A support spec in wow causes problems, is either mandatory or trash
Healers are caught between “you must DPS” and “If you’re not constantly healing, you wipe”
Healers are already a slot in groups, and therefore mandatory
If you gave healers utility, you’d be able to configure each healer with a DPS, Utility, Healing mix that made them unique and including utility, there’d be less of a clear “best healer.”
Again, I’m an outside, I don’t run dungeons, but that seems like the kill-2-birds-with-one-stone approach. Have they said why they don’t want to do this?
This isn’t actually the case in most M+ keys, at least not currently. The only time you have to constantly heal is if your group is bad, e.g. not playing mechanics, not using defensive CDs, not interrupting, not doing enough damage.
The healer’s damage only matters in certain situations and only at key levels that aren’t very relevant to most players. It’s directly related to how good your group is, too. The better your group, the more damage you can contribute as a healer.
The thing with utility is that not every healer wants it. I main a resto shaman, so I do have great utility for M+, like a 12s ranged interrupt. I love that, because I can handle more situations by myself, but it does mean I am responsible for more things than a healer who doesn’t have a short interrupt (or an interrupt at all).
For example, a friend of mine, who does 26s currently, said the other day that she’s happy her priest can’t interrupt, because if she had one, she’d be expected to use it. She doesn’t actually want more utility, because it would make her job harder.
Utility alone doesn’t make a healing class more desirable. Resto shaman does have more utility than some of the other healing classes, but it is not a meta healer and doesn’t do well at very high keys.
If you focus so much on utility game play you get rogue and warlock in every group because they do things others can’t. Same thing would happen with healers.
Okay so make sure the utility needed is universal for all healers… which is just magic dispel and healing, which all healers can do. Utility would just be another plate to spin.
Healers are already punished for having bad DPS in their groups. Why make that worse and more stressful by nerfing group heals? The only result will be that even fewer players will volunteer to heal PUGs (or heal at all).
What the game needs are better consequences for DPS that don’t play mechanics, take heaps of avoidable damage, don’t interrupt, don’t use their defensive CDs, and don’t do enough damage, but I can’t think of anything that’s easy to implement that wouldn’t also punish the healer at the same time.
Solutions I can think of would need to be connected to the rating somehow, e.g. the game making some assumptions about how well a player should perform vs. how they actually perform, like what avoidable is reasonable, what dps a player should do with their gear, a reasonable amount of interrupts for a dungeon, etc, but that is all too complex too implement and will never happen.
That was season 1, when you all complained “we just want to heal.” In season 2 you all couldn’t handle the healing checks that forced you to do nothing BUT heal. And now…well…more of the same.
Balanced timers are the main thing keeping all the difficulty of the dungeon from shifting onto the survivability of the group. If you have unlimited time to kill the boss, the only thing that matters is living through it. So the extremely light timers this season is also why healing is less pleasant than normal.
It also inflates the perceived skill of the applicant pool. Realistically, a good player who just does vault keys will have almost all 3-chested 20s this season. But their score is almost identical to a player who never uses their cc and causes their group to get 30 deaths and only 1-chest all 20s.
I’ll say, though, it’s lovely to have one! Even more so when you pug or play with less coordinated friends. At least if you see a mob casting an evil “GONNA ONE-TAP YOU IN THREE SECONDS!” spell and futilely wait for one of your DPS to notice the flashing, specially colored cast bar with the animated border, you can interrupt it yourself.
But I also get it. Between being able to interrupt, having a group stop, a stun, several utility totems and other stuff, I often feel I don’t have enough time and GCDs to heal more. I need to learn to “let go” more often and not try to do some of the stuff the rest of the group should do (and if they don’t, c’est la vie, maybe they’ll remember next time!).
This doesn’t accomplish anything though, other than just make more busy work for the healer. Spot healing and AoE healing virtually accomplish the same thing. This doesn’t make the healer’s role more fun or engaging. It’s just got an extra-step because you have to individually target people.
Like I said, it’s busy work. For no reason other to make the healer more busy. When in reality, everyone should be following their ABC’s. Use every global. We don’t need to make people have busy work which is boring. We should focus on making roles fun.
But that also affects the healer negatively. You have a dead DPS that doesn’t do damage and that you need to resurrect, and less damage means fights take longer and you have to heal more, so your chance to time the key drops, too.
