Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Endariel]

I indeed did not take into account tank ole action nor indirect mitigation, but nevertheless, healers have waay more tools than they are normally using.
As you pointed out, low cost st spells become obselete at higher levels, which leaves me the question why they aren't directly upgraded in the first place. But there's more than that
As for "green dps", isn't that the current situation anyway? Tanks are defacto blue dps, but no one is complaining
It's either this or raidwide "true living dead" every 10 seconds to make healers utilize their full kit

[Loki]

Tanks can dps/buff/dots/cure
DPS can dots/buff/cure/raise
Healers should just heal? wtf with SE

5.0 healer design is the worst i have ever seen, fortunatly you have spent 2 years for "balancing" healers...

Just give healers their identity back with some interesting gameplay and let your players choose if they want to use it 100% or just heal or just dps i'm bored to have Mama SE behind my back "you should play like that".

If we follow their pur healer way we should have pur tank way and pur dps way too, actual situation is just unfair and borring.

And please respect your own lore SE....i really don't understand your 5.0 choices.

[Saefinn]

I feel the big issue is that for an awful lot of content you're only healing 20-30% of the time. Not because you're a healer who wants to DPS more and not care about healing but because you're good enough at healing that you don't need to heal any more than that.

I accept that maybe healers need to heal more as a concept. But SE's solutions have been:
- Nerf healer DPS
- Reduce their number of DPS abilities
- Increase the number of healing abilities that end up as bloat in a lot of content

What that results in is:
70% of a run is dead boring DPS.
30% of a run is over-saturated with available healing spells

The exception being learning parties, progression groups and people who're still learning or optimizing their healing abilities to become stronger healers.

I agree that their logic is backwards, Yoshi P's comments on the Energy Drain change I think demonstrate it. I think there's a disconnect between how devs want healers to play and how healers are played.

Nerfing energy drain doesn't make you heal more. There are 2 factors that make you heal more: mechanics and the efficiency of your healing toolkit. Your DPS tool kit does not impact this. What you do in your down time doesn't impact this. At most it'll mean your healer might tunnel vision but with our super dumbed down DPS, that's still an issue, this is because the game is designed in a DPS focused way, where every bit counts. I feel this problem is unavoidable and is down to the attentiveness of the healer.

I would summarize it as:
- The devs seem to think: Less DPS incentive => More Healing Incentive
- When it should be: More healing incentive => Less DPS incentive

If they did the latter, I feel they'd be closer to achieving what they've set out to do.

If people's health is topped up enough, what healing incentive is there? There's 0 benefit to overhealing.

I think the healer problem would be solved in 1 of 3 ways:

1- Devs accept that healer down time is a thing and give healers something to do. This is more or less how they were designed originally (and it was nothing complex). This IMO is the best solution because it keeps the skill floor low whilst increasing its ceiling and respects existing design.
2- They adjust the content so healers have to heal more. This to me would be the biggest undertaking, because they would have to go back and retroactively adjust old content. Being selective won't do IMO because people do roulettes, people level, people do content outside of endgame and stuff that's current. If content is only interesting to play at endgame, then the game would just suffer from the biggest wall I had getting into WoW.
3- They adjust healer balance to make them dependent on their abilities more. The downside is that'd this affect endgame efficiency. Because to adjust it to a level where somebody isn't bored stiff doing their dailies, you'd make it a lot rougher for end game. Unless endgame gets its own balance (like PvP does but maybe not to that extent)

[Ultimatecalibur]

I indeed did not take into account tank ole action nor indirect mitigation, but nevertheless, healers have waay more tools than they are normally using.
As you pointed out, low cost st spells become obselete at higher levels, which leaves me the question why they aren't directly upgraded in the first place. But there's more than that

The Healer's kits are built around sustained healing with mp management as a factor, but fights favor spike healing that doesn't really tax healer mp management. You can more or less see how the healers are supposed to work in ARR content with bosses that almost continuously attack the tanks occasionally stopping to use party targeting actions. Modern bosses tend to spend a lot more time casting abilities to be dodged over attacking.

As for "green dps", isn't that the current situation anyway? Tanks are defacto blue dps, but no one is complaining

Tanks are complaining about being blue dps. We just tend to complain more about fight design not fully utilizing our kit than the kits themselves (outside of DRK which has a rather boring dps rotation).

It's either this or raidwide "true living dead" every 10 seconds to make healers utilize their full kit

There are actually a fair number of ways to make fights more interesting to tank and heal but the designers have more or less locked themselves into the current design scheme. More unavoidable damage on the tanks coming from Auto-attacks and DoTs would do a lot.

I feel the big issue is that for an awful lot of content you're only healing 20-30% of the time. Not because you're a healer who wants to DPS more and not care about healing but because you're good enough at healing that you don't need to heal any more than that.

What that results in is:
70% of a run is dead boring DPS.
30% of a run is over-saturated with available healing spellsp

Exactly.

If people's health is topped up enough, what healing incentive is there? There's 0 benefit to overhealing.

There really should be more abilities like Spirit's Within that scale their damage based on how high their current HP is.

2- They adjust the content so healers have to heal more. This to me would be the biggest undertaking, because they would have to go back and retroactively adjust old content. Being selective won't do IMO because people do roulettes, people level, people do content outside of endgame and stuff that's current. If content is only interesting to play at endgame, then the game would just suffer from the biggest wall I had getting int WoW.

They don't really need to rebalance existing content that can be completed. Just change how they do design future content.

[Saefinn]

They don't really need to rebalance existing content that can be completed. Just change how they do design future content.

On this point, I disagree, simply because people still do the older content, which I think is a positive for this game, that it incentivises old content so people who need/want to do it get queues for it.

But say I'm capping my tomestomes for the week, there's still Trials Roulette, Levelling Roulette, 50/60/70 Roulette. Or if I am healing for a newbie on older content and help out people in general. And of course, there's new or returning players who still have to go through that content who are at a skill level where it still feels unengaging. From a tank perspective, not as engaging as it used to be but still reasonably engaging because it feels like I am not spamming. And for DPS it feels more engaging because you have a rotation and feel like you're not spamming.

Hence my reference to WoW, because whenever I've tried to approach that game it just felt dull to play all the way right up until the content everybody's doing, which means going through an arduous slog of un-engaging content. One of the reasons for ARR rework was because ARR had that wall. And I feel as a role, healers have it too. Not the case for every new player, as I hear mixed feedback.

Sure balancing the future content would be great for future content, but I feel like it'd only a be partial solution.

There really should be more abilities like Spirit's Within that scale their damage based on how high their current HP is.

It's an option for sure. I think there's lots of options that can add a bit of spice of life. Just anything that doesn't make it feel like you're just spamming.

[Ultimatecalibur]

On this point, I disagree, simply because people still do the older content, which I think is a positive for this game, that it incentivises old content so people who need/want to do it get queues for it.

People can and will still do the fights even if future fight design changes. ARR and HW have different fight design than StB and ShB so changing the fight design going forward doesn't mean redoing all previous fights.

[tdb]

If people's health is topped up enough, what healing incentive is there? There's 0 benefit to overhealing.

Would be interesting to see overhealing transformed into a beneficial effect of some kind. A generic damage boost would perhaps be the safest choice. Skill/spell speed boost might be more interesting, but might not work equally well for all classes. Or maybe crit or DH since AST's cards are all damage now.

[Semirhage]

Just give healers a decent damage kit with procs and whatever. It recreates the skill ceiling they've been pancaking down over the last two expansions. It fulfills the (apparent) requirement that healing in most content remains so easy that Curematic Sylphietron 9000 can drag a flagging party through anything. It cures the wasteland of boredom facing anyone who wants mastery of their favorite job. Sorry if you want more healing to do, Squeenix's market research has declared that any healing scenario requiring more than two button presses takes a PhD. At least green DPS is salvageable.

[Crushnight]

Reading through the thread I guess best I comment on my thoughts on the 3 ideas I put in OP.

I don't want them to do that stuff but those are their options, their intent with the healer changes is they want us to heal more, a fine enough intent but their execution to try and get us to do that is WRONG.

But they can't see that the stuff they have targeted as the reason for our more dps focus is WRONG, they blame the dps abilities but it is the healing abilities that let us dps, it is the fights that allow us to plan things out so we do as little healing as possible.

They do not realise why healers do as much dps as they do and it is this mentality that needs to change, they need to understand why we do as much dps as we do and until they do they will continue to make the same design mistakes. If they don't realise soon I can very much see for 6.0, Sch lose Energy Drain AGAIN to be given it back later AGAIN, even simpler cards, and 1 button nuke, 1 aoe nuke as the dps rotation no DoTs because they still believe it is the Dps skills at fault, I could see even more ogcd heals added making you never cast a gcd heal.

The developers need to wake up and see, they are wrong with their design mentality for healers, and this is a fool's hope that when they get that realisation that they'll look at all 3 healers and go "What have we done".

But those suggestions in OP are ways for them to keep their current intent just as I stated in OP the playerbase wouldn't be able to handle them so if the solution to their issue cannot be done perhaps it is time to rethink their approach that is causing the supposed issue.

[GrimGale]

Would be interesting to see overhealing transformed into a beneficial effect of some kind. A generic damage boost would perhaps be the safest choice. Skill/spell speed boost might be more interesting, but might not work equally well for all classes. Or maybe crit or DH since AST's cards are all damage now.

If there was a game mechanic that tied a percentage of your dps to your HP then keeping people topped off would mean everything. 100% HP means you do 100% DPS, and as you go down, you weaken.

Now there is no rush or reason to focus on healing as long as the group has enough health to withstand the next mechanic.

(But of course something like this would ultimately open up another avenue for abuse to healers.)