Has anyone quit healing?

I don't understand what all of the fuzz is about, I don't think that healing has ever been more fun.


My only two real problems is that Art of War is boring, I want Bane back.
And numerical issues with AST ( I think that they're pretty far behind rdps wise? ).

Been a WHM since 2.1 or so (toyed with AST a bit in SB). I've quit healing now. I'd been waiting for WHM to get more interesting and ShB didn't meet my expectations for that.

Since the gutting of Cleric Stance, optimization of your performance as a healer has been reduced to, basically, finding more ways to spam 1 button. Instead of pushing yourself to your limits to squeeze out the most from your Job, you're pushing yourself to your limits to keep your eyes from glazing over. Shadowbringers made this problem, if anything, worse. Been busy this week, so I haven't gotten to see Savage yet, but I had no reason to expect that this would really change.

If you're looking for a non-healer Job to migrate to, I'd suggest giving Black Mage a try. I've found it offers some of the dynamism that makes healing inherently enjoyable, and it incentivizes well-planned, creative, and often coordinated use of your toolkit to maximize your output. You have to pay attention more than once every 30s.

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Originally Posted by AmurT

The fact of the matter is, the idea of "pure healing" has not gone anywhere in years and pushing for it has only resulted in nothing but grief, aka WHM for all of SB and SCH now. Just stop before more healers get fed up.

SE have three options:
1. Up the damage across all encounters/Nerf all healing potencies and maybe add random, non scripted damage.
2. Embrace the green DPS and make our damage kits more interesting.
3. Give all healers their own unique thing to do on the side like old AST cards.

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TL;DR: For Healers to Heal, their ogcd heal potencies need a gutting?

I've been thinking about the 'Pure healing' situation and it kinda hit me as I was playing my 57 Astro vs 58 Scholar.

I had to actually heal with Astro, where with Scholar I was more concerned about doing damage. A heal cast was the last resort! Where was the main difference? - Powerfu Off-GCD l heals!
When I could snap my fingers and heal just about any situation without a cast, there was no stress and no real need to heal unless I'm out of Aetherflow.

What then crossed my mind, how would the Healer role be different if they improved cast heal potencies and gutted off-gcd heals? In cases where Lillies or Ather can't easily top off people, suddenly healers actually need to use gcd to heal, rather than DPS. In theory. [And absolutely this would cause mass histeria, but it would accomplish the 'Healers heal' objective, no?]

Just a random, probably bad, brainstorm. But it is neat to actually heal dungeons rather than DPS and Heal on occasion.

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Originally Posted by Ubbernaut

Just a random, probably bad, brainstorm. But it is neat to actually heal dungeons rather than DPS and Heal on occasion.

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Do you find healing in dungeons that neat, really ? It's a pretty braindead experience.

Here are the possibilities for a healer in a dungeon run :
1. Your tank pulls 1 pack at a time and doesn't hear the team begging him to pull more. In that case, you don't have to heal that much... and you dps instead.
2. Your tank does big dick wall to wall pulls and you have to pop cooldowns + regen/shield + aetherflow/lilites abilities just in case... and then you aoe dps instead.

It's pretty rare to use your other healing abilities in a dungeon... because outside of some bosses, your whole party doesn't take that much damages, if they are "good enough".

Right now, I don't find healing that engaging tbh, and not because of the whole "healers need to heal" non sense, but because, in essence, this game was not made with "healers need to heal" in mind. Too much down times with dps as your sole activity. If you are a good healer, in this game, you will spent a good chunk of your time dpsing, that's all.

I play healer out of paranoia more than anything; I have died way too many times in other roles due to healer neglect that I have trust issues leaving my life in other people's hands. ShB has jacked that paranoia up to 11 as the amount of subpar healers have drastically increased so much so that, unless someone I know and trust is playing the healer, I'm very hesitant to let anyone else in the role and have taken to Trusts/Squadrons to leveling my jobs now.

I never understood the whole "complexity" argument regarding healers. What difference did it honestly make if I'm hitting 1 keystrokes vs 5 to accomplish the same thing? I mean, yeah I miss Aero 3 on my WHM and Bane to spread my DoTs on SCH but I never really viewed them as complex or engaging, it was just me doing DPS and little else. You want complex, make it so that a healer's toolkit completely interacted with one another in some way to get greater results, like how Sacred Soil used to Proc a Free Succor for SCH. The time mage aspects of AST were the closest thing I would ever consider complex but even then, I didn't really like AST all that much since it was always the same fishing for DPS cards and RR/Minor Arcana everything else of little to no value. If anything, I would like Lillies/Aetherflow/Card Seals to be more more involved than they are. They're just a resource to use XYZ skills but why is it limited to those skills alone? Why can't I use an Aetherflow stack to increase the potency of the fairy abilities? Why can't I spend a Lily to strengthen the shielding on Divine Benison? Why can't I use Card Seals for an attack move?

Regardless, I'm clearly not going to quit healing over the loss of some arbitrary complexity that healers supposedly had when I just never felt they ever had them to begin with.

My friend that has been SCHing throughout HW and SB essentially quit in ShB. The level of dumbing down is beyond his tolerance (and I can't really blame him).

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

hitting 1 keystrokes vs 5 to accomplish the same thing?

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It's one for those "fun" things that I know I enjoy, but have hard time putting into words why I find it fun. The answer might be simple: Scholar was a min-dps job on the side. Like a simple backup plan for when healing isn't needed, having 8 buttons kept me busy with durations to keep track of, not to mention rest of the tools at my disposal. And there were no build up, no combos or highlighted buttons. Just straightforward dots. You figured out an optimal way of applying them to maximise the duration of spreaded dots via Bane, but it wasn't a big crisis if you suddenly had to stop because your tank is folding like cardboard. You took risks helping the party by going into Cleric Stance, sweating as you counted each second until it came off cooldown again so you could turn it off. Sheer flexibility of it's simple design allowed for so much freedom to do the role as a healer and made sure I had something to keep me busy. It was fun.

I'm killing things solo about as fast as I did in 3.0, maybe even faster, but it's all for naught as it's nowhere as fullfilling with having one button shoulder the whole job. It was putting in some effort and as reward for your hard work you got through it faster for using everything at your disposal. Instead of doing damage worth a Broil III and a Biolysis tick for each cast, damage rampd up. Lonnger dots got to stay the more you put up until the rare moments nothing else was left to do so you have to start an investigation into where your Ruin spell was before you needed to refresh dots or Shadowflare. Or if a party, someone was probably needing healing before you thought about using Ruin.

Believe it comes around to how SE seems to continue to trivialize all that is not in the current expansion. Instead of being having to tell people "it gets fun at 80", I would want to be able to say "it gets fun soon as you unlock it." Probably a stretch. 15 would be better. When you start doing duties you should have at least a cornerstone ability and something to track so you'd want to use all you got. Secret ingredient seems to be the Arcanist class roots of scholar that ensured they had something more to do than the healing abilities the job unlocked. Think if they went back and made sure every healing job had roots in a dps class they wouldn't feel so sluggish in everything that isn't wall-to-wall pull at 80 and above (even then I miss manual embrace).

Some more intricacies and uniqueness to the way each healer would be very welcome aswell. Like you said, using Aetherflow (or Fey gauge) to augument Lily. New ways we go into combat with the job even it's solo or in a party in Sastasha or Anyder. Not sure about whm and ast, as I only have sch leveled. Path of least work to what I think would make the job fun for me again is to reassign all the ACN skills and pet hotbar to SCH so it resembles 3.0.

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Originally Posted by AmurT

Aside from AST having to heal more at expansion start, not from encounter design but as a result of ass healing potencies, ShB healing has been no different from SB.

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This and the OP oGCD heal we have and the absurdingly low damage we received are why I quit my healing in ShB
We do dps while we can, yes, but now it is 80% dps, the healer focus on healing supposed to come with ShB never make it way to the expansion

Healing is still about DPSing - no differentce from before. WHM does absurd amounts of damage.

just less different keys to press