Why is the healer class basically a one spell dps class?

[LariaKirin]

But can we just remove gear? Everything becomes cosmetic, and there is no more progression at endgame? Completely remove all semblance of this game being an RPG?

Twinning was about as hard as the levelling dungeons if you jump in immediately after clearing the MSQ, but that doesn't last long given the gear upgrades. Many would be disappointed if that was removed in general, including myself. It's nice having your avatar get stronger alongside you building skill - it's an RPG specific joy.

In the end, perhaps engaging pure healing cannot exist along character progression.

Nah, removing gear is not a good idea. It's also pointless to think about because it's realistically never going to happen.

Gear is what quickly trivializes whatever difficulty was designed into the encounters. The most they could do is close the gap between minimum item level and maximum obtainable gear. For example, if Savage/Tome gear were 520 instead of 530 now. If you look past the flaws of the old encounters, I think Unreal trials are an interesting view of what the game could be with less drastic gear scaling. I hope that Unreal is not just a piece of weekly content, but an experiment for scaling that they could make use of in the future.

Healing has more to do with scripted encounter design. In my opinion, you simply can't make it enganging past the progression phase without some degree of unpredictability.

[Absurdity]

Nah, removing gear is not a good idea. It's also pointless to think about because it's realistically never going to happen.

Gear is what quickly trivializes whatever difficulty was designed into the encounters. The most they could do is close the gap between minimum item level and maximum obtainable gear. For example, if Savage/Tome gear were 520 instead of 530 now. If you look past the flaws of the old encounters, I think Unreal trials are an interesting view of what the game could be with less drastic gear scaling. I hope that Unreal is not just a piece of weekly content, but an experiment for scaling that they could make use of in the future.

Healing has more to do with scripted encounter design. In my opinion, you simply can't make it enganging past the progression phase without some degree of unpredictability.

Umm...what? Unreal isn't "less drastic gear scaling" unreal syncs you to what is essentially the base itemlevel of level 80, that isn't "less drastic" that is no gear scaling at all, it makes getting any new gear in the entire expansion completely pointless if it were applied universally.


And yes, better gear is supposed to reduce difficulty in encounters, that's the whole point, making it possible for less optimized groups to complete an encounter in the first place.


Sure, you can clear an entire savage tier in minimum ilvl gear with a very good static, good luck doing that in a random party finder group.

[LariaKirin]

Umm...what? Unreal isn't "less drastic gear scaling" unreal syncs you to what is essentially the base itemlevel of level 80, that isn't "less drastic" that is no gear scaling at all, it makes getting any new gear in the entire expansion completely pointless if it were applied universally.


And yes, better gear is supposed to reduce difficulty in encounters, that's the whole point, making it possible for less optimized groups to complete an encounter in the first place.


Sure, you can clear an entire savage tier in minimum ilvl gear with a very good static, good luck doing that in a random party finder group.

Party finder is capable of and does clear Savage week one. I don't know what your point is supposed to be there.

Why are you under the impression that I'm suggesting this be applied universally?

Unreal requirements:
Minimum Item Level: 430
Item Level Sync: 435

That means you can only go 5 item levels above the designed minimum item level. Comparing that to Extreme or Savage, where you can go up to 20 item levels above the designed minimum item level.

I understand that it's designed for it to help weaker groups clear eventually. Squeenix is doing this to reach a desired clear rate, which means that the clear rate is more important to them than maintaining the difficulty.

I know that gear is supposed to reduce difficulty. I'm saying 20 item levels is too big of an increase.

[Ayche]

Isn't there already a minor faction of players who feel overgearing is not giving them enough boons and gear feels useless?
Unit 3 would have an outrage on their hands with those players if they killed the current overgearing.

[Irenia]

At the end of the day, Easy should no equal boring, which is the main issue with overgearing and overskilling. Anecdotally from my end, DPS classes are easier to enjoy when participating in easier content, and SE should really be looking to bring healers up to at least

Easy content is not going away, especially if connected to the MSQ. At least let us have some fun with it.

[Allegor]

I think the devs mentality stayed in ARR style fights. The only time I need to go full healbot is in Stone Vigil if the tank wants to do big pulls because I literally have nothing else to heal with but Cure I and II, heck, I don't even have Holy

[Truen]

1 DD and 1 dot rotations are BORING. They should add more because of that fact alone. B O R I N G.

[Cithaerias_pyropina]

1 DD and 1 dot rotations are BORING. They should add more because of that fact alone. B O R I N G.

They would need to rework their spaghetti code if they were to add a rotation for healers as using a gcd heal would break that rotation. Or have it act like RDM's verstone/fire ready buff.

But not much of anything can be done because of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that someone much earlier noted. Healing was made easy/boring thus a drop in playerbase which in turn means the devs need to make healing even easier to make up for less skilled players which causes another drop in healers which again causes the devs to make healing easier and it'll keep continuing because they'd rather not spend the money or work hours to fix the root of the problem: healer dps.

Which could be, hypothetically, solved by; reducing the amount of healing abilties, lowering the strength and the cooldowns of the healing abilities that stay, increasing the strength of gcd heals, lowering the cast time of gcd heals, adding at least 3 or 4 dps abilities (one is a single target ability with a 2 second cooldown, another is a DoT with a 30 second duration and 5 second cooldown, the third could be a single target ability with a 25 second cooldown, and the fourth could be an aoe with a 50 second cooldown) to replace the healing abilties that were removed and keeping Glare, Broil and Malefic for when healing isn't needed and lowering their cast times to 1.5 seconds.

With that you; heal primarily through casting healing gcds and dps through weaving dps cooldowns between casting heals. And if healing isnt needed you still have Glare, Malefic and Broil to use. Dpsing as a healer would at least be more engaging as you'd have more than just 1 DoT and single target spell. You'd be casting a heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil then weave that DoT ability, then after the next heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil you'd weave the next cooldown then go weaving the 2 second ability until the others come off cooldown.

The reason people hate having to spam gcd heals is there are no dps abilities to weave during them that do not have healing tacked on to them. Give dps abilties with very short cooldowns to healers with 0 healing tacked on and people would be content with spamming Cure 1 or Physick because they'd have those to use during the gcd.

An unintended side-effect of that is too much mobility, but who really cares about mobility anymore when nearly every job has heaps of mobility now.

[Flay_wind]

Which could be, hypothetically, solved by; reducing the amount of healing abilties, lowering the strength and the cooldowns of the healing abilities that stay, increasing the strength of gcd heals, lowering the cast time of gcd heals, adding at least 3 or 4 dps abilities (one is a single target ability with a 2 second cooldown, another is a DoT with a 30 second duration and 5 second cooldown, the third could be a single target ability with a 25 second cooldown, and the fourth could be an aoe with a 50 second cooldown) to replace the healing abilties that were removed and keeping Glare, Broil and Malefic for when healing isn't needed and lowering their cast times to 1.5 seconds.

With that you; heal primarily through casting healing gcds and dps through weaving dps cooldowns between casting heals. And if healing isnt needed you still have Glare, Malefic and Broil to use. Dpsing as a healer would at least be more engaging as you'd have more than just 1 DoT and single target spell. You'd be casting a heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil then weave that DoT ability, then after the next heal or Glare/Malefic/Broil you'd weave the next cooldown then go weaving the 2 second ability until the others come off cooldown.

Not counting all death effects and some other BLU specific things, that's basically how BLU Healer mimic plays.
You have Pom Cure with short cast time, after which you can weave your Primals (OGCD damage abilities on various cooldowns) in. You have Gobskin which is ~20% hp party shield without any healing component, so it's a strict mitigation. There's Exuviation (Cure 3 + Esuna)/Stotram (off-brand Medica), Angel Snack which is your busted 2 minutes CD which is *just* super charged off-brand Medica 2. And then there's also White Wind, which in a lot of situations is AoE Benediction (Ahem). No OGCD heals whatsoever, and as someone who has cleared all BLU content, which includes Synced/NoEcho Coils, AlexSavage and OmegaSavage i'd say they are not needed.
You have Song of Torment, aka your 30 seconds 550 total potency DoT. Then you can slot in Rose of Destruction - 30 seconds 400 potency spell, Magic Hammer 90 seconds cooldown restores some MP and is basically a second stackable Addle. Also there's Sonic Boom which is your spammable 1,5 seconds filler spell, after which you can also weave your Primals in.

[Recon1o6]

Not counting all death effects and some other BLU specific things, that's basically how BLU Healer mimic plays.
You have Pom Cure with short cast time, after which you can weave your Primals (OGCD damage abilities on various cooldowns) in. You have Gobskin which is ~20% hp party shield without any healing component, so it's a strict mitigation. There's Exuviation (Cure 3 + Esuna)/Stotram (off-brand Medica), Angel Snack which is your busted 2 minutes CD which is *just* super charged off-brand Medica 2. And then there's also White Wind, which in a lot of situations is AoE Benediction (Ahem). No OGCD heals whatsoever, and as someone who has cleared all BLU content, which includes Synced/NoEcho Coils, AlexSavage and OmegaSavage i'd say they are not needed.
You have Song of Torment, aka your 30 seconds 550 total potency DoT. Then you can slot in Rose of Destruction - 30 seconds 400 potency spell, Magic Hammer 90 seconds cooldown restores some MP and is basically a second stackable Addle. Also there's Sonic Boom which is your spammable 1,5 seconds filler spell, after which you can also weave your Primals in.

You dont even need all those abilities to have fun as blu healer. I'm missing some of the blu spells and its still a blast. Because i have an actual dps rotation between my heals even if its incomplete, which imo is how the game used to and should be- even without all your abilities you can have fun

blu healer is very close to what i'd hope all healers would be with solid powerful heals and a dps rotation with a bit of utility and crowd control thrown in as well and weaving windows aplenty to fit in the ogcds

Naturally given we are apparently going to be having another chunk out of Ast by the devs, we will have 2 regen healers and 2 shield healers. So a more in depth look at how I'd like it is one member of each has a higher focus on personal damage and the other on raid damage. That's not to say one or the other should lose out though, only have less emphasis

Whm: High pot heals and lower regens, Larger elemental combo based dps rotation with strongest healer attacks. Only one or two utility actions, refunds heal potency like misery
Ast: Low pot heals high power regens, small proc based rotation with cards and actions for lots of strong utility and ability to extend timers
Sch: High pot heals with weaker shields, dot mage rotation with personal damage comparable to whm. Little utility but can spread dots and has fairy to help silence/stun
Sge: Low pot heals but strong shields, burst type rotation with plenty of utility