Healers need an overhaul

[ty_taurus]

The canned YoshiP response would likely be "But Dosis is the best one of them all them because if you don't keep doing damage, you're not healing the tank"

In all seriousness, healer DPS is a larger issue they haven't outcome since the Post HW dismantling. Like this thread been eluding if you're not going to replace damage buttons than there needs to be more heal buttons you must press in all types of content, not just saving it for the last savage floor or DSR (which is arguable too as it's mostly do have enough mitigation game).

I think the response would fall more along the lines of "We want to avoid expanding on DPS related healer tools because we don't want players to feel obligated to deal damage."

Which is and equally bad response in all seriousness. The demand for healer DPS has nothing to do with action volume and everything to do with party damage taken, like with what you mentioned, and also because isn't dealing damage the point of SGE?

On forcing more healing buttons to be pressed, this is a failing solution also. Healers still press their DPS button more than all other buttons combined in Savage. It would take an astronomical increase to outgoing damage frequency to resolve that issue in Savage, and what about everything below Savage? How does healing stay fun in a dungeon run if Savage can't even output that much damage? What about a treasure map dungeons? FATE grinding? The MSQ? And even if we did increase the rate of damage taken to something like 500% or greater (not an exaggerated number), what do you do about the 10 years of content that's currently available? Let it rot?

The solution of "change content to demand more healing" is such a convoluted and excessive attempt at fixing what is very easily fixable by just giving healers a gameplay loop that is always applicable whether you're in an MSQ instance or progging Ultimate. If you come across a river, do you turn back, hop in your car, run to the nearest boat store, purchase a kayak, strap the kayak to the roof of your car, drive back to the river, drag your kayak over to the river, and paddle your way across, or do you cross the bridge that's 9 feet to the left? Because that's effectively the difference between the choices of changing content vs changing healers, respectively.

[AmiableApkallu]

The solution of "change content to demand more healing" is such a convoluted and excessive attempt at fixing what is very easily fixable by just giving healers a gameplay loop that is always applicable whether you're in an MSQ instance or progging Ultimate.

I think it's possible to approach this from both angles. The DPS angle is well-covered. The healing angle… well, I think there are relatively simple changes that could help. My favorite suggestion of the ones I've seen so far:

IMHO the easiest solution there is to lean more on auto attacks persisting through casts with the ability to crit whilst also giving bosses short cooldown non-telegraphed tank busters and cleaves again.

Kaliya from Coil T11 during prog was a great example of how bosses should hit. It wasn't the hardest hitting boss of the time, but you needed both tanks to soak those cleaves initially and it was nothing like as predictable as what we have now because the bulk of the damage didn't have a huge long telegraph announcing it's arrival.

https://youtu.be/1WwRDVQotgo?t=15

In the same way that no one is really asking for a top-tier melee DPS rotation for the healers, we can ask for a bit more healing without jumping all the way to 90% healing uptime.

[ty_taurus]

I think it's possible to approach this from both angles. The DPS angle is well-covered. The healing angle… well, I think there are relatively simple changes that could help. My favorite suggestion of the ones I've seen so far:



In the same way that no one is really asking for a top-tier melee DPS rotation for the healers, we can ask for a bit more healing without jumping all the way to 90% healing uptime.

We can certain increase outgoing damage to some degree, and this is a desirable outcome. Having more reasons to use the cooldowns we have, especially in casual content--not by making lethal raidwides and nasty bleedbusters or anything, but by just having damage be more frequent, would really provide a healthier experience for most healers. My point though is just that doing this won't have any noticeable impact on the fact that we'll still spend most of our time mashing 1 button more than every other button on our hotbar. It would take a gargantuan increase in outgoing damage to make any significant impact, like unavoidable raidwides every 5-10 seconds levels of increase, in order to shift the focus away from DPS, which is too drastic of a shift from the rest of the game.

So yeah, adding more reasons to heal is desirable, but it is in no way a solution to the DPS concerns.