Make all healers Supports

Community General Discussion
1

Healers will be nerfed in 10.1, so it takes longer for them to top their teammates.

I won’t go into details about whether this is good or bad or why. Instead, I want to propose a different approach to make the healing role more interesting and important, rather than just making them spend more globals in order to heal the same.

Increase Healer’s importante to the group by not just making them heal.

While some forum healers complain about having to do DPS or other tasks feeling bad, I think a big chunk of the healers playerbase actually like having extra things to do other than just spamming heals.

Now, I think one way to make the role more engaging and even challenging, without just making the damage spikier, is to give healers more tools to help the group when not spamming heals.

I think there are 2 ways to do this:

  • Make healers do more damage, specially if it’s on demand damage on CD.
  • Make healers help their teammates do more damage on demand.

I know some people hate things like Power Infusion because of Damage Meters, but let’s not make the game around Damage Meters. Give some healers active ways to help their group do more damage.

For example: A buff that temporarily increases a player’s damage by X%. A buff on a CD to recover a player’s damage CDs faster, a buff to spread a little amount of single target damage from a player to nearby targets, etc.

Make these support abilities active, not just flat passive buffs, so good players can stand out by making good use of their boost CDs on other players at the right time. These abilities can be used by the healer himself on solo content as well, so it’s a double win.

Some healers might instead just be able to dish out more damage themselves. Variety is good.

18 Likes
2

we do. outside of the usual GD whiners, most healers prefer this and already essentially play as support. we heal, dispel, purge, cc, and do damage. the “i don’t want to do anything but cast flash heal over and over” healers exist mostly in this forum and not in the game itself.

36 Likes
3

Why not just make healers also the tanks and dps? so then healers can do everything and everyone else can just sit back and sip on pina coladas.

21 Likes
4

Honestly this means I will spend more time healing than dps’ing on my healer. Which I approve.

5 Likes
5

having to micromanage a bunch of buffs so that other people can have fun sounds like the least compelling experience possible

25 Likes
6

That misses the entire point. The point of my post was to make healers buff their allies, mostly. I don’t see how this would make the healers be able to do everything.

The concept of a healbot is so outdated.

3 Likes
7

when i spec to heal i don’t want to dps or juggle a million different buffs and debuffs i just want to heal.

15 Likes
8

Different people have different ways to enjoy the game.

I like contributing to my group’s performance. I don’t mean to make all healers have a collection of buffs. One or Two of these buffs would be good enough per spec, and it doesn’t need to be every spec. There could be some healers more focused on the support role and other healers being the “easy” healers for the basic players.

2 Likes
9

Also known as…some healer classes would be invited to end-game content because of their buffs and the other specs without them wouldn’t.

Sounds like a horrible idea to me.

11 Likes
10

It’s a major issue in FFXIV as well. There’s a gap between those who can effectively dps and heal (as it is designed in FFXIV) and those who just want to spam heals (which is detrimental depending on the content).

My only qualm is bad tanking/dps hurts the mid-ground healers because they are effectively trying to DPS due to the boss/enrage threshold, but have to fork out more heals because ‘muh dps’ types mess up their rotation.

I’m for healing dps, but I grew sick of FFXIV raiding because every fight was just a boring number crunch. Needs more nuance like Maulgar or other fights where there’s variety than the typical big d dps race.

1 Like
11

Congrats! Everything you just described is already in game.

3 Likes
12

“Alright, I pressed my VE button. You’re on your own after that.”

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Healers have always been support and Blizzard not leaning into this and instead copying the homework of FFXIV is why we are where we are today.

2 Likes
14

You mean like they already do? Change for the sake of change is awful, but change that isn’t actually a change is worse.

2 Likes
15

This still results in problems leading to the game being … about Damage Meters.

As I noted in another thread today, the comparison to FFXIV feels particularly relevant in this case (in fact, the super spiky “easy healing, but slip ups kill you very easily” damage that was being referenced as a description of current WoW damage-and-healing profile reminded me so very much of how FF has done things for years).

Yes, in a perfect world, I’d love to see healers do more damage. It would probably do something to help the healer shortage, which is significantly aggravated by the lack of damage output on most heal specs (most budding healers come to realize just how slow questing gets - especially when you arrive at current expansion content - because of how weak their personal DPS is, which doubtless causes a lot of them to swap to DPS spec and unfortunately, likely usually stay there when they see how many solo things you have to do on the reg in WoW. There’s leveling via dungeons, but I’m sure we’ve seen plenty of threads on just how beautifully friendly the WoW dungeon scene is towards newbie healers and tanks … and in any case, that doesn’t solve the problem of how much slower your dailies, WQs, etc. go on a healer spec).

On the other hand, FFXIV teaches us where this sort of design goes: ultimately, to provide challenge, fights end up having to essentially always be around DPS as central challenge, and that leads into intense damage meter culture and the associated negativity.

It also shifts the shortages elsewhere. Now White Mage is the “Comfy Job” in FF, and if you look for a raid static as one (which I did on a few occasions) you can hardly find WHM openings (or even Healer ones at all, often). Instead, it was actually the “heavy-hitter melee DPS” slot that tended to be advertised as open the most … who’da even imagined an MMO where there’s a healer overabundance and DPS shortage? :slight_smile:

(There are ways to deal with things like PI in this regard, btw: most particularly, default ranking logs based on RDPS rather than PDPS - i.e., extra damage calculated to be because of a buff is counted towards the player that cast the buff, rather than the person dealing the damage directly. This is now used for FFLogs for several years because of the large number of active damage buffs, especially things like Dance Partner which are practically PI on steroids. Since the same person maintains both Warcraft Logs and FFLogs, I would presume that if this issue becomes significant enough that RDPS ranking would be enabled in WCLogs as well.)

1 Like
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My post isn’t about making an entire overhaul of the healer as a role, but about increasing those things.

For example, sure, PI exists, as well as Blessing of Summer. But that’s pretty much it. Apart from that, there are some passive bonuses or class buffs. That’s not pretty impressive.

If we take other forms of utility, healers don’t really excel at it more than just any other spec. Many DPS specs can dispel (except for magic, which all healers can do) or CC.

There are some healers that, even if they heal a lot, are not invited often and one of the reasons I keep hearing about why it’s so is because they don’t bring much to the table other than throughput. Increasing the things healers bring to the table, specially for the less popular specs, would make them more desirable and engaging to play.

2 Likes
17

No.

/putsfootdown

3 Likes
18

I agree with more offensive supportive abilities.

There obviously are some with Blessing of summer and PI but maybe adding more talents or interactions with abilities is the way to go.

Maybe Hpals make enemies take more Radiant damage if in Consecration (Holy and Fire I think), Sunfire/Moonfore take more Nature/Arcane Damage, Shaman buff totems, etc.

I do think players might complain less if their own DPS is getting buffed from a few GCDs and healers can relax a bit. Of course at the higher end the expectations will be the same.

19

I think this type of healer only exists in m+. I mostly only heal in raids with the occasional dispel etc.

1 Like
20

These are all kit tools, and what any player should be utilizing.

Pushing this on healers? Especially during certain affixes? Needs to stop. Non-healers get stupid ideas in their heads, and then think that’s the correct way to play.

5 Likes