Quote Originally Posted by Merrigan View Post
But isn't that a problem in itself?

The balance between casual, midcore and harcore players has always been a tricky one to strike, and you're right to point that out. A lot of people tend to forget that after X number of years in the game, certain things can't continue to be ‘difficult’. But if a role has no use apart from making up for the shortcomings of others, then the design itself is poorly thought out. Just imagine a buff class whose role is limited to triggering one or two powers that can only be activated if the other dps forget their buffs. That would be a stupid design. And the healer... Well, it almost fits that design.
We're getting into differences between job design and encounter design.

What is the purpose of a healer? To heal. To repair damage taken whether avoidable or unavoidable.

The average player tends to take a lot of avoidable damage. It's not always skill at fault. Latency plays a big role and not every player has top of the line gaming rigs or superfast broadband connections.

If the player base in general is taking a lot of avoidable damage, then the encounter designers have to limit how much unavoidable damage parties take to reduce the chance of a wipe.

But that then leaves the healer in a group of skilled players with almost nothing to do because they're avoiding all that avoidable damage. Improving the DPS toolkit sounds like a good idea but then we run into what makes an appealing damage kit. Usually it involves retaining proper uptime on a rotation to maximize DPS. Now the healer has to decide whether to interrupt their rotation to heal someone or ignore them until they get to a safe spot in the rotation, hoping that they don't take fatal damage in the meantime.

You could say "well just make it so healing doesn't interrupt a combo" but then what becomes the point of having the combo? As others have pointed out, there's really no difference between hitting 11111211 and 12341234. You're hitting a button. The game calculates the damage done. What can make 12341234 different is failing to keep the rotation up and so losing damage.

Why am I a healer? Because I don't find 12341234 anymore engaging than 11111211. But having to keep track of 9 different health bars (1 boss which I want to help empty and 8 player that I want to keep full) is engaging to me, especially when I don't know when someone is going to screw up and I have to toss them a heal.

So the role is founded on others screwing up and that's intentional. It allows the party to continue to progress when otherwise it would have to start over again.