Originally Posted by
Trunks
I disagree with some of what you say here. One of the biggest issues with healers pre-ShB was that their healing spells and abilities were simply too strong. Bosses were using abilities that reduced your raid to 1 HP (and blocked healing) in succession with abilities that hit for 75-80% of your health, and applying raid-wide DOTs that ticked for half of players' health. That's not "low" damage (thought you're correct on the point of frequency). But those sorts of mechanics were necessary to even remotely tax healing capabilities, because of stuff like Cure III, Earthly Star, Indom, and Critlo spread. This is why they altered healing scaling for ShB: to force healers to utilize more of their kits to deal with encounter damage. You can't just Indom one hit, Star the next, and let Eos do all the tank healing anymore. I do think they still need to make some adjustments to encounter designs going forward, and there are some indications in what we have of ShB that they're doing just that, but we'll see.
There are still other problems as well. Every healer and tank now has some sort of party-wide damage mitigation, and they all stack. Seeing boss ults in "extreme" fights hitting for 0 damage really cheapens the whole experience IMO.