Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

[Aravell]

We need to accept that skill ceiling and skilll floor gameplay is diffrent and not a problem. I play extreme and savage and dipped my toe into ultimates and my wife plays only "the roulette healer". Its roulette and thats okay, no player is frustrated or angered about others beeing way better in an expert or alliance roulette. The devs need to accept also : THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A META. I swear, outthere on steam, is a "flower picking simulator" and i bet my kuponuts on it, there is A META for it!! Instead of fighting the meta, control and embrace it but stop believing you could stop it. Also stop believing you could change "mean people" there will alway be such "special ones", so please moderate and let it be done.

This is the truth of it. The meta will always exist because the community will always create one. If you want to kill the meta completely, you have to make jobs play exactly the same with no variance, and no one wants that. The dev team should really focus on making every job unique and viable and stop wasting time trying to break any meta that the community creates.

[ty_taurus]

My new argument is this: Let's let Sage be reworked into a really well-designed healer with plenty of offensive spells to choose from and a kit filled with unique interconnectivity and decision making. Some of us clearly want this in a healer so let Sage dial it up to 11.

As for the other three, leave them. Let them fester in their own feces for all I care. Take away every semblance of choice or decision making from them so that the word "thinking" becomes an alien concept, and all three of them basically become exactly the same just with different animations. White Mage, Nerdy White Mage, and Space White Mage. Done.

[Shurrikhan]

My new argument is this: Let's let Sage be reworked into a really well-designed healer with plenty of offensive spells to choose from and a kit filled with unique interconnectivity and decision making. Some of us clearly want this in a healer so let Sage dial it up to 11.

As for the other three, leave them. Let them fester in their own feces for all I care. Take away every semblance of choice or decision making from them so that the word "thinking" becomes an alien concept, and all three of them basically become exactly the same just with different animations. White Mage, Nerdy White Mage, and Space White Mage. Done.

Hard pass on all but the Sage changes. The gameplay value of kits are contextual, but if we keep the present context, then I'm not okay with just leaving the other jobs' kits to fester.

If this is to say that we just start with Sage, then fine. If that's where we stop though, then not fine.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think the strat here is a case of 'rebirth from the ashes'?

When WOW classic first came out, everyone was screaming for 'no changes', everything should be EXACTLY as it was in Vanilla. But as time's gone on, people have realized that there were some real issues with Vanilla, things that HAD to be addressed.

When OSRS first came out, and I learned this recentlyish, people were so 'no changes' minded that they voted no on every QOL out of principle, because 'we just got the good version back, dont mess it up Jagex'. One of the QOLs polled was moving the camera by clicking the middle mouse button. Because it failed the poll, you could only rotate the camera with your arrow keys for a while. (some things have been repolled since, like that one, and passed thankfully)

Point is, we cannot fully appreciate how good or bad something is until we've tried it. I can see the logic (warped as it may be) in effectively sac'ing some of the jobs and their fun potential for one expansion, just to show people how bad it can get, and with SGE apparently being well designed in this proposal, what could be had instead. It's a gambit, of seeing if people will, after one expansion of dogdoo gameplay for their job and great gameplay for SGE, all start saying 'hey how come SGE gets to be fun, I want to have my job be fun like that too'. The issue I would identify with this strat, is that we kinda played it out in SB, where WHM was not great and SCH and AST were. And SE's solution was not to make WHM great, it was to drag SCH and AST down to WHM's level. I have no doubt in my mind that the three healers in the above proposal would suck, and SE would go 'oh SGE is the outlier' and make that one suck too for 8.0

[Raikai]

I think that if the game approached healers somewhat like they do with Blue Mages, which is kind of the reverse of what we have, it would be an overall better experience. At least for me, but that might be a hot take.

1) You need your GCD heals to cover up the damage profile. You spam your GCD dps nuke/dot whenever party doesn't need healing.
2) Your oGCDs are composed of dps and support actions. Occasional ogcd healing action for emergency spot healing that still costs mp.
3) GCD heals can build up resources to spend on ogcd actions

I feel with this, even the DPSers utility actions (Mantra, Curing Waltz, etc) can shine more beyond pure "week 1" survival, because if they're being actively used, the healers would have less GCD healing to do, and more time spend on their offensive gcds.

[Aravell]

Point is, we cannot fully appreciate how good or bad something is until we've tried it. I can see the logic (warped as it may be) in effectively sac'ing some of the jobs and their fun potential for one expansion, just to show people how bad it can get, and with SGE apparently being well designed in this proposal, what could be had instead. It's a gambit, of seeing if people will, after one expansion of dogdoo gameplay for their job and great gameplay for SGE, all start saying 'hey how come SGE gets to be fun, I want to have my job be fun like that too'. The issue I would identify with this strat, is that we kinda played it out in SB, where WHM was not great and SCH and AST were. And SE's solution was not to make WHM great, it was to drag SCH and AST down to WHM's level. I have no doubt in my mind that the three healers in the above proposal would suck, and SE would go 'oh SGE is the outlier' and make that one suck too for 8.0

Honestly, if you want to make this point, the whole role needs to burn down to the point where no one wants to play it. As we know, the dev team only looks at engagement metrics, if SGE has great depth of gameplay, that would be popular with people who want that while WHM will always be popular regardless of how bad it is (see: SB WHM), so if they see 1 pure healer and 1 shield healer being engaged with, they will see the role as a whole to be completely fine (especially since AST and SCH were never that popular).

I think this plan would be shooting yourself in the foot in the end, because they'll probably see people still enjoying WHM and then wondering why they're putting so much effort into balancing SGE, then back into the bin it goes.

[Renathras]

Honestly, if you want to make this point, the whole role needs to burn down to the point where no one wants to play it. As we know, the dev team only looks at engagement metrics, if SGE has great depth of gameplay, that would be popular with people who want that while WHM will always be popular regardless of how bad it is (see: SB WHM), so if they see 1 pure healer and 1 shield healer being engaged with, they will see the role as a whole to be completely fine (especially since AST and SCH were never that popular).

I think this plan would be shooting yourself in the foot in the end, because they'll probably see people still enjoying WHM and then wondering why they're putting so much effort into balancing SGE, then back into the bin it goes.

The funny thing is: This would end up the same as today with WHM and SGE being the two most played Healer Jobs.

Honestly though, it would be nice to have some of the healers changed into a more DPS focus, and SGE makes sense to be the first experiment since it's new and since that's what people thought it was going to be anyway.

Though no one (other than Ty) is arguing for any festering or stagnation. All Jobs change some each expansion, even those that keep their core concepts in tact.

.

EDIT:

Though I do have to point something out:

If a lot of people ARE still enjoying WHM after the change, wouldn't that suggest it was the right move to retain its playstyle since people were still enjoying it?

Wouldn't that validate the approach, not invalidate it?

[Aravell]

Though I do have to point something out:

If a lot of people ARE still enjoying WHM after the change, wouldn't that suggest it was the right move to retain its playstyle since people were still enjoying it?

Wouldn't that validate the approach, not invalidate it?

WHM was the most popular healer in SB, even with the terrible lilies. Does that mean we should never have changed lilies to be better?

Think about your argument for a second.

[Absimiliard]

If you want to kill the meta completely, you have to make jobs play exactly the same with no variance

Oh God, please don't give them any more incentive. They've already been heading that way for a while now. I really, truly would not be surprised if this is exactly what they have in mind.

[samsaraSaber]

And give DPS and tanks massively buffed self healing

this can be much better to be honest from what we have now.
sadly playing as a healer is really not fun. more so in any thing that is lower level that 80-90.