Is It Even Possible To Have A New Healer Job?

[Kacho_Nacho]

I think this is exactly what's happening. It all boils down to that 2.5sec GCD making it prohibitively difficult to change the way healing functions.

...Unless they started adding oGCD healing abilities with super short CDs that either apply a small HoT or heal a small amount (and that's a horrible idea because of how overloaded most classes are with oGCD abilities and how hard of a time they have with latency already...).

FWIW, I shelved my AST because I found healing so incredibly boring and leveled MCH (which is crippled by even a small amount of latency, so now I'm leveling RDM) because I wanted to play something that was actually engaging.

Tanking and DPS are both engaging enough to be enjoyable for me, but even AST with its card buffs wasn't enough to keep me from nearly falling asleep at the keyboard.

Maybe if healers had more interesting DPS rotations, or did something like recover mana through a damage rotation, but as it stands it's just "Is someone injured? If not, DoT and press your damaging spell until someone is."

There's "uncomplicated" and then there's "Zzzzzzzzz...".

I'm jealous! I've just started playing AST and I tell you there's times in PotD where I feel like I'm barely holding on due to the complexity of the job.

I don't see why not. It's not changing things such that every mechanic will instantly kill you. It just means it's harder to get you back to full if you take damage, so repeatedly taking avoidable damage is going to increase your odds of dying, and maybe force both healers to heal more often.



If the most popular role is also the one with the most complicated job mechanics, maybe making it simpler isn't the answer to get more people to do the less popular ones?

I mean, it doesn't have to be top level complicated. Tank DPS rotations are more complicated than healer DPS rotations but still not overly complicated. They manage to be that while all the tanking tools are in place at the same time. Tanks doing DPS are often also tanking at the same time, so they're a compliment to the job's primary role (because damage = enmity). Healing is unique and weird in that healers that are playing optimally will spend half (or more) of their time not doing healing at all, but doing DPS with extremely simplistic mechanics. When they are healing, again it's simplistic because things like MP management are barely factors and spell cast durations aren't really factors at all. You can go directly to your big heal, burst heal everyone to full, then go back to DPS.

Compare to other games where you have faster cast smaller heals, slower cast large heals, MP efficient heals, inefficient but high HPS heals, and so on. You need to manage your MP and casts to get out the required healing before more damage comes in without running out. It's more to juggle but also more engaging.

We theoretically have some of those things, but if you look at Cure vs Cure 2, at 70 there's virtually no case when you want to cast Cure. The most valuable resource you have is the GCD, both spells cost exactly the same time, MP is basically irrelevant, and one of them does nearly double the HPS of the other. There's no decision to be made there, except maybe "use Tetra instead and fire off another DPS spell" if Tetra's available.

*nods* I enjoyed healing in Cataclysm because it was more engaging. Pushing one spell every few seconds to heal someone to full is too simple. I also agree complexity could be put into the damage dealing side of healing to make it more engaging.

Furthermore, I feel SE messed up with the Lily mechanic. Instead of being about faster cooldowns and extra shields, it should have been about mana management. That would have made Cure I worth casting at level 70.