Adventurer in need: Originality

[Seraphor]

This gave me the thought that if they don't want us to straight DPS, the could give us support based DPS abilities like Stygian Spikes to cast on teammates, or even Stoneskin back for WHMs and an amended 10s (or so) Protect for SCH. Stuff like that would be cool, I'd think.

Or even some debuff oriented skills.

I agree healers should get more party support, but if Protect goes anywhere but WHM...

[Acidblood]

The problem with the whole "SE wants us to focus on healing more " is that, the game is not designed for us to heal more, and outside of an ARR level rework, I dont see how they could fix it. Encounters as well as healer kits are not designed to have healers heal most, or even half, of the time. For an example, look at scholar, your main heals are all locked behind a timer, and healing outside of that is expensive, and if done too much will screw you over. IMO SE is better off just embracing green dps, and just giving us things to do other than heal, because both the encounters and classes are better designed for it

Costs can always be adjusted, as can the level of unavoidable outgoing damage, and the penalties for mechanics (e.g. a non-removable Slow instead of Vulnerability / instant death*).

I do agree though that it would be less work to simply give healers a better 'down-time kit' than it would be to shift encounter design and rework classes to be more support orientated... then again, they have taken a LOT out over the years, so they could slowly add it (and more) back in.

* Note: I feel that all too often the 'job' of a healer is simply to cover other people’s mistakes, but if healing is to be a 'full time' job then other people’s mistakes shouldn't be adding to that workload; a Slow effect would be a noticeable alternative to death that players would want to avoid.

[Deceptus]

I agree healers should get more party support, but if Protect goes anywhere but WHM...

Protect (physical) and Shell (magical) should be Defensive CD role actions. Relatively short CD ones (1 min, 5-10s duration).

Give healers the defensive support they're sorely lacking.

[Lodi]

Well, I'm glad this thread didn't get shot down with "you just wanna play a dps" and "healers shouldn't heal", haha.

I can't blame them for sounding like that, but at the same time healers still feel very lackluster because you still have more than enough buttons to deal with damage and only up to 4 buttons to deal damage with, and the utter lack of reward once you know how the fight runs and you can keep your entire team healthy. Sure, you get to cast throw roc- wait, it's light missile now, more often, but that's not really a reward, that's just what you do when you don't need to heal already.

This is a major problem for me, our dps output almost reaches 100% by just pressing a single button. Right now, the only (slightly) rewarding healer to me is WHM, Misery feels better than most of what we have right now.

Ok, Ima start out with this, when did you start playing??!! The game has changed to be this way!! Many of us hate it too and it was done, for the most part in the name of "Balance". WHM, SCH, heck even AST used to be unique, colourful classes (jobs, whatever). Everyone bloody well askin' fer balance simplicity and this is where the devs brought us, and it's a common complaint for career healers. Healing in 2.X is not what healing is now, there was a calculated risk switching to Cleric stance and droppin some serious damage, the drop in healies was significant and although for SCH Eos did help bridge the gap it was still not done lightly unless you really knew yer tank. SCH and WHM teamed up nicely for 8 person stuffs since the potent group heals and regen on WHM complimented the strategic mitigation style of SCH. I really miss those days, even if there have been some nice qol improvements in the game overall. In the quest for balance and ease of use our favourite classes have lost their personality. To be clear I do believe there was need for balance, or at least to bring things closer in line. I do think it could have been done without such watering down. I do recognize that raid utility suffered a lot for some classes but there had to be a better way.

I started playing in 4.0, completely unaware of what healers had lost already. Once 5.0 came, I started looking more into the complexity this game used to have, and I didn't know it's possible to miss something I never tried myself. I wish I started playing four years earlier.

Every healer is practically able to solo heal everything nowadays, it's incredibly sad. When you look at the kits, it looks like the game is designed to never let us do any damage; we have ten times more healing buttons than damage buttons. But in practice, it's ridiculously far from that.
Shoutout to everybody who said "you won't need damage spells anymore, you will be healing 90% of the time" before the expansion's release!

This forced simplicity is driving me away from the game, I wonder if 6.0 will backpedal on these changes or just merge all our attack buttons into one big button so we have to think even less.

I don’t like this at all. I play whm because it is easy compared to something like blm or rdm. I don’t want complex stuff or rotations I have to memorize. I suck at memorizing rotations and because of it I can never play a dps optimally. I prefer my simple dia, glare and holy damage. I don’t need anything else. And there are already plenty of healing tools as well, particularly lilies; I like the new abilities with lilies and it makes healing easier for me in expert dungeons and other higher level stuff. I don’t understand why people want to make things so complicated to the point where it’s no longer playable.

Giving each healer one or two DoTs or CDs would make them a lot less boring for the more experienced players, without barring newer players from playing.
Healers who don't cast a single damage spells are plenty already, giving them more will not change a thing to them.

I like the ideas. Would be very difficult to balance though.

Healers are already unbalanced as heck, it wouldn't make things worse.
Besides, they managed to add one whole new tank and rework another, and make all tanks super duper balanced for some reason.

I think that things wouldn't get any worse if they tried to shake the healer box a bit.

The BIG issue with the addition of new skills, due to SHB homogenization EVERYTHING needs to be exactly like the other thing.

All party DPS buffs are to be~ 5%, doesn't matter if one click or 4 clicks to achieve it.

All party-wide mitigation has to be 10%. No more, no less.

Because of this 'The most strict Balance in all things' approach, getting exciting and bizzare skills has become substantially less likely. As SE seemed to have taken the most boring approach to balance and that is balance by making most stuff the same.

And healers are somehow not balanced, how can they mess balance between three classes with functionally identical spells...?
If "boringness for the sake of balance" is the way the game is heading, I'm out for good. And I don't believe I'm the only one who thinks about quitting.

This is just sad, how they blatantly ignore our feedback and stubbornly refuse to make the classes interesting.

[Punslinger]

Here are my half-baked thoughts on how to differentiate the healers while making them more fun and engaging:

WHM: Nuke all direct-healing oGCDs except for Bene. Add an oGCD that is Wildfire, but for healing - when it goes off, the raid is healed for some percentage of the amount healed on the original target. Add a short-cooldown oGCD that converts all remaining regen ticks on the target into an immediate direct heal for the same amount. Make MP management part of the class. Gets a "Euphoria" mechanic proposed elsewhere, where overhealing a target to 125% HP will give the target a damage buff and place a DoT on them. This makes all of WHM's healing output useful, and is an engaging way of buffing rDPS. A good WHM will be able to keep Euphoria rolling on the DPSers while healing through the resulting DoT and the fight damage.

SCH: Eos's DPS pet. Aetherflow is now built by dealing damage with DoTs and a proper DPS rotation, instead of being given by an oGCD. Meltdown is a DoT that boosts damage of the SCH's spells against the target. Drain will heal the closest party member to the target for a percentage of its damage (shamelessly lifted from Atonement in WoW). Adlo/Succor become Aetherflow heals and get stronger (but can no longer crit). Instead of healing, Fey Union now burns fairy gauge to give a damage boost to the target, like a dance partner or DRG tether.This makes SCH's buffing more engaging than just smashing Chain Strategem every two minutes. A good SCH will keep their DPS up so they can generate Aetherflow stacks to deal with fight damage, fill the fairy gauge, and Fey Union during burst phases.

AST: Go all-in on the time magery. Instead of shields, Noct-AST turns Aspected spells into delayed heals. Aspected Benefic/Helios under Noct puts a buff on the target that heals for big potency when it expires. Di-AST regens no longer stack with WHM regens, because allowing four regens on one target is stupid. Aspected Malefic is a DoT (Di) or a delayed damage (Noct). ty_taurus's brilliant card system replaces that...thing that AST has now. Time Dilation returns as a GCD that is the bread and butter of AST's gameplay now. Aspected spells' potency will snowball, increasing with each tick up to some limit, as long as the effect remains on the target without interruption. This limit will NOT be reached naturally during the short duration of an Aspected spell. Time Dilation extends all AST-supplied effects on the target for two or three more ticks. This keeps Di-AST regens and DoTs ticking away at their max output, and Noct-AST delayed spells gain extra potency with each tick of the buff when they eventually expire. A good AST will be able to keep damage effects rolling on the boss, big heals rolling on the tank or party, and juggle buffs on a couple of players.

[KanameYuuki]

AST: Go all-in on the time magery.

A lot of us assume Time Mage is next, more with the removal of ShadowFlare with its slow, I would be even more disappointing if that is not the case for the loss of TD and CO.

[Archwizard]

So, I'm of two minds on this topic.

On the one-hand, I agree that a lot of healer kits feel very same-y in terms of offerings. You've got your DoT and single-target attack, your AoE attack, two ranks of single-target heal, two ranks of AoE heal, and an assortment of CDs (one of which is another attack).

On the other hand... I also understand why the kits are same-y like that. From a damage-dealing perspective, a healer's kit shouldn't necessarily be too complex in that regard, largely because their core focus isn't on dealing damage and they should avoid being distracted by a rotation when they may need to drop everything at a moment's notice to spam heals on the tank, especially when any level of complexity in their damage rotation wouldn't necessarily be rewarded with particularly high output. From a healing perspective, every healer position has basic requirements and breakpoints they need to meet/fulfill, and by allowing them to have similar basic kits, it's easier to balance them against one another and balance encounters around the assumption that each healer has the necessary tools for each curveball; meanwhile putting a "rotation" on healing also limits their ability to respond to damage output without "breaking" the rotation.

A lot of us assume Time Mage is next, more with the removal of ShadowFlare with its slow, I would be even more disappointing if that is not the case for the loss of TD and CO.

Considering AST has Lightspeed, Gravity and Regen, still casts damage buffs on the party, and only recently lost the ability to extend its buff timers or grant specifically attack speed (the latter because literally only BLM wants it anyway), I would be severely disappointed if they went and made Time Mage, much more so as another healer competing with AST that took tools away from it, especially while there are still untapped alternative options that don't step on existing healers' toes/themes/kits.
Bear in mind that "Time Mage" is a misnomer, since the job has always been about time and space magic (shown through access to Gravity, Float, Comet/Meteor, etc), which remains the domain of the AST.

[Lodi]

So, I'm of two minds on this topic.

On the one-hand, I agree that a lot of healer kits feel very same-y in terms of offerings. You've got your DoT and single-target attack, your AoE attack, two ranks of single-target heal, two ranks of AoE heal, and an assortment of CDs (one of which is another attack).

On the other hand... I also understand why the kits are same-y like that. From a damage-dealing perspective, a healer's kit shouldn't necessarily be too complex in that regard, largely because their core focus isn't on dealing damage and they should avoid being distracted by a rotation when they may need to drop everything at a moment's notice to spam heals on the tank, especially when any level of complexity in their damage rotation wouldn't necessarily be rewarded with particularly high output. From a healing perspective, every healer position has basic requirements and breakpoints they need to meet/fulfill, and by allowing them to have similar basic kits, it's easier to balance them against one another and balance encounters around the assumption that each healer has the necessary tools for each curveball; meanwhile putting a "rotation" on healing also limits their ability to respond to damage output without "breaking" the rotation.

I'd agree with that, if we actually had a lot of healing to do. But right now, it's nothing more complex than "stop spamming Glare, use a CD or maybe even a GCD if things are really dire, resume spamming Glare". It's terribly easy.

When even E4S can be solo healed, I think that healing as a whole should be reconsidered. Unless a tank decides to aggro an entire dungeon, you'll pretty much always spend more time dpsing than healing, and it only gets worse as our gear increases in level because there's even less healing to do.

We need to shake things up a bit, by giving us either more interesting tools or more things to use them on.

[Eisenhower]

The following GCD actions are necessary for healers to function on a fundamental level in all content at (almost) all levels:
ST heal
AoE heal
ST damage

The fact that the majority of the above actions are the same is because there's no need for them to be different. The variance between them is the same as the difference between the first and second step combo actions among a lot of the DPS jobs. They're fundamental to the most basic function of the healer, and fundamental to the most basic solo PvE interactions. These action in themselves don't need any fancy effects, but are good candidates as stepping stones towards other job-specific mechanics.

Passive, converts 10% of all overheal into damage on the nearest enemy (damage converted from regen overheals is halved)

An overzealous DPS who does all they can to deal damage will be rewarded with big dps

An overzealous healer who does all they can to keep the party at 100% health will be rewarded with... nothing. Worse than nothing.

An overzealous DPS that do "all they can" at a bad time will be punished by lower overall DPS and efficiency. If you burn a cooldown or slam a potion right as a pack dies or right as the boss goes away, you lost a good 15-30 seconds of damage. If you drop a ST nuke on a mob with 1 HP, you're losing out on 99% of the potency in that nuke that could have gone into the next enemy. That's the punishment to promote good and smart play (- but let's be real and realize that a lot of us don't optimize these aspects). But in the end the "punishment" is lower efficiency, which outside of savage doesn't translate to an encounter loss.

General cases of overhealing should NOT be rewarded as you as a healer or you as a pair of healers are fucking it up. Having a cooldown that helps salvage overhealing is one thing. Rewarding what's in essence poor judgement and resource management is terrible. If you're overlapping heals with your partner and wasting 1300 mana then the solution is you talk with your partner and not overlap the heals.

I personally think that overhealing consequences are far too lenient now that aggro is a joke. Making it so that smashing through the upper bound of healing fuckups have no consequences or even rewards seem maddening.