Seems to me that many of the complaints about healing are slightly misguided.

Cruiser healing is what makes them 'tanks' and that is exactly what cruisers need to be, or we are back to the bad-old-days of pre- patch 1.2 where dps was king and cruisers were gas clouds. Cruisers NEED to be hard to kill but solo tanking is finite: eventually you get worn down and everything is on cool down and... boom... but with support healing from other ships, cruisers can go from hard-to-kill to impossible-to-kill.

So the problem is not self healing, it is too much support healing. Good self healing makes a well flown cruiser hard to kill but support healing can make it impossible to kill the way the numbers currently work.

So... lets kick some idea around...

How about making healing other people no longer MORE effective that healing yourself (as external healing does not share cool down with your own heals)...

Proposal 1:

1. Leave self-healing unchanged. This also has advantage of not upsetting the solo PvE players.

2. But rather than have an arbitrary (say) "support healing other people is 25% less effective" (er, consider that idea Proposal 3)... make it that external INSTANT heals of a given kind only work if the same skill group on the target is not cooling down.

For example:

Cruiser A has used Engineer Team to repair hull... therefore an external Engineer Team from Cruiser B will not work on Cruiser A until all the "Team" skills (Sci Team, Tac Team, Eng Team) for Cruiser A have cooled down (i.e. a partial shared cool down the same way two copies of ET share partial cool down). Likewise for AUX to SIF or Miracle Worker.

Mechanics:

a. if you have a target for a heal that is still cooling down, you should have a grey'ed out icon on that ability with a cool down counter in a different colour (so you know if it an external cool down, not your own for a self heal) for as long as you have the external target selected.

b. the external cool down on the skill you were healed with will also apply to additional external copies of the same heal as if you were healing yourself and indeed your own same-class heals.

At the moment external support healing is MORE efficient that self healing due to the lack of partial shared cool downs and that seems a bit odd. More than two copies of Engineering Team is pointless on a given ship, yet three team mates can tag you with three copies of ET on top of the one you just popped for a mega insta-heal... what is wrong with this picture? :p

However... er...consider this sub proposal 1.1...

As the Devs want to end the wild gyrations between almost no hull and 100% hull... do NOT apply this to HOTs... ie Hazard Emitter. Leave that as it is.

This would also make Sci ships more important as support healers whilst leaving cruisers as self healing 'tanks'. It would also mean escorts, who lack self-healing, will benefit more from external support healing than ships with extensive self healing capacity, and that seems appropriate.

Proposal 2:

Turn most of the insta-heals into HOTs. This probably means AUX to SIF stays an insta-heal but Engineer Team and Miracle Worker increase in absolute hull healing capacity but do it over time.

I know the devs want to see an end to instant gyrations between almost dead >> suddenly hull repaired... this would have that effect.

Discuss

Far easier:

Heals should be cut 1/3rd - 1/2 (maybe with hull increasing universally again slightly), resistance needs to have diminishing returns far sooner, and you shouldnt be able to stack debuffs like sensor scan or attack pattern beta (only takes the most recent one of each).

Then the game will be better.

I suspect that is (1) too drastic (2) resists are just fine as they are (3) agree about AP and SS stacking even now

I disagree. The problem is the lack of support healing in PUGs and too many self-heals that give us the undead, toothless cruiser.

I know that you have a really good tanking build, but i disagree with the assumption that external healing and selfhealing are inherently on different cooldowns. The one exception is EPtS (and RSP, but that already has a very long cooldown), and relying on EPtS in version >1 is good for tanking, but limits one's support abilities. Only ES is an external-only heal. Every other heal is self and external.
[It just occured to me: Do you mean with "external healing does not share cool down with your own heals" that the other players' cooldowns are independent of your own? In that case, disregard this paragraph.]

Bad idea. Really bad idea. PUGs will be full of players that carry self-heals, so their cooldowns will almost always overlap, thus making PUG healing nearly impossible. Premades on the other hand are not going to have that much of a problem. They can build for healing support and get lots of resistances that won't block their healer's ET/AtSIF/etc.
Your proposal also won't solve the problem of endless cruiser battles in PUGs, because cruiser vs cruiser tanking is possible with only self-heals, even against moderate focus fire.

MW a HOT? Where is the miracle? Unless you couple it with ablative armor-like resistances, this would make MW rather useless as a last-second rescue. And because of its long cooldown I don't see MW being used as a "normal" HOT.
Once you remove the instant heals, it will be harder to react to burst damage (BO3,HYT3 and stuff). Once again, this favors resistance stacking. But who outside of premades is willing to run with two copies of polarize hull to minimize burst damage and give their healer a chance to react in time?

Double post. pls delete

That is a tactical not a structural issue.

That was indeed what I mean


No, it just means CRUISERS will have less support healing because of their own heals, this will make very little difference to escorts.

No, even premades will find it impossible to insta-heal over and over again as their support heals start the cool down timer on the target as well as on themselves. But of course pre-mades will always be better at working any system.
Cruisers can die now in PUGs when focused properly. This will just make undead pre-mades cruisers harder

Probably true.

Self instant heals should stay the same, so burst damage resistance will be not hugely effected, it is an endless supply of external ones that are the problem.

I disagree. When a Defiant/BoP/Raptor/whatever decloaks and unleashed a firestorm on me of Attack Pattern: Alpha/Beam Overload 3/Attack Pattern: Omega/HYT 3/Cannon Rapid Fire 3 boosted weapons, the only thing that can save me is the powerful instaHeals.

Cut healing values, and DPS will rule again. If healing gets cut, buff stacking needs cut as well.

this is all well and good for cruisers, but atm escorts are difficult to keep up even when i am in a -tsi- premade (if we win 15-1 the escort is always the 1, even 15-5, the escorts are the 5), if you cut the healing to escorts they will be the only ships taking any focus fire and thus a liability despite the burst being required to finish a game this side of christmas vs an all crusier team.

A bop at least will be able to remain in stealth, wait deliver the burst when called, evasive and restealth while stacked with hull resists to cover any focus fire while the shields are down. Tho vs a good team they might not make it to stealth or be pulled out, but that is the gamble, an escort will be followed on mass and not allowed to escape, as will raptors

I would have to concur with this.

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Agree totally. You still need self insta-heals to survive spikes, it is the subsequent support heals-on-demand that make people un-killable even over time.