A summary of healer issues

[AFuzzyMu11in]

Or as a WHM, Asylum has such a short CD that it can be used every single pull, same with Divine Benison

When was the last time you actually used Liturgy / Temperance / Aquaveil in a dungeon? Hell the only reason I use Afflatus is between pulls to build up misery stacks

Same with SCH.

Fey union is pretty pointless, Seraph is too.

Fey union is actually amazing so is seraph both can be weaved with AOW, and fey union lets your tank soak up all the hate while u have to worry less about healing and can focus on dps to clear trash. This is just a bad take on sch.

[flowerfairy]

Fey union is actually amazing so is seraph both can be weaved with AOW, and fey union lets your tank soak up all the hate while u have to worry less about healing and can focus on dps to clear trash. This is just a bad take on sch.

Every heal can be weaved with AOW. Fey Union is really clunky. Seraph is meh, just another AoE heal.

But I think the point of that comment was that Fey Union and Seraph are barely needed in dungeons at all. Whispering Dawn + Sacred Soil and Recitation Excog if the tank ran out of mits covers up about any damage in W2W pulls.

[Fendred]

i think the best way to summarize the issue with healing is that it is impossible to deliver a consistent gameplay experience with healing as an active, GCD type role, so the devs get contradictory feedback. The experience is entirely different depending on the amount of healing required. Tank and DPS requests given to the developers are very consistent, whereas healer feedback is not as Yoshi-P has stated. So to satisfy players the experience must be consistent so that developers can get consistent feedback. That would require a complete rework of the healing system into a system with a standardized DPS rotation, a special kind of OGCD system for healers so that cast time doesn't interfere with it, auras, and auto heals. This would also require the simplification of healer toolkits, which would possibly lead to backwards compatibility issues on all content.

Edit: Probably not as bad as the ARR rework, but still pretty big.

On the other hand, part of what makes healers what they are is the ability to deal with the human element. There will always be some inconsistency no matter what system of healing we work under. So even if we tried to make it green DPS I don't think that would completely resolve it.

[fulminating]

Fey union would be better as a roused targeted whispering dawn, get rid of the stupid tether and trust the player to have put the faerie somewhere sensible. If it’s done with a player buff, they could even let it be spread with deployment tactics so that has more use cases. Or at least protraction. Give it some reason to be used in casual content outside of skipping cursed echo’s bleed.

[Deceptus]

Every heal can be weaved with AOW. Fey Union is really clunky. Seraph is meh, just another AoE heal.

But I think the point of that comment was that Fey Union and Seraph are barely needed in dungeons at all. Whispering Dawn + Sacred Soil and Recitation Excog if the tank ran out of mits covers up about any damage in W2W pulls.

This person gets it.

[flowerfairy]

On the other hand, part of what makes healers what they are is the ability to deal with the human element. There will always be some inconsistency no matter what system of healing we work under. So even if we tried to make it green DPS I don't think that would completely resolve it.

The way I see it, healers are already green DPS. Healing requirements are low enough that everything is recovered by one or two of the million heal oGCDs you have while you spam Glare away. In fact, healers are required to spam Glare to clear Savage. And that's the problem, spamming Glare is boring. I want more interesting DPS rotations because the healer kit is bloated with crap you aren't pressing for 70% of the fight. Of course though, a job like SCH would need a more thorough rework since a majority of its button bloat are ability heals that are unique, so clever button efficiency would need to be applied.

As for human element, that's the nature of healing across any multiplayer game. In content where error is more tolerated (e.g. roulettes), perfect DPS output is not expected from anyone simply because there's no hard enrages in Normal content. An unexperienced healer would feel more uncomfortable the lower the HP of the party is, so they'll be throwing out more heal GCDs. They aren't being punished for not pressing their damage buttons. They can pick up their rotation again whenever they feel comfortable with the state of the party.

Tl;dr Green DPS already exists. I just want Glarespam to be replaced with a more interesting rotation.

[Sparkthor]

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.

[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.

[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.