Healers are punished too hard for dying

[Tint]

Ever since the change to Weakness and Brink of Death in 4.0 from reducing all main stats by 15% / 30% to reducing everything but Vitality by 25% / 50% I had the feeling that healers get punished a bit unfairly here.

I get why they changed it - people kept dying because of reduced max health - but cutting down the Mind stat on top of losing all your ressources is a bit much.

Especially in Brink of Death status your heals are basically non existent anymore. And without ressources you also can't spam them to compensate for the reduced potency.

In the end other players will die because the healer simply can't keep up anymore.

When a tank or DD dies they will lose damage potential. But that can be better compensated by the other DDs, healer and tank (depending on party size of course). One could argue a tank does get punished less than a DD (because the ability to tank properly is not affected by a death at all and losing dps on a tank is not as bad as losing it on a DD), while a healer gets punished more.
And there is only one other healer to compensate - if at all.

Plus when they made these changes back in 4.0 we still had a TP gauge. They removed it in 5.0 and since then physical jobs also get punished less than magical jobs.

Maybe a complete rework of how a death is handled is necessary.


However:

Since healers damage now also scales from the Mind stat I would suggest to simply change the Weakness and Brink of Death debuff to a simple "Reduce dealt damage by X%" debuff.

Healers get punished enough by losing their ressources and damage potential.


Also the whole idea of changing it back in 4.0 was so people would not keep dying because of a death. But there is a good chance they will die when the healer can't heal properly anymore.

With a 50% healing debuff you can just keep lying on the floor.

[Supersnow845]

Counterpoint -

Death should be punishing and rezz is too free in this game

[ThorneDynasty]

Healing debuff just means you might have to use some of your million boring 11111 GCDs to actually help with the healing instead.

[Valence]

As an advocate of party resources and other universal battle mechanics than the encounter itself, I do support consequences for mistakes other than encounter mechanical mistakes. I've never been very fond of the mentality that one should only be punished by failing the fight mechanics and nothing else, and I do believe that it's an insidious plague that has lead the game into the solo play in a party of 8 design where anything forbids that one, especially the party, should have to suffer for the failures of somebody else, and what you're asking here sounds close enough to asking the designers to remove or tone down healer responsibility even further.

If the problem is that it puts too much weight on the healer comparatively, which I think is a legitimate concern, I must respectfully point out that healers have it incredibly easy those days with MP positive rotations and a crapload of free healing tools. Perhaps the true problem is that all other roles have in retrospect also lost a lot of party responsibility and weight as well.

[IceBlueNinja]

Well as an use to be ast main and currently sage main I do not really feel punished much if I die. Those two job got tools to recovery mp really quick, I cant speak for whm or sch though on how they do their recoveries. Side off topic why do jobs who do not even use MP at all have an mp gauge for? I missed when MP felt unique in a way that healers/magical dps had bigger numbers than the jobs who do not use mp.

[PercibelTheren]

I highly recommend bringing some mana pots for progging. They have saved many pulls that were going wrong because I got an extra rez thanks to them more or less.

[Sebazy]

I'm with Snow on this and to be more specific:

The penalty for a healer dieing is about right, the cost for raising others is generally far too low now (Outside of body checks ofc).

[Supersnow845]

Based

But also which healer is OP specifically talking about? I know SCH has options to recover resources after reviving, and heals that are not affected by brink.

I feel like the pure healer dying can be covered for by other party members easily?

Im assuming OP is talking about WHM

SCH has decent recovery because the fairy heals aren’t affected by brink of death since the fairy is a unique entity, SGE and AST are drowning in proactive mana regen (rather than WHM who mostly relies on passive mana regen by cancelling glare costs by using lilys)

SCH can struggle a lot if you died right after putting aetherflow on CD because the fairy heals aren’t that potent but yeah I assume they are talking about WHM

[IceBlueNinja]

Im assuming OP is talking about WHM

SCH has decent recovery because the fairy heals aren’t affected by brink of death since the fairy is a unique entity, SGE and AST are drowning in proactive mana regen (rather than WHM who mostly relies on passive mana regen by cancelling glare costs by using lilys)

SCH can struggle a lot if you died right after putting aetherflow on CD because the fairy heals aren’t that potent but yeah I assume they are talking about WHM

I thought the same since the entire ew whm have the most mana problems taking from 5.0 ast. Lord it almost as if they doing a trend to pick on one healer to suffer mp issues for an exp. There was still no proper reason for the nerfing of thin air.

[Supersnow845]

I thought the same since the entire ew whm have the most mana problems taking from 5.0 ast. Lord it almost as if they doing a trend to pick on one healer to suffer mp issues for an exp. There was still no proper reason for the nerfing of thin air.

Every since lilys became neutral in a full uptime fight WHM’s economy is actually stronger than any healer besides AST (because a lily is more mana than an addersgall stack, plus thin air and assize) it’s just not really designed to recover well from death because you likely aren’t going to immediately start glaring right after you die

SCH has mathematically the weakest economy right now but it’s still strong as hell