What is imbalanced about the healers. I keep seeing this said everywhere.

[Metsonm]

The problem with using healing as a metric of worth for healers is in this game there is only so much damage being done to the party in any encounter. Fights are extremely scripted.

This means if a boss outputs 1million points of damage over the fight and Scholar heals 1 million points of health it's fine. White Mage can in theory put out, say 2 million. Unfortunately that's an extra million wasted that could have been put into something else.

After a point White Mage heal nukes become superfluous, but the dev team keeps deciding to put their skill points into the pure healing tree when they've already capped it out.

[Meta-Flare]

The problem with using healing as a metric of worth for healers is in this game there is only so much damage being done to the party in any encounter. Fights are extremely scripted.

This means if a boss outputs 1million points of damage over the fight and Scholar heals 1 million points of health it's fine. White Mage can in theory put out, say 2 million. Unfortunately that's an extra million wasted that could have been put into something else.

After a point White Mage heal nukes become superfluous, but the dev team keeps deciding to put their skill points into the pure healing tree when they've already capped it out.

That makes sense. But wouldnt the bigger heals mean more uptime for doing damage as you can get away with letting people dip a bit more than others? Wouldn't that impact it?

Would the solution be to just give whm some more damage spells then? Or would changing the lily gimmick to something esle make a difference? Currently the lilies let you do ogcd more often meaning less casting of gcd heals meaning more dps time no? At least that is the intent I thought.

[Kalise]

That makes sense. But wouldnt the bigger heals mean more uptime for doing damage as you can get away with letting people dip a bit more than others? Wouldn't that impact it?

Nope. Since a lot of healing is done using oGCD heals which don't impact your uptime of using damage spells.

Also, given the way that in raids the damage comes in with predictable bursts, you can already get away with letting people dip a bit since you know "Well, I'm going to be casting an AoE heal in X seconds anyway"

Would the solution be to just give whm some more damage spells then? Or would changing the lily gimmick to something esle make a difference? Currently the lilies let you do ogcd more often meaning less casting of gcd heals meaning more dps time no? At least that is the intent I thought.

Giving WHM more personal damage would help. However, devs seem to regard them as a "Pure Healer" job and thus keep neglecting to do so.

Also, Lilies don't work because you only gain lilies from using GCD heals. So the concept of using GCD heals to let you use your oGCD heals to reduce the number of GCD heals you use quickly becomes farcical.

It was a particular design that literally every WHM player noticed right away but that the devs have been completely oblivious to since their inception.

[EaMett]

It was a particular design that literally every WHM player noticed right away but that the devs have been completely oblivious to since their inception.

This is so true and so sad. We didn't even get the skills yet, they had only announced them with skill descriptions and we could ALREADY tell it wouldn't work out at all (lilies and PI). I stood here in this forum with many others bringing this up. Really doesn't inspire confidence in SE's ability to balance/expand healer skills when us users can spot the flaw in seconds of reading descriptions and it takes them months of testing before release and months of player feedback after to finally get it (and clearly after 2 years we still have vanilla unworkable lilies).
I'm still immensely confused by how that hole thing happened in the first place.

[Yuyuka3]

This is so true and so sad. We didn't even get the skills yet, they had only announced them with skill descriptions and we could ALREADY tell it wouldn't work out at all (lilies and PI). I stood here in this forum with many others bringing this up. Really doesn't inspire confidence in SE's ability to balance/expand healer skills when us users can spot the flaw in seconds of reading descriptions and it takes them months of testing before release and months of player feedback after to finally get it (and clearly after 2 years we still have vanilla unworkable lilies).
I'm still immensely confused by how that hole thing happened in the first place.

That's why I said back then (I think it was in 3.0 already, even), and I stand to what I said, that we need better people in charge of job design. NO, this doesn't mean firing anyone, just swap them around to someone who actually knows what they are doing!

[Rongway]

That makes sense. But wouldnt the bigger heals mean more uptime for doing damage as you can get away with letting people dip a bit more than others? Wouldn't that impact it?

The reason this doesn't benefit the party as much as it sounds like it should has to do with the predictability and distribution of damage over the timeline of a given fight. Say a raidwide AoE for a particular fight can drop all the DDs to half health. Clearly you can't let them get hit twice by that AoE without healing them, because the second hit will kill them. Fortunately, regardless of which job you're playing, it only takes one AoE heal (and maybe an oGCD) to get them high enough to survive a second one. So if you know another one is coming right away (some bosses cast their raidwide AoEs twice), you do an AoE heal. Now everyone will survive the next hit, and you can go back to attacking. If you know another raidwide AoE isn't coming for a while, you can just let regens do their thing and you don't even have to touch the party for another 30-60 seconds.

That one job can heal bigger than other jobs doesn't make a big difference--each healer can put out the healing required for the party to survive (barring people ignoring mechanics); so the difference comes down to which healer contributes the most damage.



The lily mechanic is a particularly bad mechanic because WHMs aren't expected to be casting Cure/II often enough for it to make an impact. Between Regen effects and oGCDs on their normal timers, the Cure : oGCD ratio is far far lower than the 3:1 that the lily mechanic implies.