Watching other people's mistakes makes you wise.
So, as some of you may know and many of you may not; World of Warcraft Dragonflight is one of the best expansions WoW has ever managed to release in terms of content abundance, patch cadence, class overhauls and QOL, but there is a giant, Dune Mommy sized elephant in the room.
Despite all the good, there is a healer draught in certain kinds of content. Specifically, Mythic+ Dungeons, and PvP. There are a few factors causing this to happen that I feel AoC could do well to learn from. Regarding Dragonflight Patch 10.1.5. Please let it be known that these are symptoms of design flaws. Any comments about how "wow is bad" isn't constructive to the concern I have as a healer main coming in to AoC.
For those who don't know, Mythic+ (M+) is a system where there is a rotation of dungeons, new and old, that have a ladder of difficulty you can climb. Starts at 0, goes to infinity. Each number, the dungeon tuning gets incrementally more difficult but in addition to that, every ten keys or so they'll add an "affix". An extra effect that impacts the whole dungeon, whether it be flat damage buffs to bosses, or randomly spawned tornadoes, or making killed trash mobs explode and make you take a small DoT.
1) The game fundamentally does not put enough responsibility (through mechanics) on DPS. This leads to DPS forming a false sense of expectation of the healer (Who has to cure poisons, Crowd Control, Heal the group, Route the dungeon, keep DPS from butt-pulling mobs, etc) that any time something goes wrong and people die, it's the healer's fault (even when it had nothing to do with them);
2) Related to point 1, players who main DPS don't know how to be responsible for their own actions in content, nor do they have any understanding of what it's like to heal. Consistently, you will get in to groups with DPS or Tanks who outright fail their own checks, refuse to interrupt, refuse to dispel, or stand in directionals and then ask the healer why they died. This isn't just "bad players". This is an almost ingrained mentality of entitlement in DPS players who have a fundamental belief that they can simply spam 1 and 2, then expect the healer to keep them alive through thick and thin while completely ignoring their own mitigation or interrupt spells and this mentality exists right up to the highest levels of content. Absolute bare minimum effort and responsibility placed on themselves;
3) The game objectively, repeatedly has made healing just from a statistical standpoint, harder. (There was a damage and health buff on all players and mobs for Dragonflight, but healing potency remained the same). Do not scare your healers away with uninspired high end content that isn't anything other than a heroic dungeon with unreasonably high scaling. New players don't pick up healer because of that, and vet players stop healing because of #1, #2, #4;
4) Higher end M+ mechanics are just heal-checks (Mythic plus 21+ keys are essentially Mythic raiding level content that require pure group coordination with kit utilization). The entire experience is just straight up obnoxious as a healer. It's not engaging gameplay at all. You're constantly stressed, and constantly pressed to keep everyone alive because the incoming damage is just so high. It feels as if instead of adding another layer of mechanics to mitigate, they instead just cranked the damage numbers up really high and then called it "challenge" content. This is not what people are looking for when they think of challenge content. They're looking for something like the Legion Mage Tower where a scenario pushes your skills to the absolute limit by forcing you to use your entire kit at the right moments. Not spamming Mass Heal to mitigate overtuned DoTs. It's encounters like the Mage Tower that encourage players to learn how to play their class. You can't expect everyone to pick up the game and instantly know when and how to use all their abilities, and they don't. Even after several hundred hours.
5) Related to point 1, A cumulative coagulation of these previous points has left the game's community treating healers like utter garbage. Just straight up. Everyone knows about "blaming the healer" in WoW, even when they don't play the game, and it's true because DPS players have this weird sense of entitlement to being carried, or the misinterpretation that all Healers do is make your HP go up. (Not remotely true). This mindset exists in FFXIV too, but to a lesser degree because healers are inherently expected to do as much damage as possible over there.
Conclusion: I apologize if this has come off as a rant about WoW in the AoC forums, but I promise the goal here is to draw attention toward the mistakes that are being made in certain content so that AoC, through design, can avoid this from happening here too. Healers need to do more than just heal, and DPS need to do a lot more than just damage. There can't be an expectation that all healers do in the game, is make your HP go up, otherwise you end up with the same community mindset as WoW.
I make this post because I recognize a bias in the AoC community. The impression that AoC will be better than all the others, that the community here is above such problems. If you played WoW, or ESO, or FFXIV and you were one of these DPS players who has never touched healing in your life, then you're bringing that mindset with you to AoC.
If you've gotten to the end of this post I ask; What sort of design issues have you noticed in other MMOs that have led to a notable vacancy in certain classes? Is it the community? Is it the dungeon design that stops players? Is the new raid simply too hard?
