Gonna bump this thread up because it doesn't get enough feedback. My question for more experienced healers is: what sort of changes could be welcomed to Blessing of Restoration? I don't think this skill is bad as people make it out to be, but I would love for it to get some love. Any ideas to give it a unique and useful identity?

First pain point would be what has been said in other forum pages is that healers feel unnecessary.

In most non dlc vet dungeons, if the group is semi aware of there surroundings i can keep peoples health at full with little to no effort. There have been times where i just stand there and see how long people can last without my healing and for most encounters, even boss fights, i don't need to do anything. I feel i can be more effective if i wear full dps gear and dps skills and just swap one out for the occasional healing need that arises, and that feels wrong. I want to que and play as a dedicated healer but when 90% of the time a dedicated healer is not needed at all it kinda defeats the purpose.

Second pain point it the "mandatory" slotting and use of war-horn. I know it is a great skill to have and use but on my warden healer id would like to have my healing ult on demand at all times due to it buffing my healing overall (through a passive) and that it is a very strong heal that can prevent a wipe on certain fights if applied at the right time. Not sure tho as to what the solution could be other then adding major force to a healing staff skill, but it would make war-horn for the most part useless

Healers sometimes are not needed in 4 man-content (with group who knows what they do) not because "shields diminishing their role", but because most of the dangerous incoming damage either one-shot (you can't outheal that, it should be avoided anyway), or can be outhealed by players themselves, and bonuses, provided by healers, are not needed enough. Shields in their current state just make things easier. Even if you completely remove shields from the game, there still will be problem with 3dd+tank runs (if you consider this as a real problem). Yes, even if all 3 dds will be poor stamina guys with vigor+new major evasion only.
Some mechanics in the game not noticeable at all (looking at you, flame dot from final boss of coa1, which should be purged by jumping to water, but most of the player don't even know about this mechanic: it's not damaging enough even if you do not heave a proper heal on your bar at all). Look at the old base-game content, in terms of encounters it's completely brainless and can't even teach new players how to avoid the damage or give more attention to what's happening around, ofc people will always prefer to go with 3 dds to burn all this content. New content, however, is a bit another story - there we have punishing mechanics for too much damage(final boss of Fang Lair, Vycosa in Moon Hunter Keep etc.), sometimes we have dangerous dots or channels from trash mobs, or encounters (execute in Ruins of Mazzatun), so sometimes some groups can think about having a healer, but...
Bonuses, provided by healer (minor berserk, drain, orbs, offbalance, purge, minor courage) is definetly good and strong, but not strong enough to make proper healers real "must-have" unit of 4-man group, who know what they doing. Why? Tank can use drain and lightning blockade, and hell, even put olorime and provide spd/wpd increase for group. If tank prefer to keep his backbar with s/b, one of the dd can slot drain, one magicka dd can slot lightning staff and voila - you good to go. And self-sustain improving from patch to patch. Is that a bad thing? I think no.
So, ability to self-sustain, to heal yourself, to live without endless healing springs on your feet, ability to quick recover yourself from "oh, ***" situation should not be nerfed. It one of the things which make me enjoy this game, which makes you feel revarding if you avoided the death, it adds more interest to the game, it makes the game feel really unique, it even adds more build-creativity. Look, after morrowind sustain nerfs (deleting from the game additional stats recovery from blue morph of orbs, deleting repentance group sustain utility, creating the same cooldown for orbs and shards) popularity of "one tank, three dds" formula only increased. Why? Because healer's ability to help the group decreased, they became weaker and people started thinking "why are we need healer in first place? we can find a way around it and just add more damage, if there is literally no unique critical things which healer can provide".
So, does that mean, that healers are not needed at all in dungeons? No, they can greatly help with progressing through new content with sustain help, they helping with freeing teammate's slots from support skills, and ofc they helping with healing=). But when you did great, found and learned all mechanics, thats the moment when you starting feel like you don't need a proper, real 100% full-support healer, because you figured out how to heal, how to avoid the unnecesary damage and found the safe opportunities to recover your resources. At this point, well, healers just can't provide nothing more than orbs/shards and additional horn (good minmaxed horn uptime not really needed in 4-man dungeons over, lets say, additional damage ultimate). Sure, there are some additional ways, like good uptime of weakening enchant, using debuff-posions or slotting the stamina power of the light morph on magicka templar, situational purge, but does it cricital and necessary to have? Well, no.
And look, almost all additional support opportunities have only two classes: templar (Power of the Light, shards, extended rutial with amazing synergy, previously stamina support with repentance) and warden (additional synergy and minor toughness after Murkmire changes). Another classes now can do the same HPS (heal-per-second), thanks to summerset changes, but have no utility, and this is why we don't see the nb-sorc-dk healers, they cannot provide nothing, only healing.
So we can see, that pure healing is good, but not necessary in 4-man content, I'd day that we definetly don't need more healing power(especially in pvp, but it's another story). And, in my opinion, biggest healer pain point is - we need more utility/support tools which should be rewarding to have in group and fun to play. We need to bring something more that we have right now. It would be cool and it will bring more player to play this role. And maybe we need to reconsider some of the content encounters, especially in base game. Maybe.

Just look, how dead this discussion compare to dps class-rep discussions. People don't even bother with healer-role.

@Tasear @Alcast @Gilliamtherogue someone, please bring some of the thought here to next rep-meeting in context of damage-shield changes. Thanks.
Also sorry for possible typos and weird word constructions, not a native english speaker=(

tanabata wrote: »

Healers sometimes are not needed in 4 man-content (with group who knows what they do) not because "shields diminishing their role", but because most of the dangerous incoming damage either one-shot (you can't outheal that, it should be avoided anyway), or can be outhealed by players themselves, and bonuses, provided by healers, are not needed enough. Shields in their current state just make things easier. Even if you completely remove shields from the game, there still will be problem with 3dd+tank runs (if you consider this as a real problem). Yes, even if all 3 dds will be poor stamina guys with vigor+new major evasion only.
Some mechanics in the game not noticeable at all (looking at you, flame dot from final boss of coa1, which should be purged by jumping to water, but most of the player don't even know about this mechanic: it's not damaging enough even if you do not heave a proper heal on your bar at all). Look at the old base-game content, in terms of encounters it's completely brainless and can't even teach new players how to avoid the damage or give more attention to what's happening around, ofc people will always prefer to go with 3 dds to burn all this content. New content, however, is a bit another story - there we have punishing mechanics for too much damage(final boss of Fang Lair, Vycosa in Moon Hunter Keep etc.), sometimes we have dangerous dots or channels from trash mobs, or encounters (execute in Ruins of Mazzatun), so sometimes some groups can think about having a healer, but...
Bonuses, provided by healer (minor berserk, drain, orbs, offbalance, purge, minor courage) is definetly good and strong, but not strong enough to make proper healers real "must-have" unit of 4-man group, who know what they doing. Why? Tank can use drain and lightning blockade, and hell, even put olorime and provide spd/wpd increase for group. If tank prefer to keep his backbar with s/b, one of the dd can slot drain, one magicka dd can slot lightning staff and voila - you good to go. And self-sustain improving from patch to patch. Is that a bad thing? I think no.
So, ability to self-sustain, to heal yourself, to live without endless healing springs on your feet, ability to quick recover yourself from "oh, ***" situation should not be nerfed. It one of the things which make me enjoy this game, which makes you feel revarding if you avoided the death, it adds more interest to the game, it makes the game feel really unique, it even adds more build-creativity. Look, after morrowind sustain nerfs (deleting from the game additional stats recovery from blue morph of orbs, deleting repentance group sustain utility, creating the same cooldown for orbs and shards) popularity of "one tank, three dds" formula only increased. Why? Because healer's ability to help the group decreased, they became weaker and people started thinking "why are we need healer in first place? we can find a way around it and just add more damage, if there is literally no unique critical things which healer can provide".
So, does that mean, that healers are not needed at all in dungeons? No, they can greatly help with progressing through new content with sustain help, they helping with freeing teammate's slots from support skills, and ofc they helping with healing=). But when you did great, found and learned all mechanics, thats the moment when you starting feel like you don't need a proper, real 100% full-support healer, because you figured out how to heal, how to avoid the unnecesary damage and found the safe opportunities to recover your resources. At this point, well, healers just can't provide nothing more than orbs/shards and additional horn (good minmaxed horn uptime not really needed in 4-man dungeons over, lets say, additional damage ultimate). Sure, there are some additional ways, like good uptime of weakening enchant, using debuff-posions or slotting the stamina power of the light morph on magicka templar, situational purge, but does it cricital and necessary to have? Well, no.
And look, almost all additional support opportunities have only two classes: templar (Power of the Light, shards, extended rutial with amazing synergy, previously stamina support with repentance) and warden (additional synergy and minor toughness after Murkmire changes). Another classes now can do the same HPS (heal-per-second), thanks to summerset changes, but have no utility, and this is why we don't see the nb-sorc-dk healers, they cannot provide nothing, only healing.
So we can see, that pure healing is good, but not necessary in 4-man content, I'd day that we definetly don't need more healing power(especially in pvp, but it's another story). And, in my opinion, biggest healer pain point is - we need more utility/support tools which should be rewarding to have in group and fun to play. We need to bring something more that we have right now. It would be cool and it will bring more player to play this role. And maybe we need to reconsider some of the content encounters, especially in base game. Maybe.

Just look, how dead this discussion compare to dps class-rep discussions. People don't even bother with healer-role.

@Tasear @Alcast @Gilliamtherogue someone, please bring some of the thought here to next rep-meeting in context of damage-shield changes. Thanks.
Also sorry for possible typos and weird word constructions, not a native english speaker=(

No need to @ giliam any more fyi.

tanabata wrote: »

So we can see, that pure healing is good, but not necessary in 4-man content, I'd day that we definetly don't need more healing power(especially in pvp, but it's another story). And, in my opinion, biggest healer pain point is - we need more utility/support tools which should be rewarding to have in group and fun to play. We need to bring something more that we have right now. It would be cool and it will bring more player to play this role. And maybe we need to reconsider some of the content encounters, especially in base game. Maybe.

I agree with all your points, but especially with the above; I like having a healer in group, but all I want from them at this point in a 4-person content is support with sustain, because like you said, most dangerous encounters are all-or-nothing, in that either they are avoided or they one-shot you, and this has nothing to do with shields. In good groups, playing a healer feels boring and redundant, and it's entirely due to power creep, older content becoming too easy, and newer content having a lot of unforgiving mechanics, that if messed up, cannot be outhealed. I really don't understand how this talk of shields making healers feel useless came about, it is clear to me that anyone who plays end-game content would know that this is not the case... shield changes are because of pvp issues with stacking, and every magicka player, including healers, will be disadvantaged if they go through. Anyway, more tools/utility for healers would be great, but first and foremost, it's content that will dictate whether this utility is valued in groups.

Cronopoly wrote: »

So the low hanging fruit was Nerf Shields to placate Healers not having enough to do instead of bringing new toolsets to the classes for "DESIRED" support.

Not sure the desired result will be what we all envision...

That's their typical behavior. Not fixing what's broken, but make what works as bad as what's broken so the latter looks comparatively decent.

What if they gave healers the ability to instantly revive someone. Personally I was thinking adding some type of blessing to soul trap. Lets say after 10 (up for debate) casts of soul trap within 90 sec you gain a blessing that allows you to instantly revive one of your fallen comrades for 30 seconds. The reason I chose soul trap is the damage is so low that no reasonable dps would ever use it, but I could be very useful to a healer. I also think that in order to get the blessing the soul trap would have to hit the same target so this isn't OP in pvp.

db0ssman wrote: »

moonwalker23 wrote: »

What if they gave healers the ability to instantly revive someone. Personally I was thinking adding some type of blessing to soul trap. Lets say after 10 (up for debate) casts of soul trap within 90 sec you gain a blessing that allows you to instantly revive one of your fallen comrades for 30 seconds. The reason I chose soul trap is the damage is so low that no reasonable dps would ever use it, but I could be very useful to a healer. I also think that in order to get the blessing the soul trap would have to hit the same target so this isn't OP in pvp.

Neat idea, but I'm not sure why a healer would normally have soul trap slotted, let alone cast it. It might work to replace that resto staff ability that adds life steal with an ability that can insta-rez. It would have to be only slotable by healers, though. Otherwise it would actually make them more useless.

Agreed that healers don't typically have soul trap slotted, but I think adding the ability to instantly revive with something like life steal would be way over powered in pvp. My idea with soul trap is it's a completely unused skill right now in pvp and pve that we could add a really unique buff to it that is useful to healers only. Maybe we could give the morphs a strong synergy, like major evasion or something.

db0ssman wrote: »

moonwalker23 wrote: »

db0ssman wrote: »

moonwalker23 wrote: »

What if they gave healers the ability to instantly revive someone. Personally I was thinking adding some type of blessing to soul trap. Lets say after 10 (up for debate) casts of soul trap within 90 sec you gain a blessing that allows you to instantly revive one of your fallen comrades for 30 seconds. The reason I chose soul trap is the damage is so low that no reasonable dps would ever use it, but I could be very useful to a healer. I also think that in order to get the blessing the soul trap would have to hit the same target so this isn't OP in pvp.

Neat idea, but I'm not sure why a healer would normally have soul trap slotted, let alone cast it. It might work to replace that resto staff ability that adds life steal with an ability that can insta-rez. It would have to be only slotable by healers, though. Otherwise it would actually make them more useless.

Agreed that healers don't typically have soul trap slotted, but I think adding the ability to instantly revive with something like life steal would be way over powered in pvp. My idea with soul trap is it's a completely unused skill right now in pvp and pve that we could add a really unique buff to it that is useful to healers only. Maybe we could give the morphs a strong synergy, like major evasion or something.

I meant to replace that ability, not as a bonus to it. Since there are currently much more effective resource returns (orbs, shards, sanguine alter, mushrooms) that the largely unused ability could be replaced by an ability that grants insta rez, but only for the person slotted as the healer. The morphs could be that people are rez'd with full resources or not cost a soul gem. That would also help solve the problem of healers not having to stop heal for 20 sec to rez someone.

I could get behind that idea. Only granting the buff to a person slotted as a healer is an interesting idea. It would make it a useful skill in pve but not OP in pvp. I wonder how we could get it to work with trials as everyone could be slotted as a healer?

Before adding my two sticking pints, I'd like to agree with the points already raised in this thread. This is just a couple things I haven't seen mentioned:

1: Smart Healing. I've seen mixed messages as to exactly how certain skills, such as Rushed Ceremony and Regeneration (and their morphs) pick their target as to who to heal. Breath of Life is supposed to be an Ally in front of you. Some say these skills are supposed to be 'smart' and heal the lowest health player, and some say it's random. However, whether there is smart healing and it is just broken, or whether there isn't smart healing, I think these skills need to be looked at and for some form of smart healing to be implemented/fixed.

It may not be so noticeable in a 4 man group where even a random heal would have a 1 in 3 chance of hitting the right target, but in a large PVP group, those odds can be reduced to 1 in 23. I've lost count of the number of times I have stood directly in front of someone at less than 20% health and tried to heal them with BoL, only for the heal to hit someone with far more health and only a few percent missing to the side of me. Or the times I've seen a group member in the distance on low health, cast a Rapid Regeneration and for it to hit the person next to me with full health. This either ends up with the player in question dying, or me having to spam the heal until they finally get it, which is a total waste of resources.

I realise a balance has to be made so that healing never simply becomes blindly hitting a button without much skill involved, however (in large PVP groups at least) blindly hitting the button is exactly what the current system entails. Instead of seeing a person in need of healing, responding to it by casting the correct skill, seeing that person get healed, and having the satisfaction of a job well done, you are left helplessly pressing a button repeatedly in the hopes that you may eventually heal that person before they die.

2: Player Rewards: There are still events in the game that fail to reward healers for their contributions. Case in point, the fight at the centre of Imperial City. I recently was in a group of 14 repeatedly carrying out this fight. I was the only healer. I kept everyone alive through several of these fights and received no reward for my effort. In order to be rewarded, I had to switch to dps. As a result, although I received my rewards, half the group would wipe during each fight. So as a player, to be rewarded I had to a) not be the healer I wanted to be, and b) feel the guilt of knowing that my group wasn't doing as well and were losing Telvar because of my decision to switch to dps. That isn't a choice that should have to be made and isn't exactly a positive gaming experience. Rather than having fun and achieving something, I was left felling guilty and selfish.