Also, not sure if you noticed but, the gap between raiders + bads is smaller than it has EVER been. To say you need raid gear to outgear the zone is just LOL.
No one is saying we want the same ward values as previous expansions. Why does everyone seem to think that's the point of this? Please try reading, rather than assuming. And, to the Shamans. Quit with the talk of other healers. It's very nearly crossing the line of asking for nerfs, so let's avoid that so we don't get another thread locked, eh?
They should make all of it cast faster to be honest. Wards are the muscle cars of healing in a world where gas is over 3 dollars a gallon. They should be made more efficient. That doesn't mean making them hit harder necessarily. Shorter cast times and some more utility tacked onto them would make a world of difference, without restoring them to their throne. That balance needs to be made around content that actually stresses the limits of a class, not around heroic zones being done by potentially "challenged" players in weak gear.. AKA, most heroic scenarios.
Shorter cast times would mean nothing without shorter recast times. It's not the time to cast that is a problem. We can only put wards on as fast as they come off cooldown. Not that I wouldn't appreciate cast time reductions (especially on group ward), but it would solve very little, if anything.
Not exactly. It's not about being able to put out more HPS. It's about being free to click other buttons, instead of spending half the time casting wards that get eaten in a fifth of the time it takes to cast them. Reuse times could be adjusted as one of the potential solutions, but the reuse doesn't start until the cast time completes.. so you're gaining reuse speed by starting the reuse sooner by casting faster. Follow? Plus, the freedom to use other things would allow you to get some extra DPS off, debuff sooner, respond with emergencies quicker or whatever without detracting from your regular healing ability.
How does increasing the cast speed on something that is gone instantly help you do other things? The logic doesn't follow. Currently: Cast ST Ward in 1 second, Ward gone instantly. 3 seconds to recast, so cast 3 other spells (2 of which are probably heals). Half Cast Time: Cast ST Ward in 0.5 seconds, Ward gone instantly. 3 seconds to recast, so cast 3 other spells (2 of which are probably heals). With current "balancing," wards are simply lesser direct heals.
Yes that is a good idea to lower the cast time of our ward. it is probably the best idea so far, by lowering the cast time we will have more time to cast heals and debuffs. Other healer will still have to heal since we wont be able to maintain our ward up 100% of the time. The cast time will have to be lowered by like 30 to 50% too.
@Sylke What? If you finish casting .5 seconds sooner, your recast starts .5 seconds sooner, and your recast will be up .5 seconds sooner. And I don't just mean your single target ward. That is a significant amount of time freed up per round of warding. Plus, the theoretical (and probably practical) possibility that you'll squeeze in an extra ward in between auto attacks or right before a big spike. Over the course of the entire fight, your raw HPS would only change by the slight reduction in reuse time (0.5s-1s), but you'd be able to do a lot more in shorter bursts. If you knew a big spike was coming, which isn't unheard of (saves coming down, etc) it would take you half the time to fully stack the tank with wards. Or, in situations where you currently can't fully stack the tank before it hits, you would be able to frontload twice as many. You'd be on cooldown for roughly the same amount of time, but you would have doubled the amount of spike damage reduction for that round of combat by getting twice as many wards off. Which is the point of shaman'ing, right? If you have a second healer, you can certainly afford to stop rolling your face on your wards for the sake of accumulating a big burst in ward amount. And if you don't have a second healer, you're not suffering from wards falling off instantly because you're still dealing with the AOE spikes on the whole group, which don't hit repeatedly as to overwhelm your reuse times anyway.
Increasing cast times wouldn't free up time to cast things other than heals, it would just accelerate the speed at which heals were cycled. The way to free up time for non-heals would be, as you stated earlier, to add some kind of residual effect to Shaman heals/wards. Whether that was to cause all standard wards to regenerate once or twice, or to add a damage reduction percent on termination of wards. Or some other idea.
"it would just accelerate the speed at which heals were cycled." Aka.. more outgoing heals? Are you that desperate not to agree with me that you'll split hairs to such an absurd degree? How can you cycle more heals, without healing more? Even if all of your heals were down, you'd still gain like 5 seconds of free time to cast other things, as well as marginally shorter recast on all of them. You wouldn't have to choose between "healing or warding" like was complained about earlier in the thread. You would have more control over when exactly those heals landed, instead of just chain casting and hoping they landed at an opportune time. Imagine if wards had a 10 or 20 second cast time. It wouldn't matter how short the reuse was if you were casting the entire time. That's exactly how it is now, to a lesser degree. The cast speed on them is hugely inhibitive.
I never said it wouldn't increase healing output, just arguing your statement that it would free up time to cast non-heals.
It would free up time to do something besides ward... which.. sigh. Whatever.. I think I might hate Shaman. You're like the new brawlers. I give up
Unless you're being semantic on wards vs heals, I fail to see how it would give us extra time to cast anything else when we are already struggling to keep up on heals. It would take a very large cast time reduction to increase healing output enough to enable more different spells to be cast.
As far as CB goes, Darkon did make a good point with the CB being lifted to at least .75. Especially, since the mechanics that made them reduce it to .5 are no longer relevant. I'm against having utility added that would mime what non-shaman healers currently have, but if they were to tack it onto wards as Maergoth is suggesting (e.g. damage reduction), then I am really ok with that.
I approve of any enhancement to utility that does not change the existing play of the class. Adding components to wards or debuffs would be fine, in my opinion. As long as I do not have yet another button to click because I already have enough of those. I've mainly stopped posting because I've lost hope. When I'm not required to log on and miserably slog through raids on my shaman, I'm having loads of fun playing my Channeler for everything else. Sucks, but what can you do.
Ok the reuse on a st ward is 3 seconds, as you stated. It takes 1 second to cast the ward, as you stated. That leaves you 2 seconds before it is up again, and thus two seconds to cast something else. If it only took you .5 seconds to cast the st ward that would leave you 2.5 seconds to cast something else between the ward. Is that clearer?
No, because reuse starts when cast ends, not when you start casting. So reuse would be 3 seconds in both situations.
Unless they fix it within the month, that will be 1/4th of the year of this problem existing. Two months, and it will be 1/3rd of the year. That's a lot of time for being unhappy with a video game that you're paying money for! Besides. As a pessimist, the worst case scenario is that I'll be proven wrong and get to have fun.
Hmm that's true, but it still makes sense. If you have your group ward cast and then cast your single while you're waiting for the group to come up you still cut .5 seconds to cast other spells during that time. It's what 7.5 seconds recast on the group ward? If it takes 1 second to cast the single target and 3 seconds to recast, then you can get two single targets off during the the cool down on the group ward, leaving you 5.5 seconds to do something else within that time. If the cast time was reduced in half that would give you 6.5 seconds. It may not seem like much, but it definitely frees up time to cast something else. Plus, Maergoth also suggested tacking utility onto the wards which would also help. I don't know about mystics, but with defiler, if you cast additional spells between your single you get Empowered Barrier which is a really nice single target ward. If you get the chain going, that reduced cast time would be really nice.
