Ideas for healer design changes

[SargeTheSeagull]

Let me start off by saying I’m not a healer main. I’ve played healers sorta casually since 3.X and the hardest content I’ve healed is extreme. That said, the healers in my static have said a LOT about what they think of the current state of healers and I’ve got some ideas.
The biggest problem with healing imo is that the game actively discourages using GCD’s to heal since the focus for every roll is doing as much damage as possible. Use a GCD to heal, you do less damage, you’re less able to clear and/or the encounter takes longer. Just feels bad. There are a few solutions to this.
The first is to go back to how healers worked before 5.0. Every healer had an actual rotation to keep track of instead of the current “dot and spam” that they have now. They weren’t super in depth or complicated like the other roles but were at least more interesting than they are now. For instance: scholar had three dots, one instant (bio) , one cast (miasma), and one instant with short range and short duration (miasma 2) made scholar feel unique. It also had bane which allowed them to spread their dots to multiple enemies which made dungeon pulls more fun. Better than spamming art of war at least. This option is probably the most likely as it wouldn’t mean having to change other elements of the game to fit like changing how much damage enemies’ auto attacks do or retuning raidwides.

The second option would require more work but I think would make healers feel more like they’re actually healers instead of green DPS (not saying that’s a bad thing for the record). That is, give each healer a damage refund for using GCD heals. White mage has this already in the form of the blood lily. Yes, the potency of it is off and there are some other oddities with WHM’s design so it doesn’t work perfectly but the basic idea is there: Use enough lilys (instant spells on the gcd) and they build up the blood lily which refunds the damage you would have dealt had you not had to heal. This means that white mages can heal, as their role’s name implies, without being penalized for it. I do think this could be expanded and the blood lily is just a good starting point. What could this look like on other jobs? Sage, my main healer: Using diagnosis, prognosis or their eukrasian versions grants an adder’s sting regardless of whether or not a shield breaks. Using toxicon substantially reduces the cooldown of phlegma. So much that you can gain multiple uses of phlegma throughout a fight. More healing gives you more damage. I haven’t touched Astro this expac so I don’t have any ideas for it but maybe using benefic/benefic 2 can give you a free card or something? My idea for scholar is (assuming it has all three of its old dot’s back) using any gcd heal gives you a buff to your next application of your dots. It could be a potency increase or longer duration or whatever. Perhaps even a chance to generate aetherflow stacks.

[SargeTheSeagull]

“But that would just lead to us blowing more MP and why would we use a gcd heal if there’s no damage to heal?” Excellent point! Which leads us to another thing the devs need to account for: how little damage bosses do and how absurdly strong off global heals are. In phase 1 of P4S, the boss does fewer than five auto attacks in the first minute of the fight. Meaning the MT doesn’t hardly take any damage that can’t be healed with one of their cooldowns or an ogcd like drurochole or essential dignity. Or more likely, a raidwide ogcd like indom. Why are abilities like that so strong? They’re off the gcd, cost no mp, and are really potent. If you’re a whm and your options are use tetra or cure 1, that’s an absolute no brainer. In my admittedly under-informed opinion, ogcd heals should exist to supplement and compliment global heals, not outright replace them.
If you check that website I won’t mention on the official forums and look at any of the execution or speed runs of any fight this tier, the healers barely had to use any gcd heals. The vast majority of their casts were malefic/dosis/glare/broil with a handful of dots. That’s just plain boring. Pressing 1 button 12 times in a row then pressing another button while occasionally hitting whispering dawn or physis doesn’t feel like healing. It feels like slamming your head on the keyboard to try to stay awake.
As I said, I’m not a healer main. I’m just someone who likes healing every now and then in dungeons and extremes. I’m not an expert and I’m not pretending to be. But healing, in my opinion, is about as exciting as watching paint dry. What do you guys think? Am
I way off the mark or am I on to something?

[Azurarok]

Agreeing on SCH getting SMN's DoT kit now that it's gone. Maybe then have Deployment Tactics do Bane when used on an enemy.

They also should then replace Drain Touch with Fester at that point to actually justify having the 2 DoTs, but there was a thread that mentioned YoshiP wanted aetherflow to be used primarily for healing and not have us burn through them for DPS, which the new 1.5s cast time on Broil encourages us to do the exact opposite of. We'd also have extra button bloat with Miasma too.

So, most likely way out of the devs' scope, but in order to separate using aetherflow for dps vs healing, I'd say just make Aetherflow specifically for Fester, which fills the fairy gauge like Drain Touch. Then make Lustrate, Sacred Soil, and Excogitation use the Fairy gauge, merge Fey Blessing with Indomitability, and have using those fill the Seraph gauge. Merge Aetherpact with Summon Seraph and have those and Consolation use the Seraph gauge. All that makes Dissipation cut off the vast majority of your kit so they'd have to make it actually worth risking that, though.


Also, I don't really agree with the idea that healing in general should be GCD-centric though, I think that should mainly be WHM's thing (with a DPS neutral blood lily that's procced by any GCD heal at the least).

[Axious]

From what I’ve gathered. People are not engaged enough? Which is understandable from only having a handful of dps toolkits.

Change healing roll into support role. Removing GCD healing actions entirely and replacing with a 1 2 3 dps combo or niche for said job. (Ex: War beast gauge unlocks fell cleave and decimate, where Whm could mirror said niche. Unlocking a high potency single/aoe heal.)

Add more ogcd dps/heal actions. Akin to assize from Whm. Lower cooldowns of ogcd actions. ~30s max. Multiple charges? Again this would be the only source of healing since GCD healing would be removed.

Add more support buffs.

Basically a incredibly weak dps with great healing and support capabilities.

[Hasrat]

Change healing roll into support role.

Kinda had a similar thought recently. So many jobs have their own personal buffs, raid buffs, debuffs, mitigation. Would there be any appeal to just moving most of that to healers? DPS might be disappointed, but their job remains pumping out damage through optimized rotations. Tanks might have a few things pulled off, but their job remains to keep aggro and not die, while also having some rotation optimization. With healing requirements so minimized, why not have healers contribute more heavily with the buffs?

Of course, if button bloat is already a problem, does kinda exacerbate that..

[Axious]

From what I’ve gathered. People are not engaged enough? Which is understandable from only having a handful of dps toolkits.

Change healing roll into support role. Removing GCD healing actions entirely and replacing with a 1 2 3 dps combo or niche for said job. (Ex: War beast gauge unlocks fell cleave and decimate, where Whm could mirror said niche. Unlocking a high potency single/aoe heal.)

Add more ogcd dps/heal actions. Akin to assize from Whm. Lower cooldowns of ogcd actions. ~30s max. Multiple charges? Again this would be the only source of healing since GCD healing would be removed.

Add more support buffs.

Basically a incredibly weak dps with great healing and support capabilities.

This could also lead to other jobs added into support role. (Ex: Bard. Lowering the dps output. Adding healing to current actions. Adding more songs and increasing the potency of said songs.)

Role action abilities for set actions across all support jobs.