I remember talking to my guildies about this and we’re all just in this big “we told them so” circle now.
When you tell the player “the open world will have a hard mode,” that is not healer friendly. At all. Like it’s not “glass cannon” friendly either, but it’s reeeeeally not healer friendly.
Unless we’re looking at a future where a delve-like-brann tank is provided for everyone everywhere, dedicated healers just won’t engage with “it takes even longer to kill while doing overworld chores” gameplay. So players won’t commit to healers. So queues go up.
I have 5 minute queues as a tank doing random dungeons. I realize that’s a DPS player’s dream but that’s is wild and crazy. Telling us all that “you’d better be solo capable” with the heroic world tier, severely deprioritized people from playing dedicated healers. The shortest paths to all the most exclusive rewards involve questing. The idea that “you gotta go heroic world tier” is annoyingly prevalent when questing healers are even more slowed in the open world.
Some people don’t want to swap specs for questing. Some people expect the spec they enjoy to get a fair, balanced experience. That’s… kinda crazy if you know WOW at all, but it shouldn’t be. The other option is to choose a class for remix that doesn’t have to heal all the time… and they just… don’t.
Then there’s the fact that the kind of “power fantasy” that remix feeds doesn’t work for actual healer players who heal. What you get is a whole raid of “don’t take damage, it’s on you” because healers are nuking stuff. The healer power fantasy is smarter players. There’s no buff that gives that.
I’ve softened my stance on the heroic world tier itself, but this is still an issue: You still have a game where you ideally need over 1/5th of the players “playing to help others,” and you have a power fantasy game mode where either no one needs help, there’s no one TO help (open world soloing) or you’ve been told “POWER IS FUN (if you’re doing damage)” and are nudged to stop helping others and just blast things.
We can’t just skip to “NO ONE HAS TO HEAL YAAAAY” while we have people that… like healing, or people (and queues) that need healing. Remix kinda skips to that. That’s kinda a problem.
Just my more than two cents.