Thread: 7.0 Healer Redesign Developer Comments

Originally Posted by Seraphor

1. The nonsense in the first post. Literally catastrophising rubbish.
2. All of the responses along the lines of "OMG so true TC" "yep I can totally see this happening" "hit the nail on the head".
Just pure circle jerk.


I get the gripes with healing. I have my own ideas about healing. The problem is, and you can see this from any cursory glance in the healer subforum, is that the players can't make up their minds. Everyone wants something different from healing, nothing is going to please everyone. The different complaints about healing range from "it's too boring" to "it's too much DPS" with "it's not enough DPS" to "I just don't like it anymore, I want cards back"
The devs have to try and amalgamate all of these conflicting complaints into one final result. Determining what that is is a job I don't envy, and whatever they decide on has to fit into the overall balance.
It has to be easy enough that noob healers can keep noob tanks alive, while also being challenging enough for competent healers to have something to do to help support competent tanks. It has to provide enough DPS contribution to account for healing downtime, without said DPS being so crucial and taxing that it takes away from healing responsibilities.

1. I think it's funny summary of current situation. If he said just regular "I don't like X and Y", it would be lost in the sea of the same things. This way, post stands out and entertains people, while pointing out the absurdity of SE's actions by extrapolating them. I think OP did excellent job, except that he forgot to misspell scholar as sage, as devs did in latest patch notes.

2. Not any different than others commenting "just play another game", "just quit", "this game isn't for you" and similar. Just pure circle jerk.

Players can and do make their minds, but not collectively. Do you expect ~1.4million people to agree on one thing or what? No shit that this is all about compromises. But clearly, devs are not competent enough to find a middle ground, so they lazily just make no changes or any effort into actually fixing things. This is why healers became bots with 2 damage buttons and 25 healing buttons, with most of the healing delegated into oGCDs, so devs don't need to put extra work into accounting for damage/heal balance.

I agree that finding balance for healers can be hard. But you know what is not hard? Not even trying to find that balance, which is exactly what SE has been doing, with complaints being responded with "just go play ultimates". Oh wait, TOP is technically possible to do without healers while it was current. Well, how about DSR - oh nevermind, cleared with solo healer.

Same thing with relics. They don't even bother finding compromise, so they threw towel into the ring and made them buyable for tomes, making them yet another pathetic participation award.

As for your 3 specific healer complaints:

- "it's too boring" - Healing is boring because you don't heal and whenever you don't heal, you just do 111111
- "it's too much DPS" - There is too much time spent DPSing because you don't need to heal, and when you do, you use oGCDs.
- "it's not enough DPS" - There is not enough DPS because you're forced to DPS, but you only have 2 buttons to do that.

So even though these might be different complaints on the first glance, they actually have the same root issue, which is that healers don't need to heal, so they spent most of the time DPSing, while having only 2 buttons to do that. You want my proposed solution? Add more damaging buttons and remove some healing buttons. Modern healers should closer to half healer kit, half damage kit, because it's unrealistic to rework every encounter to be more healer intensive and you don't want to keep dying to raidwides because your healer is incompetent.

Just look at any healer's kit and don't tell me you couldn't axe at least 1/3rd of the healing skills and replace it with some interesting damage rotation. At least give it basic 123 and 124 for DoT. Give healers some procs to keep the rotation fresh. Make one healer job distinct by making it have 2 second GCD instead. Just try anything new. You can even keep one healer same, just keep WHM, make AST even more focused on buffs (for example, whenever someone with your card crits, it shortens CD of another card), make scholar more involved with fairies (idk, I don't play SCH, probably not the best solution since pet AI is garbage). Give SGE some fancy rotation so it can actually become DPS healers. Something like MNK's stances with 3x3 GCDs combos, where 1st combo is for damage, 2nd for ST heals and 3rd for AoE heals, if it worked same way as MNK's stances, you could change from combo to combo seamlessly and do some smooth transitions between DPSing and healing.

There you go, healers now have 3 interesting healers to play, and if they don't want to, they can go play old, boring and braindead WHM.

Originally Posted by Seraphor

1. The nonsense in the first post. Literally catastrophising rubbish.
2. All of the responses along the lines of "OMG so true TC" "yep I can totally see this happening" "hit the nail on the head".
Just pure circle jerk.


I get the gripes with healing. I have my own ideas about healing. The problem is, and you can see this from any cursory glance in the healer subforum, is that the players can't make up their minds. Everyone wants something different from healing, nothing is going to please everyone. The different complaints about healing range from "it's too boring" to "it's too much DPS" with "it's not enough DPS" to "I just don't like it anymore, I want cards back"
The devs have to try and amalgamate all of these conflicting complaints into one final result. Determining what that is is a job I don't envy, and whatever they decide on has to fit into the overall balance.
It has to be easy enough that noob healers can keep noob tanks alive, while also being challenging enough for competent healers to have something to do to help support competent tanks. It has to provide enough DPS contribution to account for healing downtime, without said DPS being so crucial and taxing that it takes away from healing responsibilities.

If you've ideas you should share them!

Personally suggested offensive and support styles, with no changes to tanks or gear, but rather giving healers more diverse responsibilities than just increasing the green bar go brrrrr as that has huge issues with our current design (could keep that but then tanks, gearing, and fights need to change too).

The easiest way, imo, to give healers more party impact in regular content is to make healing less primary. The reason to split support and offense is because some healers are healer because of the emotional theme of being supportive and some are because of the desire to be a critical role, theme of job, and privilege of being in desire (low queue).

So AST and WHM become support, where they may lose some healing spells (potency can be adjusted where needed, if needed, to ensure ultimate and other content doesn't become impossible), and then gains many support related skills. Stoneskin for example might apply a shield (of okay potency) that deals damage when broken (or expired as worst case), AST cards being more complicated (can think of example if important) but I imagine a bit like 5 minute dungeon where they have to balance purging cards vs ideal cards and consumption mechanics empowering other skills.

Ensure balance of buff skills by adding maximum potency, so AST isn't weaker with a group of 4 and stronger with a group of 8.

Then offense- SCH old self before all the damage removal is just a fine example, so.. that. Then SGE would have improved kardia mechanics where it would have greater impact and taking from another thread where I suggested a dark theme healer.. a enemy shield (curse for that thread) could be neat. The enemy shield essentially being a damage inhibitor up to X potency (so not a flat % reduction), allowing for SGE to focus the enemy more often with offensive heals, offensive shields, and further attack abilities.

So if you want to target the boss a lot and heal go SCH and SGE and if you want to target your allies mostly go AST and WHM.