So, remember back in the day when Aggro was something Tanks had to put some degree of thought into? Questions like "How much can I afford to sit in Deliverance?" and "Should I use Rage of Halone here?" were things you had to consider. This has, of course, been sanded off. Aggro is now all but automatic; do your simplified DPS rotation and you'll be fine, assuming everyone is equally geared and equally skilled.
So now Tanks' gameplay consists of doing a simplified DPS rotation and using defensive skills to ensure they or their party members don't die. That's a gameplay loop.
DPS are even simpler to boil down: do a more complex DPS rotation.
So why are Healers the way they are? Tanks and Healers are two sides of the same coin; both are defensively-oriented support classes, it's just that one is always melée and specialises in preventing damage, and the other is always a mage and specialises in recovering from damage.
Why are Healers unique in being given the absolute bare minimum of a DoT, a single spell they spam, and their 'new and exciting' skill that does a single chunk of damage every 2 minutes? Why, when the rest of the classes in the game have been unified under the acknowledgement that we're all just DPS with different upsides and downsides, are Healers still not properly integrated?
In my opinion, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Healers should have a simplified DPS rotation equivalent in complexity to Tanks' which outputs a reasonable amount of healing (either directly, such as triggering a Regen regularly, or indirectly, such as generating stacks of a resource that can be spent on healing).
This would then be supplemented by their cooldowns, which in low-difficulty content would provide a buffer to compensate for mistakes (the same way Tanks rarely need mitigation for dungeon bosses or minimum-size pulls, but can use them to survive full pulls or bosses in which they have collected a lot of Vulnerability debuffs), and in high-difficulty content would be required to succeed.
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So now Tanks' gameplay consists of doing a simplified DPS rotation and using defensive skills to ensure they or their party members don't die. That's a gameplay loop.
DPS are even simpler to boil down: do a more complex DPS rotation.
So why are Healers the way they are? Tanks and Healers are two sides of the same coin; both are defensively-oriented support classes, it's just that one is always melée and specialises in preventing damage, and the other is always a mage and specialises in recovering from damage.
Why are Healers unique in being given the absolute bare minimum of a DoT, a single spell they spam, and their 'new and exciting' skill that does a single chunk of damage every 2 minutes? Why, when the rest of the classes in the game have been unified under the acknowledgement that we're all just DPS with different upsides and downsides, are Healers still not properly integrated?
In my opinion, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Healers should have a simplified DPS rotation equivalent in complexity to Tanks' which outputs a reasonable amount of healing (either directly, such as triggering a Regen regularly, or indirectly, such as generating stacks of a resource that can be spent on healing).
This would then be supplemented by their cooldowns, which in low-difficulty content would provide a buffer to compensate for mistakes (the same way Tanks rarely need mitigation for dungeon bosses or minimum-size pulls, but can use them to survive full pulls or bosses in which they have collected a lot of Vulnerability debuffs), and in high-difficulty content would be required to succeed.
Continue reading...