Drug explains: Why too much damage mitigation is bad but Ancestral Healing is great.

This is an answer to Llyra’s post on the topic of Damage prevention and Ancestral Healing.

You should absolutely head over to Healing Way and read the post and its comments, but here’s a quick summary anyway: His main point is, that shamans don’t provide enough damage mitigation. He also mentions, that Ancestral Healing doesn’t do a good job at providing damage mitigation, because we can’t provide the buff with a single button press, as it only procs on critical healings. His solution would be, good damage mitigation spells for every class, in another post he thinks about something in the lines of PW:S.

I  do see, why I shaman could think he lacks damage mitigation abilities. The problem is, you can’t look at damage mitigation on the scale of “me vs. other healers” but only on the scale of game balancing as a whole.

In the meta game of “what is my absolute HP”, there are three important factors: Incoming Damage, Incoming Healing and Damage Mitigation. While Incoming Damage and Healing are pretty obvious, there is an incredible source of damage mitigation: Parry, Block, Dodge, Shield Wall, Ice Black, Grace, Ancestral Healing, PW:S, Magic Resistances, well you see, the list there could go on forever.

At this point, Damage mitigation is balanced but already setting a shy foot in dangerous unbalanced waters. A good example is Chilling of the Throne, an Aura which will be introduced for Icecrown raiding. The Aura will reduce every tank’s total dodge by 20%. The reason why blizzard has to apply this band aid? Too much damage mitigation. This has left tank healing in a state, where tanks mitigate such an extreme amount of damage, that the incoming damage is getting ridiculously high, else it wouldn’t be actually threatening. This makes tank healing too spiky and leads to a lot of silly two shots over a very short time, even if you raid with very well geared tanks.

You can’t give out more damage mitigation without increasing the incoming damage. The bigger incoming damage is, the sillier and spikier healing gets. You leave the path of fun reactive healing, where healers get to decide which person needs a heal and who can hold out another 1-2 seconds and get into the direction of tank healing=raid has to be at 100% all the time or else people will die. Damage mitigation is a very critical balancing issue and we’re already on the verge of having to much in the game. Everyone who had the pleasure to raid with a good Discipline priest knows, how much easier they can make some fights. Especially when there is a boss timer and we all now when the damage is going to hit the group. Pre-Shielding the raid is incredibly useful. BUT, all this damage is still damaged around the fact, every balanced group of healer can heal the damage and Disc priests aren’t mandatory. Would we give an active, strong damage mitigation to all healers, we would get in a situation where all damage is balanced around a very high amount of damage mitigation on raid/tanks, which would lead to the not so fun, spiky healing.

The second point, why I don’t think additional damage mitigation for shamans is necessary is, that I believe that reactive healing is what makes healing fun. It makes us healer very important and we healer learn to make important decisions. Directing our next heal to player A or player B can decide over win or wipe. It also leaves more responsibility in the hands of DPS and tanks. A good DPS will fire up his own damage mitigation spell or pop a health stone or healing pot and help us healers keep the raid alive. In an environment of more damage, spikier damage where every healer can provide a strong mitigation buff, those buffs would decide who lives and who dies. The incoming damage would only be a mean to check if healers are applying their damage mitigation spells properly. In tank healing we’re already in a situation like that, where you don’t respond to damage with healing but rather just heal to keep the tank at 100% at every time, else you would risk a two-shot death.

Also, a lot of reactive healing isn’t really reactive, but rather the sum of an experienced healer who knows where damage is going to land before health bars respond. A pre-cast Chainheal, directed at the right person at the right time is just as valuable and much more fun than any damage mitigation ability.

Now, what I said above is more or less directed at shamans and all healers getting a strong damage mitigation spell on a rather short cooldown. This is bad. Where I see more room for balancing is emergency spells on long cooldowns, like Guardian spirit, Pain Suppression or Hand of Sacrifice. Those abilities don’t disturb overall game mechanics very much. They’re in the game to mitigate huge damage spikes just not meant for reactive healing, but a clever rotation of internal cooldowns by the tank or external cooldowns by us healers. Here, some love for druids and shamans would be great to help them be complete tank healers.

The third and last reason, why I don’t think shamans need an active damage mitigation spell, is the fact that we have Ancestral Healing. I know, that it is dependent on crits and can’t be provided with a 100% uptime. But those small three points in our talent tree will kick a PW:Shield’s ass any day (if the PW:S is cast by a Holy Priest) in regards of overall damage mitigation. I know that it’s only mitigation physical damage, but that’s ok, other classes have good magic absorbing abilities, we don’t need a tool for everything.

I will look at our last Northrend Beasts Heroic fight to demonstrate how strong Ancestral Healing is: The uptime of the spell was around 87%. I checked multiple combat logs, and this seems a very reasonable number. Big caveat though: Around 30% of the uptime was provided by a holy priest in the form of Inspiration. This doesn’t make the talent any worse. If I had healed the tank alone, the uptime would still have been over 80%. The fact, that I provided a much bigger chunk of the buff uptime is just demonstrating, that my high crit levels make me a far better choice for a very high buff uptime than any holy priest (disc priests would of course reach an uptime very similar to the one of shamans). The incoming physical damage of the tank I healed reached something close to 2,2 Millions. The buff wasn’t up for the whole 100% of the fight, so let’s say only around 1.9 Million of the damage was actually damage with the Ancestral Fortitude active. This still leaves me at over 200k damage mitigated by this sweet little talent. In fact, that is more damage prevented than healing done with my ES and Riptide (both around 180k each). And it is ignoring the fact, that the uptime of the buff would be very close to 100% whenever heavy damage is incoming and the overall uptime is lower, because sometimes tanks just don’t need healing (one of the worms dead) or have been healed mainly by paladins in P3. Of course this is a fight with a lot of physical damage flying around, but hey, I want to demonstrate how awesome the talent can be.

Everyone who has problems feeling good about Ancestral Healing, I recommend the following thing: Download Power Auras or NeedToKnow. Set the tank you heal as focus. Let the addon watch the Ancestral Fortitude and Inspiration Buff on your Focus Target. Enjoy the high uptime of Ancestral Fortitude and just squeeze a little RT-LHW combo in from time to time to proc the buff again.