I have 800 hours in New World, I was a healer main from day one, only in the last month have I been messing around with every other possible build, but still run healer for important things or just for stuff like OPR.
Most people don’t realise that a healer has to keep their life staff out to be effective. You have to light attack to reduce cooldowns else you’ll end up with a 6+ second gap between Sacred Ground ending and casting a new one and 17 seconds from when beacon ends and casting another. You have to heavy attack every 10 seconds or less to keep your stacking 10% (30% max) healing buff going, constantly dodge for a 20% bonus healing buff, attack through allies to heal them, etc. Swapping off to a damage weapon nerfs your healing until you swap back and build up again.
Being forced to light attack, heavy attack, dodge in specific orders and timing just makes the whole system boring and repetitive. I want to see a revamp of the life staff entirely so that it isn’t just a “heal bot”, but can do more and achieve more with a higher skill ceiling. It’d also be good to have more viable options that work.
What I’m suggesting is a few things:
- Have one powerful single target heal (no random scaling off buffs or anything) and one powerful group heal, but on long cooldowns, with a small heal over time or shield added after the cast.
- Add skill(s) to shield allies. This will require timing and paying attention to all of your allies. So instead of healing, they are granted a shield/barrier that either absorbs X damage or just makes them briefly immune to damage and lasts until it runs out of health or Y seconds. Keep it short duration so healers have to be good timing it and it isn’t too powerful.
- Add different heal over time skills or upgrades that are either single target or are attached to a single target and effects other allies in a radius around them. Basically remove sacred that massively buffs healing and fortifies, and replace it with something more mobile sort of like beacon, but longer duration and with something stronger for single target. Perhaps the primary target is healed a lot more and allies nearby less.
- Change light attack so it puts a small heal over time over allies hit, so you can do the heal to more people and prevent it stacking, new application just refreshes the duration.
I just want healing to have options to prevent damage if you’re smart and have good timing, but also less of a routine where you do things in a specific order. Let us have tools to heal/shield but also do things with our attacks.