Blizzard profite généralement de chaque extension de WoW pour opérer les changements en profondeur qu’il veut apporter à son jeu. Si Cataclysm était de ce point de vue la chose la plus visible dans le genre, avec un ancien monde totalement revu, d’autres changements moins palpables, mais tout aussi concrets sont souvent de la partie. À cet égard les mécaniques de jeu, qui constituent le squelette de WoW, ont aussi le droit à des rafraîchissements, évolutions ou amélioration selon les cas.

Mists of Pandaria ne fera pas exception à la règle et le studio américain a déjà annoncé des transformations profondes, comme le remaniement des arbres de talents dans leur forme traditionnelle, qui sont l’exemple le plus apparent.

Autre changement (déjà) annoncé, celui de la gestion de l’Intelligence pour les healeurs qui risquent de subir un gros choc psychologique. Jusqu’à présent, l’Intell’ avait trois rôles : l’augmentation de la puissance des sorts, l’augmentation du score des coups critiques et l’augmentation du total de mana. À MoP, cette dernière fonction passera à la trappe puisque la firme américaine veut rendre cette stat plus claire.

L’Intelligence ne servira plus qu’à la puissance des sorts et aux critiques, gardant certes son rôle de premier plan, mais avec une importance bien réduite. Les soigneurs devront prêter plus d’attention à l’Esprit que maintenant. Celui-ci continuera d’augmenter la régénération du mana et sera un pivot prépondérant du gameplay des healeurs dans une proportion beaucoup plus importante qu’aujourd’hui. Pour autant Blizzard ne veut pas tomber dans un autre extrême qui consisterait à transformer le mana en un ersatz de Rage, d’Énergie ou de Focalisation.

Depuis cette annonce faite par la compagnie il y a quelques jours, la communauté des soigneurs a évidemment hurlé au nerf sur les forums officiels. Ghostcrawler, le développeur en chef de WoW a même du revenir au front, alors qu’il s’était éloigné des forums depuis Cataclysm pour ne plus s’adresser à la communauté que par le biais de son blog. Voici quelques extraits des réponses qu’il a pu faire aux joueurs mécontents de ce changement de système. Vous trouverez ses réponses in extenso et en anglais à la suite.

Nethaera / Ghostcrawler sur Healer en raid est plus stressant (Traduction - Source)

[...] Nous n’essayons pas de nerfer les soigneurs à tous les niveaux, et si nous le faisions, il y aurait des façons plus simples de le faire. Ce que nous voulons est rendre le rôle des stats moins ambigu. Actuellement, l’Intelligence commande la réserve de mana et l’Esprit la régénération du mana, ils sont donc tous les deux des stats de longue durée interagissant de manières complexes.

Avec le changement que nous proposons, l’Intelligence fournira de plus gros soins et l’Esprit améliorera votre rôle sur la durée. Pour les soigneurs, il ne devrait pas y avoir tout le temps de réponse claire. L’Intelligence pourrait encore être la statistique supérieure, mais pas autant qu’elle l’est aujourd’hui. […] Le total de mana peut encore être important (nous pensons à 100 000 au niveau 85), donc cela ne semble pas si bizarre pour les lanceurs de sorts existants et ça ne ressemble pas trop à la Rage ou l’Énergie.

En outre, nous pensons qu’arranger les réserves de mana aidera les soigneurs à mieux s’adapter au contenu. Certains joueurs semblent interpréter la conception de la 5.0 comme une situation où les donjons à 5 joueurs seraient faciles, mais les soins en raid seraient très difficiles. C’est certainement une meilleure configuration que des donjons très difficiles côtoyant des raids devenus faciles, mais aucune de ces deux visions n’est vraiment l’objectif.

Nous voulons que l’augmentation de la difficulté soit linéaire. Si vous pouvez gérer les donjons, vous serez capables de vous débrouiller lors des raids avec les augmentations normales de l’amélioration de l’équipement que la plupart des joueurs obtiennent. Ceci est particulièrement vrai pour les modes de difficulté normal et recherche de raid. Aller raider en héroïque restera un plus grand défi, mais même dans ce cas, souvenez-vous que le défi d’une rencontre de raid provient souvent de sa complexité, qui nécessite que le groupe apprenne et exécute de nombreuses mécaniques.

S’équiper restera une chose enrichissante et significative. Vous vous sentirez aussi puissant qu’aujourd’hui. L’Intelligence et l’Esprit joueront juste des rôles différents. Si vous vous retrouvez régulièrement à court de mana sur les combats de raid, c’est soit que vous sur-soignez probablement trop, soit qu’une grande partie du groupe subit des dégâts conçus pour être évitables. […]

Honnêtement, nous ne pensons pas que beaucoup de joueurs remarquent ce changement à moins qu’ils ne soient vraiment attentifs au montant en mana de leur personnage. Un grand nombre de joueurs se base déjà sur la proportion de leur barre que mana que consomme un gros soin et ils ont déjà une idée du nombre de soins leur restant avant qu’ils ne tombent à court de mana.

En d’autres mots, ils pensent déjà en termes de longueur de la barre de mana et de pourcentage, pas en nombre absolu. La plus grosse différence sera que votre barre de mana ne passera pas de 100 000 pour la 4.0 à 120 000 pour la 4.2, et que les mécaniques de régénération basée sur le total de mana ne prendront pas de plus en plus d’importance sur les mécaniques de régénération basée sur l’Esprit quand votre équipement s’améliorera (et nous pourrons absolument accélérer la régénération basée sur l’Esprit si nécessaire afin que les soigneurs ne se sentent pas nerfés).

Nethaera / Ghostcrawler sur Healer en raid est plus stressant (Source)

I might have read this wrong, but I thought they meant that int would no longer increase your mana pool as it does now, but having more spirit would mean more regen, and unless I'm very wrong I don't think it would change anything apart from making spirit more meaningful and making our mana increase come from regen instead of a more static mana pool. For now I'll content myself with believing that this could actually lead to more mana over a fight, and hope I'm not living in a fantasy dreamworld when the reality is that no matter how you gear your performance will never, ever change.

Hey all, here's some more information from Ghostcrawler about this topic-

This is our intent. We aren’t trying to nerf healers across the board, and if we were, there are cleaner ways to do that. What we want to do is make the role of the stats less ambiguous. Currently, when Intellect drives mana pool and Spirit drives mana regen, then they are both longevity stats and interact in complex ways. With the change we are proposing, Intellect provides bigger heals and Spirit improves longevity. For healers, there should not always be a clear cut answer. Intellect may still be the superior stat, but not by as much as it is today. (Again, for healers -- DPS specs aren’t designed to run out of mana if they use their regen mechanics every now and then.) Mana pools can still be large (we are thinking 100,000 mana at level 85) so that it doesn’t feel too bizarre to existing casters and doesn’t feel too much like rage or energy.

In addition, we think fixed mana pools will help healers scale better with content. Some players seem to be interpreting the 5.0 design as healing 5-player dungeons should be easy but healing raids should be very hard. That is certainly a better situation than dungeons being very hard and raids being easy, but neither is really the goal. We want the increase in difficulty to be linear. If you can handle dungeons, you should be able to graduate to raids with the normal incremental gear improvements that most players get. This is particularly true of normal and Raid Finder difficulty settings. Heroic raiding will remain more challenging, but even in that case, keep in mind that the challenge of a raid encounter is often its complexity, which requires the group to learn and execute a lot of mechanics.

Gearing up will still be rewarding and meaningful. You’ll still feel as powerful as you do today. Intellect and Sprit will just do different things. If you find yourself routinely running out of mana on raid fights, you are probably either overhealing a lot or the group is taking a lot of damage that is intended to be avoidable. A fight like Phase 2 Beth’tilac on heroic is about as mana-intensive as things get, and that phase doesn’t last very long, so your mana-regen mechanics and cooldowns should be sufficient to keep you going. That won’t change in 5.0.

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This is my wish for healing:

Stop changing stuff.

Just leave it alone.

Back away from the design board.

Go work on a new non-combat pet questing system or something. Or come up with someway for people to get raid gear from farming herbs. I absolutely loved my Mage prior to Cata. The constant yo-yo's of which spec is better in Cata drove me crazy and I got tired of it, so I swapped to a paladin so I wouldn't be asked to respec every week depending on which Dev got his way in the nerfs/buffs department that week.

We hear you. Believe me. As we have said a few times lately, we understand that change (even change for the better) isn’t always desired by every player. We also don’t think it’s fair to make players live with problems and these forums are a testament to the number of things players would still like for us to change (which run the gamut from buffs or nerfs to mechanical changes or quality of life problems). The strategy that we are trying lately is to make both sides happy as much as we can and limit mechanical changes during an expansion (unless we think they really, really can’t wait) but use new expansions to fix problems.

The complexity isn't in the size of the mana pool though, the complexity is in the amount of different regen talents and abilities that work off of either intellect or spirit. If you remove any linking of regen to intellect, then only thing left by way of "regen" would be how much mana you start with at the beginning of the fight which is a drop in the pan when it comes to regen.

There shouldn't be any mana regen mechanics that work based strictly on Intellect. There are several that work based on max mana pool, but that is one of the reasons we want max mana to be fixed. If there are any Intellect-based mechanics I’m not remembering at the moment, we will convert those as well.

No one liked it, its a flawed system, and the longer they keep propping it up, the more healers that will quit or reroll Dps and Tanks.

I enjoyed this expansion's approach to healing a great deal. I guess that makes me no-one. [Quoting above.]

Yes, designs like this are subjective. There are players who preferred healing in Lich King and players, like some of the game developers, who prefer it in Cataclysm. Our goal is to try to make the game as fun as possible, and we use player feedback to influence those decisions, but as you can see, feedback is often contradictory. We ask you to keep in mind that it’s difficult for anyone on the forums to be able to speak on behalf of the community. It’s fine to state your opinion, but don’t muddy the issue by asserting that “everyone” agrees with you.

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Hey all, as always we greatly appreciate the questions, concerns, and constructive feedback. We are paying attention to the discussion here and I have a bit more from Ghostcrawler to channel for you. We really do want to make sure we're communicating our plans clearly and in a way that will help everyone understand the ultimate goals and decisions being made. We also want to make it clear that none of these proposed changes are being done to cause anyone distress or make anyone miserable. So, to that end, here's some additional follow-up. As always, we welcome constructive feedback. Please refrain from forum code of conduct violations or derailing the thread.

A change like this would be huge and would require a massive reworking of a lot of classes. Things like innervate and divine plea would be significantly devalued since they wouldn't scale not to mention the mastery of Arcane Mages (to use a non-healer example).

It’s actually not that massive a reworking. Innervate and Divine Plea for example already use a % of max mana, so they would stay exactly the same. Innervate is 5 or 15% of max mana and Divine Plea is 12% of max mana. Arcane would actually benefit from the change, because currently the spec is harder to play when mana pools are low and has too easy a time cranking out huge numbers when mana pools are high, which makes it hard for other mage specs to keep up in later tiers without constant tweaking.

Honestly, we don’t think a lot of players will even notice the change unless they are really in tune with how much mana their character has. A lot of players learn that say Greater Heal takes up a chunk of their bar of X length and they have an idea on how many more heals they can cast before they run OOM. In other words, they already think in terms of bar length and percentage, not absolute number. The biggest differences will be that your mana bar won’t grow from 100,000 in 4.0 to 120,000 in 4.2 and mana-pool-based regen mechanics won’t grow more and more dominant over Spirit-based regen mechanics as your gear improves (and we can certainly boost Spirit-based regeneration if needed so that healers don’t feel nerfed).

I would point out the shaman's talent Telluric Currents. This talent scales mana regen with damage done. Since Int increases damage done, this talent allows more regen for better stats. With low end gear the mana regen can be negative since the cost of the spell outweighs the mana regenerated. With high end gear the opp set can be true.

Yes, good catch. That is an example of an Intellect-scaling regen mechanic. It would be easy to convert it to something like the paladin mechanic of Judgement granting X% of your total mana.

Complex for you to balance or complex for players to understand? I don't I can believe any player has a hard time getting what intellect or what spirit does now.

Well, both ultimately, but we meant the latter. Players probably understand generally that Intellect increases spell power, mana pool and crit. What is harder to understand is that Spirit is a good regen stat up to a point and depending on your class, but that Intellect “double dips” because it makes your heals larger and increases the benefit of non-Spirit based regen, such as Divine Plea, and at a certain point, Intellect as a regen stat is more powerful than Spirit as a regen stat. It’s not exactly rocket surgery, but we’re not sure we get a lot of interesting design space out of it. Several players have pointed out that we could make all regeneration mechanics work off of Spirit, and that would be another way to go, but we thought that required even more change. Consider for example that non-healers often have no Spirit but still need to benefit from Divine Plea.

And what makes it such that your large pool can do that? It's not the pool itself, as its size increase only cover a few more casts. No, it's the regeneration that you get from that huge pool. As long as Blizzard increases the Spirit based regen to compensate for the loss (or major nerfing) of Replenishment and other percentage-based regen mechanics the effect will be exactly the same as the current system, though probably not as pronounced (as reducing the extent of the longevity scaling was one thing mentioned as being behind this change).

Well said.

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My main concern is that while addressing their goals... they completely let the idea of what is fun for a healer fly right over their heads.

Not at all. “What is fun” is our primary concern. As I pointed out above however, players rarely agree on what is fun and are often on completely opposite sides. If everyone agreed, our jobs would be easy. (And don’t mistake a few dozen or even hundred passionate posts as consensus on anything.)

We don’t think ignoring a resource is fun. For healers, it would just mean using your most powerful spell in every situation, because there is no reason not to do so. Once you aren’t making decisions on the fly, you’re just going through encounter robotically, which doesn’t sound too engaging. On the flip side, content being brutally difficult might not be fun either (though we know it is for at least a small percentage of our players) so we want to make sure you aren’t overly punished for mistakes and make sure mana isn’t so precious that you are spending lots of time idle. As I also said above, we think this change will be smaller than some of you appear to be thinking, which is why I am spending so much effort to try and assuage your concerns.