Shield/Pure Healer Split Feedback

[baklava151]

I haven't seen much discussion about this and since we've had a tier and an ultimate to try it out, I'm curious what people think about the split they did for healers into pure and shield healers, whether it was a positive or negative change.

[Semirhage]

It's exactly the nonsense dichotomy we said it was going to be. For one (with the exception of no AOE shields on WHM), "pure" healers have decently available shields, and "shield" healers have decently available throughput and regens. They're not on the GCD, but who cares? Damage is so bloody infrequent compared to how many tools exist and how fast the cooldowns are that the healers are barely "split" between the two types; they're all a grey porridge of both capabilities.

Secondly, healing requirements are so low that throughput is an unnecessary "strength". This has always been the case, but it's really blatant now that healing is easier than it's ever been. Mitigation availability is what gets you through difficult encounters, and since the lion's share of that is on the shield healers, Square's vision of "one pure, one shield" is laughable in practice. The two shield healers as a pair clown all over the regen healers in tough content.

Third, it did zilch to combat the balancing problem they've misdiagnosed since late Heavensward: healers with buffs are just straight out more powerful than ones without, and popularity has nothing to do with this.

Fourth, they could have seen all this coming if they had a dedicated and competent healer designer, so here we are again. This is the role state that never ends. It just goes on and on my friends.

[ThorneDynasty]

You don't even use shields on shield healers unless it's downtime or a clutch situation, what a joke.

[Supersnow845]

The fact square couldn’t realise on their own game design just how much more powerful the shield healers would be and AST is only meta because of its scaling buffs just shows they have no idea what they are doing with healing at all

The shield healers are just so much better than the regen healers for the purpose of how this game works and it shows, SCH is as overpowered as it’s always been, SGE blows WHM out of the water for all content except DSR damage because of lily pooling and both of them are equal to AST’s healing which we all collectively derided as overpowered in ShB

So there is functionally no reason to even take a regen healer, if AST was the shield healer and SGE the regen healer then regen healers would be completely and utterly useless

[AmiableApkallu]

I thought the split only really mattered for parties assembled via "Raid Finder"?

Anyway, I still don't understand the "pure" vs. "shield" split. It's not how I (currently) think about the healing jobs:

- WHM: On demand restoration of HP.
- AST: Delayed restoration of HP.
- SCH: Swiss Army Knife - Perhaps the best answer to every healing problem, but some assembly and planning required.
- SGE: ???

[GoatOfWar]

I thought the split only really mattered for parties assembled via "Raid Finder"?

Anyway, I still don't understand the "pure" vs. "shield" split. It's not how I (currently) think about the healing jobs:

- WHM: On demand restoration of HP.
- AST: Delayed restoration of HP.
- SCH: Swiss Army Knife - Perhaps the best answer to every healing problem, but some assembly and planning required.
- SGE: ???

Sage should have been the dps oriented healer as promised.

[Supersnow845]

Sage should have been the dps oriented healer as promised.

SGE was never going to be the DPS healer because square refuses to leave the “I spam diagnosis and nothing else” people behind

These people would get eaten alive on disc priest which is why “DPS healer” basically became “I can force eos to target only the tank”

[ASkellington]

Its dumb. All it does is make AST/WHM and SGE/SCH clones of one another.

Instead of pure/shield healer it should be:

SCH: Shield/mitigation healer with fairy for when things go to the seventh hell
SGE: Healer who heals by doing damage OR healer who takes its shields to heal allies (not sure if this one could work but interesting if it could)
WHM: On demand healer/burst healer; no HoTs delayed healing, shields etc
AST: HoT/delayed time healer OR bring back Nocturnal sect and make AST a stance dance healer where it can switch between regen/shields in combat

Make the 4 healers more distinct in how they heal instead of pretty much giving all four of them the same tools. ESPECIALLY sub-50.

[Sebazy]

IMHO it once again demonstrates that SE's job design team simply don't understand how Healer's actually pan out when played at a high level.

SE's distinction between the two types is pretty simple IMO. Regen healers can regen on the GCD with no cooldowns, shield healers can shield on the GCD with no cooldowns. Easy right?

The problem is of course that healers don't want to do that. It's a horrible way to play in 99% of the situations out there with DSR being about the only outlier because of the number of mitigation checks.

So for the rest of the game outside DSR, you end up with Benison being about the best single target shield (on a regen healer) and Soil being about the best regen (On a shield healer). Why? Because even in Savage, the incoming damage isn't enough to need more, and whilst yes soil does cost an energy drain, if you can save a GCD being spent on a heal with it (Which it is easily powerful enough to do) it's a significant gain.

It was obvious from the moment that SE announced this change that it was going to be stupid, and to the surprise of no one that's familiar with how healer's have been handled post 4.0, dumb it was.

[UkcsAlias]

The only reason why healing is a mess is because of a diffirent issue.

If healers are more difficult, it generaly means players will be less healed up, and die more often. These deaths will be blamed on the healer (instead of the player standing in the AoE). Simply because players are realy bad at looking back in time, and looking at others (only healers do this well as thats their job). If healers get blamed all the time, it hurts their popularity even more. And this is what they want to avoid, so they actualy are too easy and effective.

As a result, healers got excessive healing, and a lot of classes got self heals to again mitigate healer mistakes. It just oversimplified the role.

But on a side note, i have noticed in plenty of cases where teams were new to a dungeon, that as healer you are getting pushed quite a lot already (and its generaly also the most fun as a healer with it). And to me that actualy shows that the kits of the classes arent actualy too bad either. Its just that most of the time you are simply not demanded to use this kit and can just resolve towards abilities that preserve most dps.