A summary of healer issues

[Deceptus]

Now if only SE would respond to all the healer complaints. I'd even take a "we're looking into it" at this point.

We've had threads hit 100 pages before and not a word. SE doesn't come to the NA boards very often, if hardly ever.

[Billythepancake]

We've had threads hit 100 pages before and not a word. SE doesn't come to the NA boards very often, if hardly ever.

Yeah, I'm aware. A damn shame, I figured the NA side of things was big enough to warrant it.

[Colt47]

My issue with this expansions version of healing at least on WHM is the flow of it. I've been on a White Mage since ARR days and have been steadily noting the same kind of optimization changes that WoW made with classes going from classic into the contemporary era.

First, WHM already had GCD heals that they could use. When they introduced the blood Lily I thought it was a great idea to help expand what healers could do (keep healing up and do some extra burst damage once in a while), but the issue is that healing blossoms are effectively a store of instant case GCD heals. On the bar, it feels like they should be some feature of the regular cure spells rather than be their own function, since they add additional buttons to the layout for no good reason and WHM already has a bunch of OGCDs to keep track of to keep it interesting.

To put it bluntly, as someone who casually heals I'm fumbling with controls half the time and the only time I really use healing lilies is to supplement my aoe heals, which obviously isn't the intent and probably sounds blasphemous to other players who main healer jobs. There's zero content before savage that demands a healer use the single target lily heals and the healer can easily just cast a cure II to do the same thing by predicting when the attack lands.

Also, I find having the ability to cast a cure II and land it via prediction to be what real skill is about with whm. We already had an ability that lets us instant cast it under dangerous situations, and that is more than enough to work with 90% of the time. In fact, I can't figure out why the healing lilies aren't giving us additional swiftcast uses since that is effectively the exact same thing as the other abilities!

I have no input on the other healers since I haven't really played Scholar or Astro yet.

[tikiwiki]

Yoshida: We believe trying to heal as little as possible and DPSing instead isn’t what a Healers role should be, so we adjusted all 3 Healers to be more balanced while keeping their original characteristics alive.

this was from a jp interview pre-shb that got translated and i think most people will agree here that they didn't achieve this at all so now the question is do they keep trying to chase this or embrace what the game is like they did for tanks sadly we wont know until 6.0 is about to come out with the lack of communication healers get so hopefully all these threads we've had complaining get listened to but i doubt it.
good post op i agree with most of it i hope we see any positive change in 6.0.

[elioaiko]

It's truly applauding that SE is silent on healer issues. Same goes for tanks, the only time this expansion they even acknowledged healer issues was whenever AST came out in that horrible state and the whole energy drain situation with SCH. Other than saying thy the cards were staying, nothing. But they are very quick to discuss DPS jobs. It's like they think healers and tanks don't exist. I just wish that they would be more transparent and actually try to look into things without brushing it off because they have supposedly overpowered SMN to worry about instead of SCH's fairy ghosting abilities.

With their track record tbh, they will likely continue to chase that full time healer dream until there's literally no more healers in queues.

I'm of the opinion that while they should balance out the healers they have now, not adding a healer will probably further divide the playerbase. It's sad when other MMOs and games with healer roles get treated better and actually get new jobs/classes. Having only 3 healers in 6.0 would be quite tragic especially if the overhaul again doesn't stick the landing (which I'm not super hopeful for).

[KDSilver]

this was from a jp interview pre-shb that got translated and i think most people will agree here that they didn't achieve this at all

Not only they failed achieving this, but it's "worse" than before.
A quick look at data and the current healers toolkit too see that this insane amount of powerful oGCD heal made the nuke button explode.

That's the consequence of giving more healing option but keeping the encounter design the same.

[Allegor]

If the devs want more focus on healing and less dpsing, ogcd should've never been heals - save for emergency ones like Benediction - they should've stayed as support/offensive skills, that way we'd at least 'look' like pure healers because we'd be bound to use gcd heals. They corners themselves because their vision of healers literally contradicts how they're played and designed to be played.

At this point they can either overhaul all healers and destroy most ogcd heals, or accept the fact that the game has no room for a pure healer mindset and that just like tanks are blue dps with extra aggro, healers are green dps with extra support skills.

[AnotherPerson]

If the devs want more focus on healing and less dpsing, ogcd should've never been heals - save for emergency ones like Benediction - they should've stayed as support/offensive skills, that way we'd at least 'look' like pure healers because we'd be bound to use gcd heals. They corners themselves because their vision of healers literally contradicts how they're played and designed to be played.

At this point they can either overhaul all healers and destroy most ogcd heals, or accept the fact that the game has no room for a pure healer mindset and that just like tanks are blue dps with extra aggro, healers are green dps with extra support skills.

They can't destroy oGCD heals by 6.0 because of the way they made fight design and how certain mechanics require heavy healing in addition to high mana consumption from GCD healing - unless they also change the way encounter design for previous content works.

From what I understand, pure healing mindset should have not been a thing, seeing how HoN encourages DPSing when healing isn't necessary.

[tikiwiki]

Not only they failed achieving this, but it's "worse" than before.
A quick look at data and the current healers toolkit too see that this insane amount of powerful oGCD heal made the nuke button explode.

That's the consequence of giving more healing option but keeping the encounter design the same.

Cant really call it worse when you could do all fights last expac with no gcd heals more like the same with less dos buttons

[Recon1o6]

and with that, 100 replies on this thread

thing is, even if they removed the ogcd healing, damage is still infrequent enough gcd healing would be enough to keep everyone alive in all content in pretty much all casual scenarios (ie not extreme or above) with a pair of healers that are at basic expected competency and still have them doing lots of downtime. The only 1 I can think of that might be a challenge is TGcid's cleansing strike without a WHM but a single mechanic isn't much

Basic competence for a whm for example:
Don't stand in the bad where possible, use Cure 3/2 and Medica where appropriate, remember to pop lucid and damage away during the 20-25 seconds the boss does nothing of import

Even in some extremes it would likely be possible for skilled healers to do it purely by GCD and still throw out lots of damage
Incoming damage is simply not frequent enough