To YoshiP, here's what too stress-free: Healer edition

[VentVanitas]

The problem is not everyone can dodge everything every time and when your group is at half hp and a mistake happens usually dps die now you rez and they have less damage, keep everyone topped off and usually it goes better. Bottom line is you are there to heal not dps if you need to dps to stop feeling "bored" roll a dps.

yeah healers, learn your place. you're not there to have fun, you're there to babysit other people as the party's janitor. now go keep raising that DPS player that stands in everything so they can have more fun than you.

[ThaCa]

If they transferred the current healer gameplay to Tanks there would be massive uproar. Imagine pressing like 2 damage buttons and having 20 mitigations as Tank.

Healer kits are bloated to hell too, they could easily combine and shave a good deal of buttons to make them matter more to make space for something more interesting, be it buffs or damage.

Personally I would love them to just overhaul the healing into cyclical gameplay of Healing builds damage buttons and dealing damage builds juicy healing buttons. This way the game would automatically teach healers to deal damage and reward it and likewise encourage to actually use multitude of your healing buttons to get rewarded with BIG explosions.

[Kaliesto]

Scholar Button Bloat kind of drives me up the wall, I rarely ever play that job.

[Supersnow845]

Scholar Button Bloat kind of drives me up the wall, I rarely ever play that job.

SCH really isn’t that bad, in modern healing design (not saying I like modern healing design) it really doesn’t have any redundant buttons because they all serve the design of SCH being the layering healer (fey blessing is probably the closest to redundant with protraction after that but even they have uses)

I’d probably argue SCH while being the healer with the most buttons actually has the least true bloat, AST for example could lose minor arcana, astrodyne and one out of exaltation and celestial intersection, WHM doesn’t need ~~stoneskin 1~~ divine bension and aquaveil and tetra is near useless, SGE’s entire toxicon mechanic is bloat and krasis doesn’t interact with its kit near as well as protraction does on SCH

This is outside of the fact that the healer kits are bloated on healing actions in general but SCH has the strongest intention of actions so to speak

[Valence]

The main problem with it was the server ticks where you can't actually tell when you'd reliably overheat and so you can waste time accidentally, also the immobility caused problems in the opener of certain fights *cough*O7S*cough*. I honestly believe that Flamethrower would've been so much more usable if it was an instant overheat GCD.

You're right that it would have made it less finicky, but it wouldn't have fixed the latency issues. Fact of the matter is the low latency rotation was generally not playable above 50-75ms of ping (unless you were into other types of instances like housing, at least for me, where it kinda worked even at 200ms... tells all you need to know how latency isn't even the problem, the problem is their spaghetti netcode). Fortunately we had a high ping rotation, unlike in shb, which was a true eyesore until they introduced the holy heat stacks (finally after all those years).

And I actually LOVED the quirks in O7S. Having to ask the shield healer to preshield you was strategy, and it was cool. I liked it a lot. Even how we griefed parties because our dps was so anemic outside of burst that we wouldn't kill our plane add on our own at release unless tanks came to help. Bard better here? So what? It was fun anyway and gave identity and purpose and adjustments and it made us veer away from mechanical script vomit (which on top of the randomized patterns of O7, was pretty nifty not gonna lie). Also one of the fight where the walls weren't an instant kill abyss. Imagine that today...

But I think i've hijacked the healer thread enough...

[ForsakenRoe]

SCH really isn’t that bad, in modern healing design (not saying I like modern healing design) it really doesn’t have any redundant buttons because they all serve the design of SCH being the layering healer (fey blessing is probably the closest to redundant with protraction after that but even they have uses)

Agreed on Blessing, Protraction would go from 'a bit questionable' to 'instant god tier cracked' if it were Deployable so they should do that (no bias)

Rather than remove buttons that suck to make room for things that suck less, I feel it'd be better to just... make the current buttons suck less? Might be a tall ask from SE, I get it, but ASTrodyne, for example, I think could be really quite an interesting part of the kit, if we had faster access to Seals, so that it was a 100% maintained buff, turning it into an AST Huton of sorts. AST would become the 'fast paced' healer, even in terms of GCD speed. Would it be accepted by the community? I dunno, but I think it's probably going to be 'more accepted' than what it currently is (basically ignorable)

Personally I would love them to just overhaul the healing into cyclical gameplay of Healing builds damage buttons and dealing damage builds juicy healing buttons. This way the game would automatically teach healers to deal damage and reward it and likewise encourage to actually use multitude of your healing buttons to get rewarded with BIG explosions.

Been saying this for over a year now: Make WHM this. Give it a reverse Misery, where dealing damage (or healing with non-lily heals, in case of Harrowing Hell moments) generates a 0-100 gauge, spend that gauge on a heal, that heal then pays for itself by making your damage spells into Quake, Flood, Tornado, with the total gained from the empowerment being equal to the Glare you lost casting the heal. Then with that, optimization would be that you rig your healing rotation in such a way that you go into your POM window with 2 Quakes, 2 Tornadoes, 2 Floods, and a Misery. WHM becomes the 'bank all your damage, and dump it all in raidbuffs', massive ADPS healer. Losing damage during the filler section (eg to movement) would also be less punished, by the fact that more is inside the raidbuff window. The 'ADPS-heavy 2min Burster' design worked for DRK in Abyssos so well, some groups ran 2 of them even in spite of the LB penalty. And the damage gained by doing so (getting 2x Elemental bursts + Misery into raidbuff windows), compared to current WHM, would be 'the difference between a Glare inside raidbuffs, vs outside raidbuffs, times 2', absolutely tiny gains that matter only to the most optimization-minded of players (this is a good thing, low skill floor high skill ceiling)

oh also because I think it's a cool side effect, Holy would generate gauge in AOE, meaning the heal can be used in trash pulls in dungeons, meaning Quake/Flood/Tornado can be used in AOE (as they would have the standard '50% damage falloff' effect like most AOEs do), turning our AOE rotation from 1 button to 4 buttons (and the gauge can be pooled at the end of a dungeon's boss fight, so you go into the next wall-to-wall with your Elemental skills ready to blast)

[Bibine_Bine]

Right, but are you using Toxikon because it’s genuinely useful to you and allowing you to accomplish things you otherwise couldn’t? Or are you simply using it just because it’s there and you might as well? How different is your performance with Addersting vs your performance without it? If you didn’t use Toxikon, what would happen? Would you lose fights that you could’ve otherwise have won? Are you saving time by speeding up the length of a fight?

What you described I could also have said about Stormblood lilies, that they aren’t that bad because hey, maybe I’ll get an extra Assize out of it. That’s, what? An extra 0.2% of my total damage maybe? It could be worse right?

I’m not trying to be antagonistic. My point is just, is this actually a useful system, or are you simply making the best out of something that is ultimately accomplishing nothing that you wouldn’t really accomplish without it?

No, I agree with you. I'm just saying it's one step above useless instead of totally useless, lol.

[Bibine_Bine]

the problem with giving healers more dps buttons is that they will use them and not heal, hell we have 2 buttons now and healers wait till the group is at half hp or less to bring everyone back up. The problem is not everyone can dodge everything every time and when your group is at half hp and a mistake happens usually dps die now you rez and they have less damage, keep everyone topped off and usually it goes better. Bottom line is you are there to heal not dps if you need to dps to stop feeling "bored" roll a dps. These healer dps posts really take me back to the idiocy of the strength stat stacking tanks that was so bad SE had to step in and change the way tanks work to save people from themselves.

You're kind of missing the point. Those moments when a bunch of people are taking damage and you need to heal are when healer's actually fun. This discussion is about the 90% of the time where healing is completely unneeded.

[OogaShaka]

If they transferred the current healer gameplay to Tanks there would be massive uproar. Imagine pressing like 2 damage buttons and having 20 mitigations as Tank.

Healer kits are bloated to hell too, they could easily combine and shave a good deal of buttons to make them matter more to make space for something more interesting, be it buffs or damage.

Personally I would love them to just overhaul the healing into cyclical gameplay of Healing builds damage buttons and dealing damage builds juicy healing buttons. This way the game would automatically teach healers to deal damage and reward it and likewise encourage to actually use multitude of your healing buttons to get rewarded with BIG explosions.

There was a healer in an MMO that did something like the dps for heals thing it was a "tempest of set" in "Age of Conan" a melee damage healer with some ranged if memory serves me correctly been a while tho, not to digress but in AoC i did like the fatalities you could do and the screen blood splatter.

[ty_taurus]

No, I agree with you. I'm just saying it's one step above useless instead of totally useless, lol.

Which is why I think it's so imperative to address mechanics in a direct manner. Like I get what you're saying. It could be worse. It could be literally functionless like Repose. It could be actively detrimental to Sage's gameplay like Gunbreaker's Double Down. Instead, it's simply nothing. It's at worst a noob trap that tricks you into playing Sage poorly, and at best, a button that you could take off your hotbar if you're wanting for hotbar space.

But so what if it's not worse? It's not good either, and that's the problem. I don't think "inoffensive" is good enough, and I'm not trying to say you do either, but I just don't believe that going "well, it's not that bad, right?" is really helpful, because the fact that it's not good makes it "that bad" anyway simply for being a waste of potential.