Has anyone quit healing?

[WanderingRoe]

Well, I am glad I am not the only one pretty frustrated by healing this expansion. After 18 years of playing MMOs and maining healer the whole time, I went DNC this expansion after SCH in 2.0 and then AST til 5.0. Hard to go over every post itt so I assume a lot of what I am gonna go over is old news and I am of course no game dev, but the Healer role design or vision or whatever does not appropriately match the reality of endgame content. There are of course other factors, such as fluctuating healer balance/toolkits scaring away old timers, lack of new classes to entice newer players to take up the role, you name it, but the fact is it is clearly a problem and the lack of healers for endgame content has been a major issue (that might get worse over time).

1): The current Healer meta and generally accepted "optimal" way to play Healer regardless of job is to heal as little as possible while keeping people alive, and deal as much damage as possible (either through direct or rDPS) to clear any given fight.

2): The developers have stated as recently as last year (if not even more recently) that they do not take Healer DPS into account regarding endgame fights. This is likely the cause for actual healer play being so unsatisfying for a large amount of the playerbase (spamming a single dot + single nuke or a single AoE button for a disturbingly large amount of content in between oGCDs).

Those two things do not mesh together well at all.

Personally, I dislike the idea of Healers being expected to heal as little as possible and DPS as much as possible (aka Green DPS syndrome), but that is the reality of the situation and I don't expect raid design to change so much to accommodate a shift to "constant, random raid damage" especially when there is no guarantee it will end up any better than now. Thus, I think the most realistic solution would be to design the few healer tools shared across classes (small cheap heal, bigger not so cheap heal) with the current meta in mind. Maybe something like WoW Smite Priest or MW Monk in that their basic damaging spells also automatically heal nearby allies, or increases rDPS? Maybe mix in some of their more unique abilities as well when the base kit is there. I had a lot more drawn out ideas but character limit so blah.

I'm not pretending any of this will be particularly easy to implement quickly or that my suggestions are the only things they can do, but I firmly believe that the longer that (effectively) nothing is done to correct the current meta's kit vs encounter head butting, the more problematic it will become, and progress toward a solution has been hard for me to see. ShB is mostly fantastic and I am having great fun with DNC (and most other DPS jobs I play) so it makes Healer gameplay all the more polarizing. Even if the gameplay continues down a path I am not interested in walking, it would be nice if it were more appealing in general than it is so I don't have to wait so long in DF queue/PF as a DPS.