Healers, then and now:

[ty_taurus]

Something I’d add is that the disparity between Selene and Eos never felt great, not that I agree with removing that entirely, but while Eos’ tools all felt appropriate for her identity, Selene was two almost completely useless buttons and one party buff that essentially made her objectively better for that reason only. Eos was like the training wheels, and once you could manage the healing without her, you’d rely explicitly on Selene.

It’s been mentioned before that attack speed is not a good buff because several jobs do not want it and even those that do are setting themselves to a specific skill/spell speed anyway

I’m more interested in seeing SGE’s tools at this point, but I do hope Selene one day gives something different to Eos again, just it’d have to be something different to what she had in the past. Personally I think Selene should hold additional mitigation and utility while Eos is more raw healing. That way your faerie can also compliment your co-healer as well. Selene fits with a WHM who has plenty of burst healing, but Eos pairs better with SGE who already has a ton of mitigation.

[Renathras]

...

The irony is, as discussed, EW made it even worse by making Broil IV a 1.5 sec cast, negating the need for Ruin 2 in almost all situations. I think the analysis is clear that SCH has lost a lot and the game's Healer options and diversity has suffered because of it - it's SCH that needs the next rework, maybe even more than AST (though SE's track record on reworks has not tended to be "make more complex"...). But this is also part of the cursed 2 min meta. Having things like Quickened Aetherflow doesn't make sense when you want everything to clockwork line up with 120 second burst windows.

For all the flack people give it for being braindead, SMN actually allows (for the brave) people to deviate from that since high spell speed SMN can break away from burst windows as Demi-Bahamut/Phoenix actually IS affected by spell speed and not locked at 60 seconds...

Though one minor correction: Bio II was a 30 sec duration in SB. So it did have a 30 second DoT, it just had...a 12 second AOE one and an 18 second one and an ability to spread them in SB that it lost all of in ShB.

For SGE, ... I think it'd be 100% justifiable to keep the DPS options for the class relatively similar, since the 'complexity' would be from juggling when to PanKardia/Zoe/Krasis/Soteria, and what combination of those you'd need to use to deal with the healing requirement. And with the basic kit's two halves boiling down to 'Dosis/E.Dosis/Phlegma for damage' and 'Diagnosis/Prognosis/Eukrasian versions to shield' for healing, it'd remain very 'new to healer' friendly, especially if all of what I suggested was implemented, as it'd mean Prognosis (the regular version) spam would cost zero MP, so there'd be no need to panic about MP economy in a pinch.

Honestly, that's not a bad idea, though I wasn't expecting you'd say that that form of complexity would be suitable. (Not trying to start a fight, just a bit surprised). I'm a really big fan of modifier abilities. Back in SB and ShB, I said my favorite abilities on SCH were Emergency Tactics and Deployment Tactics, and I just wished they were up more often (Deploy especially given its longish CD). PvP SCH has Deploy on a 20 sec CD so you're using it all the time and it's loads of fun to do so. Modifiers cut down on hotbar bloat, but that's more a side benefit. The real value of frequently available ones is that they allow intelligent modification of abilities to suit the needs of the circumstance, which creates a lot of choice in how to approach healing situations/problems, personal agency, skill expression, and players can engage with them more or less depending on their desired level of play with them. SCH doesn't NEED Emergency or Deployment Tactics, but they're useful tools (Deploy more than Emergency, but both have their place) when used well.

As long as the healing behind it is interesting enough.

It is odd to me to see you say this, since you're often one to point out that healing only matters early on and becomes less engaging and interesting as a tier goes on, gear goes up, and average player fight execution increases. I'm curious how it would stay fresh, but will be reading your link later.

I think SGE does need 'some' changes, because it's based on 'the current state of SCH'. If SCH changes, SGE is left behind, and that's not good.

I don't quite understand this logic, though. If SGE is good, and something else is changed to be better, SGE would still be..."good". "good" is still good, regardless what else happens. I guess I just don't really follow that thinking. To me, changing SCH to make it NOT BAD also makes it and SGE more distinct, giving different playstyles for players. Extra bonus points are that people playing SGE are probably happier with it than long-time SCH players are with SCH, because SGE has always been this way (that's its expectation, basically) and that it's already more complex than SCH to the point of being "good". SCH going from "BAD" to "great" doesn't mean that SGE has to change from "good" to something else, since it's already "good".

I'm not...arguing against changing SGE here (as I've proposed changes myself), more that I don't understand the argument of "all Jobs must be great, even the ones that are already good", especially given how easy it is to "break" a good Job when trying to "fix" it and how there is an argument for "if it ain't broke" and "if this is what people are used to and like...maybe it should stay with that" sorts of things.

and how often does SE make a raid fight with 2 targets?

They do periodically, but even when they do, it doesn't much matter. 2nd Eophro fight is 2 targets, but it does the thing SE loves doing for multi-target fights - you have to separate the targets to where you can't hit them both anyway. You just apply DoT to both then single target focus one or the other. I'm trying to think of any cases they've ever made where the two bosses have to be kept close TOGETHER and where moving them APART is what buffs them. I can't think of a single instance of that offhand. I can think of several instances of the keep away, though. Eophro aside, Hansel and Gretel from Paradigm's Breach, Garudia's daughters/twins/sisters/whatevers from Garuda Ex, and so on. They aren't common, but they do happen, but never where you want to keep them close such that AOEs can hit them both.

Oh yeh and before anyone goes 'oh but then you HAVE to do the augment gameplay to clear stuff,

My general rule is that an individual choice ability's difference (in damage) vs optimal should never be more than about 5%. My Holy Spirit vs Atonement is honestly pushing it at around 10%, but it's close enough that doing it now and again won't impact your overall output too much. A gap can exist, but it should be small enough to not impact much. Though my ideal is that you don't trade damage, you trade utility, as there are times that a heal or movement is actually optimal, such as ShB Ruin 2 weaves.

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't quite understand this logic, though. If SGE is good, and something else is changed to be better, SGE would still be..."good". "good" is still good, regardless what else happens. I guess I just don't really follow that thinking. To me, changing SCH to make it NOT BAD also makes it and SGE more distinct, giving different playstyles for players. Extra bonus points are that people playing SGE are probably happier with it than long-time SCH players are with SCH, because SGE has always been this way (that's its expectation, basically) and that it's already more complex than SCH to the point of being "good". SCH going from "BAD" to "great" doesn't mean that SGE has to change from "good" to something else, since it's already "good".

Let me try to clarify then, what I mean is, SGE is very clearly created, as it stands, with the current form of SCH in mind. A lot, A LOT, of SGE's skills are reskins of SCH skills, with maybe a slight nuance difference so SE can have plaisible deniability and say 'no see they are different honest', stuff like Kera being a buff that sticks to people rather than Soil being a ground AOE. They still both cost 1 'stack', last 15s, have 10% mit, heal for 100p per tick, and are learned at the same level. Ixochole is Indom, Druochole is Lustrate, etc. So if SCH is currently 'not so great' and we're upgrading it to, say, 'great', like an 8/10 or whatever, that leaves SGE where it currently is, which is 'based on not-so-great'. Some people might say SGE is 'good' atm, but I'd argue that with absolutely zero changes, SGE is 'not good'. It's not 'bad' per se, but it's definitely not what I'd call 'good'. It's a 5/10 for me, and 1 point of that is because I don't have to deal with a fairy ghosting my moves.

People who got into healing via SGE would probably say it's alright, yeh. But that doesn't mean they'd necessarily be against every possible change suggested. The fact SGE is so new is actually a perfect reason why we COULD take it in whatever direction. It's essentially a blank canvas, and with no 'well this is the way it USED to be' holding it down, it's free to go in any direction designwise. I think it'd be a crying shame to let it's design direction be 'follow SCH exactly and always live in it's shadow'. I look at something like Disc and I see two things. One is how it's regarded to be the most technical healer in WOW by a fair margin by a large amount of the players (whether that's true or not for you is personal experience stuff), and the other is that Disc is, for a lot of people, very hard to get into, understand, and perform well on. In an ideal world, I'd want SGE to be 'big room for skill expression' like Disc, but with a much better 'fallback' for when you're panic'd and falling behind on HPS. Disc is notorious for having very few 'get out of jail' cards to stabilize. Having changes listed in my SGE stuff like 'Prognosis (the regular, non shield version) is 0 MP cost' is part of that safety buffer. In an ideal world you're not using it anyway, so it's MP cost in an optimized situation is not a consideration for balancing.

As for my opinion on 'interesting healing being satisfying', Evoker's probably the most interesting healer I've played in WOW (design-wise), and it's got like 5 DPS actions. And one of those doubles up as it's Cure 1/Heal/Holy Light analogue. It's the way all it's heals interact via Echo that make the class super interesting to me. That, and I'm a sucker for 'time magic, but actually done right' which it nails pretty well, and AST completely falls flat on. Shame we can't have Evoker's 'spend 3 GCDs before the damage hits setting up Synastrys on people, then after the damage hits use Essential Dignity on the 4th person to ED all the Synastry'd people' combos in this game, because spending those setup GCDs loses you damage and 'damage > all'

Last, 2 target stuff, O12S has points where you have to stack them, but then they also have Firewall/Packet Filter so you can only hurt one. Only other thing coming to mind where you have '2 targets and you can hit both' other than BJCC, or like, Nael/Twin addphase in UCOB, is something like Shin EX with the Heart add. It dies fast enough that I don't think it really counts though.

[glamazon]

Want to fix healers? Give every job healing skills and abilities l. Already happened with tanks. Heal yourself.

Then they would finally have to give us a dps rotations and combos and something meaningful in a game designed around dps.

[Sebazy]

I more or less talked this out as did Roe, so I'll kind of leave it for now other than to reiterate what I said above, more or less. As I said, 4.0 to present is essentially "A Realm Reborn, Reborn", and as Roe said, the Devs have already indicated they don't want to go back to 3.X. So using 4.X as the baseline makes the most sense.

Ruling out anything is a mistake at this point IMO.

Going back to a gameplay style where resources are valuable and somewhat scarce across the board is definitely something that should be at least considered even if it is associated with the 2.x-3.x era. Titan Unreal was a good demonstration of this IMO. Don't get me wrong, it's my favourite unreal so far and unless by some miracle we get Thordan again, I doubt that's going to change. But as fun as it was, it still didn't come close to how much of a measured panic the likes of it used to be back when they were relevant current content. We just have too much healing firepower vs anything the game currently throws at us that isn't just a simple one shot.

Right, but this is the first time it's kinda good in its own right, not just because its competitors were garbage. It may even be meta on some fights, I dunno, but it's definitely holding it's own well and is in the best shape it's ever been in both rotational and functional and feels ways, imo

Granted I'm out of the loop now but I'm pretty confident AST is still numerically superior as ever? It's just hot garbage to play and as such, finding good healers actually willing to endure it long term is the challenge. It kind of reminds me of EQ1 and FFXI Bards, both hugely valued, forever in demand yet criminally underplayed because both needed a very specific mindset to stomach playing for hours at a stretch.

WHM is straight forward with a powerful core kit, works well when played in a reactive manner whilst also having some of the lowest APM demands in the game. That's an enticing mix for less confident or newer players to the role as well as jaded old asshats like myself who just can't be bothered dealing with the RSI anymore

I mean, every Healer is. But that aside, I never understand this argument because I play it the same way I play it in Savage.

That's fair, it likely is an across the board thing for all healers. My point is that once I have a specific fight or dungeon down, I barely have to pay any attention to what I'm doing. I just repeat the script over and over until the farm is done or whatnot. I got lucky and got my Rubicant mount early, so helped a friend farm their 50 kills for the totems as well. It was a snooze fest TBH. About the only time anyone's mistakes or deaths could change much of anything was in the moments leading into Limit Cut where it was actually important to drop everything and get people up in time. Other than that? /shrug, swiftcast raise one and carry on glaring. For better or worse, Savage fights tend to be a little less forgiving. Vuln stacks are actually dangerous and there are far more mechanics that won't resolve properly with missing people. So I at least have to pay attention even when it's on farm.

Again, I do agree that it's a role specific issue vs something that's unique to WHM. Perhaps the lower APM and methodical pace of the job makes me feel it more. AST at least mixes things up in that regard with buff fluff mixing things up a little.

I really don't think so, honestly. I think the problem is that content design has shifted, and Jobs were shifted partly with it, but not completely, leading to the disconnect. But I think that IS a combat systems and encounter design problem.

I think that's a quite significant understatement TBH.

Healer design has gone in quite literally the opposite direction from encounter design. We have bigger heals, vastly more free heals and faster heals vs anything we had in 2.x-3.x. Yet almost all levels of content deal far less damage now vs what we used to face back in the day.

Remember that even a launch day primal in Titan HM had AoEs that would wipe a group if your healers weren't getting heals off between the stomps. Coil T1 dealt enough sustained damage on the tanks to potentially murder them in the space of a couple of GCDs towards the end of the fight. Meanwhile in Rubicant, the only dangerous AoE mechanics are conveniently spaced 3 minutes apart so I can auto heal them with Lilybell. Thanks Obama

These two facets of the game's design are so polarised vs each other that I think it's fair they are equally to blame for the currently situation. We've ended up as powerhouse healers in a game where everything eventually boils down to DPS numbers.

I'm trying to think, but what utility do you mean? Protect? Stoneskin?

WHM handling CC duty via Repose in the very early dungeon meta. This was mainly a thing during ARR's betas and rapidly died out on release once people learned the power of AoE. It was a great change of pace and something I'd love to see experimented with again.

Fluid Aura also counts. Like or dislike the ability itself, but it added depth to the job. Even after Repose lost it's value, FA was still both useful and interesting as you had to think to get worth from it, bet that positioning yourself to ensure you pushed a trash mob against a wall so it didn't get shoved out of the bunch, or even just bumping a caster into the AoEs.

Eye for an Eye was interesting as it wasn't as straight forward as many people thought it was. Between varying in effectiveness on different mob types and abilities as well as also being spreadable by SCH, it was a neat defensive CD with a few more wrinkles to it's game than the current crop.

Ontop of those, Virus, Stoneskin and Protect yeah. I acknowledge that protect wasn't popular, but as an Everquest Shaman and FFXI Bard main, I honestly miss the buffs.

Hm...I may be thinking of HW, then. I remember some point WHM having REALLY bad MP economy. Other than 6.0, that is.

You're probably thinking of 3.4 aka Alex yeah. WHM had a bad time of it and A12S really laid it bare. When I tried to prog it on WHM I was flatlining MP as the first adds popped. On AST I could play just as aggressively but still had plenty of MP in the tank. ( ~2/3rds full in this example )

TLDR, some fights had WHM standing around ARR style to conserve MP. AST and SCH both had the mp economy to keep their GCD rolling.

Interesting discussion though, that's the longest post I've made in some time

[ty_taurus]

Fluid Aura also counts. Like or dislike the ability itself, but it added depth to the job. Even after Repose lost it's value, FA was still both useful and interesting as you had to think to get worth from it, bet that positioning yourself to ensure you pushed a trash mob against a wall so it didn't get shoved out of the bunch, or even just bumping a caster into the AoEs.

There's a ranged enemy in the first couple pulls of Paglth'an that you'd have to deal with constantly back when it was a part of Expert Roulette, and I can only imagine how salty some WHM players must've been to not be able to shove him into the group of enemies.

There are other examples of one-off, or exceedingly rare tricks and gimmicks you could pull off that I definitely don't think deserve to have entire actions dedicated to given how unfit those tools generally are for the entire rest of the game, but at the same time, they're incredibly fun to pull off when you can. Things like Silent Dusk on the ADS mini-boss from Coils 1 (or other examples of silence), inflicting Disease on Garuda EX to reduce the healing she received from her green tether add, inflicting heavy on the adds for Amon or Living Liquid with Stone/Ruin/Stella....

[Silver-Strider]

There's a ranged enemy in the first couple pulls of Paglth'an that you'd have to deal with constantly back when it was a part of Expert Roulette, and I can only imagine how salty some WHM players must've been to not be able to shove him into the group of enemies.

There are other examples of one-off, or exceedingly rare tricks and gimmicks you could pull off that I definitely don't think deserve to have entire actions dedicated to given how unfit those tools generally are for the entire rest of the game, but at the same time, they're incredibly fun to pull off when you can. Things like Silent Dusk on the ADS mini-boss from Coils 1 (or other examples of silence), inflicting Disease on Garuda EX to reduce the healing she received from her green tether add, inflicting heavy on the adds for Amon or Living Liquid with Stone/Ruin/Stella....

I miss the days of yeeting the T9 golems with Fluid Aura so much and that 1 add in Paglth'an was just TAUNTING me every time I got that dungeon in ShB. I hated it with a passion.

[Renathras]

One thing that DOES consistently confuse me is how people think big brain and amazing gameplay should be attributed to abilities not at all deserving of it. I've said many times that Cleric Stance is the single most rose tinted goggles abilities out of all rose tinted goggle abilities in all of MMO history. But that aside...Fluid Aura? o.O Anything worth using it on were immune to it. And once the damage was removed, it became entirely pointless. I can't think of a single time I did Paglth'an where I thought "Man, I wish I had a KB for this one enemy in this one pack in this single dungeon". Granted, I'm not the kind of person that speedruns dungeons (I set no timers, I just play to enjoy them, so I don't notice if a run takes 30 seconds longer or not), so maybe that has something to do with it. The fact you guys even noticed that is so...not meaning to insult anyone, but just weird to me. And I'm a person that tends to be OCD about stuff, but I legitimately don't remember a single time noticing said add, much less feeling taunted by it or haunted by Fluid Aura (which I had long since ceased using by than anyway) not existing.

Like...I get that might be a legitimate thing with you guys......but REALLY? I can't think of a single time since Fluid Aura was changed or removed that I even thought about it. I used it in ARR and HW, but just for a smidge of damage or in some leveling dungeons. Most things I actually WANTED to use it on were immune to it long before it was changed or removed. It's just so weird to me that people care so much about abilities that, at best, took a few seconds to position before using, if that.

I've noticed this a lot in these discussions that people seem to think abilities were huge and major parts of their gameplay that I honestly rarely used because they just weren't. It's like the people saying Energy Drain is somehow the core of SCH when I legitimately removed it from my bar for most of SB-ShB because I never found it useful since I generally used all my AF stacks on more useful and interesting abilities, like Sacred Soil, one of my favorite abilities in the game thematically and in terms of gameplay.

Ruling out anything is a mistake at this point IMO.

I'm not making a judgement call on it. I'm just saying that the Devs are unlikely to do it since they've gone the other way 3 expansions in a row now (SB, ShB, EW). If they are having second thoughts on it, they haven't shared them, nor have their actions indicated it.

Going back to a gameplay style where resources are valuable and somewhat scarce across the board

Resources are valuable, they're just not MP. Resources now are measured in charges of abilities, shared charge gauges, and ability CDs. How scarce they are depends on the Job, though. Some are more than others. But they seem to, again, want to move away from that, not towards it.

As for Titan: Partly, but part of it is also how mobile ALL JOBS are now, because encounters now are tuned to be super heavy on "the dance". It's not just "Healers have so much healing", it's "DPS are too mobile". As I've noted before, BLMs can have something like 12-14 free movement casts IN A ROW if they want to burn all their CDs to do it. Sure, that's a lot of CDs, but when do you EVER need to move 14 GCDs in a row without stopping? And that's "the most immobile Job in the game".

Granted I'm out of the loop now but I'm pretty confident AST is still numerically superior as ever?

Not actually sure if this is still true or not.

Looking at P4S, P8S phase 2, Ex5, and TOP:

AST is in last place for nDPS, aDPS, and rDPS. In TOP (and only TOP), it's top in rDPS (and only rDPS), and only by a pretty small margin. The 100% AST is actually a good chunk above ALL the other Healers, and AST seems to have a long tail to the right, but its median is only SLIGHTLY higher than WHM (53.25 vs 53.02) and it has a longer tail to the left as well.

What this means is that VERY good AST players in EXCEPTIONALLY good parties of top end players playing the VERY most difficult content in the game that they've probably worked down to an art form CAN produce higher results. But the longer tail on the left as well means that AST is both harder to play and can often produce worse results than WHM.

If we're taking more average parties, more average players, or content people haven't spent literal weeks perfecting, WHM appears to have a higher maximum than AST does. So AST is better only in theory/on paper, and only when paired with exceptional players in top damage output Jobs.

I'm not sure how technical you want to get with it, but people are clearly playing AST, but it isn't producing higher outcomes except for top end players that are also on top end teams that have worked out encounters and their personal synergies down to an art form. I'm not sure that means that AST is, strictly speaking, numerically superior, as that depends on the party its attached to and even the Jobs in said party.

My point is that once I have a specific fight or dungeon down, I barely have to pay any attention to what I'm doing.

Has this ever...NOT been true?

Ex4 is far more demanding than Ex5, but once you get it, you get it. That's also true of P1S, P2S, and P5S (I haven't done the others, but I'd wager they eventually get the same). There are only so many times you can do an encounter before you get it down. Sometimes it's fewer and sometimes it's more, but it kind of ends up that way in the end one way or another.

I think that's a quite significant understatement TBH.

I mean, fair. But the reason I say Healers moved SORT OF with it is the way the abilities work. Go back to ARR. WHM had Benediction and Regen, SCH had 3x Lustrate and Whispering Dawn (and Embrace, I guess). Every other healing ability we had in our kits had a cast time attached to it, so we had to stand still and cast a lot. In HW......this was still largely true. WHM now had Assize, but even then it was used as much for the damage as the heal, and Asylum was a longish CD that didn't heal quickly. Tetra was the only oGCD direct heal added to its kit that was usable and frequent enough to do meaningful healing. Again, most healing was still static, and casting Medica 2, Cure 2, Adlo, possibly even Physic, and Succor in encounters was common.

Now, look at some fights today. Take Ex4, for example. There are some heavy movement phases that you don't have time to stand still long enough to cast a Medica 2. Granted, Ex4 was a PARTICULARLY mobile fight, but Savage encounters have similar levels of movement, and various parts of Ex1, Ex2, Ex3, and Ex5 do as well. And those are often the parts where you need the most healing. If we didn't have the tools we now have, some of these encounters might not actually be possible to heal. But, between HW and EW, we had tools added that addressed more mobility. Every Healer now has multiple instant cast heals, several shields, and at least 1 (WHM) or 3+ (everyone else) mitigations. Not a single one of which requires standing still for even a moment to cast. We always talk about weaving, but oGCDs don't TECHNICALLY need weaves. DPS loss blahblahblah - but you can just roll your face across your keyboard/controller and unleash half a dozen abilities while also moving.

This is more tailored to the modern ADD/ADHD movement heavy fights and is FAR less methodical than prior fights, making healing old encounters a breeze. Even when Solace/Rapture were "DPS loss" abilities, they were still quite useful as on the move bursts of healing, something WHM didn't have (outside of Assize which was used for DPS instead and Tetra once per minute) prior to ShB in any meaningful sense. I remember how much more MOBILE WHM in 5.0, even when Solace/Rapture had 30 sec charges.

So in this way, the Healers followed encounter design IN THE SENSE OF the dance and much higher movement requirements. That's why I say Healer design followed half-way.

...the other half, however, is the damage requirements, and that's where the disconnect is. Healers are tailored to work with the heavy movement, but they weren't adjusted to the lower damage. I believe this was intentional on the part of the Devs, however, to make Healing more friendly to all those people with "healxiety" (everyone knows "tankxiety", but "healxiety" is real as well) and get more people to try Healers out since so many quit in HW and SB because it was too hard.

Healers have also been made more damage-centric in a "damage >>> all" environment. I didn't say "DPS rotation-centric", I said "damage-centric". The designs are much more for doing more damage and spending far less time on healing requirements.

The irony is, the only part of our kit that DIDN'T follow along (Lilies aside) are the regular GCD heals...which is why "good players" literally never use them.

The other/final piece of the puzzle, though, is the rest of the party. PARTICULARLY the Tanks. Take EW Tanks and port them into ARR and HW and you'd likewise find the encounters trivial. Instead of managing agro and boss positioning, Tanks manage their CD suite. That (and that bosses don't crit Tanks anymore so much), combined with reduced boss autoattack damage (the heavy movement stuff comes with the effect of bosses having cast bars all the time, and for some odd reason, not auto-attacking while they cast), means bosses barely tickle Tanks. Which isn't a Healer issue or necessarily (partly, but not entirely) an encounter design issue, but that's rather a problem due to the evolution of tank big CDs.

Eye for an Eye was interesting as it wasn't as straight forward as many people thought it was.

E4E is another one of those rose tinted goggles abilities. The proc rate was so low (10%) that it could literally NEVER PROC, especially vs bosses, not to mention it didn't proc on casts. While some might call that "interesting", I remember times using it where it just didn't proc on anything, even trash packs, leading to it being a total wiff of an ability.

One thing I've ALWAYS felt on Healers, even back in WoW, is that healing should be reliable. It's the one thing in the game that needs to be (from the user) predictable. You can't be sure you'll get a lucky proc or crit when you need one. You might, but you might not. In WoW, I almost always avoided crit on my Healer builds because I wanted RELIABLE heals, not a slot machine where 50% of the time I'd get a crit that would save the day and the other 50% of the time, the heal wouldn't be big enough, the Tank would die, the party would wipe, and everyone would start blaming - usually - the Healer (me), and more rarely, the Tank for an outcome that was decided by RNGesus. Instead, I focused on reliable throughput and sustain stats, like Spirit (Intellect on Holy Paladin), Spell Power, Spell Speed, and MP5. The ONLY exception was in Wrath with Healadins because of the 60% MP restoration on crits and that they had Talents to boost their crit rate to an obscene number that was MORE OR LESS guaranteed. At that point, you just Beacon the OT, target the MT, then spam Holy Light for 10 minutes straight. I distinctly remember one fight where I just parked facing the wall with my camera, character facing the boss, did this and Judgement of Light on CD, and that was the whole fight. Don't remember which, but that was basically the optimal strat in that encounter for your Tank healer Paladin.

But yeah, I never cared for E4E because of that. You couldn't plan healing around it because you didn't know if it would proc or not. If it DID, it meant your healing plan was now overhealing that part of the fight. If it DIDN'T and you DID base your plan on it, now you had to blow more resources for that part of the fight. Contrast modern Arm's Length (which works 100% of the time) to see what E4E should have been.

Ontop of those, Virus, Stoneskin and Protect yeah. I acknowledge that protect wasn't popular, but as an Everquest Shaman and FFXI Bard main, I honestly miss the buffs.

This I agree with. I actually derive an almost giddy amount of joy in FFXI just casting buffs on random people I pass by.

Interesting discussion though, that's the longest post I've made in some time

Good talk, yeah. That's the point of the threads I've been starting lately. To really get in some discussion about what's going on, where Healers are, and where Healers have been. It's easy to just say there's a problem or throw out solutions tailored to one's playstyle, but I think more productive discussion really drilling down into things could be more helpful, and probably more interesting and enjoyable.

.

Want to fix healers? Give every job healing skills and abilities l. Already happened with tanks. Heal yourself.

Then they would finally have to give us a dps rotations and combos and something meaningful in a game designed around dps.

This seems...like the opposite of an actual solution.

Make the game into TERRA is probably a recipe for disaster. GW2 tried this and had to back off of it (in group content). Originally, GW2 wasn't going to have or allow for a Trinity system at all, but they've backed off of that over time as parties/players just made it happen anyway over time, and they eventually embraced it where their modern dungeons and encounters and stuff seem to do it. Which is rather jarring as a new player you go for like 40 levels with no real group content to speak of for that sort of thing, then you get smacked in the face with it when you get to the later game and realize you may not even have the class you want at that point when it's suddenly time to have a role and you might not have the one you want.

[ty_taurus]

Like...I get that might be a legitimate thing with you guys......but REALLY? I can't think of a single time since Fluid Aura was changed or removed that I even thought about it. I used it in ARR and HW, but just for a smidge of damage or in some leveling dungeons. Most things I actually WANTED to use it on were immune to it long before it was changed or removed. It's just so weird to me that people care so much about abilities that, at best, took a few seconds to position before using, if that.

I think it actually speaks more to the healers we have currently that there are many players so dissatisfied with healer gameplay that they miss things that should be inconsequential and forgettable.

[Vinal211]

the general idea is that if we're longing for abilities that we knew were situational at best solely because it made the job feel more alive, SOMETHING IS WRONG.

remember break? i remember break, and IIRC i remember using it next to none. but you know what? it made me feel good in an odd way, because when i used it, that was a group of enemies slowed down to the point the tank could outrun it without popping sprint. that was a group of enemies in a big pull that needed more time to get to the tank once the wall-to-wall was prepped. it was a group of enemies not immediately beating up the tank, giving said tank and the healer time to pop their mitigations/regens and not have extensive worry over getting it out before one of them gets ganged up on.

did it do any drastic changes to what was happening in every dungeon from day one? no, not really. did it make the work of everyone involved easier, even if just for a little bit, and in a way that didn't involve just barfing up every oGCD you had on hand? yes.

so then why proceed to make every late game enemy immune or highly resistant to it, and on top of that code it so that even a small auto-attack would automatically break it? at that point it basically is shooting themselves in the foot with that kind of design, because they deliberately built it so that those abilities secondary effects would be basically nonexistent. and then they proceed to act dumbfounded when no one wants to use them outside of specific situations, and even more dumbfounded when people get upset about removing them instead of doing minor reworks to make those abilities look more interesting by way of simply making enemies vulnerable to it without breaking it from attacks. but that's clearly too much work, no no no we can't do that.