Well folks, it’s been a while, since I posted. Life has been quite busy for this little shaman. Things are calming down so you’ll see me posting more often (hopefully!). The past week was BlizzCon 2011, a fine time for everyone who got to go. For those of your readers I got to meet, it was an absolute pleasure! Shaking hands with readers is always fun, and sharing a drink with them is even better. Possibly one of the most exciting bits of news was the announcement of the new Mists of Pandaria! Not only will we finally get to play as our kung-fu pandas that we’ve been waiting for since the days of WC3, but it will bring with it a new class, the Monk.
The Monk class is an important addition to the World of Warcraft game for many reasons. Chief among them it is a hybrid class capable of filling all roles in the holy trinity of MMORPG; Tanking, DPS and Healing. This marks the third class capable of all three roles, with the other two being Druids (OP!) and Paladins. The monk class promotes active playing. It’s a twitch class, and will be in all of it’s roles. While in DPS there is no auto attack, so you will constantly be hitting buttons. In tanking that will still be the same, and in healing well that’s where things get interesting.
Healing for a monk is not just about playing green bar whack-a-mole. The healing monk will be an incredibly active monk. Weaving into close combat to keep their orbs charged and then running around the raid/group to place healing statues or cast effects. It makes use of the monks base abilities of tumbling and generally being a high mobility class while making you do things like deal damage or do other non-specific healing things to generate healing power. Well, that sounds pretty familiar to me, I mean this is exactly the type of healing I was talking about in March of 2010 here on the site!
It will not be your grandfather’s healing, or at least that’s the idea behind it. Since we’re still in an alpha phase, things will likely change. I personally hope they won’t. I revel in the idea of an active healer. I love the idea of being a hybrid and having to do different things in my role as a healer. I really think that it’s about time that something like this was brought into the world of warcraft as well, if for no other reason than the fact that other games are doing this as well.
T.E.R.A Online will promote active healing. Healing classes there will not just have to do multiple things besides healing in combat, they will actually have to actively target their spells for them to heal. No more just clicking an interface and a key, you will have to duck dive dip and dodge while healing, and target the right person too! Healers in SWTOR will be healers with teeth, capable of not only healing those around them but fulfilling other roles as well. The Smuggler combat medic smacks of a billy bad-ass that runs around with wookies and will make sure you don’t die… for a price.
The point is, that the future of healing classes in games is moving away from the tried and true method of select unit frame, select spell, and to see the adoption of this in WoW in the next expansion speaks volumes to me of the IP’s survive-ability. The willingness to adapt to the market is important, and to me is exciting.
I play a healer in every game I play that allow it. I love healing, it is my passion in gaming outside of story. I’ve been healing a long time though, so anything that mixes up the normal click and click method of healing to me is exciting. Making me throw punches to charge up my healing? I’m OK with that. Making me have to run around and place my healing wards to actually heal things? I’m OK with that too. Don’t get me wrong, I love healing on my shaman, it’s always a lot of fun for me, but something like this has me seriously considering the possibility of switching to a monk to heal. It depends greatly on execution and how it feels being a healer in the expansion with the class, but I can honestly say I haven’t been this excited in a long time. I can certainly tell you that the vast majority of my play time when I get my beta access to MoP will be playing with the monk healing style to see how I like it.
So, what do you think? Does the idea of monk healing excite you? Do you think it’s silly and hate it? Do you bring PANDAMONIUM!?
I personally really like the idea of a healer who is more active; I enjoyed the healing classes in the Warhammer MMO (despite its other shortcomings)because their healing tended to be increased based on the damage they dealt…and in some cases it was required.
With the challenge dungeons which will presumably place a premium on squeezing out every drop of DPS you can from your group I hope they bring other healers up to the level of Disc Priests rather than nerf Disc’s atonement healing. I have always thought it would be cool for paladins to want to be in melee smacking away; and I hope this will be true of monks.
I’m excited too about this, but I also wonder if it will succeed. I enjoyed the melee healers and the dps/healer hybrid of warhammer, but wow has some constraints that other MMOs don’t have. Movement is always an additional burden and balancing that against the other healers in 5/10 man PvE encounters where you don’t have the luxury of being niche looks to be a very tall order. I can think of tons of PvE encounters that if I had to keep a spatial awareness of the whole group to do my job, I’d be pulling my hair out.
I hope they succeed, but a class built on short range heals looks to be very difficult to pull off in today’s wow PvE encounter design.
On a side note, I do find it kinda interesting that they are going to promote healer DPS in the same expansion that they’ve decided that they can no longer balance tank DPS (splitting feral druids into two specs).
I’m hoping they add more of an Active healing system to the Disc Priest also to completely seperate holy and disc.. Atonement Healing is actually pretty fun and hope it gets a little more love similar to the monk
I’m looking forward to this too. I did normal mode 5mans while leveling in wrath as enhance dual wield healer… Using 2x earthliving and building mw stacks for insta- chain heals. It was more fun than resto spec I thought, but not really viable in endgame content without ES and riptide. I hope monk healing can be like that… And I hope enhance healing could be viable again!
I am interested to see if the monk healing ends up being anything like what was promised at blizzcon. Combat healing is going to be a completely different game than the current model and it will either be unbalance-able or so much more/less fun that everybody/nobody will want to play it.
Also don’t hate druids, just ignore that orange bar at the top of your WoL parse and be thankful that our retarded output allowed the encounter designers to put in all sorts of fun (high dmg) mechanics in the firelands. FL was a druid raid, which should give you a good feeling about what is about to happen when we join your buddy Thrall in Dragon Soul.