A summary of healer issues

[Jojoya]

I should note, for the record, I disagree a good deal of the post quoted.

What I'm trying to see is what a more general audience thinks of it. The place it was posted is a bit of an echo chamber and I'm curious what people not part of that echo chamber feel related to it.

The more general audience is too busy playing the game to take the time to read all that.

Healer is always going to be a hard role to design because what a healer will be doing is dependent on the skill level of the entire party (including the healer).

Are you a good (or better) healer in a good (or better) party? Expect to spend most of your time dealing damage because your party is not taking avoidable damage.

Are you a bad healer in a bad party? Expect to spend all your time healing and praying you don't run out of mana because they're taking so much damage and you have a hard time deciding where to prioritize your healing so you're probably just spamming your AoE heals.

Are you and your party somewhere in between? Hard to say what might happen.

Damage dealing in this game (at least for the other roles) is generally based on combo priorities. You build through a combo (or set of combos), unleash a finisher then start over. Fail to execute the combo correctly and your potency is significantly reduced.

YoshiP has said in the past that they don't want healers to be placed in the position of having to choose between keeping up a damage combo for the damage output or healing a party member. They want the core function of the role - healing - to be the priority at all times. Thus damage dealing in the healing role is simplified. We can interrupt damage to heal then immediately go back to damage without a loss of damage potency.

That means the good healers in the good parties are likely to end up bored because most of their time is spent using the simplified damage abilities. That's unavoidable in Normal content, which has to be designed with less skilled players in mind.

What about design for Savage and Ultimate? That's a question best left to those participating in Savage and Ultimate, not the general player base.

I can't raid at that level anymore myself but I would say to SE you don't need to make things easy on healers in Savage. Challenge their healing abilities instead of their ability to weave the occasional oGCD heal in between damage spam. If they were busy healing, they wouldn't be worried about having only 3-4 buttons for DPS.

[ASkellington]

YoshiP has said in the past that they don't want healers to be placed in the position of having to choose between keeping up a damage combo for the damage output or healing a party member. They want the core function of the role - healing - to be the priority at all times. Thus damage dealing in the healing role is simplified. We can interrupt damage to heal then immediately go back to damage without a loss of damage potency.

And yet we just as this expansion now have combo abilities that aren't broken by an ability. In Shb if you used your ranged attack as a tank c-c-c-c-c-combo breaker. Now? Yeah doesn't happen. Your argument no longer lines up YoshiP. What's your excuse now?

[Sebazy]

Are you a bad healer in a bad party? Expect to spend all your time healing and praying you don't run out of mana because they're taking so much damage and you have a hard time deciding where to prioritize your healing so you're probably just spamming your AoE heals.

Honestly, this angle is overrated.

Healing people through their mistakes honestly doesn't make that big a difference in mainstream endgame content. And by the time it really does in Extremes and Savage, said mistakes are every bit as likely going to get them insta killed irrespective of how much healing you throw at them.

A truly bad healer is more likely to be dropping the ball and failing to cast anything rather than overhealing to the point of running out of MP, but either way you'll usually find mechanics getting them long before they run out of resources at this point in the expansion. You can verify this by looking at 24 man logs and looking at the MP resource trace of the underperforming healers. Even sifting through some absolute stinkers that I've endured, I'm struggling to find anyone that genuinely ran out of MP without themselves dieing despite the carnage going on around them.

Where it does start to really affect you as a healer is when you have to start hard casting raises. But until that point gets reached, eh, honestly makes less of a difference than many would expect.

[ty_taurus]

Honestly, this angle is overrated.

Healing people through their mistakes honestly doesn't make that big a difference in mainstream endgame content. And by the time it really does in Extremes and Savage, said mistakes are every bit as likely going to get them insta killed irrespective of how much healing you throw at them.

A truly bad healer is more likely to be dropping the ball and failing to cast anything rather than overhealing to the point of running out of MP, but either way you'll usually find mechanics getting them long before they run out of resources at this point in the expansion. You can verify this by looking at 24 man logs and looking at the MP resource trace of the underperforming healers. Even sifting through some absolute stinkers that I've endured, I'm struggling to find anyone that genuinely ran out of MP without themselves dieing despite the carnage going on around them.

Where it does start to really affect you as a healer is when you have to start hard casting raises. But until that point gets reached, eh, honestly makes less of a difference than many would expect.

I find that, when healing in harder content, examples of failing to heal is often more about misjudging the timing. Like seeing a cast bar, knowing your party needs a heal, and deciding to finish another cast you already started because you think your cast will end fast enough to weave another heal, or perhaps cast an Afflatus Rapture. Or things like that.