The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[ty_taurus]

I don't disagree that many people play this way. However, many do not.

Ask Jonny Casual if he's thinking about the difference between a lost Glare or a dead DPS doing more damage than him when he casts Cure 2 or Raise and he will look at you in utter confusion. "When someone's dead, I Raise them. That's what healers do. When someone's damaged, I heal them so their health bar isn't as empty and they aren't as likely to die. That's what healers do."

The buff to Misery wasn't "players would not use lily healing for any other reason". It was "high end raiders trying to maximize their parse or clear tight Enrages would not use lily healing for any other reason". And it wasn't even true of all high end raiders. People were using Lilies before the change. Some where just complaining about it. A lot.

I think part of the problem with the language barrier here is you are accurately describing a portion of the player base and gamers in a more general sense. The problem isn't that you aren't accurately describing that part. The problem is you aren't accurately describing them/us all as a whole. You're describing a part and then extrapolating that part's view onto the whole, leading to confusion and a difficulty to understand and reconcile the disconnect when you run into someone that is from the part you aren't accurately describing. It also seems to cause you to believe the part you're describing is either the whole or at least such an overwhelming majority as to be functionally equivalent (in terms of how the game should be designed), when we don't actually have evidence to support that and, at the very least (again, the Lucky Bancho numbers: https://i.imgur.com/t6eJLaj.png ) have evidence showing a significant portion of the player base (at the very least a large minority) doesn't fit into that.

There are 3 realities about gamers that game designers need to understand and recognize:

1. There will always be a community of gamers that will discover the fasted road to victory, or the most efficient way to play. This community will seek out and attain "perfection."
2. There will always be many more who follow that community of gamers to reach the highest level of play; a few will reach that, but most will fall short somewhere along that road.
3. There will always be some gamers who are unaware of or who do not care about seeking "perfection" and will play whatever way feels most natural to them.

Good game design seeks to create an environment where all players who are interested in the particular genre can feel satisfied with the provided experience. Not all decisions that can be made in respects to how DPS determines healer gameplay along that road to max efficiency are inherently harmful to those in the group that are unaware or do not care, such as the example of Afflatus Misery. Making Misery DPS neutral may not have mattered at all to Jonny Casual, but what it did do is provide a QoL improvement to the WHM experience for those who seek perfection and those who obtain perfection both from a raiding perspective as well as a casual perspective, because now instances of afflatus healing and misery can be used in easier content comfortably.

And even if someone is not consciously thinking about the choices that yield the most damage as a healer, their actions are still supporting that regardless. Not every choice will be the "right" choice per say, but people are not healing their allies because every time you restore their HP, a star is obtained, and whomever has the most stars at the end of the fight wins.