Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Ixon]

Add another "WHM is terribly designed and Square Enix did it intentionally I don't know what you're complaining about stupid things are fine as long as they aren't new" on top of the pile of "WHM is a horribly designed garbage baby-tier 11111111111 job and here's why that's a good thing" takes.

Stating "I want WHM to be fun, designed to flow well, and have a refreshingly high skill ceiling while not alienating casuals" is the fastest way to summon "how could you possibly ask for something so insane" out of the woodwork. Yeah, I know the request is insane. Sue me, I don't want to water my requests down to a 5 potency bump on Glare because the job would still be embarrassingly, stupidly, horribly designed. There *IS* no excuse. Small Indie Dev Company my foot. Terrible cashgrab Korean MMOs have more engaging healers. PHONE GAMES have more engaging healers. Redesign. It.

Again, unsure if you actually read all of my post or just trigger type on the first message that hurts your feelings, but I agree. WHM is the most dire need of an update compared to the other three healers. Totally for it. However, WHM will NEVER be the most engaging healer. Ever. It was and is designed to be the most straightforward and simplistic healer. So while I am on board with all healers having a more complex dps rotation, understand that this is the direction to not make WHM more than what it's supposed to be. And I can tell you from a business standpoint, the more hyperbole's you use, the less likely anyone will take you seriously because you will just appear to be over-exaggerating.

On the previous posts, I think people are not taking into account the, let's say, ignorance, the community has as a whole when it comes to how things are played. If you go back a few pages and see my historical breakdown of how we got from A to B, you can see the biggest shift was in HW, where dps became the only thing that mattered as ARR DPS checks were rarely actually a thing. With this shift you saw negative and positive shifts from both the tanks and healer. You had tanks in STR accessories in OT stance eating dirt because they could not do it properly, and you saw healers letting their team eat dirt because they couldn't Cleric Stance dance properly. More DPS, but also more deaths and mishaps from those who couldn't handle it. This was a wide-spread issue because rumors spread like wildfire and people usually DON'T want to be the stick in the mud so they will attempt the optimal play even if they don't know how to do it, which can cause more harm than good. This "DPS is everything" shift also started a trend of, when given a choice between damage or something else, people 9 times out of 10 chose damage. You COULD tank in tank stance and clear the run fine, but DAMAGE, and so on with the other roles and jobs as well. So, in the following expansions, SE knowing full well that no matter what choice they gave the players would only pick damage, started removing the choice entirely, because what was the point?

When it came to healers specifically, I am of the opinion that SE did NOT fully accept that healers were also responsible for damage till ShB. As counter intuitive as it sounds, I fully believe that the devs fully did not design healers in mind to be DPSing during high end encounters(excluding Ultimates), and had given healers more complex dps rotations to include Cleric Stance for mostly solo content and the like. I can already feel the blood boiling of healers reading this, but it makes sense. It was stated multiple times when it was originally asked "should healers contribute DPS to a fight?" that the answer was "healer DPS is not factored into the DPS checks". So coming from HW, when you have OT stance MT's and Cleric-as-much-as-possible healers, in their mind it made sense originally, to take away the Cleric Stance first as you will always have an OT in 99% of situations, but may not always have a let's say an Off Healer. Then after SB when you still had OT stance Tanks, they took that away going into ShB. However, because there was a portion of players who only wanted to heal and did not like the idea of being a green DPS on top of healers having generally the most responsibility in most fights on top of SE finally accepting that healers are going to DPS no matter if they could functionally do it or not, they stripped the healers DPS abilities to bare minimum. I'm not saying it was the best move, but it made sense to SE and makes sense looking at the trend from then to now.

Here in EW we have two major conflicting issues as to how the healers are now. The first is SE has accepted that healers are going to DPS during a fight, however to not have the issue that existed in HW, healers have gutted DPS kits. The second issue is due to the power creep of tanks and healers getting stronger and better tools, healers have not only less to heal, but almost zero reason to GCD heal. These two things have led to healers feeling the most boring that they have ever felt. In my mind, I believe that the most feasible solution is to reduce/combine healer abilities while also reducing tank sustainability, to have healers feel more like healers, while also filling in that space with more DPS options for healers to alleviate their boredom. The only thing we have to keep in mind as players when making suggestions is the direction the game is going. SE does not want a repeat of HW, so we can't go back that far, and I assume they still want to have the game resemble SOME form of the trinity, even though it hardly exists. I would hope this could be something in 6.1, as I feel there is more than enough data to support this change, but I believe Yoshi-P stated that they might be hesitant to make major changes till after the first Ultimate. I don't agree with that, but I believe that is what they are going to do.