The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Renathras]

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Agreed. I'm not at all opposed to more complexity in healers as long as there's an out/escape for it that isn't "gimping your party/getting carried".

I would love to see SB SCH back, possibly with some PvP SCH for good measure. I love the way Adlo works with a spread and damage boosting mechanic and Bio with a reduced damage dealt that you can also cleave across the enemy party. I've thought for ages SCH should have an AF dump Divine Benison. When they removed ED in ShB, the problem wasn't "you couldn't optimize DPS anymore", the problem was "okay, so Soil and Excog are on CD, everyone's at 100% health, and I have 1 AF stack to burn before it comes off CD...what do I spend it on?" situations. There was nothing to do but just burn a Lustrate for funzies or, more correctly (since that would require either Ruin 2 or clipping a Broil), just sitting on the stack as you refreshed. Major "feelzbadman" from that. And I've thought for ages that Art of War should have some kind of tactical effect. I'm not sure WHAT - I thought Heavy but (a) that would make more sense for Gravity and (b) that could muck with tanks trying to do wall to wall pulls I guess...though arguably so can an early Swiftcast Holy... - with another alternative being Slow +10% or Vulnerability on the boss of some small amount - but those could also have complications. I'm not sure if those things have diminishing returns like Stun does, and it might be weird (even if they do) to have a meta of SCH using 3x Art of Wars every 1 minute or whatever in boss fights for the Vuln, lol. But I do feel it would be neat if it had SOMETHING, and that would also help differentiate it from Dyskrasia. Right now, the two are basically identical other than AoW doing 10 more potency and Dyskrasia working with Kardia (but since that's SGE's Eos, it's in practice not much of a distinction.)

I think they also need to acknowledge that Faerie Gauge is a total failure. It doesn't HAVE to be, but it is. If they had made Fey Blessing have no CD and just consume 30 gauge, that would have been the answer. But they seemed to not what SCH to be able to stock several AOE pulse heals, which is also a bit silly considering (a) all of SCH's other healing and (b) that Fey Blessing is one of their weakest potency AOE heals anyway. They could just remove it and make Aetherpact a toggle so you can use it like Kardia when you want to focus Eos or something. They also should probably do something with the anti-synergy between Dissipation, Seraph, Aetherpact, and <all Fairy abilities>, but I suppose at least some of that was SB accurate.

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Likewise, a lot of people loved AST. I've never been particularly partial to it, but I like that options exist. I think everyone agrees the Card simplification - while UNDERSTANDABLE given the way raiders tended to play and optimize at the time - was a mistake and a move in the wrong direction. Even PvP AST has figured this out. Ideally, there should be a way to make the "busywork/bursty" part of AST less likely to give people arthritis while also giving it back some flavor and a focus on buffing gameplay that people really enjoyed the interplay of.

Likewise, as I said above somewhere, there was no good reason to remove nAST. Misshapenchair is hardly the only or first person to mention it. If nAST was in the game today, it wouldn't be causing any realistic issues. Some people think they removed it to make SGE more attractive, but the two have markedly different, non-overlapping playstyles, and if anything, SGE plays far more like SCH than nAST anyway. This is a place they could essentially be adding "a 5th healer" without actually having to do any design work. Not to mention the disconnect now between AST's lore and AST's gameplay is pretty stark.

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There are so many little ways to make things better without revamping the entire system, and of course there's also ways they could make things better if they DID want to revamp the entire system. And there is a way they could do this with pleasing basically everyone.

I think right now, the Devs honestly don't know what to do with healers. They gave more oGCD heals because people asked for it, removed the damage interplay because some people asked for that, simplified systems because people either asked for it or (AST Cards) were playing like it anyway, etc. They've tried shoehorning all healers, together, into a single paradigm and are confused because people are always complaining and they have no idea how to please everyone because they're trying to make all healers fit into the same single mold at any given time.

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I'm thinking they should eliminate shield healers and regen healers being two diff kinds of healers and instead give every healer some form of direct heals, shield healing, regen healing and then to give each healer a distinct feel and play style have them focus on other things.

Not sure I agree with you on WHM or on every healer having the same healing kit (part of the distinctions between healers IS their healing kits being different). I think the Pure/Barrier split has been a failure, but that's just because (a) every healer needs mitigation the way raids are tuned now and (b) dAST and nAST were combined, so AST is a Pure healer with Barriers anyway.

Splitting dAST and nAST apart again and giving dAST and WHM one more mitigation would probably fix that.

But I do agree with the niches/specializations being a good direction to go.