Live Letter Response to Current Healer Accuracy Issues

[Supersun]

Are there accuracy issues for healers dpsing in EX roulette or Alex normal in patch 3.4?

You can no longer miss in Ex dungeons from Antitower and Ampador Hard and onward.

You can still miss in Alex normal, but even with no accuracy you'll still hit like 95% of the time.

[Rennies]

None in either from my experience.

[Dzian]

My only concern is in the roles of support heals and main heals. There is really nothing to do as support heals other than DPS even during Raids.
At least the secondary stats are garbage so outside of possibly Pie, you may as well meld accuracy at a loss of maybe 3% healing.

It'd be nice if they upped the damage and mitigation a bit.

I kinda think if they don't want healers doing loads of dps then they need to create environments where healing is actually required. The main reason healers do so much dps is because there's so little healing to do

Tanks can often sit in dps stance and still need no healing. Tank stance isn't really used to reduce damage cos there's nothing reduce. Only thing a lot of people use tank stances for is the enmity boost.

If they shifted the focus away from dps dps dps and even more dps it could do a lot to adjust the way healers and tanks are expected to do so much.

[Zojha]

I kinda think if they don't want healers doing loads of dps then they need to create environments where healing is actually required.

Simply requiring healing doesn't do IMO. My meager i228 AST can currently heal for 6,5k per GCD, non crit and without boosts for well over a minute non-stop, further tools not included. On equally equipped DPS, that's a third of a health bar. On tanks, a 5th. You don't even have to start healing before someone reaches like 10%, incoming tankbusters aside, because it takes so little time to get someone back up. That means that if you simply increase the damage to the point healers have to heal regularly, the HP would be flying around like a ping-pong ball or a black mages mana, which would make the whole thing immensely stressful to deal with. If you ever healed in the Feast, you can catch a glimpse of what that would look like.

I don't think that's a good way to go about it.

[Dzian]

Simply requiring healing doesn't do IMO. My meager i228 AST can currently heal for 6,5k per GCD, non crit and without boosts for well over a minute non-stop, further tools not included. On equally equipped DPS, that's a third of a health bar. On tanks, a 5th. You don't even have to start healing before someone reaches like 10%, incoming tankbusters aside, because it takes so little time to get someone back up. That means that if you simply increase the damage to the point healers have to heal regularly, the HP would be flying around like a ping-pong ball or a black mages mana, which would make the whole thing immensely stressful to deal with. If you ever healed in the Feast, you can catch a glimpse of what that would look like.

I don't think that's a good way to go about it.

That's kind of my point. the healer situation is just one small part of a much bigger problem. and the problem is partly how heavily biased towards dps virtually all content is. healing and mitigation are trivial at best. as evidenced by the overall lack of healing tanks needs even in dps stance, a lot of tanks use tank stance for nothing more than an enmity boost because the survival aspect is laughable

some people are saying just throw acc on healer gears but I think the real problem goes much deeper than that because it ties into content design and tanks and many other aspects and maybe that's why the devs are still discussing it.

if they don't want healers to be forced into dps then they somehow need to rework healing so it takes more than a fairy / regen to keep a tank alive even in there dps stances, and to do that they need to rework tanks and also rework content. it's a much bigger problem than just throwing some accuracy on healer gear I think.

Considering that they have made the exact opposite decisions when designing new expert dungeons by placing more gates around the map so you can't pull half the dungeon at once I'm pretty sure the current system where healers do loads of DPS is what they intend.

those gates aren't there to make the healers dps though. they've been there for a long time because in the earlier dungeons people would quite literally pull everything all the way to the first boss, seal off the arena and reset hate on everything they've pulled. kill the first boss and then repeat for the second and third bosses. that's why they started adding gates and stuff, not to make healers dps

[Supersun]

those gates aren't there to make the healers dps though. they've been there for a long time because in the earlier dungeons people would quite literally pull everything all the way to the first boss, seal off the arena and reset hate on everything they've pulled. kill the first boss and then repeat for the second and third bosses. that's why they started adding gates and stuff, not to make healers dps

Yeah, but from Antitower and Ampador Hard and onward they've been adding MORE gates, and using the gates to control pull sizes.

Like there are gates in Wanderer's Palace Hard, but there's still a pull or 2 that definitely require the healer to toss a cure or 2.

[ccrocker58]

...if you simply increase the damage to the point healers have to heal regularly, the HP would be flying around like a ping-pong ball or a black mages mana, which would make the whole thing immensely stressful to deal with. If you ever healed in the Feast, you can catch a glimpse of what that would look like.

I don't think that's a good way to go about it.

Healers actually being forced to heal constantly? Health bars constantly fluctuating? I...fail to see how this is a bad idea...like this sounds kinda like what most healers are expecting when they pick up the role. Or maybe that was just me?

[Kabzy]

Healers actually being forced to heal constantly? Health bars constantly fluctuating? I...fail to see how this is a bad idea...like this sounds kinda like what most healers are expecting when they pick up the role. Or maybe that was just me?

More damage output would be nice. Enough to not allow one healer to DPS 100% of the time.

However, the majority of healers atm can't even figure out how to stance dance. If they were to tune up damage to that point, suddenly people will not complain about healer DPS, but instead about people dying all the time. This would make the role a lot more pressurised, and in turn I could only speculate a lot of people would drop playing healers. Also, some healers do like to contribute DPS, so personally I would not want any damage output to get to that extreme.

[Supersun]

I kinda think if they don't want healers doing loads of dps then they need to create environments where healing is actually required.

Considering that they have made the exact opposite decisions when designing new expert dungeons by placing more gates around the map so you can't pull half the dungeon at once I'm pretty sure the current system where healers do loads of DPS is what they intend.

[HPDelron]

Considering that they have made the exact opposite decisions when designing new expert dungeons by placing more gates around the map so you can't pull half the dungeon at once I'm pretty sure the current system where healers do loads of DPS is what they intend.

If they intended that they'd be putting accuracy on healing gear, focusing on DPS as a core role of healers in all these new newbie training exercises they do (rather than mentioning as "it's nice if you can" aside), they might even be dropping the healer pretense entirely and just change the role name to "Support" or something. In addition the designers have been vocal on the state of things. While I wouldn't say their tone is alarmed or surprised, I think the healers-as-DPS-that-also-sometimes-heal thing is more of a side-effect of other decisions than a core design goal itself.