I hate to, but I think I put down healing for now. Please make it engaging again, SE.

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Originally Posted by Saefinn

My main concern and why I'm more in the pro-DPS column is that to retroactively implement ways to make the current healing toolkit more engaging with existing content would be a lot of work I don't see SE doing. Great if they design future content around it, but it'd mean any content prior to this was still suck to heal. If Hade Ex is an example of this, great, I've yet to try healing it.

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I don't disagree with your points overall but just to address this in particular:

1. I agree with your pragmatic concerns about such a healing overhaul. I still think it's worth saying - maybe SE's developers will find an alternative road to the same end. Maybe a partial revert to old DPS kits is "good enough".
2. Hades EX - at least in my opinion - is not a challenge to heal. It's Neo-Exdeath easy mode, more or less. And even in Neo Exdeath, we still spent most of our time pushing those DPS buttons.

People really want a new healer in 6.0, so wouldn't it be fair to say that if they are going to "overhaul" healers that it will be balanced around that.
Like the tanks were rebalanced to allow GNB to have function, and Dancer pushed Machinist into a "Mostly" pure DPS role.

I've seen few hardcore healers leave the role since Shadowbringers launched, mainly Astrologians.
It's sad but with this many jobs it's always going to balance things perfectly.

Just give me a gorram rotation, that's all I want. They're not going to put in the effort to fix the other problems, so at the very least - do that.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

2. Hades EX - at least in my opinion - is not a challenge to heal. It's Neo-Exdeath easy mode, more or less. And even in Neo Exdeath, we still spent most of our time pushing those DPS buttons.

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I'm pointing it out more as an example of increased healing requirements, rather than a challenge. An example of increased healing requirements that have not made Hades Ex a big obstacle even for the more casual players.

At the end of the day, given enough experience, nothing is a challenge. It is more of a challenge to heal 7 people who have not seen Titan Normal before than it is to heal your static in Titan Savage.

Healers are unique in this way, because your party determines how much work you have to do. The only way to provide a healing challenge is by leveraging randomness in such a way that it requires you to make decisions on the fly. But I'm sure I don't need to tell you how much of an impact randomisation will make to difficulty.

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Originally Posted by LariaKirin

I'm pointing it out more as an example of increased healing requirements, rather than a challenge. An example of increased healing requirements that have not made Hades Ex a big obstacle even for the more casual players.

At the end of the day, given enough experience, nothing is a challenge. It is more of a challenge to heal 7 people who have not seen Titan Normal before than it is to heal your static in Titan Savage.

Healers are unique in this way, because your party determines how much work you have to do. The only way to provide a healing challenge is by leveraging randomness in such a way that it requires you to make decisions on the fly. But I'm sure I don't need to tell you how much of an impact randomisation will make to difficulty.

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This uniqueness I think it one thing that gives a fairer argument for giving us more to do in our downtime. As I've mentioned in other threads, the better you are at DPS the more you have to do, the better you are at tanking the more you have to do, the better you are at healing, the less you have to do.

IMO it is the fairest compromise. Content should determine how much you engage DPS now arbitrary removing DPS options, because now there is a hole to fill. And anybody who likes the way healers are can still play it exactly as they are now.

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Originally Posted by LariaKirin

At the end of the day, given enough experience, nothing is a challenge. It is more of a challenge to heal 7 people who have not seen Titan Normal before than it is to heal your static in Titan Savage.

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Hm, maybe. I'm not so sure the only way to make healing more used is to count on people messing up, though.

I can't say I liked AST's card system both pre and post ShB. Maybe the 4th healer will have some other auxiliary I find more fun, and I'll settle for that...

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

Some of these have duplicates in other kits, some don't, but the point is - you have options when selecting a heal, each with benefits and drawbacks and resources to consider.

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You are the correct that the current design is much more engaging when you are actually under pressure. That said, you are vastly overstating the differences between each of the different buttons. When it comes down to it, Emergency Tactics > Succor, Indom, Seraph, Fey Blessing all exist for one express purpose: To be backup buttons for each other. Is one on cooldown? You use another. Is one lacking resources? You still good, you have a backup. Their differences begin to matter less when I need to throw them out in response to the same stimuli, for the same reasons.

They had healer design working at one point; It was in ARR. Scholar was an extremely tight design where every skill served a purpose and there were limitations that demanded I respond to mechanics differently than White Mage. It mattered that I was limited to Aetherflow stacks because if I mismanaged them I didn't have four different oGCD heals as backup. Likewise, Adlo and Succor were prohibitively expensive so I wanted to use them smartly and sparingly (and mostly predictively), rather than as my main GCD heals. And then when I needed to dps, I had a pretty neat DoT-based rotation to play with (and later, Shadowflare).

Currently, there's a fundamental misunderstand that simply having a lot of heals means healing will be more engaging. I'm of the opinion that limitations breeds creativity-- when every situation is a puzzle of how to use your limited moveset to approach a problem, healing becomes engaging. As it is, I have few limitations.

I think the best solution to boring healer gameplay is to lean into the "green DPS" stereotype. Changing encounter design to add sources of consistent, unavoidable, single-target damage would force healers to engage with the rest of their kit more often, but would bring gameplay into collision with the worst parts of the interface (constant retargeting and/or gimped macros). That's an underlying engine problem that would almost certainly require more dev resources to fix than adding (or re-adding) more DPS rotational complexity to healers.

And hey, as a healer player who came from WoW, it's kind of fresh to base my performance on damage output for a change. Healing the team is comically easy compared to WoW, but doing it with the minimum possible resources causes a meaningful DPS gain here. That's not a fundamentally bad system, I just wish there was more to the rotation that I'm doing the majority of the time.

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Originally Posted by Saefinn

DPS skills were removed, which made room for more healing spells, but I think the old balance was fine and wouldn't be rocking the boat having that.

My main concern and why I'm more in the pro-DPS column is that to retroactively implement ways to make the current healing toolkit more engaging with existing content would be a lot of work I don't see SE doing. Great if they design future content around it, but it'd mean any content prior to this was still suck to heal. If Hade Ex is an example of this, great, I've yet to try healing it.

Maybe meeting the middle, don't remove heal spells, add more DPS spells, design future content so it engages your heals more so your reduced DPS usage comes from content mechanics and not from removing abilities.

It means in content where we have more downtime to DPS, we have something to fill it. And it doesn't have to be DPS either, other support skills too, like AST currently has (and is why AST is the least boring for me ATM).

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I suppose the one saving grace to this is SE has mentioned doing a stat crunch possibly in 6.0. Doing so would force a re-balance of every piece of content already. Thus, it wouldn't be unfeasible they could adjust old content around a hypothetical increase in healing over DPS.

I have played all roles periodically since 1.0, starting as dps, then dabbling in tanking and moved onto healing. I am not the best healer by ANY stretch of the imagination, but I enjoyed it and was excited to try each new one until I got my hands on AST. At first it felt like a WHM clone with cards, but there was something different about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on at the time. Over the Expacs I've come to truly love AST and was over the moon when it was, in my opinion, at it's peak in SB. The 5.0 iterations of the healers have seriously put a sour taste in my mouth. WHM is in a good place right now, but only because the other two just feel so... bland.

It has come to a point where, instead of enjoying my favorite class and doing the grind for gear and upping my stats, I have taken a step back from the game and only really play for pixies dailies and story. I have become so unmotivated to play, which isn't a bad thing, gives me time to catch up on other games which is fine with me. I know there are other jobs out there, and i've played with a couple, but the direction a lot of the jobs have gone in this expac haven't really made me want to dive in either lol.

My AST has become a glorified Ken Doll, fun to dress up but not really good for much else.