A summary of healer issues

[fulminating]

...and that's why the 4 Healers Model would be a good idea. Well, ANOTHER reason why it would be a good idea.

It’s why it’s a bad idea. No one wants their favourite to be given the short straw of paint dryer simulator. No one wants to go from having room to grow to tripping over the skill ceiling.

But what about the terminally lazy you may ask? Well if only there was a convenient existing system that gradually introduced parts of the kit, provided a detailed description on what each new addition was and a regular opportunity to use it with new challenges appropriate for practice.

People being expected to know the correct rotation is exacerbated by the highly choreographed fight design present in the game. Yellow dead voidsent guy never casts anything but cursed echo first, wall hephiastos always casts natural alignment 1 from 35 to 40 seconds into combat, hippocampus always finishes the cast for water slide and becomes untargetable at 4m19 into the fight. When you can set your clock by the boss, all competitive improvement is rote learning.

Largely people don’t care if you’re not doing the correct rotation as long as you’re not standing around like a pudding or demonstrating a severe lack of reading comprehension; casual content barely demands consciousness. it simply does not make sense to sacrifice the possibility of nuance on whichever job to appeal to those who are unlikely to bother with content where it will matter.

[AmiableApkallu]

So then I've been thinking, why are GCD heals (that aren't lilies, and even that's relatively recent) designed to be a dps loss? I know if a party member's dead that's a worse drop and all, but it still feels like we're being punished for doing what the role is supposed to do.

Ye typical GCD heal always being a DPS loss is true only under a bad accounting scheme.

The question is always: What is better for the party's total DPS, me tossing out a GCD heal or me tossing out another stone? If the answer is "GCD heal", and I toss out a GCD heal, any accounting scheme that fails to credit me with a positive rDPS contribution for that heal is imperfect at best and broken at worst.

[Supersnow845]

Ye typical GCD heal always being a DPS loss is true only under a bad accounting scheme.

The question is always: What is better for the party's total DPS, me tossing out a GCD heal or me tossing out another stone? If the answer is "GCD heal", and I toss out a GCD heal, any accounting scheme that fails to credit me with a positive rDPS contribution for that heal is imperfect at best and broken at worst.

That line of thinking just offloads bad decision making to the healer because the DPS can then make the decision “if I intentional fail this mechanic and can still survive then I can get more uptime at the healers expense”

It’s why they changed mechanical failure in savage from a vuln stack to a damage down, because a vuln stack only punished the healers

[Azurarok]

Guilty of that for staying in my ley lines 2 minutes into the Byregot fight last night. I used manaward and addle though!

And like I said I do understand that keeping the party alive matters more for dps than you losing a glare. It's just that the trade-off doesn't feel great. It also makes the role as a whole largely a test of your reflexes and how much you can keep the party up with just oGCDs and lilies.

My impression is that the dps options were removed between SB and StB to discourage healers from attacking so they can focus on healing more, and it's kind of the only solution when attacking and healing is largely mutually exclusive. I doubt we'd ever really get out of the one-button dps setup as long as that design keeps up.

[IDontPetLalas]

Guilty of that for staying in my ley lines 2 minutes into the Byregot fight last night. I used manaward and addle though!

And like I said I do understand that keeping the party alive matters more for dps than you losing a glare. It's just that the trade-off doesn't feel great. It also makes the role as a whole largely a test of your reflexes and how much you can keep the party up with just oGCDs and lilies.

My impression is that the dps options were removed between SB and StB to discourage healers from attacking so they can focus on healing more, and it's kind of the only solution when attacking and healing is largely mutually exclusive. I doubt we'd ever really get out of the one-button dps setup as long as that design keeps up.

I'm not sure why you would see that attacking and healing is "largely mutually exclusive" with the skills that healers have, I would disagree on that. However I do agree that this is why SE removed DPS options i.e. in their minds they thought "hey isn't this want you wanted- you guys will heal more", with short-term and less than successful results.

[Post]

I remember reading the planned healer changes for ShB and being cautiously optimistic that they'd make good on their stated intention of making fights require more healing. Boy, did that turn out how I expected, and now I have less variety.

I think to this day the last focused burst healing in a short timeline needed on a random player mechanic was in like... Alexander Prime Savage, when he marks two random DPS with prey.

Come to think of it, that's kinda what prey originally heralded: this person will need shields or heals shortly.

Now we have giant tank icons, more to warn the tank to use a cooldown than to tell healers they need to be healed, because they're usually not followed with anything to finish the tank off if they barely survive (not that barely surviving is common anymore either).

I think to this day the hardest healing check in a normal version of a fight might be Cruise Chaser's Hawk Blaster he just aims at one random player. That player NEEDS heals to live. Normally, they just die and get rezzed, so it doesn't matter, but I hardly see any healers save people from it, even today.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think to this day the hardest healing check in a normal version of a fight might be Cruise Chaser's Hawk Blaster he just aims at one random player. That player NEEDS heals to live. Normally, they just die and get rezzed, so it doesn't matter, but I hardly see any healers save people from it, even today.

I miss the fact that A11S asked the party 'hey have shields up on Photon, or you burn to death instantly cos of the floor DOT', back when we had exactly zero ways to apply OGCD shields (Veil was the only one, and it needed a GCD heal to trigger), can't have that anymore cos we have so much OGCD shield tools now though

[Azurarok]

I'm not sure why you would see that attacking and healing is "largely mutually exclusive" with the skills that healers have

Sorry I meant GCD healing specifically. We want to squeeze in as many glares without letting the party die, and using cure and such is one less glare. We always prefer using oGCDs or lilies over them and I think that contributes a lot to how monotonous attacking feels right now.

[IDontPetLalas]

Sorry I meant GCD healing specifically. We want to squeeze in as many glares without letting the party die, and using cure and such is one less glare. We always prefer using oGCDs or lilies over them and I think that contributes a lot to how monotonous attacking feels right now.

Thanks for the clarification, I see your point, and agreed, and (for myself, part of this is due to the lack of interaction between healing and damage skills at present, and the lack of options for damage skills in some content.

[vetch]

That line of thinking just offloads bad decision making to the healer because the DPS can then make the decision “if I intentional fail this mechanic and can still survive then I can get more uptime at the healers expense”

It’s why they changed mechanical failure in savage from a vuln stack to a damage down, because a vuln stack only punished the healers

It also closes off any avenue for coordination if I should happen to have unused free heals and be willing to spend them so the DPS can soak for more uptime.

Instead the only solution left is 'do what the designers intended you to do at all times', which is terminally boring.