Can healers get some QoL help please?

[Risvertasashi]

I stopped queuing as healer in Frontlines before 3.0 but right now I only have healers to 60... it's a good reminder of why I stopped. But I'm stuck until I finish leveling another class, so... There are a lot of problems with playing this role in PvP but I'm going to focus on only the ones I think SE can do something about.

Oddly, even without cleric stance, healers have decent offensive capability. Heavy, stuns, pushbacks, etc. I'll be focusing on healing.

Purify:
So, we have purify to potentially get out of sleep or stuns. 3 minute cooldown. So, you know, you get to use it maybe twice in a match, 3 times if you're lucky. Or unlucky because you're getting stunned/slept so much.

Attunement:
One of our best defenses, save that we can't move or heal (so we might end it in the middle of a huge enemy group swarming around us). Still, a bit situational but useful. 4 minute cooldown. So you basically get 2 uses in a match.

Equanimity:
Casts can't be interrupted for 10s (except they can, just not by auto attacks and some abilities). 3 minute cooldown. Potentially one of the best abilities and definitely one of the most needed, but crippled by long CD and short duration. After it's spent, have fun tossing out only regen until swiftcast is up. We need this almost constantly so unlike Purify, you probably will get 3 full uses in a match.

The rest of the time, enjoy being public enemy #1, having casts interrupted by snipers constantly, getting stunlocked, silenced, and slept and every opportunity, and so on.

Suggestions:
(These will be kinda random with no particular thought to balance, just tossing out ideas. Suggestions in replies to make them balanced welcomed, or I trust that SE would do the same on any they might pick up)

Make tanks useful. As in, beyond stuns and such. How about a permanent PLD-esque Cover as long as the target (Would be a healer generally) stays in range? That way enemies would have to target the tank before taking down the healer. Or just make enmity combo finishers and provoke force an enemy to target the tank for a certain time.

I realize these are unlikely but I like it because it keeps the role meta intact. Instead of tanks being the high-HP DPS they are in PVP now.

Make spells much less prone to interruption. Not that SCHs really need it but, you know, throw WHMs and ASTs a bone here. Make it require a critical hit, or only select abilities interrupt casting. (Wouldn't be needed if tanks could actually protect healers though)

Give healers more defensive options. I have 4 full hotbars on my WHM so I'm not a fan of this but anything's better than the current situation. Or just drastically reduce the CD of the existing ones and increase their durations.
B-But PVP traits upgrade them! Oh, I'm sorry. Let me ask the entire enemy alliances to go easy on me while I rank up very slowly to gradually purchase the ability to take 30s off a cooldown several minutes long.

Increase healer rewards. We already don't get any kill-related rewards. At the very least, incentivize being everyone's (including your own team's) punching bag.

[CeveArthu]

I havnt read your entire thing because im literally asleep while typing, but the idea of a permanent cover would be extremely overpowered, tanks kick out a gigantic amount of damage and burst if the person playing it isnt bad, the paladin has utility in every nook and cranny aswell

I;m not sure where you get the extra exp for kills from either, am i missing something here?

[Risvertasashi]

I havnt read your entire thing because im literally asleep while typing, but the idea of a permanent cover would be extremely overpowered, tanks kick out a gigantic amount of damage and burst if the person playing it isnt bad, the paladin has utility in every nook and cranny aswell

I;m not sure where you get the extra exp for kills from either, am i missing something here?

exp from kills... it's been a while since I've pvp'd, so maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but I thought you got some for it. At the very least, there are kill related achievements. Well, I'll update the post then.

The idea behind a perma cover isn't related to tank's DPS or other utilities. It would be there solely to help healers. Since, yes, right now tanks are pretty much DPS with a high health pool. What they can do to shield healers is very limited (a few stuns, if you get a rare PLD you can cover for a few seconds every 3 minutes).

[CeveArthu]

You have never got pvp xp from kills, there are achievements

Bare in mind if you made any buff to the paladin's ability to permanently allow a healer to cast, it would be beyond overpowered in wolves den

You cant balance things around a mode that caters to the lowest common denominator, just because bad healers dont understand what positioning is or how to tank effectively doesnt mean you should be outright buffing tanks to allow them to cast constantly

[Risvertasashi]

You cant balance things around a mode that caters to the lowest common denominator, just because bad healers dont understand what positioning is or how to tank effectively doesnt mean you should be outright buffing tanks to allow them to cast constantly

Positioning really doesn't help that much in FL. Yes, healers should stay back as far as possible, but you'll still get sniped by ranged, and even enemy melee/tanks will do everything they can to flank or break through and get at you.

Anyways, an alternative to the cover thing was also there: Make enmity combo finishers and provoke lock the target of the victim.

And other solutions would be fine really. Just, as is, IMO healers in PvP are not fun to play at all. I'd rather play a non-healer role in a PvP party with no healers, and I would have more fun doing that, than play a healer. I guess, if no one else is having experiences like this, maybe SE can just leave it alone, I'll level my alts and be done with it.

Oddly, I wouldn't say the same of Wolves' Den. That one was OK, I think because it's a lot easier to outmaneuver the 1 or 2 people that might come after the healer and if the whole team goes after you, they're basically handing the match to your party. Wolves' Den is also pretty dead, however. Tanks, however, can't actually tank in any mode, because there's no enmity system in PVP (of course) and no way to make a team choose a particular target.

[CeveArthu]

its been dead since 3.0 sure, everyone has been busy getting to lvl 60

before that though you could get matches very regularly, albeit less so than frontlines, and there are tonnes of people playing organised matches on primal and even more so on aether

im not totally against giving tanks some sort of ability to help peel, perhaps giving the paladin and warrior tar pit. That being said this would have to be balanced for a competitive format like wolves den and the ranked modes coming in 3.2, not for frontlines (unless you made them frontlines only skills? thats not an impossible idea)

as for the positioning part, i just got out of an FL match 10 mins ago where i had 6 captures, went 3/0, got mobbed once and just walked out of them because the white mage has more CC than you can possibly need and people in FL dont understand what fetterward does, positioning in movement and fights is fairly simple provided you dont have tunnel vision, something alot of people suffer from

[Risvertasashi]

...as for the positioning part, i just got out of an FL match 10 mins ago where i had 6 captures...

If you're capping, you're the first person to the point, which means you're probably not in the thick of the action. Well... running around the outskirts can be done on any job. And, yes, if you just run into 1 horde of enemy alliance, the current toolkit is plenty to get away. But it has no staying power when you're supporting allies.

But if you're with your party/majority of alliance in the thick of a fight, things are very different. I'd like a solution that isn't "don't be with a party in the thick of a heated battle", personally... that's where the most healing is needed.

But ultimately it's SE that has the stats. If everything's fine by their metrics, ignore this thread and carry on.

[CeveArthu]

you can have 6 captures and also be in team fights for the more important points in the same way you can ignore teamfights and go for less important captures to get easy points, the map is pretty small and easy to switch between roaming and team fighting without much issue unless the S node spawns on the other side of the map

Fun fact, its actually not uncommon to be able to flip a node in the middle of the team fight, its quite common for the fight to move slightly off from the node, you just cc people near it and then flip it with reletive ease (compared to what it should be if the team properly defended it)

[Risvertasashi]

I can never sleep people in those circumstances--well, I can, but my team doesn't leave them alone. Fight pretty much needs to have moved off the point and stragglers need to be deaded. *shrug*

Well, anyway, more or less that's what I plan on doing once I have some non-healing alts at 60.

[Mutemutt]

I feel like the timers are fine for the most part. I think only equanimity is the only one that feels kinda long to me and that's mostly because blm (and to a much lesser extent, smn) have to share it.

As a healer, usually surecast, swiftcast, lustrate/essential dignity/tetragrammaton ( and lightspeed, so nice~~~) fit most of my "stop poking me, I need to heal!" needs without becoming extremely difficult to deal with; that and having another healer to cover me. And don't forget that your party members could use their purify on you... not that they will, but still.