Quote Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe View Post
THE FIFTH HEALER...? (not clickbait)

Now, while we have 4 healers, and we could arrange them like in the chart above, the question still remains, what if we have a 5th healer? Well, with the old stinky 2x2 grid SE's enforced on us we're out of room and out of luck, but with the spectrum we can slot a new healer in anywhere we like! Furthermore, since Sage was added as a Barrier healer, I believe the perfect location to put a new healer would be...



With a spectrum of Pure vs Barrier Capability, it's pretty simple to just slot in a new healer wherever, and tune their Pure vs Barrier outputs accordingly. Since we have already got the paradigms we've got, I think a fair amount of people are crying out for a HOT based healer (Time Mage?), especially in this game where damage comes in waves and is staggered by such long amounts of 'nothing's happening for X seconds'. As for their mitigation side of their kit, I doubt the engine could handle it but I'd love to see a healer that slows the incoming damage from a burst down into a DOT, 'staggering' it if you will. This would synergise with both Pure healers (because they can easily Pure heal through the DOT) and Barrier healers (because the Barriers would block the DOT ticks while they hold, and their mitigations would make the DOTs tick for less), and they'd synergise with themself because they'd turn the burst of damage into a DOT, place a HOT, and the two would counteract each other quite nicely. Add in some ways to manipulate the HOTs by extending them, instantly collapsing them for burst healing if needed for White Hole, etc and there we go, new healer

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you made it here thanks for reading, I don't expect anyone to agree with all of my ramblings (or any, to be frank), but I needed something to do while waiting for PF to become alive for the day. Leave some comments, suggest changes, tell me my maths is off, complain that SE needs to listen to healer issues, yadda yadda

Join me next time when I complain about BLU and suggest how to make it a real class (nobody's done that one yet I'm sure)

ps sorry for bad art, I thought it'd be a quaint joke but I really can't draw and after the first I just committed to the bit
This makes a lot of sense.

They literally made healer balance not be future-proof by defining those binary roles. They will have to change a lot by adding a fifth healer. It kind of makes me wonder if AST and possible 7.0 healer changes are going to observe that.