Hi guys, so after leveling up my shaman I am feeling disappointed. I didn't know about this mechanic that causes your wards to basically do nothing. I throw up my wards and it just seems totally pointless because my party takes massive damage through the wards and I end up using my direct heals anyway. Is there any stat to reduce bleedthrough?
No. BT is definitely the Bane of Shaman. You just need to rotate heals and wards to effectively heal. Wards are still important. They can keep people from being one shot on major incoming hits. It's a bit of an adjustment, but you can still heal effectively once you learn the dynamic.
I also wish they'd go back to putting bleed through information in the logs. They never gave ANY reason as to why they took that information out, let alone a satisfactory one
Gosh I just feel like I wasted so much time working on my shaman. What's the point of having a class that uses wards (which I think is a really cool mechanic) when they basically are nullified by bleedthrough. It seems like if I want to be a healer I should choose another class.
I couldn't find any real information online about this. It's such a bummer cause I've always loved playing my shaman but now I just feel like I'll always be playing at a disadvantage.
Back in Kunark Ascending, bleed through USED to be in the logs.. so we could see how much (from each mob ability) was bleeding through each ward. They removed that info from the logs without warning or explanation.
Bleed through is in my concern not the real problem at the moment. One of the main problem of shamans and wards in general is that they do not scale correctly above 1B, actually wards should probably be 3 to 6 more efficient if they were increasing in a linear way like they do before reaching the 1B limit Compare your wards tooltips and real value with different stats (potency/cb/fervor) and see for yourself Until wards calculation is fixed shamans will continue to decline. It'll be even more a problem if the heatlh pool and surge damage continue to grow as well, because ward do not scale correctly above 1B. The hidden "Heal mitigation" that exists in some zones does not help, as well as the fact that not all healers are affected in the same way : direct heals, wards, damage reduction, damage intercept, making some healers so much more powerfull than others
Shaman are still very effective healers. Back in the day you pre-warded and stacked wards to ensure group survival. Now stacking wards has no benefit unless enough damage is coming in to deplete the wards even with the bleedthrough. So instead of stacking wards, I follow up with more direct heals or totemic protection. It's a different cast order no doubt, and very different in the beginning but still allows you to solo heal very effectively. I agree with Moss's post. The apparent cap on wards is troubling. What's the point of all the Potency and CB if it doesn't scale our primary ability. It hasn't caused a major issue for me yet in healing most content, but on fights with heavy surge damage it does force me to do little else but spam the group heal when its up and reapply the group ward. If they don't look at this carefully for the next expansion it could become a much larger issue.
And this is why my Mystic is now retired as a healer and pursues weaponsmithing, when the expansion has anything useful she can craft. And why I created a Channeler. I just couldn't adjust to the bleedthrough. I expect that if I made myself play nothing BUT the Mystic with friendly groups for a while, I'd eventually get it figured out. But it frustrated me enough that I had to set that toon aside for a while.
It saddens me to see such a long-time player of the mystic class be in this position. The last time I played a mystic was.... CoE maybe? I don't know all the nuances that is the shaman today, so I never really had a grasp on how bad the bleedthrough effect was. From an outside perspective, it doesn't sound so bad... throw up wards, cast group heal to make up the damage that gets through, sounds easy. Reading the various comments about how bad it really is, is a bit disheartening. On the other hand... welcome to the Channeler club?
There should be a warning that pops up during character creation any time a person selects shaman as their class which states: Be advised, for reasons unknown, the primary healing method for this class is 75% ineffective in the majority of encounters.
It's not that the wards don't scale above 1b, it's that the devs have coded in that very very hard 'soft cap' on wards, back at least 2 expacs ago and haven't changed it. Nor will the acknowledge it. There has been a clear change in the dev.... vision.. of how healers should work/play. For reasons undisclosed to players, priest dps has been steadily and intentionally decreased and the incoming damage has been increased (without a corresponding increase in heal size or hitpoint pools) to require priests to spend more and more and more time healing. This also makes the priests gear (and frankly the priests skill) less and less important as the hitpoints of the toon being healed have become the primary, if not sole, determining factor of a healer's ability to keep that toon alive. (Tanks are somewhat exempted.. because the tanks have to use their own defensives to help or no healer can keep them alive reliably on non-trivial content). This has made healing more and more of a heal button mash-fest while hoping nobody dies while heals are on cool-down. Unfortunately, I don't foresee any changes, since they have continued on this path for several expacs despite extensive feedback from healers. Hopefully the trend of making healing less fun and rewarding while making more and more (non-trivial) content require 2 healers for stability doesn't continue to the point of failure.
I've been arguing against BT as a mechanic forever. Combining constant ticking damage with BT is basically a recipe for frantic heal spamming (at least in the tougher fights).
What they SHOULD do with this, is: lower crit/pot/etc bonuses to wards (the % would have to be balanced) to a reasonable level. Then completely remove bleedthrough. The percentage would depend upon whether they allowed stacked wards or not. It really was a mistake to take those bonuses all the way to %100 just before potency started jumping year to year at an order of magnitude because it basically made healing as a shaman a snorefest. That left them with the ridiculous bleedthrough mechanic. Having a zillion point ward on someone and watching them die while there is still a ward on them is just silly.
Am I the only one who thinks bleed-through was introduced because people were whining about ACT heal parses, where shaman wards (which absorbed damage first) looked higher than other classes?
It was added because shaman could heal entire zones hitting their group ward. It was impossible to balance it out so a druid or inquis could heal an encounter that might be challenging for a mystic or defiler.
As soon as they put booster rockets on the amount of cb and pot players had while keeping hitpoints moving ahead at a walking pace, they completely destroyed any chance of balance for healing, since, for reasons undisclosed, they have declined to a) increase hitpoints at the same rate as cb/pot or c) bring pot/cb back down to reasonable levels Instead they've added extra rockets to cb and pot and added fervor, further skewing things.
Bleedthrough is a pita no doubt, but you can still be an effective healer in spite of it. I'm used to it now and just heal through it...no biggie.
The only way to balance wards without bleedthrough is to make it to where a normal heroic encounter's damage will break the wards routinely (that's the way balance was at the beginning of the game).
