I just want to mention that healers in raid and M+ have a weird role sometimes. I understand dps is important to compete with timer.
However, I would love to see permanent changes to healing classes that make their heals do dps at the same time. IMO, things like Nature’s Vigil from the druid could be just a permanent spec buff. You have it and it’s helping everyone. Probably, some PvP tuning would be required.
Many healing specs have sometimes quite valuable like this and it’s really cool I think!
Many of you might disagree, I get it:P Healing in this expansion has been quite difficult and it’s not easy to find healers these days. Having QoL changes would simplify healing overall and help everyone to get into this role which is very high APM at the moment. I believe there is enough to think about when healing high end keys + high end raiding.
I find tanking damage in the fight spot, it’s fun and engaging. Never had issues to find tanks.
Look at the “Healer are not dps” type threads pushed by healers. Healers were begging to do nothing but heal. The only way you do nothing but heal, is to increase the difficulty.
Healing is fine. It’s supposed to be hard in hard content i.e. brand new m+ dungeons, and everyone’s gear is crap. I like doing some damage when there’s downtime. Healers who have a hard time tunneling their vision on mobs and dps have bad UIs and don’t use their peripheral vision to see their group’s health bars so they can switch from dps to healing in an instant. But they’ll complain ‘imma healer no dps for me.’ And I’m like like sure buddy you didn’t play early-WotLK WoW as a healer if you want your only meaningful spells to be healing ones
I think it’s good that healers can choose between dealing damage and healing. Making all of their DPS passive and fully automatic would make the specs less interesting to play by removing decisions that players can make right now.
I think it sounds lame if it were incorporated on a broad scale, but in a limited ability by ability capacity I can see the appeal of having some more abilities that come with a passive damage component to healing. The example that the OP gave of Nature’s Vigil is probably my favorite addition to Druid regardless of spec, but I think it should remain as a cooldown, not made passive. I could see the appeal of cooldown abilities like Divine Star that both heal and damage or talents like Acid Rain for Shaman that make it easier for healers to contribute to damage even when the encounter requires them to go all in on healing.
Healers should still have the ability to focus purely on damage when healing is not needed since I think that adds some necessary complexity to the role, but I think that looking at some passive baked-in damage to a few specific abilities wouldn’t hurt.
In Druid’s case I’d even add that their HoT-heavy play style means that they don’t need to spend every single GCD actively casting healing spells, which synergizes quite well with their ability to shift into Cat Form in order to spend some GCDs on bleeds while the HoTs are still ticking. With some practice a good catweaving Druid can have a lot of time where they have both active DoTs and active HoTs.
Part of the problem with that is that I suspect there is a large overlap between healers who don’t want to do damage when healing and healers who are not as good at the game broadly speaking. Weaker healers panic more and heal less efficiently than stronger healers do, meaning they must spend more GCDs on healing to achieve the same effect (or at least think that they do). Plus weaker healers who are making mistakes tend to be in lower difficulty content, where their party members are also making more mistakes while not being killed outright like they would at higher difficulties, creating more damage for the healer to heal.
Stronger healers are the ones who notice that they don’t need to spend every waking second healing and are looking for something to fill those GCDs with. If you make healing demands more difficult, then those strong healers will simply adjust to meet the new demand as they were already capable of handling it. Meanwhile the weaker healers who already had their hands full such they they couldn’t reliably add in some damage have now become overwhelmed and have started failing.
So yeah I don’t think that there’s a lot of overlap between healers who wanted to only heal and healers who wanted to increase the difficulty of healing.
There are other ways but it would require massive changes that might not be well received.
Increase everyone hp and separate health pools into two bars, if a players hp falls into the 2nd bar they become “exhausted” and receive a debuff of some kin. (DPS, cast time, move speed, mana consumption etc)
Using a defensive cooldown would temporarily remove the exhausted debuff.
Healers goal would be to keep their groups hp in the first bar to avoid the negative effects of exhaustion amongst the group.
Damage could then be tuned to not be so “wack a mole” as they have two threats exhausting and then dying.
I don’t think that would really change the act of healing so much as it would just make it more forgiving. All you’ve done is shift the binary point that you need to keep the group above forward a bit and if you fail to do so, the punishment is just exhaustion instead of death.
It would still be whack-a-mole, just with a different health value that matters instead of 0.
Not that I’d want something like this added to WoW but it would be an interesting healing mechanic to play around with, there probably a game out there that already does it.
Healing is finite, though. You can only heal when peoples health is not 100%, so if your healing is what does damage you’ll be doing less damage when your group is taking less damage.
The period you can do damage now (group is fine) is the time you wouldn’t be doing damage with this change.
Does it now become the best way to play is the let your group get low health, then blow healing cds to top them quickly to burn bosses down faster during hard phases? People complian now if they arent topped (even when no danger is present) imgine haveing to explian you need them all at 10% health for phase 2 of a fight. Would not go over well.
No, having your damage come from healing would not work too well
