Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Granyala]

The problem is not healer design.
The problem is encounter design.

The incoming damage is simply too infrequent and too much of it is avoidable in order to keep a healer busy.

I'd rather see them buff the encounters a bit than going the WoW route and making healers feel really weak by nerfing their output to the ground.
I hate that design.

[Ultimatecalibur]

The problem is not healer design.
The problem is encounter design.

The incoming damage is simply too infrequent and too much of it is avoidable in order to keep a healer busy.

I'd rather see them buff the encounters a bit than going the WoW route and making healers feel really weak by nerfing their output to the ground.
I hate that design.

This is the problem exactly. Both healers and tanks are victim of this. Sure you can now get 3948 Tenacity, but 10.8% mitigation isn't really going to change the spells being cast by the healer.

The rule of thumb is always be casting, but there is a problem when healers are spending more time casting dps spells than healing spells.

They should really leave only one ST heal, one AOE heal (with or without gimmicks) and 2--3 ogcds for heal. Everything else should be either dps buttons (for rotation) or buffs/debuffs.

That is far to few and would make them green dps more than healers.

A low cost standard st heal spell, a high cost spike st heal spell, a gimmick heal (i.e. regen/shield), an AoE gimmick heal spell, an AoE heal spell, st cleanse and a st raise are a solid core for healers.

The problem is that the high cost spike st heal spell has become the standard heal due to fight design and near infinite mp. Why cast Cure twice (or Cure+proced Cure II) for 900 (1100) potency worth of healing for 800 (400) mp when Cure II+Glare is good enough with 700 potency worth of healing and 300 potency damage and you won't run out of MP with the total cost of 1400.

Currently ast has 12 abilities related to heals + neutral sect
Whm 14 + temperance
Ast 16 (including faery + both tactics)

That's twice as much as mitigation buttons for tanks

The tanks have around 10 to 12 "mitigation" abilities (heals, shields and damage reduction) that vary between self and party, 2 or 3 stuns/interrupts, and 3 enmity abilities. All of which play into the role fantasy. The aount of healing focused abilities is fine.

[Endariel]

I indeed did not take into account tank ole action nor indirect mitigation, but nevertheless, healers have waay more tools than they are normally using.
As you pointed out, low cost st spells become obselete at higher levels, which leaves me the question why they aren't directly upgraded in the first place. But there's more than that
As for "green dps", isn't that the current situation anyway? Tanks are defacto blue dps, but no one is complaining
It's either this or raidwide "true living dead" every 10 seconds to make healers utilize their full kit

[Ultimatecalibur]

I indeed did not take into account tank ole action nor indirect mitigation, but nevertheless, healers have waay more tools than they are normally using.
As you pointed out, low cost st spells become obselete at higher levels, which leaves me the question why they aren't directly upgraded in the first place. But there's more than that

The Healer's kits are built around sustained healing with mp management as a factor, but fights favor spike healing that doesn't really tax healer mp management. You can more or less see how the healers are supposed to work in ARR content with bosses that almost continuously attack the tanks occasionally stopping to use party targeting actions. Modern bosses tend to spend a lot more time casting abilities to be dodged over attacking.

As for "green dps", isn't that the current situation anyway? Tanks are defacto blue dps, but no one is complaining

Tanks are complaining about being blue dps. We just tend to complain more about fight design not fully utilizing our kit than the kits themselves (outside of DRK which has a rather boring dps rotation).

It's either this or raidwide "true living dead" every 10 seconds to make healers utilize their full kit

There are actually a fair number of ways to make fights more interesting to tank and heal but the designers have more or less locked themselves into the current design scheme. More unavoidable damage on the tanks coming from Auto-attacks and DoTs would do a lot.

I feel the big issue is that for an awful lot of content you're only healing 20-30% of the time. Not because you're a healer who wants to DPS more and not care about healing but because you're good enough at healing that you don't need to heal any more than that.

What that results in is:
70% of a run is dead boring DPS.
30% of a run is over-saturated with available healing spellsp

Exactly.

If people's health is topped up enough, what healing incentive is there? There's 0 benefit to overhealing.

There really should be more abilities like Spirit's Within that scale their damage based on how high their current HP is.

2- They adjust the content so healers have to heal more. This to me would be the biggest undertaking, because they would have to go back and retroactively adjust old content. Being selective won't do IMO because people do roulettes, people level, people do content outside of endgame and stuff that's current. If content is only interesting to play at endgame, then the game would just suffer from the biggest wall I had getting int WoW.

They don't really need to rebalance existing content that can be completed. Just change how they do design future content.

[Saefinn]

They don't really need to rebalance existing content that can be completed. Just change how they do design future content.

On this point, I disagree, simply because people still do the older content, which I think is a positive for this game, that it incentivises old content so people who need/want to do it get queues for it.

But say I'm capping my tomestomes for the week, there's still Trials Roulette, Levelling Roulette, 50/60/70 Roulette. Or if I am healing for a newbie on older content and help out people in general. And of course, there's new or returning players who still have to go through that content who are at a skill level where it still feels unengaging. From a tank perspective, not as engaging as it used to be but still reasonably engaging because it feels like I am not spamming. And for DPS it feels more engaging because you have a rotation and feel like you're not spamming.

Hence my reference to WoW, because whenever I've tried to approach that game it just felt dull to play all the way right up until the content everybody's doing, which means going through an arduous slog of un-engaging content. One of the reasons for ARR rework was because ARR had that wall. And I feel as a role, healers have it too. Not the case for every new player, as I hear mixed feedback.

Sure balancing the future content would be great for future content, but I feel like it'd only a be partial solution.

There really should be more abilities like Spirit's Within that scale their damage based on how high their current HP is.

It's an option for sure. I think there's lots of options that can add a bit of spice of life. Just anything that doesn't make it feel like you're just spamming.

[Endariel]

They should really leave only one ST heal, one AOE heal (with or without gimmicks) and 2--3 ogcds for heal. Everything else should be either dps buttons (for rotation) or buffs/debuffs.

Currently ast has 12 abilities related to heals + neutral sect
Whm 14 + temperance
Ast 16 (including faery + both tactics)

That's twice as much as mitigation buttons for tanks

[Loki]

Tanks can dps/buff/dots/cure
DPS can dots/buff/cure/raise
Healers should just heal? wtf with SE

5.0 healer design is the worst i have ever seen, fortunatly you have spent 2 years for "balancing" healers...

Just give healers their identity back with some interesting gameplay and let your players choose if they want to use it 100% or just heal or just dps i'm bored to have Mama SE behind my back "you should play like that".

If we follow their pur healer way we should have pur tank way and pur dps way too, actual situation is just unfair and borring.

And please respect your own lore SE....i really don't understand your 5.0 choices.

[linayar]

Tanks can dps/buff/dots/cure
DPS can dots/buff/cure/raise
Healers should just heal? wtf with SE

Wait, why are you framing it that way?

If you go by what you put for tanks and DPS, then more accurately:

Healers can dps/dot/hot/cc/shield/buff/cure/raise/troll people with rescue (or save them)

[Loki]

Wait, why are you framing it that way?

If you go by what you put for tanks and DPS, then more accurately:

Healers can dps/dot/hot/cc/shield/buff/cure/raise/troll people with rescue (or save them)

dps? a single spell, fortunatly for solo stuff
dot/hot/cc(lol)/shield/buff/cure/raise/rescue = healer gameplay

Have we got dps/magic rotations? nope
Have we got some tanks skills? nope

But dps and tanks have some healers's gameplay, that's just what i wanted to put forward.

[Saefinn]

Wait, why are you framing it that way?

If you go by what you put for tanks and DPS, then more accurately:

Healers can dps/dot/hot/cc/shield/buff/cure/raise/troll people with rescue (or save them)

Well then you'd more accurately have for tanks:
dps/buff/cure/dots/mitigation/hot/etc.

But if we laboured on that then we'd miss the point.

The attitude seems to be:
Healers should heal not do anything else. The devs have made comments multiple times to reflect they'd rather healers to have more healing focus and have stripped our non-healing capabilities and added to our healing capabilities. And there is some level of community attitude that healers shouldn't DPS they should only heal, that's their job.

But the reality is, it's a team effort and jobs can contribute in different ways. As a Paladin, when a healer has struggled, I've helped with Clemency. In one particular case where the healer had connection issues, he offered to drop, I told him to carry on because I could help with the healing.
As an off-tank, if my main tank is struggling I can help mitigate damage.
As a tank if a DPS is taking incoming damage I can help mitigate their damage and also heal them.
As a RDM, if people are dying, I can help out the healers with raises. If it's really bad I can help with the Cures.
As a DNC/MCH/BRD I have skills that mitigate damage, not just the tank, which applies to the whole party.
As a SMN, I can also mitigate damage with the right pet.
Heck, if you sustain aggro, in an emergency you could technically off tank on MNK, which I've seen happen.
There's lots of ways people can contribute outside of the scope of their role and it's good to have, because it's more dynamic.

With healers it seems the attitude is for them not to?

Yet, they have the tools to do so, even though those tools are gradually being stripped, despite the fact we have this big gap where we can be using them and it's really unengaging to.

Whereas technically all a tank needs to do to be a good tank is take damage and keep others from being damaged. They could do have a simple "1, 2" DPS rotation and still achieve their duties. Yet, they get a more engaging set of DPS skills to work with, not as engaged as a full DPS, but tanks have focuses normally DPS's don't and I feel this is where we should be with healers. In fact, we /used/ to be there with healers.