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

[Marxam]

I think most ppl share the sentiment that the healers have good healing skills but in 90% of content, its redundant and you can mostly get away with just a aoe regen and the occasional ogcd aoe heal. Only in Savage and Ultimate will you see their full tool kit being used. A lot of strong tools but no opportunity to use it.

It's really a compounded issue. Making every tank like WAR with the self heals, everything outside of savage/ult hitting like a wet noodle, no more boss auto crits, pre-determined heal checks in savage instead of consistent raid damage, etc. Ultimately I think Yoshi P achieved the desired result of making the healers job easier, albeit reducing them to a single button dps spam.

The only way to make healers interesting is to give them "chores" while healing and dpsing. AST and SCH prior to ShB were good examples of this. AST had RR and SCH had faerie shenanigans. WHM didn't really have much but tbh there should be a minimum of one job in each role that exemplifies a "vanilla" design. Needless to say, I'm not happy with how the tanks turned out either and I'm just curious to see where they will go (though I know where they should go but I doubt they will do it) before I decide to end my sub.

It was a good run but these changes to healers and tanks make me realize this game is no longer for me anymore. I value gameplay above all in a video game and SB was the last time I got that feeling from all 3 roles.

[Atma]

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.

Ok, this absolutely almost made me crack up on my work conference call, well played. For the record, It is a shame that WHM continues to inhabit that place in the design philosophy and they have to keep treating it like babby's first healing class, on that topic we 100% agree. I love the flavor of WHM (though as mentioned I'd have preferred if lore-wise they stuck with the elemental roots as others) but yeah, just making it "MOAR POTENCY EVERYWHEEERE" is so bad.

[Irenia]

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?

Unfortunately, with the way the game as a whole is designed, this might be impossible. It is important to me that the easier content is fun, whether I play with good players or bad. I just can't see the above situation happening with good players in content considered easy.

I've been meditating on this thought experiment for awhile. "A healer clears a trial with zero deaths. What joy is there for the better healer, assuming nothing else changes?" Or in other words, is there fun to be found in overachieving?

The reason I love day 1 runs of easier content is that no one knows what to expect, and skill in this game is about 50% knowledge checks. So overachieving is all but impossible, and things are actually dangerous.

Danger. Chaos. If you don't go down the combat medic route, this is where the fun in healing lies. Your WoD run was chaotic and unpredictable, I'm sure you would agree. And that is fun. But can you get that in a group of good players, while not gatekeeping the lesser ones? Only a small percentage of content actively limits you, and it's harder to get the gear that helps your attempts to overachieve if you abstain from the casual stuff.

As it stands, the game is designed such that I was punished for helping my friends farm Titania back in 5.2. "Farm" parties and "Trap" parties. Perhaps the playerbase as a whole wants consistency and rejects excess chaos, even though that is what is required for exciting healing.

I don't know, this was just a ramble. I just want to have fun on WHM or SGE when I help my friends, whether it is to clear or to farm stuff. I don't want to be punished because my party is too skilled.

[Atma]

Unfortunately, with the way the game as a whole is designed, this might be impossible. It is important to me that the easier content is fun, whether I play with good players or bad. I just can't see the above situation happening with good players in content considered easy.

You're right, it can't in the current design. Fight knowledge allows you to avoid or drastically reduce a large amount of damage in this game.

And that is fun. But can you get that in a group of good players, while not gatekeeping the lesser ones?

I think you can, yes. The key is more damage flowing, and much more randomly, but also lesser amounts in one go. We have to get away, to an extent, from these heavily scripted entire room unavoidable AOEs that nuke 50-60% of player HP being the norm, and replace them with things that do more like 20-25% but are in the midst of 5-10%'s here or there, spread randomly amongst the party, some non-tank targets, etc. More damage on the whole, but more inconsistent, and spread over a longer period of time. That still gives people some time to react, but if you continually make poor decisions people will die. Will healers, in general, need to get better. Yes, absolutely. But not to the level, necessarily, of gatekeeping.

As it stands, the game is designed such that I was punished for helping my friends farm Titania back in 5.2. "Farm" parties and "Trap" parties. Perhaps the playerbase as a whole wants consistency and rejects excess chaos, even though that is what is required for exciting healing.

The game places far too much emphasis right now on fight knowledge. Every fight is developed as basically a delicate ballet of moving through the mechanics. Now inherently, there's not anything wrong with that and I don't even necessarily want that to change. The fundamental issue, in my eyes, is simply how the damage is spread (and the volume of it) while executing on that. I think in that situation you described, what the players 'want' is just easy clears and minimal effort to do it. I think there's a difference between exciting healing and engaging healing. Healing should 100% be engaging, it doesn't have to be 'exciting' every single moment. DPSing isn't exciting every single moment, tanking isn't exciting every single moment - but both are at least engaging. Healing well... isn't.

[TakumiHarada]

I mean savage doesn’t need GCD healing at all and ultimate doesn’t need that much of it once you have organised mitigation

say you dont do savage or ultimate without saying you dont do savage or ultimate

Early Savage definitely needs GCD heals. And you're exaggerating if you say you don't need GCD heals at all in Ultimate.
Even in Savage, you need optimised mitigation to not do GCD heals.
It's your reward for doing all the work perfectly. Or do you still want to be forced to use GCD even when you're having a perfect run?

And is a perfect run a good representative of all fights in general?
What about the non-top-5%? Do you want all these fights to do so much damage that even intermediate healers can't catch up?
I smell elitism here.

In 2.x healers actually needed to use GCD heals a lot. With Cleric Stance and accuracy stat a lot of healers didn't even participate much in dealing damage.
And most people hated it.
That's why they changed the direction and nowadays GCD heals serve more as a crutch when you're out of free tools, in case someone dies or people don't pop mitigation properly.

Are you actually asking SE to crawl back to the state where people actually demanded to move out of?

[TakumiHarada]

This doesn't really stand up well anymore though. To try and highlight how far off the mark content is vs our kits now I'll use the same P1S log I linked earlier:

The fight was 7:20, it wasn't clean, we had 2 deaths and 2 additional damage downs ontop of that so hardly smooth. Also note it was in 6.0 so no 20 second lily yet.

I had room for approximately 14 Lilies, 4 black lilies, 4 PoMs, 2 Benes, 5 Asylums, 10 Assizes, 9 Thin Airs, 7 Tetras, 15 Benisons, 7 PIs, 3 Temperances, 7 Aquaveils and 2 Lilybells (With those numbers varying slightly depending on if I use the ability on pull or early).

In reality I used:

14 Lilies, 4 black lilies, 4 PoMs, 1 Bene (To keep someone alive through their missed mechanic), 3 Asylums, 10 Assizes, 0 Thin Airs, 2 Tetras, 8 Benisons, 2 PIs, 1 Tempereance, 1 Aquaveil and 1 Lilybell. In doing so I out healed my co-healer and had ~40% overheal.

Take out the abilities that I'm spamming for damage and I'm not even using half of the oGCD healing available to me. And this is P1Savage, far from an especially challenging turn, but still worlds beyond what something like Aglaia dishes out. Should I do this for the current 24 man? I suspect it'd look even more horrible.

IMO the answer is right there, add more utility onto fluff healing oGCDs and we will use it more. This is why shorter cooldown abilities like Asylum and Soil are so good now even if they don't have actual damage potency themselves, the additional effects make them worth using more often which in turn helps alleviate the glare monotony.

Were you wearing Min IL stuff when you took this log? Do you remember if you used GCDs in your first clear when you were still at IL580?
It'll be laughable if you're wearing IL600 and say healing is too easy because things are actually balanced around Min IL.
Don't make weekly repeats more difficult than it should be. The challenge is only the first clear.

[Imora]

If you're going to start down the road with a comparison to another game, I seriously doubt that healers in WOW have such a pitiful selection of DPS skills. I won't comment because I lasted only 2 weeks in WOW.

Regarding 1- there could be multiple reasons, there has been discussion of updating the hall of the novice - I would recommend that. Or, those people could start out with trusts. Otherwise healing in this game shouldn't intimidate anyone. for some of those people it's just not the right fit for them - so - do something else? There are 16 other jobs- pick one..

Regarding 2 - I don't see SE has making dramatic changes to damage, however I really do think that various debuffs and some occasional heal check should be put in. If player do die then so what? Unlike some other games, the bosses here don't vanish. You raise someone and then keep going. If the whole party wipes, you lose a few minutes (again, more difficult content is an exception to this). I want to get away from a role being so utterly superfluous that people start to think that it's fine to leave them out, or leave half the party dead on the floor to finish a boss. It's not.

Regarding 3- from what I've heard, there are ways to get around this so that it's manageable.

In wow, healers aren't expected to DPS outside like, higher end keystones and *maybe* mythic raids. The damage output is consistent enough that there's not downtime, and you WANT everyone to be at 100% HP because the raidwides can and will kill you if you're not.

Healing with a controller isn't too bad, spot healing isn't hard. Just scrolling through players is annoying more than anything.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Were you wearing Min IL stuff when you took this log? Do you remember if you used GCDs in your first clear when you were still at IL580?
It'll be laughable if you're wearing IL600 and say healing is too easy because things are actually balanced around Min IL.
Don't make weekly repeats more difficult than it should be. The challenge is only the first clear.

I had my first clear of P1S as an AST in my static back in January, about few hours before the first weekly reset happens since the raid was first implemented. Meaning i600 was out of reach at that moment for us. It was an encounter of 09:35 duration.

The bulk of healing from my side was largely handled by the 2 Macro, 9 Earthly Stars, 5 Collectives, 6 Oppositions, and 3 timely Lady of Crowns. To handle the oopsies and helping tankbusters, I threw out a total of 5 Essential Dignities, 4 Intercession, and 4 Exaltations. GCD heals? Yeah, I did used them a total of... 3 (Three) Aspected Helioses out of 219 casted GCDs in the span of entire encounter. The majority of my overheal's culprit stems from the healing over time ticks when party's mostly at full health.

At this point one may brought up the question: "But what about your co-healer?
My cohealer was a SGE. The bulk of healing coming from their side stems from their 24 use of E.Prognosis, Kerachole regen ticks, 11 Ixocholes, 4 Panhaima(niton), and 5 Physis II. Before one may think "Hold up! That's a lot of GCD needed, isn't it?!", I'll have them know that at the moment of upload they are ranked in #95 percentile in HPS with majority of overheals stems from their direct heals, in addition to Kardion constant regen (with 0 use of Soteria), & untimely 4 uses of Pneuma (with 0 use of Zoe). They were a WHM main coming from ShB wanting to give SGE a try for this tier, but that's beside the point. Any decent healers knows that such magnitude of healing is not needed to answer the required HPS of that encounter. And this is my co-healer, who was still probing about and learning their new toy.

So no, the challenge (if there's any at all from fighting a boss that is widely considered as an attacking striking dummy) most definitely not coming from the healing portion.

[Sebazy]

Were you wearing Min IL stuff when you took this log? Do you remember if you used GCDs in your first clear when you were still at IL580?
It'll be laughable if you're wearing IL600 and say healing is too easy because things are actually balanced around Min IL.
Don't make weekly repeats more difficult than it should be. The challenge is only the first clear.

My first weeks were on AST and uh, I'm a pretty crummy AST at that, wasted oGCDs were more on me dropping the ball and reverting to type than any fault of the encounter so a direct comparison with that wouldn't really work beyond highlighting that I'm not great

IL inflation is an important detail that gets overlooked though, although I'm inclined to say it has more of a negative effect on casual content than the likes of P1S. I'm pretty sure I was BiS by the time I did the run in the log mentioned, but I was quite happily passing on everything up until that point because not once in this tier did I find myself actually needing more healing as AST (In part thanks to Macrocosmos on P3S I'll note). The lack of regen uptime is the best confirmation of that really.

[Liam_Harper]

Were you wearing Min IL stuff when you took this log? Do you remember if you used GCDs in your first clear when you were still at IL580?

I had a glance back and on my first P1s and P2s kills we had 3 GCD heals total each fight between both healers. P3s was about 6-7 GCD's (any logs my group took are unlisted) and P4s admittedly had a few for Act4 and Curtain Call but nothing crazy.

Single digit GCD heals at 580 is next to nothing. And that's prog and first clears.

It's your reward for doing all the work perfectly. Or do you still want to be forced to use GCD even when you're having a perfect run?

It would be a reward if there was something engaging to do. Spamming 1 button is not a reward.