Do you want healers to be reworked from the ground up?

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Originally Posted by Limonia

Maybe I don't remember it right, but if you have Dissipation activated, don't the Aetherflow actions not give no faerie gauge during it?
The faerie gauge isn't really great, but that's just another flaw of SCH gameplay.
Either way, I don't really like Dissipation because it doesn't have good synergy with the other SCH mechanics, and of course because of the faerie ghosting issues and how clunky it is to use.

Also, if something is more of a DPS CD it rarely gets used otherwise. I'd rather have DPS and healing CDs separately. That's why I suggested that during Dissipation you can use a free AF heal or something like that, and in return have something else for a DPS CD.

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I think dissipation has gotten more attractive as the passive fairy heals (specifically embrace but even the tether) have gotten less potent. If you pay attention Embrace is actually pretty weak at 80 by now and so dissipating the fairy isn't losing you much unless you need WD/FI and can't access them.

I look at Dissipation as kind of an alternative to Seraph - it's another thing to use while I have WD and FI on CD.

As to a preference for dps and healing CDs to be separate I dunno I kinda like the integration but I understand it's down to personal preference.

Dissipation makes a really great healing CD when you're going to need big heals too. You can dissipate for a chunky Adlo which is then spreadable and also effected by Recitation or even as an emergency thing dissipate into an ET/Reci succor + indom for damn near a full party heal depending on crits. It's usually overkill and not something you plan for but those are just some of the cool saves I've seen my cohealer pull off during prog when I went and got myself killed. I have nothing so flexible on AST/WHM and it's definitely something I'm jealous for. Closest I come is like... PoM+Plenary chained Cure3s? It's a lot less impressive.

Edit: Also you totally are correct no gauge during dissipation.

Dissipation definitely got a lot better with the faerie automatically returning after it and since its low potency heals. It's still not very fun to use the way the faerie is programmed. It probably doesn't have to be reworked completely, but still tweaked at least a little. I mean it's a buggy DPS CD with the extra side-effect of being a heal CD during prog. In all other scenarios than prog (or similar) it's just 3 Energy Drains in between Whispering Dawn. For example, Assize might still top up some DPS if they're not full. But Dissipation's healing effect often goes to waste completely when there are no healing GCDs necessary - which happens really often as SCH. And even if they changed it to also buff oGCD heals, you can't use all your free ones during it because the faerie isn't there.

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Originally Posted by Limonia

Dissipation definitely got a lot better with the faerie automatically returning after it and since its low potency heals. It's still not very fun to use the way the faerie is programmed. It probably doesn't have to be reworked completely, but still tweaked at least a little. I mean it's a buggy DPS CD with the extra side-effect of being a heal CD during prog. In all other scenarios than prog (or similar) it's just 3 Energy Drains in between Whispering Dawn. For example, Assize might still top up some DPS if they're not full. But Dissipation's healing effect often goes to waste completely when there are no healing GCDs necessary - which happens really often as SCH. And even if they changed it to also buff oGCD heals, you can't use all your free ones during it because the faerie isn't there.

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I think it’s more or less because the fairy is in general a piece of shi..... too use in this addon. Like ghosting, not having the option too target anyone you want with embrace and being forced to use the fairy abilities yourself. It’s like in so many ways a step back it’s insane and then Seraph as the big max lvl ability with ghosting feels so bad and again clunky as hell.

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Originally Posted by Veis_Alveare

I really think as they try to move away from the shield/HoT dichotomy we should probably toss Deployment and Emergency tactics, just because SCH having abilities to deliberately interact with it's shields will have people still thinking of it as a shield healer even though that hasn't been it's identity for a long time.

Emergency Tactics could just be an instant aoe GCD heal on a fairly short CD that is the same healing potency as ET+Succor right now with a similar MP cost. A tiny bit like Rapture but still distinct in the case of it being on a CD (so not spammable) and with a hefty MP cost to compensate for it's greater healing. It'd be handy and used by less experienced SCHs much more.

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People also use ET Adlo too. ET changing to an AoE shield doesn't replace ET Adlo, which is pretty useful when SCH is forced to Adlo spam because all the other healing skills are on CD to keep the tank alive and one of the adlos crit.

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Originally Posted by Limonia

Maybe I don't remember it right, but if you have Dissipation activated, don't the Aetherflow actions not give no faerie gauge during it?
The faerie gauge isn't really great, but that's just another flaw of SCH gameplay.
Either way, I don't really like Dissipation because it doesn't have good synergy with the other SCH mechanics, and of course because of the faerie ghosting issues and how clunky it is to use.

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When dissipation is activated, Aetherflow actions give no faerie gauge. While Dissipation certainly gotten better since it resummons the faerie immediately when the duration is expired, Faerie gauge skills and regular faerie skills are also not usable during dissipation which is a huge demerit depending on how Dissipation is used because if Dissipation is used for an unexpected emergency healing situation, SCH essentially gimped the rest of their healing ability for the next 30 seconds to prevent the incoming 5 second wipe and only has adlo/succor (heavy MP expensive spells) in order to try to recover from the situation after. This pretty much locks Dissipation into a DPS skill as SCH gets more healing tools via the faerie since using it would actually be hurting their healing output in the long run while the faerie is gone instead of helping it.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

Faerie gauge skills and regular faerie skills are also not usable during dissipation which is a huge demerit depending on how Dissipation is used because if Dissipation is used for an unexpected emergency healing situation, SCH essentially gimped the rest of their healing ability for the next 30 seconds to prevent the incoming 5 second wipe and only has adlo/succor (heavy MP expensive spells) in order to try to recover from the situation after. This pretty much locks Dissipation into a DPS skill as SCH gets more healing tools via the faerie since using it would actually be hurting their healing output in the long run while the faerie is gone instead of helping it.

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This is what I meant with that Dissipation is designed weirdly. Why even have the healing magic buff on it if it's a) just 3 Energy Drains outside of progression, b) locks you out of almost all of your "viable" healing actions, c) healing magic buffs suck compared to healing actions buff, and d) it's way too buggy. In the end it's a really buggy DPS CD which locks you out of most of your heals, which can also - but shouldn't - be used for Lustrates and Succors. It's just a strange ability. It's not the worst, it's usable, but feels weird to use.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

People also use ET Adlo too. ET changing to an AoE shield doesn't replace ET Adlo, which is pretty useful when SCH is forced to Adlo spam because all the other healing skills are on CD to keep the tank alive and one of the adlos crit.

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You don't really need ET adlo though. The only situations that will really force ST healing like that are resolving LD solo (fairly infrequent and technically doable with Physic) and large trash pulls with poor mitigation/dps where you've been reduced to GCD heal spam. In the latter you might ET Adlo once but the general rule of thumb is to alternate Physic and Adlo.

The problem is that occasional ogcd healing is boring and spamming one dps button in between rare incoming aoe damage is also very boring and pressing an ogcd heal occasionally and spamming glare has very little skill.

The only time healing becomes interesting is when people die, or when you have to think about mechanics that show up that you have to adhere to, just before big damage occurs, meaning you have to plan ahead a bit. Also randomness in fights in terms of mechanics and damage make healing interesting to, like WOL trial.

I can’t see them being able to redesign healers without redesigning fights, and I doubt any existing fights will be changed, but there’s an opportunity to change the design of future fights.

They could also nerf dps spells and that will probably stop the glare spamming tunnel vision healer. However instead they’ll probably just stand around doing nothing, so they’d have to counter that by handing out more aoe damage more often which some may find equally as boring, but at least healers would have an identity in this instance as in, healer job is actually a healer, rather than a dps with some healing spells and is green, instead of red. :)

Also, forgot to say. Healing was also more interesting when you had to manage your MP more, so you couldn’t just spam dps spells and heals to your hearts content, without ever worrying about running out of mp.

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Originally Posted by Thoosa

They could also nerf dps spells and that will probably stop the glare spamming tunnel vision healer. However instead they’ll probably just stand around doing nothing, so they’d have to counter that by handing out more aoe damage more often which some may find equally as boring, but at least healers would have an identity in this instance as in, healer job is actually a healer, rather than a dps with some healing spells and is green, instead of red. :)

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In the equally as boring camp here. I'd rather not play the role that arbitrarily takes 20 minutes to solo anything with my 10 potency spam spell in exchange for being a True And Honest Real Princess Healer.

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Originally Posted by Thoosa

They could also nerf dps spells and that will probably stop the glare spamming tunnel vision healer. However instead they’ll probably just stand around doing nothing, so they’d have to counter that by handing out more aoe damage more often which some may find equally as boring, but at least healers would have an identity in this instance as in, healer job is actually a healer, rather than a dps with some healing spells and is green, instead of red. :)

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Can you really tunnel vision if you just automatically press one button like every 2.3 seconds without even having to think about it?

Handing out more AoE damage would be welcomed because it would interrupt Glare/Broil/Malefic spam more often.

But "at least healers would identify as actual healers"? The problem isn't that healers in this game do DPS, it's actually never been. It's only some players who prefer just filling HP bars because they know it from some other games. The actual problem is that when you get better as a healer, playing one gets more and more boring, because less GCD heals are required and since we only have one DPS spam button left there's nothing else to do but press it over and over. Not the fact that we do DPS when heals aren't needed. Having to heal more than an occasional oGCD plus a little more engaging DPS options would help here, not making it even more boring.

Sorry if this text sounds harsh or so, I'm just bad at expressing myself properly sometimes. ^^'

It's kind of funny, this thread has sort of exposed perhaps the single commonality amongst both the "give us more interesting dps rotations" camp and the "healers should need to heal more" camp; the idea that we need more to do.

So long as it isn't shooting me in the foot in solo instances I'm not opposed to a more healing-focused sort of gameplay in theory. Don't get me wrong, there is certainly some satisfaction to being top dps in something as an AST, but if I had no choice but to heal more that would be fine. That's what makes learning new higher end fights so fun, since we don't know how much to heal yet we need to heal more and in varied ways until we can plot it all out.

The kicker is that there is a big portion, largely comprised of the "healers should heal" group in my experience, who would be entirely unable to keep up with much of an increase in healing requirements. This is also likely what keeps SE from following through on such a design.

Princess McHealsalot may have leveled WHM to 80 and touched nothing else. They are bad, like, really bad. No dps, spamming Cure, 100% Medica II uptime sort of bad. They fill in their gaps with dance emotes kind of bad.

Now if SE makes it so that we need to actually use our kits to get through more casual encounters... what happens to Princess? They literally don't know what they're doing or how to use any of their tools, they save literally everything for eMeRgEnCiEs that don't happen often enough for them to build any reflex memory to be able to pull off a clutch Benediction.

SE has painted themselves into a corner at this point. We can't have nice things and it is literally their own fault for enabling as hard as they have so far.

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Originally Posted by Veis_Alveare

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Its something that quite a lot of "Healers should only heal" camp think that the "combat medic" camp doesn't want when in fact the opposite is true

Both sides want to heal more, but the combat medic camp is going one step further and looking at what they do when they don't need to heal and when they are levelling, doing solo duties, FATEs and the like. Everyone has to do those regardless of which camp they are in. Its also noticable that a few solo duties have had HSOH camp complain they are too long. Well...if healers were combat medics, they won't feel as dull and long because we could actually do something more than spamming our only attack button.

SE has put themselves into this mess that much is agreed on. They stripped too much dps potential alienating the CM camp and the HSOH camp still aren't incentivised or forced to learn to do more than spam cure and sit around bored before complaining "its too hard" or "I've got nothing to do in this solo encounter" because the skill ceiling is too low and scripted.

Funnily though, when the HSOH camp complain they want to do more, but they STILL sit around doing nothing instead of casting one of two damage buttons they have.


Nobody disagreed with getting more incentives to play healer, but SE made things so braindead in the name of accessibility that it almost killed the healer role's veteran population at Shb launch, and still very few new healers are staying with the job at 80 because they enjoy it rather than the instant queues. Those that don't get bored to pieces spamming cure 1 or malefic or eos's many glitches because they haven't got a decent levelling kit. Especialyl with downtime not changing at all after level 4

SE might not like it, but there is such a thing as too easy. Players should want to get better at using their whole kit. They should look forward to having new skills and abilities to use as they level rather than leaving them off the hotbar because they are redundant. They should look forward to having a fair challenge and be able to recover as a healer after a poor mechanic failure.

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Originally Posted by Thoosa

They could also nerf dps spells and that will probably stop the glare spamming tunnel vision healer. However instead they’ll probably just stand around doing nothing, so they’d have to counter that by handing out more aoe damage more often which some may find equally as boring, but at least healers would have an identity in this instance as in, healer job is actually a healer, rather than a dps with some healing spells and is green, instead of red. :)

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They could nerf dps spells down to 10 potency and the "glare spamming tunnel vision healer" would still spam them, because in reality they're usually competent players who want to contribute anything they can to their team instead of wasting time overhealing.

More aoe damage would be great, but I'd imagine from experience it would actually be the healbot who would suffer most because they tend to have no mapping or toolkit knowledge. The glarebot sees a string of high damage incoming in 5 sec, refreshes Dia, weaves a Plenary, Temp, Glares, Raptures, weaves Asylum, Tetra's someone low, Raptures, Benisons the tank, drops a Lucid, yawns and resumes Glaring. The healbot reacts about 3 seconds after the damage, drops a Medica II, panics because it isn't enough and the boss is casting aoe #2, goes headless chicken mode and tries to Medica, 4 dps die.

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

Funnily though, when the HSOH camp complain they want to do more, but they STILL sit around doing nothing instead of casting one of two damage buttons they have.

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Personally I feel it's just that the HSOH camp want their style of playing (spamming GCD heals randomly at the slightest hint of damage) to be the correct way, so they can justify it.

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Originally Posted by Veis_Alveare

Princess McHealsalot may have leveled WHM to 80 and touched nothing else. They are bad, like, really bad. No dps, spamming Cure, 100% Medica II uptime sort of bad. They fill in their gaps with dance emotes kind of bad.

Now if SE makes it so that we need to actually use our kits to get through more casual encounters... what happens to Princess? They literally don't know what they're doing or how to use any of their tools, they save literally everything for eMeRgEnCiEs that don't happen often enough for them to build any reflex memory to be able to pull off a clutch Benediction.

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But why would the devs take those kind of players as an example for designing healers? I don't see ANY reason why making healers having to use more than Cure I and Medica II would be bad. Why do those kind of players get a free pass to afk and not put in any effort at all? For example, let's take alliance raids. Tanks are easy as well, but they often do get markers that they have to point away from others or have to tank adds, and if they ignore all that it can lead to a wipe. But healers don't get any of that. As long as they don't forget to keep up Medica II it's totally fine? Why? If tanks have some responsibility other than pressing random buttons, why not healers as well?

I also don't think that those really bad pure healers would be too overwhelmed and unable to keep up if they had to cast Medica I every 30 instead of 60 seconds or so. Raid-wide AoEs are quite spread out in normal modes anyway, and I don't think they would even notice how many seconds are in between the party members receiving damage. Nothing would change for them, because they don't really have a feel for the fight and when what happens anyway. And there is always a second healer as well.

It's more of an imagined problem by SE than a real problem. At least that's what I think.
Fights don't get harder if the phases at full HP just get shorter, without more deathly mechanics happening. The only thing it changes it that good healers don't sit on their oGCD heals that long and would even need to use a GCD heal here and there. The bad healer only uses their GCD heals as a reaction to the party not being full anyway.

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Originally Posted by Limonia

(snipped for length) The bad healer only uses their GCD heals as a reaction to the party not being full anyway.

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Don't get me wrong, morally I'm with you. I don't agree with the idea that healing needs to be 100% accessible to everyone all the time. I'd love it if we needed to heal more as well, anything to break up my Malefic spam.

It's SE that appears to disagree with this.

I will say I've seen some things on the off chance I play as a solo tank or dps in casual stuff. Like I've been using the normal raids this expansion to work towards my GNB mounts and so I've queued alone for them a fair bit.

The number of healers I've seen who have been more or less unable to deal with e6n is really kind if eye opening. It's not that there's a truly overwhelming amount of damage coming out (there isn't) or that healers have an inordinate amount of extra stuff to do (they don't) but even things like just healing through a heftier raidwide like Ifrit's attack can deplete their MP quickly (chaincasting shields or HoTs) and I've even taken to spot healing/mitigating dps who take avoidable damage with Aurora/HoS because people often don't get enough healing to survive unavoidable damage.

I'd be totally down for that, it makes me use some key binds I don't normally, if it were because these healer's were dps-happy and just trusted me to help with my oGCDs that I have but it's just like... they're just bad. And they need help or people will die.

Again, I think that's fine. I'm all for raising the skill floor a bit, I just think SE is like... very opposed.

And tbh if nothing is done, it will just encourage the good healers who can balance healing and dps to leave the job (and they have been) and savage PFs will be full of glare bots expecting to face roll the content as they have done for everything else (and were probably lucky enough to be carried by their co healer).

Some good healers will stay but will be bored quickly after the ilevel increases and just end up in the same place again.

If you can currently get 11k or so as whm by pressing glare, dia and assize occasionally, why not get 19k playing blm or sam which have a much more complex rotations and generally get more mechanics than healers? :P