Pre-Patch Date! Ion Tackles Criticism Head On, Many Endgame Changes 

Head to squarespace.com/bellulargaming to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code BELLULARGAMING. Sponsored by Squarespace.

other classes: nooo don't reduce the amount of defensives we have! shamans: you have more than one???

I once read a comment someone made about Belly giving both ears equal screentime and now I can't unsee it.

Next up, starting WoW at max level, because leveling your character no longer matters. So much for those that care for the journey over the end destination. Most of them shouldn't be playing anymore anyways.

The developers need to articulate a vision of what they want a mechanic or class to feel like. The result is always going to piss someone off, you cannot please everyone. It constantly sounds like the tail is wagging the dog.

As someone who plays a Healer Main in both WoW and FFXIV, my biggest issue with WoW healing and combat in general is actually that it's much too fast. Whenever I go from WoW to FFXIV, it feels like combat is super slow. But after a while, it feels like a very natural pace. You cast your spell, you have time to look up, evaluate the situation and then anticipate which spell and which target to use it on next. When I go back to WoW from FFXIV, I feel like I'm just mashing buttons, watching animations cancel each other out because the GCD is shorter than animations, and it just feels so messy to me. I'm having a blast playing a healer in Classic and SoD, as its a good deal slower than retail.

Hard times to be an MMO healer lol.

Did everyone just forget that they added back talent trees? One of the reasons talent trees exist is to give people options between what they need to prioritize for certain content. Couldn’t they just give a different defensive spell that really only works well for delves but doesn’t scale good enough for raids so that DPS don’t pick it?

The sooner they solve the healer issue, the sooner we can get rid of this annoying "pop a defensive or die" type gameplay in even moderately high M+ keys. Its incredibly annoying, unfun and downright toxic.

The affixes in M+ suck ass for us casual players. Why not have the harder affixes take effect at the higher end of keys for those hardcore players. For example: have fortified & tyrannical take effect at keys 20+.

the more they try to "fix" healing the shittier it feels.

They definitely painted themselves into a corner over the years. I tried healing M+ as resto druid in SL and it was so bad I just stopped healing M+ altogether. It's just so unfun at higher keys.

The healer issues are something that is putting me off from starting healing again. I'd really want to dust off my alt healer but it's not fun to play when it's so damn stressful to keep people alive or opposite of people not needing heals at all because dpsing as a healer feels just dumb if you end up doing that mostly (I have DPS alts for that)

Regarding bolstering and sanguine they said that those affixes are easier for newer players than storming (which does literally nothing) or raging)) They live in their own fantasy.

They need to fix healing, it’s been a neglected issue for so long.

i'm glad they finally notice that same color swirlies with same color mechanics to the dungeon you're in is not a good design. ...guess we will see if they actually do something about it. (ha ha...)

Just started following you, thanks for the most up to date updates, really enjoy it

As a frost mage main the feeling of being removed from a M+ group because its sanguine week just feels awful. I genuinely hope someone realizes sanguine needs to go.

Healer main; I’m genuinely gonna wait till like at least mid-seasonal rotation before considering coming back Let everyone beta test this just like D4

RIP Shamans.

As a disc priest turned holy because it does more damage, my input is this: teehee holy fire go brrrr. But seriously, I spend so much time not actually healing and just wating for everyone's health to get chunked and having to blast panic healing in case they get chunked again. Also I hate healing dk's I over heal them so much because their health bar just yoyo's constantly. Also I wish mana was important again.

I wish healing was as easy as it was back toward the beginning, just after they got rid of the silliness of different ranks of the same spell. I don't want 30 situational buttons when healing!

"We ruined healers and we know it" let's not get started about what healing is like for PvP. What I'm hearing is "We don't know how to fix our core mechanism, but we're trying please spend $50 on next xpac and $20 a month until we get there" For a game that should have more data on this kind of thing than any other in the industry this simply isn't good enough.

Before coming back to wow in 2022 i was playing swtor since 2011 to 2017. And i was maining healer there. It was so much fun in flashpoints (dungeons) warzones (battleground) and Ops (raids). When I got to play a healer in wow its so fucking stressful. No fun at all. It either feels useless, or group die so fast you cant even finish your cast

"dps got too much defensives" shamans in the back of the room... crying

Honestly, Wow devs need to learn defense beyond healing. The greatest example I can think of is City of Heroes but there are others too. CoH had defenders (name for the role healers fall into) that actually don't have heals. Instead they buff defenses and debuff enemies to the point that other players in other roles could play with only using "potions" and their own built in defensive abilities. Example: I had a darkness/electric defender. I set them up so they, of course, had no heals. Even though Darkness has one heal available to them, I skipped it for a different power. Darkness on it's own debuffs enemy's accuracy and buffs ally evasion along with a slight buff to ally resistances. Electric, while designed as a DPS type abilities, has their damage reduced and secondary effects increased on defenders. So I really leaned into the secondary effects... Which made it so enemies hit by my electric attacks has their "mana" drained. So what this added up to , when I played with folks, a lot of enemies having a long time before they can get enough energy to do anything if they were my primary target and when they did, they had a very high chance of missing. And when they did hit, my team mates were able to patch themselves up.

hearthstone battlegrounds' solution to the ease of use/results differing from low to high mmr play was introducing an additional layer of health (armor) and setting it to different amounts in different lobbies. implementing a system like that give the feeling of an environmental bonus/penalty in wow and can be pretty cool.

The easiest solution (but the one no one ever likes) is to have some way to separate the higher end so it doesn't affect the lower. Instead of affixes- maybe you could lose abilities (like individual defensives or self heals for dps do not work over a certain key level). You can not "balance" both ends of that spectrum. The last 20 years have proven it so, if you want to fix it- it will take a different approach.

So many players don’t know that hitting a boss form behind is still important

Easy solution is like the Disc priest talent sins of the many, For each party member present the buff gets weaker. So your CD can reduce dmg by 50% when alone but 10% when in a group

13:08 blizz have already done abit towards that new boss in the raid will now display a differnt colour indicator if a mechanic is on you

Why blizzard don’t give us promote to our pandas twink in pre patch war within???

Seemed like a very decent interview. Will be interesting to see what they come up with whilst having to balance around these hero talents.

I've been a holy priest healer since 2004. Been through the ups and downs of the class, spec, and overall healing in general. I just...like it. I like the challenege.

I, for one, am looking forward to finally getting all the crap that's been stuck in my bank guilds (on a dead server) for ages into my Warband bank, & all without paying the $35 USD transfer fee per each bank guild. As for the issues with Mythic+, healing vs defensive CDs, I can see it from the healer's PoV, where they feel like maybe they're not getting to actually be more of a healer, but my defensives have definitely saved my butt on more than one occasion when pugging, & it's just me & the tank left standing to bring the boss down. I'm sure whatever the teams decide, I'll adapt to it. I do hope they can come up with something that will make the healers feel better about playing their class, though.

That interrupt cd reduction is going to have insane interactions with pvp, worried about casters, without just as low cd disarms on any caster that doesn't have one, they are going to fall farther behind melee users. Losing a bit of spec variety overall in pvp at the worst. Though do all that and the cc break trinket loses a lot of power, might need a half reduction to its cd as well to balance with lower cd st ccs.

It feels like RWF is just trying-to-not-die-to-oneshot-mechanics instead of not having enough DPS/healing, which imo should really be the challenge (appart from execution obviously)

To fix M+ get rid of the timer. Keep affixes but eliminate the timer. The timer has always been the problem and a huge barrier to entry for people. Make them harder, but remove the timer. The entire endgame revolving around pushing keys is insane for their older playerbase that have to deal with interruptions IRL from time to time.

i hope they aren't thinking about mythic raiding alone. such a buff would benefit little raidgroups for normal and hero progress aswell - to make everyone able to clear their own raid difficulty

It might be a silly solution, but would it work to make defensives unavailable during dungeons? I mean, there are already abilities that are zone-locked, like SL covenant abilities, Heart of Azeroth abilities, even mounts for that matter, so I guess it wouldn't be impossible to implement (granted, at the beginning it may/would be an absolute nightmare with abilities not working in proper environment etc.). That way, healers would be the only ones to heal (with maybe tanks, or they could nerf self-healing for tank specs in dungeons?), lessening the amount of things to balance for Blizzard.

So WoW healers are raging about healing being too stressful, and XIV healers are raging about it not being stressful enough. Oh to be an MMO developer.

It's very simple. Dungeons and raids have an aura that reduces the effectiveness of defensive abilities. Perhaps have that disabled for tank spec or just tune around it. This way the defensives are still good for solo content while the content where a healer is 'required' actually has the healer doing their thing.

I was goin get back into wow and kock out some healing...... And then I realized that healers are not needed so I skipped coming back to wow

Gotta admit I abuse the hell out of leech as a tank. Back in Shitolands I came back to the game after an 8 year break and the people I ran with were irl friends of my bestie but they were absolute shit at the game. So i started stacking gear with extra stats, particularly leech. And that was to help my bestie, since she is my pocket healer. The people we ran with would take so much unnecessary damage. We had this chick who INSISTED her lock was an AoE type DPS. She was so dead set on getting through her entire rain of fire that she’d rather take a shot to the face than move 10 feet. And if I had to move out of her AoE she’d get mad at me. So, I started stacking that extra stat. But here’s the crazy thing. When we started running with good players AND I had that stat, my healer had a much better time doing 70% more damage.

so essentially theyre declining balancing an evergreen system like mythic+ or raiding to be fun in favor of.... their one-expansion single-player pseudodungeon? thats ridiculous.

Your know, one of the _really_ crazy things about wow that I never really understood was the lack of reactivity from the dev team. Players will tell you X is a serious issue, and you then wait until the next patch, or god forbid, next expansion to fix the issue. It's insane to me. It's like they want the players to leave.

The affixes they're adding to +4 have no interaction with healers and that lets me know they either don't know or don't want to make healers have fun.

Hey! Do you think is it possible that the players eventually "fall to darkness"? I could imagine a scenario where in the expansion Midnight we have to take out silvermoon and corrupt the sunwell and it would be the "champions of azeroth" that would take out key lore-characters like Thallysra or Lor'themar..

About the healing issue, tbh I actually would prefer if it was scaled and geared towards the higher keys and more skilled players. Im not one of them, or at least not anymore but I do think that especially in content like M+ which has recently begun to be more friendly towards casual players, especially with removal of the timer and such, we should be aiming to make people improve rather than scale mechanics around their not being good enough. However if you have a dps almost insta dying in lower level keys thats simply an issue, it is stressful for everyone involved and fun for nobody, if their goal is to make it both fun and hard to heal for healers and make dps better by having them rely on their defensives more, than there should be some sort of system in place to let us know what is wrong when someone dies, if it is a lack of healing or lack of defensive use or, more specifically, there should be a distinction between abilities that should be soaked up by defensives and those that should be outhealed, usually players can guess and there is a ton of overlap but it would make it easier for players go learn and not blame healers overtly and unnecessarily if we can tell who made the mistake without having to dive deeply into damage meters and such.

*When MoP Remix ends and your OP character gets nerfed to oblivion… oof, that’s gonna suck.*

Drop mob dmg by some percetage, reduce defiensives effectiveness in raids and mythic dungeons by the same %. Pretty simple fix. Just add an "on entry" debuff.

There they go again doubling down on bad decisions cuz the hardcore sweats have stockholmed themselves into liking it

I do 20s/10s as a Mistweaver and I don't feel bad at all.

The healer problem is not just a healer problem. This whole past expansion most of it I Played Boomy. It was the most unfun M+ I have had for a while I had to heal myself more than I could actually do DPS with the sheer amount of unavoidable damage going out. If you played or play a squishy class M+ is not fun. So the high damage overall is a problem for more than just the healers.

Can’t you have Brann as a healer in delves? Kind of makes the defensive needed for delves a moot point right?

Oo on my birthday

Have mythic+ be affixless but you can apply affixes to your key when you use it, doing do increases the amount of rewards you get and maybe at an increased ilvl? so the affixes are a reward for hardwork but not mandatory

I'd love to play healer if it wasn't as stressful or spiking in damage. Guess blizzard doesn't want me to. What a horrible experience healing is when you needed to save someone prior to a big raid wide "heres the explosion part" encounter. and EVERY SINGLE ENCOUNTER IS LIKE THIS.

U already can lvl up an alt to 70 in 2h

Why don't they just bring in AI Healers for Delves? You keep your Trinity and work on solving the healer whack a mole problem.

Give the healers something else to heal besides just the raid, npc, fill a device that heals the raid for those almost one shot mechanics, exc

I'm sure it's not as easy as it sounds, but why don't they just de-activate class defenses on Mythic?

Don’t care till they update shamans.

70 in 90 minutes whaaaat!

The end game is the same spam low m+ keys and lfr and done for most of the player base.

side note. does anyone know if there going to bring back Brawler's Guild? or stuff like that for peeps to do when not questing/raiding or mythics..

my hot take is the healer problem is not solvable with their design philosophy. when we moved from experience oriented to goal oriented gaming we sort of slowly destroyed the necessity for healers.

I cant wait until the real beta starts in August.

Aight Ion. Have it your way. Delves are dead on arrival. Never learn from previous mistakes.

also you forget about changes in PVE will IMPACT alot the PVP side how can you do such changes with out talking about the pvp implications................

Issue with Mythic+ hey? for the very top end players hey? Solution is easy - ignore them. Set the game for the vast majority of the player base and stick too that. But then if the high end community finds some busted thing and they go nuts with it - leave it, who cares, let the top end Mythic people go nuts on the busted game play or manic and the rest get to play normally. Who knows maybe that would bring its own problems. Just glad I don't have to sort it out :)

Couldn’t you just make the abilities ment for delves?

The "stops will no longer put spells on cd" change is the worst change ever suggested for M+, why blizz

Their whole idea about M+ is so wrong. The reason raiding is successful is that you can try and try again, at whatever pace works for your group. Honestly, the speedrunner mentality folks are parasite leftover from the Legion/D3 crossover days, and I can't wait for them to slowly fade.

God I wish they would just put the lvling changes into the last season of xpacks instead of adding them to pre patches. I have a ton of characters I wanna lvl and mess around with in dragonflight but im not spending 6-7 hours per character to lvl them when doing that in a month will be substantially faster.

I like playing really good so I make healers job easier

Healing was fun as hell in Wrath of the Lich King. Make dps defense skills hurt their dps. Like with cast times, debuffs, etc

Lol. The sex bots are fully out in full force on this video! XD

Just make the defensive skills only available in delves… And just ramp up the difficulty in that. easy solution no?

the downfall of healers began when every class's self-healing ability became vital to the class. It may be my cata classic brain talking, but they need to just get rid of some of those self-heals or make them less useful.

I’ve never liked the concept of the Mythic+ system. Not everybody wants to speedrun everything. Many of us like a challenge but without a timer. I get that it works for some, but it doesn’t work for all, or even many.

Leave my Retribution Paladin defenses alone or I shall smite thee

Wait wait wait. Hold on. Delves? Defensives are a core part of the whole experience of the game. Just because people play M+ it doesnt make any logical sense to punish the rest of the playerbase.

I swear to God, if they nerf an entire role's defenses so 20's aren't filled with a god comp that has no healers...

I think that realistically: -Tanks need way bigger health pools than dps and healers -Tanks shoukd take less damage than they currently do but have less ability to heal themselves - healers and tanks need more interesting ways to deal damage -no tanks like tge aggro minigame -tanks focus more on actively mitigating the damage they take than healing that damage back

Just make defensives scale inversely with group size, so you get strong defensives in solo, weaker in a 5-man, and weaker yet in raids. I don't see why this should be difficult. On way of doing it is to make your health pool scale upwards the bigger the group is, while defensives are measured in absolute numbers (not say % of healthpool). This would mean DPS can't and won't have to self-heal/mitigate as much in larger groups content, but they can in delves and solo. As a healer i hate it when I have to spend much of my time DPS, I want to heal, that's why I play healer. When I play DPS i want to focus on DPS, and pushing my panic buttons should be more like an exception.

So they didn't actually talk about the biggest WoW problems which are key depletion and runbacks after wipes. In other words they didn't talk about anything substantial. They should fix what's keeping people from raiding and Mythic+ and essentially from coming back to the game.

I stopped healing. I just wanted to heal, not dps.

Very interesting interview, I wished Blizz had a history of making good on their balancing promises, but they have the exact opposite. Let's wait and see, TWW seems to have a lot of great things to look forward to, so I am pretty happy so far. What is up with all the same comments from users with butt picture profiles? Bots, most likely...

I just hope against hope that their tweaking things for the sake of the elite of the elite doing mythic raiding doesn't hurt the PvE folks who do LFR at the MOST in doing actual solo PvE things.

Can’t they just buff defensive while in solo content and then nerf them in groups and raids

IDK, I am more for nerfing healing all-round in the WOW PVP realm.

Who is jack and what video is great lol

They need to balance tank survivability. As new to healer I just watch the tank heal themselves while not taking damage. Glad I'm disc and I'm supposed to be dpsing anyway.

Start by making tanks considerably less durable and rebalance the entire game around that. I think that the fact that tank damage mitigation/healing has been broken for years is what has led to this problem. It scaled up people's expectations and the rest of the game to match. Also, catering to extremists almost never works out for anyone. People will find alts to play or something to do if they want to keep playing after they finish with their achievable progress.

!

Nerf Shamans and Monks, the knockback and the bubble is too dominative. The knockback should only be one feet, just enuff to cancel a spell or a mount up. Bubbles should be interruptable.

The only thing blizzards ever balancing, is their own pay cheque

I do wonder how long before we just see a game like wow completely retire the very concept of “needing” healers and even tanks and just allow every monkey brained dpser to live our their self sufficient solo leveling/main character dreams.

After this video I feel sorry for Blizzard game devs working really hard to make all the classes and roles feel good. There's so much complexity behind it and people just complain for so many silly things all the time.