How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[ForsakenRoe]

stuff

We are going in circles. People in Vanilla WOW did not 'just' heal because the healing was more demanding. Classic WOW proved very much that actually, people back then were just bad at the game. I was able to get plenty of attack time in during levelling. Discounting that time as 'oh wands don't count cos that's like autoattacks' is absolutely ridiculous, because casting a spell interrupts your wand's swing timer. If you are 0.2 seconds away from using a wand shot, and you cancel to cast Flash Heal, you're reset back to whatever your wand's timer is. Maybe in raids, it's a lot tougher to get healing out and there is less time for damage. Or maybe it is not, I wouldn't know, because Classic WOW has this amazing system where, if you don't need as much healing, you can respec a healer to a DPS and push more damage that way. Makes it a bit harder to work out when there's flexibility like that. If the raids were locked to a comp of 2/5/33, then we'd likely see some of the healers doing some damage, especially considering, again, Omen of Clarity (autoattacks make your next resource spender free, including your heals), Judgements (autoattacks refresh the duration), restoring MP via Judgement of Wisdom, etc.

This also proves part of the issue. I had time to damage stuff in dungeons. I might have had time to in raids, IDK I burned out at level 48 in the vanilla version (Feralas sucks ass), and got tired of running daily heroics in Wrath for a trinket that never dropped (and I was Enh because a friend wanted to go Resto Druid). So we could say 'raids require big healing' sure, but 'dungeons kinda don't.' In fact, I saw a 'Enh healing guide' where you'd basically play Enh the regular way, but spend Maelstrom on instantcast Healing Wave or Chain Heals, allowing you to do like 50-60% of the damage of an 'actual DPS' while still keeping up with the healing the dungeon required. Sound familiar? It's the problem we have here! Raids need heals during prog, and dungeons absolutely do not. The devs of WOW saw how little challenge healers had in WOTLK's end, and made it 'more challenging' by ramping up healing requirements. We got Cataclysm. You know the effect Cata had on the healer population. You should therefore know, that 'increase healing requirements' is an absolute death knell for the role's playerbase. This game used MOP design to steer it's design for the remaking into 2.0, so I would argue it should take lessons of 'what to definitely not do, under any circumstance ever' from the absolute decimation caused by the Cata healing changes.

And if we DON'T use our DPS tools, as you claim should be the case, we don't clear the fight at all. So every fight in the game thus far has to be rescaled in HP to factor in this sudden drop in healer DPS, or it becomes harder/potentially impossible to clear at minimum ILVL. I know the DPS checks on old Ultimates like UCOB aren't exactly... demanding, anymore, thanks to the stat squish, but the mere possibility that they become impossible due to a change like this should be reason enough to pause and consider the ramifications of such a gamewide shakeup. Also, if you're saying that only the 'healing' OGCDs should be made GCD on tanks/dps, Arcane Crest/Riddle of Earth would never get pressed, for a start. Tanks would get 'globalled', that is, in the time between an ability like a TB hitting them and the next autoattack getting to them, they would not be able to react due to Equilibrium and the like being GCD'd out. It feels clunky. It'd also screw up the loop for some jobs. I heard somewhere that GNB has only 3 seconds of leeway in it's 60s loop, or it does not get enough Cartridges to do it's full burst. So, any downtime and it's immediately on thin ice. Adding a forced -2.5s to that because they need to use Aurora to help stay alive, means there is zero flexibility left.

Oh, and you'd have the Holy Paladin doing the Judgement of Light in WOTLK, to my knowledge. More than anything, it needs to judge something, because the talent Judgements of the Pure gives them 15% cast/melee haste for 60s whenever they use Judgement.

Actually nvm I was looking into JOL and it seems that, while it scaled off of spellpower originally, in 3.2 (and therefore WOTLK Classic too, being on 3.3.5a) it was changed to a flat 2% of the attacker's health pool. Guess it was scaling way too hard because of the Holy Paladins stacking SP gear. So yeh, theoretically anyone could put it up, now. But the Holy Paladin gets an additional bonus of haste for doing so. And with that revelation, now I understand why this is here:

If everyone's going to heal for a flat 2% whether it's a Holy, Prot or Ret putting the Judgement up, I guess it doesn't matter which judgement the Holy uses, just that they use one of them for the haste buff. But this part also makes sense to me, because the only other way to get back mana is potions (oof), Divine Plea (halves your throughput while it's active), AFKing (lmao), or attacking with Seal of Wisdom/Judgement of Wisdom up (having both means two potential procs of mana). I'm too used to the vanilla renditions of things I guess

Also I've asked before but I don't recall getting an answer, what would you do on Vanilla Loatheb, the Naxx boss who, when you cast a heal, locks you out of casting any more heals for 60 seconds? Stand around for 60s? Or actually hit the boss with whatever you have, be it autoattacks or Smite casts? Even in the remade version for WOTLK, where it's 16s of 'cant heal' and 4s of 'can heal', what are you going to do for those 16 seconds? And a question to you Semi, if you are playing D+D as a cleric (or other healer), and you don't need to heal anyone, do you skip turn or whack the nearby enemy with your mace? (I've never played D+D I wouldn't know)

edit:

...in other words, stuff like Zoe and Pepsis would still be oGCDs considering they're modifiers, not direct heals themselves.

This.
It's why the "real healers" thing comes up so often, because people who insist they want to heal are actively hostile to the idea of...healing instead of doing more damage.

I've done comparative analysis before and, depending on which patch and how you're counting, WHM in EW has as many or, at most, one less, damage action than they did in ARR. Their oGCDs (other than Benediction) were also modifier abilities (Divine Seal, Presence of Mind - at the time used almost exclusively on heals) or utility abilities (Shroud of Saints, Swiftcast - then used almost exclusively on Raise). Their damage actions realistically consisted of Stone 2 (even then Stone 1 was not beneficial to use unless you liked the animation better and didn't mind doing less damage; for the record, I like the Stone 1 animation better, but we have to be honest), Aero 1 (Dia), Aero 2 (cast + DoT like Miasma), Holy for AOE (Blizzard 2 was lower damage, I think?), Thunder for another DoT, but ONLY in patch 2.0 itself (this was removed in either 2.1 or 2.2 and traded for Blizzard 2, I think), and that's pretty much it. Oh, and Aqua Veil when it did damage. EW WHM has Glare (Stone), Dia (Aero 1, though pressed less often), Misery (less often than Aero 2, but we're just talking number of abilities), Holy is still Holy, and Assize in place of Aqua Veil. As Thunder was removed in 2.1 and Blizzard 2 wasn't ever used in most any combat applications (since Holy didn't require a target, it didn't even have a niche use for targetless damage), the number of damage abilities of WHM now is comparable to most of ARR.

1: Excluding 'modifiers' reduces the number of non-damage skills that are being considered as 'GCDs' in my maths, essentially increasing the percentage of the total that the 'damage skills' constitute. I purposely included those modifiers (despite saying I wouldn't if I was doing the design) to show the absolute 'best case' of how low we can push the 'damage skills as a percentage of total GCDs used' value.

So, let's be generous and say that EVERYthing is GCDs now, because the objective is to mix up how often we press our filler spell (Dosis). Personally, I'd keep stuff like Soteria, Krasis, Zoe as OGCD but we're taking it to the extreme for the example. We can see that, aside from me being kinda trash (one Soteria in an 8min fight, what are you playing at), around 60% of my skills used were just Dosis. Removing all of my damage GCDs (Dosis, E.Dosis, the Eurkasias for those E.Dosis, Toxicon, and Phlegma) leaves a total casts of 48. 48 x 2.50 (GCD) is 120 seconds worth of GCDs that would be spent on these healing tools. Exactly two minutes of extra encounter duration would be needed to fit it all in. So lets fit it in, by pruning the worst skills from our damage (that'd be the filler, Dosis). We take 48 casts of Dosis out to sub in these healing skills that we needed, leaving 83 Dosis. We then use an online calculator to find out what percentage of the total 213 casts that 83 is (because I'm lazy) and get:

/sigh

Did you even read my post?

2: 'Real healers' have no issue with doing healing. We throw out Medica 2 for Aionagonia, and safety shields on every raidwide during prog. Our issue is that as we get more gear, we don't need to do that anymore, and we replace it with one of our many OGCD tools, which feels cool. Reducing 'useless healing' and getting that overheal % as close to 0 as we can feels fun. The problem is that the reward is 'press this level 1 skill more times'. If you want a WOW example, imagine your reward for practicing as Priest so much that you get time to fit 30 GCDs into the fight that you otherwise wouldn't have, and you're told 'you can cast Smite 30 more times'. Not Mind Blast, not SW:P, not Penance. Just Smite, and it's absolutely terrible animation god I hate it it looks so weak. Back to FFXIV, I have no issue with 'healing'. You can look at my logs, I won't care. I have some good ones, sure, but you can see that I also have a fairly 'meh' median on later fights. You know why? It's not because I'm not skilled, the fact I have some purples shows I'm at least 'sort of competent'. No, the reason I have those medians is because in a lot of runs (I PF) I make the active decision:

'Sod this fight, and sod wiping to stupid mistakes, I am going to purposely overheal, play safe, do whatever is necessary to get the clear so I can get out of this hell.'

And if we clear anyway, me doing 10 less Dosis casts (replaced with E.Prognosis or something) is worth it to make sure we absolutely definitely have enough mitigation for the raidwide. IDK who you're aiming this 'no true scotsman' bullshit at when you say 'real healer' but it sure as hell shouldn't be me at least

3: Nice comparison. But let's look a little deeper at some of the details:



I guess if you want to get really REALLY picky you could argue that Misery should be 'average of 15s because of the Lily Spenders you have to use too!'. Even if we remove Blizzard 2 (cos it sucked) and Thunder (cos SE removed it), we can see that the 'interval between presses' for any skill that is not the spam skill, has been VASTLY increased since ARR. What does this lead to? Less GCDs used on the non-spam skill. What do we fill those now-empty GCDs with? Spam skill. It's part of the reason why I suggested dragging Dia back down to a 12 second duration, and having the new Banish skill as a 15s GCD. To try and mirror the old Aero 1/2 timers a bit.

[Silver-Strider]

3: Nice comparison. But let's look a little deeper at some of the details:



I guess if you want to get really REALLY picky you could argue that Misery should be 'average of 15s because of the Lily Spenders you have to use too!'. Even if we remove Blizzard 2 (cos it sucked) and Thunder (cos SE removed it), we can see that the 'interval between presses' for any skill that is not the spam skill, has been VASTLY increased since ARR. What does this lead to? Less GCDs used on the non-spam skill. What do we fill those now-empty GCDs with? Spam skill. It's part of the reason why I suggested dragging Dia back down to a 12 second duration, and having the new Banish skill as a 15s GCD. To try and mirror the old Aero 1/2 timers a bit.[/HB]

I would count Cleric Stance as a detail as well. Regardless if people liked it or not, it was a DPS tool at the end of the day.

[Deceptus]

3: Nice comparison. But let's look a little deeper at some of the details:



I guess if you want to get really REALLY picky you could argue that Misery should be 'average of 15s because of the Lily Spenders you have to use too!'. Even if we remove Blizzard 2 (cos it sucked) and Thunder (cos SE removed it), we can see that the 'interval between presses' for any skill that is not the spam skill, has been VASTLY increased since ARR. What does this lead to? Less GCDs used on the non-spam skill. What do we fill those now-empty GCDs with? Spam skill. It's part of the reason why I suggested dragging Dia back down to a 12 second duration, and having the new Banish skill as a 15s GCD. To try and mirror the old Aero 1/2 timers a bit.

From an old 2.0 veteran I'd just like to point out that Blizzard II was amazing on healers in ARR because it allowed access to AoE at a **VERY** early level (WHM didn't get AoE until Holy), and at 50 potency per mob was a DPS increase on 4 or more mobs (might have been 3)