A summary of healer issues

[Hellebore_Ghrian]

I don't think SE will affort any kind of DPS rotation for healer, as if GCD heal are poorly used at high level of gameplay, oGCD heal are all used and optimized. Having a decent DPS rotation would need more skill dedicated to DPS what would eat some space for healing oGCD. And it would also make the rôle scarier for new players.

However, what would be nice i think is to have a better implication on group burst phase outside raid buff they get. WHM also already have presence of mind and afflatus misery, others could get something too.

That's so easy...

I've always liked seeing main tanks wanting to keep healers simple and boring.

Maybe they should experiment with this high level of design 1 nuke 1 dot on their own jobs.

The tank role would be less scary for new players like that and maybe they'd think about putting their mitigation on more often and stop blaming healers when they don't.

It's deliberately sarcastic but this kind of remark is very condescending and quite annoying, it's exactly the same as saying that healers weren't allowed to have fun for the sake of others.

[Nizzi]

It's deliberately sarcastic but this kind of remark is very condescending and quite annoying, it's exactly the same as saying that healers weren't allowed to have fun for the sake of others.

Not all of them obviously, but there's a large number of DPS mains and Tank mains on these forums that pretty much think healers exist to facilitate their fun and don't actually exist to have fun themselves. They always have the most concern-trolly rhetoric too, of "what if it makes it scarier to play? Think of the new players!" or "if healers have more than one button the game will be UNPLAYABLE because healers won't be able to handle it!" Where these supposed large swathes of scared, anxious, frightened players at the thought of hitting more than Glare come from, I'll never know. I certainly know I've had quite a few of the new players in my FC tell me that the healer role is boring and that's why they stopped playing, however. For as many "scared uwu baby healers" there are, there are just as many new players who pick up a healer and think "wow, this is awful" and drop it because it's too boring.

[Sparkthor]

It's deliberately sarcastic but this kind of remark is very condescending and quite annoying, it's exactly the same as saying that healers weren't allowed to have fun for the sake of others.

I love being judge on my char sheet when I say something. To mention I also play heal in Ex trials, and to be honest, it usually messier in last trial or normal raids than in Ex content (I didn't do savage as heal because I got many friends who play heal).

Also, as for tanks...
-> War filler is 2 combo + fell cleave
-> Drk filler is 1 combo + Bloodspiller + shadow edge
-> Gun filler is 1 combo + Burst strike + hypervelocity
PLD is a bit out here because is much more a full loop than a mix filler + burst option.

What I mean, it's I think is useless to go crazy with the filler phase for healer, one nuke and one DOT is fine. However, i would love to see more more offensive abilty with CD and charge like Phlegma or Afflatus Misery, and also more option to shine on group burst phase. This is to me way more engaging than to have proc to manage or 2 or 3 DOT to maintain.

[flowerfairy]

I love being judge on my char sheet when I say something. To mention I also play heal in Ex trials, and to be honest, it usually messier in last trial or normal raids than in Ex content (I didn't do savage as heal because I got many friends who play heal).

Also, as for tanks...
-> War filler is 2 combo + fell cleave
-> Drk filler is 1 combo + Bloodspiller + shadow edge
-> Gun filler is 1 combo + Burst strike + hypervelocity
PLD is a bit out here because is much more a full loop than a mix filler + burst option.

What I mean, it's I think is useless to go crazy with the filler phase for healer, one nuke and one DOT is fine. However, i would love to see more more offensive abilty with CD and charge like Phlegma or Afflatus Misery, and also more option to shine on group burst phase. This is to me way more engaging than to have proc to manage or 2 or 3 DOT to maintain.

Putting the tank rotations like that just solidifies the fact that you don't need anything complex to make downtime engaging. I don't see how updating the filler phase for healer is useless, I mean there was an entire healer shortage this tier because veterans got bored of Glarespam & getting blamed for mitigation issues and new healers didn't know how to keep up with P8S. Also, I don't see the appeal of Phlegma as an offensive ability, it's just a heal GCD that refunds the damage you could've done spamming Dosis. Same with Misery. Not that they aren't interesting abilities, but they aren't something you're able to constantly push in a rotation. And what do you mean with more options to shine in burst phase? 3 out of 4 healers already have 2 minute buffs. There's not much thought with pressing them.

This is my issue in general, what exactly do you like about 1 nuke 1 DoT gameplay? Do you like it because it's fun, or because it's easy? It purposefully uses no brain cells so you can spend more time healing, but... we aren't spending more time healing. That's the nature of the predictable incoming damage in ShB/EW fights. Maybe the only exception to the rule is Barb EX but even that gets invalidated as item level increases over time.

When I first joined in ShB when the free trial was updated, healing wasn't immediately easy for me. It was challenging learning to DPS and keep the tank's health up in dungeons. I was hardly doing damage and I still managed to let the tank die sometimes. But I *liked* that challenge. I felt myself improving and getting better at it up until the final patch of ShB. I feel like I hit the skill ceiling way too quickly. It was really soul crushing when I saw the EW job trailer and the only new thing SCH got was “run fast”.

Having a filler rotation on top of having to heal the party makes healers more challenging. The only opposition against this I can see is "I don't want healers to be hard", which is quite disappointing to me.

[Irenia]

Personally, whatever the filler is, it should be rewarding somehow.

If 123 is implemented and it doesn't interact with anything else in the kit, then I can see how it feels like mere busywork; it's how I feel about the current AST card system and the old one when you were skilled enough to fish for balance.

The filler should enable the killer. Merelt making the filler more complicated doesn't do much for me.

[Kabooa]

This is my issue in general, what exactly do you like about 1 nuke 1 DoT gameplay?.

I like that it doesn't waste 5-6 button slots on what is effectively the same decision.

[Deceptus]

Putting the tank rotations like that just solidifies the fact that you don't need anything complex to make downtime engaging. I don't see how updating the filler phase for healer is useless, I mean there was an entire healer shortage this tier because veterans got bored of Glarespam & getting blamed for mitigation issues and new healers didn't know how to keep up with P8S. Also, I don't see the appeal of Phlegma as an offensive ability, it's just a heal GCD that refunds the damage you could've done spamming Dosis. Same with Misery. Not that they aren't interesting abilities, but they aren't something you're able to constantly push in a rotation. And what do you mean with more options to shine in burst phase? 3 out of 4 healers already have 2 minute buffs. There's not much thought with pressing them.

Could you imagine a world where you'd hit a button on a healer (like Inner Release / Delirium) that would let you fire off 3 free Pneuma / Misery casts?

Or a button that would give you a free one on demand like Infuriate / Bloodfest?

Stuff like that would be easy to add.

[flowerfairy]

I don't think SE will affort any kind of DPS rotation for healer, as if GCD heal are poorly used at high level of gameplay, oGCD heal are all used and optimized. Having a decent DPS rotation would need more skill dedicated to DPS what would eat some space for healing oGCD. And it would also make the rôle scarier for new players.

oGCD heals are used more than GCD heals because they're plain stronger. They don't interrupt your damage, they come off cooldown really fast, and there's a boatload of them on the kit. It's part of the reason why expected damage contribution for healers is high. I personally think that the choice of using your GCD for healing or for damage is a much more interesting gameplay loop than "press this cooldown for the raidwide, ok now press this cooldown for the raidwide, ok now press this cooldown..." and so on.

I also think it's a misconception that a better DPS rotation will scare away new players interested in healing. I remember in another thread someone said something like, "The only thing you need to do to make healers accessible is to make the *healing* part of their kit easy and straightforward." WHM's GCD heals are as straightforward as it gets: Cure II is the single target heal, Regen is the single target HoT, Medica I is the AoE heal, Medica II is the AoE HoT. You press the button, you get the heal. Simple as pie. Learning which heal to use in which situation is the basic skill floor for healers. The skill ceiling then becomes learning how to heal efficiently so that you spend most of your time doing damage. As long as the healing part is accessible, new players won't have any trouble learning to play healers.

Healers don't need a complex 10 button rotation to be interesting, I mean they've literally done it before in past expansions. It's so strange seeing SE struggle to solve the healer problem when they had the solution already.

[IllyaPrisma]

The skill ceiling then becomes learning how to heal efficiently so that you spend most of your time doing damage. As long as the healing part is accessible, new players won't have any trouble learning to play healers.

Healers don't need a complex 10 button rotation to be interesting, I mean they've literally done it before in past expansions. It's so strange seeing SE struggle to solve the healer problem when they had the solution already.

Giving Healers additional damage options will create an expectation to use those damage options. I personally don't think that's a bad thing, since the average caliber of Healer skill and skill expression has gotten worse (and more dull) with each expansion... but expectation of Healer DPS is something SE has shown they specifically want to avoid. Adding 1 or 2 DPS options would be perfectly fine for the current iteration of healers. It was the previous iteration of healers that created the obvious "good" or "novice/bad" labeling. Using Cleric Stance effectively, Scholars keeping Shadowflare uptime, White Mages using Assize for DPS (back when it was either/or, not both).

[ty_taurus]

Giving Healers additional damage options will create an expectation to use those damage options. I personally don't think that's a bad thing, since the average caliber of Healer skill and skill expression has gotten worse (and more dull) with each expansion... but expectation of Healer DPS is something SE has shown they specifically want to avoid. Adding 1 or 2 DPS options would be perfectly fine for the current iteration of healers. It was the previous iteration of healers that created the obvious "good" or "novice/bad" labeling. Using Cleric Stance effectively, Scholars keeping Shadowflare uptime, White Mages using Assize for DPS (back when it was either/or, not both).

Regardless of what they do or do not want to do, their current path is a terrible one that will eventually hit a breaking point, and they will need to address that. EW is showing cracks to a lot of players, and healers being badly designed is one of those cracks that is becoming more apparent to those outside of the circle. The healthiest thing they can do is realize how bad this sterilization tactic of healer gameplay is and change their mind. I think if nothing is really done to shake up the current status quo that EW has established come 7.0, there's going to be a lot of discourse. Healer design is not the only thing here, but job design as a whole is being brought into question.