A summary of healer issues

[Deceptus]

I think we're loooooooooooong overdue to hear a Dev-Workshop-like post from the person responsible for the current direction of healers. I don't want to hear a PR response, or their boss covering for them- I just want them to tell us what they were trying to accomplish, because I don't think it was "upset a lot of people." Nobody on 14's team intends to do that (except maybe whoever mixed up the names of the Ninja combo finishers.) Just let us have a discussion so that we can laser-focus our feedback on what you want to hear to accomplish your goals of happy healers, ok? Just treat us like adults, and like we matter to you, and we won't bite, I promise.

I simply think most healers want a CLEAR explanation of what the developers think healers should be doing with down time. Because clearly "Fun Comes First" isn't their mindset anymore.

If they want us to heal more, then fine. Design the game that way. Make things hit harder so we have to heal more. BUT BE CONSISTENT DANG IT.

You can't want healers to heal more but have outgoing damage be the same.

[ForteNightshade]

I simply think most healers want a CLEAR explanation of what the developers think healers should be doing with down time. Because clearly "Fun Comes First" isn't their mindset anymore.

If they want us to heal more, then fine. Design the game that way. Make things hit harder so we have to heal more. BUT BE CONSISTENT DANG IT.

You can't want healers to heal more but have outgoing damage be the same.

I think it's largely to do with them trying balance between two impossible extremes. They want players who still spam Cure I to be able to clear most content while also making it fun for your Savage tier raider. Those aspirations simply aren't realistic, and nothing they do will ever make them so. Unfortunately, with Shadowbringers, they seemed to focus on the former which has made even the average playerbase upset since, well, it's practically guaranteed you'll spend 70-90% of your time spamming Glare/Broil/Malefic if you have even a remote idea how healers work.

This is why if they're so insistent healing needs to be easy. They need to introduce things like debuffs that while not necessarily in casual content, make a big difference EX and up. That way more experienced healers having something to strive towards beyond Dia, Glare, Glare, Glare, Glare....

[Gravagar]

I simply think most healers want a CLEAR explanation of what the developers think healers should be doing with down time. Because clearly "Fun Comes First" isn't their mindset anymore.
...

I'm just not sure how gutting our downtime tools even achieved the goal of "heal more." It's like how, growing up, I'd have video games taken away as my punishment for getting poor grades. It didn't encourage me to study more at all, it just encouraged me to learn sneaky ways to evade the ban. The punishment did not achieve its desired effect- it just made me doing my day-to-day activities more anxiety-inducing and less enjoyable. Healers don't need to wind up with bad grades like me- they need positive reinforcement to encourage good downtime kit usage, not... not THIS.

Has the Development Team ever done this for any Role in the Game or any particular Class? It would be awesome to finally see what the real goal and vision is for Healing because a lot of what's discussed in this very forum is what they 'might' be trying to do and sometimes it seems like the design choices conflict with every possible scenario we come up with. It's frustrating when you really want to enjoy Healing but it keeps morphing into something less and less enjoyable every expansion.

Yes, it would be fairly unprecedented... But, we live in unprecedented times that have caused unprecedented main-patch delays. Since every hour of work spent tweaking jobs is only as efficient as (guessing 50 minutes spent in the office, it's all the more important to have a two-sided discussion. Likewise for dev-time considerations, I don't want to waste my energy giving feedback about how I think the current AST card system can be improved if the devs are only seeking feedback about other aspects of healers, no matter how much I think that system could indeed be improved. The thing is, I have no idea what goals of theirs are totally inflexible (the pessimist part of my brain feels like it's "all of them," whatever those goals even ARE), so I'd really love to hear detailed thoughts about what they are willing to budge on, especially to get more fresh ideas that aren't 'Let's Homogenization Time, Yayyyyyeee'.