Please Nerf Shield Healer Pure Heals

[Lastelli]

There's actually an easy way to make the pure/shield healer dichotomy work: make shields almost as strong as regens in terms of total hps, with the main downside being a lower duration of the shield (around 7 seconds) and a higher mp cost to account for the fact that shields are inherently stronger than regens in the case of hps parity. At the same time, make it so that most oGCD healing skills require GCD spells to work, so more skills like plenary indulgence, deploy and emergency, horoscope, the old version of celestial opposition that extended regens and so on (currently op oGCD skills should be reworked accordingly). A lazy way to do it is, for instance, to make CO and asylum only work if there's a regen effect on party members. In general, oGCD skills should be a way to modify and/or enhance GCD healing spells, not the main or only source of healing in an optimized scenario (also make it easier to weave oGCD for sch and whm maybe by reducing the GCD of their main damaging spell to 1.8 seconds).
And finally, make unavoidable raidwide damage frequent and high enough so that at max ilvl it's not a joke to heal through.

Ideally, savage and ultimate content should mandate the presence of a shield healer by not making it possible to survive certain parts of the encounter without their shields. This can be easily achieved by making aoe shields strong enough (my idea is something like succor healing for 200, shielding for 400 with 7 seconds duration so that you actually need to pay attention to when you should cast it) and aoe damage frequent enough. For leveling content, just give an oGCD skill with a 30 seconds cd to the shield healers at level 45 that converts any shield currently applied on nearby party members to hp and that's it.

If they succeed in doing this, balancing healers will be easy, since they'd only have to balance each pair separately.

[Saefinn]

If they succeed in doing this, balancing healers will be easy, since they'd only have to balance each pair separately.

Very much this. And it's why I am cautiously hopeful. I think if they pull it off then balancing becomes less complicated. Each healer will only have 1 other healer to balance against as you say instead of 3.

But it'll only work if they bring out that shield focus. Else you end up with 4 pure healers.

[ty_taurus]

Here's what you do to make barrier healing a viable alternative using Scholar as the baseline:

We start by swapping Adloquium and Succor with Lustrate and Indomitability in terms of resources-- Adlo/Succor are Aetherflow shields while Lustrate/Indom are casted spells that cost MP. All SCH's OGCD healing should come from the faerie (we also go back to casted Embrace to avoid the ghosting issue). You shield your team and the faerie covers the additional healing that's needed for the most part when solo. Meanwhile, Lustrate and Indom are objectively weaker than Cure II/Benefic II and Medica/Helios respectively; however, Emergency Tactics drastically increases their potencies AND their MP costs. The idea here is that barrier healers will be able to heal the team after a disaster, but it's going to aggressively chew into your MP, which in turn hurts your overall DPS.

Basically, if you manage your resources correctly, the team is taking less damage, and you don't need to use Emergency Tactics to catch up. If you mess up, or your team does, you aren't screwed over, you'll just take a huge hit to your DPS.

The idea here is that barrier healers would want to maximize their DPS uptime, being moreso the "Green DPS" healers.

This of course only works provided Pure Healers and Bosses are adjusted to work with this mindset. To contrast, Pure Healers have higher potencies for GCD healing and more reasonable MP costs, but lack a wide enough variety of OGCD tools to keep their DPS uptime high. Instead, they focus on maintaining their DPS contributions passively--WHM does this by nourishing the Blood Lily while healing to pump out DPS in quick and sudden bursts while AST goes harder on the buff mentality and gains GCD damage buffs to essentially have most of their DPS come from their allies rather than their own casts of Malefic/Combust/etc.

This would create a relationship much like how it was in 2.0, where you have the Pure Healer who's the one mostly responsible for recovering after large HP drops while Barrier Healers try and help them with occasional barriers that are OGCD and maintain a much more consistent DPS uptime. This would also require raidwide damage moments to hit harder (which we could make them %max health based + a regular amount to ensure the team is always taking a high enough amount of damage to warrant the Pure Healers to actually need their high potencies.)

If this were done successfully, you'd also be able to create a more defined dynamic between Pure and Barrier healers to represent players who do and don't want to DPS as healers. If you're the kind of player that doesn't like being a DPS heavy healer, then the Pure healer role is for you, since you'll have little resources to encourage you to use your standard DPS, and you'll be encouraged to use other GCD support methods to contribute your damage that way, rather than directly like the barrier healers.

[EaMett]

I feel like SCH would be such a better barrier healer if Adloquium and Succor dropped their healing and applied only shields as OGCD tools.

And this would basically not change much as per my last comment. You hardly ever need shields in this game. So giving healers more shields does nothing. All this would accomplish would be to make SCH never GCD heal ever. The rest would stay the same, it might delay your heals closer to the next hit but that's it. There's virtually no difference between giving someone more HP in direct HP or giving someone more HP in shield HP.
Shields only have value when damage is > to 100% HP. And given how many party mitigation tools there are in this game I'd say it's closer to 150% HP.

[FoxCh40s]

And this would basically not change much as per my last comment. You hardly ever need shields in this game. So giving healers more shields does nothing. All this would accomplish would be to make SCH never GCD heal ever. The rest would stay the same, it might delay your heals closer to the next hit but that's it. There's virtually no difference between giving someone more HP in direct HP or giving someone more HP in shield HP.
Shields only have value when damage is > to 100% HP. And given how many party mitigation tools there are in this game I'd say it's closer to 150% HP.

But let's look at it from this standpoint; why not let Scholar have no GCD heals? From a tactical standpoint, it would make sense. I mean Astro is the front load healer with Lightspeed right?

Instant Shields with Zero Heals on them, lower the potency of their single target heals?

Ah kupo, I dont know anymore man. I just want healers to be fun and engaging again, and I'm personally willing to break the game for it. It's not like Dungeons are really that hard, it would just make them tune Savage up? Isnt that what everyone is after?

[MintnHoney]

I just want healers to be fun and engaging again, and I'm personally willing to break the game for it. It's not like Dungeons are really that hard, it would just make them tune Savage up? Isnt that what everyone is after?

Sadly that isn't what everyone's after.
Squeen desperately wants the skill floor to basically start below ground-level for healers, while "we" need the skill ceiling to be high for our own satisfaction. The simplification of the role, as it occurred in the last expansion, makes it difficult to have one without dragging the other with it, unless they suddenly don't mind complicating things again (which I doubt, considering what little they've said and done over this expansion, and what's been talked about in the prior expansion and what's to come in the next, so far). This approach risks decreasing the successful turnover rate of new healers (which Squeen wants to see increase) and the ire of the Sylphies (whom it seems that Squeen wants to see more of, despite the reference).

[Saefinn]

Sadly that isn't what everyone's after.
Squeen desperately wants the skill floor to basically start below ground-level for healers, while "we" need the skill ceiling to be high for our own satisfaction. The simplification of the role, as it occurred in the last expansion, makes it difficult to have one without dragging the other with it, unless they suddenly don't mind complicating things again (which I doubt, considering what little they've said and done over this expansion, and what's been talked about in the prior expansion and what's to come in the next, so far). This approach risks decreasing the successful turnover rate of new healers (which Squeen wants to see increase) and the ire of the Sylphies (whom it seems that Squeen wants to see more of, despite the reference).

This is why I am in the "give us more DPS abilities or support abilities" camp. You can use these to raise the skill ceiling without touching the skill floor. To me it's the best compromise that respects how the game is designed too. I am hoping if balance suddenly becomes easier there's better room to add more of this kinda stuff.

Shield healing will increase the skill floor a little, but only in that it requires you to approach healing differently, but is not a difficult concept at the same time.

[hythrain]

Heyo, first post on the forum. Wanted to get involved in this since I've been reading what people want and I wanted to suggest an idea for how barriers could be made well without causing issues for things others have pointed out.

To me, the way to make "barrier" and "pure" work is to give multiple barriers with different strengths, some tied to heals and others not and make these spells interact different for each job. Ill use SCH and non-Aetherflow spells to explain with a possible idea for changing the kit.

First, Adloquium. Keep it as a barrier tied to a heal. Remove the critical strike function (No Catalyze, no basing its strength on the strength of the heal) and instead give the shield just a raw amount. Galvanize from Adloquium lasts 30 seconds.

Second, new spell: Catalyze. Instant cast spell that invokes a shorter GCD (say, 1 second vs. the base level) and has a short duration. It puts a strong barrier up. This barrier is stronger than Adloquium's barrier but weaker if you add in the healing. Give it a 15-20 second cooldown, so you can't just chain it and HAVE to use Adloquium. This barrier is also Galvanize, meaning it doesn't stack with Adoloquium.

This gives you two barrier spells to work with. They provide the same barrier but differ in use.

Now for Succor. Give it the crit treatment that Adloquium got. Next, change the barrier name so it's no longer Galvanize (Let's call it Bar-a for now), BUT you cannot have a target with it AND Galvanize. If you use Adloquium or Catalyze, you overwrite Bar-A since Galvanize should always be stronger.

Now take Emergency Tactics. Instead of it being a pre-cast to Succor or Adloquium, it's a post-cast to Succor only. AOE, it consumes Bar-A and heals based on how much of the barrier remains. THis way, it doesn't work as well when people are getting their barriers eaten up quickly but DOES work for those "the whole party dropped to 1 HP and needs to be healed or we die" situations. It heals more than the barrier is worth and can crit, but has a longer cooldown so you can't abuse it.

Finally: change barrier mechanics so that they are NOT affected by damage reduction buffs that the target has but they ARE affected by tenacity. Example: Tank takes a hit that, after tenacity, does 20k damage. They have a buff that reduces their damage by another 20%, making it 16k and a barrier that absorbs 8k. Instead of cutting the damage down to 8k total, you remove 8k from the 20k hit and THEN apply the 20% damage reduction. The damage after the barrier is now 9.6k and you've created a difference between barriers and heals, allowing for stronger barriers.

From here... balance the numbers. This set-up would give the tools for a low skill floor but a high skill ceiling without just throwing more DPS.

And you could probably work Aetherflow into this too. Maybe turn Excogitation into that instant-cast barrier, making you decide between if it's more valuable to use it or to wait and use Lustrate.

[EaMett]

This is why I am in the "give us more DPS abilities or support abilities" camp. You can use these to raise the skill ceiling without touching the skill floor.

This is part of the issue for the devs (and as a result, us). They don't want a bigger gap in DPS between skill floor and ceiling. That's why they simplified the dps in the first place. I'm hoping they decided against this design but part of me highly doubts it. t

[Feidam]

This is part of the issue for the devs (and as a result, us). They don't want a bigger gap in DPS between skill floor and ceiling. That's why they simplified the dps in the first place. I'm hoping they decided against this design but part of me highly doubts it. t

Could players have a hand in this issue too? In that if a class has a high ceiling players then, in my experience, expect to be rewarded with higher performance if theycan hit that ceiling. Which can in turn cause stigma towards another class and lower it’s representation as folks refuse to take that job. It’s a conundrum that I don’t envy any game developer. Just wondering if and how much this comes into their design philosophy.

To make the barrier heals work I feel they are going to have to change the strength of the barriers and how content is fundamentally run by players. I love the barrier heal idea. Loved scholar from day one, but I can see some issues that they need to tackle to make this work.