Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
I didn't say anything about "heavy" healing. Nor did you previously do so. You said "triage."

In triage, healing revolves around an element of leveraged bets, so to speak. You're guessing that there will soon be incoming damage enough to kill X, but not Y, and so you heal X first, or you're guessing, without certainty, you'll have time enough to perform a riskier but more efficient action. In triage healing elsewhere, some degree of emergency cooldowns usually needs to be saved, rather than simply used on cooldown, because spam heals won't be enough to salvage a mis-guess (no prior sustain buff, nor sufficiently topping off the upcoming victim --probably because they were chosen at random-- by which to make spam heals enough to keep them alive). That requires a degree of combat tuning and slightly more hectic encounter design.

We had already approached that a couple times in this game, only to then let it be swamped out by just having so damn much free healing and little worth saving it for that isn't so painfully obvious as to devolve into nearly pre-synced "un-mechanic" buttons. The scheduled rigid dance overtook it, but not necessarily for the better.


Again, you can have both. Having a satisfying set of downtime skills do not require the healing itself to be dry as dust. Yes, the downtime should be our first target because it's so much more easily improved, but it's not as if we have to choose between the one or the other. The contextual value downtime skills add depend also on the state of the healing kit relative to encounter design, so that area should come up eventually, too.
I was trying to think of a simplified way of describing "spam healing buttons because damage goes out every few seconds" but perhaps that was the wrong word choice, lol.

And yeah, I want the healing side of things to feel fun and thoughtful too.