Happy Healer in 5.0 thread

[Ryoutoshi]

Given the fact that healers are already absolutely bloated with healing options, especially AoE, I really don’t understand how people can still get excited for even more healing on top? If overhealing the hell out of your party is your gig then more power to you, you’ll find the new additions amazing. I however would have loved to see less dumbing down and beating a dead healing horse and give healers some more variety and innovation, not homogenisation and repetitiveness.

Why does the innovation have to be separate from healing? Why do you people always assume we over heal just because we say we like our role?

Is it wrong to be excited about more healing skills when what I want are more skills to heal with to add innovation and variety to the act and do so more often?

Do you know for a fact that the new build won't do that? It's pretty obvious the Dps with be more boring. 3 vs 7 is pretty blatant. But do you know how the healing will be?

Do you know the extra skills will be just bloat or if they'll help form a new identity for SCH that isn't "That one healer that thinks it's a dps"?

I don't. I know it has more skills though. The number went up. So I have more reason to be hopeful healing will be better than you do for being upset.

People need to face a very simple fact. If the healing is good, healers will stick around. If it sucks, we'll leave it. If the Dps sucks, Dps will leave. But they aren't necessarily the healers.

I'm a healer. I'm waiting for the healing. I'll complain if the healing is bad. But unlike dps, it's not something I can judge just on tooltips and the amount of buttons. All I see is Dps went down and healing went up in terms of numbers of skills. I'm ok with that. I'm encouraged by that.

I was never in it for the attacks. I like attacks. But if that what I was here for I'd play dps. The attacks are things I do when sadly I'm done healing. I don't want to be done. I don't know how best do do it. But when I join a party, I want to be healing. Or I want to be buffing. Or I want to be supporting in someway that is healer centric not dps centric. And anyone that looks at the role of healer, not just SCH, like a dps with enough utility to let it skip ahead in queue, I don't see as a healer.

[WaxSw]

Why does the innovation have to be separate from healing? Why do you people always assume we over heal just because we say we like our role?

Is it wrong to be excited about more healing skills when what I want are more skills to heal with to add innovation and variety to the act and do so more often?

Do you know for a fact that the new build won't do that? It's pretty obvious the Dps with be more boring. 3 vs 7 is pretty blatant. But do you know how the healing will be?

Do you know the extra skills will be just bloat or if they'll help form a new identity for SCH that isn't "That one healer that thinks it's a dps"?

I don't. I know it has more skills though. The number went up. So I have more reason to be hopeful healing will be better than you do for being upset.

People need to face a very simple fact. If the healing is good, healers will stick around. If it sucks, we'll leave it. If the Dps sucks, Dps will leave. But they aren't necessarily the healers.

I'm a healer. I'm waiting for the healing. I'll complain if the healing is bad. But unlike dps, it's not something I can judge just on tooltips and the amount of buttons. All I see is Dps went down and healing went up in terms of numbers of skills. I'm ok with that. I'm encouraged by that.

I was never in it for the attacks. I like attacks. But if that what I was here for I'd play dps. The attacks are things I do when sadly I'm done healing. I don't want to be done. I don't know how best do do it. But when I join a party, I want to be healing. Or I want to be buffing. Or I want to be supporting in someway that is healer centric not dps centric. And anyone that looks at the role of healer, not just SCH, like a dps with enough utility to let it skip ahead in queue, I don't see as a healer.

I think people assume you overheal because as the things goes now you spend more time dpsing than healing since your ogcds are mostly enough, with that in mind its not very logical to want dps to get more simple and boring unless you dont dps that much which usually means you overheal. There's also the case of people who want to heal more and its a respectable complain but thats more up to how the encounters and dungeons are designed than only your healing kit and honestly, in my opinion there's a lot of changes, specially in scholar's kit, that doesnt make any sense and damage the job flavour like eliminate energy drain or reducing the dots.

[Cled-cat]

The healing doesn’t NEED to get better, that’s what I don’t understand about your argument. We can heal ultimate levels with the current kit, it doesn’t need another Plenary Indulgence clone for AST, a new Medica for WHM, it’s boring and unimaginative and you must have very low standards to be excited for that... We definitely can judge the job from the tooltips, at least anyone with any real experience with the role in question. If it looks and smells like a turd, it probably is a turd, I don’t need to pick it up to examine it or watch it fall from SE’s butt to confirm that, unlike you people who can’t seem to be able to perceive things without touching a mouse or controller with it for some reason. Healing is healing. Numbers are numbers. It’s not complicated to put 2 and 2 together and come to a conclusion that the new changes look garbage and unimaginative. If you’re encouraged by overhealing and even more boring downtime with our dps rotation being neutered, then you’re more easily pleased than most people, and while that’s not a bad thing by itself, that’s not exactly a compliment in the context of these job changes.

[tinythinker]

We definitely can judge the job from the tooltips, at least anyone with any real experience with the role in question. If it looks and smells like a turd, it probably is a turd, I don’t need to pick it up to examine it or watch it fall from SE’s butt to confirm that

Whatever ones take on the matter, this definitely provokes... an image

[Kalise]

Why does the innovation have to be separate from healing?

Because literally none of the new healing skills have innovated at all.

It's just more of the exactly the same kind of heals.

Unless you count SCH copying SMN's Demi mechanic as "Innovative"

Why do you people always assume we over heal just because we say we like our role?

Because right now, healing takes up about 10-30% of a healers uptime. Not because they don't have enough healing skills, but because there's just not anything more to heal.

Being excited about receiving more healing skills on top of the already largely redundant healing skills that already exist (I.e. Cure I/II, Benefic I/II, Physick, WHM as a whole outside of progression raiding) suggests an affinity for overhealing, because unless damage is a whole lot higher and thus more taxing to heal, more skills will likely just get added to the pile of skills you rarely, if ever, use outside maybe PuG groups full of idiots.

Do you know for a fact that the new build won't do that? It's pretty obvious the Dps with be more boring. 3 vs 7 is pretty blatant. But do you know how the healing will be?

No. But nothing has suggested that healing will be more taxing. Nothing in the past 6 years of the game has suggested any sort of move towards more healing.

If anything, we have things that suggest that healing requirements are going to decrease, thanks to Tanks becoming tankier, due to the new trait that gives them ALL 20% damage reduction at all times as well as them ALL now having active mitigation skills (With PLD and DRK having their previous ones buffed)

Do you know the extra skills will be just bloat or if they'll help form a new identity for SCH that isn't "That one healer that thinks it's a dps"?

Given that the entire design of all Healers for the past 6 years has been "That one healer that thinks it's a dps" I'd probably bet on that it won't miraculously change.

The only major change is that the DPS skills you spend the majority of your time spamming are just less interesting.

Of course, this could always be proven wrong, we might get into ShB and damage could be ridiculously high, like Ultimate level high in Leveling Dungeons and so you'll have to be healing more than DPSing. But at the present moment, nothing suggests this to be the case.

But when I join a party, I want to be healing. Or I want to be buffing. Or I want to be supporting in someway that is healer centric not dps centric.

The issue is that this doesn't seem to have been a design shared by the Devs. Healers have been predominantly focused on DPS because of predictable damage and ridiculously strong oGCD's.

Now also with ShB, they seemingly want to gut every jobs support capacity so they can shove it all onto Dancer, so that's not even a role that Healers *Could* take if they were designed for it.

Its depressing and not what I'd call ideal, but it seems to be the case. Devs seem to design healers around spamming boring DPS rotations in between using oGCD's to negate predictable damage while fluff damage is easily nullified by the occasional HoT (Which often mostly overheals) and shield.

Nothing in their changes has suggested otherwise, from at least my point of view. If anything, they're going further into that direction by nerfing SCH and AST's support skills (Chain Strategem and Cards), by continually never giving WHM any support skills (Instead, just giving them more damage... Even their "New" mechanic is just more damage... IF they spend GCD's on heals to set it up...).

They just seem to also be doubling down on the "Healers have herp derp DPS rotations" by futher simplifying their already bottom rung complexity rotations into a simple 1 nuke and 1 DoT and 1 AoE spamfest.

Personally, I'd be happily suprised to find out that healing is more engaging in ShB (Though, at the same time, as a Tank main, it'd also suck to be even more reliant on Healers to actually do anything). But given everything I've seen so far, I'm not holding my breath.

[Urthdigger]

Why does the innovation have to be separate from healing? Why do you people always assume we over heal just because we say we like our role?

Is it wrong to be excited about more healing skills when what I want are more skills to heal with to add innovation and variety to the act and do so more often?

Do you know for a fact that the new build won't do that? It's pretty obvious the Dps with be more boring. 3 vs 7 is pretty blatant. But do you know how the healing will be?

Do you know the extra skills will be just bloat or if they'll help form a new identity for SCH that isn't "That one healer that thinks it's a dps"?

I don't. I know it has more skills though. The number went up. So I have more reason to be hopeful healing will be better than you do for being upset.

People need to face a very simple fact. If the healing is good, healers will stick around. If it sucks, we'll leave it. If the Dps sucks, Dps will leave. But they aren't necessarily the healers.

I'm a healer. I'm waiting for the healing. I'll complain if the healing is bad. But unlike dps, it's not something I can judge just on tooltips and the amount of buttons. All I see is Dps went down and healing went up in terms of numbers of skills. I'm ok with that. I'm encouraged by that.

I was never in it for the attacks. I like attacks. But if that what I was here for I'd play dps. The attacks are things I do when sadly I'm done healing. I don't want to be done. I don't know how best do do it. But when I join a party, I want to be healing. Or I want to be buffing. Or I want to be supporting in someway that is healer centric not dps centric. And anyone that looks at the role of healer, not just SCH, like a dps with enough utility to let it skip ahead in queue, I don't see as a healer.

The reason we say you guys must love to overheal is because... well, what else are you going to do? It's either that or sit around doing nothing when folks are topped off. Now, you may argue "But what if healing is needed enough that folks aren't ever topped off?" And unfortunately, that's only really the case if both you and the tank are at the bare minimum for stats for the content. The moment either of you gears up better you start to create that dreaded downtime.

The DPS healers aren't "DPS who just want a fast queue", we're actual healers. We're healers that like to push our healing to the absolute limit as a matter of fact. For me, I get a lot of thrill from figuring out how to utilize my toolkit to keep people alive with the least amount of MP and GCDs spent on healing. This means making use of my oGCDs and buffs and optimizing my gear. Our DPS is the trophy we get for healing well.

Now, that all said, we CAN actually tell how the healing will be from looking at the tooltips. We can look at an MP value and see how spammable it is, we can look at a recast timer (Or the accumulation of a resource like lilies or aetherflow) to see whether we can reliably use an ability often or if it's saved for an emergency or plan, we can use potency to tell if it's for saving the day or bandaging a scrape... all of this information allows us to figure out in what situation we're likely to use an ability. It's not like some encounter is going to blow my mind with an earth shattering revelation that being able to cast a free spell every 1.5 minutes will fundamentally change the way I think of SCH forever. Oh, and it crits as well for a nice shield which, wait for it, probably won't really help outside of giving you more downtime (Since if a shield that big is required to survive the other two tanks are literally unable to do that content) to sit around for... or I guess DPS if you're up for it but who does that anyway?

By and large, it doesn't look like HOW we heal will differ greatly, or at least not in a way that plays appreciably differently. I'll occasionally press a different version of Cure II that's free and instant, whoop-de-doo. They don't synergize off of each other or offer anything besides making the numbers go back up (I'm counting shields and damage mitigation here as they're just heals you cast before the damage instead of after).

They're not changing healing in a way that makes it more interesting, they're just giving us answers to a problem we didn't have while making the engaging parts of healer (The utility and DPS) less engaging. If they want to make the healing itself interesting, they'd need to drastically rethink how healing is done period, like maybe a healer that has lower potency heals in general but can do them in combos like a melee combo with giving indvidual or party buffs on the combo finishers that offer mitigation or damage increases depending on which finisher is used. Maybe not exactly that, I'm not the big name game developer, but something more than just "Direct heal, regen, or shield." Alternatively, they need to give us engaging things to do when people don't need to be topped off, and that means either DPS or utility, both of which took a hit with the expansion.

Edit: Since this is the "Happy Healer" thread, I suppose I'll mention a few things I'm happy for. I actually like the new lilies, as keeping folks up during mechanics that required a lot of movement like Black Hole has consistently been my biggest pain. And I even get a minor rebate on the GCDs spent healing with them too! ...unfortunately that's about it for my positives.