The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[ForsakenRoe]

They don't allow shield stacking precisely because it can cause some funny business with cheesing mechanics, and they don't really want that. Because of diminishing returns and multiplicative (rather than additive) stacking, mitigation has a far lower risk of that. Sure you CAN mitigate the heck out of a mechanic, but then (a) you've used up all your mitigation at once and (b) diminishing returns prevent outright negating entire mechanics. I don't disagree it could lead to fun mechanics, but that's what the Devs are...largely avoiding... <_<

Context matters. Negating the Damage Down in E10S for the wall-orbs (for uptime) is clearly cheese and not intended. Negating the Ifrit KB via shielding is memes, because it's not a threat, just a mild inconvenience. Negating the same Ifrit KB, but in UWU, is the intended strategy for the fight. It's 'cheesing the mechanics' only because the design wasn't made with it in mind. But if it WAS made with it in mind, then it's no longer cheese. It's the intended solution. There may need to be a clear indication that 'hey if you have a shield up for this mechanic, you can negate it/not get a debuff/it's a good idea to' for newer players to understand the concept, but maybe not. After all, how many people completely ignore all the interject-able casts in the game

[Liam_Harper]

They don't allow shield stacking precisely because it can cause some funny business with cheesing mechanics, and they don't really want that.

It's worth noting that the only shields that can't stack are barrier healer GCD shields. Basically, Eprog. They added a shield to Holos that's almost as much as a plain Eprog. Neutral Sect shields also stack with Spreadlo.

I'm quite certain that allowing Eprog to stack with Galvanize won't make the slightest difference when we already have Spreadlo and a huge range of stackable mit, oGCD shields and tank lb. There are no lethal mechanics you can skip or ignore by adding a Zoe Eprog to the current selection. We can already stack ridiculous shields and mit and Eprog is a drop of water.

Really, they don't have a legitimate reason. They just don't want to change it. Same with many other outdated things on healers, their tiny job design team is already strained simply lining up SGE/WHM and PLD with the 2 minute burst window and heal reworks are bottom priority.

[Deceptus]

They don't allow shield stacking precisely because it can cause some funny business with cheesing mechanics, and they don't really want that.

Yet Macrocosmos completely invalidating certain raid mechanics is perfectly fine (heavy /s)

[Gember]

Yeah I keep telling some of my FC mates that the healer role is very "situational". Even doing the same fight is gonna be different depending on the players in the party. Take day 1 alliance raid. The new one recently stirred the community some because some groups breezed through the content while other groups really put up a struggle. Thus healers work very different in those two types of groups, and its the same across the board with all content. I don't EVER expect a healer to do a complicating DPS rotation while they are in a very high maintenance group. I've already got hounded by some statics to do more damage while they still make mistakes in savage content. Its almost like you can't win as a healer, so the feedback is not helping at times.

[Renathras]

Uh...I'm not sure WHM's value in fights was because once every 60 seconds it could cleave 2 adds for around 1200 potency (once all buffs factored in) Misery.

WHM's value in ShB was its raw healing (pre-nerf Thin Air Cure 3 spam made anything that didn't outright kill the party and that people could stack for entirely survivable, largely by WHM solo spamming Cure 3) and WHM's consistent DPS in the pre-2 min meta buff world where sustained consistently high damage actually was more relevant than high burst buff window damage and said buffs.

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As for MCH: For most PF groups, the team as a whole isn't above 50%, so MCH's damage was comparable. Moreover, with lower skilled parties (the average in PF and in random ques), a decent MCH was doing comparable overall damage to a decent DNC/BRD if they were in a party of low-gear middle-to-scrub level players (e.g. the average playerbase)

In other words, MCH was the better option to the average player party. You know, those people who don't know what the Balance is and eat crayons while waiting for their ques to pop. But because the meta said it was trash, people who were WELL below the meta even mattering were ditching it for DNC/BRD even though MCH would have brought their party more damage in the content they were running (stuff like HydEx farm parties and the like).

It's in the party's favor to have a DNC/BRD if the party collectively is anywhere above 60%. It's not if they're collectively below 40%.