Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Saefinn]

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.

I accept that maybe healers need to heal more as a concept. But SE's solutions have been:
- Nerf healer DPS
- Reduce their number of DPS abilities
- Increase the number of healing abilities that end up as bloat in a lot of content

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

The exception being learning parties, progression groups and people who're still learning or optimizing their healing abilities to become stronger healers.

I agree that their logic is backwards, Yoshi P's comments on the Energy Drain change I think demonstrate it. I think there's a disconnect between how devs want healers to play and how healers are played.

Nerfing energy drain doesn't make you heal more. There are 2 factors that make you heal more: mechanics and the efficiency of your healing toolkit. Your DPS tool kit does not impact this. What you do in your down time doesn't impact this. At most it'll mean your healer might tunnel vision but with our super dumbed down DPS, that's still an issue, this is because the game is designed in a DPS focused way, where every bit counts. I feel this problem is unavoidable and is down to the attentiveness of the healer.

I would summarize it as:
- The devs seem to think: Less DPS incentive => More Healing Incentive
- When it should be: More healing incentive => Less DPS incentive

If they did the latter, I feel they'd be closer to achieving what they've set out to do.

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

I think the healer problem would be solved in 1 of 3 ways:

1- Devs accept that healer down time is a thing and give healers something to do. This is more or less how they were designed originally (and it was nothing complex). This IMO is the best solution because it keeps the skill floor low whilst increasing its ceiling and respects existing design.
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 into WoW.
3- They adjust healer balance to make them dependent on their abilities more. The downside is that'd this affect endgame efficiency. Because to adjust it to a level where somebody isn't bored stiff doing their dailies, you'd make it a lot rougher for end game. Unless endgame gets its own balance (like PvP does but maybe not to that extent)

[tdb]

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

Would be interesting to see overhealing transformed into a beneficial effect of some kind. A generic damage boost would perhaps be the safest choice. Skill/spell speed boost might be more interesting, but might not work equally well for all classes. Or maybe crit or DH since AST's cards are all damage now.