Healer Role Actions: SE, We Need to Talk

Healers are a mess right now. AST is OP, SCH is d-e-d, WHM is... WHM. But I'm not here to talk about why AST is amazing, or the multitude of problems with Plenary Indulgence, I want to talk about healer's role actions.

For me, I think Lucid Dreaming, Swiftcast, and Largesse are necessary. Then you have Eye for an Eye, Esuna, Protect, and Rescue all fighting for the last 2 spots.

I personally think that Esuna should be removed from role actions and given to all healers. It's too situational to always have, but it's so nice to have when those situations arise. Furthermore, Protect should receive the same treatment. There's no reason to not have extra mitigation. And I also hate having to activate it at the start of a dungeon, casting it, then getting rid of it. Then someone dies and I have to activate it again and cast it on them again.

At least, I hope that happens in 4.05, along with a lot of other changes.

The same could be said for any other role.

The only two uniquely poor "choices" are Protect and Low Blow/Reprisal, which should always be swapped prior to the encounter. Reprisal has relatively no value on trash, and Low Blow has absolutely none on bosses.
Protect, worse still, is swapped to, cast, and then traded again for something else, usually all by macro.

Each encounter determines our Role Skills, atop the extra annoyance of swapping to and from Protect and deciding which healer has to take Esuna. There's no choice in any of it.

So the thing with Healer role actions, is all three healers already had skills that filled the effects of Lucid Dreaming, Largesse, Esuna, and Break. This isn't like Protect or Eye for an Eye that were removed from one job to be made available to all, these were removed/nerfed from all apparently just to fill out having 10 role actions. There isn't really a reason any of these should exist in their current form.

Even Protect isn't really needed - it is only still in the game because Yoshi-P insisted on keeping it for FF flavor reasons; why not have make it a WHM exclusive short term mitigation buff like they did for PvP. This would also have let them stop scaling up all damage on the assumption that Protect is always active.

Protect shouldn't exist in general because it's soooo necessary. If not, whomever doesn't have it has that much less defense, and literally every major encounter is designed with Protect in mind. It's too important for such a "set and forget" buff. It really should be like it is for WHM in PvP, a general damage reduction, only for the party instead of a single target. Since they're so insistent on having Lilies, fine, lock it behind the Lily system, needing at least one Lily to use it. This gives WHM much needed damage mitigation, but, of course, SCH is just crying even further.

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Originally Posted by Riyshn

So the thing with Healer role actions, is all three healers already had skills that filled the effects of Lucid Dreaming, Largesse, Esuna, and Break.

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That's the problem. They took away our actions and forced us to waste role actions slots on them, instead of letting us use new role actions instead. I wish they created other skills to be used for role actions (and maybe put stoneskin there) instead of taking away the cleanse, the mana restore, and healing buff.

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Originally Posted by Halkon

That's the damn problem isn't it? They took away our actions and forced us to waste role actions slots on them, instead of letting us use new role actions instead.

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It is. They not only retained bloat, but used it to excuse neglect of any meaningful creation of new actions, all while extracting a bit of the individual flavor from each affected job.

They need to decide what they actually desire from customization, if that's even a subject they're willing to wade into. These Legion-esque tools to be swapped situationally with given encounter types, if touched at all, are not that. There's no multiple flavors of gameplay here. There's just bloat and additional steps required.

I'd argue that Lagresse is optional. Considering that each encounter is heavily scripted you can always just play around with or without Lagresse. At best it saves MP, but so does Eye for an Eye.

Protect, however, seems so incredibly pointless and seems to be here just for sake of tradition within Final Fantasy. The party could very well have a passive (magic) defense increase based on party size and have the same effect as Protect. Or make it a trait based on role and call it Divine Seal - The name is now free anyway. Or just flat out increase each player's magic and defense regardless or lower incoming damage equivalent to the mitigated effect when Protect is present. Groups never (or rarely) go into any form of content without a healer anyway. Passively having protect as spell, trait, or party bonus would hardly effect the game play. At worst it will save the healers a single GCD after a raise.

My issue with role skills is that all of them are equal except largesse. That skill does not benefit all healers equally like the rest. It is situational yes but it has limited use on a scholar because the skill was designed for a whitemage kit and the great majority of scholars brute force healing skills are abilities which doesn't benefit from the healing potency up. This compounded with the fact that our gcd heals are the heaviest mp costing heals i find it blatantly unjust.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

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Yep, I'd be down with it, if maybe we could have "skill loadouts" or something. Changing individual skills out sucks manually, and sucks making a macro for it. It's all an illusion of choice, and it'd be great if there was real choice. But honestly, I wouldn't mind tossing role actions to the side completely (although I would like to keep Rescue).

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Originally Posted by Liii

My issue with role skills is that all of them are equal except largesse. That skill does not benefit all healers equally like the rest. It is situational yes but it has limited use on a scholar because the skill was designed for a whitemage kit and the great majority of scholars brute force healing skills are abilities which doesn't benefit from the healing potency up. This compounded with the fact that our gcd heals are the heaviest mp costing heals i find it blatantly unjust.

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True, Largesse was made for WHM/AST. The only thing I can see Largesse being useful for, for SCH, is to try and get a massive critlo. But, it's not spammable enough. Largesse is a lot better for regen based jobs, WHM and Dirunal AST.

esuna was perfectly fine in heavensward, now its just bloating the cross role. we cant even use our new toy rescue because we can barely fit our skills. i really wish we had Disable taken from ast and put into cross role, that would benefit literally every healer (and imo mitigation is better on healers than on dps that dont even know what addle is useful for).


i personally ditch largesse for esuna because i try to maximize ogcd healing and use most of my casts on DPS (and largesse only boosts casted magic), but its still annoying having to take out an important part of the toolkit for such a situational skill. the difference between this situational esuna and tank and dps situational silences and stuns is that maybe 1 or 2 fights ever actually need those, but esuna is needed frequently enough that you need to be prepared to have it (or punishing enough in non savage content that its sorta mandatory in some fights), but also sporadically enough that a lot of people ditch it completely. protect too i think is skill bloat since its a buff that should be up 100% of the time, but i guess it sort of works to punish ressed people...i guess???

while we're at it with cross role, cleric stance needs to be buffed. 5% for 15 seconds every 90 is not very significant. a buff on the potency, duration or the recast would be fine.. anything, really

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Originally Posted by Halkon

Yep, I'd be down with it, if maybe we could have "skill loadouts" or something. Changing individual skills out sucks manually, and sucks making a macro for it. It's all an illusion of choice, and it'd be great if there was real choice. But honestly, I wouldn't mind tossing role actions to the side completely (although I would like to keep Rescue).

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Rescue and Peloton are literally the only things I've enjoyed about the change.

Just to throw some ideas out there, some job-based customization sets/menus:

• White Mage - Blessings
• Scholar - Studies
• Paladin - Oath
• Bard - Repertoire
• Machinist - Gear Box
• Etc., etc.

Example of one such set:

Gear Box

• Heat Absorber (allows for set-aside Heat storage, and Flamethrower when combined with Gas Tank, and with additional synergy with Gauss Round).
• Wrench (repairs turrets and has an oGCD Pacify that grants one ammo)
• Gas Tank (allows for your rook turrets to be launched as rockets, self-destructing in a line AoE, Bishop turrets to soak enemies in oil, causing later damage to ignite them for DoT damage, and combines with Heat Absorber to create a flamethrower)
• Gauss Tech (allows for the Gauss Turret—which deploys between you and the target to accelerate shots fired and allow you to fire from outside of line of sight by redirecting your shots, Gauss Barrel, and Gauss Round)
• Foregrip (allows you to swap to a Rifle Grip, with a short charge time available on most weaponskills for additional damage and range, and allowing for Clean Break, an extremely damaging augmented version of Heartbreak following a critical Clean Shot).
• Advanced Salvage (allows parts to be picked up from destroyed turrets, mechanical enemies, and returned after consumption, which can augment additional abilities in a variety of ways).
• Extended Ordinance Permit (allows for multiple turrets to be deployed simultaneously, albeit at mana drain cost)
• Marksmanship (something, something Head Graze, Leg Graze, Foot Graze)
• Etc. (Pick 4-5)

(With the above ideas, mana is now consumed to Repair and Deploy any of the three turrets; Repair orders may be given to accelerate the recast times of destroyed turrets. The actual Repair ability (via Wrench) is an oGCD channel which rapidly reduces the recast time at no mana cost.)

I share a similar sentiment, this is not customization. Just a watered down cross role setup.

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Originally Posted by QooEr

while we're at it with cross role, cleric stance needs to be buffed. 5% for 15 seconds every 90 is not very significant. a buff on the potency, duration or the recast would be fine.. anything, really

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I wish they would just give us a small buff to healers damage, even a percent or two, but have it constant. Then, completely remove Cleric stance from the game so we don't have to try and fit such a crappy skill into our hotbar. However, if they are going to keep it in the game, the skill needs a massive buff to be worth taking up one of our 5 limited spots. The buff should be more like 15% and should last for 20 second every 60 seconds. But 5% for 15 seconds on a 90 second cool down is laughable.

If the role system is putting you in a place where you have to choose between multiple skills, i think it's doing it's job right.

But for the sake of this thread:
Lucid Dreaming was completely unnecessary for all classes, they nerfed classes just to add it, instead of baking fully functioning class specific mp restore into their kits.

Protect shouldn't have remained the same effect. It's the definition of button bloat.

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Originally Posted by Scox

I wish they would just give us a small buff to healers damage, even a percent or two, but have it constant. Then, completely remove Cleric stance from the game so we don't have to try and fit such a crappy skill into our hotbar. However, if they are going to keep it in the game, the skill needs a massive buff to be worth taking up one of our 5 limited spots. The buff should be more like 15% and should last for 20 second every 60 seconds. But 5% for 15 seconds on a 90 second cool down is laughable.

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idk cooldown planning is a fun thing to do and cleric gives healer dps some complexity, i jsut wish it actually mattered like you said

Have you also noticed they are planning to force our role skills further limiting the choice. It's already there.

Datascape v4.0 - forced one Healer to have esuna as a wasted role ability. I say wasted because while absolutely needed to cleanse doom, doom isn't really a major part of the encounter. He caats it only once to make sure the ability is equipped and has no other detrimental debuffs to cleanse the rest of the fight.

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I personally think that Esuna should be removed from role actions and given to all healers.

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And I agree. Typically I remove it for other abilities because it's instacast. But damn... does it suck when you have a 20/25 second paralyze or bleed on that you wish you could remove. Flipping back to my other hotbar to find I didn't re-equip it.

Telling my party "whelp.. don't have Esuna". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If ONLY it was a NATIVE skill like it used to be.

Just remove Protect and make it an "Echo" effect at the start of every dungeon. It could be literally the same thing but just an automatic buff everyone received at the start of an instance. Make it so it doesn't wear off at any point until you leave and I don't see any issues.

The thing about Protect is that it's mandatory or utterly useless. Seriously in Sastasha NM it mitigates, on average, <1 (aka 0) point(s) of damage.

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Originally Posted by Riyshn

Even Protect isn't really needed - it is only still in the game because Yoshi-P insisted on keeping it for FF flavor reasons; why not have make it a WHM exclusive short term mitigation buff like they did for PvP. This would also have let them stop scaling up all damage on the assumption that Protect is always active.

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Hey, you.
I like you, and I like this thing you said.
This would also have "fixed" the issue with most healers having it too easy to spend 90% of the time in CS, as lack of protect would naturally have made everyone squishier, and this would have somewhat fixed WHM's lack of mitigation skills.
As it is protect is just a pain in my ass - it's basically mandatory for all content (bar 8-mans where you and your co healer can coordinate), and while you can swap it out after cast (thank you reddit role action swap macros) most of the time I don't even bother to swap it out, as someone dying mid combat means I can't use it on them again. It's all fine and well if someone has a momentary braindead moment and don't stand in the bad anymore as you can recast it after the fight, but if there's any new player or anyone lagging, or some such, well...

I just find it ODD that in their effort to reduce button bloat, they insisted on keeping the most useless skill in the entire bloody game. I don't even actually have 5 role action choices lmao

Bring the PvP of Protect over and make that the new 70 WHM skill. Just solved both Protect AND PI problems!

Seriously, though. Having a skill that you only cast at the start of the dungeon and then never again, so you are encouraged to swap it out, is just silly design. It doesn't make any sense to foist that on players, and people who don't realize you can swap it out are at a disadvantage (one less usable action in combat) vs their macro using companions.

The general consensus I'm seeing here is that protect is worthless, and should either

A) Be removed entirely and/or given to parties automatically
B) Be changed to what it is in PvP

Further, I've seen no mention of Break so far, which speaks volumes more than if anyone had mentioned it. I honestly don't know what to say about it, other than it should either be changed to a huge damage skill on a long CD (almagest?), for healer DPS. Or removed.

CS needs more than a 5% damage increase. 25%+?

A huge problem, I feel, is that DPS have like 3-4 skills that are necessary, then have choices for a "luxury" skill. Whereas healers have so many skills vying for only five spots. They don't have the problem of using a skill once, then never using it again an instance. Or letting the party suffer because they didn't choose a specific skill.