How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[fulminating]

I had a rather convenient Experto last night which reminded me of this topic

The healer died 30 seconds into Cagnazzo.

My first run went incredibly badly with the healer and dps unable to live through mitigated raidwides. Until I ran it a second time on healer, I was really positive about how they'd finally made a challenging level cap dungeon.
Based on subsequent experience I think I managed to get a bit of an outlier party in terms of skill, although I don't know quite to what degree. This is where minimum expected competence and accessibility to all clash though - it seems streamlining the ability for people to clear things despite their party members is fundamentally not compatible with jobs having distinct specialisations, which given the state of healers doesn't leave us with much.

[Iedarus]

This really underlines how little outgoing damage there is. If DPS and Tanks are only able to output a pitiful amount of healing compared to a single healer and yet can clear content without them it definitely points to a critical error in encounter design that "requires" healers. It doesn't take very long to realize as a healer that you aren't using most of your kit to clear regular content.

Not only that but tanks are the most overtuned role in the entire game. With how much self healing they have, even being able to fill the role of healer if need be, there's no reason for a healer to exist even in trash pulls; and let's not forget the "Oops! All Tanks!" clears this game has had in high end content.

[Semirhage]

Tank self-healing is overtuned. Finally, we have discovered the "real" issue with healers. Or maybe. Just maybe....

a downtime reward that consists overwhelmingly of spamming Glare is actually unfun, and is *also* a problem. Because the healers are actually designed badly.

[Iedarus]

Tank self-healing is overtuned. Finally, we have discovered the "real" issue with healers. Or maybe. Just maybe....

a downtime reward that consists overwhelmingly of spamming Glare is actually unfun, and is *also* a problem. Because the healers are actually designed badly.

Oh it's 100% both. I stand there and press Art of Bore ad nauseam while my tank never drops below 80% hp. It's like, why am I even here?

[Sebazy]

It's just not as simple as ramping up incoming damage and/or nerfing Tank/DPS survivability in my eyes. The whole model healers are designed around is frankly broken and unworkable. Healer's kits are just too strong ontop of all of the other problems with excessive survivability and limp casual end game content.

If we isolate just the damage I took between the WHM's death and my own and ignore the 2 avoidable hits that killed me. I took 140k damage in those 2 and a half minutes and between the dancers, we were doing pretty well but we did need Shake It Off to survive the Tsunami > Void aoe. Perhaps with better planning and Shield Samba usage we might have been ok without it.

Regardless, 140k over 2 and a half minutes is. If we ignore the dead time either side of the AoEs, that compresses it down to 5 AoEs in a minute and a half window. 1 was mitigated with Shield Samba, 1 was mitigated with Shake it off. Each AoE did between 24k and 34k damage to me.

Meanwhile, a single cast of that WHM's Medica II did a total of *drum roll please*.... 33k hp healing on me including overheal. Therefore if we completely chop out all healing on myself and remove the downtime either side of the AoEs, the healer would have only needed to cast 5 Medica IIs across 30 GCDs or 90 seconds, if we include the full timeline, that's 5 heals in 50 GCDs. Either way is far too low IMO!

So what's the solution? IMHO the highest you can go with AoEs in current casual endgame content is 50k unmitigated. Any higher and you're getting close to one shotting min ilvl characters. But just ramping up the AoEs to that level in this example would just have the WHM throwing a Lily with each Medica, that's 10 GCDs used for healing across our condensed 30 GCD sequence. We're barely at the cut off point where the healer would not have enough Lilies to cover every AoE and thus would need to either use an oGCD or just Medica 1 one of them instead.

That's with a 50k AoE coming in every 18 seconds.

Even if they didn't bother using their oGCD kit, and played with Lilies, Medica II and Medica I only, they'd still be spending 2/3rds of their time DPSing or effectively doing nothing by overhealing.

For reference, a 7 minute clear of P8S will see the group taking 28 AoEs ranging from 21k to 44k, that normalises to ~15 seconds per AoE although 10 of those are from Dark IV which is a ~21k multi hit. Basically, our Dungeon Boss needs to hit harder than an end of tier Savage fight that's in itself a fairly hefty healer check or it needs to force significantly more movement to the point where said healer can't just lean on Medica II regen ticks and Lilies.

In my eyes, both of those options will go down about as well as Wildstar.

TLDR: Ramping up incoming damage and/or nerfing DPS/Tank healing alone won't solve this. Our kits need to have significant rethink or we are just going to be spending most of our time scratching our heads/throwing rocks irrespective of what SE throws at us.

[fulminating]

I wonder how much of it is due to just passively out levelling the dungeons. Lapis manalis is 590 and troia 575 - even when new they weren’t exactly asking for a lot, and by this stage I think it’s safe to say that 630 isn’t uncommon on even the more casual players. Naturally they have to be designed around the minimum ilvl, which won’t faze people in the relevant crafted/augmented crafted gear, let alone augmented tome/raid.

[Renathras]

...

I don't quite agree...but pretty much agree.

Honestly, the solution is simple but it won't happen. Start by basically removing oGCD healing from the game. Heals should be a trade-off, ESPECIALLY for non-Healers (Tanks/DPSers). Clemency is a trade-off, Bloodwhetting is not. DPSers shoudln't be pooping out massive healing as a oGCD fire and forget weave that costs them nothing to use other than the CD itself.

For Healers, they may keep a FEW (emphasis on FEW) oGCD heals, mostly long CD powerful ones used as emergency buttons or as part of a careful plan like how Tank invulns are - in other words, stuff like Benediction.

Outside of that, heals should be GCD abilities, with a few oGCDs that are either mostly weak or long CD clutch/strategic abilities.

oGCDs for Healers should mostly consist of modifier abilities. Things like Presence of Mind or Divine Seal that are focused around tactical use to further their GCD healing package, which should be generally weaker, but sufficient to deal with casual healing needs easily enough and obviously mostly functional for higher end content, using the modifier abilities to deal with situations that demand higher healing output.

.

Which would constitute "significant rethink".

...unfortunately, it would also piss off the players that enjoy doing most healing with oGCDs to maximize their DPS contributions, so...

EDIT:

Also this:

I wonder how much of it is due to just passively out levelling the dungeons. Lapis manalis is 590 and troia 575 - even when new they weren’t exactly asking for a lot, and by this stage I think it’s safe to say that 630 isn’t uncommon on even the more casual players. Naturally they have to be designed around the minimum ilvl, which won’t faze people in the relevant crafted/augmented crafted gear, let alone augmented tome/raid.

[ForsakenRoe]

WOW had a moment similar where they moved all of the 'abilities' as we call them, stuff to weave, onto the GCD. They were tired of people making macros that popped every CD at once (there was no animation lock so you could use 6 buffs at the same time), so they whacked everything onto the GCD. It went down AWFUL with the playerbase, they're still, to this day, addressing some of the skills feeling bad because they're now 'on the GCD and feel dead'. Many had to be reworked to have 'on use' effects, because pressing Recklessness to get a massive Crit buff, then having 1.5s lockout because of the GCD which is eating into that buff's already-very-short duration, feels bad, so they had to add 'oh and it does a big blast of damage' so it didn't feel quite as bad. Paladins in particular got absolutely screwed by the change, as their Word of Glory (think Equilibrium) got put on the GCD (so, Clemency but with no cast time), meaning it's a lot more likely to get 'global'd' (ie, you are unable to heal yourself in time because you're locked out by the GCD). Eventually some things did get put back to being OGCD, but they're kinda few and far between now.

I don't think it's possible to do here. If they forced it through, people would complain enough that either A, reverted, or B, PR disaster for SE for not listening. Once again, the simple way to see if something is a good idea or not is to say 'okay what if we did this to the other roles too'. Do you want to try and play tank in a world where TBN is a GCD, or Equilibrium is a GCD? 'Hey let me kitchen sink this, just give me 5 GCDs to set up'? Or how about DPS, if their buffs were on the GCD, imagine Dragoons trying to do their opener when Battle Litany, Dragon Sight, and Lance Charge are GCDs. They're 20s long, by the time you put all three up you've lost 25% of the duration of the first one you used!

Of course, this is a change targeted at healers, and how they interact with their kit. So the question is, once again: Why are we treating healers differently to the other two roles? Why throw the flow of healers under a bus, in a shortsighted attempt to get them to use less damage skills? Not to mention, some abilities are only 'balanced' right now because they're OGCD. Putting them on the GCD requires buffing their strength to compensate. Remember when NIN got mudra's GCD'd? Raiton went from 360 potency all the way to 800, because the opportunity cost changed from 'you clip your GCD a little bit' to 'you now need to spend a full GCD on this, plus a whole extra second to do the mudras beforehand (plus the animation lock penalty of 0.1s per action or whatever it is). You'd have to, like Blizzard had to, go through all of the healer skills (even the damage ones probably) and rescale everything to take into account the fact that stuff is now all on the GCD.

God could you imagine SCH, Fairy actions are delayed by getting GCD lock'd, and then delayed a second time because Fairy response time is still jank? I dunno how Ren but I think you accidentally discovered a way to make the Fairy MORE unresponsive, which is something I don't think anyone expected was even possible, that's pretty impressive

[Icecylee]

I don't think it's possible to do here. If they forced it through, people would complain enough that either A, reverted, or B, PR disaster for SE for not listening. Once again, the simple way to see if something is a good idea or not is to say 'okay what if we did this to the other roles too'. Do you want to try and play tank in a world where TBN is a GCD, or Equilibrium is a GCD? 'Hey let me kitchen sink this, just give me 5 GCDs to set up'? Or how about DPS, if their buffs were on the GCD, imagine Dragoons trying to do their opener when Battle Litany, Dragon Sight, and Lance Charge are GCDs. They're 20s long, by the time you put all three up you've lost 25% of the duration of the first one you used!

For what it's worth, Ren did very specifically stat "healing ogcds" and not "every single kind of ogcd, fullstop". And honestly I agree with him on this point, even. ogcd heal bloat is absolutely one of the largest factors in why we're stuck just mashing one GCD button over and over. Could we use more dps or support actions on the GCD? Sure, obviously. But if it wasn't so easy to just pop an ability with no opportunity cost and thus is far and away better than using a GCD heal, you're already losing out on having a good reason to change up that singular button you're mashing. And changing most of the healer heal-related ogcds into torqs instead of direct heals mean we can still have our frankly overpower heal options readily available, but ever so often you still gotta lay off the glare for a couple of seconds. Granted, this might do dumb shit to SCH in particular but it's not like SCH having stupid issues due to how their pet-but-not-really stuff works is anything new and they couldn't take a change like this as an opportunity to making it work saner on a fundimental level.

Moving all the dps/tank heals over to the GCD or otherwise giving them greater opportunity costs (like if shelltron/intervention's regen effect ate MP instead of just being added on for free) would also make it a hell of a lot less appealing to just outright replace healers with extra WAR/DNC/SMNs, too. No reason at all to assume that would need to apply to defensive / offensive buffs tho, which are very clearly designed from the ground up to be weaved. I get where he's coming from on this, and it's definitely not anywhere close to the worst idea he's ever had.

[fulminating]

The current combat system is "If you're not doing damage you're dead weight.", the amount of effort to accommodate changing this would probably kill whichever tier they push those changes in. Just look how much bother the 2 minute buff and increased healing demands of abyssos changes have caused.