onsdag den 16. marts 2011

Damage Taken - Ranting


We are now a little more than three months into the newest expansion to World of Warcraft and much has changed since Vanilla, The Burning Crusade and most recently and most dramatically since Wrath of the Lich King. Good or bad - It is hard to say, but as some would say "Change is bad" and when you take your daily heroic or attempt to pug a few bosses in "Blackwing Descent" or "Bastion of Twillight" it does become quite clear that quite a bit amount of players still believe that everything is like WOLTK where a healer could, if he was decent, was able to outheal most damage. This is no longer the case and you can be a brilliant healer and you will not be able to "outplay" mistakes because Cataclysm is much less forgiving if you have a hard time to avoid fire, which does make you wonder - How do some people survive traffic?
I thought that this "problem" was mostly encountered in pugs and with randoms, but after 3 days of wipes on Nefarian HC I can only conclude that it is sadly also the case in my guild. Nefarian on heroic has not changed that much I am quite surprised that it is relative "easy" compared to most BoT heroics, but as almost every heroic - If one person fucks up the remaining 24 people will get punished. 

This leads me back to the point I am trying to make and the issue I want to address which I firmly believe that a big majority of healers thinks the same of (Yes, I said it healer - I have abandoned the way of "I WIN RECOUNT, LOLOLOL") and that is "DAMAGE TAKEN". Due to the changes to healing and the way encounters have been changed, a thing which hardly was any concerns than the tanks, has become 25 peoples problem. If you raid with a guild you will most likely have noticed one or two people dying a lot more than other people and why is that ? That is mostly because they focus on Recount or Skada instead of doing their job which is - To stay alive and do as much damage as possible. These people are stuck in the mentality "I STAND IN FIRE, OUTHEAL FIRE" instead of thinking "Uhm, This fire hurts perhaps I should move the 5 yards to the left in order to avoid it, or I could use my defensive cooldown (Anti-magic shell, Mage Ward, Nether Ward, Divine Protection, Divine Shield, Barkskin, Feint and the list goes on), it might lower my DPS by 50, but I will survive and thereby do 1.mio more damage. What to pick this is a hard choice".
There is no other way around this than to either /w to the people that they need to avoid damage and use their defensive cooldowns and if that doesn't work you can either yell it on Ventrilo or Teamspeak, but if nothing changes you are left with only a few possibilities a) Tell the raidleader / Guild Master that this person needs to step it up, b) IF you are the raidleader - Replace him, he might do 20k DPS, but what good is that if he almost requires a dedicated healer and a Combat Resurrection every time? This might also serve as a "warning" to people ignoring the importance of (not being Earnest), but reduce the damage taken by as much as possible. c) Tell your fellow healers to let him die until he gets the point.
And back to my personal experience on Nefarian HC. 

Phase1:  There should hardly be anyone dying in that phase, however, for three days we have used at least one CR in this phase due to two things. 1) People being morons in regards to their AoE spells and the timing with Mind Controls (E.g mages with 150 stacks using Flame Orb a second before Nefarian casts Dominate Mind - That is just retarded) and 2) People being so focused on getting the magic 150 stacks that they a) Forget to look at their HP bar as to counter if another person fucks up, however, I am aware that it is unavoidable to remove all damage on those, but a lot is avoidable just by people playing smart by not using their AoE spells while people are MCed. And b) People who have been MCed either releases infront of Nefarian and thereby getting cleaved or taking a breath and the winner is - People who are MCed removes the MC 1-2 seconds before Electorcute and that is just mind-blowingly stupid.
In phase two I have learned one thing - Interrupting is apparently incredible difficult and complex and that people tend not to use their defensive CDs despite them being at 10% HP and in the lava with Explosive Cinders. And with phase 3 quite a like phase1 you just run out of CRs before Nefarian is on 50% HP.
Now why don't we just not heal harder? 1) Mana is a limited resource and on heroics you DO need it for the tanks as they take very big hits. 2) To put it in perspective - Let us look at a warlocks Nether Ward. It is a 30 sec CD which absorbs +10.000 damage. With the current healing model 10.000 healing is for a holy paladin a Holy Light with a cast time of 3 seconds which when you hit hardmodes will be around 2 seconds give or take. And it costs roughly 2k mana - Now with 25 people taking damage and requires healing why wouldn't you use it to help the healers ? On Electrocute why wouldn't you use Barkskin, Divine Protection in order to reduce the damage you take? What is quite interesting is that everyone says "Paragon is the worlds best!!!!!111!! I am a fanboi!1!!1!", but if you e.g. look on World of Logs you rarely see a person from Paragon dominate rankings, but why is this? This is because they prioritize survivability over damage (E-peeeeen) which people forget and sadly many people think - "I am #1 on recount" or "I made a top3 WoL record" I must be one of the worlds best !1111
Gratz, however making a WoL record is a team effort and GJ on doing a lot of damage, but if you look on damage taken and find the person being 3rd only surpassed by the two tanks - Is he still then a good player? No, a good player will be able to sustain high DPS while keeping his damage taken at a minimum
To take another fights as an example - Valiona & Theralion in BoT on heroic. It is a very, very intense fight as a healer and it requires people to do their best in order to avoid damage and there is an attack which you can avoid a large part of the time "Twillight Blast", however looking at the log from our latest kill I can see that there is 300k damage difference on the melee who has taken the most damage to it and the melee who has taken the least. If we look at ranged / healers we see that there is 250k damage difference between them. I know not all damage is avoidable and since we use heroism in phase one it is stupid to move from it during heroism since it is easily outhealed in that phase. However, that does not explain that major difference and the only thing that explains it is that people are too focused on doing DiPis to notice anything else.
To look at the log from another POV - It is an 8minute fight and Nether Ward is a 30 second CD and we used 3 warlocks - 9 Nether Wards were used. I am not saying that it should be used on CD, but when gathering on Blackout and you are running anyway or in phase two with fires in the room - Just fucking use it. Divine Protection is even worse - 4 paladins only two used it.

Do you expect the tank to use cooldowns ? Why ? Because he takes damage ! Do you yourself use your cooldowns ? Why not ? 

And at that I will end my rant.
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