Corruption and Raid Healing

Tonight we only had two healers in a 15-person Heroic N'Zoth raid. It took us a few tries, but we got it down in the end. But it was a good fight to reflect on how corruption affects healing.

The thing about corruption is that the healer doesn't really see it happening. All you see is someone's health suddenly dropping, with no relationship to mechanics. Honestly, it's a little weird. It makes healing rather unpredictable and more reactive than normal.

It's actually a really good fit for Glimmer paladins, because you can immediately Shock the person who just dropped.

Another odd thing is that it's suddenly your best players who need attention. Normally, in a raid, you have the usually suspects who are a bit slow to move out of the fire, and so you have to pay extra attention to them. But now, it's likely you have to pay more attention to the better players, because they're pushing the edge on corruption.

I can't decide how I feel about it. One the one hand, it's better than the heavy raid-wide damage auras that past tiers used to challenge healers. And it's not really that different from a mechanic where the boss blasts random raid members.

However, it might have contributed to the lower difficulty of Heroic raiding this tier. When we first went through Heroic, people had relatively low corruption. So our dps was lower, but people weren't taking random damage. Instead damage was very predictable and and not as severe. That made it easier to survive and learn the fights. Compare to something like Heroic Kil'jaeden where people would die left and right while learning.

In some ways, healing actually feels a little more difficult now than it was when we first did the fights. But damage has significantly increased, so the fights are over faster.