A simple revamp to Cleric Stance that might fix raid balancing..

[Sebazy]

I don't need any Savage experience to know that the developers could not possibly be happy with the fact that Omega Savage was cleared the very same DAY it was released.

But savage experience would help you appreciate where the issues actually are.

1 FC cleared it on day one (Mine no less, yay!), with a good number of kills on day two. More typical high end/midcore teams have been taking around a week to a month to get their clears with many solid teams still progressing.

I genuinely don't think you understand the complexities and subtlety of raid design and the math behind it, nor do you appreciate the impact of what your suggesting.

As you acknowledge, world progression teams rely on healer DPS to allow them to pass DPS checks long before they are at the item level the content is designed for. By removing healer DPS as a route to go down you're effectively crippling and dumbing down the top level of play.

This would leave Yoshida's team with two options:

Release content that is mathematically or mechanically unkillable upon release. You only have to look back as far as Gordias to see how badly this went down, Twintania was another example, WoW has also done this on occasions and again, it's never been a popular move.

Lower the bar very significantly to the point where a flawless run with top tier DPS players can kill the content at the base item level for that tier. This would trivialise the content in the long run and likely introduce issues akin to what we saw with Creator once people begin to significantly overgear it.

No matter how you slice it, though, healer damage is too powerful to simply pretend it doesn't exist when balancing bosses. The day one clear of Omega Savage showed us that because there's no way in hell it should've been doable on day one due to gear gating alone.

Another factor you seem to be missing entirely is as such:

VIT melded accessories play almost as substantial a part in enabling these early clears as healer DPS does. These week 1 clears generally require very significant amounts of crafted gear with extra VIT in the accessories to survive certain mechanics.

If SE truly wanted to gate these encounters behind gear then they could simply remove VIT melding altogether and tune the encounter AOEs to a specific item level to achieve that. Thankfully they don't, because it would be incredibly unpopular and I suspect it would pretty much wipe out the top tier raid scene.

Personally I do think healer DPS is taken into account in their designs, but rather they use that data to strike a balance where a certain level of 'over optimisation' is required to clear the encounter at min ilvl, but the encounter isn't absolutely reliant on healer DPS to clear once you hit the ilvl and dps performance requirements. By increasing the amount of optimisation and healer/tank dps that's required, they can effectively increase the difficulty of the encounter for the progression teams whilst still ensuring the content is accessible to more mainstream players once they have the tome/24 man gear further down the line.

Is the suggestion terrible for the players? Sure, but it would absolutely ensure the devs can balance raids without having to worry about healer DPS throwing off their calculations.

On the contrary, they still have to factor in for vertical gear progression which is pretty much the same story.

I'm rather surprised that you think that destroying the endgame experience for pretty much every midcore and up healer out there is a worthwhile trade off vs the two encounters that were significantly 'broken' by the additional dps healers could bring. Pushing additional DPS to clear soft enrages or push through dangerous phases is nothing new and pretty much every raid tier going has a decent example of this in action, to name but a few:

Pushing past the Twister/DK phase in T5
Pushing phase 1 to minimise the number of meteors and jumps in T9
Pushing phase 1 to conserve healer mp and tank CDs in T13
NOT YOU GORDIAS
Killing Brute Justice before J Waves start getting nasty in A8S
Killing Alex Prime before the tethers+fountains mechanic in A12S

Zurvan and T11's issues were as much a fault with design and how the phases were laid out. T10 was just as heavily phased but didn't suffer for it because the mechanics within each phase were better planned and arranged IMHO. Omega (and the primals to boot) demonstrates that SE have learnt their lesson from this and adapted well. The raid scene is in a good place right now, the progression teams got a race that wasn't life destroying, whereas more mainstream teams are still progressing a month down the line. Hopefully the upcoming super savage encounter will answer the only remaining question with regards to the ultimate difficulty of these raids.

So again, no, I don't think your suggestion would achieve anything other than haemorrhaging the raid healing community from midcore up.

Holy moly that was longer than I expected, afk to sit down after that =(