The state of healers is affecting everyone

[Billythepancake]

The healers here on the forums represent a small portion of the community as a whole, and when you start tossing words like "optimization" and fflogs out there, you basically severe the silent majority who either don't/can't/won't use the tools that monitor the stats. I'm not saying all these players are content with the changes, but the difference lies within any player's enjoyment and/or willingness to play any given job and max it out.

You can talk about how SCH was gutted all day long, and while I don't disagree, mentioning its former DPS rotation as a focal point of the job is exactly why it's gone. It was the epitome of a green DPS, and we either have to face the fact that this is not how the devs and a lot of players want our healers to be, or look the other direction.

Shame every healer is still just a green DPS, despite them removing a ton of abilities. Every healer still presses their dps buttons more than any other button. Outside of an ARR level rework, that's not going to change. Imo, they're better of embracing green DPS and just giving healers fun and engaging things to do in downtime.

[Hatstand]

The healers here on the forums represent a small portion of the community as a whole, and when you start tossing words like "optimization" and fflogs out there, you basically severe the silent majority who either don't/can't/won't use the tools that monitor the stats. I'm not saying all these players are content with the changes, but the difference lies within any player's enjoyment and/or willingness to play any given job and max it out.

You can talk about how SCH was gutted all day long, and while I don't disagree, mentioning its former DPS rotation as a focal point of the job is exactly why it's gone. It was the epitome of a green DPS, and we either have to face the fact that this is not how the devs and a lot of players want our healers to be, or look the other direction.

The problem is, the dps abilities were a big focus of the job because that was the way encounter design made it. Once the healing is done, there is nothing to do except dps or spam emotes. I know there are some healers who would rather sit there and do nothing than dps, but I can’t imagine that’s the “average” healer.

Now, as a SCH you press broil more than every other button put together. By removing SCH’s other dps moves, they haven’t taken SCH’s focus off DPS because a good SCH will dps the same amount no matter what their dps tools are - that being as much as they can without letting the healing slip. It’s just that now doing your job well means risking repetitive strain injury.

I’m not a hardcore raider. I don’t use a parser. I try to optimise, but I do that for my own enjoyment. Maybe you’re right and there are a lot of healers out there who don’t mind the broil spam. Or maybe there are a lot of healers out there who don’t like it but either don’t realise that the forums exist or who don’t think posting here will make any difference. I was one of the latter in StB. I was very unhappy with the changes to SCH in 4.0. But I didn’t say anything.

None of us can just assume that the silent majority agrees with them. However, the increase in unhappy healers on the forums suggests that at the very least there are more healers who dislike this iteration of healers than who disliked the previous one, so it would be nice if there was some way to get decent data on what the majority actually think.

[Shalan]

You can talk about how SCH was gutted all day long, and while I don't disagree, mentioning its former DPS rotation as a focal point of the job is exactly why it's gone. It was the epitome of a green DPS, and we either have to face the fact that this is not how the devs and a lot of players want our healers to be, or look the other direction.

Well maybe the devs should do a better job designing their encounters to necessitate more healing if they don't want healers so focused on DPS then.

This was posted on the healing section a few days ago:

Average SCH dungeon gameplay at 80:



This job is so boring to play I loathe running my experts each week.

Spamming the whole of two abilities for more than half of your dungeon encounter is mind-numbingly boring, and it's something that every healer is having to deal with right now. This isn't fun, it's not engaging. You can argue that this isn't how the devs want healers to be played as much as you want, but it's in stark contrast with the state of combat in this game. This current kind of gameplay is why a lot of us healers are looking for greener pastures elsewhere.

They embraced the DPS nature of tanks by adjusting aggro mechanics and removing the damage penalty for tank stance, why is it such a sin for healers to want some love in this regard as well?


And on a side note, for those saying AST is fine on account of them receiving buffs and having the ability to solo heal things again...
Take a look at the number of parses coming in for the current raids. We're on, what? Week 7 or 8 now? And AST counts for a grand total of 9.6% of parses at the moment (16,733 of 162,261 Eden Savage parses). I don't think even WHM was this bad in SB. The class may be "balanced" but it's sure as hell not very fun to play. Especially that opener, Jesus.

[TwiibieTwuu]

Healers just aren't fun to play. Everything but WHM feels weak. There's no incentives either other than a quick que.

I also think healers should get mounts. As someone who plays Tank/Healer/DPS I personally feel like healers can be more stressful to play. Especially with undergeared party members. AoE eaters, and tanks that refuse to pop buffs.

[Granyala]

Except they're still green DPS, which is part of the problem. People wouldn't be complaining if they added new and interesting healing mechanics alongside more intense healing to keep people both busy and engaged.

Agreed, I hoped for more healing stuff to do but that just isn't the case.
It's not so much of an issue in savage, imho there is a good mix of mechanic dodging, healing and DPSing, that's cool.
But dungeons with a good tank consist of OGCDs and mashing one button. Ugh.

[Melichoir]

I was just thinking about AST cards in the shower. It would be cool if they could combine the new and old systems into something better. Keep the +dmg from the new system so that there are no 'useless' cards, but remove the bonus dmg for using them on specific roles and replace that condition with a secondary effect unique to each card: Bole (+def), Ewer (mp refresh), Spire (+determination), Spear (+crit), Balance (+directhit), Arrow (+atk spd). So they all do +3% dmg dealt in addition to those other effects. And as a quick fix to make dpsing slightly more interesting, bring back Break role action (light dmg and heavy) but turn it into an off-gcd ability with a fairly short CD for weaving in between malefic/broil/glare.

This results in a dumbed down version of how ast operated previously. More viability overall in the cards but itll still end up min/maxing. Bole becomes useless or OP for the defense increase unless they design around it in encounters, and hten it becomes an issue of it becoming an ideal to bring an ast no matter what. Det and ASPD have a lot lower priority on stats, and can be a negative to certain classes (put to much aspd on a monk, for example, and they start clipping oGCDs and arent able to double weave). Crit and DH are progress dependant. DH is strong right now because we cant hit the Crit thresh hold effectively. Once gear gets there, Crit overtakes DH. And as stats go overall, DH and Crit are almost universally desired. So youll have a system of fishing for those stat cards instead. Then you have to balance against these things to ensure that Ast isnt a must pick.

The current system, for what it is, pretty much makes it less important what card you get for buffs. It's the compromise.

Beyond that, I think the complaints for healer are often misplaced. People want to talk about "Oh, Healers are boring to play!" but generally I hear this particular criticism from healers who dont do savage or healers who want to play like a DPS. The non-savage thing is an issue, in that content isnt difficult enough in that regards. There needs to be harder mechanics (not just more damage, though that is part of it) and more RNG mechanics in non savage content. This is an issue of pushing the skill floor up overall and then pushing Savage even harder. Way I see it though, if you dont like the role, then dont play it. If you want to be a healer, and do healing, then the current iterations of healers accomplish this. This doesnt mean there isnt room for improvement and regular content needs to up its difficulty, but if the crux of the complaint is "I only have 3 or 4 DPS skills as a healer and thats boring" while ignoring a robust support kit as part of the play, then it seems like people are more keen on playing a DPS wiht support skills than playing a healer with support DPS abilities.

[Makeda]

I also think healers should get mounts. As someone who plays Tank/Healer/DPS I personally feel like healers can be more stressful to play. Especially with undergeared party members. AoE eaters, and tanks that refuse to pop buffs.

Unless casting your mount becomes a part of your combat rotation what exactly would that solve?
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The current design works great when you undergear content. You will be spamming heals and shields and rezzes until you run out of mana and barely getting by.

The problem is faced in every MMO with vertical progression; eventually you outgear it and healing becomes less needed. Maybe that happens early or later - but in the long run this is an unsolvable problem built into vertical progression games.

That’s why we have green dps. It’s why we have them in WoW. It’s why I personally first saw green DPS in City of Heroes almost 14 years ago... the MMO that I believe gave healers the label of “green” for their role as all healing was colored green on screen...

In WoW they originally prevented this not by stopping you from ever outgearing content... they just gave healers no viable DPS toolkit... that’s mostly gone now. And green DPS is the rule in WoW.

It’s not that green DPS are going to be parsing good DPS numbers unless the game engine is broken... but it’s about something to do...
WoW’s classic through Wrath era community solved this very differently than here. They just had healers AFK between heals - my old cohealer sometimes DC’d from the AFK timer in mid boss fight back in Burning Crusade/2007. Healer was seen as the role that you have your friend or sig-other that actually hates MMOs play... It was low engagement and easy very early on in gearing...

Many healers have already hit that point in Shadowbringers...

They can AFK or they can green DPS...

Yes many healer quit WoW healing when it started trying to fix this. First they tried what SE is trying right now. They made healing dramatically harder in Cataclysm. But within just a patch or two longer than before healers had outgeared the new standard and were back to AFKing...

And then you started seeing the counter spec, the discipline healer, rapidly become the most popular healer with a whole new set of players because it was a green DPS. Ever since every WoW healers has had a DPSing toolkit. Some of them just a few buttons, some a complex martial arts rotation...

Only in a horizontal progression game like Guild Wars 2 or Elder Scroll will you ever be able to stop people from outgearing the need for healing... and yet green DPS is actually more solidly built into the engine in those games than in any others...

Which highly implies that a good green dps toolkit is the only viable long term solution...

[Granyala]

Unless casting your mount becomes a part of your combat rotation what exactly would that solve?

Nothing, it's just the WoW/Blizzard mindset: if sth. isn't readily adopted don't ask why it isn't fun, just reward-bomb people into oblivion and call it a success. >.<

[TwiibieTwuu]

Unless casting your mount becomes a part of your combat rotation what exactly would that solve?

It's called an incentive. Something for people to work towards. Something to reward them for doing end game content as a healer. Tanks get two mounts each. Why can't healers? Would people still do the level 80 roulette if it didn't reward a tomestone bonus?

[Billythepancake]

It's called an incentive. Something for people to work towards. Something to reward them for doing end game content as a healer. Tanks get two mounts each. Why can't healers? Would people still do the level 80 roulette if it didn't reward a tomestone bonus?

It would be a bandaid at best, not an actual solution. Just like with tank mounts, people would play until they got it,then go right back to playing whatever. It wouldn't make anyone want to continue to heal.