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

[Sebazy]

You mean the time period where damage was higher and we had less oGCDs and less powerful ones (even SCH) such that GCD healing was common (and necessary even on SCH), where half of that had Cleric Stance, and that same half was when theorycrafting was in its infancy AND where the raids were so tightly tuned that the second raid set destroyed the raiding scene and nearly killed the game a second time? Oh, and lest we forget, when many players still believed that healers were for healing, the traditional MMO view, and the idea that "healers are just Green DPS" had not fully congealed?

CJ_Here_we_go_again.jpg

Correction, WHM was locked out of the oGCD game, SCH was doing just fine swinging 2 distinct GCDs around.

Theorycrafting was absolutely not in it's infancy by HW, just look at the docs Solitude was putting out at the time. Fun fact, go watch Mr Happy talk about Bcob, then look at who's docs and guides he was referring to. If that's not enough, go look at stuff like Blue Gartr and whatnot. The actual theorycrafters mostly had a pretty solid handle on things by the time SCOB was rolling round (basically, people understood SMN by then). It just didn't really filter down until Gordias because it none of this really mattered outside of Coil, staying alive and pressing buttons was more important.

As for Gordias destroying the raid scene, eeeeehhhh, put it this way. After prog was done, I took a hiatus from the hardcore scene and joined team 3 in a substantial social FC called DiZ, we ended up getting 4 teams through Gordias from memory. Trying to suggest it nearly killed the game a second time is laughable. It was hard, it was very very hard, I'm not going to deny that. Yet IMHO Midas was every bit as rough, A6S was *FAR* more brutal than A2S ever was and yet you didn't see people trying to say that this tier also nearly killed the game? Why? People were just pissed that even A3S was annihilating them after we just came from T13 which I legit killed in DF. Did pre nerf T5 nearly kill the game too? What about SCOB Savage? Remember how comically evil that was? Oh....

AND where the people who didn't like damage dealing literally could just...not. In most content, healer DPS was irrelevant, and large swaths of the community still not only had great sympathy for Pure Healers (and Support-Buffer Healers), there were people who would sometimes tell you not to DPS to prevent going OOM. There were no standards outside of the high end raid scene, and it was kind of the wild west with everyone else. Many people didn't optimize damage at all, and many didn't even DO damage when on healers.

Healer DPS is still irrelevant outside of Savage to this day. Extremes are tuned to be killed with minutes to spare if people stay alive and do a bang average job of holding their rotations and GCDs. As for why healer dps has steadily become the norm, IMO it's a combination of barriers of entry being removed. Cleric Stance was the big one, but fights being slower and more visibly choreographed is another factor, as is much more abundant self sustained MP resources that aren't reliant on Ballad/Bishop anymore.

Like, SB WHM would be EW WHM if you removed Lilies and Misery and replaced them with Aero 3 and an 18 sec Aero 2 - something the "more DPS people" reject as an allowable solution for WHM now, even if we ADDED Aero 3, cut Dia's duration to 18 sec, and LEFT Misery (so we'd actually have MORE DPS actions than we did in SB!). How does that even make sense? How is literally more to do than SB a downgrade?

If WHM got Aero 3 or an equivalent back coupled with an 18 second Dia adjustment and a replacement for Fluid Aura, I'd honestly be pretty happy. Don't get me wrong, I'd be sad that we didn't get a thundercloud proc (Maybe that could turn Dia into an oGCD proc to fill the Fluid Aura oGCD slot without needing another button++) but I'd absolutely grab that with both hands over what we have now.

That's a question, not a statement. Anyway THEN CUT IT IN A QUARTER.

We were at 2/3rds of our GCDs being required to keep up with sustained healing. If you slash the healer's potency in half again, how do you think that's going to work? The math doesn't math sir.

The idea that DPS additions can be anything but healing additions can only be very specific things - specific things that detractors can say won't work - is just nonsense. The game literally had more healing, GCD healing, requirements in the past, and people liked healing more back then.

Serious question, do you think that healers spammed heals on the GCD in Coil? This applies to both WHM and SCH.

Wildstar died because of its art style as well as its mechanics (I know quite a few people, myself included, that didn't play it for that reason).

What?

https://www.resetera.com/threads/ex-...lopment.63594/
https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comm...wildstar_fail/

Development was a disaster, the launch was a mess, unlocking content was a nightmare etcetc. But the art style was a cause for it's downfall?

And anyway, I'm not even sure what the point of your comment is? I'm not going to sit here and preach that Warhammer Online was a perfect MMO because it absolutely wasn't. PvE content had the depth of a dinner plate, class balance was pretty awful and EA got cold feet leading into pulling the plug pretty much right out of the gate before Mythic ever really had time to straighten the game out post launch. What Warhammer did have though, was masterfully designed healers, and what Wildstar had was a level cap gameplay loop that pretty much excluded people that weren't willing to knuckle down and put some serious effort in. Thus here I am making the comments that I have.

I'm not throwing out your argument by way of comparing it to wild star, I'm highlighting that your idea of a sustained healing floor is comparable to round the clock Harrowing Hell Normal and that is all that needs to be said. IMHO it would be complete carnage not to mention that it's not really a design philosophy that can be applied to the entire game. Let's not lose sight of what I'm responding to here:

More healing alone CAN work.

Thus no, by your own words, just increasing healing requirements isn't viable as a fix all. IMHO there isn't a single magic bullet that can get healers out of the hole SE has gradually dug for them over the years. Healing needs a fundamental rethink across the board, that includes incoming damage, our kits to deal with it, the utility we can provide to the group when there isn't anything to heal etcetc. The whole damn role needs to be nuked to the ground and reworked from a clean slate IMHO.

So is Warhammer.

Oh really?

https://www.returnofreckoning.com