Stop telling healers to go play dps

[Endeleon]

I never understood how healers enjoyed doing a 2 button rotation the vast majority of the time, because damage is way too low
i understand doing damage during downtime but when that downtime is so much that you're spamming stone or ruin for more than half the fight, that sounds like bad design to me and way more boring than having to use your, you know, heal abilities?

Again, for the thousandth time, these changes do not at all indicate a 95% healing uptime in content going forward, we can see this from the media tour footage where it shows things just as they always have been. So 1. We have tons and tons of downtime, 2. We used to fill it with a slightly less than mildly complex dps rotation. 3. We have now had this rotation simplified even further with no changes in sight to fight structure... I wouldn't say I really even enjoyed the spamming Broil II part of my rotation, I like the DoT uptime and such, but they took that away from us...

[Hash_Browns]

Because there was a HUGE disparity in DPS between SCH and the other two classes.

And since they are bringing healing more into focus with 5.0 and focusing less on DPS, it made more sense for them to bring the outlier (SCH) in line with the majority than to buff WHM and AST when they are trying to de-emphasize DPS.

Turning SCH into a broil spam was not the answer, however.
As far as I'm concerned the only healer that lacked was WHM.

SCH brought damage to the table, and AST brought balance.
They also could have brought SCHs damage down without making it boring.

[Kaedan]

Remember Antittower or Lost City of Amdapor (Hard)? It's i180. You are doing it synced down to i270. That's a 90 item level difference. Of course you can go as a SCH and let the fairy handle big pulls.

Compare that with the leveling dungeon Bardam's Mettle where just 3 enemies can sink the tank's health while in tank stance. That could be why the L73 leveling dungeon was hurting a lot. Leveling dungeons are heavily synced close to the minimum item level.

We know nothing until we play it. Healing may not be any different once we outgear Shadowbringers' expert dungeons.

Except for the fact that Yoshida outright said that healing will be much more necessary throughout 5.0, not just leveling dungeons. Their design philosophy of 5.0 is to increase taken damage overall so that tanks would have to be more active in their CD use and healers would have to heal more.

[disturbedcobra]

Compare that with the leveling dungeon Bardam's Mettle where just 3 enemies can sink the tank's health while in tank stance. That could be why the L73 leveling dungeon was hurting a lot. Leveling dungeons are heavily synced close to the minimum item level.

Though if I remember correctly, the character's were level synced from 80 to run the dungeon and were still getting hit fairly hard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h3d_xZR-QY

[Bright-Flower]

I know plenty of healers who HATED being forced to DPS, they're beside themselves with the changes (they aren't vocal about it on forums). Honestly I'm in the camp of that it's the DPS responsibility to DPS, and tanks to an extent. The current mentality encouraged people to roll a healer but only heal very rarely, and the ones that dps more than heal are very bad at it (letting people die because their fflogs are more important).

I don't think that healers should feel forced to dps. Ideally they would never need to.

But unfortunately with the way the game is it just leaves a lot of time where if you don't heal, you're standing around doing nothing but waiting for a health bar to go down.

And you also have solo quests and duties where healers need to be able to dps and dot nuke nuke nuke dot is really boring.

And then you also have healers who enjoy contributing dps, weaving in as much as they can while still keeping the party alive.

I'm all for them say increasing outgoing damage so healers have less dead time standing around with nothing to heal, but I know I'll definitely miss bane/shadowflare/misama on my scholar because there was just rarely ever a need to spam heals without time for dps, and if I ONLY dpsed it would be boring.

When I heal, I don't dps because I'm obsessed with numbers or don't like healing, I dps because at least in casual content, there isn't enough healing needed to keep me occupied, and having dps a little more involved than just a dot, a nuke and an aoe helps to keep my brain running when the healing part is super easy. Maybe if they do increase damage output this won't be an issue in ShB but I'm a bit skeptical they'll pivot things super far in that direction. We'll see for sure in 5.0.

[Sylve]

Problem is using a gcd on a heal outside downtime is a fairly uncommon. Healing like aggro is a group effort and that is the issue. If healing remains a group effort those at higher levels of play will have very few active skills to use, if they up the incoming damage to forcibly increase the amount of gcds one uses on healing then they run the risk alienating their playerbase. It will be a balancing act and I personally do not think SE is capable of such an act.

Specifically the bolded part, Dungeons are the perfect way around this. By incrementally increasing the healing requirements per dungeon you incrementally boost their ability to heal going forward.
It'd be hard to get the scales to balance properly, but if they did it correctly the result would be more Healers at level cap better able to deal with higher frequencies of damage.

Ironically, I think its the 'vets' that would struggle more with increased healing requirements. Evidenced by a video I saw from the media tour of an AST in the dungeon. Incoming damage was fairly consistent on the Tank, yet the Paladin was frequently dipping to 20%~ and even died on a small trash pull at one point.
So I rewatched it and paid attention to the cast bar and sure enough, The Tank was sub 50% hp with 7 mobs beating his face in and the Healer is happily spamming Gravity with no concern for the Tank that was about to kick the bucket.

And you also have solo quests and duties where healers need to be able to dps and dot nuke nuke nuke dot is really boring.

The irony is that Healers have been doing this since 2.0. People like to dress up SCH dps like its something special, but the reality is that it was DoT+DoT+Ruin spam from launch. Whee, such complexity. Dropping AoWs between Heals will add some interactivity on trash packs, IMO.
WHM was the same. When AST came out, it was also the same. Especially back when they could all use Aero.

Even right now on live, a WHM gets its first damage skills at 1 and 4 and doesn't get A3 till 58. That's 58 levels of 1 DoT and 1 Nuke. No different to what ShB is giving us.
SCH isn't much better, getting its 2 DoTs and nuke by level 10 and then simply never getting another rotational damage skill. ED is damage yes, But due to Aetherflow, its basically a short cooldown oGCD not much different to Assize.

SCH losing its second DoT was a bit surprising, but ultimately won't make a difference in how the SCH plays. You just use Broil where you would have used that Miasma. Healer dps has never been interesting. Not in ARR, HW or SB. Its literally going to be more of the same in ShB.
I was genuinely surprised to see WHM get a new damage spell. Though Misery seems to their answer to CS and Cards.

[Averax]

I like to dps as a healer when i have downtime, but i never cared for the more depth filled healer rotations. It's not my focus as a healer to be micromanaging the uptime of dots, which is why i'm glad that they've trimmed them down over the years. Remember when we had to separately apply bio and bio 2 with miasma to deal damage? I hated that.

Am i gonna miss bane and shadowflare and energy drain? Yeah a little, but i'm not that beat up over it.

Also, this is off topic, but the thread title has the exact same energy as when a bunch of Huff-Po journalists got canned and everyone was just telling them "learn to code"

[Freerider]

What? Calm down Chicken Little, the sky is not falling.

All 3 healers still have access to Lucid
WHM: has Thin Air (0MP cost for 12s on a 120s cooldown)
SCH: Aetherflow & summon has been reduced (at least in the media tour build) to only costing 200MP
AST: ED now uses the charge system and can hold 2 charges, Aspected Benefic was reduced to 500MP

Plus the skills each healer has to heal at 0MP cost, if the healer's death causes a wipe, the party was already about to wipe anyway.

Yes but sch lost energy drain and Astro lost ewer and sch still has higher cost skills.

[Averax]

Yes but sch lost energy drain and Astro lost ewer and sch still has higher cost skills.

There is a solid chance that MP values have yet be adjusted to reflect the lack of these abilities.

Also we're not totally sure yet how impactful the new and improved piety will be. Since it will now be increasing passive MP gain instead of increasing the size of the MP pool.

[Freerider]

So sch and astro stack piety while whm can get good stats due to thin air plus lucid being op in new content? Not to be a jerk honestly just saying that's how it sounds.