Healers need an overhaul

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Originally Posted by Renathras

It's why I think having all their GCDs be damage neutral via nourishing the Blood Lily makes sense. That generates ACTUAL choice. Choice they don't (in practice) have right now. Sure, there's a "choice" but the "choice" is "doing it wrong".

The solution to avoiding the oGCD bloat IS making heals damage neutral. In a world where, say, Succor was damage neutral, it would actually be more worth casting and would reduce the need for things like Whispering Dawn or Indom.

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For there to be meaningful choice, there has to be a variety of outcomes. The current situation is either you're right (this gives me damage) or you're wrong (this doesn't give me damage), in a world where all heals are damage neutral, there is only one choice because everything gives you damage, that's not meaningful choices. Picking either Afflatus Rapture or Medica becomes a meaningless choice when they both do the same thing (give you damage) because they become essentially the same thing. I maintain my position that people who think casting GCD heals when needed is a waste has a personal problem that the game should not design around.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

As for skill ceiling: Some people like their skill ceiling to be based around picking heals smartly, not juggling damage buttons/a damage rotation...

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I didn't mention damage buttons or a damage rotation once in my entire post. Don't push that idea onto me. I said in my post that part of being a skilled healer in previous expansions is by cutting down on unnecessary heals and freeing up extra time to do other things, that looks like I'm advocating for "smart use of healing" and not "damage rotations".

Well there is no alternative. One of us needs to design actual playable mods with new healers for people to find out how they actually play because theorizing has reached its limit and goes in circles now.

True design only works when you can take the first step into actuality and then continue mutating and refining that object. It needs to be more than ideas peepz.

But the devs are too scared to do that.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

E.g. WHMs use Lily heals even though they are GCDs, but despite them being identical to Medica and Cure 2, they AVOID using Medica and Cure 2 because they are not damage neutral.

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That's because there is no "Avoid GCDs" rule, in itself; that's at best an indirect indicator... which does not function for/on WHM.

There is only "avoid excess at-cost healing". As you noted, Lilies have no cost (until less than 90 seconds remain in the fight), so they're not avoided. It's that simple.

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People speak about how bad homogenization is, but when someone points out "So we can do this thing on one Job that's different", it's attacked.

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Which depends on the quality of the thing being suggested, not on the mere fact that it may be different.

Yes, context will always matter...

If you suggest something that takes far, far more effort with zero advantage (e.g., no other ways to leverage that complexity that could, even if with the same on-paper power, result in an advantage in practice when optimized), then yes, it will be shot down unless you indicate that similar changes would be happening to the other healers as not to simply put the affected one on a "To be Avoided" list. (Though even then, the fact that those components offer virtually nothing to warrant their complexity might still cause a poor reaction to the suggestion.)

If you suggest something that just does what another job but better (more easily, more leveragably, or at a better fit with content, etc.), then it'll likewise probably be shot down unless you indicate similar changes being made to the other healers.

...But let's not conflate "I don't like <Idea A>" with "I don't like differences among healers."

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Originally Posted by Renathras

It's why I think having all their GCDs be damage neutral via nourishing the Blood Lily makes sense. That generates ACTUAL choice. Choice they don't (in practice) have right now. Sure, there's a "choice" but the "choice" is "doing it wrong".

The solution to avoiding the oGCD bloat IS making heals damage neutral. In a world where, say, Succor was damage neutral, it would actually be more worth casting and would reduce the need for things like Whispering Dawn or Indom.

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Current "choice" is not between which skills to use over time, agreed, but there is at least (brief-lived) choice over when to use them.

The problem is that the relevant emergencies are so few and scripted (in WHM's case, solely for mobility, the need for which is almost only ever tightly scripted) and being overconservative (using a GCD heal on the expectation that you'll need the Lily for later, only to end up thereby needing to use the Lily before overcap without needing its mobility or burst healing*) is so heavily punished.

*Inb4 "They're not burst!!!" Yes, I realize Lily heals are identical to their normal analogs aside from their being MP-free, instant-cast, and damage-neutral. In other contexts, though, any of those things would already matter, not just the last.

This "burst healing", for those who remember ARR/HW, can be featured from a simple a matter as being able to pre-cast a normal, casted heal to land just after, say, the first of a two-hit TB and then to follow it up with another hefty heal instantly such that a mechanic that would have needed a timely tank-swap can now be done with a 1|5|2 comp.

Such can be powerful, even if our contexts have made us since forget anything beyond rDPS and the occasional mechanic-hard-countering ability. Which sucks, by the way. Without sufficient damage intake, it's very hard to make space for healing nuance or to accentuate soft utilities.

But the result of what you're suggesting would be to replace choice in timing (X must be used, but you determine when) and the gambling that may (even if only for a few runs) involve... with a broader selection of choices that... make little difference anyways. I feel like it'd be slightly better, but far from sufficient. We both agree that we need more damage, and that MP management probably shouldn't just be a joke; even with those somehow fixed, though, I suspect something more and essential would be missing before this could provide any significant increase in the breadth-x-depth of choice available to healers. For now, you'd lose nearly as much in depth and impact, I suspect, as you'd gain in breadth.


More importantly, though, I don't want to further roll over with this insistence on damage-neutrality. The more we make everything damage-neutral, the more we're just effectively pre-paying for all our damage potential. Sure, now, none of our GCD heals cost any damage... but because our offensive potency would almost certainly be balanced to keep us at roughly the same maximum total HPS + DPS against low damage intake, you'd simply have reduced healers' sense of progression over a fight.

Stark damage-neutrality is effectively just a way to replace (the starting, and thereby unavoidable / most important) part of that 'ramp' of healers' total effective output as they get better at handling a fight with (A) taxation and (B) a single goliath stair-step. It's... not a good thing.

And the only reason we're as a community thinking so much about daMagE-neUtraL GCDs right now is simply that so many still somehow confuse Lilies with being functionally "GCDs(-and-therefore-at-cost)" instead of simply a WHM's functional analog to "oGCDs(-with-thereby-free-healing)" with bonus utility attached (mobility and at least a filler attack's worth of MP saved each).
They're... CDs. They fill the same function as the other healers'... CDs. They just pack more compound utility than most.

Just make tank rotation on healers. gcd dmg, ogcd heals. Nowdays this job need a fresh gameplay and meta is DMG on hard content. The pressing 3 buttons for dmg gameplay seem not fun. It's just a idea i'm not a game designer.

I'm not afraid to ask: What does "ppgcd" mean?

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Originally Posted by Eisi

I'm not afraid to ask: What does "ppgcd" mean?

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Potency per GCD.

(See also p/gcd or %AP/gcd or %SP/gcd in WoW, or PPR (power per round) in other MMOs.)

Now, is that, too, ambiguous, in terms of what that'd mean for a given job? A little bit. PPGCD accounts for the contributions of GCD DoTs/CDs/AAs averaged across all GDDs but tends to focus on the potency floor or the amount of potential lost for each GCD of uptime lost.

PPM (potency per minute), on the other hand, includes everything (including oGCDs) by default (one would say "Spell PPM" or "GCD PPM" otherwise), and tends to be the term mentioned when considering how much potency per minute can be put out with the fewest GCDs.

To use the earlier ARR example, SCH's damage decayed less from each GCD lost because so much of its damage was clustered into fewer GCDs (due to its 4 DoTs and mere 100-potency filler, opposite WHM's 2 DoTs and 180-potency filler).

I.e., I want healers to have less free healing but more damage available per average GCD in which they deal damage. (Similarly, I'd like tanks to have a higher damage ceiling but less free mitigation, and to again have the means to sacrifice damage for further mitigation, but that's tangential.)

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Originally Posted by Aravell

For there to be meaningful choice, there has to be a variety of outcomes. The current situation is either you're right (this gives me damage) or you're wrong (this doesn't give me damage), in a world where all heals are damage neutral, there is only one choice because everything gives you damage, that's not meaningful choices.

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Uh...I think we aren't considering the concept of "choice" to be the same thing.

RIGHT NOW:

Need an AOE heal and have 1 Lily up. Here are your choices:

1) Cast Glare (someone will die): Wrong
2) Cast Medica 1 (no one will die, but you do less damage): Wrong
3) Cast Rapture (no one will die, you will not do less damage): Right

There is only one right answer here. Your other "choices" are both wrong.

Now, suppose all GCD heals were damage neutral. NOW you have some serious choices:

Do you have a lot of MP and no need for movement? Medica might be the right choice.
Do you have a lot of MP and no immediate need for movement, but an upcoming movement where you will need an AOE heal? Medica is now really attractive since you may want to save the Rapture.
...but you could ALSO choose Medica 2 here and have the HoT carry over for that future damage.
Do you need to move right now? Rapture is a good choice in this case.
Are you low on MP? Now Medica is a lesser choice and Rapture might be the better one.
Do you need to move in the near future but NOT have to AOE heal at that time? Rapture could work now since you can use Regen on the Tank then for your movement tool.

These are actually meaningful choices related to what's happening in the fight and going to happen, and what resources you have available. It rewards fight knowledge, both of what's happening and what's going to happen, which is what "skill expression" is all about.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

I maintain my position that people who think casting GCD heals when needed is a waste has a personal problem that the game should not design around.

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I do agree, but I'm working in reality, not just what I think reality should be.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

I didn't mention damage buttons or a damage rotation once in my entire post.

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I didn't say you did. Though I also meant this more generically as "to be based around damage". If you prefer, substitute that as such:

"As for skill ceiling: Some people like their skill ceiling to be based around picking heals smartly, not dealing damage"

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Originally Posted by Aravell

I said in my post that part of being a skilled healer in previous expansions is by cutting down on unnecessary heals and freeing up extra time to do other things, that looks like I'm advocating for "smart use of healing" and not "damage rotations".

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To be fair, the "other things" was...

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Originally Posted by Aravell

There's no skill ceiling
Part of being skilled at healer in previous expansion is cutting down on the amount of necessary healing that you do, that frees you time to help the party do damage. By making everything damage neutral or a gain, you lose this meaningful part of mastering a healer. Anyone halfway decent at any other role can easily pick up a healer and do almost as good as any veteran because there is no wrong decision to make.

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"help the party do damage", "this meaningful part of mastering a healer"

Maybe you can clarify, as that seemed to me you saying "The point of mastering a healer is maximizing your damage". The mechanism is "by choosing the most optimum heal for the situation to thus free you up for dealing more damage", but that still makes the purpose of your optimization to optimize/increase damage, not healing.

This may seem a semantics argument, but I think it's significant. Is your focus to most efficiently and effectively heal your party, or to maximize your damage contribution in the fight? As those are not exactly the same thing, even if they share a road.

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For me as an example, I try to use the most efficient heals since I grew up in older school MMOs where MP was actually a limiting resource that mattered, and I also tailor my healing to the situation - I'm not afraid to use GCD heals, especially stuff like barriers in prog runs of PF Ex where I know a bunch of people are probably going to mess up a mechanic and just try to get them through it as best as I can. Cast time is relevant in some situations where you need a faster casting or Instant spell to save someone from death, etc.

While the glut of oGCD heals makes this largely meaningless, it isn't in all situations, and it's where I think the gameplay should more focus. BLU healing is all GCD, for example, which has a very different feel to it. And White Wind DOES make it where MP management is relevant if you're having to use a lot of it, which is why you should spot cure with Pom Cure and use things like Exuviation or Angel Snack as situations demand it, and likewise Gobskin for large damage.

I don't do this "so I can do more damage". To me, when I have nothing to do, I fill dead GCDs with Glare, because the alternative (doing nothing) is just stupid.

But I don't try to make my healing as efficient as possible so I can do more damage. To me, the doing more damage is "when I have nothing else better to do" as opposed to something I'm actively trying to maximize. It's the consolation prize when I don't need to heal, not a reward or something I enjoy. It's like when I finish all my allotted work for the day but can't go home from work yet, so I get to sit and relax and maybe prep stuff for the next day. Those aren't things that are "fun" or "rewarding", it's just the thing to do when I don't have to do the thing I'm actually getting paid to do since it's all done for the time being. "Hurry up and wait", as is often said in the military.

While choosing the correct heals DOES work to maximize this, it isn't my focus or concern. I'm not sure a good way to explain this other than that saying about "the journey or the destination". Which one you're most wanting to focus on is actually relevant, even if they're both leading to the same general result. It also effects what changes you advocate for.

For my part, the changes I'd focus on would be to make all GCD heals viable - something that isn't possible when most of them aren't damage neutral, making oGCD heals or the few damage neutral GCD ones the only "right" choices in most situations. Right now, there's never ANY case you'd pick Medica 1 on WHM if you have a Lily up. There's also no case you'd pick Medica 1 over Medica 2. The two things that would resolve this problem, imo, would be (1) have Medica 1 trait up to Medica 2 and (2) have all GCD heals nourish the Blood Lily. Now you have a choice based on what MP you have, what healing needs may be upcoming, what movement may be upcoming, and over what pace the healing needs to occur (fast or if you have time to wait for HoT ticks). Those are relevant and interesting considerations that we, at present, do not have.

We need to trim out the heals that overlap too much, even if that means slight modifications to the other heals, and to make them all viable to use.

Part of this is removing/traiting some abilities - Medica 1 into Medica 2, for example, as Medical 2 does more healing, even with the first tick happening on application, meaning there's no case Medica 1 would be used unless you needed one of the spells and had exactly 900-999 MP but not one more nor less.

Part of this is removing the damage advantage that some carry - this means making oGCDs and Lilies NOT damage neutral OR making other GCD heals damage neutral. As I can't imagine a world where oGCDs are made damage negative (e.g. "Indominability decreases the damage of the next Broil by 100%") as practical, the logical alternative would be making the other GCDs damage neutral.

The third thing is encounter design, as we've both said, but as we both agree on that, I'm not sure it's necessary to mention here.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Uh...I think we aren't considering the concept of "choice" to be the same thing.

RIGHT NOW:

Need an AOE heal and have 1 Lily up. Here are your choices:

1) Cast Glare (someone will die): Wrong
2) Cast Medica 1 (no one will die, but you do less damage): Wrong
3) Cast Rapture (no one will die, you will not do less damage): Right

There is only one right answer here. Your other "choices" are both wrong.

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That's exactly what I said. You said it yourself, out of all 3 options, only 1 does your job and also gives you damage. So the only choice available to you right now is the right choice (gives you damage) or the wrong choice (doesn't give you damage).

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Now, suppose all GCD heals were damage neutral. NOW you have some serious choices:

Do you have a lot of MP and no need for movement? Medica might be the right choice.
Do you have a lot of MP and no immediate need for movement, but an upcoming movement where you will need an AOE heal? Medica is now really attractive since you may want to save the Rapture.
...but you could ALSO choose Medica 2 here and have the HoT carry over for that future damage.
Do you need to move right now? Rapture is a good choice in this case.
Are you low on MP? Now Medica is a lesser choice and Rapture might be the better one.
Do you need to move in the near future but NOT have to AOE heal at that time? Rapture could work now since you can use Regen on the Tank then for your movement tool..

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My point is that you can already do all these things right now, you have the freedom to make any of these choices right now. Why don't people make most of these choices? Because it loses them damage. That's log mentality and it's damaging the healer role, if you need to heal, you heal, it shouldn't matter if it loses you damage as damage shouldn't be your main focus in the first place. Making more and more heals damage neutral only feeds into this log mentality and hurts the role further, even now you'd sometimes see healers that do literally no healing if they have no free healing available, they'd rather let the party die than cast anything that loses them damage.

Making everything as damage neutral as possible also removes the need for choice. You say you'd have more choices available, yes, you would, but all the reasons for making those choices will be completely removed. Why consider your next move when they all do the same thing? If you cast a damage neutral Cure III here to top up the party, what's the difference between that and using an Afflatus Solace under Plenary?

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Maybe you can clarify, as that seemed to me you saying "The point of mastering a healer is maximizing your damage". The mechanism is "by choosing the most optimum heal for the situation to thus free you up for dealing more damage", but that still makes the purpose of your optimization to optimize/increase damage, not healing.

This may seem a semantics argument, but I think it's significant. Is your focus to most efficiently and effectively heal your party, or to maximize your damage contribution in the fight? As those are not exactly the same thing, even if they share a road.

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I mentioned helping the party do damage because that's literally the only thing you can do if you free up space where you don't need to heal. We have no support spells to keep up, we have no upkeep spells, we have no debilitating spells to use according to the situation. Free space = damage, that's how this game is designed. I didn't say I like it this way, it's just what it is. I have a lot more fun planning out healing and being as efficient as possible, which is why I only play healer for progression as there's nothing else to strive for after healing is efficient. This is also why I advocate for changing job design in addition to encounter design.

Just a couple points on this one:

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

There is only "avoid excess at-cost healing". As you noted, Lilies have no cost (until less than 90 seconds remain in the fight), so they're not avoided. It's that simple.

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In practice, this amounts to an "avoid GCD healing unless there's absolutely no other option; Lilies get a pass".

As I said above, I'm trying to operate in the real world here, not in what I think it should be. Yes, I think it shouldn't be this way...but I recognize it IS this way, and that means we have to design around that until such time as we can convince people to change.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Which depends on the quality of the thing being suggested, not on the mere fact that it may be different.
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...But let's not conflate "I don't like <Idea A>" with "I don't like differences among healers."

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Right, but I address that. It's just ignored by people who don't want the solution.

Suppose it was possible - just pretend for a moment that it was - to design two perfectly balanced Healer Jobs/Classes in a game. They do the same healing, to the same number/specific targets, and they both do the same damage.

In one case, the class has mostly healing spells. They have a variety so they can approach situations in different ways, etc. And they have few damage spells. Since this is a "arguing the endpoint" example, let's say they have 10 healing spells and 1 damage spell, and can output overall 10,000 healing and 5,000 damage.

In the other case, the class has mostly damage spells, with only a clutch emergency heal, and they heal the party while executing their rotation. Let's say they have 10 damage spells and 1 healing spell, and can output overall 10,000 healing and 5,000 damage.

For the sake of argument, let's say this is all effective healing/damage, etc. Basically, the point being to design two healers that both arrive at the same endpoint, but arrive there different ways. Like if Disc and Holy Priest were both balanced in WoW to do the same damage and healing, but one heals by properly doing a damage rotation and the other heals by smart choice of healing tools. Or the RIFT Chloromancer which also worked by doing damage to heal, but was a Mage class. So imagine, for example, a BLM o9r RDM where its attacks heal, so to keep the party alive, it must do its DPS rotation properly.

In both cases, the objective is the same - do the appropriate amount of healing to keep the party alive, do damage to the enemy as able. But the focus is different. As I said in my prior post. The latter appeals to those who like to engage with a DPS rotation, the former to those who do not and prefer more situational and reactive decision making based on the current situation on the field.

Two completely different playstyles, but both having a place and both working within the role.

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Now, I recognize in practice things are seldom perfectly balanced, but they also don't have to be exact on it, as long as they're in the right general ballpark that all of them are viable and none are being blacklisted, something that is entirely possible to do.

That's not one doing what another does better. It's them both doing the same thing, but with a different playstyle.

BLM and SAM both do (roughly) comparable damage, but SAM players tend to like it better than BLM and BLM players tend to like it better than SAM. Why? "they're just the same", right? Except they aren't. How they do it is different. And that's relevant to players.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

The problem is that the relevant emergencies are so few and scripted

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This I agree with 100%, though.

Encounter design MUST change.

Pass/fail mechanics not only eliminate the need for healers (when done correctly doing no damage, I mean), they also lead to generally weird gameplay, especially when in a tab-targeting type MMO.

There's just no case sustained Cure 2 casts (more than 1 or 2, such that Solace can't answer that problem on its own) are needed, or Cure 3 is needed. The "Tradeoff" of "Rapture or Cure 3" is never relevant in practice. That needs to change somehow, and part of that requires addressing encounter design and part of it damage neutrality of abilities and part of it overlapping abilities.

Medica 2 and Cure 3 can both exist and be a choice because there are relevant times to use one or the other - Cure 3 if a bit more healing needs to be done NOW and the party can stack, Medica 2 if the healing can be over a little time and/or the party is more spread out.

Rapture breaks that equation because it adds in MP efficiency, movement efficiency, and more damage, which makes it always the better choice UNLESS you'd need to use Cure 3. And there's just no time in the current game you MUST use Cure 3, it's just slightly more efficient than Medica and slightly faster than Medica 2, neither of which are relevant under current encounter design.

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I don't think the distinction in choosing heals should be "this one does more damage". That shouldn't be relevant.

It should be "which heal is most efficient for the given situation, factoring in things like current MP, what resources I have, and what the fight will require from me in the near-term future".

But, the reason I suggest doing something different with each of the healers (the "endpoint" example above is an extreme case I'm not advocating for, btw, it was just a way of saying "we can do this without it leading to blacklisting or other things, but where each type of player has a type of rotation/gameplay they actually enjoy engaging with") is that having them all the same doesn't work. It alienates a lot of people who want something different. But changing them all to be exactly the same AGAIN just in a different way doesn't fix that. It just alienates a different set of people.

Instead, we should embrace some difference between the. If SGE became a Chloromancer, would people be upset? Sure, some would, but give that's what most people were expecting from the Job to begin with, it would probably make things better for us collectively, not worse. "But we can't do that without also making WHM a Chloromancer!!"? Why? Why can't we change the one and not the other? "Because some people will be bored!" You mean the people who are bored now and if we can't reach a compromise and thus stay with the status quo will still be bored? At worst, they're no worse off than they are now. "But the people who like the aesthetics of WHM but want the SGE/Chloromancer gameplay!" So maybe some people like BLM's aesthetic but don't like the gameplay, they like RDM's. Do we change BLM to play like RDM to suit those people? No. No we do not.

Every role in this game other than Healers (and increasingly Tanks, but they're not QUITE as bad as Healers) has to make this choice. You like NIN's rotation but don't like Naruto/ninjas? Tough luck for you, it seems. You like Naruto/ninjas but hate NIN's rotation? Also tough luck for you. You like Rogues but hate ninja magic and ninja aesthetic in general? Double tough luck for you. You like rogues/ninjas but also want a rigid static rotation like DRG? Everyone's going to tell you to play DRG because we aren't going to see NIN changed to play like DRG.

Healers are, ironically, spoiled. By all having the same rotation, it means you get to pick the aesthetic you want right now and get the same (general) gameplay experience.

And people are complaining about that.

An inevitability of changing it to where the healers are not homogenized means that there WILL be people who like the aesthetics of one but the gameplay of another. And at the end of the day, we have to accept that disconnect will exist and some people will not be perfectly happy and have to choose between the gameplay or the aesthetic - like literally every other role in the game has to do. It's kind of the nature of the beast. Even in a game like WoW where classes have specs, you still get a different aesthetic. Maybe you like Frost Mage's gameplay but like Arcane Mage's spell animations better. You have to make a choice, you can't have both of them at the same time.

So the "aesthetics but want the different gameplay" isn't a valid counter, as it wouldn't be considered valid in any other discussion of any other class/role, and is something that is inevitable unless we continue to homogenize, which is something everyone says they don't want.

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So, given all that, there's no reason NOT to use something like the "4 Healers model". I say it all the time, but it's the best solution since it actually does address the problems people cite we have now, and combined with encounter design changes that need to happen, would make healing in this game better and appealing to more people while not alienating people who enjoy it currently.

It really is the best solution, and there just aren't good counters being argued as to why it isn't.

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EDIT:

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Originally Posted by Aravell

That's exactly what I said. You said it yourself, out of all 3 options, only 1 does your job and also gives you damage. So the only choice available to you right now is the right choice (gives you damage) or the wrong choice (doesn't give you damage).

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...y...yes?

But I feel like we're drawing different conclusions here.

My conclusion is this is bad, because it means there's no choice.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, your conclusion seems to be that this is good, because only one right choice means skill expression. That you think every other choice being wrong is...somehow choice. Which makes no sense to me because every other choice being wrong means there IS no choice.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

That's log mentality and it's damaging the healer role,

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I don't disagree, but unless you have a wide angle mind-control device available to you to change it, I'm not seeing how that's relevant. It's the reality we're in. Unless you have a proposed way of changing the minds of (literally) millions of people, what of it?

Again, I'm working within the reality that is, not the reality I'd prefer exist. My efforts may be to nudge this reality to be closer to that, but I'm still proposing solutions that work within the current reality. And the current reality is "what loses you damage is wrong, don't do it unless it's absolutely necessary" as the prevailing thought...because it IS.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

Making everything as damage neutral as possible also removes the need for choice.

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No, it doesn't.

It's what ALLOWS choice.

Until you can change the minds of, again literally, millions of people, there is no choice unless they're damage neutral. Without that, there's only being right or wrong, there is no choice. The reasons for making those choices would exist, they wouldn't be DAMAGE. That's the point.

You say yourself that "it shouldn't matter if it loses you damage as damage shouldn't be your main focus in the first place".

That's LITERALLY what making the damage neutral would do - losing damage wouldn't matter (since it wouldn't exist aside from you just not pushing buttons), and thus damage wouldn't be your main focus. Making them damage neutral literally achieves what you say should be going on - that Healers should be concerned with healing and not what loses them damage and shouldn't be mainly focused on damage. Damage neutral GCD heals accomplishes this very goal.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

Why consider your next move when they all do the same thing?

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That's the point, they don't all do the same thing.

They do the same DAMAGE, but they don't do the same HPM, don't do the same HPS, and don't have the same restriction on movement. THOSE would be the metrics you'd be using for your choices. Not damage - which you said yourself shouldn't be factored into the choice at all - but movement, MP efficiency, and/or healing speed. (This is keeping it simple, I could obviously point out the difference between a 400 potency heal vs a 200 potency heal + 200 potency shield and so on; there are even more choices/metrics here than just these three.)

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Originally Posted by Aravell

If you cast a damage neutral Cure III here to top up the party, what's the difference between that and using an Afflatus Solace under Plenary?

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Cure 3 doesn't allow movement and costs 1500 MP where Afflatus Solace under Plenary requires burning the Plenary CD and can be done during movement while not costing MP.

Are those NOT differences? How are they not?

If you don't want healing focused on damage, why do you want Solace to be damage neutral and Cure 3 not to be?

If you don't want healing focused on damage, what DO you want it to be focused on? Damage neutral means it would be focused on resource use (MP, Lilies) and movement requirements, HPS (how fast healing is needed) vs HPM (the most efficient healing for the MP cost), eHP (using a heal with a barrier) vs direct healing (filling up the green bar; basically the Emergency Tactics situation of do you need a barrier on top of your health bars or do you just need to fill up empty health bars faster).

Are those NOT things you want factored into choice? Why not?

If not, what DO you want factored in that isn't damage? And why would making damage neutral harm this?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aravell

I mentioned helping the party do damage because that's literally the only thing you can do if you free up space where you don't need to heal. We have no support spells to keep up, we have no upkeep spells, we have no debilitating spells to use according to the situation. Free space = damage, that's how this game is designed. I didn't say I like it this way, it's just what it is. I have a lot more fun planning out healing and being as efficient as possible, which is why I only play healer for progression as there's nothing else to strive for after healing is efficient. This is also why I advocate for changing job design in addition to encounter design.

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Then we're largely of a mind on this and it was just a misunderstanding based on word choice. :)

Healers honestly deal too much damage. Yes encounter design doesn't help. Yes healer design could also be better. But even if all that were to change it would still not remove the opportunity cost of using a GCD heal.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Until you can change the minds of, again literally, millions of people, there is no choice unless they're damage neutral.

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I don't see why that has to be the limiting factor. It's not up to me to change minds and make requests within the mentality of the playerbase, like I constantly repeat, if someone doesn't want to heal when needed because it loses them damage, that's a personal problem, and they're being a bad healer in general, that's not my opinion, that's just facts. I'm stating what I think is a big problem in the healer role, if SE continues catering to this mentality, things will only get more streamlined and it will feel worse to play.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

But I feel like we're drawing different conclusions here.

My conclusion is this is bad, because it means there's no choice.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, your conclusion seems to be that this is good, because only one right choice means skill expression. That you think every other choice being wrong is...somehow choice. Which makes no sense to me because every other choice being wrong means there IS no choice.

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I'm not sure how you could read it any differently, my original quote was:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aravell

For there to be meaningful choice, there has to be a variety of outcomes.

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A variety of outcomes means more than 2. I didn't say only 1 choice has to be right, I said that I want to see choices that are wrong for each situation, we have no wrong choices that doesn't lead to either a failure of your job or losing damage. I'd rather see options that are 50% wrong or 75% right, not a 0% or 100% binary pass/fail condition. That's why I said that damage refunds is the way to go, not full damage neutrality. Damage refunds also give room to grow as you can fall back on refunds until you've fully planned out the fight, in which case you get to see your damage go up as you're rewarded for your experience (in other words, a skill ceiling).

My point about full damage neutrality removing the reason for choice is that, if you've been given a bunch of tools to deal with a situation, but they all lead to the same result (party alive, no damage loss), then there's no reason to even choose. Choice in that case is an illusion, it all brings you to the same end. The only thing stopping you from doing a Swiftcast Medica now instead of an Afflatus Rapture is that the Medica loses you damage. If that Medica no longer lost you damage, you can choose whether you want to use that Afflatus Rapture or a Swiftcast Medica, but the meaning of the choice is lost.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

I said that I want to see choices that are wrong for each situation,

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And there would be. Suppose all WHM heals were made damage neutral.

The party needs to be topped off before a raidwide in 6 seconds. Casting Cure 1 would be the wrong choice, despite it being damage neutral with Cure 3.

Again, this meets your requirements.

You also didn't answer the questions that need answering:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Cure 3 doesn't allow movement and costs 1500 MP where Afflatus Solace under Plenary requires burning the Plenary CD and can be done during movement while not costing MP.

Are those NOT differences? How are they not?

If you don't want healing focused on damage, why do you want Solace to be damage neutral and Cure 3 not to be?

If you don't want healing focused on damage, what DO you want it to be focused on? Damage neutral means it would be focused on resource use (MP, Lilies) and movement requirements, HPS (how fast healing is needed) vs HPM (the most efficient healing for the MP cost), eHP (using a heal with a barrier) vs direct healing (filling up the green bar; basically the Emergency Tactics situation of do you need a barrier on top of your health bars or do you just need to fill up empty health bars faster).

Are those NOT things you want factored into choice? Why not?

If not, what DO you want factored in that isn't damage? And why would making damage neutral harm this?

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Renathras

The party needs to be topped off before a raidwide in 6 seconds. Casting Cure 1 would be the wrong choice, despite it being damage neutral with Cure 3.

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I said "wrong choices" not "dumb choices". Party needing to be topped before a raidwide means you need AoE healing, why would anyone even consider casting a Cure I there?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Renathras

You also didn't answer the questions that need answering:

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"Cure 3 doesn't allow movement and costs 1500 MP where Afflatus Solace under Plenary requires burning the Plenary CD and can be done during movement while not costing MP."
I'd consider this a choice if MP actually required management anymore. You claim movement is a bonus, but what of most fights where you barely have to move? They do the exact same thing then (tops up health bars).

"If you don't want healing focused on damage, why do you want Solace to be damage neutral and Cure 3 not to be?"
If you read what I said in earlier posts, you'd see that I don't want Afflatus spells to be neutral, I want them reverted to a refund like in ShB, along with cutting down on the free healing tools available for the other healers so WHM isn't that far behind.

"If you don't want healing focused on damage, what DO you want it to be focused on? Damage neutral means it would be focused on resource use (MP, Lilies) and movement requirements, HPS (how fast healing is needed) vs HPM (the most efficient healing for the MP cost), eHP (using a heal with a barrier) vs direct healing (filling up the green bar; basically the Emergency Tactics situation of do you need a barrier on top of your health bars or do you just need to fill up empty health bars faster)."
Everything you listed can also be done with damage refunds, there's no reason at all to make everything neutral.

"If not, what DO you want factored in that isn't damage? And why would making damage neutral harm this?"
I want a proper cost to powerful abilities, there should be opportunity costs, MP alone doesn't cut it, if you want a powerful spell, you cut into your damage for it. Damage neutrality on everything will remove the ability to add in any meaningful opportunity costs. MP costs? (MP doesn't need any management) Cooldowns? (Just use your other multitude of free things in your kit) Mitigation versus direct healing? (That's an if/else statement, if damage higher than max HP = use mitigation, else use direct heal after damage)

About the only meaningful thing that you can lose is damage because damage is the only thing that matters in this game.

Let me ask you a question in turn. How does damage neutrality help the healer role design in any way? What benefits are there aside from "I don't lose any damage"? If everything was damage neutral, how can there be a skill ceiling as there is no progression?

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Originally Posted by Coatl

Healers honestly deal too much damage. Yes encounter design doesn't help. Yes healer design could also be better. But even if all that were to change it would still not remove the opportunity cost of using a GCD heal.

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I personally think it's less a case of healer's doing too much damage and more a case of encounters valuing damage above all else.

If you go back to a time when fights put more pressure on healers and the difficulty wasn't largely defined by the enrage check, healers weren't focusing on damage to anything like the degree they are now.

Fights used to dish out solid damage outside of key mechanics and this damage could often be highly erratic, it wasn't uncommon for one round of autos/mini busters from a coil boss to be almost entirely parried/blocked down to near nothing, only for the next to be a string of crits that wipes 60% of your tank's HP off in the time that you blink. It's a crazy stark contrast compared to what e have now where even Regen usually isn't worth the GCD anymore. Healer's had to play it safe and babysit the tanks to some extent or the tanks would just randomly get dropped if both dropped the ball for a couple of GCDs.

Another factor is enrage timers themselves. IMO ThordanEX is the gold standard here. It was perhaps the toughest Extreme in the game to this day, yet it's enrage check was incredibly lenient. A decent group at the time would merrily kill it with at least a full phase left to go, possibly 2. What made this work vs the face roll primals we see today was that the fight consistently scaled up in difficulty as it progressed and IMO actually having the full party survive to see enrage was a tougher challenge than killing the boss. A12S was similar in that again, you generally never saw a hard enrage, instead the fountains would usually wipe pugs if you didn't kill it before then. Both cases were a soft enrage done right. Much better than the 'I'm going to just lazily spam AoEs as an MP check for your healers' that we see in recent times.

Simply put, whilst healers deal a meaningful amount of damage, the current design philosophy on content and jobs will force that to be the priority above all else. If you want to change that without addressing the flaws in design, you would need to have healers dealing an irrelevant amount of damage which in this day and age is functionally 0. Given the kits and content we have right now, that's an absolutely horrible idea as you'll end up with healers standing around with nothing to do for minutes at a time in some cases.

Our damage relative to tanks has decreased steadily over the last few years, yet it hasn't diminished the value placed on our DPS one bit. Continuing to reduce it isn't going to change anything except make solo content even more boring than it already is.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

My point is that you can already do all these things right now, you have the freedom to make any of these choices right now. Why don't people make most of these choices? Because it loses them damage. That's log mentality and it's damaging the healer role, if you need to heal, you heal, it shouldn't matter if it loses you damage as damage shouldn't be your main focus in the first place. Making more and more heals damage neutral only feeds into this log mentality and hurts the role further, even now you'd sometimes see healers that do literally no healing if they have no free healing available, they'd rather let the party die than cast anything that loses them damage.

Making everything as damage neutral as possible also removes the need for choice. You say you'd have more choices available, yes, you would, but all the reasons for making those choices will be completely removed. Why consider your next move when they all do the same thing? If you cast a damage neutral Cure III here to top up the party, what's the difference between that and using an Afflatus Solace under Plenary?

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It still seems really strange to me to call wanting to optimize damage "Log mentality", especially when in modern fights so many of the mistakes that could cause a wipe to enrage are not undoable through healing...

...Which, as Ren, Zebra, and others have said earlier, is the core of the issue: to paraphrase, Healers' healing has shockingly little agency anymore. There is a very low ceiling on the kind of rDPS we can produce by indirect means beyond "no one died to unavoidable damage".

And while we could additionally try to fill that lack with support spells and other more interesting downtime skills, I think at the base of all else, we need first/also to have the means of producing more effect for our party through our core healing tools themselves.

Now, I agree that job design should be changed, too, in addition to encounter design. I'd love to see fewer redundancies within our kits (partly through trimming or consolidating some tools and revising them for more versatile use cases; partly through revitalizing what remains thereafter), and enough complexity outside of healing as to still be stimulated in environments with low healing requirements.

That said, on the premise fixes to either one would reduce the urgency or reasonable ambition of fixes to/within the other... I might have to recommend encounter fixes first, if that were at all pragmatically possible (which... it may be, if we could just figure out a broadly applicable method). That is because then we can make sure that we're not simply 'apologizing' our way out of a core kit/role issue, and instead are building on a solid foundation.

Now... on the other hand, if we're only allowed bandaid fixes because the devs are utterly unwilling to bite the bullet and actually give decent space for skill expression within the healing component of healers... then, yeah, kit changes are unfortunately the only reasonable path to go. But, limiting our suggestions to what we expect the devs would actually do is akin to an oath of silence altogether, so...

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Originally Posted by Aravell

A variety of outcomes means more than 2. I didn't say only 1 choice has to be right, I said that I want to see choices that are wrong for each situation, we have no wrong choices that doesn't lead to either a failure of your job or losing damage. I'd rather see options that are 50% wrong or 75% right, not a 0% or 100% binary pass/fail condition. That's why I said that damage refunds is the way to go, not full damage neutrality. Damage refunds also give room to grow as you can fall back on refunds until you've fully planned out the fight, in which case you get to see your damage go up as you're rewarded for your experience (in other words, a skill ceiling).

My point about full damage neutrality removing the reason for choice is that, if you've been given a bunch of tools to deal with a situation, but they all lead to the same result (party alive, no damage loss), then there's no reason to even choose. Choice in that case is an illusion, it all brings you to the same end. The only thing stopping you from doing a Swiftcast Medica now instead of an Afflatus Rapture is that the Medica loses you damage. If that Medica no longer lost you damage, you can choose whether you want to use that Afflatus Rapture or a Swiftcast Medica, but the meaning of the choice is lost.

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Agreed. I'd much prefer this.

That said, I don't honestly even care that, well, anything gets damage-refunded. Any "damage-refunding" is, in balance, almost certainly all being pulled from the same budget of expected potency-per-minute anyways (the more 'refunded' potency, the less potency per actual attack to compensate).
Lilies made sense for damage refunding only because they're WHM's form of free healing that allows WHM to stack multiple soft-utilities (mobility, weave space, MP conservation) atop that usual oGCD damage-neutrality, which is honestly kinda awesome as a little twist of design (especially when adding the bit of the fun of the redemption method itself, Misery), but they're no basis for broader damage-neutrality anyways, as getting those Lilies into the kit came at cost to free healing within the kit by other means (e.g., typical oGCDs) anyways.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

[On damage neutrality]

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The way I see it is fairly simple.

Let's say you expect that a healer pair needs to output the minimum ilvl equivalent of 120k potency's worth of sustain (where damage nullification is divided by HP per potency of healing, etc.) per 3 minutes (the healer's longest CD).

Or, averaged out and divided, each healer would be expected to do ~20k sustain potency per minute.

Now, they're designed to also be able to do ~10k offensive potency per minute within the given setting, if perfectly optimized, even if at minimum item level (for now, let's consider this the average of aDPS and rDPS, so that we're neither leaving out the value of buffing nor of exploiting buffs).

So now you have a spectrum of options with two extremes:

Extreme #1:
You make all healing have no offensive opportunity cost so that no matter how much healing one does, they will still do that 10k ppm offensively.

Extreme #2:
No healing is free, but you set a balancing point around the minimum playing perfectly with a perfect team and tune their offensive casts such that they'd still do 10k ppm offensively if playing well.

Both result in that 10k ppm under perfect play at minimum ilvl. The difference is simply that the second has a lower floor (is more skill-dependent) and its offensive increases quadratically with gear (as it can now spend less opportunity cost on healing, whereas had no opportunity cost it was tuned against anyways and is therefore static except insofar as its getting individually stronger attacks).

We're currently somewhere in between those two but shifted nearer to the first than the second. I prefer the second. I would much rather have a healer on a striking dummy be able to pull much higher damage than they do right now, and to in turn have damage output vary more with healing output.

To me, the current "shape of the curve" between combined sustain ppm and offensive ppm just feels really off; rather than a long plateau of healing doable before damage declines, I'd rather that decline start much sooner, but from a higher high.

It's fine for those curves to vary healer by healer; I'm fine with Sage tapering off slower than most at first and then increasingly starting to fall more sharply than the rest (an arc vs. others' more linear curve), or for WHM to have a slight advantage in combined HPS+DPS at very, very high HPS counts such that its slope seems to flatten out a bit at the end. I just think all 4 should be shifted over a bit, becoming less dependent on free healing and having their healing spells feel redundancy (presently akin almost to a fall-back option of a fall-back option that nonetheless end up as rigidly scheduled as everything else just due to the shittiness of very limited healing agency in modern fights).

_________

EDIT:

The main things I want to see, in order of perceived reward per developer effort likely required (not necessarily in the order of what I think is most important, which is nearly the opposite order):

1. More non-healing actions / depth / interaction

Give healers more to do and more complexity to work with when no healing is required. Ideally in varied ways (some more by buffing, some more via damage alone).

It'd help a lot to also have incidental interactions with healing, such as via priority conflicts with ideally-timed soft-CDs like Regen (or some new Time Magic spells on AST for seeding healing to go off later or to restore HP instantly but then damage the target over time such that you'd have to catch up on that healing, etc.) and versatile recast pools like Aetherflow/Addersgall, as those interactions synergize well to create a sort of 'critical mass' in total cognitive load... but we'll save that for later.

2. Reducing free short-term outputs to make greater room for expression and role-centric play

Reduce free sustain (healing + damage nullification) on Healers, be that by revamping Mana as an overall system or by simply trimming and consolidating some healing abilities, replacing their button-space with new downtime options. In this way, we end up with (A) a greater effective breadth of kit since the superior options would no longer be so able to meet content's needs, making what remains less feel redundant/vestigial, and (B) a more palpable sense of progression available to healers over a fight.

Similarly, reduce free sustain on Tanks and again allow them choices between pure offense and sustain. Finally, also slightly/roughly reduce free mobility on Casters and Rangers, giving them higher output ceilings instead. Icing on the cake: give back Rangers access to indirect means of rDPS such as old at-cost, MP-limited Ballad/Promotion opposite (a revised) Foe's Requiem/Hypercharge. If MP is fixed as a system through and through, then Mana Shift can do similar for Casters, potentially.

3. Increased damage intake + Risk-reward / rDPS exchange via healing / Further healing-based healer agency

First, get rid of most (ramping-to-)OHKO mechanics, replacing them with some way for healers to actually undo them, ideally without relying on Esuna. It's fine if the ally would die exactly 3s later from a non-global DoT tick if not healed in time (and to require significant healing thereafter), or even for survival to cost a spammable but at-hefty-MP cost (especially if, say, lower %MP = lower effective potency to attack spells as well, giving those oGCDs a slight offensive opportunity cost more immediately) eHP-increasing tool to be cast on them just before impact, but there must be something that the healer can do to prevent that death.

Thrice Ruin instead reduces their maximum HP but allows overhealing to increase their max HP by 30% of the amount overhealed until again reaching normal max HP? Fine. That's healer-recoverable. It just shouldn't guarantee one-shots nor cause a second hit 1 secondaway from the duration ending to be as punishing as a second hit taken 1 second into the duration.

Thereafter... (A) increase unavoidable damage altogether, at least slightly away from existing damage bursts, and/or (B) create new forms of avoidable damage that would cost uptime to actually avoid. For instance, let's say a boss may cause near-flat (attacker's GCD-based) reflect damage on hit; if the healers are dead and still being rezzed, you may have to stop attacking for a bit, but otherwise they could heal you through it on the assumption that it's more rDPS to keep attacking despite the healer damage lost (unless one can enter the phase already very low HP and use that time to heal up and use other at-uptime-cost non-attacks, etc.; whatever).

Perhaps even introduce a new class of AoEs that visually signal that they are not as threatening as most and will not cause Vulnerability Up or Damage Down stacks... and speckle them liberally across fights. A player should be theoretically able to dodge all, but doing so should cost uptime and at least sometimes be a party-DPS loss relative to just being healed through it.

While we're at it, revamp AoEs to be more consistent in their connection between indicators and their actual timing, and create some sort of color-system for subtly indicating their raw damage proportionate to the player's max-HP.

Perhaps also include some overlying subtle visual effect to indicate what kind of debuff the AoE would convey.

We could maybe do similar for special attacks and tankbusters, too, and put indicators on the cast bars: e.g., a thick border = No debuff if the damage is fully nullified; dark gold swirled texture on the cast bar itself = Slows; Red gash texture = inflicts DoT; Red-and-black swirled texture = reduces healing; Purple glow = inflicts Doom; if not immunized; etc., etc.).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

First, get rid of most (ramping-to-)OHKO mechanics, replacing them with some way for healers to actually undo them, ideally without relying on Esuna. It's fine if the ally would die exactly 3s later from a non-global DoT tick if not healed in time (and to require significant healing thereafter), or even for survival to cost a spammable but at-hefty-MP cost (especially if, say, lower %MP = lower effective potency to attack spells as well, giving those oGCDs a slight offensive opportunity cost more immediately) eHP-increasing tool to be cast on them just before impact, but there must be something that the healer can do to prevent that death.

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This is something that P10S does right. If someone gets hit by the chain tower, it can be fixed with Esuna and a quick top up. If someone mistakenly walks into the poison puddle, you can keep them alive with concentrated heals.

I agree that we could use a lot less instant death mechanics in savage and extremes, more recoverable situations would allow a skilled healer to fix bad situations.

EDIT:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

That said, I don't honestly even care that, well, anything gets damage-refunded. Any "damage-refunding" is, in balance, almost certainly all being pulled from the same budget of expected potency-per-minute anyways (the more 'refunded' potency, the less potency per actual attack to compensate). [/SIZE]

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Honestly, I'd love to return to the ARR/HW era where there was little to no free healing, where you had to work in tandem with your cohealer to truly excel, not merely work around them. But I think that would be a bit too drastic of a change from what we have right now, so I advocate a half-measure in the form of damage refunding.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aravell

Honestly, I'd love to return to the ARR/HW era where there was little to no free healing, where you had to work in tandem with your cohealer to truly excel, not merely work around them. But I think that would be a bit too drastic of a change from what we have right now, so I advocate a half-measure in the form of damage refunding.

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Right, but there's very little difference between damage refunding... and just having fewer free heals to begin with.

Let's say that per minute you have, say, 2400 ST potency of free healing and then 800 ST potency half-cost healing via refunds... vs. 2800 ST potency of free healing and no refunding. The difference between seems, at best, to be that damage for the first healer drops off at by 0|0|0|0|0.5|1|1.5|2 Glares vs. 0|0|0|0|0|1|1|2 Glares or so. That's... really marginal.

And yet the mere fact that it has damage refunding means it would either incentivize delaying heals until right before raid buffs to buff your following filler ST/AoE attack (preferable, imo) or you need an extra Misery-/Toxicon-analog button.

So I don't think damage-refunding (as a [much] lesser alternative to damage negation) really makes any significant difference to just... nerfing the free healing. They're both just nerfs to free sustain ppm. As such, I don't see why one would be a "half-measure"; they're effectively identically drastic changes.

Nice to see nothing has changed about the healer forums in my absence

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Nice to see nothing has changed about the healer forums in my absence

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It never had. And I doubt that it will change anytime soon, because S-E won't solve anything about healer problems.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Nice to see nothing has changed about the healer forums in my absence

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Hey man, good to see ya. How are you doing? What've you been up to?

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Originally Posted by miraidensetsu

It never had. And I doubt that it will change anytime soon, because S-E won't solve anything about healer problems.

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Oh complaints about healers I never expected to change, im just more (not) surprised it’s still basically the same 15 people going round and round with the same arguments dogpilling the same 3 or so people

It’s actually rather refreshing but I must admit WHM is actually decent right now so most of my ranting ammunition has kinda been cut off at the knees

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

Hey man, good to see ya. How are you doing? What've you been up to?

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Taking a long break from 14 because EW has no content, good to see you too

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

It’s actually rather refreshing but I must admit WHM is actually decent right now so most of my ranting ammunition has kinda been cut off at the knees

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....what changed? You're still spamming one spell over and over again, occasionally with lily breaks.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

....what changed? You're still spamming one spell over and over again, occasionally with lily breaks.

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I'd very much like to know what changed as well (hint: nothing has actually changed).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

....what changed? You're still spamming one spell over and over again, occasionally with lily breaks.

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Decent as in balanced from a damage perspective, the last time I was playing was like 6.0 when WHM was in the toilet for every measurable stat

Healer gameplay is still trash

I remember really liking WHM when I first started playing. When I look back, I feel like healers used to do a lot more healing. Nowadays, it seems like most of the time as a healer there's no need to do any healing, so y'know, you can DPS. Which is a bummer, because if I'm going to play a healer I'd like for healing to be the core of my gameplay loop.

Maybe it's different in Savage or Extreme content? But regardless, I remember back when healing felt core to even lower-end content. Better days. I wonder to what extent this issue might be caused by the fact that many tanks have near-infinite self-sustain? I've seen so many times when the entire party wipes on a boss fight, except for the WAR or PLD to slowly solo the rest of the fight. If the bulk of damage output is going to the tank, and the tank doesn't need a healer, it kind of makes sense that the bulk of the fight doesn't need healing...

And that's why I've drifted away from healing, because /ac Stone just isn't my idea of a good time. Maybe a future expansion will improve things? I love in hope.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Maybe a future expansion will improve things? I love in hope.

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Oh you sweet summer child.

WHM has literally never gotten better between 2 expansions

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Maybe it's different in Savage or Extreme content?

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It's no different. Even in the most "healing intensive" fights you're still spending a minimum of 60% spamming your filler dps spell.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

WHM has literally never gotten better between 2 expansions

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1.x -> ARR
ARR -> HW

Does it suck that that's where the trend ended? Well, yeah; obviously.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I’m not gonna count legacy because WHM functionally didn’t exist in legacy.

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WHM, and all ARR jobs except SCH and SMN, were added during the course of 1.x.

True, WHM wasn't there at the start -- the actual 1.0; at the time, all healers were hybrids, with CNJ being an omni-elementalist with some heals and related utility buffs and THM being an Astral-Umbral, stat-stealing, HP-transferring, MP-nuking, counter-attacking Priest with a more interesting kit in premise than we've seen on any caster since).
But, once Yoshida joined during 1.x and truncated/narrowed all the classes to better fit in line with franchise jobs, WHM was almost identical to ARR WHM, just clunkier and with faintly less utility.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

1.x -> ARR
ARR -> HW

Does it suck that that's where the trend ended? Well, yeah; obviously.

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I’m not gonna count legacy because WHM functionally didn’t exist in legacy but 2.x->3.x I guess is true on the improvement front

Still I agree it’s pretty bad as a trend