Introduction
Healing is certainly a role many players seem to dislike picking up. From my own experience and what I encountered, this doesn’t have to do with the role and the job attached to it. The Requirement to heal goes beyond learning a “rotation” or watching health pools. While a bunch of the recent additions to the UI such mouseover have been helpful, there is a lot of work ahead to make it accessible.
To heal efficient, a player is required even in Heroic Content to run multiple weakauras or display options for debuffs and blacklisting non-important ones.
A new player in this role gets overwhelmed by it, and the extra steps setting these up is tedious work to do at the moment, esp. if you need 3rd party tools (addons).
Some of the changes I would like to suggest here are even beneficial beyond the healing role.
Introducing Players to Mouse Over right away
Currently, Mouseover is an option that is turned off by default - certainly it would help esp. in follower dungeons to introduce players to learn about this function and its benefits. It should also be a part of the new player experience. Maybe even as an ingame video tutorial which displays how to use mouseover spells.
Displaying Debuffs as you like! via the Adventure Guide
The Adventure Guide certainly packs the power to help players reading up on certain boss mechanics and debuffs. It could also help in the customization departement how debuffs are displayed on unit frames.
As not all debuffs are as important players could choose to have them displayed very small or not at all. Since some are simply healchecks or not disspellable by your class (f.e. bleeds).
While the adventure guide only displays bosses at the moment, I can only incentivize to thinking about adding these options to dungeons as well and offer a read-up on any trash mob in M+ and what they do. Currently dungeon players often times have to hand pick spell ids from Mythic Dungeon Tools (a 3rd party tool) to track certain abilities - having these easier to pick up and customize in the default interface would be a blessing.
Offer Defensive Cooldown Tracking in the UI
As a healer you are required to track these to know if someone can still help themselves if the situation is dire. It is long over due to have these added to the interface in some capacity besides raid / player frames.
Current Healing Gameplay Design is really not fun for the average player and discouraging
Certainly it is not a secret non healer defensives are getting weaker by the minute - A lot of the current design esp. in keys and high content isn’t much in the hand of the player itself and more dependent on the healer. Having damage spikes from time to time is fine but it gets toxic when you always stress out while healing - personally I think the game was alot better when healing was more about mana management and not who can press his buttons the fastest. Healing gets to a game where only the healers with the highest throughput are considered for content - there is no space for slowpace group heal designs.
High Damage Spikes also create a troublesome environment for classes that lack constant healing and are vulnerable to rot damage (constant damage events).
Therefore, I would advise a pruning of defensive cooldowns for dps players and a complete redesign how damage events happen in WoW. While this is a complete shift in gameplay design philosophy, I think it is necessary to keep wow engaging for new players.
Please note, I’m not a main healer myself and a lot of these observations have come from talks with CE Level Healers and my own adventures into the role. I still hope this is some valuable feedback.
As my term in the council is about to end, I couldn’t finish my post on this issue how I would like and it is certainly missing some notes and ideas that aren’t fully fleshed out. Still, I thought it might be good to have a talk on it here.
Cheers
Yumuros-Thrall EU