Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Do death knights need better healing debuffs?

I saw an interesting thread this morning over at http://deathknight.info/ about some people asking for better healing counter measures for pvp. Here is the post.

Here was my rebuttal.

"I think you guys are forgetting a big piece of the puzzle here.

Let's say we do bring a new and unique healing debuff to apply to targets that works alongside blood plague and mortal strike/aimed shot/wound poison.

You know what would happen then? Every team would have to consist of DK + warrior, or DK + Hunter, or DK + Rogue, and healers would basically stop pvping because it would be damn near impossible to keep someone alive that has MS on them, AND hots are getting removed, AND DKs would have an additional effect on them. It would just 100% completely flat out suck and not be fun for healers in pvp. At all.

Blizzard made this mistake once before in TBC alpha by letting wound poison stack with MS for 75% healing reduction. The only thing that changed was every arena team was then forced to bring a warrior and rogue to be competitive, and healers basically quit wanting to pvp (and rightfully so) because it was impossible to keep other people (or themselves) alive through that kind of crap.

You have to stop thinking in terms of 1vs1. The combination of blood plague + wound poison or an MS effect is already extremely strong. Druids are no longer going to be the gods of healing 3v3 teams by themselves anymore simply because of the addition of blood plague (which they can't remove).

I think the addition of DKs is going to shake things up nicely just fine the way it is. I'm really not certain we need an additional healing debuff as of this time, and if we do, it should be very minor that won't affect group balance severely.

The only reason I really pushed for blood plague to remove hots periodically is that hots, up until now, have never really had a counter-balancing factor. That, and having to plague strike every time you wanted to remove a diseases is hardly effective against a competent druid."

What do you guys think?

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I think you are absolutely correct. Giving Dk's a healing debuff like warriors/rogues/hunters have would be counter productive for the game as a whole from a pvp perspective. I'm rather excited about the HoT removal by itself.

Veok said...

I'm not sure I'm even a fan of HoTs being able to be removed, especially if they are "removed" and not "dispelled". I'll admit, as a 2k+ warlock in S3 (I have not participated in S4), I had to deal with my fair share of pillar-humping, painfully long, painfully frustrating druid / warrior matchups.

I guess it's more of a general disagreement with blizzard's design philosophy regarding dispelling-- "remove" versus "dispel" being the case in point. If a class can "remove" but not "dispel", that makes any talents that provide "dispel" resistance completely worthless against such an adversary.

Also, HoTs already suffer from MS, and they are only viable if your class has enough HoTs that combined they can put out enough damage. I'm reasonably sure no one complains about "renew" or "Gift of the Naaru" in arenas. (There's also the aspect of me that wonders if resto druids -- the primary HoT healer -- have a suitable subsitute direct healing spell)

But I digress -- I am not in the beta and can't strive to hypothesize on the effects or balance.


In other news, here is the information I mentioned about DoTs, haste, crit, and scaling, Leiah. http://ravenworkshop.blogspot.com/
(Yeah, weird URL/ Blog name, but whatever)

Sam said...

"(There's also the aspect of me that wonders if resto druids -- the primary HoT healer -- have a suitable subsitute direct healing spell)"

They do. Have you not seen Nourish? It's an outstandingly good single target heal, even with no hots on the target.

Unknown said...

With the way the druid trees are set-up right now, Regrowth actually outclasses Nourish in both efficiency and healing output. Regrowth + Moonglow + ToL + Imp ToL = 44% off of the mana cost. Add in the Regrowth Glyph (+50% to regrowth if the hot portion is still on the target) and we have some serious healing going on. If the trees stay the way they are, and with the nerf to lifebloom, regrowth may just become the main heal of choice for resto druids.

Unknown said...

I completely agree... we can already remove HoTs, so we have the anti-healer portion covered.

And a -%healing debuff that stacks with the others is OP..maybe if it didn't stack it'd be alright, but DK's don't really need it.

(isn't regrowth also a hot? well its half hot/ half direct heal)

TomE said...

Agreed, one of the aspects of the DK that excited me the most was that its MS effects were going to be HoT removal and barrier removal, and while barrier removal is no longer on the template, between a 5 second ranged silence and a 4 second spell interrupt a % healing debuff is just asking for too much.

Give us the barrier removal back and we can just call it a day, IMO Unholy Embrace had the right design philosophy.