Can we stop punishing shield healers for playing together?

[Colt47]

I would love for Toxikon to not be the shitty action that it currently is, however, just boosting the damage to 660 potency creates a very different issue where suddenly E. Diagnosis becomes a tool you want to use aggressively because, for an additional 100 MP, you get some healing, a barrier, and equal damage to 2 casts of Dosis III every time the barrier breaks, and it will break very quickly in harder content because of auto-attacks on the main tank. It probably wouldn't quite be E. Diagnosis spam, but it also gives SGE a significant advantage over every other healer because of the shear volume of free healing it receives.

Toxikon absolutely needs to be reworked, but it can't be constantly available, it needs to respect downtime exploitation, and it needs to respect buff windows, because these are things that the community will 100% exploit if not considered.



What are these hoops you speak of and how on earth do you see any value in the "Pure Healer" archetype? SCH/SGE is the strongest healing comp that enables 100% uptime on party mitigation, SGE benefits greatly from Chain Stratagem, offers the highest total healer DPS output, and has so much free healing that their "lack" of burst healing is negligible. Quite honestly, because of the shear volume of low-cooldown OGCD pure heals and regen heals Barrier Healers have, they are better Pure Healers than WHM. AST is still good because its tools are ludicrous, but WHM has nothing on SCH or SGE, and AST, while still amazing, really lags behind in damage that it offers even with its buffs. AST is much better at the beginning of a raid tier where healers are often forgoing gear drops in favor of letting the DPS gear up first, something that hurts SGE and WHM since they rely entirely on personal damage.

I figured that someone would ask about that. The problems are really about skill cap vs skill floor during leveling up. I purposefully chose to avoid doing healer for a few months to try and see how hard it would be to pick up sage and use it properly compared to say, whm and use it properly. Everything sub level 50 is basically brain dead since you can just kardia heal the tank like a fairy. 50-60 you start doing things with the shielding but overall it felt manageable between both whm and sage.

Where things go off the rails is when you hit levels 65-80. It gets bad. It gets really bad. So, the problem is that there are fights where you need to know to use something pre-emptively to get the most benefit. If a boss is using an AOE, you need to know that the attack is an AOE and then you use the aoe shield heal ahead of time to deal with it. However, new players are going to miss that a lot so what really happens is that they heal after the attack hits and the shield does nothing. The sages base heals are weaker than the whm base heals and the astro as well. They also make it so sage has to use Zoe to boost base heals in many cases before they get holos.

This isn't saying shields are bad, just that from an ease of use deal they really shouldn't make pure shield and pure HP healers. They probably need to refactor into something like Regen healers and Shield healers, where both have base heals that are the same, but one provides shields where the other does regen. I mean the healer design is pretty bad right now regardless, but what they did this expansion feels like a big step back.

Oh, and the fact that Zoe only effects spells and not spells and abilities feels bad, since there were times when I was learning and realized that the only thing zoe impacts is prognosis and diagnosis.