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I played during Vanilla: Want to (Have to) Come back...
MMOVet82
Member Posts: 33
Hey all...
I'm a 31 year old guy from the New York area and I used to play WoW heavily. I was a big part of Vanilla and I stuck around for quite a bit of TBC. Loooong story short...I quit this game several years ago and moved on in life but I simply cannot get away from it. Maybe it was how heavily I played for a while but I can't shake this game from my memories or dreams. Bottom line: I want to come back. This is still the most populated MMO out there and I want to see how I fare in today's game.
I want to be a healer. I've been a tank, a dps, a utility, etc...But I always ultimately wanted to be a healer and raid leader who understands the dynamics of every battle.
I'm downloading the starter client as we speak. I've done a bit of research tonight but wanted this community's input: For a primary raid healer, what do I want? I understand there are multiple builds but what will give me the most gas for my mileage as a healer? Druid, Priest, Monk? Is a holy priest still the #1 healer in the game followed closely buy a resto druid? Where does a Monk fit into the mix?
As said, this game used to be my life. I'd like to get back there. I want to get great again and be able to be the main healer for competitive guilds. Where do I go from here?
Thanks,
Joe
Comments
Thanks for your reply: Something has to be the cookie cutter favorite though. I would naturally think it would be a Priest. I mean, some class has to have the main raid healer title these days, no? Is it really that balanced now?
And that approach works these days? I guess this will be easier than I thought.
Looking at the class specific talents and the talent trees I think it's pretty obvious that a priest is the way to go for me...
Coming back will cure you of that feeling, sorry to say. I too miss the feel of my early Warcraft days. After coming back for cataclysm, I realized that what I was looking for could not be acquired in current wow. But even looking for private servers has failed to bring that feeling back.
I wish you the best in your pursuit. I hope you can get that feeling back, but dont be afraid to simply enjoy those memories and feelings when they come to you if you can't get back to that place.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
IMO, if you plan on returning and having fun I suggest that you don't expect it to be like it was during vanilla. It's nothing like it was during that time, but that doesn't mean you can't like what it is now.
Find things within the game that you enjoy the most and focus on them - that's what I do.
I'm only a few levels in (waiting for my account upgrade to leave the queue) and of course I can't help but notice just how different everything is. Everything is fast tracked, streamlined, and much easier in general. What I'm surprised to see is how the higher level dungeons contain so little in the way of trash mobs and are just a few corridors filled with bosses. I can't say I'm shocked: This was what the masses were screaming for back when I was playing TBC.
I definitely know this isn't going to be like my early days on Vanilla back in '06. So much time has passed and so much has changed. The landscape and world maps alone are so drastically different.
I rolled a Troll Priest. I like how the racials mix with the talents of a priest and think I could develop a really good healer out of this. I'll play...somewhat casually, and see where it takes me. It's definitely not the good ol' days anymore, though. They practically spoon feed quest items to you now.
Although I didn't play as heavily as you I had some great times in this game in 2005/6. I fear that going back to the game now will not be the same, especially with the vanilla experience having been changed so fundamentally.
However, reading this reminded me how much fun I used to have and I've decided to download the free trial and give it a shot again.
It depends on what you want to heal like. I'm an avid healer or tanker myself. Although pretty much everyone but monk heals the same, each have their on strengths and weaknesses.
Druid is my favorite healer. You can glyph your mushroom to aoe heal on the ground, and it lasts the longest of any of the "smart" heals, 5 minutes. As a Druid, to get the maximum from healling, you'll be keeping a HoT on the tank (lifebloom) and then using rejuvenation and Regrowth (if you have it glyphed) or Healing Touch/Nourish to keep everyone else up. Druid is the HoT healer, great for keeping people topped off. Other than Wild Growth and Tranquility, there isn't much in the way of AoE healing however. Tranquility is one of the best heals in the game imho though.
Monk is probably my least favorite healer. You will be very busy as a Mistweaver. I really have no clue how it works 100%, but you can attack and the game will choose who to heal for you, and then switch to pure healing when needed by channeling Soothing Mists and using your other mist spells which you can cast instantly while channeling. Monk is another good HoT healer, I just think Druid is simpler and easier to manage. However, in 10mans the extra dps you get from Mistweaver is a bonus.
Paladin is a good main tank healer. With Beacon of Hope, any heal you use on other players will heal the Tank as well, which is good. Lay on Hands has saved the main tank or someone that's about to die more times than I can count. I don't really play my paladin holy as much as protection, because I think they make a better tank, but they do fairly well on the healing charts.
Priest has two ways to heal. Priest does good with mana, since they have a few abilities that help gain mana back, but it's nothing like Shaman. Holy is your typical healer that everyone knows since the begining of MMOs. It's one of the easiest to play. Discipline is the FotM healer right now. With Atonement you can heal people like monk, but from range, just by attacking. Also Discipline can save a lot of people's lives by using their shielding techniques. They have the most powerful shields in the game (except for paladin's hand which has no cap, only time limit hehe). Disc priest is popular with 10man because they can add a lot of dps to the group while healing. It's not uncommon for a good Disc priest to top the healing and dps charts at the same time.
Shaman has the best mana management imho. Druid is good with mana as well, but Shaman can regain mana quickly, and restore mana to others in the entire party. Shaman also makes a great tank healer, since their heals increase the tanks overall health points. I've seen tanks with over 1.4 million hp tanks to my Shaman healing. Shaman is probably my second favorite healer, behind druid. They're pretty straight forward, while also having a lot of utility with their totems and other abilities.
All the Healing classes do a great job at it, so it really just comes down to a matter of preference. I guess I'm more of a "heal the earth" kind of guy, so I like Druid and Shaman hehe.
Edit: sorry for the long post, in short, just pick which healer you want to play hehe.
This is some awesome and valueable info for everyone who wants to return as a healer.
I've been playing healing classes only for many years in WoW, but eventually quit the game because i was beyond sick of the constant imbalances among healers and huge, borderline classbreaking nerfs that hit healing abilities while other healspeccs been left way overpowered and untouched for patches and patches to come.
The game never handled classbalance very well, even to an extend where one could assume it was on purpose. But playing several healers, this constant juggling hit me left and right literally with whatever char i logged in.
Good to see that all healers are about equal in both fun and value to the group/raid nowadays.
Just understand that the game has been largely simplified now, to the point that builds don't matter too much anymore. That's not always a bad thing, especially since you can find a build that has a fun playstyle for you without having to use something else because it's "more effective."
It's still a really big design change compared to Vanilla and TBC, so worth mentioning.
You make me like charity
That's sort of a fallacy if you're talking about talent trees as there wasn't really any choice or depth in those either. Maybe a point or three to put where you wanted, but as a raider, there was basically one viable spec.
I would recommend a Druid because they never oom and they heal like jesus but they have like 100 buttons so you could easily become overwhelmed.
Second: Pally, same as a druid but their heals are HUGE.
I have a priest and raid healing it meh (Holy)... we oom easily and I dont feel like theres much bang in our heals. I'm more of a PvPer though. You cant kill a Dpriest in PvP 1v1 no matter how hard you try.
wow's idea of balancing is giving everyone the same spells with different skins.
That's blatantly false. People are so disillusioned with this game and "what it did to the genre" that they'll readily make things up to suit that viewpoint.
As a former "hardcore" raider from the Vanilla and TBC days, I can say with certainty that there were many viable talent specs. That doesn't mean they all performed equally, but there'd be many examples where a different spec would do, say, 90% as well as the standard cookie cutter spec. So yeah, there were clueless raid leaders who certainly demanded cookie cutter specs just because a website shows them to be mathematically superior, but they did so without realizing just how close the other options came to matching it.
It wasn't all perfect, and there was definitely some straight up useless stuff, like Shaman talents that boosted your shield blocking, but there was definitely more variation than anyone cared to realize if they just limited themselves to the "best" spec.
You make me like charity
At the moment, Shaman is the best healer in the game.
None really stand out as terrible though. The rest are fairly balanced.
P's if you're going to lead there is a way toresto shaman is my favorite class for multi tasking, druid is just busy work, pally is boring and monk/priest are meh
I disagree with you. The talent and glyph choices now are actual choices. Picking mathematically superior talents wasn't a choice at all. You took those talents or you gimped your class. Maybe your raid leader was fine with DPS showing up doing 10% less DPS on purpose during TBC raiding, but mine would have benched me and I wouldn't have blamed him.
Like I said, there was a bit of wiggle room with a few leftover points, but the talent trees of TBC and Vanilla didn't offer any more depth than what we have now.
Not sure if your rose tinted glasses are fogged up or if you are deliberately being misleading. After you got all your essential talents you literally had less than 10 points to play around with for optional things, which meant choosing 2-3 talents and maxing them. Most of these were just fluff choices - reduction of mana cost for rarely used skills, lower hate generation, slightly better CC etc - which is why they didn't matter if you strayed slightly from the cookie cutter build. And even then, usually only one of the other trees offered things that would synergise with your primary tree.
What you didn't see was people doing 50/50 builds, or even 33/33/33 builds, because the endline abilities were simply too powerful. You HAD to spend those points in that tree, if you wanted that specialisation, which just made it an illusion of choice, when in reality there was very little actual choice available. Could you make terrible choices and be a gimp? Sure you could, but for anyone with a brain it was pretty straight forward.
At least in the new system, you get 6 ACTUAL choices to make, which are all mostly viable for either PvE or PvP. There is far more variation between builds now than there ever was in Vanilla.
Can you please film yourself loading up the game and the subsequent 1-2 hours of play so we can see the soul crushing horror that will descend on you as you see what the game has turned into? This would be epically awesome.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche