How to easily have healers dps engaged ( yet another thread)

[Sighearth]

Hello all, everyone here already knows that we want more engaging content, either by increasing healing requirement or giving more things to do (specially dps things). But instead of reworking entire jobs or adding a lot of stuff, I've come with the purpose to increase the level of engagement in a simplistic way. Something that the devs could do easily on a patch. Also without increasing the number of buttons we currently have.

I think WHM is in a good spot right now in that regard so I would leave it as it is. For the rest I would do something like this

For SCH: Just make SCH get a proc of Energy Drain ready (that makes your next ED consume no AF stack) when you spend AF stacks in healing. Every time you use Dissipation (while the buff is active) you can use 1 strong gcd named meltdown or something (dissipation button becomes meltdown for the duration) so you can actually have a burst phase (which is your dissipation) you can pool 3 EDs from AF + 3 EDs from dissipation + that strong gcd would feel good.

For SGE: Every time you heal someone with Kardia you increase your kardia gauge, you can spend 50 of this gauge to use a strong GCD something like Eukrasia phlegma that does damage + leaves a short dot (like 10s or so). Soteria also give +50% the amount of gauge. Rhizomata would give +50 gauge as well. So you would try maximize eukrasia phlegma dot uptime and in raid buffs.

For AST: Every card gives damage as it is now + an extra effect (not related to damage) so bole is like 10% mit, spear is like increased range (single target) (so you could help melee with uptime), ewer is mana (aoe mana), balance is a potent regen (single target), spire is movement speed (single target) and arrow is increased max HP (or give it like an Warden's Paean). Also I think we could have astrodyne giving a buff ( called black hole or something) that your next gravity II will do increased damage (a gain in single target) and require no cast time I think that would be pretty neat.

[ty_taurus]

Healing needs an overhaul, but this is more like throwing some new paint on a house with crumbling walls.

WHM is not in a good place balance wise nor gameplay wise. The lily system is a nice change of pace, but the job needs to bring the lilies down to early levels and expand on the system to make your GCD usage more evenly balanced between a slightly more developed rotation and utilizing lilies that reward you with bursty DPS refunds. The job also needs to have an answer to mitigation. If we want the pure vs barrier healer dynamic to survive, then sure its mitigation can be limited or come at an opportunity cost, but it simply doesn't have an answer to how damage is foundationally being handled in higher levels of content.

SCH needs a rework. It's confusing for new players to go from ACN to SCH, and the kit is bloated and at war with itself. It also should return to having a DoT focused DPS rotation like it once did, restoring tools like Miasma and Shadowflare, and its resources need to be reworked. The Fey Gauge is a disgrace to gauge mechanics and why does a job need 2 different resources for healing? Why not make the Fey Gauge your healing gauge and turn Aetherflow into your offensive gauge?

SGE is not a DPS healer and it should have a massive expansion of offensive tools or merging supportive tools with new offensive ones. It should feel like the GNB of the healers otherwise what was the point of advertising it as the DPS healer if it's going to play identically to every other healer?

AST is already known to be receiving an overhaul, to whatever extent the devs have planned. I've said it before, but I'd like to see its cards become GCD, its casting focus transition to support, and have the cards additionally generate passive, Malefic-potency damage through a new gauge mechanic. This gives thou-shall-not-DPS healers a job that may still need to maintain Combust and throw a few DPS buttons out once in a while, but can redirect a lot of their focus to spreading buffs.

[Mithron]

I miss Cleric Stance. Added commitment, coordination with other healer, and complexity to extremely simple DPS rotations. If you don't want to add more DPS buttons to healer, stance dancing was a great solution.

[AmiableApkallu]

To the original post:

The reason WHM has Lily heals feeding into Lily damage is because those Lily heals are GCDs. You can either Lily heal for the GCD, or you can Glare for the GCD, but not both.

None of the other healers is faced with that choice with their resources. Having their resources feed into damage is essentially buffing their damage, and that would need to be balanced, somehow.

[ty_taurus]

I miss Cleric Stance. Added commitment, coordination with other healer, and complexity to extremely simple DPS rotations. If you don't want to add more DPS buttons to healer, stance dancing was a great solution.

There's no choice in Stance Dancing. It was never your choice to go in or out of it. It was an obligation that required you to engage with it, and punished you for doing so. What gave old healers more engagement was a combination of more DPS buttons to work with and less OGCD healing to solve all your problems, making you have to rely on GCD heals and juggle your tools accordingly. The button you pressed before and after DPSing was not what made old healing fun.

[Sighearth]

To the original post:

The reason WHM has Lily heals feeding into Lily damage is because those Lily heals are GCDs. You can either Lily heal for the GCD, or you can Glare for the GCD, but not both.

None of the other healers is faced with that choice with their resources. Having their resources feed into damage is essentially buffing their damage, and that would need to be balanced, somehow.

Since the last patch Misery is dps neutral (have the potency of 4 glares) you don't need to choose you can lily away. Yes that would be a dps increase for healers so the numbers would need to be balanced

[flowerfairy]

For SCH: Just make SCH get a proc of Energy Drain ready (that makes your next ED consume no AF stack) when you spend AF stacks in healing. Every time you use Dissipation (while the buff is active) you can use 1 strong gcd named meltdown or something (dissipation button becomes meltdown for the duration) so you can actually have a burst phase (which is your dissipation) you can pool 3 EDs from AF + 3 EDs from dissipation + that strong gcd would feel good.

I think tying your burst damage spell to the ability that locks you out of your fairy doesn't feel great when you need that healing for whatever comes next. You'll might have to keep your AF or use a GCD which is already a DPS loss for SCH. IMO all healers need a rework no matter what if we're going to continue to have this style of endgame fights. The Energy Drain Ready proc sounds okay but it isn't enough to make up for the 1111111 gameplay.

[TheDustyOne]

While a decent effort, I feel like these would only occasionally break up the monotony every couple of minutes or so. I'd still rather see full reworks to healer dps kits, with every healer having their own mini rotation unique to them. I'd also like to see the main healing spells get more use and interaction with their respective kits rather than as something to avoid 90% of the time in favour of ogcd heals.

As a quick example, Scholar could go back to its DoT styled gameplay where it has to maintain multiple DoTs on different timers, and we could borrow Fester from SMN, make it a 30s cooldown with 2 charges, and have the potency be equal to a broil cast if all its DoTs are up. Good use of Adloquium (like making sure the shield breaks) would give back one charge of Fester, which would make Adlo dps neutral in theory. Something like this I think would be more interesting than having them all be Nuke + DoT with 4 very similar healing spells in each kit.

I'm sure a lot of people here would prefer something else, and the example I gave isn't the most thought out, but I'll take anything over nuke spam with ogcd heals at this point.

[Sani2341]

None of the other healers is faced with that choice with their resources. Having their resources feed into damage is essentially buffing their damage, and that would need to be balanced, somehow.

Only reason SGE doesn't have that choice is because Toxikon is not worth the GCD spent on the shield to gain addersting.
Which, tbh, was basicly the same place WHM was in for the longest time, but without being forced to use those GCDs to Heal anyways.

Which leads me to my counter idea for SGE:

Make Toxikon worth the heal investment. And immediatly you would increase the variety in gameplay for the job and thus engagement, bc now you'd be incentivized to have a GCD shield on the tank whenever it can break, at least up till you get full addersting stacks for the next burst.

[Renathras]

This gives thou-shall-not-DPS healers a job that may still need to maintain Combust and throw a few DPS buttons out once in a while, but can redirect a lot of their focus to spreading buffs.

In other words, it gives them nothing, because "thou-shall-not-DPS" healers hate DoTs/maintaining them? Though I do think buffing instead of DPS would be fun, good god, I hate DoTs. DoTs are the worst invention in any videogame ever. I don't mind DoTs if a Job is built entirely around their use (e.g. Warlock in WoW or something), but as just a tacked on "upkeep thing", they are the most obnoxious and uninspired mechanic ever, and I abjectly hate them. No, I don't want to have to squint at the boss health bar to see when that tiny little number is less than 3 and remember to press it again.

I'd rather have buffs with a single direct damage spell like Glare, Malific, or Ruin 2. No DoTs, please. Hell, one of my issues with healers right now is THEY ALL HAVE DOTS. It's THE EXACT SAME (in terms of DPS gain and duration) DoT, too!

I'd be perfectly happy if WHM got rid of Aero/Dia entirely and had a Ruin 2 movement/weave tool instead. That, a second party mitigation (I always feel like WHM needs a 60 sec or so partywide mitigation; make Asylum 60 sec and give it a damage reduction - blahblah stepping on Sacred Soil's toes, whatever, it would be true to the name Asylum and it needs SOMETHING for when Temperance is on CD), and I'd be happy with the Job. Maybe rework FreeCure into a 25% chance proc when you use Cure 1, Cure 2, or Glare to proc a free, boosted damage thing (like how old SMN had Ruin 2 proc Ruin 4 randomly, before they tied that to Egi Assaults) to kind of mix things up some so when you're casting Cure 1 or Cure 2 you have a chance to be refunded with a boosted instant cast damage spell, and every 3-6 Glare casts, the proc would give you a reason to hit that second dps button instead.

I'd MUCH rather have that than Dia as a DoT.

But yeah, a second party mitigation (either an existing spell or a new one), and removing the DoT but trading it in for an instant cast movement tool that can also be proc'd into a more powerful version for a dps gain over Glare/a partial damage refund for having to cast Cures would basically fix WHM entirely for me.