Troubling sign for 6.0

[Gemina]

That's complete nonsense. The majority of posts boil down to "we want something more engaging to do during our downtime". No one wants to heal less, we have barely anything to heal as it is, but even if you significantly increased damage intake we'd still have downtime, especially with better gear, and dealing damage is a good way to fill that. We'd prefer if the devs acknowledged this was a thing and made dealing damage a little more interesting.

How so? This statement is basically what gives that impression. When processing thoughts on how to fill downtime, you immediately default to causing damage. Of course, the argument of content design being the reason for this will be the rebuttal towards that, but this is a deadend. It does not solve the puzzle on how to make healing enjoyable for everyone. And when this dev team consistently comes out with content that takes us by surprise such as G-warrior back in 5.3, and new mechanics each patch that give players something to think about for a few days until the knowledge becomes widespread, I know they can do better. They just have to give healers the time and resources they deserve.

Increasing the healing requirement is also not the answer, and I've covered that. Each of these possible solutions only serve to loop the problem. The dev team is going to have to come up with something different to circumvent a perpetual and very difficult issue.

[ForteNightshade]

Increasing the healing requirement is also not the answer, and I've covered that. Each of these possible solutions only serve to loop the problem. The dev team is going to have to come up with something different to circumvent a perpetual and very difficult issue.

I disagree. At least to an extent. While upping the healing requirements to essentially trade spamming Glare for Cure II accomplishes nothing. Healing requirements are embarrassingly low in most content, including savage. When you have bosses like E7S where two full minutes go by and all the healers do is weave an oGCD between their DoT weave, it's poorly designed. That's two minutes where you're a gimped DPS with a single button "rotation." It isn't like the fight suddenly ramps up in healing intensity later. When you look at the normal modes though, it's downright ridiculous how little healing you actually do. Case in point, I healed E9N with a friend and literally did nothing but spam Glare for 95% of the fight. Now this wasn't me greeding while she healbotted. We were both spamming our nukes. There's simply so little healing her kit on Astro managed everything with barely any GCDs used.

This is why you're seeing even people outside raiders complaining at how boring healers have become. It's hard to play into the healer fantasy when content simply doesn't require two healers actually doing their primary job. Abilities like Temperance, Seraph and Neutral Sect may as well be Savage exclusive because they're way too overpowered for anything below.

The usual rebuttal to this is they can't increase the healing intensity or demand because inexperienced players wouldn't be able to keep up. Whether you agree or disagree, this is what shifts the argument towards improving healer DPS tools. They need to do better because we're two expansions in where the healing has become nowhere near demanding enough to keep up with the tools at their disposal.

[Semirhage]

I disagree. At least to an extent. While upping the healing requirements to essentially trade spamming Glare for Cure II accomplishes nothing. Healing requirements are embarrassingly low in most content, including savage. When you have bosses like E7S where two full minutes go by and all the healers do is weave an oGCD between their DoT weave, it's poorly designed. That's two minutes where you're a gimped DPS with a single button "rotation." It isn't like the fight suddenly ramps up in healing intensity later. When you look at the normal modes though, it's downright ridiculous how little healing you actually do. Case in point, I healed E9N with a friend and literally did nothing but spam Glare for 95% of the fight. Now this wasn't me greeding while she healbotted. We were both spamming our nukes. There's simply so little healing her kit on Astro managed everything with barely any GCDs used.

Increasing healing requirements is part of a solution, but not the whole solution. It can't be. Downtime is a thing. It always will be. That's just how it works. If you make healing in most content so time-consuming that there's very little room for downtime, healing is now only the purview of the best-in-role players. If healing is to be accessible for a range of player skill levels, you leave enough room for mistakes that the more experienced players have downtime. How that downtime gets filled is up to design consideration; damage has worked reasonably well in the past. As long as it's a satisfying reward I'm working toward. That's two of the big red flags that got me to drop the role for DPS this expansion; the skill floor for "enough" healing got so low that you can hit it very quickly, and the reward for slimming down your performance there is...casting one spell a thousand times. Which is boring. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to the idea of higher healing requirements (abysmal skill floor be damned, there comes a point where you should at least expect a minimum level of healing skill). I'm not an elite best-in-role Ultimate raider, but I'm also no slouch at playing healers. Even if you increase healing requirements, I'm not going to be wowed by getting to cast Glare more as my crowing achievement for improving my gameplay.

[Liam_Harper]

How so? This statement is basically what gives that impression. When processing thoughts on how to fill downtime, you immediately default to causing damage.

Because there will always be downtime, even if they make the healing we have to do enjoyable and require us to do more. Downtime needs to be filled, or we just sit there twiddling our thumbs. I agree with Kabooa that adding another DoT is not the magical fix, nor am I in the "buffs and debuffs will make everything great!" crowd (although it fits for AST's identity). Buffs, debuffs and DoTs generally have a duration, you press them once and reapply when they drop off. Damage is by far the easiest downtime filler to design into a constant flowing activity, is always valuable to the team and is not reliant on the performance of your team.

Increasing healing requirements is part of a solution, but not the whole solution. It can't be. Downtime is a thing. It always will be.

I agree. I do think increasing healing requirements is a good thing, but it wouldn't be the entire solution. Both healing required and our downtime abilities need addressing.

The usual rebuttal to this is they can't increase the healing intensity or demand because inexperienced players wouldn't be able to keep up.

This one really baffles me. It was also their argument for not adding Mythic+ dungeons, because it would be too much pressure on the inexperienced healers. I understand if they want Normal to be tourist mode and even EX to be casual mode, but I don't get what they really want Savage or concepts like Mythic+ to be. Why does the harder endgame content also have to be designed so a healer with 50% uptime spamming their main aoe heal GCD and little else can beat it with a little gear? Savage should be the content that tests healers.

[AnotherPerson]

Because there will always be downtime, even if they make the healing we have to do enjoyable and require us to do more. Downtime needs to be filled, or we just sit there twiddling our thumbs.I agree with Kabooa that adding another DoT is not the magical fix, nor am I in the "buffs and debuffs will make everything great!" crowd (although it fits for AST's identity). Buffs, debuffs and DoTs generally have a duration, you press them once and reapply when they drop off. Damage is by far the easiest downtime filler to design into a constant flowing activity, is always valuable to the team and is not reliant on the performance of your team.

Pretty much this. Downtime is usually there for many reasons, such as:
1. When the party and you start outgearing a duty (stat progression in an mmo extending downtime)
2. When the team plays better and take less damage (players rewarded by good play by creating downtime)
3. Hard raising and healing mistakes such as avoidable damage. (Base downtime in a duty - affecting accessibility and difficulty to recover from a less than ideal scenario)

While downtime can be shortened by increasing the unavoidable damage in frequency, downtime still needs to exist for when healers have to fix player mistakes by hardcasting GCD healing or hardcast raise. When everyone does well and didn't make mistakes, that downtime will be filled with just mashing the attack one button over and over again as no heals are needed.

However, if downtime was shortened, less downtime means more outgoing damage (mainly unavoidable), thus mistakes can become more punishing to outright causing a wipe in a less than ideal scenario (ex: one healer dead and one healer with weakness/brink of death debuff cannot keep up with constant outgoing damage since their heals were weaker). Healing requirements going up also means making players manage their resources better (raising skill floor). Taking away or reducing downtime will inevitably affect and require the general player performance to be raised, which affects the accessibility. Finally, if the difference between having better stats is not so readily apparent (think if level 50/60/70 roulettes where you get better gear but enemies also hit even harder so it feels like leveling dungeons at level 71 to 80), then the player wouldn't feel actual stat progression in content, which opposes the general idea of a mmorpg. In short, reducing downtime affects a lot of factors related and unrelated to the healer in particular as well, which is a lot more to consider in the long run when designing content. In contrast, giving healers more DPS variety to fill that downtime is much simpler to accomplish because doing so acknowledges downtime exists and rewards players for doing better when creating downtime.

[ForteNightshade]

This one really baffles me. It was also their argument for not adding Mythic+ dungeons, because it would be too much pressure on the inexperienced healers. I understand if they want Normal to be tourist mode and even EX to be casual mode, but I don't get what they really want Savage or concepts like Mythic+ to be. Why does the harder endgame content also have to be designed so a healer with 50% uptime spamming their main aoe heal GCD and little else can beat it with a little gear? Savage should be the content that tests healers.

Because they seem hellbent on accessibility above all else. Savage has essentially become geared more towards the mid-core save for the last encounter in each tier. Leviathan and Idol are the easiest third fights we've ever seen, and E11 isn't exactly knocking down doors either. I think part of their hesitation stems from Gordias and Midas being so disastrous for the raid scene. Although, perhaps a bigger problem is the devs simply aren't paying attention to how we're playing the game. Yoshida citing they want Aetherflow to be more reserved for healing only adds credence to that theory. I can't help but wonder if their play testers aren't the best healers or play extremely cautiously, leading to the constant focus on more healing tools we simply don't need and low healing requirements.

Either way, I feel like the devs have overlooked player enjoyment in their strive for accessibility. It's understandable they want content to be approachable, regardless of the difficulty. But the primary focus should be making jobs enjoyable for the players who already like them instead of trying to convince people to try something new.

[Ceasaria]

I can't help but wonder if their play testers aren't the best healers or play extremely cautiously, leading to the constant focus on more healing tools we simply don't need and low healing requirements.

Or maybe they play too much with Invincibility cheat activated like Yoshida did on some live letter.