The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Renathras]

Sorry for the late responses.

All good.

1 - Other than Twin Emperors in Vanilla, I'm not sure Warlock has ever had a fight where they were SUPPOSED to be a tank. I'm not even sure if they were EXACTLY supposed to be for that fight so much as their kit just worked for it, so it was a lucky coincidence. But there was a point before Warlords, I think, where for a patch there was a glyph for Demonology where they could basically use their transformation as a tanking stance and legitimately tank 5 man dungeons, and some people played around with them doing harder stuff. Sorta like Enhance tanking (which worked up to level 40-45 or so in Vanilla and which someone tanked Uldar with in Wrath...but with the entire raid party supporting that). Unfortunately, it was yet another case where Blizzard decided fun was unacceptable and had to be nerfed. Then they made Demon Hunter as basically the same thing... <_<

2 - Maybe, but I don't mean armor types. Melee vs Ranged vs Caster. Arguably within each there is a further subdivision with each having a selfish Job (SAM, MCH even now, BLM), and then ranges of utility. Ranged (even MCH) are pretty clearly designed for a shoehorned Support Role in a game that refuses to have a Support Role. Each of the other sub-roles have support leaning members, though it's most obvious with Casters having RDM and SMN falling somewhere in the middle. It's not flawless, but it's far more noticeable and impactful than "Pure/Barrier" (which has been an utter failure to the point SCH/SGE is downright common) or "Main Tank/Off Tank" from ShB, which worked so poorly they dropped it. The only "real" Healer sub-role right now is "buffs the party" or "isn't meta outside of niche cases", with WHM getting the shortest end of that stick.

3 - Yeah, I figured SB would be your peak. I was just wondering if you disliked ARR SCH or just liked it...less, I suppose?

4 - I feel like an anchor that moves isn't...really an anchor. Maybe we mean something different with that term. Like on WHM, PoM is an anchor to me. On SCH, Chains Strategem. On RDM, Embolden. NOT Manification. Manification has a 110 sec CD and should not generally be held (optimally) for Embolden because this can cost you a use over the fight, meaning you intentionally drift it to the left out of buff windows. It can't be an anchor because it moves. Embolden, on the other hand, is optimally used on CD (whether or not it lines up with your melee/burst combo) instead of being used selfishly. Embolden is an anchor because it stays in the same place and, as long as you're using it on CD (which you should) gives you a static point of reference and you can use its CD or coming off CD as a metric to know about where you should be in your rotation, where the party is in theirs, if you have a potion window coming up, and can use it for those "Okay, so in about 20 seconds, the Boss should start using X mechanic..." reference points. SOOOO...perhaps we just mean different things by this term, I guess? (Also agree Lucid is dreaming - just bake the MP regen into our base stats at this point, SE... <_< "Oh, you can use it for recovery after you've been Raised!", yeah, but not if it's on CD because of you keeping it relatively on CD if you died at all recently after using it.)

[Shurrikhan]

I'm not even sure if they were EXACTLY supposed to be for that fight so much as their kit just worked for it, so it was a lucky coincidence.

Hard to tell back then. Which was maybe even a little charming in its own right.

But there was a point before Warlords, I think, where for a patch there was a glyph for Demonology where they could basically use their transformation as a tanking stance and legitimately tank 5 man dungeons, and some people played around with them doing harder stuff.

There was. Granted, one could also tank 5-man dungeons as a Beastmastery Hunter even go 5-DPS some 3 or more among Ret/Feral/Arms/Enhance/Frost (DK) back in the day, so long as the team was skilled enough. I suppose things managed to be more free back then even without necessarily increasing lenience, just due to there being less passive eHP bloat or such absurd active eHP peaks on tanks for that content to necessarily be tuned around.

Arguably within each there is a further subdivision with each having a selfish Job (SAM, MCH even now, BLM), and then ranges of utility.

Kinda, but that's only relevant to single-target buffs. Without a DNC or AST, there's really no difference between having a pure exploiter (SAM, MCH, BLM) or just taking yet another buffer.

Ranged (even MCH) are pretty clearly designed for a shoehorned Support Role in a game that refuses to have a Support Role.

Agreed, and it's a mess. I feel like that mostly comes down to their failure to ever actually make meaningful management out of MP (or even get close to that outside of maybe a couple fights within very particular eras) or, even more obviously, TP, instead leaving it solely as an unlikeable starvation for TP and MP users just to give BRD/MCH something to weave into their periods of low throughput. MP/TP were a decent Phys. Ranged mechanic, but they've never been a game mechanic, only a poorly implemented constraint.

It's not flawless, but it's far more noticeable and impactful than "Pure/Barrier" (which has been an utter failure to the point SCH/SGE is downright common) or "Main Tank/Off Tank" from ShB, which worked so poorly they dropped it. The only "real" Healer sub-role right now is "buffs the party" or "isn't meta outside of niche cases", with WHM getting the shortest end of that stick.

On a broader point, I feel like the game simply needs to decide whether they want (A), effectively, a few shades each of 4 jobs, or if they want (B) as many jobs as appear separately in their list.

If the latter, they may have to facilitate multileveling and simply accept that, depending on one's state of progression and what all others can bring to the table, some jobs may be advantaged over others within a given fight and that may be okay as long as, across the whole of time spent in these various fights, there's still a decent parity in value.

At that point, btw, something like your thought-experiment Support/Pure Healer distinction wouldn't be so bad. (I'd just still prefer to stay away from any such sub-role templating for the same reason I'd prefer to stay away from virtually any and all templating, and would have preferred, even, that we had kept WAR and PLD distinct and simply instead worked out the obvious balance oversights that plagued Warrior at the time.)