Healers need an overhaul

[ForsakenRoe]

At the end of the day, having a more engaging healing kit first requires more stuff to heal. The damage in this game is so scripted and so predictable that it's more or less impossible to have an engaging healing kit with the current fight design. They would need to revamp fights to do more periodic damage to more people more often. And I don't see them revamping their entire fight structure for one role. For comparison's sake, check out this video from a high end boss in WoW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooraW9sZVuI It's from a healer PoV. This video has the player health bars in the bottom middle, note how much damage the group takes and how that compares to a raid in FF14

Because of that, in my opinion, the only cost effective way they could make healers fun is to give them a few more dps buttons to worry about in the down time between heals. Nothing crazy, just 1-3 more then currently.

Even then, they're playing holy priest in this POV, the 'simple healer' analogous to our WHM. But I can also see a Holy Paladin on the meters, who generates Holy Power (kinda like aetherflow, stacks to 5, costs 3 to use a heal skill). How does that Healer Paladin generate Holy Power? By hitting the enemy with a very large hammer. Crusader Strike, Judgement, Holy Shock (which can be used as a heal or a damage skill!), weaving building Holy Power with these attacks vs spending on healing is an integral part of the gameplay. Discipline Priest we all know about, do damage heal ally we've heard many times. Mistweaver Monk has HOTs that can have their duration extended by using Rising Sun Kick, and RSK's 10sec CD can be reduced by Blackout Kick. And BOK can be in turn be made to strike multiple times, by using Tiger Palm. In a sense, a 123 combo, but it interacts with your healing.

Heck in WOW healers are expected to do damage, you don't see it as much in that vid because there's enough healing required to keep the healers healing instead of throwing damage, but you do see them put Holy Fire (DOT) up at the start while they have the chance. In M+ healers are expected to contribute to damage if they can because it's a timed mode. In Vanilla WOW, Paladins had to Judgement the enemy to keep Judgement of Light on the boss, for people to get a passive 'you hit the enemy, you get a bit of hp back' effect from. Priests could throw wand shots to get Judgement of Wisdom procs to restore mana, Shamans contribute more support than actual damage with totems (Windfury, Grace of Air, Strength of Earth, etc).

I hear lots of people say 'healers should ONLY heal' but never WHEN this was the 'accepted truth'. It's not true here, it's not true in Retail or Classic WOW (As long as the boss dies and it's not overly burdening the other healers, I doubt anyone's getting kicked from a Naxx 25 for doing damage as a healer). I've even made a character just to test this back in SHB, and when I started as CNJ, the very first solo instance I hit (where you see the sword in the tree trunk), it was not completeable. Adds came in, and I was told to hit them by Yda/Papalymo. If I left those adds alone, Yda/Pap just softlocked after killing the 'non-adds' that were there at the start of the fight. It was not possible to complete the instance by 'only healing'. Furthermore, the adds DID attack Yda/Pap, but they did not fight back, which implies to me that they were coded specifically to not interact with those adds, forcing the player to use damage spells. It's intentional that the player is forced to use damage skills in that solo instance, it's meant to teach the healer player 'Do damage as part of your role as a healer'. But apparently some players saw this tutorial and said 'that won't stop me, because I've already decided what 'being a healer' means in my mind, and this tutorial conflicts with that mental image!'

So someone who believes that 'healers should only have to heal', can you show me where that's the case, AND my damage as a healer is not 'helpful'? That is, if the 'expectation' is that I just heal and afk, but I can make the boss fight end faster by autoattacking too, it doesn't count. Examples where I'd Heal, Buff allies and afk only! Targetting the boss is forbidden!

Hope healers roll up to FanFest in droves.

If I knew it'd get into the game, I'd do all the potency balancing and stuff for my WHM and SGE ideas at least (SCH and AST ones aren't so solid atm) and just give it to him for free. But Fanfest is likely too late in the dev cycle to affect any massive changes so I doubt it'd help. All I need for WHM is 2 more buttons (4 if we're removing the pure/barrier split), which can easily be reclaimed by just having cure upgrade to cure2, and medica upgrade to medica2. Doing so would let me add a new damage GCD, retune the potency/duration on the DOT so we use it more often than just twice a minute, and add a new 'reward' for doing damage, in the form of a powerful AOE heal, which refunds it's lost damage via Quake Tornado and Flood (which lots of people seem to want to see)

I can't find where someone said 'we cant really have 'damage causes healing' type healers because XYZ reasons' but while I'm shilling, I believe my SGE idea gives an idea of how we could have the beginnings of one, by shifting the MP costs from the GCDs to the Augments like Zoe, Soteria, etc. This would also align more with that slide at Fanfest that said 'Able to temporarily augment their abilities', Eukrasia doesn't do it for many of us, and 'the next GCD' doesn't really seem like a good use of 'temporary' (even if it's technically true). Rather, my idea would allow the next 4 skills to be augmented with each augment, giving the class a set of selfbuffs to juggle durations of. It only needs one new button too (PanKardia or whatever you'd call it, AOE Kardia for 4 GCDs)

That being said, there are ways we could be creative with how DPS is returned through healing. I've done a fair amount of theorycrafting on healer reworks over on the healer forums (here if you're curious).

If everyone who's displeased with healers atm, came up with ideas and we stick em all together we could probably cover all 4 healers pretty easily. I've got fairly solid ideas (i think) for WHM and SGE that I'd refine if SE wanted to use em, Taurus got an AST idea I'm 100% on board with (because my idea has about as about as much meat on it's bones as I do IRL). Lets prove SE wrong with their 'we didnt really know what to do with SCH' and come up with ideas to change that up too, and then we've got all 4 covered