Has anyone quit healing?

Honestly, the other healer isn't playing your character. Play what you want to play and what you find fun. AST is a good healer, however busy it may be. It's also completely broken for some mechanics, as they can be bypassed entirely with Macrocosmos (looking at you, Death's Toll in p3s).

Will WHM work? Yes. But the take away here is: have fun. It's a game. Play it your way.

I like healing, I don't want to move to a GCD/hardcast focus as I'm not looking for WoW over here. I just want to heal in more types of content and I want more DPS buttons.

DPS get flashy finishers, primals, melee combos. We get to press Dosis/Broil/Glare/Malefic 180 times a fight, which is pretty terrible design. It's basically 95% of what I do and it makes Yoshi P's comments come across very awkwardly. This should be an easy question to field and clarify and instead over the past few letters he's said:

"Healers shouldn't have to heal much, it's too difficult!"

"Healers shouldn't have to DPS if they don't want to! It's too difficult"

"Healers should do Ultimates if they want challenge!" (They haven't released one in two and a half years...)

So the main take away I get from the recent Live Letters is that the Director has no vision at all for healing and far less of an interest in expanding end game than he does trying to lure lapsed gamers into retired content with Scion bots.

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Originally Posted by Mapleine

I like healing, I don't want to move to a GCD/hardcast focus. I'm not looking for WoW over here.

I just want to heal in more types of content and I want more DPS buttons. DPS get flashy finishers, primals, melee combos. We get to press Dosis/Broil/Glare/Malefic 180 times a fight. It's basically 95% of what I do.

Yoshi P's comments were very concerning and seemed clueless. This should be an easy question to field, clarify and understand and instead over the past few letters he's said:

"Healers shouldn't have to heal muchl"

"Healers shouldn't have to DPS at all if they don't want to!"

"Healers should do Ultimates if they want challenge!" (This is the most tedious, niche content in the genre IMO and an Ultimate has not been released in over two years).

To all of us players, this just looks like the director of the game has literally no real vision or experience with healing.

All of this after having to sit through a presentation about coddling single player gamers and revamping ARR's awful MSQ really rubbed me the wrong way. Especially when I'm sitting in an active end-game that has never improved in the 8 years since ARR. Iffy on the future of the game, will probably be playing less in general, especially since we sound like we're moving into filler story.

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Honestly I'm still very bullish on the future of the game, and I feel many are, but I will agree on the line in the sand the devs have drawn on healers. There has never been a time to me when I felt the devs were outright ignoring player feedback. Plenty of times where I felt they got it wrong. Or took a long time to get it right. Or went another direction entirely. But never a time where I felt they heard player feedback and went "Yeah, no."

Except now. Healer gameplay is the one time where I feel the dev team truly feels they know better then the player base and are actively pushing back against it. Every other time they have relented, even if it took two years to do so, and never did they draw such a hard line in the sand about it. The thing is though I honestly feel they don't know that pushing that hard back isn't going to get the desired effect. This player base kinda has a track record of never backing down on something and just going with the flow. I doubt this is the first or last time where gonna have a contentious answer from Yoshi-P in a Q and A about healing.

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Originally Posted by Rika007

Honestly I'm still very bullish on the future of the game, and I feel many are, but I will agree on the line in the sand the devs have drawn on healers. There has never been a time to me when I felt the devs were outright ignoring player feedback. Plenty of times where I felt they got it wrong. Or took a long time to get it right. Or went another direction entirely. But never a time where I felt they heard player feedback and went "Yeah, no."

Except now. Healer gameplay is the one time where I feel the dev team truly feels they know better then the player base and are actively pushing back against it. Every other time they have relented, even if it took two years to do so, and never did they draw such a hard line in the sand about it. The thing is though I honestly feel they don't know that pushing that hard back isn't going to get the desired effect. This player base kinda has a track record of never backing down on something and just going with the flow. I doubt this is the first or last time where gonna have a contentious answer from Yoshi-P in a Q and A about healing.

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I actually love most of the combat design. I've agreed for years with the idea of removing the punishments and rigidity from MMO combat it and making the game revolve more around the fight so I will be a little off the mark from some of the naysayers.

I also think the greater community is wrong a fair bit as well but this is on the team to be able to sift good feedback from bad, this is a nessecary skill to have nowadays. Expedience being treated like a meme alone kinda sums this up, Expeidence was clearly going to be an insanely good skill from day one.

For me, while this is a big problem, and it has to be fixed a lot of this was amplified by the director acting like a brat.

It's like, four jobs worth of gameplay gameplay is pushing one static ability 97% of a fight and you're talking down to us and treating us like we're crazy. Genuinely felt like I was watching a World of Warcraft Q&A, which is the last thing in the world I am after.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

E. Prognosis and especially E. Diagnosis are my two least useful heals next to Pepsis.

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E. Diagnosis is great for getting three Toxikon stacks instantly from transition raidbusters!

Other than that...

TBH i dont really understand much of the concerns. Like sure WHM needs some love but healers r really not broken at their core. Y do u want flashy DMG buttons on a healer? Go play DPS a bit to scratch ur itch. Y do u want more DMG buttons on a healer? Is the addition of a 123 really gonna solve ur problems? Ppl r clamouring for putting 123 into a one button combo like in PVP, and u can already do that with plugins if u choose. There is serious ability bloat going on and u guys want even more?

I had a discussion with my static and they told me that healing requirements go up in tiers 2 and 3. So i guess this is the easy tier. Might be a better idea to just keep it even across the board, i think their argument was so that more ppl can clear the first tier?

So if u wanna be busy, go play astro. I love that job, but i simply dont have the time to learn to play it at a high lvl as an alt job, so i appreciate there being a more approachable/simple WHM choice.

What i do agree with though is that there just needs to be more dmg going out. In all content. Raidwides literally do nothing in casual content (dungeons, normal raids), u could just heal up with ur standard health regeneration. The only times i noticed HP bars getting chunked to a decent degree is in the last boss of dead ends. I suspect thats gonna go away in a few weeks once the general population has more ilvl.

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Originally Posted by Chopstix

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"Healing isn't bad. I can't be bothered to do it but it's not bad."

Let's just remove all the big flashy moves from the game. What's the point of them? You just need to do damage, it doesn't have to look nice or interesting. Hell, let's just make the auto attack animation the only thing you see when you hit your DPS buttons. Your entire combo? Just fluff so let's simplify it by making it so that you only have to hit 1 button to do optimal damage. I mean, it's not as though there isn't a 1 Button SMN macro or a Dragon Kick rotation MNK that does comparable damage to actual rotations. If they can do it, why not just consolidate all jobs to have braindead easy rotations?

BECAUSE IT"S BORING AF!!!!!!! No one wants to have some brain dead 1 button spam rotation. If DPS can complain about some BS like that being in the game, I think we can complain about our lot in life as Healers.

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Originally Posted by Chopstix

So if u wanna be busy, go play astro. I love that job, but i simply dont have the time to learn to play it at a high lvl as an alt job, so i appreciate there being a more approachable/simple WHM choice.

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Not even AST is immune to the 1 button spam during downtime, and this period will never be lower than the amount of healing required in high end contents. Granted they are the least boring of all thanks to their cards which is also such a messy shambled system from dev’s pitiful attempt to keep the seals mechanic relevant.

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Originally Posted by Mapleine

E. Diagnosis is great for getting three Toxikon stacks instantly from transition raidbusters!

Other than that...

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I mean, it's there if you need it haha. Ideally ogcd heals would cover everything but people mess up, prog PFs notably. Sometimes it's a Pinax fire stack and only 2 people left alive in your stack. For the sake of prog just to see more mechs might as well shield xD

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Originally Posted by pinkbubblegum

I mean, it's there if you need it haha. Ideally ogcd heals would cover everything but people mess up, prog PFs notably. Sometimes it's a Pinax fire stack and only 2 people left alive in your stack. For the sake of prog just to see more mechs might as well shield xD

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Generally speaking, your GCD healing is pretty useless both in the fact that it's a DPS loss and that they're just not very good. That said, they do serve as a very limited safety net and do have very niche situations. During P3S, for example, I'll stand in the middle after the first wave of adds fall during the add phase and hardcast prognosis. There's nothing to attack there, and raidwide damaging is being pumped out, so I can avoid spending more important resources that will be needed very shortly. So I don't think these are bad to have in concept.

The issue I take with them is that they're painted as the bread and butter of healing when they're really the opposite, and are often used as a crutch by casual healers despite it actively being a worse way to even keep HP up because they're not particularly strong and cost a lot of MP.

I think they just need to be stronger. Make them work harder so that players that are using them as a crutch actively can brute force their way through healing, which makes the role easier at face-value, but since they remain DPS losses, skilled healers still won't rely on them so long as their healing isn't too overtuned.

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Originally Posted by Chopstix

...Y do u want more DMG buttons on a healer? Is the addition of a 123 really gonna solve ur problems? Ppl r clamouring for putting 123 into a one button combo like in PVP, and u can already do that with plugins if u choose. There is serious ability bloat going on and u guys want even more?

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I guarantee you if you right now gave White Mage a 1 > 2 > 3 damage combo and then in response also condensed some of their more useless abilities (ie got rid of cure 1 by just upgrading it to cure two, merged Medica and Medica 2), you would instantly silence half the complaints of the current white mage crowd. Solve all the problems? No. But it would sure as heck liven up 90% of the playtime on the job.

Your other points are just bad faith arguments or not relevant. Plug ins and condensing combos are not something all players want, if anything it is a small minority. Ability bloat is definitely an issue, but that also doesn't mean we should be locking out healers from getting new DPS buttons. You could easily trim and condense half of WHM an SCH's kits, add 3 new DPS buttons to both, and come out on the other side with more hotbar space then we have now. And WHM being simple and approachable does not mean it also can't be engaging for upper level players to play. Black Mage is simple and approachable. Reaper is simple and approachable. Bard is simple and approachable. Red Mage is simple and approachable. Warrior is simple and approachable. None of those jobs spend 90% of a fight pressing only one button.

It is a joke to think that White Mage can't be reworked to be more engaging for upper level players while still being a simple and approachable job for lower level players. In fact the job outright is making healing harder on new players by teaching them bad healing habits that will handicap them if they ever attempt to move into anything beyond regular content.