Nobody Really Wants To Heal

[Aramina]

Yeah, with how the way ilvl works, eventually we'll "outlevel" 80 content and it will be easier to do with less healing, but at least even when we outlevel it, it will still require more healing than older 70 content does now (which is almost none) by comparison.

And leveling dungeons will always require a lot of healing, which will be nice.

That's true, anything with level/ilvl sync should keep some level of "difficulty". Should be fun

[Ilyrian]

Secondly I've done the research, the game offered more flexibility and customization with abilities, skills, and attributes as opposed to how it currently works today. You can be a mage of ice arcana and fire instead of being forced down one land.

Already been covered but a world of no to this.

If anything Vanilla WoW was much more rigid in what worked and what didn't - from the classes you picked to the spec you had to take.
I played a full time Holy Priest back then and though I loved it (and I will be going back to gets some nostalgia feels) there was no choice, the build was set, unless you were unlucky enough to be the Prayer of Spirit bot, and you did your job.
Horde choices for healer: Priest. Occasionally you'd see a Druid or Shammy.
Ironically modern WoW is more flexible especially where class and spec choices are involved.
(Unless they are going through a loving Discipline Priest phase where all other healers become irrelevant - though this hasn't happened for a few years in raiding to be fair).

[Shurrikhan]

Secondly I've done the research, the game offered more flexibility and customization with abilities, skills, and attributes as opposed to how it currently works today. You can be a mage of ice arcana and fire instead of being forced down one land.

Your research is clearly lacking. I loved Vanilla WoW, but it was notoriously imbalanced.

That's not to say that you couldn't do tons of different stuff when leveling, but even in leveling dungeons at the end of the day you were better off running 3 Mages, a Warrior, and a Paladin/Holy Priest or 4 Mages and a Paladin/Holy Priest than anything else.

I mean yea you have people that love the healing class as a general concept. A holy centric magician that can utilize the power of light to slay the enemies and rejuvenate the health of allies.

People do love to play healer but truthfully nobody wants to be a full on healer as it's boring and quite frankly just not fun. It's the same situation with Tanks if all you are is just a meat shield then you may as well be a puppet with 2 buttons.

Yes, but it's not like anyone must design their tanks and healers that poorly. Other games do a fine job of involving far more interesting healing mechanics to involve risk are reward beyond simple or obvious minimization of inefficiencies or providing active mitigation mechanics to tanks.

It's not that no one wants to play a tank or healer. It's just that very few people want to play XIV tanks or healers.

[Kaethra]

Did you ever actually play classic WoW? If you didn't match the specified cookie-cutter build, you'd be laughed out of parties all day. Take off the rose-tinted glasses and it's a terrible mess.

I played a Shadow Priest in Vanilla WoW and healed and DPS'd in both Molten Core and Onyxia. So what you said was totally untrue. Of course, the people I played with had just came from Everquest where Shaman and Druids did incredible damage. Clerics did too in undead heavy areas such as Crypt of Decay and Plane of Hate. Not everyone that played WoW were MMORPG noobs.

[Nyvara]

This guy. I can't even find any more Memes.

We really need NA Moderators!

[Seraphor]

Healer DPS really isn't getting as gutted as people think.

WHM is losing one DoT. Potency is made up for in other skills.
SCH is losing a lot of superfluous buttons.
AST hasn't lost a damned thing.

If you play AST, you have nothing to worry about (except for cards, but that's another matter)

[gumas]

People do love to play healer but truthfully nobody wants to be a full on healer as it's boring and quite frankly just not fun

if you put "some" on it i agree, but everyone? nah iam healer and i WANT to just heal, i dont mind helping dps with dots but full cast time dps spell? no, i love to see my party above 50% i love that green number that pop above their head and i find a self satisfaction when i can clutch heal on big group/raid.

if people dont like being full time healer, we will never have this bazillion "full time dps versus dps healer" thread.

[Lersayil]

I don't really care what we're doing and how its split between dps and healing as long as its interesting. But I do hope we get to heal some more (or all the time), since I never much enjoyed the AST / WHM styled 1.5 button dps rotation.

As for WoW yeeah. Vanilla was notorious for the meme class specs. Lot of illusion of choice, but in the end the choices we're usually very limited by their performance and split by PvE / PvP.

[Jeeqbit]

• This isn't FF11.
• This isn't Classic WoW.
• Protect is a Role Action and has not been a WHM spell since 4.0, so its removal is unrelated to Dia.
• Stone and Aero still exist but upgrade to Glare and Dia, so they don't replace anything.
• They upgrade them because needing Stone, Stone II and Stone III on your hotbar is annoying.
• Protect's removal is probably related to it being unnecessary and healing being too easy.
• WHM has Assize (400/45s), Holy (140/2.5s), Afflatus Misery (900, Lily) for AoE. Looks great to me.
• Not being able to use all actions at all levels is an issue faced by all roles; not just healers.

[OcieKo]

If I could only have 6-9s out of every 30-60s to do anything but heal as a healer, I'd be happier. As a few have said before me, the DPS healer meta is more a consequence of the lack of necessary healing than it being fun or engaging. If optimization didn't bring us down to 10% GCDs on healing but like 40-60% GCDs on healing, the lack of non-healing buttons would be less of an issue. Also getting veering away from scripted boss moves and moving to move CDs on bosses that they can somewhat pick and choose would go a long way in making healing more fun along with the generally increased damage and rate of incoming damage will. Most of us older MMO players remember learning Boss Move Lists so we knew what could happen, then when it happens we know what can be done. Here nearly all fights have basically a movie script to follow, and you just need to do things on queue according to the clock.

If fights generally require more out of me as a healer, I'm happier. If my MP actually matters, I'm happier. If being MP efficient is important, I'm happier. And I'm probably not the only one.

While I will admit, given the track record, I am concerned on if it will pan out or not, but I'm also waiting til about July 16th-30th to resolve my opinion. Since that's about how long it will take for initial end-game content and the large waves of adjustments to come out.

As someone who played Vanilla WoW... Ya, most specs we're absolutely trash in the wrong content. Basically you had, PvE Spec, PvP Spec, and Other (Trash/Wild Card) Spec/Has-That-One-Must-Have-Skill-21pts-In Spec. Sure there we're quite a few crazy things you could get to work if your group co-operated, i.e. I spent a few weeks as a Tank Shaman. But still, if the Dungeon Finder was in place back then... you would've spent A LOT of time in queue.

Also played EQ1 & EQ2 before (was in WoW/EQ2 kick when FFXI came out and the mandatory group/extreme open world combat numbers over-turning was a turn off, even if my family basically made it so we always had 3-4 people to play with) along with minor stints in other MMOs.