Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[Deceptus]

There are actually a lot of ways we could adjust encounter design to make healer design a more balanced system. A lot of these require some pretty significant changes to how encounters are designed to begin with, but here are some examples, some of which have been discussed in the past on the forums:

1. Replace Vulnerability Stacks with Damage Dealt Down. When players make mistakes, their most common "punishment" is that they take more damage for a minute, sometimes longer. This actually causes more work for the healers and not the DPS or Tanks who make those mistakes. If we switched Vulnerability to Damage Down, then suddenly the punishment is largely on just the person who failed the mechanic. If this means the party fails to meet a DPS check, then yes it's a punishment on the party, but it does make mechanics easier to survive which would actually speed up Prog times regardless since your party would get more time to see more mechanics in a fight and start learning them sooner. This inadvertently allows designers to pump more damage into unavoidable attacks because they'd be able to exclude some amount of theoretical damage from overall calculations.

Yes, yes, 100% yes to this. I loved it when the dev's introduced this but they keep going away from it.

Why?

Because it makes people responsible for THEIR mistakes, not the healer.

[inhaledcorn]

Yes, yes, 100% yes to this. I loved it when the dev's introduced this but they keep going away from it.

Why?

Because it makes people responsible for THEIR mistakes, not the healer.

However, most DPS who are getting hit by those mechanics that cause the Damage Down don't even know what kind of damage they're doing or how it affects everyone. Damage Down only matters where there are DPS checks, but there are barely any in regular content. Damage Down means literally nothing to them.

[Recon1o6]

tis why i think paralysis and slow should be the punishment in addition to twice come ruin

everyone knows how annoying those statuses are. Fail your mechanics and you get annoying stuff that makes your job suck. So do your mechanics and have more fun.

[MaxCarnage]

How the heck would a newb know what the minority/majority wants? Good grief. MANY healers are sick of spamming one spell 40% of the time--spend a few years here first before you start ballparking this bs. You've never even played a build before 5.0 LOL.

See, you say that, and I get it to a degree, but oh boy, let me tell you something.

I have run hundreds of Bozja-related content. And 9/10 times, there will be healers with Profane. So they effectively become a 1 button dps. Won't even benediction themself, help with raises, nothing. Just glare from start to finish. That is such a common thing I have run in to.

So yeah, 1 button is boring, dps wise, but there seem to be a large number of players who like being braindead. And that's the problem.

And also, who are you to be a gatekeeper on who can and cannot post feedback?

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I have run hundreds of Bozja-related content. And 9/10 times, there will be healers with Profane. So they effectively become a 1 button dps. Won't even benediction themself, help with raises, nothing. Just glare from start to finish. That is such a common thing I have run in to.

Hpnestly, they better be.
Because nothing’s worse than a profane healer actually attempting to heal with their gutted healing potencies, as if they weren’t under Profane Essence at all. In my experience these meme profanes are more prominent than the ones you mention.

[MaxCarnage]

Hpnestly, they better be.
Because nothing’s worse than a profane healer actually attempting to heal with their gutted healing potencies, as if they weren’t under Profane Essence at all. In my experience these meme profanes are more prominent than the ones you mention.

I have never run into a Profane healer that tries to heal regardless of essence. They don't even benediction themself, which is not affected by Profane. It's a full heal, no if, ands, or buts.

They don't help with rezzing, which is annoying, but I get it. But I also find that they are always dead, so profane is a waste on them.

I've had runs where the only healer in my party has profane on. So I, as a red mage, have to be the healer because the person who queued as one doesn't want to be.

Regardless, though, the fact that there are so many people who go profane all the time says a lot.

[Truen]

See, you say that, and I get it to a degree, but oh boy, let me tell you something.

I have run hundreds of Bozja-related content. And 9/10 times, there will be healers with Profane. So they effectively become a 1 button dps. Won't even benediction themself, help with raises, nothing. Just glare from start to finish. That is such a common thing I have run in to.

So yeah, 1 button is boring, dps wise, but there seem to be a large number of players who like being braindead. And that's the problem.

And also, who are you to be a gatekeeper on who can and cannot post feedback?

I'm glad we can agree it's boring, but I'll have to disagree that the solution to teaching "braindead" people is to lower the bar for everyone else! Pressing "broil" 6 times in a row sucks. Staying alert playing the SCH is harder than the damn job itself because it's so hypnotically basic. Seriously though, staying alert on the SCH is harder than juggling the job's mechanics. So yea, this is a very boring design. Sadly dps is something akin to staring at dripping water - it's so awful.

And, I'm trying to gatekeep anything. The OP came out with this passive-aggressive "loud minority" post and then proceeds to explain how little experience they have in the game and the healing role? Na, it's basically trolling to call a community of people a "loud minority" with such admittedly limited experience in what they're complaining about.

If anything, judging by the community reaction to the posts on these official forums, I'd say those sick and tired of 1-button dps spam are a loud majority moreover anything else.

[Kolaina]

And, I'm trying to gatekeep anything.

I mean you did say come back in a few years. As someone who’s been here since day 1, i can say, old healing, which everyone seems to claim is better than current healing, isn’t as good as people remember it. While i will say old scholar was much better, multiple dots and bane, old whm was not as glorious. What did old whm have that it does not have now? Stone 1, which added heavy. Not good for party content, having a mob or 2 lag behind, not getting caught in aoe. Aero 1 to be used with aero 2. Was more dps to just stone instead of stacking the lower DoT. Fluid aura. Usually got used wrong, and you get better results just walking up to the tank. Cleric stance. Now i was good at stance dancing. The community as a whole, were not. That skill was why we had a lot of healers who would not dps. The dps without clerics was weak and not worth it. Many were too afraid to miss a heal having it on.
Whm now is in a better, more accessible position than it used to be. Scholar, yes, used to be so much better. Astro pretty much same, except cards are dead easy now.
I really don’t think people recall what healing was actually like. How useless some of the skills were. That even having those skills, most people used barely half their tool kits anyways. Touching on what maxcarnage is saying, if healers wanted more in depth healing, they wouldn’t 1 button profane. Profane gives up the entire healing tool kit minus benediction, which they don’t use, as well as rez, which they seemingly also don’t use. Neither of which are effected by profane.
The community cries 1 thing, but acts another

[MaxCarnage]

I'm glad we can agree it's boring, but I'll have to disagree that the solution to teaching "braindead" people is to lower the bar for everyone else! Pressing "broil" 6 times in a row sucks. Staying alert playing the SCH is harder than the damn job itself because it's so hypnotically basic. Seriously though, staying alert on the SCH is harder than juggling the job's mechanics. So yea, this is a very boring design. Sadly dps is something akin to staring at dripping water - it's so awful.

And, I'm trying to gatekeep anything. The OP came out with this passive-aggressive "loud minority" post and then proceeds to explain how little experience they have in the game and the healing role? Na, it's basically trolling to call a community of people a "loud minority" with such admittedly limited experience in what they're complaining about.

If anything, judging by the community reaction to the posts on these official forums, I'd say those sick and tired of 1-button dps spam are a loud majority moreover anything else.

I understand dulling down the content doesn't help the experienced healers. I know it only makes it more boring. However, the OP, lack of experience or not, made some very good points.

Most of the difficulty as a healer has to do with your groups' skill level. If you have people constantly eating dirt, you're going to have to spend more time healing and less time dpsing. And if there are more intricate dps rotations, as people on the forums have asked for, it's going to be a lot of fumbling around and getting extremely aggrevated any time someone eats a mechanic and ultimately causes the healer to have to restart their rotation. In a lot of groups, actually, the healer won't have time to even get a full dps rotation finished. The overall skill level, especially in pug content, has decreased so significantly that to even call it "skill" is an overstatement.

The devs have to cater to the bad players. It's unfortunate, but true. They already can't handle the bare minimum that they have to do now. How on Earth do you think they can handle more? And I've seen the argument of, "Well, if they suck now, making healing more engaging and intricate won't affect them" but it will. Oh boy, will it. As it stands, you can clear content by the skin of your teeth with a bad healer. But you think if they make playing a healer more intricate, that that will be feasible? It won't.

So, unless this "loud majority" you're referring to actually tell people to get their crap together, and stop coddling and hand holding underperforming players, excusing minimal effort, and enabling them to keep being bad, you're never going to get what you want.

Start holding people accountable and stop calling anyone "toxic" for giving advice.

Ps - the forums, in no way, represents the majority of the players. The people who frequent the forums are such a low percentage, it's hard to really tell what the playerbase actually wants.

TL;DR - making healing harder will only make bad healers worse. People need to be told to essentially get good if you want more intricate rotations so that people can actually handle the skills given to them.

[ForteNightshade]

However, most DPS who are getting hit by those mechanics that cause the Damage Down don't even know what kind of damage they're doing or how it affects everyone. Damage Down only matters where there are DPS checks, but there are barely any in regular content. Damage Down means literally nothing to them.

In a twisted sense of irony, damage downs actually impact better players more because they know what will kill them and what won't. I know I can greed all of E10N's attacks in lieu of disengaging, especially as a tank. A damage down forces me to disengage. Meanwhile, Mr. Freestyle SAM doesn't care about his damage or thinks he's top DPS already and a damage down won't matter much anyway. So he stays and now the raid has suffered twice.