Today’s WoW developer chat on Twitter is now complete! The selected questions and answers are here.

They answered my question straight up – which is awesome, since last time I posted the same one but it got skipped over.

Q. Is the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter a deliberate move towards making WoW more “fun & interesting” for healers? Will we see more encounters like this?

A. We want to make healing more fun, yes. Part of that is letting healers use their whole repetoire instead of just their best spells. Part of it is trying to get healers to look at the battlefield a little more and unit frames a little less, that of course means a little more time in between spamming heals so you can do stuff like that.


I suppose it was mostly a rhetorical question. I kinda expected them to say “yeah, sure.. it was totally deliberate.” Although, they didn’t actually say that it was a deliberate move with healers in mind.

At any rate, I will be very interested to see how they can make things more interesting by having us heal less – because logic, to me, dictates that a fight that requires less healing will become a fight that people simply take fewer healers to, and that would be BAD.

That is, if we’re spamming less, and running around more, won’t people just lean towards taking fewer (but skilled) healers who can spam a little more than intended? And then stack the group with more DPS?

It’s an age-old problem though. Making encounters harder usually means we have to spam harder. If they want to make things more “fun” and have us look at the fight more, that (apparently) means spamming less. But will that make us feel bored? Will it make the fights easier? Will it just encourage raids to stack more DPS and fewer healers?

I dunno, I’m happy staring at my coloured boxes, for the most part. But I know there are lots of people out there who want to enjoy the encounter more, rather than just staring at frames. So how can the developers keep things challenging while satisfying the healers who want more immersion?

While I don’t particularly feel like campaigning for “more interesting” healing, I am VERY interested to see how they can make things challenging AND immersive for us. Because I have no idea how they are going to manage that.

(Please, WoW gods, don’t ever consider the horrible suggestion of “let’s heal people through their nameplates!” Because whack-a-mole + LOS + range + jostling nameplates is NOT my idea of super funtime raiding..)



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