Healer DPS metagame for non savage content is getting old

[Zojha]

Welcome to something that isn't totally boring.

Implying spamming damage is more fun and engaging than spamming heals. Implying the trinity is a boring system.

Both arguably right or wrong.

[Brannigan]

Consider that you are likely i230-240 in a dungeon that has a minimal ilevel of 170-180.

They should probably stop designing dungeons for people who haven't played the game in months.

[Alistaire]

Outside of current savage encounters, I spend maybe 10% of my time outside of Cleric Stance healing, because that's really all that's required of me to keep a party alive.

What it comes down to is that all incoming tank and raid damage is tuned down to trivial levels outside of the savage encounters, and it's led to some silly trends among healers, most notably that they're melding accuracy into their gear instead of something that would make them stronger healers. They're doing this because strengthening their heals at this point would be superfluous on top of overkill.

For content going forward, both normal and savage, please make incoming tank and group damage more relevant. Make it so relevant that healers aren't melding Accuracy because they expect to spend 90% of their time in Cleric Stance pretending to be caster DPS.

It's already bad enough that tanks meld and gear for optimal DPS; when you see the healers doing it too, then it should act as a red flag.

Tanks are a different story; there's no defensive stats worth melding.

And despite you thinking this is the way it is for healing being easy, there's some out there that are pretty terrible at it. And people have always complained about hard dungeons, look at Pharos Sirius. I remember beating that first day without even understanding how to remove charm, we just cured through the charmed ppl attacking us. Was a joke. To us at least. But if you make tome farming content difficult SE risks losing $$ over it so yeah, probably not gonna happen.

Also most healers melding accuracy are doing it for raid content. Just because you see them in dungeons doesn't mean that's their main focus.

[Atoli]

So far I only heard people complain that the new content is too brutal to healers; especially Nidhogg NM and Weeping City require "so much healing".
Personally, I found it to be a nice amount that finally forced me to heal more on the level of how much I had to heal in Alex Savage, while still not stopping me from supporting and attacking.

Also, healers meld accuracy mainly BECAUSE of raiding, since content outside of it can be done just fine with base accuracy.
Why are healers dpsing in raids? Because the combined dmg from DPS and tanks is not enough, and usually NOT because they don't have to heal.

[Destous]

snip

They DPS because SE can't manage to make an encounter where the best strategy isn't "burn as hard as possible when possible". It's not that they need to heal, because savage encounters and DPS checks are designed with an assumed 0 DPS from the healers; but the best strategy for every encounter inevitably becomes to throw as much damage as possible as a top priority.

On principle, healers going out of their way to boost their accuracy for endgame content is bad game design. If SE wants to support this stance dancing DPS thing that healers do, then they could very well bake a caster hit cap into Cleric, and then encourage healers to meld more spell speed and det; both secondaries that increase their proficiency in both healing and DPS. As it is, you have these classes whose top priority is the heal their party, yet they meld a stat that only increases their ability to DPS.

[Destous]

My god, **** the 1k character limit.

It's the same problem we saw with tanks wearing slaying accessories for endgame content. SE, to their credit, at least picked up on how very bad it was that a class dedicated to surviving damage was prioritizing their DPS above their durability; and we got the changes to Vit for tanks. Healers need the same treatment.

The root problem, I believe, of all of this is that stats and melding stats in this game is extremely shallow. Every stat you see on a piece of gear is already capped for that gear. So if a piece of gear has 4 beneficial stats for a class, then the meld options are reduced by those 4 stats because they can't be any higher than they are on that piece of gear. So melds go the outlier stat which still provides a benefit.

[Alistaire]

My god, **** the 1k character limit.

It's the same problem we saw with tanks wearing slaying accessories for endgame content. SE, to their credit, at least picked up on how very bad it was that a class dedicated to surviving damage was prioritizing their DPS above their durability; and we got the changes to Vit for tanks. Healers need the same treatment.

The root problem, I believe, of all of this is that stats and melding stats in this game is extremely shallow. Every stat you see on a piece of gear is already capped for that gear. So if a piece of gear has 4 beneficial stats for a class, then the meld options are reduced by those 4 stats because they can't be any higher than they are on that piece of gear. So melds go the outlier stat which still provides a benefit.

Just post the first 1k characters, then copy/paste the rest in as an edit.

[ErryK]

snip

Why is this an issue? If you want to meld Spell Speed, Piety, Determination or Critical Rate on your healer set, be my guest. But when you raid and you've got a single healer able to soloheal the raid for about 85%~ of the time, you have the possibility of throwing damage at points, and eventually, consistently throughout the fight.

The thing here is that raid fights are semi-scripted, so healers learn the boss's rotation and work around it. But if you don't raid, what does me melding accuracy have anything to do with you? I don't suddenly get weaker heals/adlo's when I meld accuracy. And no, sorry, it isn't the same as tanks because we don't use and entirely different set of accessories for damage, we still use Mind BECAUSE of Cleric Stance. Cleric is to healers as Sword Oath/Darkside/Deliverance is to tanks. You are treating what is effectively "bonus damage", seeing as healers are supposed to provide 0 damage, as a negative. Why does it have to be a negative? Why is it not a plus? The only people you can blame for this being what it is, is SE, because of the removal of accuracy on healer gear...

[Destous]

snip

It's as I've already laid it out. It's an issue of stat balance. Healers shouldn't be incentivized to meld a purely offensive stat when there exist options that increase both their offensive and healing ability. It's the same problem tanks had with stat weights. Str was worth a hell of a lot more than Vit. SE has acknowledged that it was a problem for tanks, it logically follows that it's also a problem for healers.

It's fine that healers do DPS; but the focus of the role has shifted way too far towards DPS.

[Alistaire]

It's as I've already laid it out. It's an issue of stat balance. Healers shouldn't be incentivized to meld a purely offensive stat when there exist options that increase both their offensive and healing ability. It's the same problem tanks had with stat weights. Str was worth a hell of a lot more than Vit. SE has acknowledged that it was a problem for tanks, it logically follows that it's also a problem for healers.

It's fine that healers do DPS; but the focus of the role has shifted way too far towards DPS.

Man, I consider myself an elitist and even I don't care one bit what a person has chosen to meld for dungeon runs. Tanks were a different issue because it was a whole right side of gear that was dps oriented, not just the melds but the prime stat. It was never a real issue; a tank in full STR accessories was still easy to keep up, nothing in dungeons even remotely required VIT accs. But when bad healers see an easy target to blame that's not themselves...well, we get what happened. And everybody lost out because of it.