A summary of healer issues

[Absurdity]

The problem is that the "limited range" isn't always part of the intended difficulty and it started to create problems. Fights like P4S have Curtain call where the limited range is part of the intended difficulty as it gives consistent time lapses where players can play around buff application and using mitigation to reach everyone, which is nice because during uptime the 2m meta and mechanics wait for no one, but in other recent fights, like TOP, that is not the case and have some phases that may ask players to randomly go away without them having much agency to play around that limitation. These changes are made to solve that problem which was pretty clear an unintended difficulty.

There is also the whole issue of the hitbox of the bosses which may cause tanks to miss dps buffs or mit if there is any mechanic that force the players to not enter the hitbox and the boss is big enough

Those are problems entirely of SE's own making. They made the mechanics for TOP, they made gigantic hitboxes and they made the 2 minute meta, I don't need to be sold a solution to a problem they themselves created.

[WaxSw]

Those are problems entirely of SE's own making. They made the mechanics for TOP, they made gigantic hitboxes and they made the 2 minute meta, I don't need to be sold a solution to a problem they themselves created.

All the problems in the end are SE's own making. The thing is, these are problems that are happening at the hardest fights and can't be solved without massive reworks that are not realistically happening this late into the expansion, so I'd rather have a blunt solution that letting the problem fester and ignore it.

Let alone how out of all the things healers have lost over the years dying on the hill of range limitation is a weird one.

[Shurrikhan]

Those are problems entirely of SE's own making. They made the mechanics for TOP, they made gigantic hitboxes and they made the 2 minute meta, I don't need to be sold a solution to a problem they themselves created.

This... mostly.

I wouldn't mind if the "solutions" were something that helped players for whom such "clicks" less to then more easily engage with complexity. And often that can even be something relatively subtle.

Let's take the recent raid buff range increases. It's a solution to a problem of "It's annoying when randoms won't get in range of buffs," but it's not the only solution. An alternative, for instance, would be a raid buff display, with noticeable timers for when those raid buffs are coming up. At the most extreme, maybe even a visually-integrated macro-warning and/or ping system (similar to how the countdown is a visual indicator of something otherwise found only in chat). It still eases up players getting into range, but in a way that eases engagement with that point of engagement, rather than simply removing it outright.

Similarly, let's take frequent positionals, as per Monk. Cutting its positionals down to a third of what they were an expansion ago is a solution to "Having chosen the iconically positional-heavy class, I'm getting overwhelmed by positionals, especially since I feel tuned around getting 100% positional accuracy, but due to fight design I must often rely on a Role Action gimmick to even do that." But, again, it's not the only such solution. We could have instead, for instance, just revised positionals and their interactions with bosses suddenly turning or affixing themselves to the edge of the arena where positionals would be impossible regardless of what the tank does. We could, for instance, have positionals re-check for positional success a half-second later, such that so long as the positional was correct either before or having predicted the boss spin, the attack still succeeds. And rather than making certain fights rely on True North, we could also just have the boss temporarily become successfully attackable from any/all sides, or convert the front into a 'rear' (e.g., as per original Demon Wall), when they affix themselves to the edge. Etc., etc.

Either way, though, we'd need to roll back the more recent "solutions" already given, and change that route to reduced annoyance from reduction to, instead, polish and facilitated engagement.



:: To be clear, though, I don't think the "2-minute meta" is a problem, or at least certainly not a new one. It just does what we were obliged to do previously in HW and StB anyways: to stack a single CD template. It merely removes that chance of playing basically without raid buffs when we're somehow allowed into the Savage party despite being the odd one out (and not even being a BLM/SkS-SAM). I'll agree that having no competing reasons to hold CDs, etc., beyond boss jumps or phase-shift cutscenes makes things more dull, but that's more an issue with fight design (e.g., lack of short-term checks) and, just as importantly, how quickly we could out-gear competing challenges anyways.