Healer Suggestions Megathread

[ty_taurus]

Many people claim they want to heal more than they DPS, but as Roe says, you have to imagine how much damage needs to go out in order to force healers to stop using DPS spells and use Cure/Medica equivalents instead. It would require an astronomical increase to outgoing damage frequency. Basically every fight needs to have a boss doing mechanics while also emitting J waves constantly throughout the entire fight. There is no way the average player could handle that, but if someone wants to try and grab players and get them into J-waves and see how long they can last, then go ahead.

Just asking for more damage will not solve the problem, because either they cannot do this to any meaningful degree that will actually influence the rate at which healers DPS because of the average player, or the healing role bombs as players struggle to get through a basic dungeon boss and taking every tank and DPS player down with them, creating a massive barrier between current content and future content that'll bottleneck the entire player population.

The healthiest step 1 to take is treating the healers like how we treat the tanks. Give them modest DPS actions on par with what tanks have, with one healer having a little more and another having a little less much like GNB and WAR respectively, while also trimming down the excessive bloat each healer has with their actual healing tools. Create an environment where every heal feels fairly equal in value. Let the player base get comfortable with those changes, and gradually increase the frequency of outgoing damage in all forms of difficulty to better encourage the need for healing by introducing far more frequent chip damage throughout a fight that doesn't threaten the party, but creates more reasons to top the party off and puts regens to actual work.

[WaxSw]

Just asking for more damage will not solve the problem, because either they cannot do this to any meaningful degree that will actually influence the rate at which healers DPS because of the average player, or the healing role bombs as players struggle to get through a basic dungeon boss and taking every tank and DPS player down with them, creating a massive barrier between current content and future content that'll bottleneck the entire player population.

T H I S

Just an increase in healing requirements across the game is not only a massive waste of dev resources but it would affect much more the skill floor than the skill ceiling. Those who are learning won't be able to keep up and those who already know how to play still won't find much enjoyment outside high end content because there is a cap of how much healing you can put in the majority of the game.

And all of that is ignoring solo quests in the msq or how the healing kit of every healer would have to be reworked too

[Icecylee]

tbqh, they could stand to increase the necessary skill floor required to be an Average Healer, just a tiny bit regardless. If you've sunken 200h+ into getting through all 5 expansions worth of content and hit level cap, I don't think it's unreasonable to except your Average Player to be aware of how their buttons work and be able to push them in response to mechanics they've been doing for longer than the span of most single player games in their entirety. It's kind of ridiculous that anyone for any reason has to go "wait, but if we increase healing requirements will the guy standing around picking his nose and occasionally hitting medica 2 be able to clear too????"

[ForsakenRoe]

It's kind of ridiculous that anyone for any reason has to go "wait, but if we increase healing requirements will the guy standing around picking his nose and occasionally hitting medica 2 be able to clear too????"

I mean, true, but at the same time we have two ways to 'increase healing requirements'. One is Abyssos, where the 'increase' was changing a raidwide that does 110% of your HP into a raidwide that does 125% of your HP and also has a bleed attached. The other is Barb EX, where instead of a raidwide that does 110% of your HP, it's like 15 raidwides over a period of 10 seconds that each do 10% of your HP. Totals up to more damage (150% instead of 125%), but is staggered out so you can heal between hits. Now the problem is, certain people apparently don't like Barb EX, it's too hard etc. So we're stuck between a rock and a hard place, of the choices being 'oops all mit checks' or just leaving things as it is

I'd also suggest that someone who spent 200h+ going through the MSQ to get to level cap might actually be able to handle an extra damage button or two in their rotation. Y'know, just maybe. The tanks sure don't seem to have any issues when a new button gets added to their DPS rotation. Well, except GNB cos Hypervelocity made it hard to move bosses, I guess, but that got kinda fixed a bit now with the range increase

[Sebazy]

The other is Barb EX, where instead of a raidwide that does 110% of your HP, it's like 15 raidwides over a period of 10 seconds that each do 10% of your HP. Totals up to more damage (150% instead of 125%), but is staggered out so you can heal between hits. Now the problem is, certain people apparently don't like Barb EX, it's too hard etc. So we're stuck between a rock and a hard place, of the choices being 'oops all mit checks' or just leaving things as it is

Honestly whilst I personally think that BarbEX's healing requirements are somewhat overrated, I always felt that it that it was pretty well received all round? I don't remember seeing it getting bashed with any real consistency here at least.

If you compare Rubi and Barb's big aoe phases, Barb (~4:30-5:30) is some 20% behind Rubi (5:30-6:30) on sheer incoming damage. As you say, the beauty of BarbEX is that it gives the illusion of pressure, forcing you to move making it hard to lean on the basic GCD kit and rewarding those who can manage and plan cooldowns and resources well far more than almost any other recent Extreme that I can think of. It's a rare treat compared to the usual trends of Rubi or Zodiark style fights now.

[Icecylee]

I'd also suggest that someone who spent 200h+ going through the MSQ to get to level cap might actually be able to handle an extra damage button or two in their rotation. Y'know, just maybe. The tanks sure don't seem to have any issues when a new button gets added to their DPS rotation.

definitely not gunna argue that point. I'd love a couple extra damage buttons, bonus point if it were capable of integrating some kit synergy between it and the healing side. I think in general SE could stand to trust its player base to not be complete morons a tiny bit more. Like maybe I'm misremembering stuff but I feel like duty finder randos weren't... as bad when I quit back in HW? And I imagine part of that was because the game expected you to have a base amount of competency, rather than making it so easy to finish an instance without touching even half of your kit. At any rate, especially in more casual content, I think increased damage frequency is a lot more valuable than increased mit checks (especially since so much mit comes from not-healers anyway). Maybe instead of one raid wide every minute that does 20% of a dps HP bar and ignoring tanks half the time, they could go back to bosses autoing through cast and kept a stead stream of hits coming in so you at least need to be awake. Like we don't need dungeon bosses barfing out 150% over several hits in 15s, but they probably could stand to do like 15% every 30s or so and bump it up to 30~40% for the extra spicey ones.

[Irenia]

Hmm.

People talk about more healing. But I do believe we have content in the game to actually mull over.

What would happen if dungeons were designed like Criterion dungeons? I will admit, Another Sildihn Subterrane actually makes the healer feel like a valued member of the team, and that helps keep me engaged. Most of the healers in the game probably couldn't handle it though.

That said, I would like it if Criterion could consume your expert roulette bonus. Or have it's own roulette/daily bonus, even. I want to cap my tomes there, haha. But we all know that tomes are payment for work, in the technical sense of the word, so it'll never happen.

[Shurrikhan]

Problem is, no healer in WOW has a Medica, or a Helios.

Right, but that's their way of spreading out the healing GCDs by not letting AoEs be the solution to every partywide/raidwide problem (i.e., the majority of unavoidable damage intake), not a way of gating any/every sort of worthwhile heal.

We could do similar here by just having AoEs' spammable values hit for equal parts a fixed low value and a split value (or, making them weaker 'smart' heals) so that they don't overwhelm virtually all other choices in 8-mans (despite being very meh in 4-mans).

(Note that in WoW, they're just capped at the normal party's number of allies healed, avoiding any sort of balancing issue between raid content and content with less than a raid's number of players.)

[Renathras]

At the end of the day, any suggestion hast to take into account all the different types of Healer player AND the average skill level of players doing various content. MSQ is always going to be pretty simple for anyone that understands what the words "Opener", "oGCD", and "ABC" means. Anyone who knows those things is going to far and away exceed the median person doing casual content, and this is true in literally every game, which is why games that don't recognize this (like, say, Wildstar), are always doomed to have either a small base of hardcore fans or closing down because they can't afford to keep the servers running. And this extends to the fact people don't JUST play the MSQ. It's acceptable for there to be hard content, and makes sense for people to complain about Ultimates and Savages not being hard enough, but when people start talking about Extremes, 24 mans, and 4 mans, those things drop off. We don't even have optional 4 man (Hard) dungeons anymore (the ones that weren't necessary to unlock), with every 4 man now being MSQ. The average player that clears 8 man normals and 24 mans is not a Savage raider. I'm not even sure the average Extreme hero is.

Likewise, there will be no solution that takes all Healer Jobs back to pre-SB or probably even SB days. The reticence to allow for any deviation is not only homogenization by another name, it's going to prevent ANY movement in that direction. No solution that is "all Healer Jobs get Tank or DPS level rotations" is going to fly, either. And any solution that is "that, but also with a nerfed ez mode for people to have a gimped play experience - that's fair, right?!" is also going to fail and be unacceptable to the devs and the general playerbase.

People can come up with all the...creative...ideas and fanfiction that they want, unless they're seriously accounting for and accommodating for those things, it won't be acted on by the devs.

It's why ideas like the 4 Healers model make sense and why proposing additional difficulty levels makes sense. But I suppose refusing to talk about those things just means we keep the status quo, so...I guess plenty of people are fine with that at the end of the day as well.

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EDIT:

Honestly whilst I personally think that BarbEX's healing requirements are somewhat overrated, I always felt that it that it was pretty well received all round? I don't remember seeing it getting bashed with any real consistency here at least.

The only issue with Barb is that it requires too much movement so you can't actually GCD heal. That means players that aren't as good with oGCD plans (OR if you have a "Dosis-spam" co-healer that won't even cast an oGCD heal - ask me how I know this...) are screwed and it becomes wipe city.

If they had Barb's damage profile with Rubicante's movement level, that would be a pretty well designed fight for the playerbase.

[Semirhage]

It's why ideas like the 4 Healers model make sense and why proposing additional difficulty levels makes sense. But I suppose refusing to talk about those things just means we keep the status quo, so...I guess plenty of people are fine with that at the end of the day as well.

This is Gemina "Yoshida's my uncle"-speak. "You MUST keep White Mage terribly designed in any possible discussion, otherwise the solution is impossible and you're obviously okay with the status quo"

Wow, with parameters like that it looks like we all need to bow down to the Renathras vision of healer design. Pack it up; your creativity folds before the Sylphie NO NO NO.