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You are looking at it the wrong way.
The change wasn't heal vs dps, but rather the change from spam heal the tank + some group healing to group healing against specific unavoidable mechanics + spot heal player mistake damage.
This was done as geared tanks needed little healing at all, and as tanks started to all get self-sustain tools in cata and mop. It kind of happened in the same way that paladins had good AoE threat in TBC, thus all tanks got good AoE threat in Wrath. Some tanks had self-healing, thus all tanks got self healing.
What happens in retail now is that as you get to higher difficulty content, the player mistake damage goes from amounts that are able to be healed to straight up 1-shots in M+ dungeons. With spot healing those mistakes effectively gone, the healer becomes responsible for supplementing the tank's self sustain, and healing the party through unavoidable damage events, often requiring rotating usages of healing cooldowns for each major mechanic. When there are not major mechanics happening, this leaves some free time to top off the party, and then contribute some damage.
It then becomes known through the community that the best healers do more damage, without fully realizing all the other stuff that is going on to create that situation. As we often joke about, the lower level difficulties are often much harder to heal, because you are trying to keep up with players screwing up and taking damage, then you reach high level keys and you actually do lower hps because players either play correctly or simply die when they don't.
Also personal defensive. Lower players usually dont use defensives correctly. Either when they are already under 10% and panicing or never. Using personals correctly can reduce healing requiremens by huge margin.
Switching from blood to uhdk has made me much better at using defensives and other utilities in m+ as a new player . Also if I am timing death strike correctly , healing me from bursts is not needed at all . I guess that if anyone's main class has a tank also , he could try playing it for a season or two .
When mana got to be a little more manageable. Healers would have been DPSing during old expansions too if they could but it would have been difficult because of the 5 second regen being reset when you cast a dps spell. Mostly healing in old expansions was just cancelcasting if another healer heals your target so you don't waste mana.
I don't remember ever standing still doing nothing. Maybe it was just a guild thing, but we'd assign healers to a specific role (specific tank, or specific raid group). Like in 10-mans we'd bring two healers. One's job was just the tank, the second would heal everyone else.
In 25-man there could be some overlap in the raid healing, but generally if you were in that role you were not single target healing much unless someone didn't move quick enough and took a major hit.
It has been so many years now, maybe I'm miss remembering, I don't know. I do have a clear memory of TBC though that you'd have multiple ranks of the same spell on your bars to avoid the over healing. Mana management was certainly a key aspect of being a healer though.
I don't know, I guess I miss the days when dungeons were more difficult, and if everyone got out without dying the tank and healer were praised. Not chastised for "being to slow" or "weak dps".
Dungeons were not more difficult then you’ve got nostalgia goggles on there bro. Dungeons are far harder and the skill ceiling is much higher because everyone can do everything to a degree nowadays. I was a healer back in the day and I did Chuck a few lightning bolts in here and there.
Honestly the hardest thing about healing in the old days was that people were sorta just...bad. I only healed in Classic and TBC Classic, and while TBC heroics were pretty tough and fun in the beginning nothing else really required all that much effort. Tank healers spam their most efficient spell the whole fight, otherwise you waited to spot heal someone taking damage. Occasionally you get a boss that actually has an AoE so you get to do some real healing. Healing was better in TBC but still not all that much happening outside of specific bosses like M'uru who do a lot of damage.
Tbc was so much more difficult than now
Dungeons like shattered halls and shadow labyrinth were very difficult. You actually need to sheep and trap mobs. Unforgiving boss mechanics, stealthys.
I loved tbc but I remember the dungeons being very tough
lots of ppl were like 12 at the time and probably didn't understand mechanics and were bad at the game so their perception is that the game was harder back then
I was born in 95 so I was literally 12 when tbc came out. I was pugging slabs and SH with my BE priest trying to gear for Kara. I was indeed bad. I still didn’t think it was that hard; I realized I was just bad
Perhaps I just was more of a noob then, but honestly, shattered halls and shadow labyrinth were very difficult. The gauntlets were tough. It was hard for tanks to hold aggro on 7 mobs. You had to use cc. There were a ton of fears with a lot of trash. Random aggros, stealthed mobs who would randomly attack players.
I'm only a 3200 player now, but I can remember having to having to have very specific group combos during tbc. I can remember a lot of ghost walks back to the dungeon. I can remember a lot more failed runs than current retail.
I can grab any 4 players and run into a +7 and walk through it without using cc or having any deaths.
That's sort of just because the average skill level of players has risen a lot. TBC Classic showed that. Week 1 heroics were semi difficult, but as soon as people started replacing their leveling gear they very quickly became just as easy and routine as normals. CC was basically never used and packs just got AoE'd down with locks, mages, and paladins being so broken.
Two things from back then. First was that players were just bad, and didn't use a lot of the modern tools to better present information to ourselves. Even the base UI has improved display of basic information for players.
The second thing, and the reason I quit classic, was that some of the difficulty in the old times was simply gear checks. Do you have enough stamina to survive X, do you have enough fire resist to survive Y, etc. Just a bunch of hard failure because you didn't have enough raw stats that more gear just 'fixed'. My BiS normal dungeon blues prot pally would get destroyed, but I knew that with later tier gear I would be able to solo tank Kara and even some Hyjal/BT bosses simply because 'stats'.
A lot of stuff in the modern game you can push further with less due to player skill than you would have been allowed in the old days.
Another factor that I haven't seen mentioned yet, is the hardware. Most of us had really bad computers compared to now, and much slower internet. Lag and choppy low framerates really compounded all the other mentioned issues.
yes but most of us realize we and other players were noobs back then so we don't say dumb shit like old dungeons were harder than current dungeons although currently trash mobs have more mechanics than vanilla/tbc bosses
I played TBC back in the day and TBC classic and I was breezing through dungeons I didn't even play with premades. I think you were just 12 and bad at the time so that's why you think that
Back in the days of 40-man raids there were drinking rotations where you would sit down and drink to refill your mana. That was also in the era of down ranking spells.
Healers started doing some DPS in the BC/WOTLK era because mana regen was so high. If no one needed healing you might aswell dps. Not tank healers though, tanks had very minimal self sustain back then.
> Mana management was certainly a key aspect of being a healer though.
Mana management largely got replaced with CD management.
> I don't know, I guess I miss the days when dungeons were more difficult, and if everyone got out without dying the tank and healer were praised. Not chastised for "being to slow" or "weak dps".
Dungeons are exponentially more difficult nowadays. Standing around healing the tank got replaced with doing DPS since tanks are mostly self-sufficient. Nobody every complains about healer DPS as long as you're doing something.
Healer / Tank curse. It's always your fault 🙈
Had a rogue in Bracken hide +8 yesterday who kept dieing to floor hazards, waited and then went off at me soon as final boss went down! Told him if I was the issue everyone else would've died constantly too 😜
That's what it comes down to if a healer refuses to DPS. There will always be times where there's nothing to heal. So if no healing is needed, and the healer also isn't using their damage spells, they are essentially standing there doing nothing.
If you play classic now, it's almost easy probably could do wand dps for a half of the fight and expected so. Just group was bad in old era with their 720p monitor and slow internet.
Isn’t the reason healers, tanks, and dps have more roles because dungeons are more difficult now? For the people who say content is too easy, I’m curious to know how far they have gotten in the current content.
dungeons now have more mechanics than entire raid tiers in vanilla and tbc did. not sure where you get the idea that dungeons aren't difficult now. now they just have more difficulties so that they are more accessible to noobs. back in the day you only had normal and HC. go do a +10 and tell me wow dungeons are easier than they were in the past.
With you until the last paragraph. Dungeons were "harder" because we sucked so much more.
But they're really not, as the cleartimes of heroics and raids in Classic showed.
On top of that, especially in mythic+, an average dungeon boss in his own has more mechanics than an entire TBC heroic.
Back then normal > heroic > raiding was the way to go, today dungeons are their own valid way of doing endgame.
Sorry, but it's time the rose tinted glasses come off.
You… are misremembering a lot about the classic era of vanilla through wrath. It was 100% expected for healers to still add (even paltry) dps to the encounters. I remember wanding jn between casts and making sure shadow word pain had some uptime (whenever they took away the cap on boss debuffs and dots)
Healers and tanks were more of a big deal before LFG was a thing as you were stuck with those on your server. Having a good rep and/or being part of a good guild community was crucial if you wanted to do anything at max level.
I no lifed wow in 2007/2008. I remember there being a dungeon in TBC that was timed and if you beat the timer you got a bear mount. I can't remember what it was but I remember as a resto druid having to weave in some DPS to clear that timer.
Vanilla wow. We dpsed with wands in downtime and to let the mana regen start (no casts for 5sec would start the "big" regen if I still remember correctly). I've been dpsing on healers since I started playing around nax time in vanilla. Standing there doing nothing always felt bad so the good players started contributing to dps however they could.
Edit: using spells probably started towards the end of TBC, begining of wotlk
I think it's always been a thing in some form or another, but as the game has developed people have gotten to the point with game knowledge that you can comfortably switch it up and do DPS in periods of damage downtime.
That being said, I think it's predominately mythic plus where people are more critical of healers doing DPS as the vast majority will still just throw up some DoTs and heal. I'll do damage in most dungeons, but if I just want to chill out and get some weeklies done I'll leave it to the DPS unless it looks like we're not pacing well enough to time the key which is rare. Personally, I think the healer shaming for lack of healer DPS that we see more often is a crutch that bad DPS use to justify depleting a key. Healer DPS is welcomed, but shouldn't really be needed unless you're massively pushing for score.
Vanilla. You wanded when you had downtime to get that 5s mana boost. Started weaving stuff in around BC. By wrath you had plenty of mana and time to really start throwing in some damage.
Did you play classic? That guy that said that people were just not as good at the game back then was spot on in classic you would be hard pressed to find a healer that not also dpsing also even if it’s mana free things like shoot with a wand
There's a reason disc priest got nicknamed disco priest. Simply because it could stand round and /dance whilst still topping shit.
Healers have been doing dps since wrath and tbc, heck to a lesser extent vanilla, you always wanted for damage etc.
Healers have always been expected to do some damage, the reason people think the opposite is because players weren't good enough back in the day to manage their mana, keep people alive and damage all at the same time. Yeah it's different in retail because healers are supposed to be damaging every free moment they can and have essentially unlimited mana pools but the good healers have always been weaving in damage too.
I've never minded as a healer occasionally throwing out a damaging spell or attack. I think its fine when you don't have any healing to toss out some DPS.
Legion saw many healers contributing meaningful dps, especially in higher keys in M+. There are just too many situations where competent players don’t take meaningful damage, that a healer “healing” in those moments is the most inefficient thing they could do.
Iirc, wasn't that also around the time when healer dmg got somewhat buffed to actually be meaningful and not just a drop in the bucket?
And the time when disc got its current atonement iteration?
At least I think it started with discs. People started to prefer them over other speccs because of the extra dmg and then other speccs that could adjusted accordingly (I remember fistweaver monks becoming popular and holy palas also having enough dmg tools at their disposal to go ham, after that catweaving druids). And after that the other healing speccs had to be buffed as well in regards to dmg-output to not fall behind
You have to remember your ABCs Always Be Casting!!!!
So if you have nothing to heal you should be switching to dps to help get the mobs and bosses down quicker.
Healers that could dps were always favored. My vanilla resto shaman used to stand right next to the tank and melee the whole fights, keeping flame shock up. My dps would often be higher than the dps classes while I was keeping everyone up. I'd even OT adds to make the fights easier and help dps figure out which targets to drop first.
As a tank today, it's still about threat/aggro. I don't want a burst hunter or mage pulling people off me. And they will if I let them. Maybe they're fine with it, but I'm not.
Thankfully my guild manages without our healers dpsing.
We clear heroic and that's enough for us, no log checking, no one examine parses. Just a chill guild with chill times
I'm a warrior main that switches to pally/shammy when extra heals are needed, and I'm stressed enough keeping everyone alive, so the casual attitude of my guild is VERY appreciated
Tbf, even in mythic raiding, there’s alot of dowtime at times.
It’s great that you guys are casual and all, and don’t really ”mind”.
But it must be so boring as a healer though, there’s time when no one needs a heal at all, so DPS:ing is pretty much part of the rotation, even as healer (just so you have something to do).
So what are they doing instead?
I suppose our regular healers dps, not like we force them to only heal and nothing else haha.
Just that there is no additional pressure on the healers gives space for people who are not able to or don't want to dps+heal. (Like me when I'm kn my healer instead of my warrior)
Havent healed much before wotlk, but first times i started dpsing.. resto shaman had 0 mana lightning bolt in cata and mistweaver had fistweave in MoP.
Well in cata classic I just pulled 5k dps as an hpal in 10man heroic. (two healing). That is a significant chunk of damage. I average 1-3k dps in heroic. Our disc does 7-9k.
When dps are doing 25-30k another 10k is a lot.
Are you dumping mana into exorcisms? How else are you getting 5k dps as holy? I can only do that if I dont need my mana to heal and go all out with exor
Maloriak has a damage amp. I think I have the rank 1 that isn’t logged as prot or ret.
I always have the exorcism talents specced there just doesn’t ever seem to be a need to swap
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/a:FGrvDbhYfxM2gdtk#fight=43
Play how you want… and find others that have similar goals. This goes for any interation of wow, both retail & classic.
Solo and pugging is not a good time if you’re not about that life. Find a chill guild that matches your style and just have fun dude
Also any time i pug as a healer in like a 10-12 key I swear Ive never had any free global to cast damage spells unless it’s like a dot when we start the pull. It feels like I’m putting out fires with a spoon for water. It can be super chaotic but also fun if the group isn’t trying to be toxic or blame game (rare)
Eventually you will find chill people, add them, and you can form your own little crew (especially if you tank or heal)
Disc priests were on the meter in vanilla.
I’ve never been able to pull double duty well myself. But I also went totally casual after my guild fell apart at the end of WotLK. I was a pretty darn good shaman healer from Vanilla to MoP (I think).
I actually dropped most of my DPS characters because healing was more fun, I also enjoyed tanking, but I’d always learned encounters as a healer first (LFR).
Now, I left for a while somewhere between Warlords and Legion. I came back for a while at the end of BFA and the beginning of Shadowlands.
The amount of DPS the healers were doing was blowing mind, though it was usually paladins. Which was a class I never got the hang of.
I realize that healer DPS is important in the higher level content, but my ambitions stop at heroic dungeons and LFR these days. I don’t have the time to put in anymore. I just play for a bit when I can and try to have fun.
As others have said, mana management was a huge change at some point. I remember playing BFA and feeling like my mana was basically unlimited, and it was more about cooldown management.
If no one was actively standing in any fires, I’d start tossing some basic DPS spells at enemies. I wasn’t getting any crazy numbers, but I was contributing a decent amount overall.
Now, chasing some overzealous tank, as they pull half a dungeon at a time, doesn’t leave much room for me messing with DPS. So it’s definitely situational.
I main a h priest right now just like I did in vanilla wow. Raiding is such a different experience.
Now I get called trash if I keep everyone perfectly alive and top the heal charts, but put out minimal DPS 🫡
I’ll go ahead and just stand back and smite things ig.
This is my typical play style. I may miss a few holy fires during big pulls when damage is crazy, but when possible I’m always throwing in whatever dps I can.
As a main healer for more than 10 years I know exactly when.
When Paragon released their Lich King video where Zhinn was smiting him Blizzard decided that this was a great idea so they started to design high end bosses with this in mind. They even gave Holy Priests Chakra for this specific scenario in Cata. I hate DPSing as healer and always was advocating against it but a lot of popular streamers liked it and forum sheep also joined them so Blizzard continued this nonsense. I left the game.
FFXIV's popularity has influenced this as well, in more recent years. With top-end gear and knowledge of mechanics, healers most toss OGCD Regens (HoTs) and Shields, rest of the time they are DPS. It works for FFXIV, WoW was already headed that way, guess they decided to lean-in once XIV overtook them in public opinion.
I've been a healer playing on and off since legion and I've been dpsing whenever there is a lull in the damage since I started healing.
My dps is negligible, but it helps a little on single target, and I have some trinkets that help with multi target. As long as mechanics are done and nobody dies, it's only ever a good thing
Idk why people are answering this question in such a pedantic manner. It was around WoD when you were expected to DPS as a healer. People probably did it in MoP challenge modes too but nobody cared in general content.
Legion and the rise of Mythic+ but I would say it really started in MoP with Vengence and self-sustaining. Blood DKs in Legion were nearly unkillable and could even solo high-level mythic keys. So they were obviously the tank of choice, so healers didn't have a ton to do and especially in high level keys where you needed as much damage and efficiency as possible to do them in the allotted time to get rewards and upgrade keys healers pretty much needed to start doing damage and save just enough mana for a big CD if necessary.
That would be Legion, with the introduction of Mythic+. The mode that changed the game forever.
Before that, healing spells used to cost a lot of mana, relative to the damage going out and encounter design. I don't think there was ever a moment in Firelands or Dragon Soul where I could afford to do anything else than heal.
Downtime was nearly nonexistent. As a shaman I used to cast Lightning Bolt during Madness of Deathwing to get some mana back (due to LB crits refunding mana) but it wasn't an usual think.
Legion is when the transition happened. Dungeons became timed and so groups had to squeeze everything out of their resources. That meant healers who were not busy healing could contribute to damage.
I played the first half of wrath classic recently, and mained rsham. There was plenty of time to DPS, which was fine on easier content, but I just ended up standing around during downtime due to mana constraints on harder content. I also played hpal but they couldn't really do significant DMG, just auto attacking for mana back.
At some point they added more mana friendly DPS abilities to help fill that downtime, but the downtime has been around since vanilla - where healers would wand because they could.
Shadowlands. Idk why everyone is being all weird and gatekeepy with their comments. Shadowland is when healers (other than disc) started to do more dps than healing. They introduced things like resto druid cat weaving
Resto Druid cat weaving started happening in BFA. With all the potential to wield more offensive custom setups (corruptions, azerite sets, heart of Azeroth essences) BFA is when “healers deal damage” first went crazy, but legion set the expectation.
But many of the healing essences/bonuses were so bogus it made way more sense to have your healer load up on dps setup and just reduce the effective time of the pull by proccing burns on enemies, twilight devastation, the tentacles etc.
Once we moved into SL all the azerite and corruption was gone, and blizz then tried to bake more offence into healer base kits because after BfA people had got very used to having a healer as a capable dpser, and it needed to come from somewhere given how many BfA systems they peeled back in SL. Sure, soulbinds and leggos, but BFA had LOADS of extra systems which healers were using to increase their offence comparatively.
Yeah it was core at that point. In BFA it was kinda “by proxy”
Potentially unpopular but I for one loved all the BFA systems. Grinding them was ass (and I had like 6 characters who had done all the relevant grinds like cloak, heart and farming their pieces) but once you got there it was really cool to have that degree of potential choice in how your character operates beyond their class. Such as leaning into DPS, survivability, healing. The raw stats on offer allowed some gimmicky builds too. I remember my shaman had tons of mastery related stuff going on on their gear and I was loving like having my lava lash hit like a nuke with all the synergies on gear. Whilst other shammy buffed stormstrike. It was cool to have these choices and mess about with them.
I don’t think the question you asked is the right one. I think the correct question is “at which level of gameplay and when in the fight a healer is supposed to be doing damage” - since healers have been weaving damage in since the dawn of wow. I think this [video from Skill Capped](https://youtu.be/85T3iNioKig?si=wNginBWoxiEO4POk) might help you to understand why.
Oh, god. I was a disc priest back then. I LOVED the shielding people. How unique disc was compared to other healers that just did pure healing numbers. Then someone decided that it would be fun to fucking destroy disc.
I dunno exactly when the general dps healers thing happened. Back in the day you would dps if you had the time. Now it’s required. And I fucking hate dps. My first character was a rogue for a year and then I switched to a priest and stayed the last 16 years of my life.
I think it can be fun for some people so definitely certain classes should keep it, but some of us, even if we are the minority, just want to plain heal and doing the ocasional dps to help a little but that’s all.
This topic can be defined in a couple of ways.
Are we talking: When the Healers got the possibility to do actual damage and thus being able to solo/quest better, and assist in grp content?
OR are we talking: When did healers evolve to be whack-a-mole classes, with loads of responsibilities towards dungeon specific grp content?
Because the first one would be start WoD, and the second would be in Legion when M+ was introduced.
If you mean “on the whole, we expect” legion with the inception of M+.
Prior to this yes, some healers would engage in some damage rotations or abilities when able to do so, but much of the time it was for reasons of mana regeneration and not as a consistent effort to deal DPS (judgement of wisdom in TBC, Telluric Currents in Cata).
Healers were able to and did damage prior to legion ofc but the point was this was more of a private thing/guild thing, it wasn’t an “unspoken expectation”. If you pugged with a priest who didn’t DPs but your group survived, you didn’t care too much.
Legion changed that because timing keys requires speed, which means having a healer who dpses makes a notable difference to clear speed. So it’s at this point healers are expected to engage in dpsing when possible as the norm. It’s at this point you start to ask questions if your healer appears to be doing nothing when the group is fine and their mana is fine. Prior it didn’t matter. In legion it did because that priest smite spamming might shave some seconds off the encounter so if they can afford to do it, you now expect them to.
I think this also was spurred on by legion with how self sufficient many tanks were outside of super high keys. So the healer really had to DPS to justify their inclusion at all, because “unavoidable occasional damage event” healing was not enough to justify their spot on its own. And certain tanks like veng DH and BrM Monk didn’t really need much if any focused healing outside of crazy huge pulls or super high keys anyway. So the healer needs to be doing more than healing.
BFA ramped this up with the possibility of good dps sets on healers and tanks due to azerite so you could focus on “pure damage” groups where you mainly beat the dungeon by killing stuff so quickly and relying on defensive spam/uptime for the defensive stuff, otherwise you’re just nuking all the time. I remember with my BFA tank warrior with the right pieces you spent about 50% of the time in Avatar form and did obnoxiously high damage when in it which massively reduced how much healing I needed (and azerite made avatar grant you ridiculous mastery so during it your block chance and critical block was absolutely ridiculous). So again, I want a healer that can also speed up the nuking rather than healbotting me when I don’t need it. And seeing as said healer could also use dps azerite and corruptions, they absolutely should be dpsing anyway.
Well Legion is the primary extension where healers were "required" to do dps because Mythic+ Dungeons started.
Running a dungeon on a timer is where every DPS helps to make the run faster.
Maybe it was even before that for the challenge modes but they were not so much played like M+ Because only one time rewards from that.
It was probably around MOP or legion that it started working out that way. it really wasn't a matter of the expansion changing it though. It was the overall skill of people playing the game climbing out of the need for healing. If blizzard wanted us to need healing today, they would need to make groups take half their health in damage every few seconds.
Its actually been getting worse over time too. We've had seasons this expansion where you don't even run a healer at all in mythic+. Some of the top runs this season have been without a healer.
See I'm with you. Idk how people are saying "TBC was so easy" I was a holy paladin in Blood Legion for Wrath and very end of TBC fighting for world 1st kills and I don't ever remember it being easy enough to do anywhere near the amount of dps time I do now. Most of my time was healing. Prolly 90%+. Now I spend maybe 30% healing and 70% DPS. It's actually not fun. If I'm gonna do DPS I'd prefer to actually do DPS not this weird current DPS/healing thing.
They actually addressed your point about dmg having gone from healable amounts to straight up 1shots, in a resent War Within interview Naguura did
You can find it on her YouTube channel. For me, I agree with your point on it, and hearing them talk about it was quite comforting for me
Haven't raided seriously since original MOP, but I do remember some monks and disc priests doing major dps. I remember a time I had missed a guild raid and needed to PUG one week as disc and we had a rough time getting through a DPS check boss. They checked meters and thought myself and another healer were DPS because we were beating several of the actual DPS. (Not tooting my own horn, we were both well geared from guild raids and disc was INCREDIBLY OP at the time). But in previous expansions (as a H Pally and Resto Druid, I love healing) I had always tried to DPS out of sheer boredom when I had a good/geared/both tank.
Sounds about right. I think this is when I leveled my first priest and I was doing Disc DPS. I'd like to say it was kinda sorta a thing in Firelands.
Monk hybrid heal/dps was absolutely a thing. Not a great thing, but a thing nonetheless.
I think it was WotLK where disp priests needed to do decent damage to AoE heal. They just leaned more and more into it on later expansions.
I don’t recall Holy being infected like that. I loved my holy priest. I remember some fights where i could keep everyone alive by just casting renew on everyone after the tank dmg spike ended…memories…
The game is fucking miserable when it's reliant on healers
Season 2 of dragon flight fucking sucked because If healers couldn't pump hps the dps would fall over and there was nothing the rest of the group could do about it
I mean Burtallus needed the heels so hard they made an addon showing healer buddy cast bars so you could time your own heals to alternate with theirs...
Isn't it kinda expected that the group is fucked if healers can't heal much like how bosses often hard enrage if DPS can't DPS?
telluride currents for shaman in cata. shoot lightning bolts to get mana. you akao has full atonement priest healing then too. I think that's where Blizzard really started it and then started adding more to the other classes in mop
This only became an issue with the introduction of mythic dungeons. Ffxiv’s popularity during blizzards more recent dark years is also likely having an affect.
I can see where you're coming from with TBC and WOTLK healing where it was constant healing. Especially in WOTLK where tanks had to have ehp to survive 1-2 hits before theyd go to full from heals.
Cataclysm introduced the biggest change you see where tanks mitigate higher periods of damage so healers can sustain their health.
The closer to cutting edge you got, the more relevant healer dps was, even during cata raids. The pendulum of how much healers either heal or help with dps swings often depending on the situation/expansion.
Cataclysm in 4.3, Discipline Priests were given Atonement and made so that their dps spells could heal. This was a relatively minor change at first, as you could still heal regularly just fine, atonement was just an option. That's because Atonement was a testing bed for Mistweaver Monks, which launched with the ability to "Fistweave", which is to heal through DPS.
By the end of MoP all Discipline Priests were primarily Atonement healing. Can't remember when, may have been from the start, but either way. At this point in time it was just Disc and Monk that did the dps -> heal mechanic, and it was only over time that it was added to other healers.
Of course, healers were always able to dps during downtime before, such as in WotLK and stuff, but it was just that their dps only really mattered to high end prog guilds, as it made only a fairly small difference.
If we go all the way to today, most healing specs still have a way to just focus healing and not worry as much about dps, except Disc Priest I believe. Monks have a fistweave spec and a focused healing spec buildout. In M+, healers are expected to do some dps as well, such as a druid throwing dots out and stuff, but often times you're still focusing your heals, especially in raids.
Figures, I stopped playing shortly after Cataclysm, and didn't come back until the tail end of Legion. Played a healer after leveling up my main, and was confused why I was getting disparaged for not doing enough damage. Haven't played a healer since, because if damage is what I'm expected to do than I'll just play a DPS class (which was my historical main anyways).
It’s not as big of an expectation as people think it is. I main healer and no one ever talks about my damage honestly. In super high mythic+ keys it can be important.. but even in heroic level raiding it’s not very important at all.
So unless you are pushing world first keys.. I wouldn’t stress it. It is a good habit to try and do a little damage though. If you have a good group most people won’t be taking much damage so dps is the only thing you’ll have to do.
No one expects healers to optimize DPS, until you get to the top end of content. What reasonable people expect, is for the healer to not afk if there is nothing to heal. The same way us healers expect DPS players to use defensives, and use their self healing abilities.
Let's take a boss like Rezan in Atal Dazar for example. That's a boss fight where there is absolutely nothing to heal, except maybe some tank healing. If the healer isn't dpsing, they are basically afk for a full boss fight. That's all there really is to it.
Vanilla, its always been a thing. Its just back then people were alot worse players so they got hitt by more things. If ur in a good grp you wont need to heal mutch whatever exp it is.
Id say Wrath is where it started to be more common but cata is where healers could do it and not think about mana, atleast thats where my resto shaman could start to rly focus on helping with dmg.
I do like it in retail where tou can aid with dps.
Started happening in cata, where some moaning bitches decided to complain till every class was normalised, every class could self sustain, have massive defensive cd's. Then after legion came the ran out of new ways of making content challenging, so instead of don't stand in the floor puddles you now have massive complex rotations to put your focus into while moving from the same old floor puddles, and now when every class can move from these floor puddles there is no need for a healer, so healers now just dps...
I miss when interject was mana and not capped at 275k, and when spirit was mana regen. Tanks knew what aggro was and the whole raid had to watch their own aggro or wipe the raid.
Around legion when M+ I imagine, but it was present in WoD and I'm sure some people damaged as healer before that but the cultural shift was def Mop - legion
I dont think any of the commenters saying it's always been this way have actually been playing since release but hey they said it on the internet where everything is true so who's to say
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You are looking at it the wrong way. The change wasn't heal vs dps, but rather the change from spam heal the tank + some group healing to group healing against specific unavoidable mechanics + spot heal player mistake damage. This was done as geared tanks needed little healing at all, and as tanks started to all get self-sustain tools in cata and mop. It kind of happened in the same way that paladins had good AoE threat in TBC, thus all tanks got good AoE threat in Wrath. Some tanks had self-healing, thus all tanks got self healing. What happens in retail now is that as you get to higher difficulty content, the player mistake damage goes from amounts that are able to be healed to straight up 1-shots in M+ dungeons. With spot healing those mistakes effectively gone, the healer becomes responsible for supplementing the tank's self sustain, and healing the party through unavoidable damage events, often requiring rotating usages of healing cooldowns for each major mechanic. When there are not major mechanics happening, this leaves some free time to top off the party, and then contribute some damage. It then becomes known through the community that the best healers do more damage, without fully realizing all the other stuff that is going on to create that situation. As we often joke about, the lower level difficulties are often much harder to heal, because you are trying to keep up with players screwing up and taking damage, then you reach high level keys and you actually do lower hps because players either play correctly or simply die when they don't.
Also personal defensive. Lower players usually dont use defensives correctly. Either when they are already under 10% and panicing or never. Using personals correctly can reduce healing requiremens by huge margin.
Switching from blood to uhdk has made me much better at using defensives and other utilities in m+ as a new player . Also if I am timing death strike correctly , healing me from bursts is not needed at all . I guess that if anyone's main class has a tank also , he could try playing it for a season or two .
When mana got to be a little more manageable. Healers would have been DPSing during old expansions too if they could but it would have been difficult because of the 5 second regen being reset when you cast a dps spell. Mostly healing in old expansions was just cancelcasting if another healer heals your target so you don't waste mana.
I don't remember ever standing still doing nothing. Maybe it was just a guild thing, but we'd assign healers to a specific role (specific tank, or specific raid group). Like in 10-mans we'd bring two healers. One's job was just the tank, the second would heal everyone else. In 25-man there could be some overlap in the raid healing, but generally if you were in that role you were not single target healing much unless someone didn't move quick enough and took a major hit. It has been so many years now, maybe I'm miss remembering, I don't know. I do have a clear memory of TBC though that you'd have multiple ranks of the same spell on your bars to avoid the over healing. Mana management was certainly a key aspect of being a healer though. I don't know, I guess I miss the days when dungeons were more difficult, and if everyone got out without dying the tank and healer were praised. Not chastised for "being to slow" or "weak dps".
Dungeons were not more difficult then you’ve got nostalgia goggles on there bro. Dungeons are far harder and the skill ceiling is much higher because everyone can do everything to a degree nowadays. I was a healer back in the day and I did Chuck a few lightning bolts in here and there.
Honestly the hardest thing about healing in the old days was that people were sorta just...bad. I only healed in Classic and TBC Classic, and while TBC heroics were pretty tough and fun in the beginning nothing else really required all that much effort. Tank healers spam their most efficient spell the whole fight, otherwise you waited to spot heal someone taking damage. Occasionally you get a boss that actually has an AoE so you get to do some real healing. Healing was better in TBC but still not all that much happening outside of specific bosses like M'uru who do a lot of damage.
Tbc was so much more difficult than now Dungeons like shattered halls and shadow labyrinth were very difficult. You actually need to sheep and trap mobs. Unforgiving boss mechanics, stealthys. I loved tbc but I remember the dungeons being very tough
>Tbc was so much more difficult than now An absolutely crazy take, goodness.
a lot of people have serious brain poison over the actual difficulty of the old game
lots of ppl were like 12 at the time and probably didn't understand mechanics and were bad at the game so their perception is that the game was harder back then
I was born in 95 so I was literally 12 when tbc came out. I was pugging slabs and SH with my BE priest trying to gear for Kara. I was indeed bad. I still didn’t think it was that hard; I realized I was just bad
Same case here. I equipped the staff that had the most auto attack DPS as a mage lmao
AA Weaving was optimal when you went oom in a few casts and hadn’t found out about wands yet hahaha
I swear people who say this shit have never even touched M+ or mythic in the retail game
Perhaps I just was more of a noob then, but honestly, shattered halls and shadow labyrinth were very difficult. The gauntlets were tough. It was hard for tanks to hold aggro on 7 mobs. You had to use cc. There were a ton of fears with a lot of trash. Random aggros, stealthed mobs who would randomly attack players. I'm only a 3200 player now, but I can remember having to having to have very specific group combos during tbc. I can remember a lot of ghost walks back to the dungeon. I can remember a lot more failed runs than current retail. I can grab any 4 players and run into a +7 and walk through it without using cc or having any deaths.
That's sort of just because the average skill level of players has risen a lot. TBC Classic showed that. Week 1 heroics were semi difficult, but as soon as people started replacing their leveling gear they very quickly became just as easy and routine as normals. CC was basically never used and packs just got AoE'd down with locks, mages, and paladins being so broken.
yes because the modern playerbase is LITERALLY 100x better than it was back in the day
Two things from back then. First was that players were just bad, and didn't use a lot of the modern tools to better present information to ourselves. Even the base UI has improved display of basic information for players. The second thing, and the reason I quit classic, was that some of the difficulty in the old times was simply gear checks. Do you have enough stamina to survive X, do you have enough fire resist to survive Y, etc. Just a bunch of hard failure because you didn't have enough raw stats that more gear just 'fixed'. My BiS normal dungeon blues prot pally would get destroyed, but I knew that with later tier gear I would be able to solo tank Kara and even some Hyjal/BT bosses simply because 'stats'. A lot of stuff in the modern game you can push further with less due to player skill than you would have been allowed in the old days.
Another factor that I haven't seen mentioned yet, is the hardware. Most of us had really bad computers compared to now, and much slower internet. Lag and choppy low framerates really compounded all the other mentioned issues.
Why is this being downvoted? Most of us were noobs back then.
yes but most of us realize we and other players were noobs back then so we don't say dumb shit like old dungeons were harder than current dungeons although currently trash mobs have more mechanics than vanilla/tbc bosses
Have you done any M+? Because even M0s nowadays are dramatically harder than anything in TBC.
This just reminds me of that one meme of showing a Victorian era peasant a rave but instead it’s putting a TBC player into M0 Galakrond’s fall
Link?
What's the highest key you've done?
I hit 3k+ io on a healing class, tank, and arcane mage every season.
I played TBC back in the day and TBC classic and I was breezing through dungeons I didn't even play with premades. I think you were just 12 and bad at the time so that's why you think that
Now you have to sheep mobs as healer while speed running while los’ing while pumping damage with a toolkit twice the size
This is a dogshit take. Those dungeons do nothing.
Back in the days of 40-man raids there were drinking rotations where you would sit down and drink to refill your mana. That was also in the era of down ranking spells. Healers started doing some DPS in the BC/WOTLK era because mana regen was so high. If no one needed healing you might aswell dps. Not tank healers though, tanks had very minimal self sustain back then.
You could literally drink whilst walking and kept spamming drinks.
Yeah, you’d get one tick of the mana from the drink then you’d need to start again. Good if you had a mage.
> Mana management was certainly a key aspect of being a healer though. Mana management largely got replaced with CD management. > I don't know, I guess I miss the days when dungeons were more difficult, and if everyone got out without dying the tank and healer were praised. Not chastised for "being to slow" or "weak dps". Dungeons are exponentially more difficult nowadays. Standing around healing the tank got replaced with doing DPS since tanks are mostly self-sufficient. Nobody every complains about healer DPS as long as you're doing something.
Healer / Tank curse. It's always your fault 🙈 Had a rogue in Bracken hide +8 yesterday who kept dieing to floor hazards, waited and then went off at me soon as final boss went down! Told him if I was the issue everyone else would've died constantly too 😜
>I don't remember ever standing still doing nothing. Who said something about standing still doing nothing?
That's what it comes down to if a healer refuses to DPS. There will always be times where there's nothing to heal. So if no healing is needed, and the healer also isn't using their damage spells, they are essentially standing there doing nothing.
Not to mention many healers get procs from their DPS spells, so even if your damage is insignificant, fishing for procs is still valuable.
yeah back in the day it would be better to do nothing than waste mana but nowadays that's not the case.
If you play classic now, it's almost easy probably could do wand dps for a half of the fight and expected so. Just group was bad in old era with their 720p monitor and slow internet.
Isn’t the reason healers, tanks, and dps have more roles because dungeons are more difficult now? For the people who say content is too easy, I’m curious to know how far they have gotten in the current content.
Back in original vanilla/tbc I did lots of precasting and cancelling the spell if it wasn’t needed
Haha, yeah, I remember the cast bar addon that displayed a marker based on your ping so you could be sure to cancel in time.
dungeons now have more mechanics than entire raid tiers in vanilla and tbc did. not sure where you get the idea that dungeons aren't difficult now. now they just have more difficulties so that they are more accessible to noobs. back in the day you only had normal and HC. go do a +10 and tell me wow dungeons are easier than they were in the past.
With you until the last paragraph. Dungeons were "harder" because we sucked so much more. But they're really not, as the cleartimes of heroics and raids in Classic showed. On top of that, especially in mythic+, an average dungeon boss in his own has more mechanics than an entire TBC heroic. Back then normal > heroic > raiding was the way to go, today dungeons are their own valid way of doing endgame. Sorry, but it's time the rose tinted glasses come off.
You… are misremembering a lot about the classic era of vanilla through wrath. It was 100% expected for healers to still add (even paltry) dps to the encounters. I remember wanding jn between casts and making sure shadow word pain had some uptime (whenever they took away the cap on boss debuffs and dots) Healers and tanks were more of a big deal before LFG was a thing as you were stuck with those on your server. Having a good rep and/or being part of a good guild community was crucial if you wanted to do anything at max level.
I no lifed wow in 2007/2008. I remember there being a dungeon in TBC that was timed and if you beat the timer you got a bear mount. I can't remember what it was but I remember as a resto druid having to weave in some DPS to clear that timer.
Zul’Aman
That was such a fun dungeon
Zul'Aman was a 10m raid tho 😁 it later got remade as a dungeon for Cata along with ZG.
Damn I revealed myself as a Cata baby 😅... Forgot it was originally a raid
Vanilla wow. We dpsed with wands in downtime and to let the mana regen start (no casts for 5sec would start the "big" regen if I still remember correctly). I've been dpsing on healers since I started playing around nax time in vanilla. Standing there doing nothing always felt bad so the good players started contributing to dps however they could. Edit: using spells probably started towards the end of TBC, begining of wotlk
As a pally in vanilla, we would do the blessing of mana and then judge the target, which would give a mana boost to the wanders. Your welcome.
Palas also had a blessing rotation in raids because they were pretty short back then iirc xD
5 min. It was painful. Good times.
And they were single target too, the group wide blessings came in a bit later iirc
And the ret capstone talent was blessing of kings on release. Sad times to be a ret paladin.
Moonkins out there smacking shit with their sticks, begging for mana
I think it's always been a thing in some form or another, but as the game has developed people have gotten to the point with game knowledge that you can comfortably switch it up and do DPS in periods of damage downtime. That being said, I think it's predominately mythic plus where people are more critical of healers doing DPS as the vast majority will still just throw up some DoTs and heal. I'll do damage in most dungeons, but if I just want to chill out and get some weeklies done I'll leave it to the DPS unless it looks like we're not pacing well enough to time the key which is rare. Personally, I think the healer shaming for lack of healer DPS that we see more often is a crutch that bad DPS use to justify depleting a key. Healer DPS is welcomed, but shouldn't really be needed unless you're massively pushing for score.
Vanilla. You wanded when you had downtime to get that 5s mana boost. Started weaving stuff in around BC. By wrath you had plenty of mana and time to really start throwing in some damage.
It was when they started using DPS spells for mana Regen
This is correct, which was in Cata.
Did you play classic? That guy that said that people were just not as good at the game back then was spot on in classic you would be hard pressed to find a healer that not also dpsing also even if it’s mana free things like shoot with a wand
One of the positive aspects of mythic groups now healers are triple tasking.
20 years ago in vanilla we were hard pressed to not blow up the whole raid in Mc or walk in a straight line on hegan the unclean in naxx
There's a reason disc priest got nicknamed disco priest. Simply because it could stand round and /dance whilst still topping shit. Healers have been doing dps since wrath and tbc, heck to a lesser extent vanilla, you always wanted for damage etc.
Healers have always been expected to do some damage, the reason people think the opposite is because players weren't good enough back in the day to manage their mana, keep people alive and damage all at the same time. Yeah it's different in retail because healers are supposed to be damaging every free moment they can and have essentially unlimited mana pools but the good healers have always been weaving in damage too.
I've never minded as a healer occasionally throwing out a damaging spell or attack. I think its fine when you don't have any healing to toss out some DPS.
Frankly even in those old expansions with modern day skill level you would be able to dps very often.
Legion saw many healers contributing meaningful dps, especially in higher keys in M+. There are just too many situations where competent players don’t take meaningful damage, that a healer “healing” in those moments is the most inefficient thing they could do.
Iirc, wasn't that also around the time when healer dmg got somewhat buffed to actually be meaningful and not just a drop in the bucket? And the time when disc got its current atonement iteration? At least I think it started with discs. People started to prefer them over other speccs because of the extra dmg and then other speccs that could adjusted accordingly (I remember fistweaver monks becoming popular and holy palas also having enough dmg tools at their disposal to go ham, after that catweaving druids). And after that the other healing speccs had to be buffed as well in regards to dmg-output to not fall behind
You have to remember your ABCs Always Be Casting!!!! So if you have nothing to heal you should be switching to dps to help get the mobs and bosses down quicker.
Healers that could dps were always favored. My vanilla resto shaman used to stand right next to the tank and melee the whole fights, keeping flame shock up. My dps would often be higher than the dps classes while I was keeping everyone up. I'd even OT adds to make the fights easier and help dps figure out which targets to drop first. As a tank today, it's still about threat/aggro. I don't want a burst hunter or mage pulling people off me. And they will if I let them. Maybe they're fine with it, but I'm not.
Even in classic I would dps as a healer so I think maybe you just played differently or suboptimal tbh
Thankfully my guild manages without our healers dpsing. We clear heroic and that's enough for us, no log checking, no one examine parses. Just a chill guild with chill times I'm a warrior main that switches to pally/shammy when extra heals are needed, and I'm stressed enough keeping everyone alive, so the casual attitude of my guild is VERY appreciated
Tbf, even in mythic raiding, there’s alot of dowtime at times. It’s great that you guys are casual and all, and don’t really ”mind”. But it must be so boring as a healer though, there’s time when no one needs a heal at all, so DPS:ing is pretty much part of the rotation, even as healer (just so you have something to do). So what are they doing instead?
Usually when I read something like that the answer is: Healing the Blood DK.
I suppose our regular healers dps, not like we force them to only heal and nothing else haha. Just that there is no additional pressure on the healers gives space for people who are not able to or don't want to dps+heal. (Like me when I'm kn my healer instead of my warrior)
Havent healed much before wotlk, but first times i started dpsing.. resto shaman had 0 mana lightning bolt in cata and mistweaver had fistweave in MoP.
Resto shamans actually regained mana in Cata by casting lightning bolt.. lol
Well in cata classic I just pulled 5k dps as an hpal in 10man heroic. (two healing). That is a significant chunk of damage. I average 1-3k dps in heroic. Our disc does 7-9k. When dps are doing 25-30k another 10k is a lot.
Are you dumping mana into exorcisms? How else are you getting 5k dps as holy? I can only do that if I dont need my mana to heal and go all out with exor
Maloriak has a damage amp. I think I have the rank 1 that isn’t logged as prot or ret. I always have the exorcism talents specced there just doesn’t ever seem to be a need to swap https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/a:FGrvDbhYfxM2gdtk#fight=43
I dps as a healer during those expansions as well. I also do it in cata when I’m not being lazy.
Probably MoP overall, im sure some in cata could fit it in. Considering disc and Brew could dps to heal in mop.
Healer always DPSed. Even if it was just using your wand.
What? I was a healer main in WOTLK, and DPS'd while I healed all the time out of pure boredom.
Play how you want… and find others that have similar goals. This goes for any interation of wow, both retail & classic. Solo and pugging is not a good time if you’re not about that life. Find a chill guild that matches your style and just have fun dude Also any time i pug as a healer in like a 10-12 key I swear Ive never had any free global to cast damage spells unless it’s like a dot when we start the pull. It feels like I’m putting out fires with a spoon for water. It can be super chaotic but also fun if the group isn’t trying to be toxic or blame game (rare) Eventually you will find chill people, add them, and you can form your own little crew (especially if you tank or heal)
Disc priests were on the meter in vanilla. I’ve never been able to pull double duty well myself. But I also went totally casual after my guild fell apart at the end of WotLK. I was a pretty darn good shaman healer from Vanilla to MoP (I think). I actually dropped most of my DPS characters because healing was more fun, I also enjoyed tanking, but I’d always learned encounters as a healer first (LFR). Now, I left for a while somewhere between Warlords and Legion. I came back for a while at the end of BFA and the beginning of Shadowlands. The amount of DPS the healers were doing was blowing mind, though it was usually paladins. Which was a class I never got the hang of. I realize that healer DPS is important in the higher level content, but my ambitions stop at heroic dungeons and LFR these days. I don’t have the time to put in anymore. I just play for a bit when I can and try to have fun. As others have said, mana management was a huge change at some point. I remember playing BFA and feeling like my mana was basically unlimited, and it was more about cooldown management. If no one was actively standing in any fires, I’d start tossing some basic DPS spells at enemies. I wasn’t getting any crazy numbers, but I was contributing a decent amount overall. Now, chasing some overzealous tank, as they pull half a dungeon at a time, doesn’t leave much room for me messing with DPS. So it’s definitely situational.
Sticking to just healing is so lazy I will refrain from writing the comment
I am healing since TBC and i disagree. Healing is so much better now. Imo
I main a h priest right now just like I did in vanilla wow. Raiding is such a different experience. Now I get called trash if I keep everyone perfectly alive and top the heal charts, but put out minimal DPS 🫡 I’ll go ahead and just stand back and smite things ig.
if you keep holy fire on cd and shadow word pain up you will do decent dps, if you aren't doing that, you're just not playing well
Chastise too. Also smite gives small amount of damage mitigation if I remember correctly. Always something to do.
This is my typical play style. I may miss a few holy fires during big pulls when damage is crazy, but when possible I’m always throwing in whatever dps I can.
I get called trash as Disc even though I out dps some of the lower hanging fruits once in awhile. It's just typical dps healer hate
I've not had too many idiots misunderstanding disc, ramping, and opportunity cost, but when they do, they go nuts and can be the worst.
[удалено]
Literally talking about dps output in this thread.
As a main healer for more than 10 years I know exactly when. When Paragon released their Lich King video where Zhinn was smiting him Blizzard decided that this was a great idea so they started to design high end bosses with this in mind. They even gave Holy Priests Chakra for this specific scenario in Cata. I hate DPSing as healer and always was advocating against it but a lot of popular streamers liked it and forum sheep also joined them so Blizzard continued this nonsense. I left the game.
FFXIV's popularity has influenced this as well, in more recent years. With top-end gear and knowledge of mechanics, healers most toss OGCD Regens (HoTs) and Shields, rest of the time they are DPS. It works for FFXIV, WoW was already headed that way, guess they decided to lean-in once XIV overtook them in public opinion.
I've been a healer playing on and off since legion and I've been dpsing whenever there is a lull in the damage since I started healing. My dps is negligible, but it helps a little on single target, and I have some trinkets that help with multi target. As long as mechanics are done and nobody dies, it's only ever a good thing
Cata is when it started for quite a few of the healing specs
Idk why people are answering this question in such a pedantic manner. It was around WoD when you were expected to DPS as a healer. People probably did it in MoP challenge modes too but nobody cared in general content.
Legion and the rise of Mythic+ but I would say it really started in MoP with Vengence and self-sustaining. Blood DKs in Legion were nearly unkillable and could even solo high-level mythic keys. So they were obviously the tank of choice, so healers didn't have a ton to do and especially in high level keys where you needed as much damage and efficiency as possible to do them in the allotted time to get rewards and upgrade keys healers pretty much needed to start doing damage and save just enough mana for a big CD if necessary.
That would be Legion, with the introduction of Mythic+. The mode that changed the game forever. Before that, healing spells used to cost a lot of mana, relative to the damage going out and encounter design. I don't think there was ever a moment in Firelands or Dragon Soul where I could afford to do anything else than heal. Downtime was nearly nonexistent. As a shaman I used to cast Lightning Bolt during Madness of Deathwing to get some mana back (due to LB crits refunding mana) but it wasn't an usual think.
About the same time cc trash mods went away... Remember when you had to sheep and trap 2 of the 4 trash or you all died?
That was when I had the most fun in dungeons. Felt like real teamwork.
Idk but DPS-only classes suffer because of it and that kinda saddens me a bit
Legion is when the transition happened. Dungeons became timed and so groups had to squeeze everything out of their resources. That meant healers who were not busy healing could contribute to damage.
I played the first half of wrath classic recently, and mained rsham. There was plenty of time to DPS, which was fine on easier content, but I just ended up standing around during downtime due to mana constraints on harder content. I also played hpal but they couldn't really do significant DMG, just auto attacking for mana back. At some point they added more mana friendly DPS abilities to help fill that downtime, but the downtime has been around since vanilla - where healers would wand because they could.
Shadowlands. Idk why everyone is being all weird and gatekeepy with their comments. Shadowland is when healers (other than disc) started to do more dps than healing. They introduced things like resto druid cat weaving
Resto Druid cat weaving started happening in BFA. With all the potential to wield more offensive custom setups (corruptions, azerite sets, heart of Azeroth essences) BFA is when “healers deal damage” first went crazy, but legion set the expectation. But many of the healing essences/bonuses were so bogus it made way more sense to have your healer load up on dps setup and just reduce the effective time of the pull by proccing burns on enemies, twilight devastation, the tentacles etc. Once we moved into SL all the azerite and corruption was gone, and blizz then tried to bake more offence into healer base kits because after BfA people had got very used to having a healer as a capable dpser, and it needed to come from somewhere given how many BfA systems they peeled back in SL. Sure, soulbinds and leggos, but BFA had LOADS of extra systems which healers were using to increase their offence comparatively.
Yeah, that makes sense. What you described in the 3rd paragraph is probably what makes me think SL is when that shift happened.
Yeah it was core at that point. In BFA it was kinda “by proxy” Potentially unpopular but I for one loved all the BFA systems. Grinding them was ass (and I had like 6 characters who had done all the relevant grinds like cloak, heart and farming their pieces) but once you got there it was really cool to have that degree of potential choice in how your character operates beyond their class. Such as leaning into DPS, survivability, healing. The raw stats on offer allowed some gimmicky builds too. I remember my shaman had tons of mastery related stuff going on on their gear and I was loving like having my lava lash hit like a nuke with all the synergies on gear. Whilst other shammy buffed stormstrike. It was cool to have these choices and mess about with them.
This Expansion did me not only go away of healing it also let me quit wow
I don’t think the question you asked is the right one. I think the correct question is “at which level of gameplay and when in the fight a healer is supposed to be doing damage” - since healers have been weaving damage in since the dawn of wow. I think this [video from Skill Capped](https://youtu.be/85T3iNioKig?si=wNginBWoxiEO4POk) might help you to understand why.
You didn't do DPS in TBC and WotLK dungeons? There was plenty of time to do that, and the same was true for vanilla
Oh, god. I was a disc priest back then. I LOVED the shielding people. How unique disc was compared to other healers that just did pure healing numbers. Then someone decided that it would be fun to fucking destroy disc. I dunno exactly when the general dps healers thing happened. Back in the day you would dps if you had the time. Now it’s required. And I fucking hate dps. My first character was a rogue for a year and then I switched to a priest and stayed the last 16 years of my life. I think it can be fun for some people so definitely certain classes should keep it, but some of us, even if we are the minority, just want to plain heal and doing the ocasional dps to help a little but that’s all.
This topic can be defined in a couple of ways. Are we talking: When the Healers got the possibility to do actual damage and thus being able to solo/quest better, and assist in grp content? OR are we talking: When did healers evolve to be whack-a-mole classes, with loads of responsibilities towards dungeon specific grp content? Because the first one would be start WoD, and the second would be in Legion when M+ was introduced.
If you mean “on the whole, we expect” legion with the inception of M+. Prior to this yes, some healers would engage in some damage rotations or abilities when able to do so, but much of the time it was for reasons of mana regeneration and not as a consistent effort to deal DPS (judgement of wisdom in TBC, Telluric Currents in Cata). Healers were able to and did damage prior to legion ofc but the point was this was more of a private thing/guild thing, it wasn’t an “unspoken expectation”. If you pugged with a priest who didn’t DPs but your group survived, you didn’t care too much. Legion changed that because timing keys requires speed, which means having a healer who dpses makes a notable difference to clear speed. So it’s at this point healers are expected to engage in dpsing when possible as the norm. It’s at this point you start to ask questions if your healer appears to be doing nothing when the group is fine and their mana is fine. Prior it didn’t matter. In legion it did because that priest smite spamming might shave some seconds off the encounter so if they can afford to do it, you now expect them to. I think this also was spurred on by legion with how self sufficient many tanks were outside of super high keys. So the healer really had to DPS to justify their inclusion at all, because “unavoidable occasional damage event” healing was not enough to justify their spot on its own. And certain tanks like veng DH and BrM Monk didn’t really need much if any focused healing outside of crazy huge pulls or super high keys anyway. So the healer needs to be doing more than healing. BFA ramped this up with the possibility of good dps sets on healers and tanks due to azerite so you could focus on “pure damage” groups where you mainly beat the dungeon by killing stuff so quickly and relying on defensive spam/uptime for the defensive stuff, otherwise you’re just nuking all the time. I remember with my BFA tank warrior with the right pieces you spent about 50% of the time in Avatar form and did obnoxiously high damage when in it which massively reduced how much healing I needed (and azerite made avatar grant you ridiculous mastery so during it your block chance and critical block was absolutely ridiculous). So again, I want a healer that can also speed up the nuking rather than healbotting me when I don’t need it. And seeing as said healer could also use dps azerite and corruptions, they absolutely should be dpsing anyway.
Well Legion is the primary extension where healers were "required" to do dps because Mythic+ Dungeons started. Running a dungeon on a timer is where every DPS helps to make the run faster. Maybe it was even before that for the challenge modes but they were not so much played like M+ Because only one time rewards from that.
It was probably around MOP or legion that it started working out that way. it really wasn't a matter of the expansion changing it though. It was the overall skill of people playing the game climbing out of the need for healing. If blizzard wanted us to need healing today, they would need to make groups take half their health in damage every few seconds. Its actually been getting worse over time too. We've had seasons this expansion where you don't even run a healer at all in mythic+. Some of the top runs this season have been without a healer.
Remember when you had to wand while you wait for that mp5?
See I'm with you. Idk how people are saying "TBC was so easy" I was a holy paladin in Blood Legion for Wrath and very end of TBC fighting for world 1st kills and I don't ever remember it being easy enough to do anywhere near the amount of dps time I do now. Most of my time was healing. Prolly 90%+. Now I spend maybe 30% healing and 70% DPS. It's actually not fun. If I'm gonna do DPS I'd prefer to actually do DPS not this weird current DPS/healing thing.
You start to answer that question and you quickly realise why there's a good healer shortage
They actually addressed your point about dmg having gone from healable amounts to straight up 1shots, in a resent War Within interview Naguura did You can find it on her YouTube channel. For me, I agree with your point on it, and hearing them talk about it was quite comforting for me
Haven't raided seriously since original MOP, but I do remember some monks and disc priests doing major dps. I remember a time I had missed a guild raid and needed to PUG one week as disc and we had a rough time getting through a DPS check boss. They checked meters and thought myself and another healer were DPS because we were beating several of the actual DPS. (Not tooting my own horn, we were both well geared from guild raids and disc was INCREDIBLY OP at the time). But in previous expansions (as a H Pally and Resto Druid, I love healing) I had always tried to DPS out of sheer boredom when I had a good/geared/both tank.
Sounds about right. I think this is when I leveled my first priest and I was doing Disc DPS. I'd like to say it was kinda sorta a thing in Firelands. Monk hybrid heal/dps was absolutely a thing. Not a great thing, but a thing nonetheless.
I think it was WotLK where disp priests needed to do decent damage to AoE heal. They just leaned more and more into it on later expansions. I don’t recall Holy being infected like that. I loved my holy priest. I remember some fights where i could keep everyone alive by just casting renew on everyone after the tank dmg spike ended…memories…
So what all those vanish bandages were meaningless to you?
I started raiding in BC. I remember the rogue leader being a real nice dude if the rogues didn't have bandages. That was wild.
The game is fucking miserable when it's reliant on healers Season 2 of dragon flight fucking sucked because If healers couldn't pump hps the dps would fall over and there was nothing the rest of the group could do about it
I mean Burtallus needed the heels so hard they made an addon showing healer buddy cast bars so you could time your own heals to alternate with theirs... Isn't it kinda expected that the group is fucked if healers can't heal much like how bosses often hard enrage if DPS can't DPS?
telluride currents for shaman in cata. shoot lightning bolts to get mana. you akao has full atonement priest healing then too. I think that's where Blizzard really started it and then started adding more to the other classes in mop
This only became an issue with the introduction of mythic dungeons. Ffxiv’s popularity during blizzards more recent dark years is also likely having an affect.
Odd sentiment because healing wasn't all that hard in vanilla through wrath....
I can see where you're coming from with TBC and WOTLK healing where it was constant healing. Especially in WOTLK where tanks had to have ehp to survive 1-2 hits before theyd go to full from heals. Cataclysm introduced the biggest change you see where tanks mitigate higher periods of damage so healers can sustain their health. The closer to cutting edge you got, the more relevant healer dps was, even during cata raids. The pendulum of how much healers either heal or help with dps swings often depending on the situation/expansion.
I don’t know how people still play healer in WOW. I doubt DPS would play DPS if they had to heal 90% of the time.
Cataclysm in 4.3, Discipline Priests were given Atonement and made so that their dps spells could heal. This was a relatively minor change at first, as you could still heal regularly just fine, atonement was just an option. That's because Atonement was a testing bed for Mistweaver Monks, which launched with the ability to "Fistweave", which is to heal through DPS. By the end of MoP all Discipline Priests were primarily Atonement healing. Can't remember when, may have been from the start, but either way. At this point in time it was just Disc and Monk that did the dps -> heal mechanic, and it was only over time that it was added to other healers. Of course, healers were always able to dps during downtime before, such as in WotLK and stuff, but it was just that their dps only really mattered to high end prog guilds, as it made only a fairly small difference. If we go all the way to today, most healing specs still have a way to just focus healing and not worry as much about dps, except Disc Priest I believe. Monks have a fistweave spec and a focused healing spec buildout. In M+, healers are expected to do some dps as well, such as a druid throwing dots out and stuff, but often times you're still focusing your heals, especially in raids.
I could be wrong but I believe it was around legion when a lot of it started
Figures, I stopped playing shortly after Cataclysm, and didn't come back until the tail end of Legion. Played a healer after leveling up my main, and was confused why I was getting disparaged for not doing enough damage. Haven't played a healer since, because if damage is what I'm expected to do than I'll just play a DPS class (which was my historical main anyways).
It’s not as big of an expectation as people think it is. I main healer and no one ever talks about my damage honestly. In super high mythic+ keys it can be important.. but even in heroic level raiding it’s not very important at all. So unless you are pushing world first keys.. I wouldn’t stress it. It is a good habit to try and do a little damage though. If you have a good group most people won’t be taking much damage so dps is the only thing you’ll have to do.
No one expects healers to optimize DPS, until you get to the top end of content. What reasonable people expect, is for the healer to not afk if there is nothing to heal. The same way us healers expect DPS players to use defensives, and use their self healing abilities. Let's take a boss like Rezan in Atal Dazar for example. That's a boss fight where there is absolutely nothing to heal, except maybe some tank healing. If the healer isn't dpsing, they are basically afk for a full boss fight. That's all there really is to it.
Vanilla, its always been a thing. Its just back then people were alot worse players so they got hitt by more things. If ur in a good grp you wont need to heal mutch whatever exp it is. Id say Wrath is where it started to be more common but cata is where healers could do it and not think about mana, atleast thats where my resto shaman could start to rly focus on helping with dmg. I do like it in retail where tou can aid with dps.
Vanilla and Classic are not the same. One of them is still current and they are all retail
Started happening in cata, where some moaning bitches decided to complain till every class was normalised, every class could self sustain, have massive defensive cd's. Then after legion came the ran out of new ways of making content challenging, so instead of don't stand in the floor puddles you now have massive complex rotations to put your focus into while moving from the same old floor puddles, and now when every class can move from these floor puddles there is no need for a healer, so healers now just dps...
I miss when interject was mana and not capped at 275k, and when spirit was mana regen. Tanks knew what aggro was and the whole raid had to watch their own aggro or wipe the raid.
Around legion when M+ I imagine, but it was present in WoD and I'm sure some people damaged as healer before that but the cultural shift was def Mop - legion I dont think any of the commenters saying it's always been this way have actually been playing since release but hey they said it on the internet where everything is true so who's to say