Should healers be designed like tanks?

[Xelanar]

Having a proper DPS rotation to manage during downtimes would make healers way more interesting to me than their current design.
I spend most of the time doing DPS, no matter the content difficulty I am in, yet my toolkit does not reflect that. Instead I get only one button to press, while my healing stuff is just sitting there.

And this is not a difficulty thing. In terms of pure healing requirements, playing ultimate is no different than playing anything else.
Why does Benefic-I exist? I don't even need my HoT skill anymore. And why does Synastry exist, if there is no need to ever cast anything?

The entire healing toolkit is designed completely in reverse to what I actually have to do during a fight. So many awesome cool healing stuff I really wish I needed to use more... being useless on my hotbar. Meanwhile I still only press one button for DPS.

So in terms of a more fleshed out, yet simplified DPS rotation, I believe healers should be designed like tanks.

[IllyaPrisma]

You may want to re-read that in full. They said "even more so before DPS-neutral lilies", which is true. DPS-neutral lilies were only introduced in 6.1. Before 6.1, using lilies was a DPS loss as it took 4 GCDs to give the output of 3 glares.

That’s why I said that it seems out of touch…. They are speaking about WHM as if prior to 6.1. The statement clearly points to WHM as a healer that needs to rely on DPS negative healing. This is no longer the case and WHM brings an abundance of lossless healing now.

[ThorneDynasty]

What's more the healing kit bloat is definitely more on the party-wide heal side when A) the only time the game actually demands you go all out is spot-healing the tank during huge pulls B) the only even slightly realistic way to amp up the healing requirement in the future is to greatly increase the auto-attack damage to the tanks.

The lack of any design cohesion in the healing kit is just baffling. The only time you need most of your buttons is when you have to salvage total trainwrecks without missing a single DPS GCD. But those are also the exact situations where it's 100% acceptable for the healer to drop their DPS and just start GCD healing the party. Why is it designed so that you are smashing 11111111 no matter the situation?

[AmiableApkallu]

snip

In all this talk of DPS, healers are the only role who get zero credit for doing their job and maintaining a Damage Up buff on the party — that Damage Up buff otherwise being known as HP Greater Than Zero.

This needs to change. Otherwise, the design discussion inevitably devolves into homogenizing the healers into some other role. In the OP, that's tanks. In other proposals, it's essentially Magical Ranged DPS.

A ten button damage rotation is no more engaging than a one button rotation. Both are busywork to distract from the fact that the healing demand in this game consists of:

• Occasionally doing something about an unavoidable raid-wide,
• Occasionally doing something about a tank buster,
• Occasionally giving the tank a hand during a trash pull, and
• Waiting for people to make mistakes.

Combat and encounters should be designed to make the healing demand more interesting. A party playing well instead of poorly shouldn't have such a large impact on how interesting the actual healing aspect of being a healer plays out. For sure, a few more traditional DPS buttons for variety would be welcome, but I do find it dispiriting how little talk there is about making healing itself interesting.

[GoatOfWar]

What's more the healing kit bloat is definitely more on the party-wide heal side when A) the only time the game actually demands you go all out is spot-healing the tank during huge pulls B) the only even slightly realistic way to amp up the healing requirement in the future is to greatly increase the auto-attack damage to the tanks.

The lack of any design cohesion in the healing kit is just baffling. The only time you need most of your buttons is when you have to salvage total trainwrecks without missing a single DPS GCD. But those are also the exact situations where it's 100% acceptable for the healer to drop their DPS and just start GCD healing the party. Why is it designed so that you are smashing 11111111 no matter the situation?

You only really have to spot heal tanks that don't use the appropriate cd's during big pulls. And/Or when they're undergeared. As Sage i can easily keep most tanks up without ever interrupting my 1 button damage rotation.

[ThorneDynasty]

You only really have to spot heal tanks that don't use the appropriate cd's during big pulls. And/Or when they're undergeared. As Sage i can easily keep most tanks up without ever interrupting my 1 button damage rotation.

Well I didn't say GCD heal, I assume you are using all your single-target cooldowns during big pulls.

[Jovakim]

This needs to change. Otherwise, the design discussion inevitably devolves into homogenizing the healers into some other role.

That's the thing though. Why do you think healers here on these forums think somewhat like me and want their role to play more like tanks and/or dps?
The answer lies in the fight design. The only players that are truly having fun with the current fight design are tanks and dps. There's bearly any healing to be done, and all of the healer's kits just don't match with the fights themselves.

Combat and encounters should be designed to make the healing demand more interesting. A party playing well instead of poorly shouldn't have such a large impact on how interesting the actual healing aspect of being a healer plays out.

I 100% agree. I already said in another thread that increasing healing requirements would also please me.
There are two ways the devs could go with healer design, and I'm honestly fine with either, as long as they put some effort into that.

If they're going to keep incoming damage as low as is, there is no better way than making healers as I've explained before. That is, for them to be more like tanks.

Now, if they're going to increase incoming damage, they better get to it already!
I remember Yoshida doing a Q&A with Mizzteq (from MTQcapture) and telling her that they would increase healing requirements for EW fights. But... did that ever happen? No, it didn't. So far the only fight that seems more demanding to me is P3S. But that's just one fight!

And if they do somehow increase the healing requirements from 6.2 and onwards, what will they do with every other fight before that? Are we supposed to only have fun with the newest content? That would be stupid, and I would come back here to protest for healers to be more like tanks.

[AmiableApkallu]

You can ignore your GCD toolkit in 90% of the content. Healers already only heal with only oGCDs in most content.

*cries in WHM*

[Jovakim]

My point is exactly that. (...) Then what does this change achieve?

Dps neutral GCD heals allows you to use the majority of your kit without feeling a sliver of guilt for losing dps. I didn't think I would enjoy playing WHM this expansion, but the dps neutral lillies just feel so much better to use now. It's still not the whole kit, but it's an improvement.
Removing some GCD heals (that would go more for WHM than the others) would leave space for extra dps spells to fill that void during downtime.

In every fight that you use GCD heals, you have the opportunity to optimize your heals to avoid the DPS loss from the GCD heals.

Are you talking about the moments when bosses get untargetable and such?

If you can heal prog without losing DPS, then what’s even the point of mechanics that do avoidable damage? The healer can outheal them without losing any DPS - so you don’t need to learn to avoid them.

Vulnerability up, damage down, and other debuffs are a thing you know? Damage down usually does its job to get a sloppy party to hit an enrage (although, imo it's the most boring debuff type). There are also one-hit kills, that's another form of damage down.

I don’t understand your point? Clemency (...)

Haha, I'll give you that one, I didn't explain that point at all (it sounded better in my head, I swear).

What I wanted to say is that PLD is pretty close to what healers could be, that is, a simple GCD heal accompanied with oGCD tools and a pretty decent damage rotation.
I also wanted to point out that a job that has only one GCD heal can be very powerful with that tool alone. Healers (WHM especially) just get too many of them and I believe they're just unnecessary bloat.

One last thing, you might have misunderstood me that I want every single GCD heal to be dps neutral. Not exactly, I would prefer some of them to be neutral especially if they're not going to get pruned. But if they do get pruned, they could stay as a dps loss to be worked around with.

[AmiableApkallu]

What I wanted to say is that PLD is pretty close to what healers could be, that is, a simple GCD heal accompanied with oGCD tools and a pretty decent damage rotation.
I also wanted to point out that a job that has only one GCD heal can be very powerful with that tool alone. Healers (WHM especially) just get too many of them and I believe they're just unnecessary bloat.

I'd argue that the DPS jobs are the poster children for bloat. They all have one task: Do damage. The only GCD buttons they need are:

- One GCD button for single target melee damage.
- One GCD button for single target ranged damage.
- One GCD button for melee AoE damage.
- One GCD button for ranged AoE damage.
- One GCD button for melee single target DoT.
- One GCD button for ranged single target DoT.
- One GCD button for melee AoE DoT.
- One GCD button for ranged AoE DoT.

(Not all jobs currently would have all 8 of these buttons.)

Replace damage/DoT with heal/HoT if you want to build a GCD healing kit.

Everything else can be moved into an oGCD ability, if necessary.

Amazingly, the healers are already fairly close to that GCD design philosophy. The DPS and tank jobs are the ones that are bloated and think you need, say, 3+ GCD buttons for single target damage.