Why Refunding Damage for Healing is Bad.

[Rithy255]

Hello its been a while since we've seen the changes and I've been thinking a lot and I'm pretty puzzled by what we saw with white mage honestly.

I've seen posts sometimes talk about having all heals be damage neutral but frankly this is a BAD THING.

Why might this be a bad thing you may ask? because it gives incentives towards healers just spamming out heals without actually thinking about any risk/reward to when you should heal and when you should damage; which is a big reason why healer is fun in savage as you are planning out your resources and TRYING to not waste damage on healing.

I do not think the devs will also make the healing part engaging on healers, they never have The engaging part should be managing that healing with damage as a reward for good resources rather then healing is a mindless thing you spam for damage gain and nothing matters.

This also effects other jobs, bard got a regen? well thats gonna be pointless what healer damage is that going to save? if both your healers are spamming heals anyway (same with PLD's round table ability we saw) Theirs literally zero point in any job having any sort of healing utility skill now.

I personally think we should actually go back to a Healing vs damage management system, with more engaging damage options on healers (not less with no dot and instant cast) right now healing looks like its in a state thats some how even worse then Dawntrail and heck its going to negatively effect other jobs too by proxy of making Utility heals on tanks/dps borderline useless.

I've always thought the biggest issue with Healer was they had too much healing ogcds (or for white mage lillies built up too fast) Now your essentially giving healers infinite ogcds and making the dps rotation even more boring I feel like most people can agree this isn't the right direction.

Even if Healers should "heal more" do we really believe the content will make healers heal more? whats the difference between healing well now or just spamming heals mindlessly now? This really feels like its bad for both the "we should heal more" and "we should have more damage button" crowds to me.

[Supersnow845]

I agree but the visceral hate so many people have for energy drain seems to show that this is not the general community’s opinion

[Rithy255]

I agree but the visceral hate so many people have for energy drain seems to show that this is not the general community’s opinion

I actually used to hate energy drain but now really like it.

I do think people will be bored with the state of new healers but I guess only time will tell, we already do have people complaining enough (rightfully so) so I do hope... but again we're talking about healers here SE just doesn't even know what to do.

[Azurarok]

Weighing offense and healing (and mobility) is fun, but if you're on the receiving end of a healer who's bad at that it sucks.

Every adjustment to healers (and tank survivability) they've been making always feels like they've been made by someone who falls in the latter group, the enjoyment of the healer be damned. Evolved WHM is just another step in that direction

[ty_taurus]

Given how content has been balanced around healers having very high DPS uptime, I think finding ways to refund damage when casting GCDs is a valid solution to trying to refocus some of your GCD back onto healing without disrupting the requirements of existing content. That said, I think it needs to be something you actively engage with in some way, not just something you get freely and with functionally no limitations. Technically based on the demonstration, you only have 3 DPS neutral GCD heals per 25 seconds, but in most content you didn't always have a use case for the healing just having 3 per 60 seconds, so any half-competent healer likely won't have issues with managing their DPS uptime this way. In other words, there'll be virtually no management for you to handle in order to min-max Sanctity usage.

What white mage needed was to have more agency over lily generation, and flesh out lily usage so you don't just have basically Cure and Medica. I think just making your standard heals able to utilize lilies is fine, but white mage needed more.

Side note, I find it really depressing that what appears to be most if not all of the resources that white mage got toward developing new things seems to have gone into making a system that's almost exactly the same as what it already had, just more automatic. Like you could've accomplished the same end result with lilies and the blood lily and spent that animation budget on something more useful.

[Moqi]

Refunding damage can be an interesting mechanic if it's treated as such for WHM only when they mostly relies on (lots) of CGD.

Get rid of most free oCGD healing (Evolved WHM is doing it a bit but not enough) and make the refund happen when you heal at least 80% through your spell or something and it'd be fun to play with.

[Aravell]

I used to say the same thing, that making everything damage neutral is just not a good direction for healers because it further reduces the need to work with your cohealer.

I always said maximum healer damage optimisation should require coordination with your entire party, all healers/tanks/DPS tools working together. Doing lower damage wouldn't mean you're bad, it would just mean inexperience with the fight or bad coordination with the party, people can get better at those and better damage will come. But as we can see in early ShB, rather than coordinating with their cohealer, most WHMs would rather wipe the party entirely than take the minor damage loss with Afflatus Rapture's refund.

[Torvalis]

Weighing offense and healing (and mobility) is fun, but if you're on the receiving end of a healer who's bad at that it sucks.

Every adjustment to healers (and tank survivability) they've been making always feels like they've been made by someone who falls in the latter group, the enjoyment of the healer be damned. Evolved WHM is just another step in that direction

I'm going to preface this by saying that most of what I'm talking about here is extrapolating general healer design decisions from the Evolved WHM showcase, so I could be completely off, but we'll have to wait for more information.

I feel like I'm having a deja vu, because I'm pretty sure this community had similar discussions when the ShB to EW Healer changes were announced, where they tried to get more people to play healers by making them easier and reducing their dps kits, but it just resulted in healers being not that interesting to play in normal content.

So we're back in the situation where the announced changes could end up working well if we actually see a major increase in the amount of required healing, but that just shifts the problem.
Assuming that we are going to get a meaningful increase to the amount of healing required, I find it very unlikely that such an increase would happen in any content with difficulty below an extreme, because whenever they have tried to increase the difficulty of any normal-mode content(dungeons, trials, normal raids, alliance raids) we get at least one major thread in general discussion complaining about the "extreme" level mechanic of not having every single ground aoe telegraphed with a giant orange marker 10 seconds before it actually happens, and instead expecting the player to read basic telegraphs.

But even if the normal-mode content gets the healing requirements increased, there will still be 6 expansions worth of legacy content where that will not be the case, and if only the high-end content gets a significant amount of additional healing requirement, then we are just in a worse situation than we are currently in. Currently healing can be pretty engaging when doing high-end content, while the role is basically redundant in most other pieces of content, requiring almost no healing GCDs unless it's very new content and people are constantly dying and taking avoidable damage. Which results in healing high-end content being very imposing to new players and difficult to get in to. Now if the healers dps toolkits get pruned, then normal-mode content is going to be arguably less interesting, while high-end with increased healing requirements will be even more imposing, but arguably less interesting for those that are already familiar with it.

Generally speaking, it feels slightly premature to make a final judgement until we have seen at least one more healer as a point of comparison, but given their track record on healers it's also reasonable to be concerned.

[Alice_Rivers]

On on hand I understand your logic but on the other hand, with the healing attitude this game has fostered not having healing refunded in some form is likely to see the problem get worse as people refuse to heal at all unless it's absolutely necessary. Now I would argue these people should not be healers.

For my personal opinion on the matter, I wouldn't mind that much if my healing didn't get refunded, sometimes it's fun to think about how I can manoeuvre or maximise my lily value without having to spend a lily on an already full blood lily but I don't think it'd be a huge loss to me if I didn't have that.

[RaionKansen]

Hello its been a while since we've seen the changes and I've been thinking a lot and I'm pretty puzzled by what we saw with white mage honestly.

I've seen posts sometimes talk about having all heals be damage neutral but frankly this is a BAD THING.

Why might this be a bad thing you may ask? because it gives incentives towards healers just spamming out heals without actually thinking about any risk/reward to when you should heal and when you should damage; which is a big reason why healer is fun in savage as you are planning out your resources and TRYING to not waste damage on healing.

I do not think the devs will also make the healing part engaging on healers, they never have The engaging part should be managing that healing with damage as a reward for good resources rather then healing is a mindless thing you spam for damage gain and nothing matters.

This also effects other jobs, bard got a regen? well thats gonna be pointless what healer damage is that going to save? if both your healers are spamming heals anyway (same with PLD's round table ability we saw) Theirs literally zero point in any job having any sort of healing utility skill now.

I personally think we should actually go back to a Healing vs damage management system, with more engaging damage options on healers (not less with no dot and instant cast) right now healing looks like its in a state thats some how even worse then Dawntrail and heck its going to negatively effect other jobs too by proxy of making Utility heals on tanks/dps borderline useless.

I've always thought the biggest issue with Healer was they had too much healing ogcds (or for white mage lillies built up too fast) Now your essentially giving healers infinite ogcds and making the dps rotation even more boring I feel like most people can agree this isn't the right direction.

Even if Healers should "heal more" do we really believe the content will make healers heal more? whats the difference between healing well now or just spamming heals mindlessly now? This really feels like its bad for both the "we should heal more" and "we should have more damage button" crowds to me.

As usual, You should try doing some actual content before you comment on topics like this. You don't do Savage. You don't even do Extremes