of this change is a little unclear at the moment, since we don’t have information on the relative size and cost of Flash of Light to be able to understand the role of FoL and Beacon together.

Edit: The section of the class preview quoted above has been clarified and the original post on the forums updated. The new version is quoted below for reference, but I’ve left the original in place in this post as well for reference. This doesn’t affect the conclusions, but it is worded slightly better.

We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains a fast heal, but will be more expensive to justify the cast speed. Holy Light will be the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light needs to be changed so that its benefit is letting the paladin heal two targets at once, not letting the paladin get two heals for the mana cost of one. It’s intended to save GCDs and targeting time, not mana.

And the final change for this section:

Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.

This change was announced previously, so it will probably not be news to many people. It will be slightly odd to be picking up Spirit gear again.

Masteries

Holy
Healing
Meditation
Critical Healing Effect

Meditation: This is the spirit-to-mana conversion that the priest, druid, and shaman healers also share.

Critical Healing Effect: When the paladin gets a crit on a heal, it will heal for more.

Clearly Paladins will continue to be built around the idea of critical heals and single target heals, which is good if only to retain some consistency in healing style between expansions. Generally though the mastery speaks for itself.

Conclusions

The Paladin preview was released later than the other classes because the developers felt they needed more time to hammer out the details of the class changes before publishing them. Even then there are still gaps, the odd error and the notes feel a little more vague than other classes, but despite that this preview is a decent indication of the intentions of the developers for the Paladin in Cataclysm.

They have stated clearly that they want to allow the Holy Paladin to feel empowered to heal more than just the tanks, and have given them a number of useful tools to do this, from a body-centred AoE HoT in Healing Hands to a summonable Guardian of Ancient Kings to smartheal the raid on their behalf. I’m just not sure if the changes alone will be enough to really move the Paladin out of their niche, but not much would break them out of it in a short timeframe anyway. Little steps.

No doubt there will be some distress at the Beacon of Light change, but from the (probably biased) point of view of a Disc Priest who has been left in the dust on many occasions I’m almost glad that Paladins won’t automatically have the throughput of 2 tank healers in the future. Beacon of Light is an amazing ability and I’m glad it’s staying in the game in some form, but the contrast between raiding with and without a Holy Paladin is probably a little too big at the moment. My Holy Pally is sad though!

On balance I think this preview represents a good step forward: expanding utility and moving Paladins out of the niche without too much naked homogenisation.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Cataclysm Class Previews – Summary
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Druid
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Shaman

Following on from the Shaman and Priest class previews, here’s the Druid preview from a healing point of view.

Druid

Spells and Abilities

Now the thing is, Druids aren’t going to get any new healing spells in this expansion, because according to the developers:

They have plenty to work with already, and our challenge instead is to make sure all of them have a well-defined niche. A druid should be able to tank-heal with stacks of Lifebloom, spot-heal a group with Nourish and Regrowth, and top off lightly wounded targets with Rejuvenation.

I can’t disagree with this; in fact I already feel that there’s possibly too much overlap at the moment which leaves no niche for Healing Touch. The other healing classes will end up with large, medium and small direct heals. Resto already has these boxes ticked and then also has a range of HoTs to choose from.
There will be some tweaks to the spells, to make them align slightly better and to fit the defined roles, but nothing new for this section, so I’ve included a couple of the other new spells that I can foresee Resto Druids using in Cataclysm instead.

Stampeding Roar (Level 83): The druid roars, increasing the movement of all allies within 10 yards by 40% for 8 seconds. Stampeding Roar can be used in cat or bear form, but bears might have a talent to drop the cooldown. The goal of this ability is to give both bears and cats a little more situational group utility. 3-minute cooldown. No cost.

I know it talks about giving Feral more utility, but this one is a nice new toy which non-ferals might be called upon to use as well, especially since it has no cost. This would be perfect for helping your group run out of ground-targeted or mob-centred damage when needed, although the 10-yard radius will require some pre-planning on the positioning front for a healer standing at range.

Wild Mushroom (Level 85): Grows a magical mushroom at the target location. After 4 seconds the mushroom becomes invisible. Enemies who cross the mushroom detonate it, causing it to deal area-of-effect damage, though its damage component will remain very effective against single targets. The druid can also choose to detonate the mushroom ahead of time. This is primarily a tool for the Balance druid, and there will be talents that play off of it. No cooldown. 40-yard range. Instant cast.

I wonder how long this was referred to as “Magic Mushroom” before someone caved and changed the name to something more family-friendly. Anyway, Druids now get their own Explosive Trap, with a bit of Fire Nova thrown in for added control. The only missing information here is the duration of the Mushroom, but I’m sure it will be long enough for it to be used and not to be too inconvenient.
This could be pretty handy in any case, and it’s a nice touch that it’s been given a 40 yard range so you won’t be running into melee range every now and then like your Shaman brethren replacing their totems.

And now for the Resto spell changes.

All heal-over-time spells (HoTs) will benefit from crit and haste innately in Cataclysm. Hasted HoTs do not reduce their duration, but instead add additional HoT ticks. Haste will also benefit Energy generation while in cat form.

If you’ve looked at the other healer previews this won’t be much of a surprise, since every class’s HoTs have been given the ability to scale with Haste and Crit without needing a set bonus or glyph.

Crucially for Druids in particular Haste does not reduce the duration of the HoT but adds additional ticks, which addresses some of the weaknesses of the Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation implementation. As I mentioned in the Priest Preview, it’s unclear whether there will be a threshold of Haste needed to gain an additional tick from the HoT (i.e to reduce the tick interval enough that you can gain a whole extra tick within the fixed duration of the HoT) or if there will be a different solution. One to watch for clarification.

Druids will lose Abolish Poison with the dispel mechanics change, but Restoration druids will gain Dispel Magic (on friendly targets) as a talent. All druids can still remove poisons with Cure Poison and remove curses with Remove Curse.

Another change which is expected given the other changes to dispel mechanics in Cataclysm. In summary, all “fire-and-forget” dispels are being removed (Cleansing Totem, Abolish Disease and Abolish Poison) and each class is being given three types of single dispels, one of which will always be a defensive Dispel Magic. The stated intent of this change is to increase the importance of deciding when and what to dispel, a change which is probably for the good, although does feel very strongly like a PvP change. Still, Blizzard does design encounters around the abilities players have, so I don’t see this being much of a detriment in PvE.

Druids are pretty mildly affected by the changes, compared to other classes (commiserations to the Shaman out there), not losing any dispel type and even gaining one.

Talents

Deep breath!

Tree of Life is changing from a passive talent to a cooldown-based talent, similar to Metamorphosis. Mechanically, it feels unfair for a druid to have to give up so much offense and utility in order to be just as good at healing as the other classes who are not asked to make that trade. We are exploring the exact benefit the druid gets from Tree of Life. It could strictly be better healing, or it could be that each heal behaves slightly different. You also will not be able to be banished in Tree of Life form (this will probably be true of Metamorphosis as well). Additionally, we would like to update the Tree of Life model so that it feels more exciting when you do decide to go into that form. Our feeling is that druids rarely actually get to show off their armor, so it would be nice to have at least one spec that looked like a night elf or tauren (and soon troll or worgen) for most of the time.

We knew changing Tree of Life to a cooldown was going to be controversial. There was just no way a change this big would be unanimously accepted. My apologies if being a tree was what really drew you to the class.

We might (*might*) consider a minor glyph that kept the visual of the old tree form in some fashion even when not using the Tree of Life cooldown.

Yikes! This one came at me like a bolt from the blue, and it took a lot of other Restos by surprise as well. Needless to say there has been a lot of writing and discussion about this change. I’ll give you my take, there’ll be plenty of others out there to compare and contrast.

First, as Allison Robert did so well in her WoW.com post this morning, it’s important to consider where Tree of Life came from. Originally the Tree was a response to a low Resto Druid population, and an attempt to take them from a secondary, utility healer into the mainstream. At the time the idea of a hybrid tax was in full force, and it was fine for a Resto Druid to accept limitations on Tree of Life as a balance for their flexibility. Over time those limitations have been steadily removed as the hybrid tax idea has been eroded away, leaving the Tree of Life form as essentially a healing buff an artwork change, and a restriction on the casting of damaging spells in form.

So the primary reason for this change is that being a tree requires the Druid to sacrifice the ability to DPS in order to do comparable healing to the other four healing specs, which is regarded widely as not “fun”. I won’t get into the concept of “fun” because it’s so subjective, but looked at dispassionately it’s easy enough to see how little there is tying the artwork to the gameplay any more. Move a couple of the Tree of Life bonuses into talents or masteries and then Tree of Life becomes, from a theorycraft perspective, an artificial restriction on your choice of ability (a net loss) in exchange for a change in model (neutral).
If you only wore matching armour sets, refusing upgrades unless they came in a nice fetching shade of blue, you would probably be ridiculed by most raiding guilds. While not quite so extreme, choosing to be in Tree of Life form would be a similar choice for form over function (pun intended).

That said, plenty of people will only ever have played a Resto Druid since TBC, and will always have had access to Tree of Life, so this would be a removal of a huge, defining aspect of the class. Imagine a Shadowpriest without the purple glow. I remember one of our Restos in TBC experimenting with a specific build for Zul’Aman which did not include Tree of Life, and it was a real shock.
For this reason, I’d love to see them follow through with their Minor Glyph idea and allow Druids to choose Tree of Life form if they desired. Druids are characterised by their forms, it would be odd to be the only Druid spec without a form.

One highly positive change from this is that resto druids will be given a strong healing cooldown built in to the class, although the developers have not yet settled on what that might actually be. This means your friendly neighbourhood Resto Druid might turn out to be your saviour in a pinch, which is a step in the right direction compared to the unsung heroes of the raid today. You really miss them when they’re not there, but they don’t get many opportunities to really grab the spotlight.

Which segues nicely into:

Tranquility is an emergency heal, and we’ll change it to act more like Divine Hymn.

Another way to grab the spotlight. It’s great to see Tranquility getting some love and some recognition that in its current implementation it isn’t the valuable raid-saver it could be.
Homogenisation? Probably, but I’m not going to complain too loudly because I think Divine Hymn is a really nicely-implemented spell.

Restoration druids will have a new talent called Efflorescence, which causes a bed of healing flora to sprout beneath targets that are critically healed by Regrowth.

If I’m reading this correctly, it means that when you land a critical heal with Regrowth, you also place a ground-based AoE healing zone down. Cool, especially since Regrowth is being positioned as the Flash Heal equivalent. It will be interesting to see how many of the buffs to its crit chance Regrowth gets to keep after the talent cull, but in any case this could be quite a powerful effect.

I imagine it as roughly comparable to a Shaman’s Chain Heal: often now a Shaman will Chain Heal off the tanks to heal the melee, or Chain Heal into a group of DPS in danger (Pact of the Darkfallen springs to mind); in the future a Druid can Regrowth a tank and add healing to the melee, or Regrowth a player in an AoE damage zone and add healing to the others in the same predicament.

The big question will be how much it heals for, to decide if it’s worth casting Regrowth until it procs, in the same way other healers work to keep Inspiration or Ancestral Fortitude up today, or if it is regarded as simply a bonus when it does. With the Wrath mindset the former seems most likely, but that does seem slightly at odds with the Cataclysm philosophy of mana-management. Then again it will probably be situational, and where it matters enough it will be used and where it is less valuable it will be neglected.

Masteries

Restoration
Healing
Meditation
HoT Scale Healing

HoT Scale Healing: HoTs will do increased healing on more wounded targets. The mechanic is similar to that of the Restoration shaman, but with HoTs instead of direct heals. In Cataclysm, we anticipate druids using a greater variety of their spells so there is a distinction between healing and HoT healing.

The third mastery bonus is an improved and baked-in Glyph of Rejuvenation, but with no breakpoints (i.e. it will scale smoothly with health, rather than just turning on below a certain percentage) and applying to all HoTs.

In Wrath the Glyph of Rejuvenation has ended up a bit forgotten, because people just don’t stay at low health for long enough to make it worth the glyph slot. In Cataclysm though this will be changing a lot, and these effects could be a very powerful boost to healing output.

A lot will depend on the discipline of the healing team as well though, to trust that players on low health have HoTs on them and will be healed up and not to snipe with a quick Flash Heal. However I’m hopeful that Blizzard can manage to make mana sufficiently constrained that this will be as necessary a part of how healing will operate in Cataclysm as it once was.

There is no detail on the sort of scaling we will see, and I don’t imagine this will be fixed until we actually have some dungeon or raid encounters to test on the Beta servers and can see how things play out. It needs to be significant enough to be able to quickly and effectively “rescue” someone on very low health (meaning getting them out of one-shot territory), while not so strong that no one with a HoT on them can ever die because it heals for more per tick than anything the encounter can throw at you.

Conclusions

On the face of it the loss of the iconic Tree of Life form and the relative of new toys (except for the new cooldown, which is somewhat under a cloud) is a bit of a disappointment, but actually a lot of thought has gone into better-refining the role of the Druid and giving them the tools to do the job Cataclysm demands.

The beauty of hybrid classes is that they do have access to the abilities of other forms, and dealing damage with Wild Mushroom and possibly using an AoE run speed buff from Cat form are great new tools for Druid utility in groups.

Plus the potential to save the raid with a revamped Tranquility and the chance to beat those Shaman at the cluster-healing game with Efflorescence are both nice thoughts to hold on to.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Cataclysm Class Previews – Summary
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Paladin
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Shaman