The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Fendred]

Something relevant to this: Back in ARR 2.0 and 2.1, the healing experience in PUG dungeons was very different when dealing with a scholar versus a white mage. Back at that time, scholar became a hybrid dps/healer due to branching out from the arcanist DPS class. To balance that, it's "cure II" level ability was limited to 3 charges (lustrate). The dynamics between a party with a white mage were different than one with a scholar. A white mage could carry a mediocre party doing wall to wall pulls due to being able to spam cure II if DPS was too slow or the tank didn't have enough mitigation. Scholar was only enough to wall to wall pull if every single person was at the top of their game because their big heals used aetherflow stacks. If everything went right, it was potentially faster than using a white mage due to their dot spam. If things went wrong, the tank would get eaten despite spamming adloq because of how the shield consumption vs cast time worked. The devs pretty much said they didn't like that approach, so they stripped it of DPS abilities and replaced them with more healing abilities to make the healing more "safe." That has pretty much been the philosophy going forward, and if my memory is accurate, the stuff in dungeons today hit lighter comparatively to mobs back in 2.X.

I'd like to know what the dev team's philosophy is on healers today. It looks like they've compartmentalized job abilities with sage in a way we haven't seen in previous expansions.

[Zarkovitch]

The problem of healer hate this tier is they have to heal with gcd heals a bleed and it mitigation checks not a healer checks. Next is the healer class is fighting between healing dpsing due the kit somewhat conflicted. Finally we are running on end game raid tier relies on damage not healing check like the use to have back on old days of ARR. They implimented that on HW and stick with it. The solution is to make GCD damage abilities meanwhile all the healing kit being ogcd. It somewhat how tanks currently plays with the damage and mitigation. This would open the door who can be the drk/gbn of healers (Heavy ogcd or perfectionist/rigid playstyle) and pld/war of healers (less ogcd simple rotation or rigid playstyle but simple ish ogcd). That just a idea for the current meta we are living. I wish there be a other choice to change end raid but nowdays we are stuck on HW era for too long and devs are okay with this era.

[Sebazy]

To balance that, it's "cure II" level ability was limited to 3 charges (lustrate). The dynamics between a party with a white mage were different than one with a scholar. A white mage could carry a mediocre party doing wall to wall pulls due to being able to spam cure II if DPS was too slow or the tank didn't have enough mitigation. Scholar was only enough to wall to wall pull if every single person was at the top of their game because their big heals used aetherflow stacks.

This is categorically untrue though.

People initially thought SCH couldn't solo heal Titan HM either. They were quickly wrong, it was just a case of A) Realising that Selene was garbage and B) Learning how to play properly.

Lustrate wasn't the Cure II replacement, Adlo was, the secret with Adlo was that (at least on EU servers at the time) you couldn't spam it back to back as the shield would never take effect thanks to the horrible latency we had back then. Instead the secret was to alternate Adlo and Physic for the most single target healing potency. Couple that with forced and roused fairy healing spam on the tank and you could exceed WHM's single target healing quite considerably. Soil was also a considerable amount of mitigation for trash, even shadow flare had a small damage reduction element via it's Slow proc.

WHMs advantage in early ARR dungeons was that they didn't need to lean so heavily on their dot damage for AoE packs. Thus in dungeons like WP where you either walled off trash or just melted it in seconds Holy was king.

In leveling dungeons or situations where you weren't overgeared thus trash pulls tended to considerably outlast the holy stun window and in turn, lived long enough for Baned dots and shadow flare to do strong damage, SCH wasn't at anything like the sort of disadvantage that you seem to suggest it was. By HW the repeated Holy nerfs actually had SCH as the better dungeon healer.

The problem of healer hate this tier is they have to heal with gcd heals a bleed and it mitigation checks not a healer checks

The bleeds are a pretty good step in the right direction at least. IMHO if they amp those up a little bit more without going OTT on the initial AoE damage I think it'll be a pretty good time.

[Sebazy]

To specifically clarify a couple of points:

To balance that, it's "cure II" level ability was limited to 3 charges (lustrate).

Cure II was a straight 800 potency heal.
Adlo was 300 potency + 180% as a shield for a total of 840 potency.

If you crit, things get really spicy. A crit Cure II effectively equalled 1200 potency thanks to the 1.5x crit modifier.
For Adlo? You get a 450 potency heal + 810 shield potency, however the crit would also cause your shield to be doubled to 1620 potency for a total of 2070 potency combined.

Keep in mind, this is ontop of the considerable amount of healing from the fairy that could be focused onto a tank with manual embrace spam.

SCH was a monster at healing once you understood it.

If things went wrong, the tank would get eaten despite spamming adloq because of how the shield consumption vs cast time worked.

To confirm, this is exactly why you didn't spam back to back Adlos, you alternated between Physic and Adlo for the best effect. Assuming a worst case situation where you didn't see a single crit, the lost potency from each physic was easily offset by fairy embrace spam and lustrate. Also remember that SCH actually had more healing focused CDs than WHM thanks to the triple whammy of Fey illumination (Remember, Selene was a trap and sucked), Rouse and Sacred Soil.

The devs pretty much said they didn't like that approach, so they stripped it of DPS abilities and replaced them with more healing abilities to make the healing more "safe."

Do you mean the quote where Yoshida said that WHMs were carrying all the healing whilst SCH sat there DPSing? You realise he was instantly proven wrong there right? IMHO the real reason SCH got stripped was because it's damage was wildly out of control on Heavensward trash pulls.

I did video guides on how to do 1000 DPS as a SCH in Nevereeap pre Gordias gear in patch 3.0. If logs didn't have it's full premade requirement those demo runs would have landed me a top 100 DPS spot for the entire expansion. I was doing as much DPS in primal gear at 3.0 as some DPS jobs were doing by 3.5 in vastly better gear.

That was a bit of a problem