The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Renathras]

I think the problem here is your perception of my perception. And also how you're using your perception as agreed upon objective positions. For example, "proper" swimming pools. You seem to want all the pools to have the same variable depths while I'm more interested in having a kid's pool, a backyard pool, an in-ground pool, and an olympic pool so people can swim in whichever one meets their needs.

Aside: The reason WHM was ostracized in SB had nothing to do with it being "healer for dummies". It was because Lilies were ridiculously bad and the Job was undertuned vs SCH and dAST. WHM was still the easiest healer in ShB but was brought to many many MANY clears and generally accepted as a good choice for healer in a lot of content. As you note, it was AST dealing better damage contribution, not WHM being easier, that was the problem. This is, btw, an argument for why the healers should NOT do higher damage based on skill or kit...

Reason why someone might want to play...

I don't understand who you're arguing against.

Did I not already say I can see why people would want to play healers with more damage buttons?

Did I not already suggest that three healers be changed to have more damage buttons?

I've already acknowledged this argument, why are you making it as if it were a counter to some point that I'm not arguing?


ALSO:

"they like to be engaged while playing the game"

So that means they don't need to do more damage, right? The DoTs can do the exact same potency as their filler spam spell and they'll still be happy because they're "more engaged", right? If them being more engaged by having more damage buttons is what makes them happy, then the damage of those buttons should be irrelevant as long as they aren't a DPS loss to use. I have a feeling that this isn't the actual answer. There's a curious principle in Economics. If you doubled the prices of everything but doubled someone's wages, the person should be no happier. They can only buy the exact same amount they could before. But, oddly, people ARE happier. Something about the larger number. While it seems that it shouldn't matter. Likewise, if people wanted to be more engaged, if that was all it took to make them happy, we could add dozens of DPS buttons that all did the same damage and they could be "more engaged". But the fact is, they wouldn't be, for...I think obvious reasons. While some few would like more buttons, many would see them as meaningless and pointless.

Unless, again, using them makes a large enough change to be noticeable. But once that happens, we again have the problem of it affecting people and reducing clears of content for people following their preferred playstyle, which they are allowed to do in the game right now as it is live (well, when the servers come back up), and thus is taking something away from people (actual content) in exchange for making some other people feel a bit "more engaged". This seems like a net loss for the community. Especially since there's an entirely workable counter that lets both get what they want.

Your SMN extreme doesn't work. WHM doesn't cast Dia then go afk for 30 seconds. It'd be more like if you hit your Primal summon that does 2x the damage of your <Elemental> Ruin 3, then you chain casted Ruin 3 for 20 seconds until the next Demi. And honestly, there are people that would be perfectly fine with that (and some that argue that's more or less all SMN is already...)

And eh, Cata...

lol, yeah, Cata's healing model sucked overall. Mists was the golden era for WoW, honestly. It was probably the best balanced and most fun expansion in WoW's history to play and heal. Pity so many people didn't like the "Kung Fu Panda" aesthetic (even though Pandaren predate KFP), as the expansion overall was one of the best in the game's history. The big problem was their class and encounter designers didn't get the same memo. The class designers were told that Cata healing was going to use a "triage model" where damage came in steady and healers were supposed to parse out heals to keep people at healthy levels but not necessarily 100% all the time. Then the encounter designers didn't get that memo, and so made encounters as big spike damage as Wrath. This resulted in healers HAVING to use their big expensive and mana inefficient heals just to survive because their healing kits were changed from Wrath healing so they didn't have the tools to do their basic job anymore. Combined with people forgetting they had crowd control abilities in dungeons and were supposed to use them again like BC, it created the perfect storm.

As to the earlier in its history: Wanding was autoattack. It wasn't an active button you pressed. That'd be like if in FFXIV a WHM right-clicked the boss and, when not casting heals, un-actively twacked them with their staffs. Not exactly the gameplay you're asking for (nor I, for that matter). Vanilla healers were actively discouraged from dpsing. And some from healing. (PLDs were brought for their buffs and Druids for Innevation, I think the name of it is?) Or, in some cases, from even entering combat (Paladins). Druids were brought to Vanilla raids to give mana to the Holy Priests, whose sole job was healing because mana economy kind of sucked. The reason healers didn't damage was because they couldn't without being unable to heal. There weren't massive mana free heals like there are now in WoW, so if you went oom, your tank died, and that meant you failed at your role. Also, healer damage spells were garbage at the time while costing stupidly high mana, and worse, agro management was very much an issue, and heals already generated a lot of agro, meaning doing additional damage risked turning the boss on the healer (and likely cleaving the raid)

It also wasn't just WoW. And it wasn't for a very short time (Holy Paladins spammed one button (Holy Light) for two solid expansions!) Everquest did this (including with sitting, called "meditating", during the fight to gain mana back. Given EQ massive bosses could take literal hours to kill...) EQ2 did this some. LotRO did this some, etc. It was a staple of MMOs from their inception to the 2010s that healers were supposed to heal and only deal damage tangentially. Even in FFXIV 1.0 this was true, as well as most of 2.X. For WHM, this was true as late as SB, and even in ShB/EW they use GCDs for healing (but have enough oGCDs now to largely limit it to just Lily spells)

It wasn't "just this one, 2-4 year window of time, in one MMO".

...though that doesn't matter at all: What matters is that it's what some players want. It's irrelevant why they want it.

Some people enjoy pressing 5 buttons to get the same output...

Who are you trying to convince here? I've already said such people exist, which is why I think healers should be like tanks with a simple option and then three flavors of more complex. I'm not sure why you're posting in reply to me when the points you're raising are ones I've already stated I agree with and are the basis of my proposal. Did you mean to quote Shurrikhan? Shurrikan has argued against some of these points.