Troubling sign for 6.0

[glamazon]

Yes why are status ailments not more of a thing? Also different elemental damage is already there why was it gotten rid of? These things add depth and interest.

[Rymi64]

Yes why are status ailments not more of a thing? Also different elemental damage is already there why was it gotten rid of? These things add depth and interest.

It was pretty trivial when it was a thing in ARR and HW iirc. I don't see how it would add depth or interest in PvE setting of our current trial and dungeon structure

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

If they add elemental properties, then it will ghost out few classes from certain dungeons.
I.e., what if the boss resists/blocks/absorbs fire damage? it'll be out of question to bring BLMs into that encounter.

[Jirah]

Yes why are status ailments not more of a thing? Also different elemental damage is already there why was it gotten rid of? These things add depth and interest.

the that are present are trivial sadly what happend to stackable poisons? this used to add urgency no its barelt a tic

[Gemina]

I feel like for those who are contented with the changes should have had a 4th healer with those design philosophies. Give them what they want, let us keep what we want.


But I guess my frustration, particularly with the quote at the start of the thread, is not even so much it's a sign they're not listening to healer complaints here but it's that they misunderstand how to achieve the goal they've allegedly set out to do.

On the one hand they want people to focus healing more.

On the other hand none of their changes make people focus on healing more, if anything, they DPS more.

The 5.4 change, whilst makes energy drain less useful, it is still better than not using energy. And without energy drain we end up with lots of unused stacks.

If they want to solve both problems, then the healing requirement needs to go up.

A 4th healer in ShB was not possible because of their main goal when they first spoke that they were addressing healing back during SB: And that was they wanted to balance the healers. Besides, it isn't any one healer that is causing the issue players have; it's healing in general. If you release another healer that plays differently, then healing becomes unbalanced again, and the leap frogging will return. A 4th healer in this case is what I call "bringing another cat home", because it disturbs a delicate balance among the current healers. This happened the last time they brought in a new healer with AST in HW.

It is also not an issue of the devs wanting healers to heal more. What they have stated is that they don't want healers too focused on DPSing. I can assure you that this is a result of the tunnel visioning found inside random groupings. If you've ever not been topped off before taking an unavoidable AoE that finishes you off, steamed as your DPS plummets because your heavy or paralyze doesn't get cleansed, died to 'heal to full' doom debuff, involuntarily solo healed a tough duty because of a green-DPS minded co-healer, just watch your HP fall to zero without a heal as a tank, or laid KO'd on the floor far longer than what is reasonable then you should know exactly what the devs are talking about. This is still happening despite healers having only two buttons to DPS with, so now they are looking at other methods to discourage focus DPS as is the case with Energy Drain.

The healing requirement is very likely to remain unchanged in casual content. Healers have to seek out encounters where they are pushed more. Alliance raids, especially the most recent is a great place to go if you like to heal reactively. The first week or so after patch day is a great time to head into the normal raids if those are released, with this time being the most ripe the earlier you go. Unreal trials are also a good place since the ilv sync prevents the group from zerging the boss, and failed mechanics are far more punishing.

EX and Savage is all scripted, and you heal when the fight calls for it. If you have to heal reactively too much, chances are the group won't clear, especially if players haven't out geared the content yet. I don't do savage, but EX trials do not provide as much engagement with healing as the casual stuff. I am far more DPS focused in those encounters due to the enrage. So as you can probably perceive, it's my own mentality that shifts to accommodate the content instead of wanting the content to accommodate my mentality.

[ItMe]

It is also not an issue of the devs wanting healers to heal more. What they have stated is that they don't want healers too focused on DPSing. I can assure you that this is a result of the tunnel visioning found inside random groupings. If you've ever not been topped off before taking an unavoidable AoE that finishes you off, steamed as your DPS plummets because your heavy or paralyze doesn't get cleansed, died to 'heal to full' doom debuff, involuntarily solo healed a tough duty because of a green-DPS minded co-healer, just watch your HP fall to zero without a heal as a tank, or laid KO'd on the floor far longer than what is reasonable then you should know exactly what the devs are talking about. This is still happening despite healers having only two buttons to DPS with, so now they are looking at other methods to discourage focus DPS as is the case with Energy Drain.

That's just part of the learning process of being a healer (the backbone of the party).
Those things will always happen on the road to "getting gud."
I feel SQEX could do more to smooth that out by giving us more learning tools (like an upgrade to the hall of the novice).

[Gemina]

That's just part of the learning process of being a healer (the backbone of the party).
Those things will always happen on the road to "getting gud."
I feel SQEX could do more to smooth that out by giving us more learning tools (like an upgrade to the hall of the novice).

I do think this is true to a certain extent. I will even go as far as to say that tunnel visioning is 99.99% unintentional, with the .01 going to the bitter healer who says, "Want me to DPS? Fine! No heals mo-fos!". This doesn't excuse it though.

All roles have a way of tunnel visioning. Tanks and DPS can let their uptime buffs drop if they focus too much and causing maximum damage and forget to refresh them, resulting in a severe drop in DPS. However in the realm of casual content where there are no enrages, this just results in taking longer to kill stuff. With healers though, their tunnel visioning results in player death in all content, or players have to burn up CDs unnecessarily to help sustain themselves in hopes the healer wakes up in time. IOW, it is really difficult to argue that healers have too many healing skills when they don't use the ones the situation is calling for.

Another big issue is the lack of a sense of urgency when fellow players are down to get them back up, and this is silly to me because if a healer has to hard cast a raise, it is quite possibly one of the most engaging times to be a healer. The cast time, the MP cost, how vulnerable it leaves you, and the potential punishment for interrupting your cast, or deciding to eat the AoE. Now that is what I call healing. But nope. Most healers just go 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 until swift comes off of CD. And you know as well as I that a good portion of them just think, "Shouldn't have stood in bad dude."

[GrimGale]

In short, they do listen but would be hard pressed to go through countless pages of what can be boiled down to, "We want to damage more, and heal less."

Is this bait? Most complains are from the side of "Please give me something more engaging to do than spamming one button for 80% of a fight."

The problem is, and has been ever since the reveal of 5.0, healing downtime and how to fill it.

If fights are designed to have such lengthy moments where healing is not required, then players will fill it up with Dps, just to do something more than standing idly by waiting for healh bars to get chipped only to cast a heal to fill them back up. (Which I would argue is increadibly boring too.)

[GrimGale]

>t is also not an issue of the devs wanting healers to heal more. What they have stated is that they don't want healers too focused on DPSing. I can assure you that this is a result of the tunnel visioning found inside random groupings. If you've ever not been topped off before taking an unavoidable AoE that finishes you off, steamed as your DPS plummets because your heavy or paralyze doesn't get cleansed, died to 'heal to full' doom debuff, involuntarily solo healed a tough duty because of a green-DPS minded co-healer, just watch your HP fall to zero without a heal as a tank, or laid KO'd on the floor far longer than what is reasonable then you should know exactly what the devs are talking about. This is still happening despite healers having only two buttons to DPS with, so now they are looking at other methods to discourage focus DPS as is the case with Energy Drain.

If this is true then its a terrible way to go about designing your game.
Some healers are bad, therefore we bring the whole group down together.

Why is this philosophy not applied to dps?

Some dps fail to efficiently perform their rotation, they don't maximize their damage output and die to mechanics. Should devs simplify jobs based on that? Give everybody a single button rotation with a dot? That way, surely nobody will make mistakes.

[Saefinn]

A 4th healer in ShB was not possible because of their main goal when they first spoke that they were addressing healing back during SB: And that was they wanted to balance the healers. Besides, it isn't any one healer that is causing the issue players have; it's healing in general. If you release another healer that plays differently, then healing becomes unbalanced again, and the leap frogging will return. A 4th healer in this case is what I call "bringing another cat home", because it disturbs a delicate balance among the current healers. This happened the last time they brought in a new healer with AST in HW.

It is also not an issue of the devs wanting healers to heal more. What they have stated is that they don't want healers too focused on DPSing. I can assure you that this is a result of the tunnel visioning found inside random groupings. If you've ever not been topped off before taking an unavoidable AoE that finishes you off, steamed as your DPS plummets because your heavy or paralyze doesn't get cleansed, died to 'heal to full' doom debuff, involuntarily solo healed a tough duty because of a green-DPS minded co-healer, just watch your HP fall to zero without a heal as a tank, or laid KO'd on the floor far longer than what is reasonable then you should know exactly what the devs are talking about. This is still happening despite healers having only two buttons to DPS with, so now they are looking at other methods to discourage focus DPS as is the case with Energy Drain.

The healing requirement is very likely to remain unchanged in casual content. Healers have to seek out encounters where they are pushed more. Alliance raids, especially the most recent is a great place to go if you like to heal reactively. The first week or so after patch day is a great time to head into the normal raids if those are released, with this time being the most ripe the earlier you go. Unreal trials are also a good place since the ilv sync prevents the group from zerging the boss, and failed mechanics are far more punishing.

EX and Savage is all scripted, and you heal when the fight calls for it. If you have to heal reactively too much, chances are the group won't clear, especially if players haven't out geared the content yet. I don't do savage, but EX trials do not provide as much engagement with healing as the casual stuff. I am far more DPS focused in those encounters due to the enrage. So as you can probably perceive, it's my own mentality that shifts to accommodate the content instead of wanting the content to accommodate my mentality.

I realise the reason we didn't get a 4th healer is because of balance, but I feel it was the only way they could have provided the aforementioned design philosophy to appeal to certain players without negatively impacting existing healers.


With the perceived issue of "healers too focused on DPSing", I don't think that's a problem that's at all gone away. And I don't think it will as long as there is a zerg focus in content. We still see the complaints of healers who DPS, of healers who seemingly do nothing but DPS and healers who let their party die because they were DPSing. I don't think complexity affects much in that focus because the principle is to drop what you're doing to go ahead and heal. But there's so many different factors here, and the one that has caught me out is simply misjudging the situation. I hope even with the absolute minimum to focus on and this /still/ being an issue i hope at least has the devs see that maybe a little (even if not a lot) of DPS complexity is not that much of a problem. I think if any thing more tools to make healers realise they need to focus their attention to people's dropping health would be more productive in that issue. Me personally? I just accept it as part of one of the challenges are a healer and that like anybody else in any other role, they simply make mistakes. I've had many tanks and DPS make mistakes, do things wrong or have errors in judgment and could deaths and wipes. So I don't think it's such a bad thing and comes part and parcel with this kind of game.

And I would probably argue that a cycle of constant repetition is more or just as likely to cause somebody to tunnel vision. And thinking on it, in a way, this is a benefit of the AST's card system, because you're drawing your attention to your allies and can immediately spot when their health is dropping. And the card will be drawn for long enough for you to heal.

Also, I don't mind so much that the healing requirement in casual content will be low, hence I figure breaking up the monotony is the best option. And I don't want my enjoyment of playing a healer job being relegated to little bits of content, especially when I don't think the means to make that happen are unreasonable.

But as a semi-casual, a lot of the time the content I'm doing is roulettes and Normal Raids or even FATE grinding to get shared FATEs up except when I have the time to dedicate myself to longer runs of stuff like Alliance
Raids or get stuck into Savage/Ex progression.

So often or not, my incentive ends up being playing something other than a healer. Yet I don't really always want to because I am a healer at heart.

Meaning, I hope that this "rebalancing" means something positive for 6.0. If that has been their intention, communication on it I think would probably do a great deal to quell concerns.