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Originally Posted by
Aravell
If you want to fix healer gameplay, calling for a healing requirement increase alone fixes nothing. You need to actually fix healing bloat, tank sustain, MP economy, incoming damage, healer downtime and also give healers a cohesive kit, THAT would fix the healer role, not just bumping up healing requirements and nothing else. People can say "Healers HEAL" as much as they want, but that's not all healers do in this game, and I'm tired of people claiming that that's all they need to do.
It's only been 3 pages but I'll relink this again. It's very pertinent and every time someone says 'healers HEAL and should heal more, that's the way to make them more engaging', we have to ask the following
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- Rather than 'make us use 70% of our GCDs on heals instead of the current 30% (a 40% increase)', a bit of 'increased healing required' so we're at like, a 50/50 split (this still would not solve the EX roulette issue, hence the next part). This also requires SE to realize that there's a world of difference between 'more healing required' and 'more mitigation required', otherwise we would just end up with SCH/SGE being way too strong a comp compared to bringing a regen-healer
- Rather than what some people ask for, an 'actual tank rotation' of like 9-12 buttons actively used once per minute or more, I would like to see just... a bit of 'increased variety in what buttons we press for our damage' (note: not an increase in damage output) of either reworking current buttons to be used more often than currently, or the addition of 1-2 short-CD buttons (example, shortening a DOT from 30s to more like the 12s for Aero2 we had in ARR/HW, readding a DOT button to SCH, reworking SGE's Toxikon to be more integral to the rotation, etc). While having a healer that is 'the GNB of the healer role' would be cool, we don't need them all to be that technical. We can have one (probably WHM lets be frank) get comparatively smaller changes, like previously mentioned 'change Dia duration to 12s, add a 15s CD GCD' and then build systems that have interplay from that (Eg 'do damage to build gauge, spend gauge on heal, heal is damage neutral by giving access to Quake/Flood/Tornado)
- AND more interactivity between the damage/healing halves of our kit, and I don't just mean 'Pneuma is damage neutral cos it does 1x Dosis damage'. Misery is a good idea, giving access to damage because of utilizing your healing, while also allowing you to 'bank' said damage, either for raidbuffs, or if SE were to actually use such a concept more often, being able to instantly blow up a priority add (imagine if we had Misery in SB, cleaving the Worm's Heart in Shinryu EX, or the White Flame in O3S, the 'Load Program' goons like Dadaluma in O7S, etc). So it makes a lot of sense to me that SE could look into a sort of 'reverse Misery', where it gives access to strong healing by doing damage, so that you can get into a sort of flowstate, where each feeds into each other. The above 'do damage, get gauge, spend gauge on heal, refund via elemental burst damage spells' is such an example, the damage feeds the healing, which feeds back into damage, which feeds healing...
If we have a 'jack of all trades' esque solution where everything gets touched on a little (rather than going all in on one part), it allows SE to get feedback on all aspects of the solution at once (people can say on the forums 'hey I like doing the new damage rotation, but the increased healing GCDs required haven't really felt very impactful, I still heal the content pretty much the same way I used to', so SE can then see that and go 'ok we ramp healing required a little more' or 'ok more healing isn't really working so much so we should focus more on the damage side of things', etc), but also, it avoids the issue somewhat of 'sudden increase of X required'. If we ramp healing GCDs needed so instead of 30% of our casts are healing related (as currently) to, say, 70% of them being healing related, people will get caught out by it and we'll have the Abyssos problem again. If we increase it to 40%, or 50%, then it gives time and room for the playerbase to adjust to that new amount. If that amount is satisfactory to play content in, then it can remain there, and if not, SE can take the data from that smaller increase, and again, analyse whether to adjust it, or decide that increasing healing any further has too much risk of the 'Abyssos incident' and look into alternative design paths