Healers need an overhaul

[Shurrikhan]

I'm going to say something that's probably going to be incredibly unpopular and may get some disagreement from some on the healer forums, but it needs to be said. The constant push towards making healers log friendly and introducing damage neutral healing is a mistake and has completely stunted the design of the healer role.

I don't really get this idea that these changes are intended to make healers "log friendly".

Misery's damage returns weren't increased because it was "log-unfriendly"; they were increased simply because otherwise WHM had lower free healing than other healers, which then meant that the devs' only other option --balancing its damage around that fact-- meant that WHM would be superior to other healers (other than SCH) in rDPS as soon as it could cut out even Lily heals, effectively making use of that excess healing potential by being compensated for it (much like the function of Energy Drain).

The problem, imo, isn't that WHM and other healers are now more closely matched. It's that the match was made in the wrong direction. The more free healing relative to healing requirements, the less one log differentiates itself from another by consequence of optimization in the healing itself:

Rather than giving space for optimizations in knowing when precisely to place a Regen as to meet the next eHP threshold without waste, how to pre-cast heal to follow-up a near-fatal tankbuster before the trailing AA can finish off the tank, etc., that overwhelming amount of free healing means that healing is increasingly reduced to memorized schedules of heals, and healing optimization increasingly shows little result in one's logs beyond that initial cliff. Whether Misery crit or not becomes a bigger factor than any would-be minor healing optimization beyond "Did I avoid casting any at-cost heals?"

And that's before even getting into the issues of that design path bloating healer kits with redundancies such that healers feel like they merely have (A) a schedule and then (B) a couple actions at a time of "trickle-down" for increasing levels of fan-flung **** that probably won't ultimately be recoverable anyways (due to vuln-stack guaranteed deaths, immediate OHKOs, and eventual MP attrition to just Raises itself given insufficient non-BLM casters).

But I see no reason to call that change "log-friendly". It seems nearly the opposite. And I don't think the dev changes have ever been intended as a means of dealing with an "issues" pertinent simply to parsing/parses.

(Rather, those changes merely hammered down the one nail sticking out... rather than taking that moment to wonder if maybe the board itself was thinner than it ought to be given that the three others were already sticking out the far side unintentionally.)


On all else / in all other regards, fully agreed.

1) Those that enjoy healing and not doing damage/damage rotations.
2) Those who enjoy buffing (and healing).
3) Those who enjoy healing and doing damage.
4) Those who enjoy doing damage and want some healing utility for their friends.

In ARR, WHM was (1) and SCH was (3) and it worked pretty well with most people pretty happy with it.

The simple fact that WHM's filler ppgcd was literally 80% higher than SCH's at the time meant that it accentuated doing damage at least as much as SCH did. WHM had fewer DoTs to manage, yes, but in terms of rDPS it was far more punished for excess GCD healing than SCH was as its spending every GCD it could on offense meant far more to it than it did to SCH.

While many a SCH would decide to "chad" their co-healer back then since Lustrate was originally only a 20% HP heal and Energy Drain 150% of a filler GCD attack, iirc, actually maximizing rDPS across a WHM-SCH pair would usually mean making sure that they could not only both maintain their DoTs with full uptime (2 vs. 4) but also that the WHM wasn't giving up Stone II casts when the SCH could cover the GCD heal instead.

As such, no, we've never particularly seen this split paradigm you suggest.

Which is probably because having a more DPS-focused healer isn't really possible unless the given healer is also more capable of rDPS (otherwise, you just shift priorities from maximizing offensive uptime --as when damage potential is more spread out-- to meeting offensive rhythmic checks --as when damage potential is more densely clustered into CDs/DoTs/infrequent_spenders), neither of which is any more DPS-focused than the other, exactly.

(And, in the ARR context, where pre-healing, MP management, etc., were more entwined, those opportune healing moments themselves on WHM contributed in mirror to a sense of DPS rotation. That, almost if not equally as much as the loss of the short-duration DoTs on WHM, is what makes Glare-spam so comparatively uninteresting relative to old Stone spam. [Yes, I stand by the idea that Cleric Stance had very little impact on that sense of 'rotation' unless one's latency and/or packet loss was especially bad, in which case... it reduced reasonably available nuance at least as much as it added to it, for a net increase primarily just in bloat and annoyance.])

And if one healer is capable of greater rDPS than the others... well, the best one can hope for is that the others are better than it in early prog before being replaced by it for farm; regardless, longevity of choice will be reduced.

[Aravell]

Misery's damage returns weren't increased because it was "log-unfriendly"; they were increased simply because otherwise WHM had lower free healing than other healers, which then meant that the devs' only other option --balancing its damage around that fact-- meant that WHM would be superior to other healers (other than SCH) in rDPS as soon as it could cut out even Lily heals, effectively making use of that excess healing potential by being compensated for it (much like the function of Energy Drain).

I'm aware that the change to Misery was made because most WHMs would just not heal at all because they lose so much damage (along with the MP issues that brings), I just completely disagree with the solution they decided on. Instead of making Misery damage neutral, they could've bumped up the potency to be 930, matching the damage refund that old Misery had, then cutting down on the amount of free tools the other healers have along with that. My main point is that free healing is limiting to the healer design, damage refunds give room for growth and improvement, making everything free does not give room for improvement.

I didn't mention Misery when I talked about log friendly changes, I only listed Misery under damage refunds, which I find to be a good system. Refunding some lost damage through things you had to do is a good system in my opinion, completely free damage is not a good system.

EDIT: I think it's best that I re-clarify. What I meant by log friendly changes being pushed is stuff like Macrocosmos and Pneuma. Normally, such impactful skills would require some amount of planning and come at an opportunity cost. Look at Deployment Tactics, it's incredibly powerful, you plan beforehand where you want to use it, and it has an opportunity cost (1 GCD spent on Adlo). Macrocosmos and Pneuma don't have any opportunity cost, they're basically another flavour of Malefic/Dosis with a powerful effect tacked on.