What Healer kit (not encounter) change would make GCD heals NOT bad gameplay?

[Semirhage]

Depends on how you define "bad gameplay". Do you mean "I lost damage", "I'm overhealing" or what? There's basically no way to make GCD healing not "bad gameplay" in regards to how the current playerbase thinks as they're too used to the abundance of free healing tools we have now. You can see all the calls for Toxikon to be damage neutral, nobody nowadays wants to lose damage when there's so many free tools that lose you nothing.

The only thing they can do without making damage neutrality is by massively cutting down the free tools on every healer, return to the HW style of healer kits (mostly GCD, limited OGCD). If WHM is to flourish as a GCD healer, every other healer also has to have a cost to their healing or WHM is made worse by default.

In short, if everyone loses damage when healing, no one will be lambasted for healing and losing damage for it.

Pretty much. "It's a damage loss" is only a problem because you have a different healer five feet away you can point to who does exactly the same thing, but for free, with no interruption to damage at all.

There's also the problem with the healing kits being uninteresting flat landscapes of nothing. Do you want to heal one person for (an amount)? Or one person for (higher amount)? Or everyone for (amount)? Or everyone for (higher amount over time)? If WHM isn't allowed to have interesting downtime, and isn't allowed to have interesting healing, then its gameplay loop is....uh... spam!

[Aravell]

There's also the problem with the healing kits being uninteresting flat landscapes of nothing. Do you want to heal one person for (an amount)? Or one person for (higher amount)? Or everyone for (amount)? Or everyone for (higher amount over time)? If WHM isn't allowed to have interesting downtime, and isn't allowed to have interesting healing, then its gameplay loop is....uh... spam!

This part is actually a big concern to me after EW launch. The moment the anticipated new healer was revealed to be a Nocturnal AST framework with SCH cooldowns slapped on it along with an Aetherflow gauge that charges over time instead of pressing a button to trigger it, I now fear that the dev team no longer have any ideas on how to move the healer role forwards.

It's not even solely about the damage kit, the healing kit is also showing signs of becoming stale and no longer creative. We get gold here and there like Macrocosmos, Panhaima and Expedience, but everything else is just so similar.

[Supersnow845]

This part is actually a big concern to me after EW launch. The moment the anticipated new healer was revealed to be a Nocturnal AST framework with SCH cooldowns slapped on it along with an Aetherflow gauge that charges over time instead of pressing a button to trigger it, I now fear that the dev team no longer have any ideas on how to move the healer role forwards.

It's not even solely about the damage kit, the healing kit is also showing signs of becoming stale and no longer creative. We get gold here and there like Macrocosmos, Panhaima and Expedience, but everything else is just so similar.

What you mean you don’t want another pointlessly overpowered heal at level 100 that doesnt gel with your kit at all and then have yoshi p say “idk we didn’t know what to do with you”

Shock horror, healers demanding way too much as usual

[Allegor]

This part is actually a big concern to me after EW launch. The moment the anticipated new healer was revealed to be a Nocturnal AST framework with SCH cooldowns slapped on it along with an Aetherflow gauge that charges over time instead of pressing a button to trigger it, I now fear that the dev team no longer have any ideas on how to move the healer role forwards.

It's not even solely about the damage kit, the healing kit is also showing signs of becoming stale and no longer creative. We get gold here and there like Macrocosmos, Panhaima and Expedience, but everything else is just so similar.

Like how at 82 everyone gets their dps upgrade, at 85 everyone gets gcd upgrades, and at 86 a brand new ogcd that's a thinly disguised copy paste of the same ability.

I can predict at 92 we'll get a dot upgrade (if they're not removed, that is), at 94 we'll get an upgrade to an aoe heal, and our capstone will be an ability they'll either remove by 7.0 or have already removed in the past and pretend it's brand new.