The death of savage raiding and SE's lack of action

[Maltothoris]

If healing so easy why so many bad at it?

Honest opinion, thw game does not teach you well at all when it comes to healing. My crucible of fire was with Gordias and Midas. People also don't understand jow powerful their healing kits are. Especially with the fact that the potencies on the tooltips do not reflect their actual strength.

[Jojoya]

Honest opinion, thw game does not teach you well at all when it comes to healing. My crucible of fire was with Gordias and Midas. People also don't understand jow powerful their healing kits are. Especially with the fact that the potencies on the tooltips do not reflect their actual strength.

Does it teach anyone to be good at their role? I don't think so.

Those that are good become good because they are willing to put in the effort to learn from other sources. For others this is just a game and not worth that effort.

Where the game does a disservice to healers is with ilvl scaling and mitigation abilities. More HP means incoming damage takes a smaller percentage of HP and so lessens potential urgency to heal. Mitigation abilities on top of that means HP is so small the need for healing is infrequent. When the amount is reduced to the point that a player does not need healing at all to survive an encounter, how can a healer learn to heal?

Someone else mentions job design as the problem. The job team could come up with the most amazing job design for a healer that's the envy of all other MMO developers and it will mean nothing if the encounter design team doesn't put that design to good use. If healers feel like they're nothing more than green DPS, it's not the job design at fault. It's the encounter design.

[Supersnow845]

Does it teach anyone to be good at their role? I don't think so.

Those that are good become good because they are willing to put in the effort to learn from other sources. For others this is just a game and not worth that effort.

Where the game does a disservice to healers is with ilvl scaling and mitigation abilities. More HP means incoming damage takes a smaller percentage of HP and so lessens potential urgency to heal. Mitigation abilities on top of that means HP is so small the need for healing is infrequent. When the amount is reduced to the point that a player does not need healing at all to survive an encounter, how can a healer learn to heal?

Someone else mentions job design as the problem. The job team could come up with the most amazing job design for a healer that's the envy of all other MMO developers and it will mean nothing if the encounter design team doesn't put that design to good use. If healers feel like they're nothing more than green DPS, it's not the job design at fault. It's the encounter design.

The reverse argument is also true though. The design team can create the best fight for healing possible and it would still be garbage because healers are designed like garbage

[Jojoya]

The reverse argument is also true though. The design team can create the best fight for healing possible and it would still be garbage because healers are designed like garbage

So then what is good job healer design?

Are there other MMOs players can point to and say their healer job design is what a healer job should be and XYZ is why?

I can remember healing in WoW. What was in my DPS toolkit was rarely on my mind because I rarely had the spare GCDs to use it. Toss out a 24 second DoT then go back to healing. Maybe I'd get another spare GCD to toss out another DoT when the old one expired.

I think the healer job design is fine here. We can do what we need to as healers to help the party survive. We've got a few DPS tools to use if we get spare GCDs.

What isn't fine is encounter design. DPS use their GCDs to deal damage during an encounter. I want to be using my GCDs to heal damage taken. But most of the damage taken by a party overall is taken by a role that doesn't need healer support. That is where design goes bad.

[Supersnow845]

So then what is good job healer design?

Are there other MMOs players can point to and say their healer job design is what a healer job should be and XYZ is why?

I can remember healing in WoW. What was in my DPS toolkit was rarely on my mind because I rarely had the spare GCDs to use it. Toss out a 24 second DoT then go back to healing. Maybe I'd get another spare GCD to toss out another DoT when the old one expired.

I think the healer job design is fine here. We can do what we need to as healers to help the party survive. We've got a few DPS tools to use if we get spare GCDs.

What isn't fine is encounter design. DPS use their GCDs to deal damage during an encounter. I want to be using my GCDs to heal damage taken. But most of the damage taken by a party overall is taken by a role that doesn't need healer support. That is where design goes bad.

“If we get spare GCD’s”

That’s the core of the problem, it’s not “a few spare GCD’s”, it’s 95% of your total GCD’s. GCD healing is expensive on mana and mana regen is completely static. All you have to do is look up your kill time and you will know exactly how much mana you will have. So just bumping up damage to reduce damage GCD’s doesn’t fix fundamental flaws in the healer kit

I’d argue WOW goes too far in the other direction where they actually have well designed DPS kits but they don’t have enough time to use them

14’s healer designs are fundamentally at odds with the encounter but you can’t fix the encounter to bring healing back to the forefront with the current healer kits because once you overwhelm the oGCD’s your kit quickly collapses because we simply cannot sustain GCD spam because it’s so expensive mana wise

WOW is closer to the answer but it needs to be slowed down to 14’s combat speed opening up that extra space to actually using their more in depth rotations

Your final point also isn’t encounter design as a problem that’s a problem or tank design. It’s not encounter designs fault that tanks can heal the amount of damage they take that would be threatening if they didn’t have such ridiculous self healing. Bumping damage up doesn’t fundamentally change the fact that problem comes from tank imbalance, not lack of damage

[Jojoya]

That’s the core of the problem, it’s not “a few spare GCD’s”, it’s 95% of your total GCD’s. GCD healing is expensive on mana and mana regen is completely static. All you have to do is look up your kill time and you will know exactly how much mana you will have. So just bumping up damage to reduce damage GCD’s doesn’t fix fundamental flaws in the healer kit

My point was that I didn't have those spare GCDs in WoW because the encounter design team made sure there were players that needed to be healed.

We've got the excessive number of spare GCDs in FFXIV because the encounter design team doesn't give us that much to heal.

Again, that's encounter design and not job design.

I agree that SE hasn't done a good job of incorporating mana into the healer toolkit but what does that matter when there is little to heal unless someone screws up a mechanic? It's all going to go to damage regardless.

If we actually had things to heal throughout a fight, then mana allocation would be worth another look.

I also feel like a lot of healers don't understand the difference between instant cast and oGCD. As WHM I have Benediction, Tetragrammaton, Liturgy of the Bell and Assize for oGCDs.

I save Benediction as an "oh crap" button, usually using it after a party member gets raised. Tetragrammaton I use if I don't have a lily available for Solace. Liturgy I use if the party is going to take either multiple hits over a short period of time or we're going to take a large hit that that I know is coming and can time placement of Liturgy so it goes off just after. Assize I use on cooldown because free damage.

In other words, I don't have to use any of those that often because I'm getting lilies fast enough to have Solace and Rapture available. Those are not oGCDs. They're just instant casts.

I could choose to use them if I want just as I could choose to use any of my heals with a cast time. I don't need to because the party isn't taking damage often enough for me to use them. And first I'm going to use up my lilies to generate blood lilies for Misery. Maybe I put a Regen on the tank before a pull but it's usually pointless after that because the tank will heal themselves to full without help.

So most of my healing actions used are 2 actions that share a resource that has a 20 second recharge timer. Or in other words, I only have a need to cast a heal about 5 times every 60 seconds and 2 of those are going to be oGCDs more often than not. That leaves me with 22 free GCDs per minute for dealing damage because of a lack of better things to do.

The job design team could cut the potency of all those abilities in half so they're more in line with heals that have a cast time and I'd still have 17 free GCDs per minute.

They could switch around mana costs and I'd likely still have 17 free GCDs a minute because they're not going to take things to the point that poor mana management is going to cause a wipe. Even if they did, the answer is to stop dealing damage so that mana is conserved for when the healing will be needed (anyone else remember "wanding" to conserve/regen mana in WoW?).

I agree that tank sustain isn't an encounter design problem but a job design problem. But it's a tank job design problem, not a healer job design problem. SE could leave tanks as they are and still make healing more engaging by having encounters deal more party wide damage more frequently.

Again, I'm fine with the toolkit I've been given and I get a lot of use from it when in a duty with group of players that love standing in bad. What I want is that toolkit to be just as useful when I'm in a party of good players. There is a middle ground that can be reached through encounter design.