Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

[ty_taurus]

You can add more offensive spells and abilities to creates a small, but interesting offensive gameplay loop for all healers, which addresses solo content as well as healing downtime.

You can prune the bloated healing action library and create a smaller, yet also more interactive library of healing actions that are both easier for less experienced players to keep track of and more compelling for skilled players to take advantage of.

You can gradually increase healing requirements from fights of all difficulty modes to try and create more reasons to heal without making it too difficult for the game's target audience to stay in control of.

All of these are independent solutions that, on their own, can improve the situation to some degree, but you cannot solve the problem of one only by addressing the other. Adding more DPS will not change the lack of healing gameplay, nor will it increase the opportunities for healers to engage with healing. Pruning and revamping heals will not fill the gaping hole in healer gameplay when healing isn't needed, nor can it increase how frequently you'll need to heal either; if you weaken healing throughput in an attempt to create a greater need to heal, you risk making old extreme and savage content considerable harder, or even impossible if you don't have the throughput to keep up with that. Increasing the frequency of healing required, but it's not plausible to do this enough to justify the current healing kit bloat, nor can it be enough to eliminate healing downtime as an issue. Resolving one concern and not the others can certainly help, but it won't relieve the role of all of its issues, and may not be enough for some people who have left the role, nor enough to keep some people who are considering leaving the role.

Naturally, the best solution is to address all angles if the issue. That's a pretty daunting task that would require a lot of work. I believe it was Aravell who mentioned how starting with DPS could work to help alleviate some of the tension in the meantime, provided that other changes were also along the way. If they came out and addressed the concerns while providing a roadmap for how they plan to address them, I could be entirely content with that if I agree with their projected endstate.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think it was Roe who said in the healing forums she was uneasy about something to the effect of (paraphrase) "Just slap a 1-2-3 rotation on all the healers", because her fear was we may only get one bite at this apple and didn't want to waste it on something that would be unfulfilling.

I think that was in response to specifically someone saying 'oh you want more damage buttons to press? OK just give healers a 123 combo, then they have to press 3 buttons instead of one, that solves the issue right?' No, it wouldn't solve the issue, and my fear is that SE would do it, want to wait 2 years to 'collect data' or whatever, then when the complaints come in about how 'healer still sucks' (with no additional detail on why it sucks), they go 'well we tried what they were asking for ('more damage buttons') and it didn't stop the complaining, so let's just not do anything further, since they will complain anyway'. It's the same thing as Abyssos, people asked for 'more healing', and we got 'more healing'. But where some people were hoping to go from 'a raidwide every minute' to 'a raidwide every 40s' for example, Abyssos instead went with 'a raidwide every minute, also there's a bleed that totals up to the full damage of the raidwide again attached'. Yes it's 'more healing' but in an unsatisfying way

I'd also be uneasy about 'just decrease the time between raidwides by 25%' or 'add a ground DOT effect that constantly ticks for 5% of your max HP per tick', because they are equally as boring a 'solution' as the 1-2-3. They raise the healing required, sure, but even in the unlikely chance that they manage to make us dip into GCD healing, something like the permanent DOT would just mean we do full Medica2 uptime and it's dealt with. And that's not enough to make the role fun either. At least with a 15s damage spell (instead of the 15s HOT duration on M2) there's potential for kit interactivity, like idk 'using this 15s CD attack reduces the CD on Tetragrammaton by 2 seconds' or something

Naturally, the best solution is to address all angles if the issue. That's a pretty daunting task that would require a lot of work. I believe it was Aravell who mentioned how starting with DPS could work to help alleviate some of the tension in the meantime, provided that other changes were also along the way. If they came out and addressed the concerns while providing a roadmap for how they plan to address them, I could be entirely content with that if I agree with their projected endstate.

And the largest amount of work is 'getting SE to acknowledge the problem exists in the first place'