How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[Sebazy]

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)

Also Blizzard II was still very very powerful on SCH in early HW. It was a key ingredient for how I pulled off 1000 dps in dungeons.

Your argument is that more DPS buttons wouldn't hurt anyone, because people could choose not to engage with them and continue clearing content just fine and no one would have any major issues. This would suggest that Glare can be used as a crutch to the point it renders the rest of the kid invalid. Am I mistaking your argument?

To clarify my stance: Both should be noticeable IMHO, crutch DPSing should be noticeable in solo content but not impactful enough make a significant different in group content. Crutch healing should be the opposite perhaps making it uncomfortable in group content through resource pressure. IMO it would go a good way towards reinforcing the importance of healing and encouraging the more inattentive player to actually try to engage with the kit. It doesn't need to be 2 Medica2s and your out. Perhaps even something like 4.0 SCH's Succor cost would be enough tbh. It just needs to make spamming that button get really uncomfortable.

Both of us are arguing from the perspective of "Focus the Healing model more on X" (in your case, damage rotation, in my case, healing requirement and button presses), with the "out" for those who don't enjoy that gameplay (or aren't skilled enough) that they have fallback buttons they can use instead to do a passable job.

Is that...NOT your argument?

Not quite IMO. There's a huge difference between a DPS doing their rotation and a DPS that's just spamming heavy thrust. Granted the game doesn't technically require anything more than that until Extremes for the most part, but it's still really noticeable even without tools giving you numbers.

On the healer side of things, from a purely healing perspective, there's currently little to no downside for doing the same thing. It's perfectly fair for little Timmy healer to feel that he is doing absolutely fine maintaining 100% Medica II and frankly, if he's doing a good job keeping his GCD rolling, it's unironically not wrong either. The only real downside is the awful medica II jingle causing all the healer mains eyes to roll out of their sockets around him

I'm not asking this with snark or anything. I'm trying to see if I'm just misunderstanding your argument when you say that adding more DPS buttons won't affect people who simply choose not to use them and continue Glare spamming.

I guess the TLDR is that I'm of the opinion that our DPS should be our focus in solo content and our healing should be our focus in group content. Both need to be able to support and encourage that. If I can heal even casual end game content whilst focusing more on my Netflix than my healing, that's a fail.

If so, what on earth makes you think we'd see remotely challenging DPSing?

That's a fair stance, but IMHO good DPS at least has a tangible and noticeable payoff even if it isn't required in casual content. Good healing has a ceiling on par with a ventilation duct in the same content and even the payoff of additional damage isn't particularly big right now IMO. I really should do a dungeon with only healing GCDs and see how high I can get my damage, an interesting experiment for tonight methinks++

I somewhat agree, but again, this would apply just as strongly to DPS kits, would it not? Which is probably the reason for the ShB changes (DPS kit gutting) and doubling down on them in EW.

Different thing really. DPS doesn't really have a true skill floor outside of the duty time limit. For healers that floor is people's HP bars, whilst it's a bar that's pretty difficult to actively fail, it's at least there. Making healing genuinely difficult in casual content would be akin to rereleasing a dungeon akin to early 2.0 Amdapor Keep where bosses effectively enraged and had multiple mechanics that even tanks couldn't get away with ignoring. I'd absolutely lap that dungeon up again, but you can guarantee that the masses would hate it because it would be a huge shock to the system even if it wasn't actually that hard in the grand scheme of things.

They have the creative talent:

I'm not trying to say they don't have talent, I'm trying to say they don't have the time and resources

Case in point:

Just look at the PvP Healer kits.

The key distinction here is the simplicity of the healer kits. They are simple and streamlined with a small number of very distinctive keystone abilities. It's so much quicker to design a kit that compact than it is to flesh out and refine a kit that needs 3+ hotbars to fully utilise.

The creativity is there, they just need to USE it.

We see sparks of that creativity, Macrocosmos and Earthly Star are close to perfection as healing abilities go, a little interactivity with the rest of the kit and they'd be amazing. Even the EW single target oGCD barriers were a neat addition. But these flashes of greatness are buried under a mire of Fey Blessings and Celestial Oppositions. If abilities like those don't scream '4pm on Friday we need to get something on the board to fill this slot', I don't know what does.

Again I can't stress the importance of this. They are running the same sized job design team now as they did at the release of ARR. Meanwhile we've got something like double the number of jobs plus the side task of unique if simplistic PvP kits ontop of that as well.

They either need to open the coffers and recruit or they need to turn to another studio in an advisor capacity and just buy in some whiteboards full of prebaked ideas to work with rather than trying to come up with ideas from scratch (Which is much more time consuming).