I’m for the camp of healers just being healers. It makes no sense, literally no sense, for any healer to be up front in the melee zone. Even wearing heavy plate armor it doesn’t matter, gameplay wise it makes no sense to be up front outside of when you’re forced into doing so cause talents or abilities.
You can’t have this because most people are going to gravitate towards whatever does the best for whatever they’re doing. And again, half the healers want to just heal, the other half are more DPS players pretending to be healers and wanting to do more.
And again, half the healers want to sit in the back and the other half want to sit up front.
Like I stated before: the healing community is split, but performance will dictate which sees play in areas of the game.
I’m in the camp for the healer’s job should be as simple as possible, yes, standing is the back is the safest because most people don’t watch ground effects on the ground or can’t see them when they’re in melee. Go into pugs and see how many melee dps get hit by everything and you’d be surprised at how many people do.
That’s honestly the job, bro. I don’t like people advocating for your role to do more than what it needs to do and I don’t like people advocating to make this game harder when it’s already rough for pugging as it is. I don’t care for the “get some friends” aspect because most people play this game through pugging, not through friend groups and not through guilds and not through other means. It’s a pug world and a pug life.
That being said, though, I’m all for things being easier for pugs since that’s where the majority of players are going to be interacting and then when you que into guild groups half the time they play like pugs regardless, too. There are very very good guild groups, sure, but those are few and far between compared with guilds that aren’t very good.
Most people are casual and play this game to relax, not to push a boundary or get world first, world 100, etc. They don’t care to think of this game as a job, either. If it was they would be getting paid for it, but they aren’t so it’s a hobby and as such it should be and will be treated as such.
As i stated, though, I want to see how badly people want “melee healers” and I want blizzard to go all in for both this and MW as a melee healer, not hybrid, but an actual literal melee healer and I want to see just how many people change their minds saying “nah, nevermind I don’t want melee healer.” Most people fall into the “you think you do, but you don’t” category which is why blizzard listens to some feedback and not all feedback, especially given a lot of people’s feedback isn’t detailed and is more along the lines of “this just doesn’t feel right” with no specifics mentioned outside of that.
By melee healers I am stating no hybrid nonsense of any kind. No ranged attacks or abilities or heals, at all. You are in melee, you will heal those within melee range or at most 3 yards range. Anyone beyond 3 yards in front of you isn’t going to be healed, at all. Let’s see the melee healer style in full swing and not a hybrid style, not a caster style, but a full on melee healer style. All heals are instant cast just like a melee dps, and you do dps to heal n all that but the cost of such is you have no range on your abilities or on your healing, at all.