SCH changes are outrageous. Don't design classes around your trust system.
Seriously SE let me recap these past events:
- No healer announced for the new expansion in order to "balance" healers (you painted yourself into a corner and HAD to deliver... now it's obvious you actually have no clue)
- Live letter where you just skim over healers like it's nothing. You had gameplay footage of all other roles but not healers... Shows you don't care much / don't know what to do.
- Changes are made public and there's hardly anything of what healers needed and SCH got gutted into the ground.
It's almost like it's on purpose. I don't understand what the endgame is (FFXIV classics in 10 years maybe?). Or perhaps there's no need to balance healers if all 3 are the same? (200iq move).
I know this is old news but the community has felt like the design team had very little high end experience with healers as a whole, and this just confirms it. Hell, the changes to SCH don't even make sense if you don't play the class at all.
I'm having a hard time deciding how to tackle this because it's so massively incoherent when it comes to SCH changes so let me start with what I do understand.
- SE wants to stick to balanced healer combos in 8 man content. They don't want to make some pairs stronger in some fights and other pairs stronger in others. Which would be viable and allow for a lot of healer diversity but alas not the choice they made. The result is that some homogenizing has to occur in order to introduce new healers.
- Trust system means they need to homogenize for the AI (Can't stress enough how bad a design that is but whatever)
- Healing requirements most likely won't change in the upcoming tiers. The current level of damage output from raids seems consistent with the level of play SE wants to provide for the more casual players. With that said I will (for argument's sake) assume that healing requirements for all content in 5.0 will be on par with ultimate raids (which lets be honest won't be a thing).
Ok so with all that in mind how do I approach this.
Lets talk about what makes a class flow nicely and what is fun.
Usually, the most painful thing for a healer in terms of enjoying gameplay is to instant cast and then have to wait for the gcd to end without any weaving options. This was a huge issue on WHM and something people have been wanting/expecting for a long time. Low and behold, they're still waiting. In the case of SCH, although fairy skills are now ogcd, the loss of shadowflare, energy drain (wtf were you thinking?), bane, quickened aetherflow we are most definitely ending up with more blocky gameplay.
SE made improvements for AST regarding this during SB, I thought that this was well understood but clearly that was either them getting lucky or one of them playing AST. This gameplay flow seems to be just as good for AST in 5.0.
Gameplay in dungeons. Just having the one aoe with the added healing abilities is going to be boring and suck away a lot of the enjoyment that was SCH. AST have a couple of options now as do WHM. SCH are stuck with just the one. Even early testers/"influencers" have noted that SCH feels lackluster in dungeons.
Lastly when it comes to enjoyment we need to talk about optimization and skill ceiling/cap. With many weaving options gone, almost no more pet management, embrace, down to the one dot to keep track of (from 3), etc.. the skill cap has dropped significantly. What once used to be a class you could highly optimize is only a shadow of it's former self.
There essentially isn't a SINGLE positive about this. Even the pet management being a qol improvement just sucks since we can no longer deploy off of her. Again biting into our optimization options.
Now lets talk about personal dps output:
Things seem relatively unchanged for WHM and AST in this department. But SCH..... Since we lost abilities that account for about 30% of our dps with nothing to show, that's essentially a net loss. Our fairy skills are also using up weaving opportunities (though that may no longer be an issue *cries*). I know potency calculations are different but there's nothing there to make up for that 30% loss. This is the real kicker. How can you just remove these but not see the issue? Our party utility has been nerfed along side this. The nerf in and of itself is ok given the direction the design team seem to want to take things, but both a personal dps nerf and a utility nerf?
There's nothing more to add here. Most healers were complaining that there was a lack of a more complex dps rotation. And although it didn't have to go as far as being a decent rotation, one dps skill and on dot is a kick in the nuts for our gameplay when 80-90% of our time is spent dpsing (even with ultimate levels of healing requirements).
Healing:
All healers get more options and overall more potencies etc... Again, as the community have been saying forever now. This is overkill. At ultimate levels, the added direct healing may be beneficial but what's the point if we turn around and only have 2 dps skills after we're done.
However for SCH a few things don't make sense. We lost our ability to critlo deploy, we lost energy drain, the new dissipation is nice but really lackluster in the face of the aforementioned changes. Sacred soil becoming the new CU is cool though, it was a bit of a lackluster skill for sch in the first place.
It's really hard to look at this and think, at any point, that the changes are nice. Even someone who doesn't play healer would figure this out.
The ONLY reason I can think of for these changes is that SCH needed to be put back in line with other 1/2/3 type skills for the trust system to work. A real shame as the class has essentially been gutted of everything that made it fun to optimize and unique to play.
Conclusion:
Unless we see very serious damage output increases from raids all the new shinies will be pointless and our dps and gameplay loss will be a net loss. If healing requirements aren't increased I can easily see healers solo healing content and that becoming meta (will need to wait and see fully how potencies and HP work). I expect a lot of healer pair mechanics in savage to force parties into dual healer. I personally would love to see solo healing become meta, if only to make a statement.
I can't express my disappointment enough. There are so many skilled players out there who would love to have an opportunity to sit down and help SE sort healer out for free I don't understand why they can't get someone experienced on their team to tell them that this just isn't viable.
Edit: More food for thought, coutesy of the wonderful Sebazy:
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Sebazy
[...] healers simply don't have enough facets to fill their time with. ASTs are halfway there with cards (And I made a huge suggestion years back recommending that cards get taken off cooldown and put on the GCD). WHM have pretty much nothing to do outside of healing or dps whilst SCH are about to join the WHM camp thanks to the decision to remove most of the fairy micromanagement.
Other successful MMOs have healers setting up combos in advance of mechanics or events, placing and maintaining buffs or even putting as big an emphasis on their positioning as their GCD efficiency. SE just aren't interested in investing the time and effort into implementing involving and rewarding healer gameplay which leaves us in the position we are.