Cataclysm: A New Healing Approach

It took me more time than I thought but I finally started this. With a lot of guild business going on a week before release, I didn't really find the time to write down all the gameplay related aspects of the restoration druid in Cataclysm raid environment.

As planned, I won't do a proper guide as all the guides are pretty much same, telling you to go for intellect, haste soft cap, leather specialisation, giving you basic uses of our spells but not really going deep into how you have to play your druid and what you can do to improve both the quantity and the quality of your healing.

My introductions are always long and fastidious, but it's mostly to set the bases of the explanation. In this case, Cataclysm raid environment would need a big topic to explore in-depth the subject, but I will try to summarize as much as I can. All my experience comes from the 5 months I spent on the beta practicing almost every day, at first in dungeon and then in raid when they were made available.

If you think you already know the real essence of those changes, you might want to skip the following explanation and go directly to more druid related posts. However, it might help you having a better view of the situation.

I hope you are ready and open to the change, because it's quite a shock on the first place. I would say that the only thing left from Wrath of the Lich King is your experience in the healing role. By this, I mean the experience you have to constantly look at your raid frames while being aware of your surroundings. Basically your ability to be a good healer. Obviously we still have similarities such as specific tank healing needs, group assignation etc.. but the overall system got completely revamped and you must understand that first.

To sum changes up, I'm used to tell people: your healing will not be increased compared to wotlk, health pools are 5 times higher, damages are 3 times higher. So to give you an example, you will be able to do around 12k HPS but people will have around 100k HP and damages can sometimes be around 40k aoe on everyone.

If everything scales up with the level and stats increase but not our healing, it's mostly because Cataclysm is no longer about overhealing. In Wotlk you usually do at least 60% of your overall healing as overhealing. In Cataclysm overhealing accounts for 5-10% of your healing, never much more.

To go deeper in this explanation, in wotlk you had a huge potential healing. You can understand potential healing as Effective + Overhealing = Potential healing. It means that you could do a lot more effective healing that you were actually doing and this potential was capped by two factors: rotation (having the most throughtput oriented rotation) and spell power (gear to a larger extent). Basically, you could cover high damages and it would have resulted in using more of your potential healing, doing less overhealing and more effective healing. In other words, your HPS was highly dependent on the damages taken by the raid and the number of healers.

As you might have understood so far, mana regen wasn't such a huge factor in Wotlk. It's the main difference in Cataclysm. Mana management is now the biggest challenge of the healing gameplay. Mana regeneration from all sources is the new cap of your potential healing. And because your potential healing is almost the same as your effective healing, the more your regen, the more you heal. Obviously, you must understand that mana regeneration mostly comes from your gear level while mana management depends on you as a player (good or not).

Even if it's the main element, we are not considering the human factor in all it's complexity. But to be sure you fully understand what you will be facing, let me share you a list of ideas, from my beta experience:

- First, even tho the patch 4.0 prepares Cataclysm, what you do now has nothing to do with what you will do at 85. It only helps you getting used to new spells and mechanics.

- Almost all the encounters will ask you to heal a lot of damages.

- Unlike Blizzard said, there is no real spell selection according to the damages. Especially in hardmode, you will keep spamming your heals, mostly your big heals.

- But if mana matters a lot, it impacts your spell selection.

- You can't ignore spell selection, otherwise you will be out of mana very early in the fight.

- So to say, spell selection is tied more to mana management than damages.

- The junction point between spell selection, mana management and potential healing mainly lie in “the number of target you cover”.

- You will usually feel like your heals just can't cover damages.

- The point is to use your mana accordingly to the fight length or to a certain extent, to a specific phase length. It favorises experience.

- Obviously, but to a much lesser extent, you will use your mana according to damages intensity.

- Failing with your mana cooldowns and procs will result in going oom very fast.

- Unlike in wotlk, your potential healing is close to your effective healing. If damages go too high, you can't cover them because you can't use more of your potential.

- The only solution to increase your potential healing during the fight is to spend more mana.

- If a DPS takes avoidable damages it will impact much more healing intensity than before. - Taking additional damages directly impacts healers mana and sustainability.

- The aim is to cover unavoidable damages while not taking too much avoidable damages.

- With this design, encounters will always do a lot of unavoidable damages along with a lot of avoidable abilities to challenge both healers in their role and dps in their own survivability.

- Even in a perfect situation where everything is avoided, healing can still be very intense.

This list of thoughts is directly linked to the raid environment but after considering all those ideas, everything fits for Dungeons healing.

A final note to get back to an important point: encounter design and damages. In Wrath of the Lich King, healing aspect of encounters was mostly designed around people failure. It means that you had a ton of avoidable damages (or way to reduce them) but not so much unavoidable damages (except on aoe fest bosses, but the aoe wasn't the “hard part”). Difficulty for healers came from how much people could fail.

In Cataclysm, it feels a bit different. All the encounters are a lot more “controllable” but unforgivable. Every encounter is very specific and always has a set number of abilities. Developers have worked a lot on adding specific mechanisms to each fight and it leads the encounters to have like only 1 viable strategy and positioning. You just can't deal with those abilities by force, and by force I mean outheal avoidable damages. In fact, a lot of abilities are unforgivable and will oneshot you if you fail.

This is a point that affect you doubly, as a player and as a healer. This is a very important change in the system and not only you must understand it but also everyone in your raid, especially DPS.

I cross-posted this on the official forums.