Is the "healing portion" of healers hitting a wall in EW?

[GrumbleBeard]

Skilled healers can heal without using gcds while spamming dps and this gets spammed all over as THE way to play healer. Unskilled healers see this and spam their dps skills without realizing they need to at least be using ogcd heals appropriately leading to lots of unneeded deaths. SE attempts to rectify the issue by making dps easier to do by simplifying it and having more ogcds. Literally the exact same thing happened to tanks from HW to SB with the whole dropping tank stance thing. You ended up having a lot of new or bad tanks losing agro nonstop until SE steps in and kills aggro management. Really, if you think about any of the weird or annoying class decisions they've made since HW, almost all of them stem from people screeching about optimization.

[Sebazy]

You both know damn well I meant 'that is the role that all of their class abilities are structured around' and also that I'm even being generous giving a number like 8 for how many active abilities that would leave them with. We can have this discussion without resorting to silly things like "what if they reduced all DPS classes to one button, imagine the uproar!"

I'm not trying to be facetious with my point, sorry if it came across that way.

Rather I'm trying to make it very clear that there is a fundamental disconnect between the game that the class designers seem to think that we play vs how just about any content in the game actually ends up panning out and the divide has gotten progressively wider with each and every expansion post Heavensward.

We spend the majority of our time in content either standing around doing nothing or DPSing, it took how many expansions before the MSQ would even acknowledge that we could heal? The role has been neglected and underdeveloped pretty much from SB onwards and it's really starting to show now. The class team clearly aren't incompetent, 6.1 Lilies are spot on now and some recent abilities like Macrocosmos have been excellent additions. They just need to learn from these successes and build on them. Tightly integrated synergistic abilities that reward careful use are the way forward, not another round of 30 second ogcd aoe heals for all.

[Frodnoxx]

But it would be worse than the status quo? Healing literally can't get more easy as it is. I feel that the easiest way to appeal to both audiences is to just increase dps actions or side activities (like the role cards have for AST) for healers and leave healing as it is, because this way the skill ceiling rises, while the skill floor - which is the healer not letting the party die - remains.

Yes, adding dps skills or side activities would be helpful. But it turns the healer role into more of a support dps role. Which is fine. Personally I would prefer to be a good healer for my healing, but I know that would take major changes of the whole system.

[MintnHoney]

Really, if you think about any of the weird or annoying class decisions they've made since HW, almost all of them stem from people screeching about optimization.

Changes to ASTs cards (as an example) likely stem from their desire to simplify calculations that they go into when designing their encounters, to make them as streamlined and predictable, for the purpose of their testing and design, as possible. Or, in other words, to reduce "damage variance." This is supported by other decisions that were also made to reduce "damage variance" (which is likely most of the design choices made to this day).

Who cares about "damage variance" except those people who are seeking optimization?
And who's designing classes in such a way as to reduce "damage variance" based on skill expression, and shifting as much of that variance onto skill uptime as possible?
In other words, this fixation on optimization begins with Squeen.

[Banriikku]

I do not care about "who is at fault", i care about Yoshidas ignorance and copy cat behavior of WoW mistakes. Healer should get DPS rotation or the battle design needs to change. We dont need more Beginner healer we need quality. Sorry but i see so many WHM or even SGE just spamming their base healing like no tomorrow. I hope thats not SE vision of a player base.

[Semirhage]

Tightly integrated synergistic abilities that reward careful use are the way forward, not another round of 30 second ogcd aoe heals for all.

That's one of my major gripes with the current lily system. They don't reward careful use. They reward just blowing them whenever, carefully or not. Overheal? Doesn't matter. Blowing healing resources during downtime for more damage? Yep, then you're DPS positive instead of neutral. They reward playing WHM like a brainless heal ogre just waving their healing club wherever. The biggest reward in the system comes from using the lilies to blow heals on people during boss downtime, when you don't even need their supposed primary effects.

[Semirhage]

You both know damn well I meant 'that is the role that all of their class abilities are structured around' and also that I'm even being generous giving a number like 8 for how many active abilities that would leave them with. We can have this discussion without resorting to silly things like "what if they reduced all DPS classes to one button, imagine the uproar!"



I know, I was making this argument for about 6 pages of the thread. I fully understand why and how healing is broken in this game, (next to) all of the damage is scripted beats that you press an OGCD to deal with. It's crap design. My position is that them changing the situation regarding DPS will result in them never addressing the fundamental problems with the design and thus, the situation will never improve. It's just kicking the can down the road.

It's just easier for people to assume I'm a simpleton that can only handle a single button for DPS (despite clearly having multiple DPS classes levelled to cap) than accept the fact that I'm on their side but I want the core problem fixed first and not to give them and easy out to hang up a "mission accomplished" banner in the office and call it a day for another two xpacs.

And my entire disagreement with you boils down to the ridiculous notion that poorly-designed healing gameplay is "the REAL" problem with healers. It's not. It's *a* problem, and deserves addressing. The lack of outgoing damage, the noninteractive kits, the overabundance of resources, the redundancy, those are all problems. If you waved a wand and fixed them tomorrow, the healing role would be less badly designed.

But they would still be badly designed.

Downtime is your reward for healing well. Efficiently. Intelligently. It's the place you get the endorphin rush for a job well done. It's logically impossible to remove it, or even minimize it to "a few GCDs at maximum". Healers are currently rewarded for mastering a preschooler's block puzzle game with pig slop flavorless gruel. I absolutely want more than a baby toy to solve. I also want more than an insulting slap in the face as a reward for that mastery.

[Raikai]

Personally I would prefer to be a good healer for my healing, but I know that would take major changes of the whole system.

That's my take too, but I try to be as realistic as possible. They would have to retroactively change everything in the game, from dungeons to raids, and that's a lot to take on.

[Atma]

And my entire disagreement with you boils down to the ridiculous notion that poorly-designed healing gameplay is "the REAL" problem with healers. It's not. It's *a* problem, and deserves addressing. The lack of outgoing damage, the noninteractive kits, the overabundance of resources, the redundancy, those are all problems. If you waved a wand and fixed them tomorrow, the healing role would be less badly designed.

But they would still be badly designed.

Downtime is your reward for healing well. (...).

I honestly cannot even understand your position. The way healing works in this game practically guarantees that "endorphin rush" you (and I) so desperately crave cannot exist in the present design. It's impossible. You know well in advance when you're going to need to press some buttons and 90%+ of the time it's an OGCD so you're never interrupted. Downtime isn't a 'reward for healing well or efficiently", it's the normal state. There is *no way* for you to get what is sought without them substantively changing how things work.

I want every encounter to be like the 3am 'WOD savage' I had a week ago when I was up with insomnia queuing for random crap, where it's half an alliance of sprouts so the damage is absolutely flying because they're hitting everything they don't need to, blowing everything I had available to me at the time, and find those exact pockets of 'endorphin rush' DPS time where the whole world feels like "Yeah look at me, I'm keeping all your butts alive through this and STILL DPSing." I get it, ok?

Listen. You're trying to replace the endorphin rush we should be getting from healing well with one you'd get from DPSing well. And if that's what you want and you're willing to settle for that, fine. I can't argue against a personal preference, even if that preference is to perpetuate the cycle that leaves us as trash-tier DPS that keeps the party alive with cooldowns.

But understand if they do that first, you can kiss any notion of ever routinely feeling that endorphin rush goodbye. It will be lost to you forever. Because if they give you this, I assure you they will never address the problems with how healing works in this game.

People are convinced I am opposed to healers ever getting more DPS buttons, I'm just. not. Everyone thinks I'm worried that the minute I'm gonna have to press another button I'm just going to wither and die when it's clearly just a silly position given I do it *all the time* within my group of people when others want to play healer as well.

If you feel like the fight's truly lost, then we can just continue the slow decline trajectory we're on and have been on for 3 expansions into becoming nothing more than second rate DPS classes with healing cooldowns, sitting around hoping we queue into random content with new players and screw-ups just so they get hit by stuff.

[Semirhage]

snip

I'm a former WHM main. That fight is absolutely lost, at least as far as I'm concerned. The development team and at least half the healing community see WHM mains as airheaded bimbos incapable of handling more than two braincells worth of complexity, and (even more obnoxiously) that it's the way things are supposed to be. Adding complexity of any sort to WHM is badwrongevil, and would be distressing to all of the window-lickers who like playing it. Even in the unlikely event that they fix the entire rest of the role, I constantly run into the opinion that WHM being the crayon-eating drooling healer for babies who are too slow to handle anything vaguely interactive in their healing kits or anything more braincell-heating than 1111111111 is the beautiful destiny WHM was always meant to inhabit, and the only issue with the healer role is that the GOOD healers for smart people like SCH and AST aren't overpowered polymaths of superior engagement, strength, utility, and capability that -they- were always destined to be.

If they fixed healing for the rest of the healers, they'd just make Medica 2 have a million potency so Jethro the WHM healing monkey can keep licking the Medica 2 button through content, because everyone's convinced that at least one healer NEEDS to play as horrifically as current healers do for god knows what reason.

Listen. You're trying to replace the endorphin rush we should be getting from healing well with one you'd get from DPSing well.

My personal preference is against an attrition healing model. I know a lot of people like attrition healing MMOs, and I'm not one of them. I'd be fine with the approximate amount of healing we had to do in Heavensward: you can't just do all of it with free instant cooldowns, but you still get a generous (50%+) amount of downtime if you're good at it. That downtime doesn't necessarily have to be DPS. It can be buffing or debuffing too. I don't think the endorphin rush "should" be from healing. I like playing support jobs. My rush comes from doing my job efficiently, and my job is assisting the party. Healing is only fun as much as I can minimize it. Again, I don't like attrition healing models. I don't get my fun from spamming cure spells. I get my fun from being useful and having a challenge in that being useful.

At the very least, healer DPS used to be more complex. Not much more, it's true. But there's some history there. The healing kits have never been complex in this game. Squeenix has never shown us anything more engaging than disconnected boring Cure spells and free instant oGCDs. I'd love to see more there, but the track record is even worse with the healing kits than it is with the damage ones. It was just less obvious because the split between the two kits was more even, so there wasn't as much time to feel bored with half the kit.