The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[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.)

[ASkellington]

I'd rather see healing archetypes (regen healer/burst healer/shield healer/heal by damage) than this asinine dichonomy they stubbornly cling to. It clearly isn't working with how much all four borrow from each other (see SGE being a near copy pasted SCH).

It won't get rid of the overlap entirely, but it would make the healers feel more distinct than they do now.

[ForsakenRoe]

Agreed with Skel, there's no 'split' in the 7 healers in WOW like Pure/Barrier. The closest there is, is whether they're flagged internally as 'melee or ranged' healer for deciding mechanics. EG on Sludgefist, people are chained together. Snap the chain with distance, die instantly. Melee healers are linked to melee players, ranged healers to ranged players. Other than that, you've got 'cleric style club you with mace' Holy Paladin, 'Vanilla throughput' Holy Priest, 'Do damage to heal premiere' Disc Priest, 'weave between applying HOTs and extending them with physical violence' Mistweaver Monk, 'you have one direct heal, everything else is HOTs' Resto Druid, 'Totems and healing rain and chain heal, oh my' Resto Shaman, and the new kid on the block 'Time magic done really well surprisingly (plus some boring Green spells, they're boring though)' Preservation Evoker. They all work regardless of comp, you don't go 'Ah we have 2 throughput healers, we need a Disc for the shields' because that's not how WOW raid design works. There's no 'you mit this or you die instantly' kind of thing really, it's more 'you take 30% of your HP every second, pump like your life depends on it'. Because it does. Maybe you take certain healers for Mythic, because of their CDs like Aura Mastery or Spirit Link, but that's utility talk, and not to do with the way they deploy their HPS.

Maybe SE could do with less reliance on oneshot raidwides, that you have to Feint Addle Tactician Soil Succor and it STILL drops you to 20% week 1. This tier showed that people aren't so hot at dealing with them...

[Renathras]

I agree that WoW was far more charming back when there was more variation. Though it was more "casual" than Everquest (remembering that EQ had world boss fights that had to be fought in shifts because of how many hours it would take to beat them - like potentially multiple DAYS worth of HP bar...and I mean irl days with 70 people beating on them or whatever it was), it was still unpolished and unrefined. It eventually became a "themepark" probably late Wrath and into Cata, where the Devs wanted a far more curated experience, and that's when it started to lose its charm and eventually lost me. Like pre-Cata, Holy Priests would have many versions of the Heal Spell on their bar. This is because Heal Rank 3 would do less healing, but have a lower mana cost and maybe lower cast time. In fact, Lesser Heal, Heal, and Greater Heal were three names for the same thing. Lesser Heal had 3 ranks, I believe, with the last one at level 15 or so, and Heal rank 1 was basically a slight improvement on the same spell and picked up the track for 7 or 8 ranks before Greater Heal took over. But HPriests basically used the quirk of this system to make their own heals that they could tailor to the situation, using the right heal for the situation at hand.

...then Cata came and the Devs decided they new better, so there were no ranks, and there were just three kinds of basic heal every healer had - a medium cost, slow as Christmas cast big heal; a high cost, really fast, little heal; and a low cost, nearly as slow as Christmas, slightly larger heal. In addition to making healers heal like crap since the encounter designers forgot they were supposed to be going for a triage model, it also made healers samey, but perhaps worse, it took away player agency and all those little quirks. They eventually just did away with talent trees with that not really 100% true argument everyone used the cookie-cutter build, and then you were just hard-locked into a spec to do anything, which removed almost all of the quirks. The last ones were removed later, like when they split Feral and the new Guardian Druids.

WoW still had healer subroles - mainly tank healer vs party healer - but in trying to break that, they really just broke healers and never quite got them fixed to a way I liked before I quit playing.
.

Shurrikhan - Honestly, I don't DISagree with you on all that. We've kinda got designed into a corner at this point.

.

ForsakenRoe - That said, in WoW, this was once the case as well. Every 10 man in Wrath and Cata had either a Paladin or Disc Priest in a guaranteed slot as the tank healer. The other slot was taken by any one of the others as the raid/party healer. In 25 mans, it was GENERALLY expected that a raid team would have one of each healer. There was a little wiggle room on this, but having 5 healer slots tended to mean you did - Holy Paladin for tank healing, Disc Priest for kind of support healing, Resto Shaman for raid sustain with HoT rolling, Resto Shaman for raid burst healing, and Holy Priest for kind of "fill in" healing as it could do a little of all types. A lot of raid groups would carry 6 healers, and so when Fistweaving was added, they just had that as their 6th. You HAD to have them for the longest time because of their individual dispells, then they made it where 5 and 10 man content debuffs were all just the "Magic" type and they gave all the dispells the trait of dispelling their type (Paladin was Disease, Druid was Poison or Curse, I can't remember, Shaman the other, and Priest was...maybe Disease too, I don't remember, and there were some that had two types), and made them where they were for their one type + for magic, so they could all do the job in smaller group content (Priest had a slight advantage from AOE Dispell Magic), but in big raids, you were expected to have one of each and the Devs made debuffs of each type in encounters so if you didn't have one of each, you were kind of screwed.

.

There were a lot of things they did differently back then.

.

ASkellington - I've heard it said that the Pure/Barrier dichotomy doesn't work because Barrier Healers have to be able to heal (non-coordinated group content) even if there are 2x Barrier Healers. This ultimately makes Pure Healers redundant. Add to that the community's hyperfocus on damage > all and it means the community will largely pick Healers that do "enough" healing (all of them) and then pick the ones that buff damage after that. Leading to the AST/SCH meta.

Oddly, SCH/SGE was quite popular (mostly because they both heal by oGCDs and together they have a massive mitigation suit that they can chain to provide consistent mitigation for the party, which in turn can lead to safer prog runs and more consistent and reliable damage for farm runs) as an alternative. So this gives every healer a place other than WHM, because it has neither the buffs of AST nor the mitigation suit of SGE that clicks together like perfectly interlocking puzzle pieces with SCH.

So even now we don't have a system that's working. I hope the Pure/Barrier thing goes the way of the Main Tank/Off Tank thing. Either lean fully into it to make it work or abandon it. Half-assing stuff like that results in the system just entirely breaking down. And that's even if we ignore AST solo healing Ultimates. XD

[Shurrikhan]

I'd rather see healing archetypes (regen healer/burst healer/shield healer/heal by damage) than...

I guess my concern is that the pure/shield distinction is meant to be a distinction in result, or in what is uniquely provided, but what you're aiming to replace it with is only necessarily distinction in process.

For instance, a barrier healer theoretically provides {not dying from one-shot heal checks or to a further degree of vulnerability stacks} and a pure healer provides {not dying from repeated heavy damage}, but what does "heal via damage dealt" actually provide?

Healing through damage dealt is, in itself, only a constraint, so what's the reasonable compensation? Would it, as per examples from other MMOs, just be "slightly higher combined damage and healing if/when everything's going right"? Or would it simply be some other utility feature of the job that has nothing necessarily to do with that constraint anyways?

So even now we don't have a system that's working. I hope the Pure/Barrier thing goes the way of the Main Tank/Off Tank thing. Either lean fully into it to make it work or abandon it. Half-assing stuff like that results in the system just entirely breaking down. And that's even if we ignore AST solo healing Ultimates. XD

I don't feel like the present failings in how (un)equally attractive different jobs are for raiding are even because of that Pure/Barrier distinction, though. It's more a matter of their just not being enough (especially, GCD) healing to do for something like WHM to present any advantage outside of its single arbitrary bonus -- Afflatus Misery for multi-target burst.

I've heard it said that the Pure/Barrier dichotomy doesn't work because Barrier Healers have to be able to heal (non-coordinated group content) even if there are 2x Barrier Healers. This ultimately makes Pure Healers redundant.

I've heard the same, but... it doesn't really make any more sense than the idea that Pure Healers should be able to meet every mitigation check.

If either one brings something wholly unnecessary, they start to seem redundant, but, perhaps worse, if both are required then you have a very high chance of "Death by composition check," which would ruin any matchmade content unless it badly worsened an already bottlenecking queue by truly splitting it into those sub-roles.

Personally, I feel like the distinction, if it's to be drawn up roughly as it already is now, should simply come down to different particulars of ease. Pure Healers should be better able to salvage stepping in fire when you step in the fire. Barrier healers should be better able to keep you from dying (to unavoidable damage) because of having stepped in the fire almost a minute ago (via vuln stacks) and occasionally sacrifice their own would-be damage for others' uptime.

[ForsakenRoe]

Healing through damage dealt is, in itself, only a constraint, so what's the reasonable compensation? Would it, as per examples from other MMOs, just be "slightly higher combined damage and healing if/when everything's going right"? Or would it simply be some other utility feature of the job that has nothing necessarily to do with that constraint anyways?

I guess the answer to that I'd give is 'when you're playing good, your healing occurs naturally as you're doing your damage, you don't need to think about it because it's happening semi-automatically'. I say semi, because eg: with my SGE rework ideas, you'd have to press augments like Krasis or Zoe still. But they're OGCD, they don't cost damage to use, they just slot in as a weave and you carry on. In WOW terms again though, they're more akin to old Warrior's Heroic Strike, you can weave the button press OGCD, but it doesn't take effect until the next autoattack. So there's a difference in feel between it and something like Hamstring, which was a true OGCD.

One major thing is that, similarly to barrier healers atm to an extent, playing from behind on a 'damage to healing' healer can be rough. It's really hellish to try and stabilize as a Disc in current WOW, or a Holy Paladin. Which is why I tried to keep the lifeline of 'Prognosis/Diagnosis are MP free', so you have a reliable fallback if you need it. Playing well means you shouldn't need it, but if it all goes tits up, you're not up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

But one other reason to have it is just 'its a different style of healing', I guess. Why does Resto Druid layer loads of HOTs, when the sheer burst healing power of a GCD from a Holy Priest or a MW Monk do similar output, but without the 'wait for the ticks' thing? Different gameplay styles, more player choice, more engaging. Healing as a Resto Druid is very different to healing as a Holy Priest, is very different to Disc. Heck, just the fact that Holy and Disc are SO different, means swapping between the two can be nice just to spice up the gameplay

A phrase like 'heal by doing damage' can help be a vehicle for class identity. Like imagine the new healer had been Necromancer instead of Sage, with a heavy focus on keeping up debuffs on the enemy that cause HP drain effects, stealing enemy HP to fuel the job gauge, spending that stolen life force to heal allies. Now imagine that it played like 'WHM, but it holds a scythe instead of a staff', down to carbon copies of Lilies, Medica2, Asylum, Tetra, etc. We'd (rightly) be asking 'why is this WHM but with an edgy coat of paint', as we do re: Sage being conspicuously SCH shaped

[Shurrikhan]

I guess the answer to that I'd give is 'when you're playing good, your healing occurs naturally as you're doing your damage, you don't need to think about it because it's happening semi-automatically'.

But is that really an advantage, to let the job essentially "play itself" when things are going good?

That kind of seems like a worst of both worlds, especially given that a healer that cannot choose to purely heal or purely damage, but instead will always have their burst healing held back by the strength of their combined overall damage+healing output, will be far harder pressed whenever things don't go perfectly right?

Output, at least, I could see as being a feature, but being semi-automatic? Moreover, to even be that way, it'd need to have very little control over the timing of its damage, either, which would make it even worse off (and more akin to a DPS with the likes of a permanent Vampiric Embrace than akin to a Healer).

Why does Resto Druid layer loads of HOTs, when the sheer burst healing power of a GCD from a Holy Priest or a MW Monk do similar output, but without the 'wait for the ticks' thing?

They don't quite, though, at least for so long as I've been playing them (~8 years).

A Resto druid preemptively layering HoTs before its burst will certainly exceed the HPS of a Holy Priest or Mistweaver, especially in repeated cycles (since the Holy Priest will depend in large part on CDs), else there'd be no reason to take the HoTs (themselves a weakness, as the healing is less responsive). After all, the concern over in that game isn't just the total healing a HoT will do, but also how much HPS it can add. Because HoTs can be laid out before their HPS is actually needed and Resto Druids can layer their more direct healing and/or HoT-consumption atop that, they can leverage the compensation for that weakness into very high near-burst HPS.

And that, the high potential HPS that can't be easily exhausted through CD depletion, is the advantage they actually bring to the party, not the fact that they use HoTs.

A phrase like 'heal by doing damage' can help be a vehicle for class identity.

It can, absolutely. And I think it's essential that the means differ. Heavily. The jobs feel far too similar at present.

But again, if we're looking to keep each job competitive, which then has to do with the advantage each brings to a party, then that's a matter of the result, not just the means or vehicle it comes by.

I would like, therefore, to see also what intended advantages come from/with each job under these alignments/categorizations.



For instance, something like (though overly wordy and including undermechanics not in the game)...

• WHM - highest depth and breadth of indirect, non-rDPS utility (leading Cleanse efficiency and good Purge capacity via Water; Levitation, Downforce, and Swift via Wind; point-mitigation and knockbacks via Earth) and leading near-burst capacity (more sustained than a mere few seconds of healing, but far from constant HPS/DPS); best armor-buster; comparatively high survivability if not pinned down.
  
  
• SCH - greatest ability to turn combat in a directed way atop mitigating and/or predicting specific threats (forewarning on random targeting, more quickly exposed weaknesses, etc); can fire Leeched debuffs into enemies via Energy Spike; high accuracy, pinpoint attacks excel against breachable armor and fliers.
  
  
• AST - greatest point-support power and versatility, especially useful for supporting parties of unequal performance levels, atop considerable planned ally and enemy movement assistance through gravity manipulation (generally highly useful against especially heavy or light enemies; useful for Launching enemies otherwise two heavy or Grounding fliers).
  
  
• SGE - greatest combined healing and damage when things are going well, and especially well-suited for substituting the position of a physical combatant in terms of damage suppression or baiting mechanics; hypermobile, with excellent mild multi-tasking useful for mitigating the uptime costs of using certain forms of minor utility.

[ASkellington]

I guess my concern is that the pure/shield distinction is meant to be a distinction in result, or in what is uniquely provided, but what you're aiming to replace it with is only necessarily distinction in process.

For instance, a barrier healer theoretically provides {not dying from one-shot heal checks or to a further degree of vulnerability stacks} and a pure healer provides {not dying from repeated heavy damage}, but what does "heal via damage dealt" actually provide?

Assuming I've read this right - damage. Chloro in Rift for instance is more akin to what I'd like SGE to be (even if I think SGE shouldn't exist atm). You're debuffing the enemy to get your heals in Chloro's case, but that doesn't mean you have no tools to heal without them, they just take more mana to use, hence you can't spam it.

Pure/Barrier as I've said in another post can still work, but honestly its more of a limitation than my 4 playstyles. Case in point - SGE is a barrier healer and barely does anything different than SCH. AST could have been a stance switcher between Noct and Diurnal, but because we must have 2 pure 2 barrier, Noct is gone.

Frankly the split deserves to die if SE can't work with their own limitations to make 4 classes play different between each other. DPS don't have this problem (especially caster), and I'd argue tanks don't either (PLD vs GNB at least).

[ForsakenRoe]

But is that really an advantage, to let the job essentially "play itself" when things are going good?

That kind of seems like a worst of both worlds, especially given that a healer that cannot choose to purely heal or purely damage, but instead will always have their burst healing held back by the strength of their combined overall damage+healing output, will be far harder pressed whenever things don't go perfectly right?

Output, at least, I could see as being a feature, but being semi-automatic? Moreover, to even be that way, it'd need to have very little control over the timing of its damage, either, which would make it even worse off (and more akin to a DPS with the likes of a permanent Vampiric Embrace than akin to a Healer).

So, like Resto Druid or Disc Priest, the reason it'd be 'an advantage' is the gameplay feel. Setting up your HOTs on Resto for the big raidwide damage HPS check thing, then hitting that Flourish to double their output and watching the HPS bars just shoot up (especially with how HOTs tick way more often in WOW anyway) is satisfying to see. Likewise, other people might find the instant jump from 10% to 70% because of a well timed Power Word: Life on Holy Priest. The reason I think 'do damage causes heal' would be 'an advantage' is because, atm, we have a very large disconnect between our healing and our damage, when it comes to GCDs. It's jarring to swap from our damage kit to our 'pump HPS for JWaves' kit. With a proper 'do damage, causes healing' kit, the two would be much more intertwined, and feel a lot more fluid.

Vampiric Embrace is interesting-ish, but not quite what I'm thinking of. Like, I was playing Guardian Druid in DF, and we now have a talent called 'After the Wildfire'. Every time I spend 200 Rage, I explode a burst of healing (about 60k in my gear) to all around me. Which is nice, but that is what I'd call semi-autonomous. I can't control when it goes off, it's happening at times pretty much out of my control, and I'd have to purposely play bad to get it to be timed right (not using Ironfur just to get it timed right). No, maybe I worded it wrong and that's MB. When I said 'semi-autonomously' re: SGE, I meant more like 'when you're playing correctly, it's happening alongside the damage'. You're still having to do Disc/Resto style 'set up' windows before the damage comes in. There's still 'choice' about what to use, and when. But when you are 'optimized', it's something you're not thinking about per se, as you're doing it instinctively. And since the effects I went for in my suggestion last only 4 hits (but can be used as much as you want, as long as you have the MP to fund it), VE's not exactly the most accurate comparison. It's more akin to setting up Atonements on Disc, I guess. But instead of lasting X seconds, I made them last X attacks.

And yeh, I guess theoretically, the SGE doing their healing via damage isn't covering everything in the raid, just as they don't now. They'd still have to rely on the cohealer for some things. As an example, let's take a raidwide, idk Hemitheos' Dark IV in P6S. Big damage, no bleed. As it stands, one Ixochole and one PI Rapture, and it's sorted. So, what if instead, we had the SGE able to PanKardia/Krasis/Soteria to cause some healing when they do damage? This way, we instead can go Ixochole, 'maybe' a Rapture (the SGE damage-heal might cover it if there's enough augments used) and therefore the WHM can keep their PI for something else. Or we could go Asylum/SGE damage-healing, and the Kardia heals are all buffed by the Asylum, meaning the burst healing of Ixochole and PI Rapture are still available for something else (in prog, very handy). The 'reward' is that your combat flow isn't going to get interrupted by having to press Eukrasian Prognosis, if you're skilled enough to cover it via the 'damage causes healing, which causes shielding' augment (I forgot which one I assigned that to, maybe it's Zoe)

[Renathras]

I don't feel like the present failings in how (un)equally attractive different jobs are for raiding are even because of that Pure/Barrier distinction, though. It's more a matter of their just not being enough (especially, GCD) healing to do for something like WHM to present any advantage outside of its single arbitrary bonus -- Afflatus Misery for multi-target burst.

Well, what it is is that Barrier healers HEAL TOO MUCH. For the Pure/Barrier distinction to have any meaning, the way it should work is that Barriers are required to minilevel fights, but that they are balanced as regards the Pure healers to do far less healing. Pure healers should do more healing than Barrier healer's heals + shields + mitigation multiplier, with the trade-off that they can't survive one-hit-KO/full health bar level attacks and/or their heals and MP economy should be better. When Barrier healers have to go all out on healing, their DPS should tank and they should be hard limited by MP while the Pure healers should have the opposite issue that they can't smooth damage and so HAVE to shift away from damage to healing more frequently but have the ability to deal with those greater spikes of damage and can continuously cast GCD healing tools for extended periods without going OOM.

That is, Pure healers should have raw power and sustainability at a moderate cost to damage (until the party overgears content and they need only token healing output) while Barrier healers should have mitigation smoothed damage spikes and better damage (when things are going well but the content hasn't been overgeared) with the tradeoff of losing more damage when they are forced to heal and not being able to sustain it as long.

This would actually make bringing one of each sensible and actually make the dichotomy make sense.

A simple example:

Suppose a Barrier healer had one 10% damage reduction ability, a 100 potency (let's say worth 100 HP) shield, and a 200 potency heal. This means that in terms of effective HPS, if they have a party member with 100 HP and a tank doing an attack of 100 HP, their party member will survive with the mitigation (taking only 90 HP worth of damage) and their 100 shield placed can also protect the party member (eating all the damage), and if they use both, the party member will be at 100% health with a further 10 HP shield. On average over a given fight using these abilities, the Barrier healer here will effectively provide a total of 300 potency worth of healing between the heal and the shield (assuming shields are 100% used up), and by mitigating damage by 10%, this makes an effective x1.1 to their healing (or something akin to that, might be 1.09, but same ballpark). This means they are, on average, providing 330 healing, and party members will not die to a hit of anything less than 190 HP since they can shield and mitigate it, and then 200 heal immediately after it with their direct healing spell. Note this also works if you flip the heal/shield portion to be a 100 heal with 200 shield.

Now, suppose a Pure healer has no damage reduction ability and just a 300 potency (let's say worth 300 HP) heal. Their party members must always have more HP than the attack in order to survive it. Their HP pools must be bigger than any unavoidable raidwide (not always true in minilevel gear). Assuming they are, boss hits must consistently strike for 300 for this healer to not be overhealing, and even if they did, the Barrier healer described above does 330 effective healing anyway. So this healer is only useful when there is consistent high damage, and its heal must be tuned to be 330 or greater (say 400) before it actually is appreciably more useful in that role than the Barrier healer. And that's ignoring things like Pepsis exist.

Granted, our healing kits are far more complex, but the example shows that mitigation makes up for raw healing in terms of effective HP [eHP] and that enemies need to reliably out damage that WITHOUT one-shoting party members AND the Pure healer needs to have a greater combined total healing potency than the Barrier healer's (heal + shields) x mitigation multiplier.

In live, a SGE can output NEARLY the healing numbers of a WHM absent Cure 3 spam. At its worst, Ixochole is as powerful a heal as Assize and up more often, Kerachole is approximately equal to Asylum and up more often (shorter duration but can be reapplied 3x per every one Asylum), augmenting that with Physis creates ROUGHLY as much healing over time as a WHM maintaining Medica 2 consistent uptime, Eukrasia Diagnosis (when it doesn't crit) is 300 potency of heal + 540 potency of shield = 840 vs Cure 2's 800 potency and Pepsis can not only turn that shield into a 450 potency cure but can do so every 30 seconds AND can do so even 1 potency/1 HP point of the shield is remaining, meaning this could be as much as a 1,239 potency heal. Holos matches Temperance pretty well with yet another barrier, Panhaima matches Lilybell with a shorter CD, standard Prognosis (300) is 3/4ths of a Medica (400) at 8/9ths (800 MP vs 900 MP) the cost, with the Eukrasia version is a 100 cure + 320 shield, for 1.05x a Medica (420 vs 400) at the same 900 MP cost, and can be Pepsi converted into a further 350 potency heal, making it up to 769 potency AOE, which is nearly twice a Medica's power. Medica CAN be buffed by Plenary, but only once per minute (instead of Pepsi twice) and only gains 200 Cure potency per Medica, making it 600 vs up to 769.

Solace and Rapture are Cure 2 and Medica that are instant and MP free, but gated by only once per 20 seconds. They ARE damage neutral, but SGE is also getting 170 potency of healing every damage spell cast, meaning every 3 Dosis (510) is effectively casting Cure 1 (500) on a target with no DPS loss; every 5 is 850 potency, or greater than a Cure 2 (note Cure 2 costs 1,000 MP to cast). And this is all free healing with Kardia being swappable every 5 seconds.

And I'm not 100% on the math, but I think SCH makes this even more absurd.

Point is, the Barrier healers have as much, comparable, or more healing than the Pure healers do. Further, their mitigation not only makes this healing more useful (eHP multiplier), but also allows parties to survive what would kill them. For the Pure/Barrier split to even make sense, Pure healers would need to not only outheal the Barrier healers, but do so by a fair margin. That is, for every 100 HP a SGE can heal, due to the eHP multiplier, a WHM needs to heal 110 HP just to be even with it.

ALTERNATIVELY, the Pure healers could be more efficient. Sure, Medica 1 and Eukrasia Prognosis may be comparable in healing, but if Medica 1 cost 500 MP, then WHM would clearly have the upper hand in MP management and sustain/spam healing...but it doesn't. With the Thin Air nerf in particular removing the Cure 3 spam option, which is what WHM had over SCH and AST in ShB. Not only that, but SGE has better MP and even gets refunded MP by using its oGCD heals, encouraging their use. For this version of the paradigm to work, it would need to be WHM and AST that have the MP efficient heals and better MP management, and SCH/SGE oGCD mitigation tools and shields would all need to have MP costs and be MP expensive so that their use had to be carefully monitored.

As it is right now, SGE can cast 2 Kerachole's per minute offering 10% mitigation to the party, 500 potency worth of 100 potency per 3 sec HoT ticks, and it even refunds the SGE 7% of its MP. This is 1,100 eHP potency and 14% MP regen. Conversely, WHM casting Medica 2 2x a minute is 500 potency of cure and 150 x 10 potency of HoT, or 1,300 total potency (but lacking the "damage mitigation saves lives from being one-shot), and COSTS 2,000 MP or 20% of the WHM's MP pool. While it's true the WHM can do this 4 times, doubling these numbers, it also doubles the cost. 40% of the WHM's MP would be comsumed doing this, as well as 4 GCDs, while SGE is generating + 1,400 MP and able to do 1,350 potency of Dosis damage and generate 680 potency (basically a Tetra's) worth of healing on their Kardia target in the process.

And this comparison holds looking across most of SGE vs WHM's toolkit (note I'm not bringing up SCH because it has more or less the same toolkit as SGE with a few extras AND a party damage boost from Chain Strat; but basically the comparison with SGE is "Same thing, but even more.") Barrier healers have comparable healing to Pure healers but also bring additional mitigation and HP buffer shielding to the table. And because of how more useful percent mitigation is alone (ignoring shields) Pure healers have to be able to do a lot more outright healing, and it needs to be more efficient, to make up for this.

AST KIND of escapes from this because it has a 400 Potency shield every 30 seconds from Celestial Intersection while matching WHM's one party mitigation with Collective Unconscious which is available twice as often as Temperance is, and still has Exaltation to match Aquaveil.

The game has two Barrier healers, one Semi-Barrier healer (which also has the best MP economy in the game), and one Pure healer that has heals that aren't really stronger than anyone's, far less mitigation, and it doesn't even have the MP budget to routinely access those powerful heals without going OOM anyway.

In effect, WHM's heals should all have their MP cost slashed in half and made damage neutral OR SCH/SGE barriers and mitigation oGCDs should have an MP cost on them. And I'm not saying this by way of suggestion (I don't know that it's a good idea at all to do it), I'm saying this by way of "for it to be balanced". Alternatively, WHM should get a second mitigation/half CD on Temperance and a party Barrier effect of some kind, possibly from Plenary. Plenary's 200 potency on every AOE GCD heal for 10 seconds creating barriers that stacked instead (or even that didn't) would be kind of interesting, and basically just an inefficient Panhaima with more steps, and math out to ~800 potency party wide barrier every 60 seconds. But it would at least be something and wouldn't be homogenizing too much since it would still be pretty distinct.

If either one brings something wholly unnecessary, they start to seem redundant, but, perhaps worse, if both are required then you have a very high chance of "Death by composition check," which would ruin any matchmade content unless it badly worsened an already bottlenecking queue by truly splitting it into those sub-roles.

I think that's the reason they made Barrier healers so strong in healing, so that for anything less than Extremes (matchmaking doesn't do Extremes, Savages, or Ultimate unless you specific que, and most people use PF since coordination is needed anyway), it's irrelevant. That's why 24 mans routinely will make the parties something like WHM/AST, SCH/SGE, SGE/SGE instead of taking the WHM or AST from Party A and swapping them with one of the SGEs from Party C. It's just so irrelevant it doesn't matter.

Personally, I feel like the distinction, if it's to be drawn up roughly as it already is now, should simply come down to different particulars of ease. Pure Healers should be better able to salvage stepping in fire when you step in the fire. Barrier healers should be better able to keep you from dying (to unavoidable damage) because of having stepped in the fire almost a minute ago (via vuln stacks) and occasionally sacrifice their own would-be damage for others' uptime.

This is a possibility, but I think it goes to the above. WHM GCD heals are too MP inefficient to make that work, and they're sacrificing a lot of DPS to do them. Making WHM GCD heals damage neutral via Misery and half MP cost would actually make what you say above a reality.

WHM should either have the most efficient heals in the game OR the largest (or both). It really doesn't. All its non-Lily GCD heals are comparable at best to the other healers while costing as much or more MP. You can point to Lilies, but Lilies aren't up all the time and are just MP free versions of Cure 2 and Medica, which other healers match with their oGCD suite. A 600 potency Durchole (or Lustrate) can be weaved after a Dosis (or Broil), both of which also have an average of 1 generated per 20 seconds (and SGE can bet +1 every 90 seconds or +2 per 3 mins with Rhizo and SCH able to get +3 per 3 mins with Dissipation), both SCH and SGE's generating MP, and SGE also gets 170 heal potency more from their Kardia, making their version better than a Tetra weave and ALMOST as good as a Cure 2 (DPS loss) or Solace GCD. And there's a similar argument with them having an answer for Rapture with Indom + Sacred Soil (also 3 uses per min, +3 every 3 mins) or Ixo + Kerachole (also 3 uses per min, +2 every 3 mins via +1 every 90 secs). So even its "efficient" heals that refund the GCD are exceeded by the two Barrier healers healing. And not, this is raw potency only, I'm not counting Sacred and Kera's 10% damage reduction here, which makes things even more lopsided.

WHM's heals are not bigger, and not more sustainable, and outside of Lilies, cost it damage to use, while also not offering the superior advantages of mitigation. The ONLY exception is Cure 3 if you need to spam it, but that is ONLY raw healing and not sustainable between the MP cost and loss of old Thin Air, and is a DPS loss to boot.

.

We don't have a Pure/Barrier split. We only have one Pure healer. AST is effectively a Barrier healer, too (which also has buffs). And when that one Pure healer's heals are no bigger than the others while also lacking in mitigation and having no advantage in MP economy or sustained healing, and the fights don't work that way anyway, the system entirely breaks down, imo.