Shadowbringers Healer Role: Complaints, Feedback, and Suggestions

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Originally Posted by inhaledcorn

In my opinion, the purpose of more oGCD healing buttons is so that healers can DPS harder. Healer DPS is a reward for knowing how to use our oGCD healing kit effectively to spend as little GCDs on healing as possible. Healers should have at least a second DoT (AoE, except SCH, which should have two single-target +Bane) and a 1.5s cast time to make weaving oGCD more viable and to encourage healer DPS in a more subtle way.

Personally, I also want to see any timer overflow on WHM's Lily generation to auto-feed the Blood Lily and SCH's that spend Aetherflow on healing to grant a free Energy Drain. Again, you're still encouraging the use of healing by rewarding the healer with something else. I want more interactivity between the healing aspects and dps aspects of a healer's kit. Like, why is Freecure on Cure I? Why isn't it on Stone/Glare/Holy?

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Have to disagree on all of these personally. Let SCH and WHM have their own solutions to movement and weaving without making them into AST clones. Ruin II is functional and minimalist and buffing it properly to kill hard clipping and would have indirectly nerfed Energy Drain and feels much more in tune with how SCH actually plays. WHM is the only one of the three that needs a DPS option to move around that compliments Lilies.

Also never do ‘Free Blood Lilies’ or ‘Free Energy Drain’. These abilities have trade offs that are worth keeping around as is just for that tension alone. If you want to reward healing efficiently use a new ability to do so that can further act as a tax for using those DPS options.

While we have a plethora is oGCDs, I don't mind them because GCD heal is just so one-sided. It's boring. There's no interesting mechanics for GCD healing. It's ST direct heal/shield/regen and vice versa for AoE options.

For the nature of FFXIV encounters, oGCDs are the only things that feel remotely interesting healing wise. Excog, Star, and Assize feel good to use and don't punish you for using them. GCD healing on the other hand, while is necessary is punishing if used unnecessarily (DPS loss and MP waste).

AST is fine with the niche of 1.5s Malefic, but I would like Lightspeed to have 2 charges for a slight lower duration.

SCH tbh really needs it's dots back. They felt different and it was nice to balance them while weaving your oGCDs inbetween. And if I'm being honest, SCH should have gotten Fester, not SMN. It rewards SCH for healing like Lillies (which is basically Aetherflow if you think about it).

WHM for life of me needs to be rid of this turret nature. It's horrible design and even BLM has better movement than it. In a game where you're severely punished to drop a cast vs surviving a mechanic. None of this "but prepositioning if you're good" even then you still need to do slidecasting which doesn't feel good and frustrating sometimes. If BLM gets options for its movement, then WHM should as well. In a game where you have to move for mechanics a bit and even a lot, it's clunky. Not to mention clipping from needing to weave. Yes you can use a lily but if Misery weren't a dps loss and the heal wasn't needed, it still feels bad. WHM should get procs for a second DoT. Or an instacast DPS spell (like Further Ruin) from accumulating Glare stacks or from Dia ticks.

Good post. I've been so thoroughly unsatisfied with healer gameplay in Shadowbringers that I've stopped playing the game. I was already unhappy in Stormblood, but they managed to double down on poor design choices for a second expansion in a row with no acknowledgement of feedback from players.

The current healer jobs feel like they are designed for people who don't play healer, such that should they (for whatever reason) decide to play one there is almost no room for failure.

Is healing in Shadowbringers challenging? No. Healers have far more tools than necessary to accomplish their job. Mobile/instant healing is abundant, mana issues almost non-existent, threat generation a non-issue. This is the easiest it's ever been.

There's little incentive to improve or become a more efficient healer when the reward is simply more casts of a filler damage spell that you're already casting dozens upon dozens of times in a fight.

Either we have far too many tools at our disposition, or everything has been "dumbed down". I don't even mind damage anymore, there's just so much off GCD, instant cast or anything now, on all three healers. Why should I even bother with pre-galvanizing the whole party as a scholar, when I have 4-5 party heals at my disposition, or the other 4-5 from the 2nd healer? Not even to save mana, since mana is very, very hard to run out nowadays, especially on WHM. Why had astrologian be dumbed down so much, one of its identities was the card system which has been reduced to two options (not to mention that since HW they turned WHM nearly irrelevant).

The changes to how healers do damage is ridiculous. We have been spending more time dealing damage than actually healing/mitigating damage since early Stormblood, but at least then we had somewhat of a rotation or more things to do. Now everything boils down to single-target damage + single-target DoT. WHM lost aero3, SCH oh my god lost miasma, miasma 2, shadow flare. The current SCH plays more like a nocturnal sect AST than an actual SCH from previous expansions, where they had to proactively shield people to reduce the incoming damage, since that was their main focus - damage mitigation.

Now all healers pretty much play the same. WHM has always been about regen and filling bars, so not much has changed, except that mana is endless unless DPS are really doing a bad job at taking damage/dying. SCH, why even bother shielding? Just do an emergency tactics -> Succor / fey union / indomitability / whispering down / Seraph. What is even the point in shielding anymore? not like it makes a difference anyway. Big fights are basically a big chunk of damage here and there, followed by the 1-2 "rotation" (I refuse to call this a real rotation) and if you mess up you're more likely dead than in need of heal. Why should I waste my time galvanizing the party when it's better to just pop one of my endless party heals and keep Biolysis/Broil on boss? I don't remember the last time I actually had to use Physick on someone, since ET -> Adloquium or plain Adlo makes it obsolete, especially since the fairy can't be killed, or just throw an ET -> Succor followed by Indomitability or wait the 2nd healer do a party heal with regen (which surprise!! everyone has it)

Continuing on my scholar feedback (more like a rant I suppose), why in the world we had to lose control of our pets? What is even the point in having a "pet" if we are allowed little to no control over it? Fairies are basically undestructable turrets that you leave on the battlefield to heal random people - and this has ZERO risk whatsoever, they have been turned into a somewhat passive skill that reads "every X seconds, someone in your party is healed with a potency of 400". This is a very boring design. Positioning the fairy in order to secure her buffs across the entire party felt rewarding, it felt like we were using SCH to a maximum. Lastly, never would I imagine that I'd miss the ability to macro our heals with the fairy's - for those who don't understand me, around HW we used to macro Physik/Adlo so whenever we casted this, the fairy also healed our target, effectively turning both Physik/Adlo into a Cure2/Lustrate. Yes, this might seem a bit "too much" for many, but at least we had the CHOICE to do so - now we have nothing, just wait for the fairy to do so.

Oh, something else: Aetherflow sucks. We only use it to dump on energy drain for some laughable impression that we have a rotation. just delete it altogether alongside with ED and give Lustrate a cooldown.

Astro card system is still bad and not interesting.

Lastly, healing has never been as boring or uninteresting as it is now, and I have been around since 2.0 when Titan used to knock you down from your chair due to server latency. It is awful to spend the majority of any savage/extreme fight only pressing 1 and 2, and occasionally pressing 3 during dungeons for AoE. Healing needs a redesign so that we either spend the majority of our time actually healing or mitigating damage (assuming galvanize actually becomes worth using again) or give us more tools for damage. WHM and SCH have been my favourite jobs since the release of 2.0 but now, while WHM did got better (because it pretty much never had anything in the beginning), SCH has become so massively uninteresting and mind-blowing "plain" or "boring" that I cannot force myself to play it anymore. It really sucks that despite me liking this game very much, and ShB has been the best it has evern been, playing my favourite jobs makes me want to quit the game and actually do something interesting with my time. If Endwalker doesn't bring massive changes to the way healing and healers work, I don't see myself even leveling my WHM past 80.

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Originally Posted by Eorzean_username

For example, you could have an OGCD. Let's call it "Pope Stance".

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Just here to throw my support behind any ability called 'Pope Stance'

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Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

Have to disagree on all of these personally. Let SCH and WHM have their own solutions to movement and weaving without making them into AST clones.

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I'm not sure why cast time is seen as a class identity rather than a basic function tbh. It's sort of like claiming melees or phys ranged are clones of each other because they all have instant abilities. Shorter cast time (or significantly more free weave) opens the potential to design all sorts of abilities to combo and weave, dps, utility and heal because now you can make them flow and work properly.
Asking the Devs to leave WHM as a turret with maybe one more weave because "it takes a braincell to optimize around the clunkiness" is actually shooting ourselves in the foot, because a clunky clipping turret has no room to receive a wide toolkit of engaging dps, weave and oGCDs. A mobile WHM has room to add anything they like and could be far more rewarding to optimize.

I also really dislike the words "tax" and "punish" in class design. Dps and AST don't punish you for simply playing your role, they "reward" you for playing it well and the punishment is mainly for making mistakes. Being rewarded simply feels better than constantly being slapped on the wrist for things you have to do like avoiding a mechanic or using a heal.
To compare, it would be like placing tank defensives on the GCD, giving them no potency and making them break combos. Sure you could mitigate the impact with smart play, which gives the illusion of it being a skill based system, but it'd feel frustrating to play.

I'd just like healers to flow, feel good to play and reward me when I play well.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I'm not sure why cast time is seen as a class identity rather than a basic function tbh. It's sort of like claiming melees or phys ranged are clones of each other because they all have instant abilities. Shorter cast time (or significantly more free weave) opens the potential to design all sorts of abilities to combo and weave, dps, utility and heal because now you can make them flow and work properly.
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I'd just like healers to flow, feel good to play and reward me when I play well.

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You can fix WHM and SCH without giving them the AST treatment though. What you said may be true, but at the same time it's also true that cast times do define how some jobs play and contribute to differentiating jobs in the same role. Also we shouldn't forget that AST has a quicker cast time because it has a significantly higher APM count when compared to the other healers. An easy way to help WHM whould be something like giving them a dps neutral instant dot with a 15 seconds duration, that would be more than enough considering how little weaving they have to do. As for SCH, they could just slightly buff ruin ii and/or get a little more creative with AF damage interactions. Think of something like the following: every time an AF stack is used for an healing oGCD, a stack of "disaster" is gained. At 3 stacks, ruin ii is changed to "catastrophe", a new instant cast offensive spell that places an aetherial mine below your target that explodes a few times, dealing damage to all enemies in its vicinity. This would make for a little more interesting gameplay flow for SCH: you'd still want to minimize ruin ii usage, but you'd gain 1 more instant spell for every AF use and you'd be rewarded for using AF stacks for healing instead of feeling bad because you had to "waste" them on healing skills instead of energy drains. ED would remain an emergency measure to deal with mana issues and in an optimized scenario should be avoided.

Anyway, the point is that giving SCH and WHM a quicker casting time would just be a bad move. Both of them are already terribly boring and trying to maximize uptime is their only form of optimization. Take that away and there would be absolutely nothing interesting about them. AST at the very least has cards management. That might not seem like a lot, but optimizing cards distribution based on the burst windows of your dps is at least something to think about and may be occasionally challenging, especially when cards distrubition happens during non-trivial mechanics.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I'm not sure why cast time is seen as a class identity rather than a basic function tbh. It's sort of like claiming melees or phys ranged are clones of each other because they all have instant abilities.

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its probably because the healer dps "kits" are so shallow and simplistic that anything even slightly different is being mistaken for identity.

that said theres plenty of other, more interesting ways to open up weave spots. im not in favor of clunky classes, but rather of each class having a creative way to make them not clunky

miasma ii was one of my favorite approaches because of the complexity it brought compared to ruin ii. having frequent instant or low cast time skills and/or procs like firestarter/thundercloud baked into the rotation also works

If fastcasts are considered class identity now, the standards must be really low after the Shb changes. Not that I'm surprised.
AST got fastcasts not as part of it's identity but out of sheer neccessity and it is an admittedly cheap solution that adds nothing to its class fantasy but it works. There is no rule stating that a class should only have as many weaving slots as they need. RDM has far more weaving slots than they ever need, BLM has more weaving slots than they need and it's only when people go at AI playstyle really hard that they need to plan carefully.
WHM does not even have enough to function while SCH has less than it needs to flow decently well as a healer without forcing their co heal to carry the healing.
Of course there are other solutions like a 1-2 combo with the 2nd being a fast cast that can be used without combo but at lower potency than the first skill and/ or is instant if combo'd. Or making Assize an 1,5s and adding charges (would also serve to make Assize finally interesting for healing and use it according to needs rather than blindly keeping it on cd). Or making Misery available at 2. Or add another dot with a shorter duration. Or add a proc to dot ticks that gives charges for using an instant cast.
But right now the reason why they couldn't add more interesting oGCDs to WHM if they wanted to is the severe lack of weaving slots.
In an ideal world I'd take a unique way for each healer to deal with weaving and movement on top of interesting oGCDs and class mechanics in general. But fastcasts isn't a class identity, it was a quick and easy way to take care of a neccessity.

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

AST got fastcasts not as part of it's identity but out of sheer neccessity and it is an admittedly cheap solution that adds nothing to its class fantasy but it works.

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I'm won't be debating about if WHM and SCH should have the same treatment, but we have to remember something indeed.

Malefic-type spell used to be 2,5 cast time.
It changed to 1,5 because AST was clipping very hard.

So it was not intended to be in its "identity".

Meanwhile, Benefic, Cure and Physick all share the same 1,5s cast time.

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

Anyway, the point is that giving SCH and WHM a quicker casting time would just be a bad move. Both of them are already terribly boring and trying to maximize uptime is their only form of optimization. Take that away and there would be absolutely nothing interesting about them.

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What I was talking about isn't just tacking on a faster cast time and calling it a day. Healers will always be terribly boring if we don't address weave because you can't just tack on 5 more interesting oGCD's on a clunky turret. There's no room. There are other options for weave slots than the AST cast, but WHM/SCH would need significantly more free ones to have on-demand windows, especially when healing isn't always as predictable as dps if people take avoidable damage or die. The WHM/SCH casting just doesn't support a well designed toolkit. If we ask the devs to keep 2.5 sec endless Glares, we're hindering any potential to have enjoyable gameplay.

What I'm trying to look at is the broader picture, for example if they changed the cast time and then took the opportunity it provided to add an engaging toolkit and interesting oGCD's to weave into those new slots, and I feel most people are stuck using the current healers to judge any potential change. They're also looking at it from the perspective of the current heal design of 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 where if you opened up the way for a better toolkit, you'd ideally have multiple dps abilities, for example your main cast could be 1.5 sec, with some slower big casts, some procs, a mix of things. There's also the fact that GCD heals are often a full cast and in a better designed game we'd need them sometimes. So ideally you wouldn't just be spamming a Malefic clone.

I don't think a minor Ruin II buff and call it a day is a fix at all either. Ruin II is bland and almost an excuse not to give SCH any real weave. They could get creative and reward you with free windows for various things. Extra dots, procs from DoTs, an instant GCD hit that triggers from Aether heals, ED being a harder hitting instant GCD (not saying all those are good ideas, but you get what I mean).

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

What I was talking about isn't just tacking on a faster cast time and calling it a day. Healers will always be terribly boring if we don't address weave because you can't just tack on 5 more interesting oGCD's on a clunky turret. There's no room. There are other options for weave slots than the AST cast, but WHM/SCH would need significantly more free ones to have on-demand windows, especially when healing isn't always as predictable as dps if people take avoidable damage or die. The WHM/SCH casting just doesn't support a well designed toolkit. If we ask the devs to keep 2.5 sec endless Glares, we're hindering any potential to have enjoyable gameplay.

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I agree, but we need to be realistic here. They're not going to significantly alter how healers play, unfortunately. 111111 will still be the basic offensive gameplay for healers in the next expansion. That's just how it goes with mmos when they are popular and accessibility becomes the primary focus. Any change will be incremental and marginal. So they're obviously not going to give healers a lower cast time offensive spell so that they can add new and interesting mechanics to 4 different jobs via oGCDs, as much as it pains me to say it.

I wonder if people realize about how SCH has no problem weaving actions in AoE since, y'know, the AoE is an instant cast? And it's SCH's main damage tool, unlike Ruin II? Amazing how much smoother weaving actions is in AoE pulls than in regular ones since I have plenty of windows to do it.

My healer of choice is SCH, but I'm so hyped for SGE, just because it looks like a tech-based healer mixing with magick. But at the same time, I'd love SCH getting some attention.

Complaints:
- Fey Union is terrible, I can barely see the impact of it. I wish the Faerie Gauge had more direct impact in whatever the Fairy does, so I wouldn't be forgetting it as the last resort button to press when I don't have anything else available. Maybe an on-demand gauge spender would be nice to have, so I could feel that the resource is actually more meaningful on the gameplay - after all it's the Job's gauge system;

- This is not just for SCH but SMNs as well... The way the pet actions are organized in the UI is kind of convoluted to read, you have to keep double checking 2 different icons to see what activates what;

- The Seraph duration is too short to make the best use of both Consolation charges, especially because it's also a shiel. Actually, if the Seraph was what consumed the gauge instead of Fey Union, it would actually be much more useful, since you'd be able to activate/deactivate on demand and optimize its use;

- Again, a shared complaint with SMN, the pet action delay, why it does even exists anymore? The pets at this rate are basically just cosmetic entities with zero interactions on the field itself, might as well turn them just into the animation of the abilities themselves;

- A complaint for every healer: Give us back the pre-SB dps complexity;

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

I don\\'t think a minor Ruin II buff and call it a day is a fix at all either. Ruin II is bland and almost an excuse not to give SCH any real weave. They could get creative and reward you with free windows for various things. Extra dots, procs from DoTs, an instant GCD hit that triggers from Aether heals, ED being a harder hitting instant GCD (not saying all those are good ideas, but you get what I mean).

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What distinguishes Ruin II from Malefic is that it presents an opportunity cost on SCH specifically. On its own it is a straight DPS penalty. Situationally it’s a DPS increase. Currently, it’s only an increase when you’re required to move, but only marginally, because its contingent on Energy Drain stacks being dumped with them. But when it is tuned properly so that it discourages hard clipping, it becomes an active DPS increase to use alongside Energy Drain while offering a weave slot for healing actions. That double weave window then opens up the opportunity to give SCH another oGCD DPS action or two that supplements their oGCD heals, where the goal would be to tie the use of Fairy Gauge into their DPS through those actions so that their overall focus becomes juggling this feedback loop between Aetherflow, the fairy, and their DPS oGCDs so that they make the right trade offs to have just enough healing resources when they need it while still maximizing their DPS. From that view, Ruin II actually fits better as a DPS spell just for being able to squeeze more actions into less space as they’re only being used when absolutely necessary.

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Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

What distinguishes Ruin II from Malefic is that it presents an opportunity cost on SCH specifically.

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THAT.

That right there.

You're saying that it's okay for Scholar to be punished for doing something that they should be doing. Here's the problem: If every other job had an opportunity cost, then this would be fine. However, other than White Mage, these "punishments" have been largely removed. Lance Charge was once Blood for Blood, which increased the damage you dealt but increased the damage you did. Every DPS that could carry this skill, did. Back in ARR, you actually had to turn off Blood for Blood when taking Bahamut's Earthshakers or else you would probably die. I mean, opportunity cost was already baked into the healer role with Cleric Stance. Scholar was the best at mitigating it because of the fairy which covered the bulk of their healing (Lustrate in ARR was also a flat % which would ignore the healing penalty of Cleric Stance).

But, now? Shadowbringers has done its best to remove any sort of opportunity cost jobs have, but, for some reason, Scholar and White Mage are still rife with this problem. That's the problem. Scholar and White Mage are stuck in a fundamentally different design philosophy.

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Originally Posted by inhaledcorn

THAT.

That right there.

You're saying that it's okay for Scholar to be punished for doing something that they should be doing. Here's the problem: If every other job had an opportunity cost, then this would be fine.

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Firstly, I'm not trying to solve the healing taxes with the Ruin II change. I'm trying to facilitate other changes that WOULD be used to solve the healing taxes, while keeping Ruin II, because Ruin II fits Scholar's gameplay loop better than Half AST casting. Ruin II only represents a gain as a weaving tool if it's able to out do hard-clipping oGCDs between Broils alongside the use of other actions. Currently, Energy Drain is the only action that does this. Yes I want more of them. If that's your only concern, then let me remind you that SE isn't going to walk back on pet changes. Not even for a second. SCHs are going to want on-demand no-brainer double weaving in that context. But it shouldn't invalidate Broil in the process.

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Originally Posted by inhaledcorn

Lance Charge was once Blood for Blood, which increased the damage you dealt but increased the damage you did. Every DPS that could carry this skill, did. Back in ARR, you actually had to turn off Blood for Blood when taking Bahamut's Earthshakers or else you would probably die. I mean, opportunity cost was already baked into the healer role with Cleric Stance.

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Blood for Blood was a problem because Dragoon's MDEF scaling was garbage for a tier and a half AND there wasn't a reason to actually have the penalty in the first place beyond flavor. Cleric Stance was a problem because gear scaling and encounter speed eventually made it not worth keeping around for the sake of improving healer gameplay as a whole. Removing both effects were net-positives. Ruin II is not a problem on that scale. What all three have in common is each were mechanics that at one point were broken because of bad tuning, though I'd argue there's another important distinction. Ruin II doesn't incur a significant gameplay penalty for using it incorrectly. You press Ruin II when you're not supposed to? Oh well, lost 90 potency. That's it. End of Discussion. Compare this suboptimal play to "I'm On A Controller and Can't Right Click The Red Icon Guess I'll Die" or "Raiders and Sylphies Hate Him for Using This One Trick". Punishment by Death it is not. And those two issues mostly deal with Stat Scaling and Encounter Design. Not Class Design.

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Originally Posted by inhaledcorn

However, other than White Mage, these "punishments" have been largely removed. Scholar was the best at mitigating it because of the fairy which covered the bulk of their healing (Lustrate in ARR was also a flat % which would ignore the healing penalty of Cleric Stance).

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And it was changed to be a flat heal in Heavensward and the world didn't break. Scholar was the top DPS healer for both expansions and Stormblood with a Mandatory slot if you just wanted to exist in speedkilling. But on the topic of White Mage: Yes, I agree. Doesn't have any relevance to Scholar beyond "I want their solution to this problem to feel like a WHM". And they suffer from far more than just hardclipping. They're still two expansions behind in terms of development as far as I'm concerned. But I'm not talking about WHM.

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Originally Posted by inhaledcorn

But, now? Shadowbringers has done its best to remove any sort of opportunity cost jobs have, but, for some reason, Scholar and White Mage are still rife with this problem. That's the problem. Scholar and White Mage are stuck in a fundamentally different design philosophy.

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I wouldn't say there was an opportunity cost to former DPS rotations. Situational decisions borne from proc management and holes in their design and More to micromanage, sure, but it absolutely has gotten easier to juggle over time. But Blood For Blood doesn't even qualify there when compared to Stance Dancing on either tanks or healers. It's not even a contest. I'd say there were obvious gaps in design focus though. Monk's aged even worse than any healer has. Summoner and Machinist get reworked every expansion and their biggest misses were both in Stormblood, not Shadowbringers. Dragoon and Black Mage are the only ones that don't seem to get screwed over, but they are showing their limits. I think both are due for an evolution and that does have me wary.

That all said. Healer design works better with Tradeoffs. At least in XIV's style of encounters. Because as you maximize their potential and gear up those tradeoffs have the potential to flip from erring on healing to erring on DPS, and I'd like that skill progression curve to remain intact. Hell I want it back on AST through their cards or filler DPS too. I want that philosophy to stay on the roles that care about defensive gameplay, but not at the cost of gameplay fluidity. Hardclipping is just garbage, but I want solutions to hardclipping that are -unique- to each healer. I'm uncertain what WHM's should be, but my gut says to give them an on-demand tool as a last resort, a lossless way to do it on a cooldown a bit shorter than Lilies are, and/or shift Lilies so the DPS tax comes from another Afflatus skill rather than Misery itself, so that Misery can be tuned as an active DPS increase that aligns with SCH and AST's respective raid cooldowns and therefore is used to compensate for WHM's lack of raid utility.

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

I agree, but we need to be realistic here. They're not going to significantly alter how healers play, unfortunately. 111111 will still be the basic offensive gameplay for healers in the next expansion. That's just how it goes with mmos when they are popular and accessibility becomes the primary focus. Any change will be incremental and marginal. So they're obviously not going to give healers a lower cast time offensive spell so that they can add new and interesting mechanics to 4 different jobs via oGCDs, as much as it pains me to say it.

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Regardless, there's no point in giving feedback that supports and cements a 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 design. I'd prefer whatever gradual changes they make to start leaning towards smoother gameplay so they have a foundation to build on, rather than the Devs thinking "nope, can't add more utility, oGCD, procs or engagement because we're definitely keeping 2 button dps forever, there's no room to add more, and the players seem ok with that".

Cleric stance wasn’t interesting satisfying or fun

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Originally Posted by Ariel_Valmont

Cleric stance wasn’t interesting satisfying or fun

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It was quite the barrier to entry too.
Out of all the people in my FC (around 10) only 2 of them had even touched healer (one out of a sense of obligation) and it was largely because of cleric stance.
Now that cleric stance is gone most of my FC heals and loves it. If they don't main it, it's their secondary job.

On the flipside, now healing requires basically zero brainpower and has chased out a decent portion of people who actually enjoyed playing them before.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

It was quite the barrier to entry too.
Out of all the people in my FC (around 10) only 2 of them had even touched healer (one out of a sense of obligation) and it was largely because of cleric stance.
Now that cleric stance is gone most of my FC heals and loves it. If they don't main it, it's their secondary job.

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Except it wasn't.
Cleric Stance had fairly low impact at lower levels because DoM gear had Int and Mind, making learning healer quite easy and Cleric pretty much optional. It was perfectly fine to dps without using it or only occasionaly at most for a long time. It only became relevant at higher levels when gear no longer had both stats, meaning you did signifcantly less damage without it but by then people were past the point of "entry".
The community knew about the risks and drawbacks of it and I'm disinclined to believe that it was only on my data centre. If a healer didn't or rarely used Cleric Stance it was much more accepted than a healer not or barely dpsing now.
And certainly not when someone stated they're not yet good at juggling dps and healing.
It was great when people used it but the community wasn't nearly as adamant about healers going full green dps as it is nowadays, so when someone didn't feel comfortable utilizing it as much as they could, it was okay.

It's a common mistake to not set sensible priorities when learning a class but that has nothing to do with wether something is actually an entry barrier or not. Wether it was fun or not is debatable, that much I can agree on. But setting the priorites wrong or trying to focus on too much at once is a player mistake, not a game mistake.
If the came to enjoy healing after all, good on them. But to get some people to enjoy it, many veterans were permanently driven away from that role and the decline in healer quality is quite noticable. What remains are mostly people who didn't have a genuine interest in healing and only do it for the queue time because it's now easy enough to while netflixing.

SCH needs something to do with it's Fairy Gauge.

WHM and AST build up their resources for a big BANG and SCH gets . . . a bigger regen? In fact, that's most jobs other than SCH. Build resources, use on a cool flashy ability. Maybe if Fey Pact was strong it wouldn't be so bad but it's not. There are times I went entire fights without using it because it's just not needed.

I wouldn't mind seraph draining it if it's potency was actually worth it and could be still build mid call.

I sometimes forget Fey Blessing even exists because not only does it use the gauge but you barely notice its heal. That and none of the capstone abilities really synergize with each other. Between Dissipation, Fey Union, and Seraph use one and the other two cannot be.

A slightly-weaker-than-physick aoe heal on a 60 second cooldown that uses the fey gauge barely. How exciting.

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

Except it wasn't.

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You say it wasn't, but it literally was what stopped my FC from trying the healers lol.

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

Cleric Stance had fairly low impact at lower levels because DoM gear had Int and Mind, making learning healer quite easy and Cleric pretty much optional. It was perfectly fine to dps without using it or only occasionaly at most for a long time. It only became relevant at higher levels when gear no longer had both stats, meaning you did signifcantly less damage without it but by then people were past the point of "entry". The community knew about the risks and drawbacks of it and I'm disinclined to believe that it was only on my data centre.

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Maybe cleric didn't matter until high level, but ultimately that's what we would be playing it in. No one was gonna pick up the class just to use it in lower level content, and we all looked at cleric stance, saw the "risks and drawbacks" as you put it, and none of us wanted to wrestle with it in high level stuff.
It was our barrier to entry in that it stopped us from trying it.
(Perhaps I didn't use that phrase properly...)
And this was all added to because our obligatory clerics who were begrudgingly levelling healers... didn't enjoy healing largely because they hated cleric stance.

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

If a healer didn't or rarely used Cleric Stance it was much more accepted than a healer not or barely dpsing now.
[...]
It was great when people used it but the community wasn't nearly as adamant about healers going full green dps as it is nowadays, so when someone didn't feel comfortable utilizing it as much as they could, it was okay.

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The tanks in my FC (myself included) were regularly chewed out by randos if we had tank stance on in levelling roulettes and normal mode trials... so none of us wanted to mess with cleric stance lol.
I'm glad you had better experiences and matched with more understanding people, but man we did NOT.

Cleric stance, while admittedly clunky and ultimately in need of replacement with something that doesn't occasionally glitch out with this game's horrific netcode, was seriously not the math lady meme rocket brain surgery this forum seems to believe it was. It was a button. That increased your damage. And decreased your healing for a minimum of five entire seconds. Was it prone to stickiness? Yes. Was it possible to press it at a bad time and get people killed? Absolutely. Did it add an impossibly complicated layer of bigbrain to the role that killed most of the interest in it? Please. Healing, like tanking, isn't nearly as popular as damage dealing because it's an often thankless task that requires multitarget spatial awareness and rarely involves the same consistent satisfying crunch that big hits deliver. "Cleric Stance is scary" is a red herring. Healing is "accessible" now because it's a set of DPS classes that've been lobotomized with the death of a thousand cuts. The damage rotations could be managed by a sufficiently trained cat, the combo of few party-wide hits and absurd universal self-sustain means healing is mostly an occasional leisurely break from bonking that 1 key, and managing debuffs is now a red DPS thing so that's out the window too.

Cleric Stance wasn't the boogeyman that kept most DPS mains from trying healer. They're trying it out now because the role is now just easymode DPS classes.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

"Cleric Stance is scary" is a red herring.

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Maybe, but it sure scared us.

Well of course it would make someone nervous! It made me incredibly anxious at first too.
If you haven't interacted with something before it can be intimidating, but that doesn't mean it's bad or that its removal is necessarily good, even if the removal makes it more "accessible."


For the longest time, positionals on MNK intimidated me, but eventually I bucked up, got down, and started playing the role and forced myself to use them. Doing so not only allowed me to overcome my hesitation to the class, but made me a better player overall. I would never dream of asking for or celebrating the removal of such a mechanic just because it made something more accessible to me. Doing so would be stifling my growth and removing a mechanic that adds to the gameplay.


It's the same with cleric stance. It was intimidating at first, and I had some discomfort with using the ability. But eventually I got the hang of it and fell in love with the ability and healing in this game.

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Originally Posted by Shalan

but that doesn't mean it's bad or that its removal is necessarily good, even if the removal makes it more "accessible."

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I never argued that it was bad or that it's removal was good.
Someone said:

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Originally Posted by Ariel_Valmont

Cleric stance wasn’t interesting satisfying or fun

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And I just chimed in with my own frustrations (it was scary).

Now everyone is jumping on me like I was trying to beat up the idea of cleric stance.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Cleric Stance wasn't the boogeyman that kept most DPS mains from trying healer. They're trying it out now because the role is now just easymode DPS classes.

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People often forget healers back in Heavensward, and especially ARR, had nowhere near the ridiculously overpowered kits they do now. Benediction alone was on a five minute CD. Tankbusters were also far more frequent, thus you were expected to actually, ya know, heal the tank more. Healing has become remarkably easier than it's ever been. Hence why you see so many complaints from players at all skill levels they have little to actually heal.

The combination of accessibility on both tanks and healers have reduced the role of both roles into gimped DPS who occasionally play the role they signed up for.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

People often forget healers back in Heavensward, and especially ARR, had nowhere near the ridiculously overpowered kits they do now. Benediction alone was on a five minute CD. Tankbusters were also far more frequent, thus you were expected to actually, ya know, heal the tank more. Healing has become remarkably easier than it's ever been. Hence why you see so many complaints from players at all skill levels they have little to actually heal.

The combination of accessibility on both tanks and healers have reduced the role of both roles into gimped DPS who occasionally play the role they signed up for.

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Healing being more challenging would be nice. I'm also in what appears to be a minority on the forums, because I also don't think the baseline healing kits beneath the OP always-available oGCDs are particularly interesting either; having like two GCD heals with barely any difference between them other than efficiency is an okay start, but a decision tree it is definitely not. Bouncing back and forth between juggling a modest damage kit and needing to swap out for a ~20 second triage with a few decent GCD heals and a short list of strong oGCDs back in Heavensward struck a decent balance between what would have otherwise been two kinda boring kit halves (on their own).

But I spend a decent chunk of time ranting at people who also seem to think "having one button for damage is just *chef's kiss* yum yum! Now just delete the oGCDs so we spam Cure when we're not spamming Glare!" would make healing better. Garbage can it all and start over for all I care. Current healer kits don't even have the distinction of any connection to their class lore. They're a collection of random, incoherent abilities that survived expansion slashing and were moved around to hide the huge holes where a glimmer of actual design used to live. Given your choice to spend the next GCD casting something, why would you use Thunder on a black mage? Easy, because Thundercloud is a strong, impactful part of the job design that outdamages Fire 4 if you don't overwrite too soon. Fire? Resetting the timer on Astral Fire. Freeze? Adds an umbral heart and lets you do more with your Flares. Why would you cast Regen? Who the hell knows, maybe it's the nearest Cure 2 equivalent button to your already cramped Glare finger. Holy? Because it's literally the only correct choice you have when facing a group of enemies. Assize? Because the white cooldown numbers disappeared. Cure 3? Because fuggit, why not, Medica 2 is overused and it basically does the same thing when you're in a stack, and trying to muscle memory where it is on the hotbar is the most fun you've had in the last ten minutes. Do Medica 2 or Cure 3 feed into another system that would give you pause to think about which of the two would influence your next move in a more interesting way? God no, but I'm gibbering into the void here because I hear "WHM is so well designed!" on these forums and ingame a frightening lot, largely because someone on the dev team figured out how to feed two entire heals in the Jumbled Trashpile Of Functionally Identical Healing Spells into poor man's Foul, as if that salvages the rest of the confused mess.

My rambling point here is, nuke the healers from orbit. There's barely anything worth saving. They're piles of barely-related buttons with some sparkles attached.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Given your choice to spend the next GCD casting something, why would you use Thunder on a black mage? Easy, because Thundercloud is a strong, impactful part of the job design that outdamages Fire 4 if you don't overwrite too soon..

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Because you have to fill the GCD in Ice phase with something.

Make no mistake, if thundercloud didn't exist, we'd still use Thunder, because we're not going to use Blizzard 1 or Scathe, and being tied to the Server Tick for MP regen creates a variable recovery phase.

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Originally Posted by Mesarthim

I sometimes forget Fey Blessing even exists because not only does it use the gauge but you barely notice its heal. That and none of the capstone abilities really synergize with each other. Between Dissipation, Fey Union, and Seraph use one and the other two cannot be.

A slightly-weaker-than-physick aoe heal on a 60 second cooldown that uses the fey gauge barely. How exciting.

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Only bonus is it's aoe but yeah, it's weak and on top of that it suffers the pet penalty (33% IIRC). I really wish SE would just update the fairy tooltip to show what the actual potencies are.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

The damage rotations could be managed by a sufficiently trained cat, the combo of few party-wide hits and absurd universal self-sustain means healing is mostly an occasional leisurely break from bonking that 1 key, and managing debuffs is now a red DPS thing so that's out the window too.

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Real Talk? I have as little spell speed as I can, stack Crit and Det and have a macro for Glare / Broil / Malefic spam. What's sad is even using that inefficient macro, I've outdps'd people before.

Also:

SE needs to stop making single target spells that only can target "Your Party members". In Delebrum Reginae I can't Excogitation or Divine Benison another groups tank because reasons?

I honestly would not mind having 50% healing and 50% downtime. I do enjoy the wider support role beyond healing. Honestly, better crafted downtime could be potentially fun, juggling healing with each jobs distinct internal mechanics during downtime, just like AST.

Again:

WHM, proper damage rotation, big slow strong spells combined with light hitting quick casts, and mobility skills.

SCH, proper debuff management. Drain and leech effects and weakness exposing debuffs. Why our dot damage doesn't feed into our fairy healing is something I don't yet understand.

AST, proper buff management. Royal Road was a great tool to ensure me made the most of the RNG. Feels like the 3 charges on redraw could have worked much better for that system.
Buff extension, spreading, expanding could have worked great.
Also Balance needed to go. Too strong compared to the others.

Interestingly enough we have 6 secondary stats: Determination, Critical Hit, Direct hit, Spell/Skill speed, Tenacity and Piety. One for each card, hmmm...

From a newbie's perspective on "normal" (read: easy) content, the healing kits are full of stuff that is used in niche situations and can definitely be pared down. On the flip side, the DPS kit could be made significantly more complex (and rewarding).

One of my favorite healers to play in any MMO was Chloromancer from RIFT. Its healing was intertwined with the damage that it dealt and that was a fun concept and something that I'd like to see in FF14, even if it's just a single class that does it.

It had a passive heal, a debuff put on enemies that when hit had a 10% chance of the attacker to heal the damage they dealt (with a cap dependent on the Chloromancer's stats), a DoT on enemies that heals any players near that enemy, a buff that you put on the tank and damage from certain abilities cause a heal on that target (think Dance Partner and some of your DPS abilities cause a heal on your partner).

I would love a healer that had a complex DPS kit and if you did great at the DPS portion, it buffed, augmented, or even replaced most of the need to use direct healing.

Well, if we're going shields vs HP recovery types...

WHM
1) Cut or remove divine benison as it really doesn't fit the regen style healing they have.
2) Remove the current free cure and make it something more useful to the job. Something like after using a solace or rapture you get a free instant cast of Cure I, cure II, medica, medica II, or cure III, depending on what is unlocked. Maybe even make the next cast instant cast and free regardless.
3) make cure II replace cure I.
4) Plenary indulgence feels kind of weird and I think it should proc off any heal from anyone and not just your own medica, medica II, cure III, or afflatus rapture.
5) Definitely need a less sluggish holy. The new style of gameplay just doesn't work with the delayed animation and the damage from holy doesn't really match the impact it is supposed to have.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

Interestingly enough we have 6 secondary stats: Determination, Critical Hit, Direct hit, Spell/Skill speed, Tenacity and Piety. One for each card, hmmm...

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Sadly, the meta will demand Crit becomes the new Balance, with Tenacity and Piety becoming the new Spire and Ewer aka "the useless cards" - there's just no winning there.

So, the past days i have been pushing my luck in dungeons by running Daily Roulette (lv80, expert and 50/60/70) as a regular Conjurer and amusingly, that Healing Kit is so far, more than sufficient to heal any Dungeon i encountered so far, even with mass pulling.

I have yet to test this later with Trials, trough, but i doubt it will be any different, but i will make another post or even a Thread once testing is completed.

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Originally Posted by Anhra

So, the past days i have been pushing my luck in dungeons by running Daily Roulette (lv80, expert and 50/60/70) as a regular Conjurer and amusingly, that Healing Kit is so far, more than sufficient to heal any Dungeon i encountered so far, even with mass pulling.

I have yet to test this later with Trials, trough, but i doubt it will be any different, but i will make another post or even a Thread once testing is completed.

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Please do not do this.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Anhra

So, the past days i have been pushing my luck in dungeons by running Daily Roulette (lv80, expert and 50/60/70) as a regular Conjurer and amusingly, that Healing Kit is so far, more than sufficient to heal any Dungeon i encountered so far, even with mass pulling.

I have yet to test this later with Trials, trough, but i doubt it will be any different, but i will make another post or even a Thread once testing is completed.

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I keep telling people: soul stone-less runs can be surprisingly fun ♡
You going in with your friends though? Or inflicting your test on randos?