
Originally Posted by
PercibelTheren
snip
On one side, we have people who think that a healer's primary role is to heal. However, if we want a healer's main thing to be healing, the healing requirements need to go up severely so that healers don't mash their one damage button 60% of the time. More importantly, people need to be willing to put trust in the healer to keep them alive and, as we're continuing to see, many are not. Case in point, all the people complaining about not wanting to be "held hostage" by bad healers not pushing their buttons.
This leads us to the other side of the conversation - the people who don't want the party's survival to be reliant on a healer. The problem here is that if the healer isn't primarily healing, we need to give that player something else to do. The most straightforward answer to this issue is a more complex DPS rotation, essentially turning the current heal dispenser design to something more of a hybrid support. If we don't want to do that, healers need a different gimmick. The argument against this that I see most often is "but bad players" - well, then it needs to be a gimmick that's not essential for Normal content but very helpful in Extreme and up, something that will keep the skill floor low and allow overwhelmed newbies to pull through without properly understanding it but also raises the skill ceiling by allowing for optimization.
Personally, I'd be perfectly OK with either option. I like keeping the party alive, running triage and saving pulls that went horribly wrong. I also enjoyed Astrologian specifically because it gave me something to do besides spamming Fall Malefic and waiting for the scheduled every-30-seconds raidwide. Is there a happy medium to be found? I have no idea, unfortunately. All I know is that I'm unhappy with the current state of both healer jobs and fight designs where healers are heal dispensers with few opportunities to actually do that dispensing.