A summary of healer issues

[hunkygladiator]

Incoming damage cannot be increased because it'll kill raiding as a whole, look how few healers there have been this tier with the increased pressure on healers. If casual content requires healers being remotely competent then firstly it'll be hilarious and secondly the role will be even deader.

The gameplay loop of healers is entirely wrong for the game. Both other roles interact with their niche through damage - which with timed enrages is all that matters. Aggro is generated through damage, or healing at a push, and bloodwhetting, TBN and vengeance all combine damage with sustain. HW warrior even took this a step further with abandon stacks being generated from vengeance/raw intuition. Healers have energy drain and lilies. Kardia doesn't even count because it's just a fairy that can't be relied on when you need to gcd heal.

Lol the high end healers I know mostly quit because healing got mind-numbingly boring. Since ShB. Not because there's pressure.

[fulminating]

Lol the high end healers I know mostly quit because healing got mind-numbingly boring. Since ShB. Not because there's pressure.

It's amazing really. They're too boring for competent players and the slightest bit of challenge makes them too difficult for the lower end. You couldn't design a system like this intentionally.

[Kickwars]

It's amazing really. They're too boring for competent players and the slightest bit of challenge makes them too difficult for the lower end. You couldn't design a system like this intentionally.

Honestly they should just cater to the top-end while minimizing the damage gap between the skill floor and the skill ceiling. Technically you can just win everything below Ultimate by using only Cure II, Regen, and Medica II (in Savage, once you get +20 ilvl gear). Back in HW if you were a newbie healer you just choose to NOT use Cleric Stance. Sure people gave you crap for it but most people didn't begrudge a sprout healer not using Cleric Stance. Same goes for tanking. You can just stay in tank stance the entire fight even in Savage. Elitists will give you crap but most people don't care. Everything was clearable with perma tank stance more or less.

There are ALWAYS options for very simple gameplay on a complex class. Don't like caster bard? Literally just don't toggle Minuet. Don't like positionals? Just... don't hit them? They literally don't matter in 99% of content? Don't like HW/SB astro cards? Just use Spire and Ewer on yourself and use the other cards randomly. Don't like Summoner pet micros and DoTs? Just only ever use Tri-disaster, don't bother with manual DoTs and use Garuda for everything and let it auto-use abilities. The pressure certainly isn't coming from the game. I honestly think it comes from two sources: one from elitists who scold people for not playing optimally. But just ignore them, they'll scold you for not standing behind the Reaper so that the buffs cascade to the Reaper first before you these days which probably makes like a 1 rDPS difference, so who cares? The other from people wanting to hit top damage but not wanting to put in the effort. I mean, I don't know why we want to cater to the latter type in any way.

The solution that SE implemented though, is to homogenize and simplify everything. An actual competent solution would be to minimize the damage gap so that people who don't want to engage with the extra optimization would be at most 5% DPS behind or something, as long as they're rolling their GCDs. That's basically what EW BLM was in 6.0/6.1 (not sure about now). There was the meme Paradox rotation that was less than 5% dps behind the standard rotation. People who want to play BLM casually should literally just use that instead of complaining about transpose lines and whatnot.

I know the real casual players certainly don't complain about stuff like TK+Riddle of Wind or positionals or tank/damage stance. At least I've never encountered any. They probably don't even know it exists. So why are these removed? I can only conclude that it's to appease the wannabe raiders who want to be part of the """elite""" without putting in the work. Majority of people on JP actually does Savage, but are not quite at the top level. It's probably these guys that are the real culprit than WoWfugees or casuals or elitists honestly (I know, I know about that other shitpost). SE doesn't listen to NA. These same JP players were on perma-WHM brain rot in SB so much that SE overbuffed AST, and WHM was basically never really a hard class. In retrospect we should've all seen it coming, when JP just can't get rid of its WHM addiction year after year; of course the developers will just turn everything into a WHM.

[Absurdity]

Lol the high end healers I know mostly quit because healing got mind-numbingly boring. Since ShB. Not because there's pressure.

Both you and fulminating aren't contradicting each other though.

The majority of competent healers had left a long time before 6.2 so the increase in pressure this raid tier destroyed healer participation for savage, because the healers that still remained were incapable of dealing with it and just gave up. And who can blame them when they had an easy time for an entire expansion? Heal checks in ShB were a joke, so all these new healers ever knew was basically getting a free savage carry by spamming 1 and occasionally an oGCD to solve any incoming damage... until they suddenly hit a brick wall in the current raid tier.

It was so bad you could notice it on any role, I stopped counting the amount of times I died to autos as a tank because the random pug healers neither expected nor were able to deal with the increase in tank damage compared Asphodelos.

[Silver-Strider]

Both you and fulminating aren't contradicting each other though.

The majority of competent healers had left a long time before 6.2 so the increase in pressure this raid tier destroyed healer participation for savage, because the healers that still remained were incapable of dealing with it and just gave up. And who can blame them when they had an easy time for an entire expansion? Heal checks in ShB were a joke, so all these new healers ever knew was basically getting a free savage carry by spamming 1 and occasionally an oGCD to solve any incoming damage... until they suddenly hit a brick wall in the current raid tier.

It was so bad you could notice it on any role, I stopped counting the amount of times I died to autos as a tank because the random pug healers neither expected nor were able to deal with the increase in tank damage compared Asphodelos.

And this is exactly why increasing the amount of healing required also doesn't work. You have 90 levels worth of content that healing is easy enough that you can get by with the bare minimum in most cases and still compete it. Hell, there's a short clip of a P4S run where the WHM was literally Medica 2 Spamming during the last 8% of the fight.

THIS IS NOT A JOKE.

There is no excuse to be casting Medica 2 back to back like this man was but here he was, in the final fight of the last raid tier, doing exactly that. This is how low the bar of entry is for savage that this type of player could get that close to clearing the raid tier by using Medica 2 spam.

This tier may as well have been Goridas levels of difficulty for this type of player that it really isn't a wonder at all why Healer participation wasn't particularly high this time around. I have no doubt this type of player struggled and probably quit the savage tier entirely, along with any other healer that fell back on their Medica 2 spam as their primary crutch because there was probably no way for them to handle it. Now imagine this type of player being asked to do even the slightest bit more healing in average content and I just don't see it ending well at all.