Why Refunding Damage for Healing is Bad.

[Carighan]

You know very well that this isn't true. The dev team hasn't taken player enjoyment of game mechanics as a point in their balancing for a very long time now. See how the removal of Kaiten was overwhelming pushed back on and the devs doubled down.

[citation needed]

VPR also had a very small amount of people asking for the removal of the debuff yet the dev team decided that it "impacts the overall feeling of the job among players"? That's a laughable notion. The dev team isn't balancing for the players, they've just been working towards removing friction between players, they've even admitted to this themselves on stream.

... you might want to reread that line. It's disagreeing with yourself.

Also, you thinking the things I listed don't actually happen is what's the funniest thing here. You know what else actually happens in game? Tanks not mitigating because they're mid-burst, do we demand to take away their damage rotations and give them only 1 spammable button so they can mitigate with no trouble?

Uuuuh... you're not going to like hearing this, but this was the stated reason for removing damage from DRK and GNB charge moves, yes. Too many oGCD weaving slots filled already, and if these had to be woven for damage, too many GCDs filled with all-damage and hence players would opt to not press mitigation buttons. That's why that was removed, yes.

Or do we demand their rotations be simplified and their OGCDs removed so they can support their team? If people demand healers be kept simple and impossible to fail, it's only fair that the other jobs are made simple and impossible to fail too, no?

Again, I hate to repeat myself, but "Uuuuh....". You may want to check in on most classes in this game. The game is very intentionally designed with unnaturally simplistic class gameplay, in turn the combat is a "ballet" of never-ending quite specific movement and coordination requirements. Which do not care about your specific class, which would lead me to believe they originally went this route realizing they had started adding too many classes to do the gameplay class-side; but I have no verification for this, might be any other reason, too. In any case, failure statue is in the encounter, not the class. Ninja is maaaybe an exception since they can genuinely blow up their mudra combos.

I'm really not quite sure what you are trying to get at, sorry. And don't get me wrong, I absolutely loathe the class (non-)design in this game, and while I think Evolved is a massive improvement this is entirely because it cuts two-third. So it's still all bad, but just less bad, which is already better. However, I can also kinda see why the design is the way it is, and as much as I loathe the class design, I like (most of) the encounter design. And while I wish they could get both done, even over all the years playing MMORPGs since M59, I can't really say I saw someone pull it off in a way where I could point at it and go "Just do that instead". Not really. All things I could point at come with their own list of caveats, like how GW2 does its class design would be even better than what we're getting in Evolved Mode, but it also comes with the negative that is their millions of newbie-trap combinations for every class and more importantly the flattening effect that class design has on encounter design. Would it be cool to have? Maybe. Could also be bad.

If the encounters are changed, if enemies deal more and harder damage, then healing rewards more damage might be a good change.

We still havent seen the shield healers, I will wait with making a judgement untill I learn more.

Exactly.

Now IMO the chances of them actually requiring actual amounts of healing in EC are slim at best. And that's being very generous. On the plusside, the massively overloaded and overburdened current then-legacy loadouts could trivially handle it, too, and for the evolved loadouts they just have to keep the potencies of the raw GCD heals high enough and it's all smooth sailing.

We also know from other MMORPGs that healer mechanics where healing compensates damage (and vice-versa, something I'm still missing tbh but we've only seen 25% of kits) work very well and also just feel "nice" to use. You feel like you're doing well if you're busy saving everybody and then also get one or more huge hits in as a result of that, squeezing them between heals where they can fit.

Again I can't really see them change encounter design so much, but I sure hope they do. It'd be the single biggest fix they could do to so many things: Overall healer design issues, specific healer kit design issues, tank defensive loadout problems, even DPS utility skills. There's a huge room for a slew of cool non-damage skills, but they all need the breathing space that the raid constantly taking medium+ damage would create.