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 |
11.5s |
| Saurfang-25 | 10300 |
1.2s | 8s |
7s |
| Putricide-10 | 10600 |
1.8s | 12s |
10s |
| Putricide-25 | 15200 |
1.8s | 8.5s |
7s |
| Rotface-10 | 12600 |
1.8s | 10s |
8.5s |
| Rotface-25 | 14800 |
1.8s | 8.5s |
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.
Hi
It was my post originally about this. My point was that Blizzard have said that in Cataclysm healers will be mana-limited and therefore won’t be able to spam their biggest heal on the tank for any length of time (yes, we’ll see if that happens!). Now suppose that you take a 10 man raid, where 1 healer can be assigned to heal the MT. This is fairly straightforward to tune for Blizzard – they can assume a reasonable level of overall tank damage mitigation (talents, mastery, avoidance, armour, block chance) and a reasonable level of health, and can ensure that decent execution of the encounter provides sufficient tank damage to occupy 1 healer without letting him go OOM.
Now take exactly the same tank and stick him into a 25 man raid. You now need to put sufficient damage on the tank to occupy 2 healers, but so that they aren’t spamming all the time and therefore going OOM. In theory, and if your healers trust each other and can communicate, then this is doable. In practice you’ll see the tank dropping fast, and healers will panic and move into high gear , which should (if Blizzard come through on their healing philosophy) mean they run OOM.
The alternative is that one healer will be able to keep a tank up in a 25 man with some support from a second healer, who has GCDs free to chuck some heals elsewhere in the raid.
When the tank healers have time for raid healing, this means less requirement for healers in 25 man. It’s just blue sky thinking at the moment, but the coming together of relatively weaker 25 man tanks and Blizzard saying that they want healers to scale back their healing throughput or risk going OOM makes balancing 25 man tank damage very difficult indeed imo.
Thanks for the comment. I went over and read your original post, and I agree with what you’re saying in there in general; it’s a slightly different position from Gravity’s post, which is what I read and was responding to, and the logic makes a lot of sense to me.
I agree that we will see fewer healers in 25-mans than we do now, where 6 is (I think) standard, dropping to 5 occasionally. Where we differ a bit is in our thoughts about the levels of DTPS on tanks, and the response of the 25-man tank healers to the increased DTPS in that mode.
If we take the position that doubling the number of MT healers will necessitate a doubling of the DPS a boss needs to do to your tank, then you will halve the TTL and the health bar will indeed fall twice as fast. However, I’m not sure that automatically means that healers will panic more and switch to spamming the quick heals and going OOM.
The point I tried to make was that I think it mostly depends just how fast the bar is going down. If you go from a TTL of 8 seconds (10-man) to a TTL of 4 seconds (25-man), that makes a huge difference. But if you start with a TTL of 20 seconds (10-man) and go to a TTL of 10 seconds (25-man) then you have plenty of time in both cases for heals to land, which will slow the average rate of HP loss to (hopefully) the same sort of level in both cases. The amplitude of the oscillations will be greater on 25-man, but not the average rate of descent.
These numbers are just plucked from thin air of course (although the examples in the table show that they’re not too far off the mark, and a lot better than ToGC was), and the reality will depend strongly on the numbers that go live, but I wanted to offer a counter-example.
The other thing is that with a shared lockout people are likely to specialise more strongly in one format, where they will become accustomed to the damage profile of that format and won’t contrast the two modes as often. Over the medium-term I suspect people will learn not to be fazed by the 25-man damage profile.
My position is probably a bit more optimistic (or alternatively naive!) than your position. It’s all speculation at the end of the day.
Your TTL numbers look very high! I guess because in part you are using a bear tank with very good gear. I have 5.4k gear score in my tanking set, and 40000 unbuffed HP, with 32k unbuffed armour. Our pally MT has gear score of nearly 6k and I think 46k unbuffed HP. Neither of us break 60k buffed HP from memory.
Last week LK 10 man was meleeing me for 14k, although I was in a full survival spec with maxed out improved demo shout. It was nearly 18k when I let demo shout drop. He’s not an extreme case either – Gormok the Impaler heroic also hit very very hard, as did hard mode XT002 – although that was before the avoidance nerfs of course.
I also not that you don’t account for block/avoidance, which would increase TTL. I appreciate that when healing you work on the basis of zero avoidance, but tbh with 10 seconds TTL assuming zero avoidance, I would have thought you could wait a couple of seconds!
I was slightly surprised when I calculated the TTL numbers actually. It often feels like the tanks are going down faster than that, but I know time does funny things in a raid.
Having calculated the LK number below though, I might repeat my calculations for the bosses in the original with a similar method and see if the numbers still stack up.
And I remember very well the horrors of heroic Gormok; I hope that never gets repeated!
Our bear sits at a little over 6k GS (basically full 264 plus the ring), and she’s usually between 65k and 70k HP buffed (honestly I forget the exact number, but it’s definitely well over 60k).
I looked back at the WoL for our LK-10 kill and I’m seeing numbers similar to what you’re saying: roughly 14k hits on a slightly erratic timer of anywhere between 1 and 2 seconds. I’ve included a section of the log for reference below, taken from Phase 2. It’s sadly short because the tanks are swapping.
Using these numbers, assuming nothing is absorbed (even though the smaller numbers are probably Savage Defense, I’ve included them anyway), that gives about 120k damage over 13 seconds, which gives a tank with 65kHP an almost 7 second TTL (on average), dropping to 6.2s if I replace the “miss” with a hit the size of the average of the other hits.
You’re right, I’ve not accounted for block (or Savage Defense) or avoidance, and the run I’ve included above doesn’t include any dodges. The thing is, this provides almost a “worst-case” model, which I think is safer from a survival perspective than working on a more realistic case. You’re quite right, I tend to work on zero avoidance as a healer, same as tanks did when they used to gear for 2.5 average hits way back when.
From my point of view I prepare for the worst, and assume tanks will lighten my load with their own tricks.
I’ve gone through WoL parses in more detail and updated the values slightly. Rather than making a back-of-the-envelope, quick-and-dirty average in my head I’ve put all the hits and misses for a kill into Excel, and then taken both the mean and median and used the median for the table.
If not for the fact that it’s stupidly late I’d be tempted to tidy up the spreadsheet and pop it on Google Docs. Perhaps another time.
Nice geeking there, Mal. 🙂
This really is a fascinating speculation.