Healing Warmups came in a couple of hours ago on the test server, and although as a 55 Bloodmage it doesn't effect me very much, on the main server I am and have been a unspec'd healer for a long, long time due to my lazyness, so I figured I should post here.
Because of the heavy mana use and relatively small heals compared to mob damage, it doesn't take long for more than one mob to kill me in the main server, especially in the case of skeles as I have little offensive power and only bandage to keep me alive. Basically, once a healer runs out of mana, he's dead, and that's how it should be, because they're basically a caster class. I don't mind removing armor from healers, or making the cooldown longer, but the warmup is sort of killing us, because when that happens, not only do healers have less offensive ability than most classes, but a skele can kill us before we can get our bandages working. Of course at the moment even the warmup itself is glitchy, but when it is fixed, it will underpower healers as a whole quite a bit.
What a healer is and always has been is a sort of defensive version of a caster. Where casters have offensive spells but little defense, healers have defensive spells and little offense. Both classes rely almost entirely on mana, and while both classes aren't as built for PvP as the main pvp classes, the rogue and warrior, they're still a fair force at it. Clerics needed a nerf and we all knew it, their consume was giving them huge amounts of mana, making them unstoppable, and their heals were pretty huge. But in the end, I think increasing mana use to the old numbers (25% per bandage) or changing other things was a better solution than inducing a warmup time. But ah well. I guess I could just be ranting.
I know that a long time ago, near the beginning of the Zeal map, healer bandages were accidentally set to have a warmup time. During that time being a healer was very, very difficult (Which wasn't helped by the fact that bandages were interrupted and stopped by ANY movement at all, including being hit, looking around, whatever D
and I struggled a lot. When Kain fixed it, I was a lot happier with the healer class as a whole, and in the test server I've been happy with every healer class except cleric and I believe they're fairly balanced with a few minor tweaks. But I don't think this is the way that it should be happening.
Ah well, having taken 6 months as a healer and too lazy to change, I'll probably be staying one, whatever happens. And maybe I'm biased because of that. But I, like most healers, think that while we should be more focused towards support and general nice things like what Megan suggested, also think that we shouldn't be completely useless in the battlefield because you're dead before you can apply a bandage ._. I've loved being a healer so far and hope that whatever happens, that doesn't change.
Cheese,
S
@
Megan - The arrow thing is epic
