How to easily have healers dps engaged ( yet another thread)

[Renathras]

HeALeRs shOULd HeAL oNLy, every time.

ExCePt lItErAlLy nO oNe sAiD ThAt aT AlL.

EDIT: Seriously, SHOW ME where someone - anyone, but especially me - said "healers should heal only". Show me this direct quote. Or admit you're using a strawman fallacy and STOP doing it. Either is fine by me.

My two cents: If you want healers to engage more meaningfully with the healing portion of their toolkits, the first thing that needs to change is encounter design, i.e., the reason healers have those buttons in the first place.

The best, most practical suggestions I've seen so far for increasing outgoing damage from mobs and bosses are:

• Let auto attacks crit again.
• Let auto attacks continue through casts.
• Randomize who gets hit by auto attacks.

I gather that some or all of these used to be aspects of game play before I started playing. Regardless, unpredictability would keep healers from falling asleep while waiting for the next scripted raid wide or tank buster.

Oh I don't disagree with that.

But the encounter design has fallen into the trap of making the oGCDs the common used healing spells and GCDs the rare use emergency tools when most games (and most healer design) does the opposite and to better effect. MOST of our oGCD direct heals/HoTs have a GCD counterpart. The only weird ones are we don't have cast mitigation spells now that Protect (for what it was) is gone.

The big thing is to mix-up damage (instead of 30 sec of nothing then spikes of damage (oGCD through), 30 seconds of nothing which heavily encourages oGCD plans and not using GCD heals. I feel that design is partly driven by the oGCDs, though, as fewer oGCDs that were up less often would mean more smooth damage patterns since the spike system wouldn't work so well anymore for encounter design.