Healer DPS that builds to Healing/Mitigation?

[LilimoLimomo]

Broadly speaking, I stopped playing healer within the past few years when I started to feel like most of my time was being spent casting Glare, and I didn't find that fun. There are certainly a lot of possible ways to partially address this problem, but I recently had a shower thought that I couldn't recall seeing before, so I thought I'd make a quick post about it.

In short, I think part of what sucks about Glare-spam is that it just feels meaningless, especially if my purported goal is to heal. So my thought was: what if Glare-spam actually helped you better protect or heal your team?

For example, what if casting Glare filled a meter, and every 3 or 5 Glares gave you the ability to cast some manner of Stoneskin on a single party member, or gave you Swiftcast for your next non-instant healing spell, etc? Something that made it feel like you were doing something more than just meekly contributing to the DPS pool, that your DPS efforts were actually building towards something relevant to your class?

I'll get out ahead of this and say that something like this might have little to no impact on high-end players; if optimizing for DPS as a healer is the game you're playing, then maybe you'd be inclined to skip the Stoneskins (if it was a GCD) because you've done the math and you know it's not necessary. But for lower-end casual players like me, something like this might feel nice; it seems like it would have the potential to make doing DPS feel less like stepping out of your healing lane and more like part of being the best healer you can be, regardless of whether you already care about doing DPS or not. Imagine that: an incentive to do DPS even for healers who have yet to realize that DPS is king?

As I said before, this wouldn't entirely solve the problems that face healing today, but I think it might make things a bit better. Curious to hear thoughts.

[AmiableApkallu]

In short, I think part of what sucks about Glare-spam is that it just feels meaningless, especially if my purported goal is to heal. So my thought was: what if Glare-spam actually helped you better protect or heal your team?

The first reason for Glare-spam is because the team is already well-enough protected and healed. There's no need for "better."

The second reason is because the kit lacks something to address the needs of the moment. In which case, why not add that "better protect or heal" to the kit directly? Isn't gating necessary and useful healing behind damage supposed to SGE's niche?

[ForsakenRoe]

For example, what if casting Glare filled a meter, and every 3 or 5 Glares gave you the ability to cast some manner of Stoneskin on a single party member, or gave you Swiftcast for your next non-instant healing spell, etc? Something that made it feel like you were doing something more than just meekly contributing to the DPS pool, that your DPS efforts were actually building towards something relevant to your class?

cough cough

Sarcasm/shilling aside, I agree with the general idea, the issue is that SE has removed a lot of options of 'what' to tie it to. For example, you say 3-5 Glare casts. But what else is there? We have that, DOT ticks, and that's basically it. Which is why I'd ask for a couple more buttons (or maybe just one is all that's needed on some healers), so we can have variety. Like, differing build rates between certain skills. Example, Glare is 1, Dia is 1 per tick (incentivizing keeping DOT up for faster gauge build speed), Water/Banish/Absolution whatever new button is 5 but has a CD (incentivizing using on CD for bigger burst of gauge gain). Something like that.

There is also room for even the highest end players with this direction, if you can believe that. As I put in my above post a year ago, using the heal move would give you Quake, Tornado, Flood. The gained potency over their 'base forms' for those three, added together, total the potency of the one Glare that was lost to casting the heal (because it's a GCD). But, that means that since they're 'neutral' in the same way Misery is, they're actually 'a gain' if you can wrangle your healing in such a way that you land the 'recompense' skills into raidbuffs. Since they're going to literally replace your standard GCDs, you cannot hold onto them without just... not casting, so you would have to purposely change what order you use your Lilies vs this new heal move, so that you land at the raidbuff window with the Quake set prepped AND Misery ready to fire. That would hopefully make for an interesting enough amount of optimization for the top end, while the lower end of the skill bellcurve would happily say 'cool I press the strong heal move, and now I can throw massive elemental devastation around, this is hype'

[Zeastria]

The dmg output is so low in this game..It would probably be enough to cover the dmg..
Meaning you will never have to press a single heal ever again.

[Renathras]

I feel like _A_ healer working this way (SGE should have, honestly) would make sense. Not all of them, but one working like this could be interesting. That way people know what they're getting into when they pick that one.

The problem of gating heals behind damage is that it makes it difficult for new healers or certain situations. For example, on SGE, when you ARE having to GCD heal a lot, you aren't getting Kardia procs. Now take that and extend it to having abilities that are locked until you do damage and...yeah, it doesn't always work.

Again, one healer Job working this way is probably fine and their kit would be designed around manipulating this in various ways. But all the healers being forced to this would probably not be so great. Even if it was something subtle that didn't affect healing at all - e.g. suppose SCH had Energy Drain on a 20 sec CD instead of costing AF, and casting Broil cut the CD by 5 sec each cast - you'd still have problems of people chading their co-healer to get better parses. But at least that wouldn't (generally) be wiping the party where lacking an essential heal at a critical time could do so more consistently.

[LilimoLimomo]

The first reason for Glare-spam is because the team is already well-enough protected and healed. There's no need for "better."

I think these are both valid responses! My initial thought (which I never explicitly wrote apparently) was that the functionality gated behind DPS should be something that isn't already accessible somewhere else in the kit. So the design of this wouldn't be that you're Glare-spamming because your team is the best they could possibly be, but rather because the team has everything they could possibly have except for the benefits gained by Glare-spam. The rewards from Glare-spam should be minor compared to everything else in the kit while not being negligible, so it is never the urgent thing to do, but is rather a "nice to have".

The second reason is because the kit lacks something to address the needs of the moment. In which case, why not add that "better protect or heal" to the kit directly? Isn't gating necessary and useful healing behind damage supposed to SGE's niche?

In regards to why not adding whatever the "reward for the DPS" is to the kit directly, I would say because we're already in a situation where there's next to no healing or mitigation to do, especially in non-Savage/Extreme content. If CBU3 solves that problem, fantastic, throw my idea in the trash, I'm satisfied. I am simply not confident that they will. And that's the reason why I think it would be nice if the DPS-spam we healers do at least had the aesthetic of helping the healer do the job of keeping the party alive. Even if whatever benefit it gives is absolutely unnecessary in the content you're doing, it means that when you Glare-spam you haven't just turned into a budget DPS, because you're gaining something that has to do with healing/mitigating by doing it.

[Sebazy]

This is a discussion SE should have had when penning out Sadge =/

Warhammer Online's Warrior Priest is a great case study in making DPS lead healing work and work well.

Effectively you could stand back and heal like a traditional healer, but it was slow, inefficient and restrictive on your mobility to do so. Meanwhile your Melee swings generated resources that powered your proper healing kit allowing you to weave bursts of powerful healing in between your various shaped attacks.

Kardia is just a sad sorry example of SE lacking imagination.