Thread: Healer identity in 5.0

Originally Posted by Mimilu

They would have to find a way to make hard-casting heals actually interesting to entice people to play healers.
I really hope they don't do this... =A=

What do you mean? Needing to hard cast cures is what actually feels enticing as a healer. It's what makes me feel like an actual healer. A recent Orbonne run I had left me little time to cast anything offensively. I still was, but the 90/10 DPS/healing ratio easily adjusted to about 40/60. I hardly casted Broil at all, and focused more on DoT upkeep to sustain damage to the last boss. It was so fun, and I felt I had purpose outside of a green DPS. I'm not even going to say that it was unfortunate that I had to rely on player derps for this change in ratio. I welcome it. We're not perfect, and mechanics that confuse players and unavoidable damage is how the CPU provides challenge. Such things need to be accounted for when designing healers.

I know a lot of players will feel like this kind of adjustment would feel like a nerf, but I am hard pressed to call this role a healing role when in the majority of content we spend 90% of the time DPSing. Which when you think about it, a good portion of that time is spent either spamming Stone/Broil/Malefic against single target, or Holy/Miasma II/Gravity against multiple targets. How is that enticing? And the answer is not to give us more DPS options. We are healers, and none of the three even have this identity, let alone their own. They're all green DPS.

With a reduction to the reliance on ogcd heals, time spent hard casting curative abilities will undoubtedly go up. The question then remains how do they diversify our healers and also leave room for a fourth in the future? Unfortunately, I don't have this answer. I'm not a game designer. It could come from utility but they really have to be careful when it comes to how healers benefit raids outside of healing. It's part of the problem we currently have.