5.0 healer catastrophizing is illogical - Change My Mind

I've been popping into threads and trying to correct what I see as misconceptions or misunderstandings about the updates to healers in 5.0 but then I realized... I only have so many posts in a day. In an effort to still hopefully calm down the people who are still able to be calmed and don't have their dials stuck on "literally shaking" I thought I'd make this post.

General Updates

• Not talked about a ton but potentially something to show concern about - we lost Cleric Stance but now all share Repose? Maybe the worst change to healers in 5.0, especially if you don't do Eureka.
• Homogenization isn't always 100% bad and we need to stop treating it like a dirty word. Homogenization around potential healing output especially leads to less "let the WHM do it" which is at least nice for WHMs.
• We literally can't know meta because there are too many variables that haven't even been addressed in passing. Putting aside things like not having final potencies and not knowing the impact of rDPS buffs because we don't know which dps roles will be most desired we don't even know what the damage in the upcoming raids looks like.
• If your biggest concern is that you feel there may be less optimization available to you (hi SCH mains, nice to see you made it) I urge you to look again. In terms of synergizing with a cohealer we have some huge healing CDs across the board that are going to be coupled with not only your cohealer but tanks, Casters and Ranged dps to find new ways to minimize necessary GCD heals - If your concern is that your personal dps will be lower because some of those solutions may now require you to GCD heal I have no sympathy.

WHM Updates

• People wanted WHM to get an rDPS buff and it didn't... but it got more of a pDPS buff than either other healer. By a lot. The point of any dps increase is a faster clear. Right now WHM may be able to give faster clears by virtue of its own personal damage and that's great. The core of this idea involves it's cohealers having good answers to big damage that aren't Indom and Star - now it is generally worth it for AST and SCH to GCD heal before a WHM almost universally.
• Misery is not a dps loss anywhere but a training dummy. Once you need to heal the only way Misery isn't effective is if there is legitimately nothing you can't heal with oGCDs for 90 seconds. The only place this really happens is level capped dungeons sometimes... but on a big trash pack Misery is still a huge gain so it's a moot point.

AST Changes

• The idea that AST identity was tied to suboptimal card use needs to die in a hole and be buried there. You aren't an AST because you throw Boles on tanks, you're an AST because of mobility and timing. Short cast times on Malefic, Lightspeed being generally amazing, ED and Star being two of the best and most interesting healing CDs in the game; these are the core of AST's identity... and also the prettiest spell animations, don't @ me.
• People are mad about the cards. People need to actually think about how the cards work now, the rework and which set of cards requires more thought.
  
  Right now you fish for an AoE Balance and you'll toss a Spear in a pinch. Bole and Arrow are for Minor Arcana. You know what you're doing with a card as you see the color of the sign show up.
  
  In the new system the goal in the short term is actually to Minor Arcana as much as you can since it gives better buffs, but since they're single target ideally you should know who is going to be doing the best damage in the upcoming 15 seconds within a given role. Standard comp is 2melee/2ranged so you've still got choices to make there even once you know what you've drawn.
  
  While giving out as many Ladys and Lords as you can you still need to fish up seals for Divination so now it becomes a game of do you fish first? Do you risk burning something like Sleeve Draw on just buffing your dps directly or do you use it to secure a successful Divination? AST feels more like a gambler here and I like that. It also synergizes better with the idea floating around of a potentially meta comp composed of mostly selfish dps, something we haven't seen before.

SCH Updates

• Selene wasn't useful outside of openers and niche, I'm glad that button bloat is gone now.
• Shielding Changes remove Spreadlo - good? Spreadlo was broken and if it hadn't been removed you wouldn't be able to insta-crit free Adlo now on a timer not to mention the other amazing effects of Recitation like free Indom. Dear god, Recitation is just amazing.
• Dissipation automatically returns your fairy? More SCH QoL.
• SS got a HoT, Seraph is amazing and you can finally justify Ruin II outside of a double weave like... they should literally make the abbreviation for SCH QOL instead.
• SCH may not be top healer dps anymore and I understand it's hard to come down off of a pedestal you've been sitting on for literally years. I would say I'm sorry but I'm not. SCH is going to be able to rival AST for the sheer smoothness of its gameplay and it still brings a ton to the table.

So go ahead and change my mind. I'm open to actual dialog but if all you want to do is hitch yourself to the chicken little bandwagon that the sky is falling I've got no time for it. Specific concerns, rationalize your position and make me see it... because right now healers in 5.0 look like they're going to be really cool and my biggest concern is which one to go for first.

Wow, a very reasonable well-written post that's not full of whine and gloom&doom.

Good job!

This is all well and good but you forget that this is a game wherein you are only ever considered good or worth having if you do a ton of damage, and they just took that option away from healers altogether. You think community mindset will change? People that are upset aren't complaining because dungeons will be difficult now, we are talking about end game raiding where everyone needs to do their part and 5.0 Healers have toddler damage.

Also your statement that selene is hotbar bloat is illogical, because it's immeasurably easy to create a hotbar replacement macro, or like me... keybind the dang pet hotbar so it changes itself. Now I have MORE hotbar bloat because I have to now put my placement and obey actions on my battle hotbars.

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Originally Posted by Veis_Alveare

[*]Homogenization isn't always 100% bad and we need to stop treating it like a dirty word. Homogenization around potential healing output especially leads to less "let the WHM do it" which is at least nice for WHMs.

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Homogenization is bad the closer classes get to being reskins of each other, and Shadowbringers is getting extremely close.

The DPS GCDS are 1:1 identical. The healing toolkit with even more oGCD added to everyone, is becoming more and more identical: Excog/Lustrate vs. ED/CI vs. Bene/Tetra/Beni, Assylum vs. Soil vs. CO ... Earthly Star vs. Assize vs. Fey Blessing/Consolotation, plus whatever the GCD kit is. All these spells are essentially reskins of eachother (yes, fairy is also only a more elaborate reskin of these abilities)

You could give a WHM player that never played a SCH give a SCH, swap their respective keybinds with the identical spells, and i'd bet you they would have very little problem healing any content, because that's how similar the mechanics are.

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SCH Updates

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The primary SCH feedback is that it's dumbed to to WHM levels of gameplay. Instead of at least one healer that has a remotely more complex gameplay, you now have three with absolute no skill ceiling whatsoever.

I'm just gonna say about sch since is the one I main:

-"Selene wasn't useful outside of openers and niche, I'm glad that button bloat is gone now" Agreed, Selene was the weaker fairy outside of Fey wind and some niche uses of Fey caress, but instead of just make the fairies a skin they could've reworked Selene, transforming the two fairies into basically one is a lost oportunity and limits our decision making.

-"Shielding Changes remove Spreadlo - good? Spreadlo was broken and if it hadn't been removed you wouldn't be able to insta-crit free Adlo now on a timer not to mention the other amazing effects of Recitation like free Indom. Dear god, Recitation is just amazing." I agree that a critdlo spreaded was too powerful so no complains there.

-"Dissipation automatically returns your fairy? More SCH QoL." Yeah it would be great if there was a reason to use dissipation, being the ogcds as powerful as they are and the damage so scripted one can easily run content without needing to use it, the only reason why someone used dissipation rn is to get more dps using energy drain (not anymore I guess) and some panic situations which are strange, again due to how scripted the damage is.

-"SS got a HoT, Seraph is amazing and you can finally justify Ruin II outside of a double weave like... they should literally make the abbreviation for SCH QOL instead." 100% agree again, its great to see how SS finally is useful but again with such powerful heals as ogcd we wont have to heal a lot using gcd's which makes the loss of dps skills even worse.

-"SCH may not be top healer dps anymore and I understand it's hard to come down off of a pedestal you've been sitting on for literally years. I would say I'm sorry but I'm not. SCH is going to be able to rival AST for the sheer smoothness of its gameplay and it still brings a ton to the table." Its not about meta or being the king is about FUN, sch in sb is op thanks to its great ocds heals (and utility) but its fun due to having a lot of decision making and interesting dps tools for a healer but in shb that interesting dps kit will be boiled down to 3 buttons, we will lose miasma II and bane for a boring aoe with any effect more than just plain damage (even the people who has tried say that art of war is underwheilming), we will lose 2 dots condensed in 1 and we will lose shadowflare so we will have less to manage and we will lose energy drain, one of the best ways to compensate the mp unefficiency of our spells as well as making aetherflow a risk/reward mechanic (you can do more dps and get mp back or save the stacks for when you have to do big heals) and our way to fill the fairy gauge without overhealing, add to all that pile of s**t the fact that our ogcd heals are stronger than ever and you have a job with boring dps kit that will spend its gcds doing that boring thing because it can heal by only using ogcd heals.

I'm not going to be trying to change your mind, just trying to understand the mindset of looking at only half the changes to jobs to show them in a good light.

As to bullet points, to the best of my ability.

Homogenization mostly falls under "Boring" to me over bad, but I can see where the train of thought is coming from.
Theorycrafters are capable of working with little information for figuring out ideas, and while I agree that we don't know enough for a perfect picture, we can still paint a picture with the information at hand.
I wonder how you could put "find new ways to minimize necessary GCD heals" and the following part in the same statement. Maybe that's just a point of view thing, but if we are minimizing GCD heals, we'll still be DPSing.

WHM:
This is true, subject to actual testing. But it's also been an assumed truth for a little while now, and as far as I am aware, pDPS won't outshine rDPS unless all the changes as a whole make rDPS boosts that much worse. That may have happened. I don't know.
I feel like Lilies are going to fall under the same issues as Aetherflow on SCH will now. If you aren't spending them, you are wasting potential on them, which may not be an issue, but it's hard to say.

AST:
I had actually commented on a nerf to Balance to add more power elsewhere in AST a while back, but this wasn't quite what I had in mind. I disagree on the new set requiring more thought, though, because once people get used to the new changes it's pretty simple, and you don't even had things like RR or Spread to spice it up.

SCH:
You comment on button bloat with Selene, but SE *just* made changes to SMN pets so that the SAME button works on different skills for different pets. I'm not saying Selene was good, but it could have been something *better* than just SCH version of pet glamour.
Yeah, Crit-lo had to go in some way, and this is probably the best way they could have done it. I'm okay with that change, sad as it is to see it go.
Dissipation is nice, but the loss of ED means we have less to use our Aetherflow stacks on, so we basically get boosted heals that barely affect any of our heals (Unless it's changed, it affects Physick, Adlo, and Succor.) still, 3 aetherflow stacks that won't get any boost from Dissipation in the first place (still) and get our faerie back. It's a QoL change, yes, but I wouldn't call it a huge one.
Sacred Soil is nice, Seraph seems...Lackluster to me as a whole, but I'll have to play with it to see, and I still feel like Ruin II doesn't matter much. Yes, it's more damage for rare points when you need to move or double weave, but we have less opportunity to do so, as far as I am aware, because of the mentioned ED loss.

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Originally Posted by Ilenya

I'm not going to be trying to change your mind, just trying to understand the mindset of looking at only half the changes to jobs to show them in a good light.

As to bullet points, to the best of my ability.

Homogenization mostly falls under "Boring" to me over bad...

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It's boring, and bad because it's boring--carbon copy jobs who's biggest differences are superficial cosmetic designs is a worst-case scenario for a game like this. THE FUN in trying something new is that it is...well, NEW.

Edit: If they reverse the damning changes to green DPS I'd actually be fine and go back into obscurity and stop posting, but the way this has been rolled out is pretty darn bad. I know many who LEFT WoW (a game many had played for years) b/c of similar class changes that came with BFA. To some this is happening all over again in FF14 in a similar, albeit slightly different light.
Quite disappointing.

I am coming around to the new card system providing more consistent gameplay across all types of content. While it looks bland as heck on the surface, and the "ranged or melee" thing feels weird and artificial, the gameplay seems potentially interesting at least. I wish there was a little more interaction with seals right now, but I assume they have plans to expand that in 6.0.

The removal of the time mage spells still has me very sad. Celestial Opposition was one of my favorite skills in the game, Time Dilation was a lot of fun. I wanted them to do more interesting things with these, not just remove them. They were one of AST's fun and unique features. (And time magic has just always been a favorite for me)

I was also really hoping for at least one more offensive spell/ability to do something with when I solo or do dungeons, not getting that isn't surprising, but is still kind of disappointing. The changes to when we grab gravity and minor arcana should at least keep me a bit more busy when doing lower level content. Running through things solo as AST will continue to be mind numbing as ever.

Are the changes catastrophic? Probably not, but they aren't exciting for me. It is more "Okay, fine, whatever. I can deal with this." right now, while the DPS jobs I play have me genuinely excited going into ShB. The thing I am most excited for as an AST is just "You get gravity 7 levels earlier".

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Originally Posted by Veis_Alveare

People wanted WHM to get an rDPS buff and it didn't... but it got more of a pDPS buff than either other healer. By a lot. The point of any dps increase is a faster clear. Right now WHM may be able to give faster clears by virtue of its own personal damage and that's great.

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So I am genuinely curious about how you reached this conclusion.

Healer pDPS appears to be very very close now. The "homogenized" as people are saying. So... I'm curious about what you're looking at that makes you think WHM has more, somehow.

OP, is your main class really lvl 43 NIN? Respectfully, I see some points in your post which make me think you haven't played healer at a high level in this game.

General-- We'll have to agree to disagree on homogenization. I like variety. "Let the WHM do it." The opposite is true. In theory, WHM has the highest sustained DPS if it were to do nothing but DPS the whole fight, so you really want the SCH to heal with its fairy and oGCDs while the WHM uses its very, very limited oGCD kit and spends the rest of the time spamming stone. Fun. However, most of why WHM dps suffers in raids is because we have so few oGCD options. We actually LOST an AoE oGCD option and gained 2 GCD heals with these changes.

AST and SCH are so great in part because they synergize really well and have powerful oGCD kits. They also bring buffs. This means not only can they weave heals between damage-dealing skills--heal without losing DPS--they increase the raid dps as a whole. WHM has greater potencies, but that has not translated into higher numbers for WHMs in raids. When WHM got a DPS buff with the assize change, they actually fell even more behind the other healers in personal DPS contribution.

WHM: The pDPS increase would have to be astronomical to make up for lost rDPS from buffs. This isn't my opinion, it is a fact based on tens of thousands of logs. This was not addressed. About Misery, here's another place where inexperience plays in...WHM has a 60 sec oGCD heal and a ST shield, in addition to whatever your cohealer brings. With intelligent oGCD usage between you and your cohealer, you almost never need use a GCD every 30 sec. If you had to choose between using your GCD Afflatus ST heal and your cohealer's oGCD or your own Tetra, it's an easy decision. So it's likely a dps loss somewhere other than a training dummy. Also, unlike AST and SCH, WHM still has no way to weave without clipping. They also don't have much to weave, which is the other issue.

AST: I actually think the new card system is fine. Most of the time you were dumping trash cards and fishing for a balance. Now you use more cards and juggle seals. AST has a mini-game to play while SCH heals. You don't address the biggest change to AST--the CU change. That's huge, I don't see how it was necessary, and it's a hit where AST really didn't need one IMO. The instant application of the heal for CU was a great change. Now they get only sadness.

SCH: SCH dps took a big hit, but their healing kit is buffed massively. SCH is going to be the undisputed king of healing, and I'm genuinely curious how anyone (devs) thinks this is balanced. Not doing anything with Selene is a head-scratcher, and I think a missed opportunity. I feel for my SCH buddies, but I would sacrifice Alpha for a heal kit like they have.