A summary of healer issues

[ForsakenRoe]

Spirit Dart which is really strong.

its not. i've been testing it because i thought my eyes were getting bad. "a 2040p per tick dot? that seems ludicrous, there's no way" i thought, and i'm pretty sure i was right. it's PVP scaling potency, that is, when it says 2040p, it means '2040 damage per tick', this means it does not scale at all with gear either, allowing the devs to set a baseline amount of damage the non-dps classes can do by keeping that dot up.

with my gear, my E.Dosis does about 2300 per tick for comparison. it's just 'your dot as a healer, but you can hit all the mobs at once with it!' better than nothing, sure, but no gamechanger

[Videra]

its not. i've been testing it because i thought my eyes were getting bad. "a 2040p per tick dot? that seems ludicrous, there's no way" i thought, and i'm pretty sure i was right. it's PVP scaling potency, that is, when it says 2040p, it means '2040 damage per tick', this means it does not scale at all with gear either, allowing the devs to set a baseline amount of damage the non-dps classes can do by keeping that dot up.

with my gear, my E.Dosis does about 2300 per tick for comparison. it's just 'your dot as a healer, but you can hit all the mobs at once with it!' better than nothing, sure, but no gamechanger

2040p on an OGCD PBAOE Dot is pretty nice, though.

[Deceptus]

2040p on an OGCD PBAEO Dot is pretty nice, though.

Seriously, it's essentially Bane.

[Liam_Harper]

I don't know, it felt very slow and boring doing Variant solo as a healer and I spend every GCD on dps. I imagine the DoT is meant to compensate for my lack of damage as a support but it wasn't adding much. It also won't scale with gear at all if it's flat damage.

[Sebazy]

It's targetable as well no?

It's a pretty healthy chunk of damage for trash.

[aderichi]

Tbh I feel like the current content from Barbra on is going in the right direction. More healing, more reasons to use my healing kit. I hope they keep pushing healing as a healers focus. Add smaller follow up damage and bleeds to damage that keep us busy but don't instantly kill us.

[ty_taurus]

Tbh I feel like the current content from Barbra on is going in the right direction. More healing, more reasons to use my healing kit. I hope they keep pushing healing as a healers focus. Add smaller follow up damage and bleeds to damage that keep us busy but don't instantly kill us.

Barb EX should be the gold standard for EX damage, for sure. That and P5-P8 will hopefully become the standard for their respective difficulties of damage. I'd like to see particularly max level dungeons also get a bit of a damage frequency increase since they're often a joke. The 2nd and 3rd bosses for Dead Ends feel pretty good, but goodness knows I never want to see another Smileton again. Also can we stop having dungeon bosses that are just waves and waves of nondescript trash mobs? Multiple bosses is fine if they are interesting and unique like the Magus Sisters, but a ton of floating heads that throw out 1 baby mechanic and then die is not the ticket.

If those levels of content can stay consistent, and we can address each healer's skillset to feel more engaging, then healing can start feeling a lot more healthy.

[Rilifane]

Eh, no. P6s can go to hell. The damage is laughable and has far too many gigantic snoozefest gaps of nothing happening.
But the rest is fine, especially Barbie for EX damage. And p5s was actually really nice for the first floor, not just compared to the pushover that was Eric but in general. Some nice back to back damage too. I like the Spark on p7s, the only long gap is between Purgation and Harvests in savage. It could've done with some damage inbetween instead of just making everyone run around but overall it's a fairly nice fight on healer.
Normals are fine as well... except p6n, that thing can go to hell on all difficulties.

[Fendred]

Yoshida mentioned in an interview that they get conflicting requests going both ways. Some players are adamant that they want healers to focus on healing and others want healers to have full on DPS rotations. In a separate interview, Yoshida mentioned that designing healers presented a particular challenge/barrier in that they couldn't really replace older healer abilities. They always had to add some new tool. I believe this is because healer toolkits are introduced to counter particular mechanics from different expansions and raid tiers. As a result, they can't just replace them without having to retest whatever they add against the mechanic the old ability was built to address. Additionally, this means its hard to make room on the UI for DPS abilities because they'd be replacing cooldowns meant to address something.

So, according to Yoshida,
1. The healer community is totally divided on the direction of healing jobs.
2. The healer toolkit is a backlog of abilities designed to address different boss mechanics introduced during each expansion.

Given what Yoshida said, I'd posit that if healers were rebuilt with DPS rotations we'd be in a scenario where healers are no longer built for the game they exist in (other than the current expansion). All the older raid content would have mechanics that the healers no longer have cooldowns to deal with because those were sacrificed to make room for DPS. They'd have to test four entirely new jobs against all the existing content just to do that. That's not to say we can't have quality of life improvements. Having the ability to designate two targets for card mechanics so we don't have to target swap on astrologian would be great. A one, two, three rotation could also work if they gave us the ability to cast while moving kind of like in PvP. Or just have the rotation built into one button. At least it would be visually different.

[ty_taurus]

Yoshida mentioned in an interview that they get conflicting requests going both ways. Some players are adamant that they want healers to focus on healing and others want healers to have full on DPS rotations. In a separate interview, Yoshida mentioned that designing healers presented a particular challenge/barrier in that they couldn't really replace older healer abilities. They always had to add some new tool. I believe this is because healer toolkits are introduced to counter particular mechanics from different expansions and raid tiers. As a result, they can't just replace them without having to retest whatever they add against the mechanic the old ability was built to address. Additionally, this means its hard to make room on the UI for DPS abilities because they'd be replacing cooldowns meant to address something.

So, according to Yoshida,
1. The healer community is totally divided on the direction of healing jobs.
2. The healer toolkit is a backlog of abilities designed to address different boss mechanics introduced during each expansion.

Given what Yoshida said, I'd posit that if healers were rebuilt with DPS rotations we'd be in a scenario where healers are no longer built for the game they exist in (other than the current expansion). All the older raid content would have mechanics that the healers no longer have cooldowns to deal with because those were sacrificed to make room for DPS. They'd have to test four entirely new jobs against all the existing content just to do that.

You keep saying that DPS would break healing as we know it but it still doesn't hold up. For starters, SCH existed in both ARR and HW having half a DPS's toolkit and didn't have any problems in its ability to heal through the content. It was and has always been the top performing healer both because of its damage output and its incredibly effective healing tools. And it still had a fairly decent DPS library in SB. How can content that was designed when healer DPS tools existed break for restoring the concept of healer DPS tools? It makes no sense.

Even if we move into ShB and EW content were healers are broken and unfun, why do you assume that adding in DPS tools can only result in the removal of core healing tools that content was designed around having available? You don't think there's bloat in other areas that can't be trimmed or consolidated? I mean I went through and theorycrafted my own wishlist of healer reworks with all updated GCD rotations to give healers a fun and consistent form of gameplay throughout all forms of content without actually removing any major healing buttons and still found ways to drop the button total, not raise it. My way is not the only way, it's just me doing what I like to do for fun, but a professional design team should not have issues working around that. Sure it takes effort, but so does any amount of job change. If the idea of spending time working on and improving jobs is seen as a hinderance then why even have a job design team at all?