Nobody Really Wants To Heal

[Lissyl]

People do love to play healer but truthfully nobody wants to be a full on healer as it's boring and quite frankly just not fun.

I'm late to this conversation apparently but I just want to say that this is not true. I love healing, only healing, all healing, and if I had my way we wouldn't even HAVE a dps button outside of levelling up. My best memories are nonstop healing in heroic Ulduar, heroic Naxx, heroic Icecrown, and before that in Black Temple, Sunwell, Serpentshrine, and so on. Where healing, and healing constantly, were all that mattered. I know and accept I can't do that here, but if I had my way it'd be like that. I know I'm a minority, but that's okay.

I'm a healer. That's what I like to do. Anything else is only out of necessity.

[Keddera_StormMoon]

I mean yea you have people that love the healing class as a general concept. A holy centric magician that can utilize the power of light to slay the enemies and rejuvenate the health of allies.

People do love to play healer but truthfully nobody wants to be a full on healer as it's boring and quite frankly just not fun. It's the same situation with Tanks if all you are is just a meat shield then you may as well be a puppet with 2 buttons.

This whole closed minded notion that "Healers only heal" and "Tanks stop doing damage leave it to DPS" is just absurd. Everybody is equal and important to the task at hand in some way shape or form and not everyone has to be one trick ponies when they dont have to.

With Shadowbringers coming up, I couldnt be more excited, but the White Mage changes are just especially heinous. The fact of the matter is you are removing OPTIONS in combat which is something you should never do regardless of the state of the game.

How do you go from a game like Final Fantasy XI where you had spells as far as the eye can see on top of the spells you obtain from your sub class usually black magic or scholar if you were a wiz kid, to now where the healer ONLY heals.

XI- Cure I II III IV V Protect Shell Blink Stoneskin Aquaveil all the Bar and En elemental buff spells Banish I II III IV V Holy Dia Diaga Diaga II Sneak Invisible Deoderize
And so many others

XIV- Protect.....Cure I, II, III, Holy....yea that's about it.

And now were getting protect removed in favor of Dia which was always traditionally a lvl 1 spell now it's a max lvl spell explain that one to me.

Bottom line- nobody likes it when they have options taken away from them. Why do you think people enjoyed classic Wow so much? Because classes back then didnt limit you in silly ways you could make yourself whatever you wanted to back them and have skills/spells up the wazoo.

Speak for yourself, I'm perfectly happy being a pure healer as is my wife.

[Adrestia]

Oh they will. Sorry but the fail green dps b.s gone on long enough. Time to take the toys away.

So you believe SE is okay with the healers who today, cannot keep up with DPSing and healing and so only or almost only heal, in 5.0 become the reason why parties fail dungeons for hours, due to their inability to meet healing demand?

Or you believe that these players are today playing at 30% of their potential and come 5.0 will be 3x better players?

[Amnmaat]

So you believe SE is okay with the healers who today, cannot keep up with DPSing and healing and so only or almost only heal, in 5.0 become the reason why parties fail dungeons for hours, due to their inability to meet healing demand?

Or you believe that these players are today playing at 30% of their potential and come 5.0 will be 3x better players?

They'll level up to that standard. There's ways for a company as professional and competent as Square-Enix to measure this.
Take The Burn's last boss for example, some healers will cry, die, and fail but eventually they'll get better at healing and complete the fight.

They have ways to measure when enemies are doing too much/too little.

[Adrestia]

They'll level up to that standard. There's ways for a company as professional and competent as Square-Enix to measure this.
Take The Burn's last boss for example, some healers will cry, die, and fail but eventually they'll get better at healing and complete the fight.

They have ways to measure when enemies are doing too much/too little.

That's an incredibly optimistic viewpoint you have, I'll give you that. In my opinion, the higher clear rates of The Burn as time went on had more to do with people overgearing the fight and ending it before too many cycles of mechanics. Many groups I've been in kill it before the first set of line AoEs. I still see healers fumbling there plenty, but we just don't take enough damage or for a long enough period of time for it to matter any more. We're back to the status quo of 70% of GCDs during the fight can be used on healer DPS.

[Amnmaat]

Well ilevel power won't change in Shadowbringers, the struggling healers will get an easier time once the ilevel adjust does its magic. The point is those healers that struggle will be fine, which is what most people use against the need to make content more healing intensive.

[Adrestia]

Well ilevel power won't change in Shadowbringers, the struggling healers will get an easier time once the ilevel adjust does its magic. The point is those healers that struggle will be fine, which is what most people use against the need to make content more healing intensive.

They make it through fine today because if they only press the right button about once every 10 seconds, that’s enough that no one is going to die very often. Make it so they have to perform at the level that a DPS is expected to perform, but with the penalty being the party dying instead of a fight taking longer, and many of these healers are going to get a rude awakening.

[RyuDragnier]

I'd rather prefer if healers were more support in general, and got more party support oriented buffs and debuffs. So say, AST could increase raw damage for the party, SCH could put debuffs on enemies that could strengthen the party (think chain strategem, but also versions for direct hit, and vuln down), and WHM could increase the party's substats, such as DET/SS/Crit/DH. Basically, give the healers more to do to support so we worry less about DPSing and more about increasing the rest of the party's DPS while not healing.

[cougarel]

I'd rather prefer if healers were more support in general, and got more party support oriented buffs and debuffs. So say, AST could increase raw damage for the party, SCH could put debuffs on enemies that could strengthen the party (think chain strategem, but also versions for direct hit, and vuln down), and WHM could increase the party's substats, such as DET/SS/Crit/DH. Basically, give the healers more to do to support so we worry less about DPSing and more about increasing the rest of the party's DPS while not healing.

Tbh this is how it was in Lineage 2, you had a pure healer and 2 co healers which acted like a mana generator and had more buffs/debuffs and some healing spells + an ultimate buff which could be used only on a party member for 4 mins or so.
That combo was really effective when raiding since the one healer could focus on the tank /party and the others would have to keep the main healer mana and also use the ultimate on a party member every time it was available.
So in the end there wasn't any dead time for healers at all.

[Sylve]

You know what … Lets remove the second healer from Full Parties.
BOOM, Instant increase to the healing required by the Healer. No more 'Meh, the other healer will fix it, ima pewpew some more.

On another note, It'd be pretty cool if they made boss abilities have random cooldowns upon use.
Basically instead of having X Ability have Y Cooldown, give that ability a range of cooldown times that it goes on with each use. Tankbuster might be a 10 second cooldown this use, but the next one could be as little as 4 seconds away. Would add some much needed 'surprise' damage that Healers would need to be wary of. Not limited to Tankbusters of course.
Imagine that painting boss being able to zip into whichever painting it felt like at any point during the fight as another example.