Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[mallleable]

Not a healer main, but from what I've picked up is that it seems like players have more or less optimized out the need for healers so I feel like part of what will fix the role would be to heavily nerf or remove certain optimized strategies such as avoiding using GCD heals/shields, mitigation being the answer to everything, 'the only HP point that matters in your last one,' etc.

[Mostly_Raxus]

Not a healer main, but from what I've picked up is that it seems like players have more or less optimized out the need for healers so I feel like part of what will fix the role would be to heavily nerf or remove certain optimized strategies such as avoiding using GCD heals/shields, mitigation being the answer to everything, 'the only HP point that matters in your last one,' etc.

most mechanics equate to mess up =/= death, healers are basically a rez battery that use a aoe heal for stack markers. they might as well spread heals to all classes and make healers dps also

[WaxSw]

Not a healer main, but from what I've picked up is that it seems like players have more or less optimized out the need for healers so I feel like part of what will fix the role would be to heavily nerf or remove certain optimized strategies such as avoiding using GCD heals/shields, mitigation being the answer to everything, 'the only HP point that matters in your last one,' etc.

The main problem is that the average healer cast over a fight look like this:



and this is on savage btw.

As you can guess spamming 1 1 1 1 1 over and over regardless of what healer you play is not really fun. We have reached this point because of a multitude of factors but some of them are:

-They took away all the damage dealing tools that allowed us to diversify our means to do something useful when not healing

-They gave us insane amounts of powerful oGCDs, bloating the kits and giving us more time to do things like dpsing, making the removal of said dps tools even a bigger problem

-The fights in the high end are designed around big burst of damage and the tight dps checks some of those high end fights have (or had) meant that GCD healing was never going to be a preferred way to heal them

-The fights are scripted and the party amount of healers is fixed, leading to an scenario where damage optimization is the focus as healing can be solved by simply looking at the timeline.

-The devs baby healers in normal mode leading to a situation where the healing per second demands of those duties can be covered by dps and tanks, making healers feel vestigial.

and I could go on and some others can point even more.


The solutions you propose have some flaws that can be understood considering you do not main it but let me point those out so you can understand how f... the situation is:

-The only HP point that matters is the last one:

Is something that can't be changed without promoting mindless healing. HP is a binary resource, either you live or you die. This means that healing more damage than you take has no value whatsoever which ofc leads healers to do other things once that healing duty is done (in this game is dpsing). Is really something that can't be avoided

-heavily nerf or remove certain optimized strategies such as avoiding using GCD heals/shields:

Its not that simple to do because a lot of mechanics in the higher end demand the versatility that those cooldowns give, either by forcing players to be mobile with healing (which translates in 3/4 healers not being able to cast gcd heals) or by the strict dps checks which makes the loss of multiple dps casts all the more detrimental. That is without mentioning how the GCD kit is one, if not the most homogenized part of the role and how being able to heal duties without GCDs is one of the only sources of optimization and uniqueness left on the role

-mitigation being the answer to everything:

This is the more doable thing but it wont really solve anything in the long run as proven in duties like criterion savage where the lack of mit demands means that a healer with mit can fold the entire duty in half (Sge has more than twice the clears Ast and Whm have combined). Some duties like TEA on launch proved that it can be implemented but the healing needs for that model to succeed cannot be implemented in the majority of the content, let alone normal modes and we would like a role where we "have to do Ultimate to find engaging content"

[Heroman3003]

GCD healing being pushed aside is absolutely fault of raiding community feedback tbh. Constant complaints of muh parse and such about how any GCD heal is a DPS loss. That's the reason Misery exists and why oGCD is norm for healing tool additions.

[Supersnow845]

GCD healing being pushed aside is absolutely fault of raiding community feedback tbh. Constant complaints of muh parse and such about how any GCD heal is a DPS loss. That's the reason Misery exists and why oGCD is norm for healing tool additions.

Except the raiding community accepted it’s necessity in everything pre- shadowbringers, it’s only when they gut the healers damage kits and replaced it with a bloat of oGCD’s (remember how we lost 3 DOT’s and cleric stance on SCH in order to get fey blessing, recitation and summon seraph) that focus changed to be oGCD focused; because there is no reason not to be when we have this many heals

[ty_taurus]

GCD healing being pushed aside is absolutely fault of raiding community feedback tbh. Constant complaints of muh parse and such about how any GCD heal is a DPS loss. That's the reason Misery exists and why oGCD is norm for healing tool additions.

If the reason healer design has taken that shift is because of raiders complaining about losing DPS, then it's still 100% the fault of the designer, not the player. We may influence what things change, but it's ultimately the design team that pulls the trigger. If a change is not healthy for the game, it's on their hands, not ours regardless of what anyone asks for. This whole "the community needs to come to a consensus." mentality is shifting the blame onto the player, but they are the designers--they are the experts. If the community is asking for a change that they disagree with, they need to take a stance and communicate why they don't believe those changes are healthy for the game. Either they bend the knee to player feedback, or outright ignore it. There's no communication, no middle ground discussion about these things.

And as with Supersnow pointed out, it really wasn't the raiding community that was asking for hyper simplification. Reminds me of this segment from a Misshapen Chair video.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Makes a fight that demands or incentivizes better outcome with dpsing healer.

Then be surprised that healers are trying to avoid unnecessary GCD heals. Oh wow very surprising.

What a joke. This is a similar degree of ineptitude as how they come to conclusion of how ‘successful’ EW’s relic is because it is now a tome weapon functionally.

[Aravell]

It seems to be very easy for most people to just blame raiders for anything they don't like. "Those filthy raider scum" have become the scapegoat for basically anything nowadays.

But not a single person has managed to answer what raiders gain that they weren't already able to work around before the job simplifications.

[Supersnow845]

If raiders are to be blamed because they wanted better parses and less GCD healing then how did some raiders not do GCD heals and parse better

Either everyone had to GCD heal so all our parses were on equal footing or some could get away with not GCD healing which also meant you could as well if you were good enough (spoiler alert it was the former)

[ty_taurus]

It's not the raiders, it's the players who want to be as good as raiders but have a negative amount of interest in practicing or learning to be one.