Thread: Every problems with healers at 5.1

now that 5.1 is 1 day away,i thought to prepare a thread that will focus all our issues we find there.

to post every new bug/problem we find out on our healers and talk about it(or simply rant about it) cause new patch means new bugs to find .

Lightspeed still has no charge and a stupid duration.
No one needs 15s of instant spells, but many would enjoy 9s every 60s (preferably with a charge mechanic, up to 2 charges)
This way you could LS during the opener, (if you really need it you could use both charge) and for the rest of the encounter you have more freedom on where you use lightspeed, wether it is for movement, card weaving or mp management.
15s is just... too much...

150 second Presence of Mind is super annoying

Originally Posted by Corbeau

Issue with healers? Well, I suppose there is a continuing issue...

I'm beginning to believe that a good chunk of my personal complaints are tied to the need to support controllers as an on-par control scheme. Don't get me wrong, doing so has been an impressive achievement, but I can't help but think that the focus on achieving such a difficult feat has left it's mark on the game's input code - and, by necessity, ability design. The crippling of mouseover options - a standard in pretty much every other game ever at this point - is one example. It's terribly clunky to not allow fully functional mouseover casting... but if allowed, M+KB would completely smash controller in speed. So both control methods are stuck with a set of clunky tradeoffs instead. I strongly suspect that, as a natural extension of this technical reality, design-side focuses on minimizing the amount of healing (especially targeted healing) that the game asks of the player. After all, the more that you heal the more that you're forced to interact with the clunkiest part of the combat interface (rapid target switching).

As a controller player I'm gonna find myself disagreeing on this point. I have almost immediate quick access to 32 different abilities. If I were to bother getting used to it, I could add another 8 to that figure and make it 40. I can still swap cross-bar pages fairly easily, which is the clunkiest part of using a controller, but I can use 32 fluidly. Though many perhaps use 16 fluidly because they've not touched the options to customise the controller set up. But extended crossbars can be a godsend. From a healer perspective and in used to having a more complicated DPS set up than we do now, I'd be able to hold down 1 extra button on my controller and swap from "heal" mode into "DPS" mode and it worked well for me.

But SE in fairness, have made some smart ways of expanding functionality without assigning extra buttons, mudras for example are capable of producing more than 4 skills whilst only having 4 buttons. DNC was smart in replacing their DPS moves with steps when they start dancing. Designs that swap out abilities is an option for expandability. Targeting it still effective, it takes some getting used to, but they are ways of make that easier too, such at the aggro list you can cycle through and your party & alliance lists you can cycle through.

I think the disadvantage with a controller is that it has a steeper learning curve, which may be where some struggle, but their control design is very ergonomic and really intelligently done, so much so I prefer it to using a keyboard & mouse.

Originally Posted by Corbeau

Issue with healers? Well, I suppose there is a continuing issue...

I'm beginning to believe that a good chunk of my personal complaints are tied to the need to support controllers as an on-par control scheme. Don't get me wrong, doing so has been an impressive achievement, but I can't help but think that the focus on achieving such a difficult feat has left it's mark on the game's input code - and, by necessity, ability design. The crippling of mouseover options - a standard in pretty much every other game ever at this point - is one example. It's terribly clunky to not allow fully functional mouseover casting... but if allowed, M+KB would completely smash controller in speed. So both control methods are stuck with a set of clunky tradeoffs instead. I strongly suspect that, as a natural extension of this technical reality, design-side focuses on minimizing the amount of healing (especially targeted healing) that the game asks of the player. After all, the more that you heal the more that you're forced to interact with the clunkiest part of the combat interface (rapid target switching).

I don't know that there is a good solution. I know the solution that I'd prefer: give me a tickbox to cast friendly-target and ground-target spells by mouseover while still allowing them to queue, but that's because I straight up don't care about input method balance. It's probably not healthy for the overall game if MKB becomes a de-facto necessity for healing (and even small advantages can get blown up all out of proportion into necessities by internet communities).

Except controllers could do far more than just left-right cycling (tab-targeting and reverse tab-targeting). Even just the addition of directional scanning (point stick in target's direction while an ally-targeting action is held down in queue, then left-right or click the same joystick down to fine-target from there before releasing the key to complete the queue) could help tremendously. So would the ability to

• find a target at any time during a cast instead of having to find them beforehand (MP costs changed to MP drains over the cast time, allowing us to hold many spell at continuous minor cost while we find a target or, more often, when we excessively pre-cast for incoming damage),
• set up both an ally and enemy focus target,
• set up targeting schemata when we place an action on our hotbars [scan target > lock target > current target > focus target > target of target > target of target of target, to give an extreme example] as per, say, WoW's controller-based healing,
• stack actions as we please so that we can, say, cast Glare when targeting an enemy and Cure II when targeting an ally, with the same key (wouldn't work as well with post-targeting or target-scanning, but the buttons you save allows you more comfortable space to allocate to targeting, though the benefits would be relatively small for healers now, compared to in previous expansions).
• etc., etc...

They're not just holding back M&KB for the sake of controllers. They're holding back both for the sake of artificial difficulty and/or by pure neglect.

Just so long as people aren't complaining about changes because they don't like change. I'd encourage everyone to justify and explain their complaints.

So far, looks like AST is getting more buffs, though I seriously doubt these will suddenly make AST spring up in terms of use, or at the very least, I cannot see it genuinely competing with the other 2 healers in savage.

As for the rest of the issues, the same issues we've been having since 5.0 launched. SCH is still boring with nothing to do bust spam broil 90% of the time, WHM with glare, and AST with a butchered card system. (albeit better than launch)

Oh yeah, do find it funny how they addressed ghosting, instead of actually fixing the problem, Square basically just said "nah, just tell the fairy to do nothing so pet GCDs don't roll between abilities", cheers mate, f*** you too.