Thread: Happy Healer in 5.0 thread

Originally Posted by Ryoutoshi

Why does the innovation have to be separate from healing? Why do you people always assume we over heal just because we say we like our role?

Is it wrong to be excited about more healing skills when what I want are more skills to heal with to add innovation and variety to the act and do so more often?

Do you know for a fact that the new build won't do that? It's pretty obvious the Dps with be more boring. 3 vs 7 is pretty blatant. But do you know how the healing will be?

Do you know the extra skills will be just bloat or if they'll help form a new identity for SCH that isn't "That one healer that thinks it's a dps"?

I don't. I know it has more skills though. The number went up. So I have more reason to be hopeful healing will be better than you do for being upset.

People need to face a very simple fact. If the healing is good, healers will stick around. If it sucks, we'll leave it. If the Dps sucks, Dps will leave. But they aren't necessarily the healers.

I'm a healer. I'm waiting for the healing. I'll complain if the healing is bad. But unlike dps, it's not something I can judge just on tooltips and the amount of buttons. All I see is Dps went down and healing went up in terms of numbers of skills. I'm ok with that. I'm encouraged by that.

I was never in it for the attacks. I like attacks. But if that what I was here for I'd play dps. The attacks are things I do when sadly I'm done healing. I don't want to be done. I don't know how best do do it. But when I join a party, I want to be healing. Or I want to be buffing. Or I want to be supporting in someway that is healer centric not dps centric. And anyone that looks at the role of healer, not just SCH, like a dps with enough utility to let it skip ahead in queue, I don't see as a healer.

The reason we say you guys must love to overheal is because... well, what else are you going to do? It's either that or sit around doing nothing when folks are topped off. Now, you may argue "But what if healing is needed enough that folks aren't ever topped off?" And unfortunately, that's only really the case if both you and the tank are at the bare minimum for stats for the content. The moment either of you gears up better you start to create that dreaded downtime.

The DPS healers aren't "DPS who just want a fast queue", we're actual healers. We're healers that like to push our healing to the absolute limit as a matter of fact. For me, I get a lot of thrill from figuring out how to utilize my toolkit to keep people alive with the least amount of MP and GCDs spent on healing. This means making use of my oGCDs and buffs and optimizing my gear. Our DPS is the trophy we get for healing well.

Now, that all said, we CAN actually tell how the healing will be from looking at the tooltips. We can look at an MP value and see how spammable it is, we can look at a recast timer (Or the accumulation of a resource like lilies or aetherflow) to see whether we can reliably use an ability often or if it's saved for an emergency or plan, we can use potency to tell if it's for saving the day or bandaging a scrape... all of this information allows us to figure out in what situation we're likely to use an ability. It's not like some encounter is going to blow my mind with an earth shattering revelation that being able to cast a free spell every 1.5 minutes will fundamentally change the way I think of SCH forever. Oh, and it crits as well for a nice shield which, wait for it, probably won't really help outside of giving you more downtime (Since if a shield that big is required to survive the other two tanks are literally unable to do that content) to sit around for... or I guess DPS if you're up for it but who does that anyway?

By and large, it doesn't look like HOW we heal will differ greatly, or at least not in a way that plays appreciably differently. I'll occasionally press a different version of Cure II that's free and instant, whoop-de-doo. They don't synergize off of each other or offer anything besides making the numbers go back up (I'm counting shields and damage mitigation here as they're just heals you cast before the damage instead of after).

They're not changing healing in a way that makes it more interesting, they're just giving us answers to a problem we didn't have while making the engaging parts of healer (The utility and DPS) less engaging. If they want to make the healing itself interesting, they'd need to drastically rethink how healing is done period, like maybe a healer that has lower potency heals in general but can do them in combos like a melee combo with giving indvidual or party buffs on the combo finishers that offer mitigation or damage increases depending on which finisher is used. Maybe not exactly that, I'm not the big name game developer, but something more than just "Direct heal, regen, or shield." Alternatively, they need to give us engaging things to do when people don't need to be topped off, and that means either DPS or utility, both of which took a hit with the expansion.

Edit: Since this is the "Happy Healer" thread, I suppose I'll mention a few things I'm happy for. I actually like the new lilies, as keeping folks up during mechanics that required a lot of movement like Black Hole has consistently been my biggest pain. And I even get a minor rebate on the GCDs spent healing with them too! ...unfortunately that's about it for my positives.