the fact that you actually just said learn it makes your whole quote make me lose hope for humanity, you expect people over 40-50+ years old to learn Lua/Kitty when they play the game for fun and just wanna play for the nostalgic feeling not to mention have 0 knowledge about writing code, everyone with a decent IQ can tell this change was unnecessary and not wanted by the community.
Yes, I'm so evil, I expect ppl to properly play/learn their new classes and to use an addon if they can't do it manually... I bet if you get along with healbot or raidheal, you can also understand kitty very easily, I mean the rotas of healers aren't complex or something, no need for big condition stacking and such, they remind me of warlock/druid rota of 2-3 skills... those rota-healers are actually easier to understand than most configurations I saw in raidheal or gridcliqueit, but what do I know...
And however, there are still some full lazy-mode heals in existance, so yea, I'd actually expect ppl to learn kitty to play the rota-ones properly, IF they can't press 2-3 skills manually (which seems to be an issue for quite a lot ppl already) xD
Have you written a healing CE before? And I don’t mean one where you click targets manually and try to spam a button for choosing heal spell on top of that. It’s INCREDIBLY complex, for more than a few reasons:
1. Figuring out if a player is in range to cast a skill is almost impossible unless you first target a player and check GetSkillUsable; but being that so many healing skills are AOE now you have to find a way to do a range check against the player to see if your desired skill will even hit/heal them. Luckily now we have TargetFriendByName, which helps a bit, though.
2. Identifying the proper main tank to put buffs like Healing Salve or Curing Seed can be tricky — you might have a Wl/K offtanking, or two tanks in party where one player is geared and the other isn’t as much.
3. No public CEs I’m aware of make the addition of any of those changes even close to easy. Kitty combo is an absolute mess of an engine to try and read (which is not to say it’s bad code, it’s just A LOT of code to read through to try and understand). I’ve got 15 or so years of work experience coding and there have been multiple times I’ve given up trying to fix or understand something in Kitty’s core code.
4. Reading and debugging lua within RoM, including needing ReloadUI (or dofile if you have deeper knowledge), is tedious and frustrating. I don’t know why we’d want more players having to do that.
I think one of my biggest fears about this change is you’re taking a class people have played a similar way for 15+ years and now expecting them to enjoy playing their whole class a different way. There’s already so much to focus on for a healer, tbh their jobs were already harder than a DPS which primarily stands still and spams a single button.
I think if CoA really wants to have the official stance at reworking healers into hybrid DPS, CoA should take responsibility by creating a full healing combat + heal engine (if that’s the goal now).
Also, I’m not sure the core issue for healer damage has been fully fixed — The main reasons healers don’t do damage is that they wear healer gear. They’re missing melee magic damage %, getting mdmg bonuses from various pieces of gear, pve dmg %, etc. I get that the goal was to make it so it was less necessary to stat / spec for heals in healer gear, but it’s not just an overall healing reduction per heal - it’s less time spent healing vs DPS which also lowers overall healing done.