Healer changes

[HyoMinPark]

At this point, the developers have stated that they have no plans to increase the amount of healing that healers have to do. By this logic, the only option left to us is to develop our DPS rotations. It’s redundant that they keep increasing the amount of shiny healy tools we get, but then don’t give us ample opportunity to actually use them due to incoming damage being so low and nonthreatening in most content. We spend the majority of our time dealing damage—even in Savage and Ultimate—so why not capitalize more on that.

The reason agreements aren’t being reached is because of the same ol’ divide within the role. There are still people who unironically think that healers should only heal and rarely do damage when, at this point, it is griefing to not DPS as a healer. There’s simply not enough healing uptime to defend it, and it’s not like healers so piddly amounts of damage either. The developers no longer have the mindset of “we don’t design encounters with healer DPS in mind” because it’s highly likely that you will not clear high-end fights with enrage timers if you have two healers dealing zero damage. Even with the rest of the party at peak performance. Two good healers did more damage combined than the highest parsing DPS in Patch 6.0, and such will likely be the case after the 6.1 changes. There’s still data to be gathered on this since the patch is so new, but it’s unlikely to have changed much.

It has very little to do with tank healing. Content simply isn’t threatening enough. People can meme on Bloodwhetting all they want, but healers weren’t doing all that much healing before it or even Nascent Flash in ShB were a thing outside of a handful of leveling dungeon pulls. Single-target encounters are primarily DPS uptime and have been since HW.

There’s already two huge threads about the issues with healers that go into far much detail than I will in this response (the “Just go do Ultimate” thread and the “Has anyone quit healing” thread). There are also several other smaller ones on the healer subforum that reiterate the issues. You could write an entire dissertation on the problems with healers at this point.

It all boils down to the dev team actually looking at their design philosophy for healers and then at how they are actually played. And to stop balancing them around the lowest common denominator healers. They should be balanced more with the average healer in mind, not one that struggles to do the bare minimum. That they balance around bad healers who have no idea what to do only exacerbates the boredom skilled healers feel and the issues with current healer design (low healing uptime with a bloated healing toolkit, high damage uptime with boring “rotation”).