Sensible Toolkit Expansions: Healers

[Shurrikhan]

Just some Devil's Advocate inquiry:

- The two Lily skills, Solace and Rapture should be oGCD heals, not GCD heals. This will allow WHM to weave and not lose 300 potency on Misery during bosses. Though I'd love Misery to be a oGCD skill too.
- Give WHM back it's Cleric Stance.
- Fix the clipping issues on it's spells like AST got.

1. I think we need to consider balancing points here. Ultimately, any numbers can be retuned to achieve balance, but consider the difference between where they would have to be set to compensate for oGCD vs. GCD healing. Either would need to be balanced, essentially, around the best possible output. But, while that has very little range in GCD healing, it can vary immensely for oGCD healing due to potential clipping. You'd essentially be balanced as if you only ever used your Lily heals immediately after a Regen or Aero II, where you'd fully avoid clipping, rather than the more likely .3 to .8 seconds lost uptime caused by using any oGCD after a Cure II/III or Glare/Holy, respectively.
   
   The benefits, also, are almost nill. Except after a Aero II or Regen, your heal would be no more instant when oGCD than GCD-based.
   
   So you're trading more opportunities not to clip for a greater need for no-clip GCDs and a minor responsiveness increase after using an instant HoT or DoT.
   
   
2. Again, this would probably have to be balanced for maximal output. That means Cleric Stance could only increase the difficulty of reaching maximal damage, rather than increasing the actual maximal damage possible. WHM would then be uniquely limited/constrainted/inconvenienced, but at no real benefit. Some version of Cleric Stance would doubtless work, but I imagine just increasing the power of Presence of Mind and adjusting Temperance to also affect damage, for instance, would give greater burst opportunity (so long as Temperance isn't then balanced solely with damage in mind despite WHM's alleged "pure healer" identity) and a greater feeling of the uniquely "bigger, badder WHM dps".
   
   
3. We cannot expect that the same mid-expansion panic changes that awarded AST so much free extra DPS on the basis of gameplay would be similarly applied without cost to WHM. Moreover, AST's "solution" to clipping was far from comprehensive. They simply added a reliable oGCD gap to a single Spell, their offensive spammable. If we really are going to see greater healing requirements in Shadowbringers, allowing for healers who would truly need to spend significant time healing, then AST will be quick to find that their "solution" is rather... haphazard. And they'll already likely be paying a bit more for the added convenience (reduced uptime penalties) of their Cards.

At this point, I honestly dont' believe SE has an idea how to properly do anything but DPS roles. That is why tanks are officially blue DPS now...

What I would do is, scrap the whole concept of the healer role and replace it with the support role. The support role could be anything from a melee, to physical ranged or caster and would be a DPS/heal hybrid. DNC would perfectly fit that role already (with a few tweaks).

This has two big pros:
1. You can give the support role a full DPS rotation,which either buffs the group or debuffs enemies and give them 2-3 heals.
2. You can make tanks have an identity besides "blue DPS"!
Make them be responsible for their own survivability, f.e. by giving them active mitigation they have to keep track of while tanking and give them the tools to keep themselves alive.
The group dmgreduce CD also already fits into that concept.

Though it's dwindled over time, there already was a large sense by which tanks (other than perhaps Warrior) could take on significant survival responsibilities, at least in dungeon content where their rDPS penalties for healing were much closer (and in rare situations even favored tanks taking on the healing responsibility for overall DPS).

Is this something worth making more obvious, or ought it all be scrapped in favor of tanks having a more diverse rotational toolkit (of survivability vs. damage) while supports largely lose their own spectrum (of healing vs. damage)?

To take an extreme interpretation of what you'd said... Should Support mostly fall to Ability selection and on-cooldown or on-situation presses of CDs -- as needed to support more elaborate DPS rotations (full "Green DPS") -- or should Support still have significant GCD options?

To what extent would more elaborate non-healing functions require the reduction of healing functions?
To what extent should Supports still be able to trade between curative (or defense-supportive) and offensive (or offense-supportive) resources? In the case of GCDs, that resource would be time, while in other cases offensive and curative Abilities may share recast timers.
To what extent might changes in damage intake (due to, say, more damage-intense fight designs in Shadowbringers) affect your answers to the above questions?