It's time to kill the argument that DPS abilities keep healers from healing.

If you just remove glare it fixes the problem entirely.
https://files.catbox.moe/2y6qeu.jpeg

All this problem are just from the assumption that healers have to be pressing something 100% of the time. There are plenty of games where supports don't have to deal any damage and just have downtime between healing. Only in XIV do people complain "dps dps I want to dps" as a healer. As you all say not every role has to be the same, dps and tanks are already told to press buttons 100% of the time and optimize their damage, so why can't healers have less stressful gameplay to satisfy players who would rather not have to optimize every second of the fight to press one more glare?

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Originally Posted by lisaa

If you just remove glare it fixes the problem entirely.
https://files.catbox.moe/2y6qeu.jpeg

All this problem are just from the assumption that healers have to be pressing something 100% of the time. There are plenty of games where supports don't have to deal any damage and just have downtime between healing. Only in XIV do people complain "dps dps I want to dps" as a healer. As you all say not every role has to be the same, dps and tanks are already told to press buttons 100% of the time and optimize their damage, so why can't healers have less stressful gameplay to satisfy players who would rather not have to optimize every second of the fight to press one more glare?

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It's time to either do nothing or do the beez knees for 60% of the fight lol.

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Originally Posted by lisaa

If you just remove glare it fixes the problem entirely.
https://files.catbox.moe/2y6qeu.jpeg

All this problem are just from the assumption that healers have to be pressing something 100% of the time. There are plenty of games where supports don't have to deal any damage and just have downtime between healing. Only in XIV do people complain "dps dps I want to dps" as a healer. As you all say not every role has to be the same, dps and tanks are already told to press buttons 100% of the time and optimize their damage, so why can't healers have less stressful gameplay to satisfy players who would rather not have to optimize every second of the fight to press one more glare?

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Remove glare and do what, meanwhile?

Guaranteed replies.

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Originally Posted by lisaa

If you just remove glare it fixes the problem entirely.
https://files.catbox.moe/2y6qeu.jpeg

All this problem are just from the assumption that healers have to be pressing something 100% of the time. There are plenty of games where supports don't have to deal any damage and just have downtime between healing. Only in XIV do people complain "dps dps I want to dps" as a healer. As you all say not every role has to be the same, dps and tanks are already told to press buttons 100% of the time and optimize their damage, so why can't healers have less stressful gameplay to satisfy players who would rather not have to optimize every second of the fight to press one more glare?

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A...Are you seriously proposing that in order to fix healer's gameplay we should just not play the game the majority of the time?

This is hilarious 10/10 trolling

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Originally Posted by lisaa

If you just remove glare it fixes the problem entirely.

All this problem are just from the assumption that healers have to be pressing something 100% of the time. There are plenty of games where supports don't have to deal any damage and just have downtime between healing. Only in XIV do people complain "dps dps I want to dps" as a healer. As you all say not every role has to be the same, dps and tanks are already told to press buttons 100% of the time and optimize their damage, so why can't healers have less stressful gameplay to satisfy players who would rather not have to optimize every second of the fight to press one more glare?

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At least you are honest here about wanting to be lazy and lax: I respect you for that. Not all people want that from their gameplay though, hence why all those suggestions and discussions in this subforum.

Let's hope you can get 3-7 other players who are willing to carry your slack, then. I personally, won't tolerate that. But you do you. Experience told me that only silent ostracization awaits those who insist on being this lazy, unless you are solely playing with group of friends; which I'd highly salute them for being a saint.

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Originally Posted by lisaa

All this problem are just from the assumption that healers have to be pressing something 100% of the time.

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and why shouldn't they? every member in a party should contribute to its success. doing nothing for extended periods of time is not only boring but detrimental to the team

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Originally Posted by lisaa

dps and tanks are already told to press buttons 100% of the time and optimize their damage

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Are they though? a tank can do "just fine" holding aggro using their ranged attack a few times every minute and afking the rest of the time. Dps in normal content do "just fine" doing freestyle rotations and having terrible gcd uptime.

jobs are only asked to optimize their damage in content where there are dps checks. and if any party member is expected to contribute damage, healers are too. especially when a good healer can do more damage than a tank.

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Originally Posted by lisaa

There are plenty of games where supports don't have to deal any damage and just have downtime between healing.

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and this is ffxiv, where healers do damage

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Originally Posted by Drkdays

Agreed. it's amazing how many would-be healers just want more dps. Shows how little they know about actual healing.

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We don't want more total DPS; we want more variety to the current amounts of DPS.

But by all means, go ahead and simply accuse many people who have gotten all their healing jobs to level 80 and played them for lengthy amounts of time that they're not really healers at all and apparently know less about healing than you; it's incredibly rude and dismissive, and it doesn't help that some of your posts in this thread have included blatant strawman arguments, but if convincing yourself of that mentally helps you justify the total ignorance of their data and experiences, then more power to you.

Looking at your character on the official Final Fantasy XIV character search, by the way, it looks like two of the three healer jobs you haven't even touched once, only White Mage. And yet you're also telling level 80 Scholars and Astrologians that they're "would-be healers" despite you never even unlocking either job?

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Originally Posted by lisaa

If you just remove glare it fixes the problem entirely.

All this problem are just from the assumption that healers have to be pressing something 100% of the time. There are plenty of games where supports don't have to deal any damage and just have downtime between healing. Only in XIV do people complain "dps dps I want to dps" as a healer.

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I mean, if you want to be bad at the game, that's on you but don't expect other people to tolerate it.

The baseline of competency in this game is doing something productive every single GCD.

If that entails healing, so be it, if it doesn't the other option the developers have given us is damage spells.

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Originally Posted by lisaa

If you just remove glare it fixes the problem entirely.

All this problem are just from the assumption that healers have to be pressing something 100% of the time. There are plenty of games where supports don't have to deal any damage and just have downtime between healing.

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Games like?

MMOs with enforced downtime that spring to mind all had reasons for said downtime.

Everquest? It was an MP thing primarily. Sure, in isolation, all the gear in the world only got you FT15 back when I played and if you were a Druid or Cleric, you were sitting for inordinate amounts of time. Shaman were the solution to this and could turn cannibalize their HP for MP, then regenerate efficiently with Torpor and Regen. In raid situations, Clarity and modrods combined with a healer for the healers were also used to significantly reduce or even eliminate downtime for healers. Bonus fun fact, sitting and meditating in Everquest was a huge agro gain and at lower levels you even had to have your spell book open filling the entire screen making you totally blind.

WoW? Again, mostly MP and it was greatly reduced here. MP regeneration ramped up rapidly the longer you meditated for and if you could get yourself out of combat, it only took 3 or 4 ticks to get a huge chunk of MP back in PvP. Often enough to swing the tide of a team fight.

FFXI? MP, Enmity and Accuracy were all significant roadblocks for healers to contribute any sort of DPS at the end game. As a bard main here, even though I could land a good number of my songs, I still had to be super careful with enmity as well. With a blink tank and a quick hitting mob I'd routinely end up overtaking the tanks in agro and either end up having to kite or just sucking it up and taking the death to clear my enmity.

Meanwhile in FFXIV land:

MP really hasn't been an issue since 4.0
Enmity most certainly hasn't been an issue since 5.0 and was only problematic in very specific fights with tanks generally wanting to avoid using stance as much as possible.
Accuracy hasn't been an issue since 4.0

Removing glare doesn't solve the problem at all. It just murders it and stuffs it under the stairs in the hope that no one notices. That's not a very sound way to solve issues and it still doesn't solve the fact that we just aren't casting enough healing abilities relative to how many GCDs we have to play with.

The better solution IMHO is to head back towards healing being primarily GCD based and make bosses actually hit like a truck again. Let them auto attack whilst casting too. Go right back to early coil T1, those snakes could murder a tank in the time it took to wind up a Cure 2 cast and the sustained damage was just far too high for a SCH to maintain the tank with Fairy/Lustrate alone. Remember Clownkefka doing the whole intermission jig for the first time, and them promptly curb stomping the tank whilst you took a sip of coffee thinking nothing was coming? This is what healing should be about. Not standing there scratching my rear for no good reason other than little Timmy's Netflix.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

And DPS who refused to use the single button that would negate 90% of emnity in general. Diversion. A single button and so many players were too lazy to press it.

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It's this precise mentality in some DPS that made Virus getting dumped on them as well so painful =/

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Originally Posted by MellowMink

We don't want more total DPS; we want more variety to the current amounts of DPS.

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Because having the exact same dps options from lvl 4 to lvl 80 sucks.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Enmity most certainly hasn't been an issue since 5.0 and was only problematic in very specific fights with tanks generally wanting to avoid using stance as much as possible.

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And DPS who refused to use the single button that would negate 90% of emnity in general. Diversion. A single button and so many players were too lazy to press it.

Or Ninja Shadewalker / Smokescreen in raid content.

i have had enough, you call yourself "pure healers" / "actual healers" maybe even "healing masters" but you are actually the stuff people in party pray not to enter, the people that you want to avoid and you know what you are called, the leachers.

what do you lot see in your fantasy?

A)your party is full hp and you just sit there and once they hit you scream "DONT WORRY I WILL HEAL YOU" and from 99% hp he gets to 100%

B) your party members say help and you say "dont worry heres a heal" and you smile like a fool

then let me tell you what reality see instead and what your party truly see:

for A, yea that is another afk person that won't do anything, either we bare with him weights and just continue until the end or kick him and either wait for a normal healer or even lets do it solo cause we can't wait for 15+ min until a healer will join(but you probably its not cause they are soooooooo many healers that the gameplay actually keeps them playing, HAHAHHAHA ).

for B, the party scream for help not because they are hurt and need heal ,they scream at you cause after they did all the work, passed the very tight dps checks in runs that you lazily did not help cause "me pure healer, me only heal".
the party is about to hit enrage, they don't need further healing and instead to actually be helpful and be supportive to the party and help end the long hard progging experience, they are about to fail(cause the game actually designed to make you pick up your slack on dps, yes you the "pure healer" ) and you "princesses" don't want to lift a finger cause pressing 1-2 to actually help is hard and prefer to ignore their cries and expect that pressing 1 basic spell an entire run is actually a luxury and people need to be honored by the fact that healers bother to press them when they don't heal.

but guess what we "would-be healers", the healers who not only heal also want to contribute to our party, the healers that when they don't heal actually want to support the party in any way we can, the ones that throw every buff we can when we don't heal: like reduce damage, so people can keep going without worry, throw buffs that increase performance or throw debuffs at enemies to actually weaken them and if we have neither then we might actually pull up our sleeves and join the fray and actually do dps if we are able proabably care more then you about healing.

yes i would call you leachers cause if you were actually pure healers you would actually read what people are saying ,how they actually want to heal more ,how they want to help more in a party in all times in meaningful ways when they don't need to heal and actually debate and throw valid points., you know like normal people who like healing would do.
but no, you are not, you are so scared you actually will lift a finger that you just reject anything said about actually contributing more, claiming "all they want is dps so i dismiss your call" or "who cares if it actually happens cause its 1 run from many" or "you just want a dps that can heal so just go for a different role" when said people actually advocate how they want to heal and support more, all to just justify the fact that the true toxic behavior comes from you.

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Originally Posted by lisaa

All this(sic) problem are just from the assumption that healers have to be pressing something 100% of the time.

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A reasonable assumption, given that the alternative to pressing something is pressing nothing. If you are standing around intentionally doing nothing, then you are sandbagging your team, and asking seven other players to carry your lazy ass.

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Originally Posted by lisaa

There are plenty of games where supports don't have to deal any damage and just have downtime between healing.

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Then go play those games, and stop asking the rest of us to carry you.

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Originally Posted by lisaa

Only in XIV do people complain "dps dps I want to dps" as a healer.

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Overwatch says, "Hi."

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Originally Posted by lisaa

As you all say not every role has to be the same, dps and tanks are already told to press buttons 100% of the time and optimize their damage, so why can't healers have less stressful gameplay to satisfy players who would rather not have to optimize every second of the fight to press one more glare?

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If any of the tone-police here are wondering why we call people Sylphies and look down on them, I present this comment as Exhibit A. This is a person who is whining that Glare-spam is already too galaxy-brained for them to handle, while explicitly confirming that they want healing to be the FF14 Easy Mode role for lazy players.

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Originally Posted by WaxSw

A...Are you seriously proposing that in order to fix healer's gameplay we should just not play the game the majority of the time?

This is hilarious 10/10 trolling

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They're in the top 50 in the world for AST logs this Savage tier. They're 100% hard trolling.

There's nothing like Sylphie justification to really rile up the forums, so it's easy bait. To be fair, after several years of Glare, Glare, Glare and just being told it's going to stay that way indefinitely, I don't blame us.

I've lurked these forums for a bit, as someone who's generally interested in what people have to say, and not a very good healer, all told. I understand the frustration with having not very much to do, tho I'm personally still engaged enough just learning fights or maintaining awareness (and, frankly, spamming Holy). But like...does it make sense to approach the question of boredom from the perspective of 1) someone who knows all their fights and can plan them out and 2) starting new pulls on failed mechanics because we assume that's a wipe anyway?

I ask, because those are assumptions (however true in your case) that are naturally going to make healing more boring. You're essentially taking the worst-case scenario for healer engagement and using it as the basis for balance. DPS don't DPS less when everyone does their jobs better. Tanks don't tank less when everyone does their jobs better. But healers DO heal less when everyone does their jobs better. Healers heal less if everyone knows the fight (which does take time and effort, even if it doesn't require any great amount of skill). Healers don't even get opportunities to try and recover, if you just restart on failed mechanics so you can get a clean run. (I'll note that for recoverable fights, I and the healers I've played with have pulled out the stops and sometimes succeeded or sometimes failed, but generally had fun) Hell, healers heal less when people have better gear! (which is maybe an argument for smaller allowed iLvl ranges) You're looking at a best-case scenario for play (however achievable you think it is), which is actually a worst case scenario for healing.

Now, do healers deserve to be punished for playing better, or with better players? No. But I'm not sure it makes sense to balance healing around *the exact least engaging scenario for healer play,* no matter how awful y'all vets feel about it. Wanting more DPS options or utility toolkits or better-tuned fights sounds good and all, but all those things would make learning to heal more difficult...and without RADICAL changes to the FFXIV fight formula, I don't even think they're a solution to the malaise. I don't think there's any content that won't be a faceroll when you've learned it and optimized the way you play. People complain about dungeons being mass pull hallways, but then resent the less linear ARR dungeons when they get them in roulette. People complain about raids all being arena fights, but then bitch about mobs. People complain about how gear trivializes fights, but will still gear as best they can. So long as damage is predictable and manageable by healers of less skill, more skilled healers will figure it out and optimize and get bored. No?

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Originally Posted by lisaa

If you just remove glare it fixes the problem entirely.
https://files.catbox.moe/2y6qeu.jpeg

All this problem are just from the assumption that healers have to be pressing something 100% of the time. There are plenty of games where supports don't have to deal any damage and just have downtime between healing. Only in XIV do people complain "dps dps I want to dps" as a healer. As you all say not every role has to be the same, dps and tanks are already told to press buttons 100% of the time and optimize their damage, so why can't healers have less stressful gameplay to satisfy players who would rather not have to optimize every second of the fight to press one more glare?

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Question for you. If you removed DPS from healers how would we get through the MSQ and the solo duties? This would turn healers into a limited job that is unable to do the MSQ. Is that what you want? Also, in those duties should healers have only 1 spell to cast as that isn't riveting game play.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

I've lurked these forums for a bit, as someone who's generally interested in what people have to say, and not a very good healer, all told. I understand the frustration with having not very much to do, tho I'm personally still engaged enough just learning fights or maintaining awareness (and, frankly, spamming Holy). But like...does it make sense to approach the question of boredom from the perspective of 1) someone who knows all their fights and can plan them out and 2) starting new pulls on failed mechanics because we assume that's a wipe anyway?

I ask, because those are assumptions (however true in your case) that are naturally going to make healing more boring. You're essentially taking the worst-case scenario for healer engagement and using it as the basis for balance. DPS don't DPS less when everyone does their jobs better. Tanks don't tank less when everyone does their jobs better. But healers DO heal less when everyone does their jobs better. Healers heal less if everyone knows the fight (which does take time and effort, even if it doesn't require any great amount of skill). Healers don't even get opportunities to try and recover, if you just restart on failed mechanics so you can get a clean run. (I'll note that for recoverable fights, I and the healers I've played with have pulled out the stops and sometimes succeeded or sometimes failed, but generally had fun) Hell, healers heal less when people have better gear! (which is maybe an argument for smaller allowed iLvl ranges) You're looking at a best-case scenario for play (however achievable you think it is), which is actually a worst case scenario for healing.

Now, do healers deserve to be punished for playing better, or with better players? No. But I'm not sure it makes sense to balance healing around *the exact least engaging scenario for healer play,* no matter how awful y'all vets feel about it. Wanting more DPS options or utility toolkits or better-tuned fights sounds good and all, but all those things would make learning to heal more difficult...and without RADICAL changes to the FFXIV fight formula, I don't even think they're a solution to the malaise. I don't think there's any content that won't be a faceroll when you've learned it and optimized the way you play. People complain about dungeons being mass pull hallways, but then resent the less linear ARR dungeons when they get them in roulette. People complain about raids all being arena fights, but then bitch about mobs. People complain about how gear trivializes fights, but will still gear as best they can. So long as damage is predictable and manageable by healers of less skill, more skilled healers will figure it out and optimize and get bored. No?

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Reposting because yes.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

But like...does it make sense to approach the question of boredom from the perspective of 1) someone who knows all their fights and can plan them out and 2) starting new pulls on failed mechanics because we assume that's a wipe anyway?

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It does make sense if you consider experience and optimization to be the natural result of playing the game. If Devs create content to be run repeatedly and make said content require a Healer then they must design the jobs to adapt to a player base that has the capacity to evolve and learn.

You say that designing jobs around the worse possible scenario for healing doesn't make sense, but it also doesn't make sense to design jobs around the best scenario for healing either, knowing how much these two scenarios will naturally vary the moment your players get to know the fights and gear up.

The fact remains Healing dowtime occurs naturally. Devs should account for that.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

snippy snip

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People despise ARR dungeons because we lost a ton of our skills from actual ARR era, ilvl sync got more and more lenient with time, we had several potency buffs to skills and lost aggro and MP management. We leave every button that's remotely fun at the entrance and use 123 for ST with the occasional 4 and 5 and 1212 or just 1111 for aoe for the entire dungeon. On dps, mind you. On healer we have even less buttons.
With the original toolkit and maybe even some cross class shenanigans, many ARR dungeons were fun. Much more than any of the current hallway dungeons with a perfect 3 packs - 1 boss rotation 3 times.

The fights are already balanced around worst case scenarios in terms of party and especially healer gameplay.
Casual content unavoidable damage occurs with gaps of sometimes a full minute between hits. Avoidable damage usually hits for so little a single heal is all it takes to take care of it. Resses are only limited by healer MP. No enrages, so no pressure to even keep people alive at all cost.

But everyone that has gotten past the sprout stage of "keep everyone topped at all times, keep shields and regens up, oGCDs are for emergencies, only dps when everyone is full HP and I had nothing to heal for a few GCDs" has nothing.
Not even endgame fights are balanced with more experienced healers in mind and to add insult to injury, we have a single button to fill our downtime.
More dps skills will not make it harder to heal. Period. It won't.
It will make it harder to optimize dps. But not healing itself.
If you feel uncomfortable using them, don't use them or only a few of them until you heal more efficiently to give you more time to focus on other things.

If a healer feels overwhelmed because of so many dps buttons and then fails at healing, that has nothing to do with the amount of dps buttons. It's on them, because they set the wrong priority and focused on all the downtime fillers instead of their primary role. It doesn't just "sound good and all", it's the only way to keep the skill floor low while raising the skill ceiling.
Or should vet healers be permanently bored just because someone can't handle a skill on their hotbar they're not using anyway because they're still struggling with just healing even when doing it fulltime?

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

I've lurked these forums for a bit, as someone who's generally interested in what people have to say, and not a very good healer, all told. I understand the frustration with having not very much to do, tho I'm personally still engaged enough just learning fights or maintaining awareness (and, frankly, spamming Holy). But like...does it make sense to approach the question of boredom from the perspective of 1) someone who knows all their fights and can plan them out and 2) starting new pulls on failed mechanics because we assume that's a wipe anyway?

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In my opinion, the clear answer is to aim for somewhere in the middle surely? Right now healing is tuned to the lowest common denominator in the majority of content pre Extremes. I fully appreciate that it's not viable to have everything auto attack like Clown Kefka but the game could really do with some small semblance of a difficulty curve once you hit the end game. The fact that the first pull in a level 65 dungeon is arguably more dangerous to heal than just about any 'expert' dungeon speaks volumes about how poorly healing is tuned in this game overall. I'm not really sure what you mean by point 2) though? That's a speed run or very specific progression thing. People don't tend to force a wipe after a failure unless they are confident they aren't going to beat enrage or are just going for logs. I'm not sure why you would try to make a point of it in this discussion? I've certainly not seen that suggested as a point elsewhere here.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

I ask, because those are assumptions (however true in your case) that are naturally going to make healing more boring. You're essentially taking the worst-case scenario for healer engagement and using it as the basis for balance. DPS don't DPS less when everyone does their jobs better. Tanks don't tank less when everyone does their jobs better. But healers DO heal less when everyone does their jobs better. Healers heal less if everyone knows the fight (which does take time and effort, even if it doesn't require any great amount of skill). Healers don't even get opportunities to try and recover, if you just restart on failed mechanics so you can get a clean run. (I'll note that for recoverable fights, I and the healers I've played with have pulled out the stops and sometimes succeeded or sometimes failed, but generally had fun) Hell, healers heal less when people have better gear! (which is maybe an argument for smaller allowed iLvl ranges) You're looking at a best-case scenario for play (however achievable you think it is), which is actually a worst case scenario for healing.

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Ok hang on a second. Can we please pump the brakes on this whole deal of 'all runs get wiped if someone fails something' angle? It's borderline hyperbole and just not typical outside of specific logs runs and such. You only have to go back a page or two to see where I've used charts from my own runs where we've had 8 deaths and still merrily trundled on to a clear.

Back on track though. You need to add the fact that Healer's heal considerably less as they do their own job better. This is even more so in casual content. Case in point, Amaurot last boss:

Two comedy deaths vs No deaths

Spot the difference. He got a swiftcast raise and a Regen. Nothing more was needed as this was enough to top him before the next AoE. His comedy deaths didn't ruin my run, in fact it barely made any difference at all.

You are falling into the same trap of overvaluing the impact of other's mistakes on your gameplay. If you can avoid overreacting to these mistakes it'll make you a much more efficient healer whilst also helping to reduce the risk of someone else's error snowballing into mistakes of your own.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

Now, do healers deserve to be punished for playing better, or with better players? No. But I'm not sure it makes sense to balance healing around *the exact least engaging scenario for healer play,* no matter how awful y'all vets feel about it.

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So..... how do we feel about tuning gameplay to slot somewhere in the middle? The world isn't black and white. Not everything has to be done to one extreme or the other. We live in an analogue existence so I'm not sure why the middle ground doesn't seem to exist in your views here?

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

Wanting more DPS options or utility toolkits or better-tuned fights sounds good and all, but all those things would make learning to heal more difficult

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We've had more DPS options. Was Creator considered to be a hard tier because of them? No. Not even remotely. It was arguably the easiest raid tier yet when it landed.

The same can be said for utility as well. Again, I'm really not sure how you can link having more utility with making healing more difficult? Healer's could merrily sail through everything short of Coil without ever touching Virus or Eye for an Eye.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

I don't think there's any content that won't be a faceroll when you've learned it and optimized the way you play. People complain about dungeons being mass pull hallways, but then resent the less linear ARR dungeons when they get them in roulette. People complain about raids all being arena fights, but then bitch about mobs. People complain about how gear trivializes fights, but will still gear as best they can. So long as damage is predictable and manageable by healers of less skill, more skilled healers will figure it out and optimize and get bored. No?

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It feels like your nitpicking various random moans from elsewhere and bringing them into this thread to try and bulk up your point TBH, I'm not really sure why half of these points are relevant to this?

Why wouldn't people gear as best as they can? That's the carrot that drives the end game and progression as a whole in a vertical MMO. This doesn't change the fact that a lot of content is either undertuned from the moment it lands or that gear just scales too strongly to keep things interesting beyond a month's worth of upgrades. Perhaps this is something that the stat squish will address though.

Damage being entirely predictable and manageable is the a big part of the overall problem though. The overarching formula and gameplay for healers has only really regressed over the last 5 years of raid content, so it's inevitable that it'll be stale and optimised to within an inch of it's life by this point.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

starting new pulls on failed mechanics because we assume that's a wipe anyway?

Healers don't even get opportunities to try and recover, if you just restart on failed mechanics so you can get a clean run. (I'll note that for recoverable fights, I and the healers I've played with have pulled out the stops and sometimes succeeded or sometimes failed, but generally had fun)

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To these points specifically, I raise you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry2a-1DZ-mE

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

It does make sense if you consider experience and optimization to be the natural result of playing the game. If Devs create content to be run repeatedly and make said content require a Healer then they must design the jobs to adapt to a player base that has the capacity to evolve and learn.

You say that jobs around the worse possible scenario for healing doesn't make sense, but it also doesn't make sense to design jobs around the best scenario for healing either, knowing how much these two scenarios will naturally vary the moment your players get to know the fights and gear up.

The fact remains Healing dowtime occurs naturally. Devs should account for that.

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I am not asking whether it's good to design for a different range of players with different abilities. That's obviously true, and FFXIV obviously does this, unless you think EX/Savage/Perfect fights are only trivially different from lower-level content. I'm asking whether it's good to design around players who've "cracked" the game, because that inevitably makes it harder for healers who haven't gotten there yet, and because players will crack *anything* if you assume sufficient effort and time.

Healing downtime occurs naturally, and it occurs less when you and your party are less skilled, and it occurs more when you and your party are more skilled. Up to a certain point, healers are learning to use more of their kit--after that point, healers are learning to use less of their kit. This is not really true of other roles. (it might be true of tanks too, if aggro management was more of a thing and still more of a party responsibility) The more you design around healers who heal less, the harder you make for healers learning to heal more. Devs should account for as many cases as they can, but a balance has to get struck at some point. We can talk about what an appropriate balance is--I'm not saying the current iteration is the right one--but I don't think you *can* balance by assuming the specific cases where a job's primary role has been solved.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

Up to a certain point, healers are learning to use more of their kit--after that point, healers are learning to use less of their kit. This is not really true of other roles. (it might be true of tanks too, if aggro management was more of a thing and still more of a party responsibility) The more you design around healers who heal less, the harder you make for healers learning to heal more. Devs should account for as many cases as they can, but a balance has to get struck at some point. We can talk about what an appropriate balance is--I'm not saying the current iteration is the right one--but I don't think you *can* balance by assuming the specific cases where a job's primary role has been solved.

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You mentioned that expanding our DPS and utility toolkits would make things harder for healers.

Couldn't the same be said of our complex and over tuned healing toolkits?

You don't see new healers rotating their oGCDs. Rather you generally see them relying on Succor, Medica etc despite having oGCDs that are far more powerful and time efficient. So by your logic, wouldn't you agree that simplifying our healing toolkits and forcing us to lean more on our GCD heals at all levels of play would be a good solution that appeases both ends of the spectrum?

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

If a healer feels overwhelmed because of so many dps buttons and then fails at healing, that has nothing to do with the amount of dps buttons. It's on them, because they set the wrong priority and focused on all the downtime fillers instead of their primary role. It doesn't just "sound good and all", it's the only way to keep the skill floor low while raising the skill ceiling.
Or should vet healers be permanently bored just because someone can't handle a skill on their hotbar they're not using anyway because they're still struggling with just healing even when doing it fulltime?

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I've seen the idea that more DPS raises the ceiling without raising the floor, and I've never quite understood it. It's not as though players just tunnel-vision on the specific buttons they feel comfortable using, until they're suddenly comfortable using more buttons through hitting the dummy or whatever. You admit that there's more things to focus on and more mistakes to be made, so why do you think that has no impact on the skill floor? Again, a balance can be struck, but pretending this has no impact just doesn't make sense to me.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

It feels like your nitpicking various random moans from elsewhere and bringing them into this thread to try and bulk up your point TBH, I'm not really sure why half of these points are relevant to this?

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The point was literally brought up in this thread by WaxSW, so I take a little issue with this. People have different thoughts, and it's no good assigning everyone's random carping to everyone else just because they're all dissatisfied with the same thing--but I've seen the point made in this thread and elsewhere, so I spoke generally. If you don't agree, that's fine. Well done on the save!

I agree that there's a balance to be struck, and that dungeon/fight design generally could be better, etc. I'm not against the idea of having more DPS or more of a kit, and would certainly like more interconnection between different parts of the healer kit. It's no good NOT to account for the point where healers are more confident and clear-headed and more efficient with their skills. But starting from assumptions like a learned fight, braindead healing downtime, etc. seems iffy when evaluating engagement. I don't know if it makes sense to judge a job based around when most of the kit is irrelevant. (The argument might be that it's too easy, and most of the kit is irrelevant most of the time, but that touches on broader questions of game design and how the rest of the playerbase plays and etc)

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

You mentioned that expanding our DPS and utility toolkits would make things harder for healers.

Couldn't the same be said of our complex and over tuned healing toolkits?

You don't see new healers rotating their oGCDs. Rather you generally see them relying on Succor, Medica etc despite having oGCDs that are far more powerful and time efficient. So by your logic, wouldn't you agree that simplifying our healing toolkits and forcing us to lean more on our GCD heals at all levels of play would be a good solution that appeases both ends of the spectrum?

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I actually do think that making healers lean more on GCD heals would be a good, personally. I think it's great to have oGCD tools, and things to weave, but also that it would be nice to have either slightly fewer tools or more aggressive fight design so that healers have phases where they actually focus on healing. There was a specific part of leveling WHM that felt like that, around I think mid-60, and that was fun.

EDIT: It's funny, because it is the sort of thing where I'd get a new tool and be like "oh fuck yeah" and be excited about it for a while, and be really into how it made things easier, and then kind of realize it made the rest of my time less interesting, not more. Or, not get used, while I'd be keeping an eye out trying to gauge if I needed to use it. But, y'know, Blood Lily go brrrr

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

I'm not against the idea of having more DPS or more of a kit, and would certainly like more interconnection between different parts of the healer kit. It's no good NOT to account for the point where healers are more confident and clear-headed and more efficient with their skills. But starting from assumptions like a learned fight, braindead healing downtime, etc. seems iffy when evaluating engagement. I don't know if it makes sense to judge a job based around when most of the kit is irrelevant. (The argument might be that it's too easy, and most of the kit is irrelevant most of the time, but that touches on broader questions of game design and how the rest of the playerbase plays and etc)

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I find the devs' position absolutely ludicrous, and indicative that they don't actually play healers. Yeah, of course you should design kits to work on a base level for players learning their job and fights. Designing kits in such a way that the pinnacle of skill you work toward is 11111111111111111111 until you want to cut your finger off is awful. Design.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

Wanting more DPS options or utility toolkits or better-tuned fights sounds good and all, but all those things would make learning to heal more difficult...and without RADICAL changes to the FFXIV fight formula, I don't even think they're a solution to the malaise.

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Are you learning to heal in Savage, or Normal mode content? What normal mode fights (if any) can you tell me that require healers to DPS efficiently to clear? Is this older content (when healers had way more DPS options) or is it newer content (when healers have generally all the same DPS options)? At what level should we consider that someone should have some level of understanding on their job and they're no longer "learning"? We're about to be at level 90; are you still a "learning healer" at level 90? What about now, at level 80?
Why is it that we just have to accept that "this thing COULD make "learning" healing harder, so the jobs will gain no mechanical depth from level 4 to level 80!" When does the "learning" end and when do we start expecting that players have some idea of how to play their jobs?

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

Wanting more DPS options or utility toolkits or better-tuned fights sounds good and all, but all those things would make learning to heal more difficult...

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You know, maybe it was just me, but back in SB when i first learned to heal in ffxiv, the fact a lot of my damage came from a couple of DoTs on SCH meant I could much more easily just apply one or two, and then focus on healing, even when I was still a wet behind the ears sprout.
Then came the ShB changes, and keeping both healign and DPS up beame a lot harder for the first while for me.

I'd even going so far as that reintroducing the DoTs we lost at the start of ShB would lower the skill floor for starting to contribute damage, because using 2-3 GCDs for damage every 30s is, at least imho, much less to ask of sprouts than getting as close to 1 damage spell every GCD if they want to contribute a noteable amount of dps.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

People complain about dungeons being mass pull hallways, but then resent the less linear ARR dungeons when they get them in roulette. People complain about raids all being arena fights, but then bitch about mobs. People complain about how gear trivializes fights, but will still gear as best they can. So long as damage is predictable and manageable by healers of less skill, more skilled healers will figure it out and optimize and get bored. No?

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This is an incredibly disingenuous argument, and completely disregards any context as to why people dislike older ARR dungeons nowadays. Being synced down to lower level content removes a good portion of most jobs toolkis, leaving several complete shells of themselves. Bard, Dancer, Black Mage and pretty much every tank all are extremely lacking at or below 60 simply because they're missing far too many of their core skills. Take Gunbreaker, for example. What makes the job fun is Continuation. Below 70, you're essentially doing 123 Burst Strike and nothing else. Bard and Dancer have laughably low proc rates (I believe 20%) at these level ranges. Granted, Standard Step isn't remotely balanced for low level content. So that gives Dancer something. Bard is little more than a Heavy Shot simulator.

Even with all the aforementioned issues, the dev team simply doesn't incentivize non-linearity. Adding a few branching pathways is nice... if it leads to something. A lore dump or an extra accessory 30 ilvls lower than what most players will have isn't going to entice anyone. Sure, the lore dump can be fun but it's a one and done occurrence. People have run the dungeon 50-10-200 times aren't going to slow down so you can read lore. They just want it over with.

Likewise, raid mobs were equally pointless because they were nothing but AoE fodder. You blew them away in seconds. Hence why people complained. They weren't made to be interesting; instead being more of an annoyance. If the dev team actually did something with them, perhaps people would be more receptive.

Lastly, of course people prioritize gear. That's literally the entire purpose of raiding. It's the dev team's responsibility to design fight mechanics around the knowledge we'll inevitably outgear them. They have, at least not for healers who are denied any form of meaningful gameplay progression. Optimizing their healing throughput means spamming the same nuke button more frequently. They aren't being given debuffs, buffs, utility or DPS to actually manage. Just a simple DoT and 200 Glare casts.

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

The point was literally brought up in this thread by WaxSW, so I take a little issue with this. People have different thoughts, and it's no good assigning everyone's random carping to everyone else just because they're all dissatisfied with the same thing--but I've seen the point made in this thread and elsewhere, so I spoke generally.

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Aah I see, I think you're referring to this quote right?

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Originally Posted by WaxSw

If you're in endgame not doing a mechanic will likely go from killing you to depending on the situation wipe, just swiftcast raise if the former, nothing you can do in the latter.

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To clarify, I think you are misunderstanding what they are saying in this case. This isn't the group just going 'oh ok let's jump off the edge now'. But rather Savage fights (and extremes to a lesser extent) generally have a number of marque mechanics where it has to be done flawlessly by the entire team or it will typically just kill off the raid. This isn't something that's limited to end of tier fights either. You'll find this sort of thing in the majority of Savage fights.

A more notorious example would be Lions Rampant in E12S - His death at 6:14 causes the next set of breaths to overlap with an extra lion breath going randomly through the raid forcing a near inevitable wipe.

A good example of this sort of thing in an easier Savage turn would be E5S Ramuh and Fury's Fourteen where one person missing a spear = raid wipe.

Otherwise, good discussion so far. Thanks :o

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Originally Posted by Hjihna

So long as damage is predictable and manageable by healers of less skill, more skilled healers will figure it out and optimize and get bored. No?

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Are....

Are you seriously suggesting in order to have more fun as a healer just... don't be good at the game? Do you even know what being a "good healer" even entails? Yes, the goal of a healer is to minimize the use of GCD heals to maximize use of GCD spells. There are various levels of people who can reach that ideal. I can get pretty close to that ideal. Sure, not many people can. Are you seriously saying it's fair that I have to suffer just because I wanted to be a better team player? I'm not saying I want a NIN or DRG level of rotation. I just want a second DoT to juggle. Spells or skills to use for Burst phases. If I keep getting oGCD healing tools to minimize my GCD healing to maximize my GCD damage, why can't I get more GCD damage? New players aren't a factor. They're not going to hit those buttons until they feel they're ready, and there are plenty of people who are never ready to hit those buttons. There are tons of people who believe that their ideal state is to just be a healing battery. We've already accommodated their play with Cure I spam. Why does someone like me have to suffer when playing healer? Don't say, "Play another role," I want to play and I like playing healer.

I like playing healer because it gives me the satisfaction of feeling smarter than the thing I'm fighting. DPS is for when I want to punch something's face in. Tank is for when I want to feel invincible. But, when I'm a healer, I'm thinking about how I'm going to use my multitude of tools to "optimize the fun out of a fight" as you put it. If you think that "optimization" is somehow inherently unfun, then maybe the problem is on you, not on us.

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Originally Posted by inhaledcorn

Are....

Are you seriously suggesting in order to have more fun as a healer just... don't be good at the game? Do you even know what being a "good healer" even entails? Yes, the goal of a healer is to minimize the use of GCD heals to maximize use of GCD spells. There are various levels of people who can reach that ideal. I can get pretty close to that ideal. Sure, not many people can. Are you seriously saying it's fair that I have to suffer just because I wanted to be a better team player? I'm not saying I want a NIN or DRG level of rotation. I just want a second DoT to juggle. Spells or skills to use for Burst phases. If I keep getting oGCD healing tools to minimize my GCD healing to maximize my GCD damage, why can't I get more GCD damage? New players aren't a factor. They're not going to hit those buttons until they feel they're ready, and there are plenty of people who are never ready to hit those buttons. There are tons of people who believe that their ideal state is to just be a healing battery. We've already accommodated their play with Cure I spam. Why does someone like me have to suffer when playing healer? Don't say, "Play another role," I want to play and I like playing healer.

I like playing healer because it gives me the satisfaction of feeling smarter than the thing I'm fighting. DPS is for when I want to punch something's face in. Tank is for when I want to feel invincible. But, when I'm a healer, I'm thinking about how I'm going to use my multitude of tools to "optimize the fun out of a fight" as you put it. If you think that "optimization" is somehow inherently unfun, then maybe the problem is on you, not on us.

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Are...

Are you seriously suggesting that what you got from all that is that to have fun as a healer you should be bad at healing?

Did you really read the whole thing? Context matters...

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

To these points specifically, I raise you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry2a-1DZ-mE

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That moment when you realize it's all gone to sh!t and you might as well go out with a blaze of glory and give it your best shot.

A comment from the skill floor.

Dps complexity or simplicity does not impact the absolute skill floor. The required minumum healing skill is to be able to heal the first 10 perhaps 15 seconds of roulette trash megapulls, when dps has zero priority anyway. After that, it's stable, and healing the rest including bosses is cake in comparison. The challenge on bosses are mechanics, not healing. Even the mechanics required for the msq, makes a mockery of a claim that more than dps single button spam is too hard even for the higher tier players. Seriously.

I don't know the state of healing above the floor, but I would expect higher level difficulty content to require more job skill. Otherwise, why do it?

See, I'm of the opinion that to unlock the new jobs, you should have levelled one of their category to the starting rank and perform a basic solo duty to make sure you can do that role. So for gnb you needed to get a tank to 60 and fight as a drk, pld or war. Sage likewise should be to 70 and you got to do it as a whm, ast or sch.
Ensuring basic competence is not the same as gatekeeping

Back in the ARR and hw days, if you didn't know the basics of your job by the time you reached level 30, aiatar would give you a kicking over in brayflox's longstop. Likewise you had to do dps in order to stop madison from shooting everyone dead in sastacha hard or Titan from punting everybody back to the start.

You learned to do dps when healing regardless of stance dancing or not.
The msq too, forces you to dps while healing. You cant heal the trash to death when saving the beggar in uldah. You cant heal your way past raubahn in 3.2
The msq duties do not give you the echo healing as a healer. You got to heal yourself and do dps to beat the encounter.

Healing while dpsing is like pc requirents

The skill floor in duties is healing everyone enough to clear the content. That's the absolute minimum specs
But you want the reccommended specs which is always be casting- healing everyone enough to clear the content and do something productive with your gcd. This means damage.

You should be past the skill floor once you reach the end of ARR's story.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

This is an incredibly disingenuous argument, and completely disregards any context as to why people dislike older ARR dungeons nowadays. Being synced down to lower level content removes a good portion of most jobs toolkis, leaving several complete shells of themselves. Bard, Dancer, Black Mage and pretty much every tank all are extremely below at or below 60 simply because they're missing far too many of their core skills. Take Gunbreaker, for example. What makes the job fun is Continuation. Below 70, you're essentially doing 123 Burst Strike and nothing else. Bard and Dancer have laughably low proc rates (I believe 20%) at these level ranges. Granted, Standard Step isn't remotely balanced for low level content. So that gives Dancer something. Bard is little more than a Heavy Shot simulator.

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Yeah, this is huge. Levelling is straight up scuffed for a lot of Jobs. Every time the devs think "we need to remove skills to keep the Job from getting bloated" they end up removing skills from early levels. After all, the later levels need to be exciting, so people are sitting there going "I just hit Stormblood and got a bunch of new tools!" or whatever. Except now the ARR portion is largely garbage barring the few Jobs that have sane levelling kits. RDM is fine, SAM is pretty decent, but then there's BRD as you mentioned, DRK which is the poster boy for a completely jacked levelling experience, multiple Melee DPS that don't get AoEs until horribly late because obviously DRG loves getting Doom Spike at level 40. SE needs to actually sit down and do a full revamp of the 1 to 90 experience, but that would probably require so much damn work to make sure content doesn't snap in half that they'd probably run out of time to design Jobs for the next expac.

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Originally Posted by Beddict

Yeah, this is huge. Levelling is straight up scuffed for a lot of Jobs. Every time the devs think "we need to remove skills to keep the Job from getting bloated" they end up removing skills from early levels. After all, the later levels need to be exciting, so people are sitting there going "I just hit Stormblood and got a bunch of new tools!" or whatever. Except now the ARR portion is largely garbage barring the few Jobs that have sane levelling kits. RDM is fine, SAM is pretty decent, but then there's BRD as you mentioned, DRK which is the poster boy for a completely jacked levelling experience, multiple Melee DPS that don't get AoEs until horribly late because obviously DRG loves getting Doom Spike at level 40. SE needs to actually sit down and do a full revamp of the 1 to 90 experience, but that would probably require so much damn work to make sure content doesn't snap in half that they'd probably run out of time to design Jobs for the next expac.

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Do we really need new jobs for the next expansion? I'd say we've hit a pretty solid amount of Jobs at the moment.

We got the healer and the heavy armor DPS we needed to make things more or less rounded. (Though I guess we'd still need another ranged and a second Dexterity melee job, that is if you consider Blue Mage the 4th caster.)

Given how many of the supposed new buttons are actually old ones under a different name, there's really no reason why a lot of them can't be restored to lower levels since SE already admitted they don't do much balancing for them (look at the ED nerf) just like how healer dps actions being restored would be beneficial to the levelling process by giving new healers options to do in combat during the long levelling process instead of yet another heal they won't press.

Plus, judging from the preview, monk is getting howling fist and steel peak being returned at lower levels. Why not other jobs? Energy drain should be back at the level it was taught to be used in the acn quest for example. Get the core mechanics taught early.

And tbh, if all the flashy new holy, aow and gravity is just a 10 potency increase, just scrap the current form and make that a trait and make the holy/gravity/aow 2 do something NEW

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

Do we really need new jobs for the next expansion? I'd say we've hit a pretty solid amount of Jobs at the moment.

We got the healer and the heavy armor DPS we needed to make things more or less rounded. (Though I guess we'd still need another ranged and a second Dexterity melee job, that is if you consider Blue Mage the 4th caster.)

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I'd be perfectly fine with SE skipping out on new Jobs to re-do the levelling kit for the Jobs we have, but I bet SE heavily banks on showing off new Jobs to generate hype. "We fixed the trash levelling system and made ARR combat less boring!" doesn't have the same appeal as "SUMMON A DEMON FROM THE VOID TO BECOME THE ULTIMATE EDGELORD". Plus there are still some fan favourite Jobs that people are asking for, such as Beastmaster, Time Mage, and Chemist, and going an expac with zero Jobs would just being "delaying" those Jobs (even if SE has zero intention of ever making them).

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Originally Posted by Beddict

I'd be perfectly fine with SE skipping out on new Jobs to re-do the levelling kit for the Jobs we have, but I bet SE heavily banks on showing off new Jobs to generate hype. "We fixed the trash levelling system and made ARR combat less boring!" doesn't have the same appeal as "SUMMON A DEMON FROM THE VOID TO BECOME THE ULTIMATE EDGELORD".

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This is the issue in a nutshell.

The changes that'd seem common-sense to those already invested in the game aren't sufficiently juicy to hook those who aren't yet customers, so when push comes to shove...

As a WHM player who levelled the Job to max level back in Stormblood (also first Job I levelled to max) and will be dropping it in favor of AST, the Job needs something to make it a more enjoyable Job to play. The Job is simply too boring for me now, and after seeing the media tour for the Job, I believe it's time to hang my cane up.

However, I still want the Job to succeed. Believe it or not, WHM doesn't need a lot to make it fun. Aside from a few nitpicks, the WHM healing toolkit is fine in my eyes. Really good even. And I do agree with the nerfs to Thin Air. I believe that in order to fix WHM, the devs can add one or two DPS skills and that's it (maybe three but that's pushing it). Healing isn't hard. It's not. And adding one or two DPS skills won't raise the skill ceiling all that much. Maybe I'll make a new thread about WHM in the future. It's just sad to see the Job that I loved and levelled to max level first isn't being shown any love at all.