Every problem with the current iteration of healers.

I think it's fair to say that many of us here on the forums, myself included, are unhappy and upset over the current iteration of healers. I know there are several threads talking about healer issues already, but my goal is to put every single healer issue into one thread and not have them split onto separate threads.

A couple of things that I do ask though:
Please be specific, don't just say something along the lines of "healers are boring now and I don't like them", not saying I disagree with such a statement, but it doesn't tell me anything, tell me why you don't like healers right now, be as clear and detailed as you can. Tell me about specific classes as well, tell me why SCH is boring, why AST sucks, and, especially, WHMs I want to hear specifics as to WHY WHM isn't as good as people want to think it is. I also ask when you tell me a problem, give me a solution as well, tell me what can be done to fix it.

Second point: please do not use this thread as a means of debates with others, I believe there are plenty of threads where people on both sides have argued with each other. I'm asking you here to talk to me, and only to me. If someone responds to you, or you see they respond to someone else, just ignore it. I can think of one person in particular that will attempt to bring toxicity to this thread and try to turn it into something that it isnt. If that does happen, just ignore and move on, I don't want a snowball effect.

Last point: if you have any positives, I want to hear those as well. As much as I dont enjoy the current healers myself, I'd be remiss to say that they messed up everything, and I have positives to say myself. Tell me, and again only me, what some of these positives are, what draws you to your healing class? Again, do be specific, I want details.

I want every healers perspective, but as a scholar main myself, I'm most interested in what AST and especially WHM have to say, because I know what the issues with SCH are by heart, but I'm not as well versed in the other two.

Most of all what I find is that there’s a large disconnect with our kits as a whole. Very few things interact with each other aside from gating a resource, and the things that do interact have the same consequence (ie aetherflow healing giving more healing via the fey gauge, horoscope proccing healing from more healing).
As well as several underwhelming interactions (only union and blessing using gauge) and straight up un-interactions (Seraph can’t use blessing, union, or be dissipated, neutral Sect only affects GCDs)

We don’t really have an incentive to use our entire healing kit outside of getting more DPS spells out in a fight, which has been made boring by reducing the thought required.

Why I play healer (in general):

I want to be a fighter like everyone else, while making the group's health my responsibility. That's what I do in most games, I want to be part of the fight and at the same time take care of my teammates.
It's a balance between offense and support that I absolutely love to practice, because it feels rewarding to be a good support while actively partaking in a fight.


Why I don't want to play healer anymore in FFXIV:

1- Too much healing downtime, and too predictable damage. WAY too much. To the point where even in savages I'll spend 75% of my time just mindlessly attacking.

2- A ridiculously simple damage rotation, that doesn't change with my level. I end up pressing the same button over and over, from level 1 to 80.

3- Disappointing levelups. Every content plays the same except the higher it is, the more healing OGCDs I have, the less GCD healing I need to do, the more time I spend pressing the same button.

4- Being told to deal with it by everyone. Players telling us our healing kit is fine even though we want more dps skills. Devs pushing changes on us without asking, and then blatantly ignoring us when we try to offer feedback.

5- As YusiKha above mentioned, absolutely no synergies between our skills, and little originality. We could use them all in a random order and get the same results everytime, and everything is a variant of ST heal or AOE heal, with perhaps added regen or shields.

All healers are lacking in this current expansion. they wanted us to heal more but they didn't get the entirety of each healers kit just right for this type of change. YES the can all heal just fine. scholar being an odd ball needing a potency change on a couple things but its still relatively easy.

White mage Personally speaking they've got it all besides party buffs. the damage is great. the Healing is great. what they do need however and which i feel like the only real problems are. they need more Party support. and the lilies need to be taken off GCD, and there needs to be other ways to expend their extra lilies if they want to use their blood lily faster and or want to use one before the gauge resets.

Simply put lets get another party based buff may it be single or AOE and the cost of a lily. why type of buff im not entirely sure its hard to provide a buff with how the current balance of the healers are and how the Damage dealers get more damage. i don't want to offset the balance even further here. the only thing that keeps coming to mind is some sort of single target Player buff that gives a small damage reduction buff. that or maybe just get a DoT out of it. nothing crazy maybe like a 15-20 second one.

God i don't know where to start on these other two without someone flipping a tit or two.

Astro's Healing is actually pretty good. it feels great. it feels rewarding almost. what they currently lack is MP regen for their shield stance which takes a lot out of them and even if they want to contribute with Damage dealing. their current reworks of cards does not need a reversal. We are intended to heal more thus less damage from us healers as a whole handing out a card thats always a Damage buff is need not just a want. However in saying this. the card system feels a bit clunky. and the redraw mechanic and trying to optimize your divination is NOT fun. its a chore. they are way to occupied with their cards half the time trying to get the most out of them.

so what needs to be done? simple. some gentleman had a great idea over in the Astrologian thread in terms of a Solar, Lunar and Celestial draw method having more control over the cards you can draw. while they share recast timers. this guy has the right idea. because you can still get all 3 Symbols going for AOE buffs, this might be the possible best way to get the old card buffs back. but they said they wont bring them back.. so.. lets try and slam an idea on the table. i think the new draw idea from ty_taurus (#559 post over in http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...cussion/page56 good suggestion imo) should be used. 1 its still more control then we currently have. 2 we need different playing methods. Spire and Ewer should give mana back flat out, Balance and Spear should give a critical buff, Bole and arrow should be healing based (kinda the same from his post but just less added effects) . 1 this gives control to us if we need an extra spot heal at a moments notice or if we need mana back BAD, then the crit buff is an added bonus. we still get our symbols set for divination while we play our cards differently for that damage buff. i wish i could come up with better names rather then call it Defensive play and Offensive play. Defensive play giving all of the effects i mentioned earlier while Offensive play gives Astrologians other options for instant/Free cast Attacks. just like the old Lord card did. Spire and Ewer Should be Celestial strike for single target, Balance and spear Solar burn for a Dot, Bole and Arrow Lunar burst for AOE.

IMO, i think that would fix things if not definitely what ty_taurus said in his post.

As for Scholar.. For being the weaker healer for healing and more shield based. they are lacking the healing potency in many areas, as well as the dps front being being a lil clunky and risky and easily punishable toward their healing. the fairies are pointless the potency heal of embrace is too low, yes its a perm Regen bascially. but their AOE regen does not compare to WHM or AST and their single target regen.

their dps kit took a hit. which im not too mad about. but they also took away the fairy kit which we have less to do then they nerfed the hell out of the fairy heal trying to make us heal with already weaker healing kit...

Weaker heals, Less support abilites, less Dps, all around undertuned.

give them miasma 2 back, make it cost a aether flow stack, cooldown 30 seconds. make it a burst on hit then let it leave a dot behind AOE. boom more damage another dot all in one. also make it ranged casted not close.

Fairies...

keep 1 get rid of the other for /glamour summon. or turn Selene into a DD fairy that attacks when you do like the Trance summons from smn. nothing over tuned just simple dot based damage to go with your broils or ED's ruin 2's let her use the same fairy skills having the same effects.

Embrace needs a potency buff to keep up with the current content. 3k is not enough 5k is plenty. so 150 to 200/250?

We need the AOE esuna back and AOE quicken, if possible the silence (im not fussed about that one though..) make the cooldowns longer. have them cost fairy gauge. let us spend the gauge on some thing else rather than aetherpact and blessing.


physic just needs a 50 potency buff and it'll be fine.

i feel like getting just those small changes will make scholar feel better that fairy potency increase and physic alone is enough to keep the tank up a bit longer and getting the extra fairy skills back will let us expend out gauge more during boss fights. the DD selene idea is very unlikely but it adds a full time DoT to our kit with still being able to use the fairy skills letting us adjust to more damage if need be and it dosen't risk us not being able to do our jobs.


however a lot of this is my opinion.. and i think others can make a better worded/shorter posts with either the same if not much better idea's. personally i feel like this is whats wrong with them and what i think can help by not going too far back and not going too far out of SE's vision of healers right now.

Lodi summed it up pretty well.

Too much scripted damage output, which leads to:
Not enough to heal. And a
Simple damage rotation which doesn't make up for it.

Scholar

I never really cared that much about pets, and while I like shield healing it wasn't what drew me to the class. What really made me like scholar was a) having a tool for every situation and b) the interplay between aetherflow, damage, and heals.

The latter has been largely, though not entirely, restored via the return of energy drain, so I'm mostly okay there. Though I would like out-of-combat aetherflow back. I feel like that change was made to benefit raids at the expense of dungeons.

As for having a tool for every situation...okay, here's the thing. I love how FFXIV gives me powerful heals so I can make a difference in a fight, where other games give me little piddly heals that make me play catch-up the whole time. But when you have overpowered heals, you also have downtime that gets filled with DPS, and you need some interesting damage skills if you're not going to become intolerably bored.

Right now, I think SCH now has too many heals and not enough damage spells. I have sacred soil, an overpowered regen bubble that seems like it belongs on white mage, and fey blessing, yet another oGCD AoE heal. Meanwhile, I spend too much of the fight using my three DPS skills, none of which is particularly interesting.

What I want is bane back. Bane was the perfect scholar spell, because it let you deal with a particular situation ("How do I get all these DoTs out without the tank dying?") using a highly specific ability.

If I could have my second DoT back in addition to bane, I would even be happy to lose art of war. Would it weaken scholar DPS? Quite possibly. But it would weaken it in an interesting way. Where WHM and AST spam nukes for their AoE, SCH would put out DoTs and let them tick. It would give strategy and reliability at the expense of raw power, which is kind of a scholar thing.

So I guess I'm happier with scholar at the moment than a lot of scholar mains. I just want bane, my extra DoT, and out-of-combat aetherflow.

Also, I kind of hate the new broil 3 and biolysis animations, which look like they came out of an Allagan facility. I want my Nymian and biological themes back.

White Mage

I almost don't want to comment on white mage, because I feel like I haven't played it enough, and I don't want to give suggestions that mess things up for the people who do play it. But there's been concern about white mage being left out of these discussions, so I'll just say two things.

First, I think a lot of healer balance issues have been caused by SE's unsuccessful attempts to balance personal DPS against rDPS, which appears to be impossible. Either white mage needs a group damage buff, or scholar and astrologian need to lose theirs. I couldn't care less which it is; I just think this issue is screwing things up and needs to be dealt with once and for all.

Second, I don't know what these "dia" and "glare" things are. Where are my rocks? I want to throw rocks. And also wind. The conjurer theme appeals to me more than the holy one.

Astrologian

My problem with astrologian in Shadowbringers is that it feels like a DPS class.

For me, healing in MMORPGs is about problem-solving, resource-management, and situational decision-making. You choose the right spells for the right situation, and there are so many considerations that you have to do it with fuzzy---i.e., intuitive---thinking.

For DPS classes, the job is simpler ("kill this thing"), so complexity is added via interaction between spells ("rotation"). This is more predictable and less situational, so it requires deductive rather than intuitive thinking.

The new card system feels like a DPS mechanic. Where Stormblood had card abilities, Shadowbringers has a card rotation. The object is no longer to choose the right card for the right situation, but to quickly execute abilities in the proper sequence. And that just isn't why I play healer.

Also, nocturnal astrologian feels weak to me. Its overpowered shields are a band-aid, trying unsuccessfully to hide the fact that the class lacks the tools scholar has (high mana regen, some direct heals) to compensate for the weaknesses of a shield healer.

I really like the idea of this thread, since it's trying to compound all of the issues into one place. I main a Noct AST and play it in savage, so I'm going to give my perspective from that point of view. I've posted some of these thoughts on other threads, but I'll restate them for this thread.

Currently, the major sticking point in AST is the current iteration of the card system. To be honest, I don't necessarily hate the new system, but I feel like the old system was more developed. For example, Sleeve Draw in the current system produces three cards in a queue which require the use of the "Play" oGCDs to resolve. Unfortunately, outside of lightspeed, this means that you need to squeeze these oGCDs in between your heals and spells one at a time. This becomes a problem when you need to use a healing oGCD, because you have to make the decision to either use the queued up card from Sleeve Draw or use the oGCD heal. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but the goal is to fish for the correct seals, so this creates a dynamic where you are using more oGCDs to try to align seals correctly or to convert the card into a minor arcana. It's extremely difficult to resolve sleeve draw without clipping a GCD, which makes the ability feel extremely clunky to use.

As to how I would correct it: I realize that some people may disagree with this opinion, but I think sleeve draw should apply a missing seal that you currently don't have. Then the cards produced by the ability should all be converted into minor arcana before they are drawn. This results in Sleeve Draw only taking 4 oGCDs to resolve with the application of a missing seal, which would make resolving these oGCDs completely reasonable in a 30-second window before draw comes off CD. The missing seal would help during openers in raids where you pre-draw before a pull, play the card, draw and play another card, then use Sleev Drawe. The change to Sleeve Draw would result in the missing seal being applied, which would ensure that divination going out for it's full value. I think this reasonable considering the ability is on a 180 second CD.

The second issue I have with the card system lies in playing each card individually; this requires a lot of clicking and can be taxing in raid situation. The move to a single card system has caused me to move my Play ability to 4 different macros, which plays cards to people in my 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th spots in my party list. I think it's a bit ridiculous that so many macros are needed to play cards to each individual person without manually targeting them. That being said, with the current iteration of the card system, I have no idea how to fix this without restructuring the entire card system.

The third issue I have is divination's short radius, for an ability that is on a 2 minute CD timer and results in a good chunk of our rDPS 15y is way too short for the ability. I think extending the radius to 30y would be more than enough to alleviate my concerns.

My fourth issue lies with Nocturnal ATS use of Aspected Benefic under the duration of Neutral Sect. Currently, Neutral Sect provides shields and regeneration despite what stance you are in. However, Aspected Benefic remains at 1000 MP for Nocturnal AST and 500 MP for Diurnal AST, meaning despite both stances having access to heals and shields, Nocturnal still pays more for the same benefit. The resolution to this would be to reduce the MP of Aspected Benefic to 500MP for Nocturnal AST under the duration of Neutral Sect.

My final issue is with MP generation. Currently, WHMs and SCHs have access to MP regeneration outside of Lucid Dreaming in the forms of Assize and Aetherflow/Energy Drain respectively. With the exception of Energy Drain, these abilities are frequently used as soon as they come off CD. AST has no form of MP regeneration outside of Lucid Dream, unfortunately, this means MP issues have happened to me a few times. This can be resolved by simply allowing Celestial Opposition or Draw to restore MP in a way that makes it equal to amount restored by WHMs


Moving on to the things I like

I've really enjoyed healing, it feels really good to setup Earthly Star and Horoscope to get value out of them later. AST is all about knowing when and where to setup up your ability, which results in very rewarding healing gameplay. Celestial Intersection gives us a nice little healing bump that is a free healing ability. Synastry is getting a lot of use in this
tier with the double tank busters, which makes it pretty valuable.

Outside of the issues above, I really enjoy playing the class, you always have the feeling that you are doing something, even though the cards are extremely weak now.

AST healing feels *okay*, but the cards/card system doesn't feel rewarding enough. Overall, AST requires much higher APM than SCH/WHM for too similar a result, IMO. Also, MP management feels rather lacking for AST.

WHM feels much more polished and complete than it did before. WHM rewards efficient planning of lily usage with higher personal DPS while lowering MP usage. Still no rDPS utility, however, I'm alright with that position and don't expect it to change given the history of WHM and direction they took it with the new lily system.

I haven't played SCH enough to warrant having an opinion at this point.

Overall, though, healers seem "balanced" but not in a way that leaves any of them feeling unique. They're all way too similar at this point in terms of rotation/CDs. Also, as the number of oGCD healing options steadily increases, the amount of GCD healing required steadily declines; this leads to an increased amount of downtime that's now filled with an all-too-simple spam. While I don't see this changing at all in 5.0, I really hope that 6.0 will see a new resurgence in healer gameplay that results in more engaging class mechanics.

Healing potency in general is incredibly over-inflated, IMO. We pull wall-to-wall groups in dungeons and still barely have to heal outside of oGCDs. SE could slash healing potencies by half across the board and we'd still have plenty of healing downtime. Honestly, until healing actually obtains some modicum of difficulty, anything short of a complete restructure of the way healer class mechanics works wouldn't result in much changing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kartana

Lodi summed it up pretty well.

Too much scripted damage output, which leads to:
Not enough to heal. And a
Simple damage rotation which doesn't make up for it.

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Which unless they change the 2.5 gcd it will be hard to implement consecutive spike aoe damage. I was thinking something along the lines of more mechanic that deals consistent aoe damage to the raid, ones that will oom healer unless they use all their skills properly. I do believe healers heal skills are generally decently designed, so if they refuse to improve dps rotation because they don't want healer to do 2 roles at once, then at least make healong harder/more interesting

Healing as a white mage is too easy. The only reason I can find to use my lilies is get the blood lily filled and use afflatus misery. There's no other reason. I can completely ignore my lilies, use mp based heals exclusively, follow up with lucid dreaming, and never run short. Also, Holy feels obnoxious to spam but it's so useful. Gotta be obnoxious to be useful in large pulls.

AST needs another mp regeneration tool, if it has to res, it's in a pickle compared to the other two healers who have 3 tools to regen mana vs AST who only has 2.

There's too much time being spent in the party list giving out cards compared to how much they give to people. Also, if you mistime it you lose uptime and it feels meh, it's a very short window considering how many times a fight you have to do it. I think this is due to AST having short cast times, which are great, but with how many cards we give out now compared to one aoe card every now and then feels a bit clunky. I'd rather get fewer cards to give out that are more powerful instead of how many cards we keep throwing around constantly.

With the buff to "wrong card" distribution, it feels less worth it to hand in the correct card, so my point above is not as bad because you can just keep throwing your cards to the same 1/2 people but it shouldn't be like that. It should feel rewarding to give the right card to the right person. There's not much difference right now.

I do like the new celestial opposition, having access to instant aoe regen/shield is very cool and much needed.
Same goes for celestial intersection, very cool to have access to the opposite sect tool on ogcd.
i also really like the charge on essential dignity, very useful to have.

I don't understand why Neutral sect doesn't affect celestial opposition nor intersection. They're both aspected abilities and should receive the buff. WHM is able to buff all it's ogcd, why not ast? it's unfair in a ast/sch combo vs whm/sch. Sch can only do shields so they don't really have this issue because regardless of who they're paired with they will shield, but a diurnal ast cannot bring this buff to the party.

Which brings me to my next point, the collective unconscious bubble is too weak. If we're immobile, it doesn't regen/shield enough to last through a boss burst aoe phase, which makes it pointless to use in that way. So we all use it to flash the regen 15s, and 5sec shield. Why does the shield only last 5sec and not 15 like the regen? At least 10sec? Or, give it more potency while immobile. Right now there's no reason to stay immobile so it's kinda weird in my opinion.
What would be cool (in my opinion) would be to add a card/divination buff while people are in the bubble while ast is immobile to make up for the lost dps from being immobile. Or just make the shields stronger like they are for every other npc that uses the shield in the msq..........

(continued)

Horoscope feels too short a window to activate and too long a window to execute in total, here's why I think so:
If you're going to use a gcd aoe heal, you might as well use neutral sect right? so you end up having to do something like this:
horoscope > malefic > neutral sect > aspected helios > horoscope.

Most likely, you either miss a card throw opportunity or cut it very short on the initial horoscope window because you only have about 3sec left before the aspected aoe so within all that combo you can't throw out any cards at all. I seriously feel like the time window of this combo "rotation" should have a longer timer to allow at least one card to be given to a party member.

What else... The new tome weapon looks very cool. I hope we see more card colouring options in the future.

Collective Unconscious needs buffs.

It just does. The amount of healing and damage reduction for being unable to move or cast do not pan out. Outside of big party hits, it should never be used because it isn't worth the time. Something better most likely could have been used instead.

Say it with me: It's hot garbage.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Billythepancake

I think it's fair to say that many of us here on the forums, myself included, are unhappy and upset over the current iteration of healers. I know there are several threads talking about healer issues already, but my goal is to put every single healer issue into one thread and not have them split onto separate threads.

A couple of things that I do ask though:
Please be specific, don't just say something along the lines of "healers are boring now and I don't like them", not saying I disagree with such a statement, but it doesn't tell me anything, tell me why you don't like healers

Second point: please do not use this thread as a means of debates with others, I believe there are plenty of threads where people on both sides have argued with each other. I'm asking you here to talk to me, and only to me.

Last point: if you have any positives, I want to hear those as well. As much as I dont enjoy the current healers myself, I'd be remiss to say that they messed up everything, and I have positives to say myself. Tell me, and again only me, what some of these positives are, what draws you to your healing class? Again, do be specific, I want details.

I want every healers perspective, but as a scholar main myself, I'm most interested in what AST and especially WHM have to say, because I know what the issues with SCH are by heart, but I'm not as well versed in the other two.

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If you want the game developers to pay attention, for the love of the Twelve just stop making new threads about it. It is seriously getting beyond entertaining - oh look a new healer complaint thread meme - and is accomplishing nothing but diluting your argument and pissing people off who might previously have sympathised a little.

I was prepared to be unhappy with my healers after reading all the gloomy threads here pre-Shadowbringers. But I actually have found them to be fine. My only complaint about SCH was the loss of Energy Drain, meaning that I was wasting aetherflow stacks by using OCD heals I didn't need; now I have Energy Drain back I'm happy. I'm also enjoying WHM; Afflatus Solace is lovely, I feel that I have enough oshit buttons to really try and push my DPS. All the people in my FC and my crossworld linkshell are similar engaged by the current healer interactions. Two friends who main AST are very happy they're not constantly fishing for balance cards and enjoying themselves.

I know you will dismiss this as anecdotal; I would respectfully disagree and say that most people in game do not have an issue with healers. Of course that isn't what you want to hear, and you are of course welcome to disregard it. But reading the numerous posts/threads you are currently making I can't help but feel that the only thing you'd be happy with is an echo chamber where all you hear is people murmuring in support of you.

I do not normally post often on the forums although I've been here since 1.x and mained SCH since ARR. But I am utterly tired of new threads every day on this subject. Please just stop, post everything in one thread, and then maybe the Devs might read it.

Personally I would much rather SE invested their time/money in sorting out housing for example however

Astrologian:

• Collective Unconsiousness needs a buff to be on par with sacred soil it is far too weak in potency, has way too long a cd and the fact it roots you in place while being a smaller size is just way too glaring with how bad it is.
• Nocturnal stance needs the 1k aspected benefic cost removed or it needs to bring more than that shield
• Neutral sect favors Diurnal far more, this shouldn't be a case if they want both sects worthwhile right now(despite the noct ast solo E4S) diurnal is just too much better than nocturnal with better mp to heal ratio
• Horoscope could use the automatically go off once timer runs out once procced clause.
• I like the old card system better but working with the new system, Divination still needs potency buff maybe up to 8% instead of 6% and i would prefer the major arcana to give the 4/8% increase and the minor give the 3/6% this would also help a bit with Sleeve Draw/Divination window as would reduce the amount of ogcds there.
• Give ast a secondary mp refresh could allow lightspeed to give 750 mp back or something

That is what i currently feel needs addressing that the devs could do something about without taking a second hammer to it. What i like about current AST is it kept some aspects of planning with Earthly star and Horoscope, the aesthetic of the job is still there just wish lore wasn't a mess too.

Scholar:

• Feel it needs more of it's decision making tools back like with sacred soil/shadowflare, players decide on situation what is best heals or damage
• Give seraph a dps ability even if shares a cd with consolidation, this gives seraph more oomph and sets it apart from the more basic Eos/Selene
• Fix the ghosting issues with regards to the fairies if i tell them to do it they should do it immediately no hesitation or embracing(a smn thing too)

Not as much for SCH but the 1st point can cover a lot more ground this was what interested me most about sch they're very kit was telling them do you heal or dps at this moment and i loved that. The best thing about sch right now its healing kit is great interacts well with itself with recitation to force crits/burst aoe heal, deployment for spread that good adlo but it's biggest flaw was apparant the moment we saw the media builds it is a far cry from as entertaining as its past iterations.

White Mage:

• Give it a utility ability already tie it to the lily system could even make it cost 2 lillies but allow it to briefly buff 1 party member for 15s
• Give it a non heal lily expender, the above is an example with giving a buff out but could be a weak attack just something in case there is no healing needed (like Enrage casts etc)
• Give fluid aura its damage back, why this doesn't have it while being continuingly gutted over the years is just baffling

Whm is alright right now certainly the best healer but it still feels like the same old whm that i have known and that is it is the safe healer the easiest one to pick up but for me also the easiest to put down again which is sad but that is my personal bias due to being sch for ARR and ast for HW-SB.

Conclusion:
All 3 healers need work Whm is the best but that was not due to bringing it up but by bringing ast and sch down from their previous incarnations. The fact they decided to give all 3 healers the ast dps rotation while making the systems for each job less engaging, even lilies are technically simpler than SB but SB lilies were fundamentally flawed from the beginning is just :( , balance is certainly closer atm but the fun factor is currently drunk somewhere and i'd like it to come home again soon.

I know my problems with WHM are just as much historical as they are mechanical I haven't played the other two anywhere near the amount of time I've invested in WHM, so I'll stay away from commenting on their issues.

1) Every expansion the changes to WHM have been hacking and chopping away at the kit. Players of the other two healers definitely can relate, but personally it's been extra baffling with WHM. The claims that "we need to cut back every expansion because hotbars are full". Uhhhh, WHM has one of the smallest kits in the entire game, noticeably fewer abilities than the other two. Those hotbars aren't anywhere close to full. Plus, the skills they've cut/moved into role actions over the years: Divine Seal. Shroud. Repose. Protect. Stoneskin. Cleric Stance. They've had various reasons for each, but notice a pattern there? They're largely abilities that allow WHM to do things other than Cure and Stone spam. They're kit depth, even if that depth is minor. I've advocated making WHM deeper for years, instead things other than spam heals and spam damage get the axe.


2) Big numbers are currently the only thing WHM has going for it. People have said it a lot the last month because it's true. Lilies are Crap Aetherflow. They come in more slowly, you can spend them on fewer, less varied abilities, and their payoff is, while cool, mostly a payback for the time you spent using the system rather than a solid gain at the end. Look behind the bigger damage numbers and WHM is currently a crappy SCH with a passive shallower version of Aetherflow, no fairy, none of the AOE shielding, no enemy debuffs other than Holy's stun, no haste or damage or crit or mana cost or movement speed or drop rate or levitation or so much as a flipping sound volume increase buff for anyone. Again, not a dig at Scholar, but an illustration of just how utterly barebones WHM's kit is. A raid buff would be a start, there is just so much functionality outside ME CURE and ME DAMAGE that WHM could do, so many directions to take, and the fact that the job design team has taken this already inflexible healbot of a class and hasn't thought of anything for it to do outside of "direct healing and damage" for six years is incredible. Even more incredibly, they looked at it and thought "Hmm, you know what the problem here is? Their damage rotation is more than one button, and therefore too complicated. GROG SMASH".

Quote:

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Please just stop, post everything in one thread, and then maybe the Devs might read it.

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Like we did last expansion with that giant consolidated feedback thread on how stupid lilies were and nothing was done about them anyway?

So I know I said to try to keep replies out, and I'm being a bit of a hypocrite, but I'm just using this to clarify more than anything. The point of this thread is not to be an echo chamber nor is it really meant to get the devs attention. I would love If it somehow did, but I know its unrealistic. The point of the thread was to do exactly what you said "put it all on one thread" and for me, not the devs, me, to better understand the issues with healers, because *I* want to know all of their issues. I also invited positive thinking, and for those that do enjoy the classes to tell me why as well, so if I wanted nothing but to spout healers are bad, I'm doing a piss poor job at it, because I do think there are positives here, and I want to hear those as well. I had also hoped to do exactly as you had mentioned "keep it all to 1 thread" because I know there's a 57 page AST thread, but i cant garner a lot from that because that is a lot of reading to do, and a lot of it is debating, which is why I specifically asked for not that, just opinions directed towards me.

Anyhows thanks for all the replies so far everyone. I do appreciate it, and I would appreciate even more.

More and more I'm starting to suspect the ridiculously potencies of oGCD abilities is the big issue with healers in their current iteration.

When in between casts we top off everyone, the moment we can cast there's little else to cast BUT damage spells. Which leads to the issue that generally we have 3 buttons to our whole class... Single target, dot, aoe.

I would absolutely abhor to see them removed, as they do make healing entertaining, but with their sheer power, abundance and availability right now its grown into a massive issue.

all healers having the same damage spells when we have so much downtime is an issue its incredibly boring and makes me not care what healer i play since 90% of the time ill be playing the same class and spamming broil/glare/malefic

WHM
The thing is, healer DPS is boring, but this is especially true for WHM. Unlike SCH with Energy Drain and managing fairy or AST and the card system, WHM has nothing extra to them. It's so unbearably simple.
When they take this awful dps rotation with nothing extra and force all our utility into it... despite being very strong, it's just awful to play and the glare spam really gets to you after a while.

If WHM is going to focus on damage over utility, they should at least work towards making it interesting to use.

I'll talk about SCH as it was my main.
Positives: Seraph looks cool, more mitigation is the direction I'd like to see of SCH, so it is good they got more in the way of shields. The storylines are always good.
Negatives: Too much downtime in general, I'd probably favour weakening some heals in favour of mitigation. And there's little to do in the down time. Ergo I get bored playing it. Healing is too easy, DPS too monotonous. I don't have to put much thought into what I'm doing.

Suggestions for improvement:
Rely more on mitigation. weaker pure heals versus AST or WHM, but good mitigation tools make up for it. Kind of like an evolution of 2.0 SCH, but more suited to today's mode of play. I figure SE may have their reasons for removing our DPS toolkit and I'm not sore in the sense I wanna go big deeps! Because that's still a thing people can do, it's just less interesting to. I am willing to compromise and say maybe if we want to move away from a deeps focus, I'd like to see healer roles, in general, gravitate to more of a support mentality. AST is already on its way there. Specifically for SCH, I think replacing their DPS toolkit with debuffs would work for the job and could include mitigation as a part of it. The 2.0 DPS rotation included debuffs, I'd be okay if they were brought back but without being a part of a DPS rotation.

I'd also like to see even experienced healers to be more engaged with healing outside of EX and Savage content, because we have to level, we do roulettes and so on. One proposal I have is to have a trait learned for when you hit current content, for example, in ShB it could be learned at level 71. When healers get balance for new content it seems that lower content has felt less engaging. Let's say hypothetically we could do a 20% flat nerf to heals and regain that potency at level 71. Healing would need to be more engaged at lower levels. I'm not saying this would be the "ideal" solution, but I think one way it could be approached without necessarily rethinking how they've designed the job for new content. I am sure better ideas could be made.


In talking about making healing more challenging, there is a trap here to simply make stuff hit harder without as much thought behind the process.
The great thing I feel about the dev team is that they increase difficulty in content through mechanics and add penalties for failure greater. An example of what I felt to be good healer mechanic design was the Titan Ex fight, a SCH/WHM set up was great, because the SCH would focus the tankbusters, and mitigate the flurry of damage coming in from Titan whilst the WHM could keep everybody's health topped up. And at times the tank's health would be lower before Mountain Buster hits, so a SCH and WHM could work together. I think how healsets respect mechanics or how mechanics respect healsets can help them feel engaging.

Well, I think the main issue is that they won’t give healers anything to do during downtime other than DPS, which, is never really going to be ‘fun’ because healers can’t have full DPS rotations because of balance. And with healing oGCDs being ridiculously overpowered, you have basically no uptime required on gcd healing spells. Which means more downtime, and SE is just like ‘lol just DPS harder’.

I love healing, but it feels like chasing dragons. You get that one party where everyone is like asleep or something. You’re having to cast Raises, keep the party healed, use both GCD and oGCDs and be strategic with positioning, how you use your spells, what you’re weaving and what you’re weaving with, maximising uptime on DoTs, look for opportunities to use filler attack spells. But then you try the fight again and everyone has better gear this time. They don’t die anymore, and their shiney new gear makes their HP and defense much higher, so they can survive attacks with less healing/mitigation that before. You’re no longer using any GCDs on healing, and it becomes gradually replaced by DPS spells.

If you ask me, but I don’t think there’s any point in the healing role existing if they just make us DPS in a green skin, which isn’t far off what we are now, just with extremely simplistic rotations. I’d much rather see healers get support options to use during downtime. Best provisional idea i have as an example would be adding the spells into the role skills like ‘Bravery’, ‘Haste’, ‘Protect (PvP version)’. Give them standard gcd cast time, 400 MP cost and like 30 second duration. And I’m not saying that having a ‘DPS healer’ job would be wrong somehow, because they should cater to every playstyle, but right now there’s only one that’s acceptable because of the game’s design, and it’s the DPS healer playstyle. I don’t think that kind of playstyle should be a baseline for healers; they should have the healing kits as the baseline then split off into DPS / support / mitigation / etc, rather than having the one kind for all of them.

I guess what I mean is, the DPS kits for healers are just basic direct damage and damage over time, and I think it’d make healers much more fun if there was some sort of interaction with the healing kits. I mean, if they want the DPS healer playstyle as the baseline surely we should have more interesting attack spells that have some interaction with our healing kits, like if Malefic IV inflicted Slow or Glare inflicted Blind (not very worthwhile status effects but just examples to try and make what I mean make sense lol)

Basically my issue is that we have nothing to do during the huge amounts of healer downtime we get but SE just tries to cover it up by slapping DPS spells on healers, reducing and then homogenising the spells instead of making the healing mechanics fun and engaging or allowing healers to contribute in a meaningful way outside of DPS spam. Or maybe a better way to say it would be, my issue with healers is that the whole DPS thing is just a cover up developers are using for how easy and weirdly uninvolved healing. And it’s compounded by the fact that if you’d prefer a different healer playstyle, you don’t have any real options without becoming a huge detriment to your party

Tl;dr: my issue with healers is that they aren’t giving us enough interesting abilities beyond ‘small heal, big heal, filler attack, DoT, etc’

I played all 3 healers and I can post healer main problems in ff 14:

- dungeons is way too easy even for casuals rly, if you want easy dungeons for story ok, but give us harder version of dungeons with 2x exp, 2x loot etc, or just M+ from wow ...
- healers are not healers actually they are hybrids dps/healer, how to solove this ? give us old cleric stance that can't be change in combat like astro stances but in exchange give us some cool buffs/debbufs/ccs

- in exchange of new cleric stance give us combo system same as dps have: for example you can't cast cure II 1st, for casting cure II you need cast cure I to proc cure II etc is just examples don't need to look exacly same ...

another mechanic would be combo cure I > cure II or cure I would be buffed like 50% mana cut or give 5-10% power attack to healed targed or armor or any buff (this is only example how healing combo would work)
combo would be cure I > cure 1 with buff > cure I with buff for healer like 10% healing power ETC

aoe combos would be medica > medica 2 with small party buff > medica again big party buff 80% mana cut etc (you could combo medica with medica II too etc,) or regen from whm 1st regen is normal one, 2nd regen heal faster more ticks , another regen would give some buff like barrier some kind etc is just random ideas not need to do same ...

we could use same system for buff combo too, there is shitload of possibilites

I would see that system on harder dungeon content similar to m+ from wow ...

another thing, don't make all 3 healers the same balance them but ... make 3 healers with diffrent skill cap: whm for begginers with small skill cap , sch for mid skill cap players , astro for veterans with big skill cap make more advanted healing combo for example and for whm make simple one ... but with same power

in this scenerio we would have healer for begginers and for veterans who would need more challenge and more fun and SE would be happy that could get new players and some old veterans would be happy too with harder class ...

before any of you tell hohoho but you don't do savage is harder version of trials ... yeah I don't do but I would like to make some m+ in ff 14 version, in wow I made +15-20 m+ in legion and it was rly fun as prot/holy paladin ...
and before you tell why we need debuffs or ccs they don't work for bosses !! - sure they won't but they would be rly fun in m+ environment for bigger pulls that would help party alive on some rly high levels !

I don't wanna talk on balance overall in this thread rly and im totally against on so big dps numbers on ANY heal

I would love some GCD spells like that but I can see immediately why they are hard to implement. Either the buff will be a waste of a GCD, and no one will use it (Break, wasn't it?), or the buff will be strong enough to justify its use, and then it becomes part of the rotation (with the MNK complaining about either getting the haste or not getting bravery). It becomes necessary instead of bonus. I think maintaining 4 GCD buffs on different players, refreshed every thirty seconds, sounds like a nightmare.

So that leaves us, again and always, with the Green DPS icon. So long as there are enrage timers, there will be healers trying to beat it. So long as fights progressively get harder/mechanic intense the longer they go on, there will be healers trying to prevent mechanics with optimized nuking. This game is designed so that spamming Broil will almost always be in mine and my groups' best interest.

Since I can't imagine the game being redesigned (again) from the ground up, the only solutions I can think of to deal with the fights we have is more complex DPS for healers. I understand that a lot of healers want to heal more than they do, I am disappointed too at how little healing is required (despite the million different ways to heal that we have been given, talk about false expectation).

I'm not calling for a full rotation, by any means. Just one mechanic. Something to watch for. A reason to cast Ruin II and Fluid Aura. Like, casting Broil has a chance to proc a special Ruin II (which would crazy help with weaving). Or casting Glare gives a stackable buff (up to 3, say) that can be consumed with a special Fluid Aura. Something to work toward that would be easy enough to manage when things are going well but also set aside when things don't--if those stacks and procs had a long enough duration that they would be available after a burst of healing. Healers who don't want to deal damage aren't punished by these additions, and healers who want to optimize have something to build/fish in the thirty seconds between fight mechanics.

There's too much healing downtime. And this is not a problem they can fix into design of the next Savage tier--that ignores the fundamental problem for the first 79 levels.

There's too much healing downtime. Nerfing our skills and heals to the point that spamming is required won't fix the problem, either, because that's too unfriendly to DF content. We already have people complaining about healers that "let" someone drop below 60%--I can imagine the storm of cries because the healer couldn't heal a player with 3 vuln stacks back up to full in two GCDs. We can't fix mistakes if we have to spam the tank just to keep up, and I believe that this paradigm (godlike healing power for maximum forgivability in leveling content) is here to stay.

With that in mind, give me something meaningful to do between bursts of divinity.

I play all three. Aside from job specific problems. Healers in general have a few common problems that is on-going. I will make them into categories.

DPS wise: Healers lost their already short and limited amounts of damage spell. WHM lost aero III and SCH lost dots and the ability to bane though AST is still the usual 1 damage spell + 1 dot. Some would say old ways were already boring, but right now everyone can say it's boring because it really is. I am especially salty about SCH's 1 dot gameplay.

Healing wise: Those new healing tools in 5.0 is something I would not call lame, but they are certainly too much as an not-really-necessary stuff since healing gameplay didn't change all that much. All of the healing tools we've had until Stormblood (before them getting nerf in 5.0!), I would say it's pretty sufficient. Many were expecting healers to heal more, but what we got is an artificial way of asking to heal more because there is overall nerf across the board in our existing skills, which to me, is pretty much uncalled for.

Finally, It's still DPS or Heal: This is the cage we are in right now. You can say AST's card gameplay added a Buff-Supporter type into the healer role's formula, but in 5.0 the buffing gameplay got gutted heavily. Many people including me, play/prefer AST because we can actually do something outside of dps and heal. Cards gameplay was my relieve from being bored with playing healer too much. I wanted a buff and debuff-supporter healer that can actually provide equal party contribution as WHM's pdps potential.

The only time I can truly say i enjoyed healing thoroughly in this game was in heavensward, where on scholar I had.

Aero
Bio 2
Bio
Misma
Shadowflare

Just for single target. I dont care how much more effort it was than other healers, it was just fun

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Originally Posted by kartana

Lodi summed it up pretty well.

Too much scripted damage output, which leads to:
Not enough to heal. And a
Simple damage rotation which doesn't make up for it.

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Pretty much this.

SE wants us to heal more but won't increase incoming damage enough to do it because the casual playerbase can't handle anything remotely difficult. See: Steps of Faith, Shinryu normal.

Astrologian card rework didn't achieve the goals the devs set out with. They should have tweaked the numerical values of the cards instead of reworking the entire thing if it was just going to obliterate the lore of the job and make every card a mini-balance. If balance was better than spear and arrow than they should have increased their values or decreased its. With TP gone spire could have easily been given something such as direct hit. The last two cards would be easy consumable choices for the double duration or AoE .

But most importantly redraw should have been designed in a way that didn't give you clearly a disadvantaged card. If you just consumed Ewer/Bole it is incredibly simple to program it so that you receive an offensive card on a redraw. Or just rename it and make it always return an offensive card.

Personally I think Divination needs to go. 15 seconds of 6% extra dps is an abysmal mechanic for what it requires to set up. It's a less than an 1% average total group damage increase.

Even if the devs do not undo the rework they must reprogram redraw to not give a card with the same seal we already have. It's trivially easy to do from a logical/programming standpoint and means we won't get times when are screwed over by the RNG. Then you could remove the charges associated with it as well. The very existence of three charges on redraw is a testament to it being a inherently flawed mechanic now.


As for healing in general really the only thing I can give input on is the dps changes. They wanted us to dps less and focus more on healing and to that end simplified our kit. But the problem is that how we dps doesn't determine how often we dps, our healing does. The stronger our heals compared to the current content, the more downtime we have. You could simplify each job to a single attack and we would still spam that one ability in our downtime.

If the devs want us to do something else other than dps during our downtime they need to give us something else to do. As it stands now all they achieved was making it less enjoyable via simplification. I miss Aero III, I miss Miasma, I miss Bane

Handing out cards ever 30s + 3x each 3m with Sleeve Draw while Redrawing and Minor Arcana them doesn't feel intuitive at any point, especially playing on a controller.

Add to that the fact that you have to manually detonate Horoscope otherwise you will get no value from it.

More than ever I feel those "useless" cards, either form getting the same seal over and over or getting the wrong type of card with a party composition that has no such DPS.



What I like, the visual team did an outstanding job as always with the class, Celestial Intersection, Horoscope and Neutral Sect are great additions to the job, not only thematically but gameplay wise are quite unique and miss them whenever I'm doing low level content.

Ast feels gutted, and the rework lazy. Stormblood was a good time for Ast, but balance needed adjustments. Same with Spire.

Scholar I play the least of, but there are things i hate. Some attacks are gone leaving 3 (not including energy drain). Then their faries were over simplified and are now the same....making having 2 usless.

White Mage is the better off of the 3. Lilly gauge is better now since it's over time. Heals feel good and strong. And...blood for the blood lilly.

Hi Billy. Really glad to be consolidating things like this. :)

As a general note on damage abilities: here I advocate for many more offensive abilities for healers. That doesn't mean I want them to do more damage. It means I want them to do damage in a more interesting manner. If any of my suggestions went into effect I'd want SE to modify the potencies of all relevant abilities to keep damage contribution stable.

SCH:

The fairy:

Back in 2.0, the SCH fairy both lowered the skill floor (on sic it would take care of some of your healing for you while you worked out how your own buttons worked) and raised the skill ceiling (being able to effectively micromanage embraces and use the cooldowns effectively took some skill, as well as keeping it alive while also keeping it in range of as much of the party as possible. Additionally, starting to use Selene instead of Eos felt like a graduation: you feel comfortable enough in your own healing that you're happy to give up some healing tools in exchange for more utility.

By contrast, the current fairy feels like it lowers the skill floor without providing anything engaging. Embrace can no longer be manually controlled, so it's always just a free heal. Because of the delays on casting for the other skills, they can't be reliably used to mitigate specific mechanics, so instead I find myself weaving them in alternately whenever I have room to weave something extra. This is better than nothing, but not particularly engaging.

Another side effect of the fairy being immortal and not on the party list is that it can be hard to keep track of her, especially when playing in synced content without the fairy gauge. I find that when I manually place her I often forget that she won't follow me and leave her behind. This is more of an annoyance than anything else, but it feels like insult to injury after the other changes.

My suggested fix:

I understand the argument that being able to use fairy skills completely independent of your regular gcd is overpowered, even if it's only for 2 skills. I would like to have the fairy back on its own gcd, but I'd settle for regaining manual control of embrace independent of the gcd. I want this independent of the gcd because if it wasn't then it wouldn't be worth using, and I don't think that this is OP since the fairy is always casting embrace anyway, so you're only gaining some control, not any additional healing. The fairy healing abilities also need to be actually instant. Let them interrupt embrace. It would be nice if an interrupted embrace simply finished early and gave a much smaller heal, but I could deal with it being wasted if it means my fairy commands happen on time.

Also, give Selene distinct abilities again. I don't mind whether they're her old ones or a new set, but I'd like to see something that can be used for utility and something that can be used offensively.

Finally, if they made it so that your fairy would automatically go back to following you if you went out of range to control her that would be a significant QoL upgrade.

Downtime:

As you get better at a fight, or more geared for it, you end up spending more and more time spamming the same 1 or two buttons. This is especially pronounced in old content, where it's possible to heal a dungeon with only 1-2 healing abilities used per minute.

The only solution I can see is to give SCH's more offensive abilities. I'd like some of these to be dps abilities, for use in solo content, but I'd also be happy with offensive debuffs, or buffs, or whatever, so long as whatever system is put in place is reasonably interesting and can fill an indefinite amount of downtime where there is no healing required. Back in 2.0, almost half of SCH's abilities could be used offensively. I'd like to get closer to that ratio. Perhaps not to 50/50 but at least to 1/3 of abilities being capable of being used offensively. (Abilities that can be used offensively include abilities like WHM's Presence of Mind, since this can be used to spam Glare's and do a lot of damage very quickly, not just abilities that are dedicated only to damage).

Increasing the amount of healing required, or reducing the power of our heals could also help here, but I think it's important for us to get more offensive skills either way because there will always be content which we have mastered/outgeared to the point that we have downtime. Downtime tools we have but don't need can be ignored. Downtime tools we need but don't have are a problem.

This factors into SCH at lower levels:

Considering how many SCH abilities have been gutted from lower levels, playing SCH at those lower levels feels excruciating. Upon equipping the SCH job stone, SCH loses Miasma, Energy Drain, Fester, Bane and a second, unique summon. In return it gains adlo. This means that at level 30, a SCH has only 1 DoT, 1 nuke, Physick, Adlo, Whispering Dawn, and Rez (along with role abilities repose (useless), esuna, swiftcast, and lucid dreaming.) SMN, by contrast, has Bio, Miasma, Ruin, Energy Drain, Fester, Bane, Physick, Egi Assault (which I will count for 3 abilities considering that it changes depending on summon and summoners can switch pets pretty much for free), rez, bane, and energy siphon (along with role abilities addle, swiftcast, and lucid dreaming). This simple comparison shows how threadbare early SCH is, and how bad it feels to equip the SCH job stone.

My suggested fix: In early dungeons, the healing tools we have are more than sufficient. The dungeons were designed with those healing tools in mind, and so any extra heals would just create more downtime. SCH needs more front-loaded offensive abilities. They don't have to be the same abilities as SMN, but give us a new ability for each ability that we lose upon equipping the job stone (adlo doesn't count because we get it instead of summon III AND energy siphon). I'd like this to include some sort of AoE, which Bane used to be for SCH.

The Fairy Gauge:

We got energy drain back because we needed an aetherflow dump, but this is just kind of moving the problem. If we don't need any aetherflow heals, we presumably don't need more fairy gauge heals. This is once again a problem of too many healing tools for not enough healing required.

My suggested solution: add offensive options to the fairy gauge. Maybe it's a buff. Maybe it's as simple as empowering whichever fairy is out, which could be used offensively if Selene is reworked to have offensive abilities (probably in the form of buffs/debuffs). However, I don't want fairy gauge to become just another aetherflow. There's no point in having two gauges if we don't use them differently. For this reason, I'd like one of the two to be more effective for offensive utility and the other to be more useful for healing and defence. This is once again leaning into getting closer to 50/50 offence/defence. That way if there is no healing required you can use both gauges offensively, and if you're struggling to keep your group alive you can use both defensively, but optimal play (in non-trivial content) will come from using both gauges for their preferred purpose as much as possible.

WHM:

I have not played WHM to cap, but I will comment on WHM at the levels I have played it at. Ofc, my comments about the low number of moves at low levels, the offensive to defensive ratio, and the general downtime problem also apply to WHM, although I chose to express them in terms of SCH as that is the kit I'm most familiar with.

WHM at low levels:

Feels clunky. A lot of the weaving tools WHM later gets like assize don't become available until later, leaving low level WHM with very little weaving to do.

Solution: Add more moves or allow some more moves to be learned at an earlier level. One thing I'd love for WHM is an instant dps ability (like perhaps fluid aura) to weave with their instant heals.

Lilies:

Might work great at cap, but in lower level content, before you get misery, there's not much benefit to using them over regular heals unless you're strapped for mana or forced to move. Having an instant damage ability to weave would help, but I also think WHM needs an offensive lily dump. Not necessarily direct damage, so as not to just mimic aetherflow, but perhaps a buff. This offensive lily option should nourish the blood lily less than a healing lily ability, so that misery remains the primary offensive use of lilies, but this would mean that lilies have some offensive capacity before learning misery, and after misery is learned it becomes a choice between a small dps gain now or a greater overall gain from misery.

AST:

As a disclaimer, the last time I played AST seriously was back in 3.0. I never played it in 4.0 not because I didn't like it but because I unsubscribed pretty much as soon as I saw what they did to cleric stance. I kept pressing F (my old cleric stance key) and setting off the buff when it wasn't optimal or having nothing happen because it was on cooldown and that plus the loss of miasma 2 (hadn't been given back yet) was enough to turn me away. When I came back my focus was on SCH, which was my main, and I didn't get around to WHM and AST until after the expansion released.

Also, those who have been reading my posts will probably have seen these ideas before.

Cards:

As has been mentioned earlier in this thread, the current AST cards feel more like a dps rotation than a healer rotation. There's a correct way to use them that involves pressing a certain set of buttons in a certain order without much concern for context (except perhaps lining divination up with a certain mechanic or stack of buffs). Healing feels good to me when it's responsive. This doesn't mean that you should be waiting for health bars to drop and then topping them up, but rather that the optimal thing to do in a given situation will depend on changing factors: usually the mistakes made by your group and how well geared each party member is. The AST I remember leaned into that style of healing because you had an additional situation to adjust to: the cards that you draw. As such, I would like the cards to have different effects and some rng involved in which cards you get.

Useless cards:

Spire was pretty much useless, and Ewer and Bole could be useless under certain circumstances. However, given the old royal road system, along with the minor arcana system, you could get some use out of pretty much any card. That said, those runs where you draw 5 spires and only 1 spear were pretty painful.

My suggested fix: Make Spire into something else. Direct hit would work, or a buff that transforms damage dealt into healing. Balance could also have done with a nerf so that it wasn't so much better than the other offensive options. I would also liked to have seen bag randomisation, as was suggested in another thread, since a promise of getting balance once and exactly once every 3 minutes would be a lot less frustrating than the possibility of not drawing it once. I would combine this with a shuffle button which comes with a 2 minute cooldown. This button would reset the bag randomisation, so if you only have spire and bole left (for example) and know that there's not much damage coming up you can reset your chances and hopefully get something you need. Having this as a 2 minute cooldown means that you still have to interact with approximately 2/3rds of your cards at least per cycle (only approximately because of the next section's suggestion).

I'd support this with a small extra job gauge which displays the 6 card symbols. The symbols for cards still in the bag (can be randomly drawn) would be lit up, and the symbols for used cards would be colourless. This way you could easily tell what you might have to work with, and when you want to shuffle.

I'm not sure how I'd have the bag randomisation interact with redraws. I'd probably have them go back into the bag, but only AFTER you play another card, so that you can't redraw a card you rejected. Redraw just wouldn't work if there were no other cards in the bag you hadn't used, but you should never come up against a circumstance where there are no more cards to redraw and shuffle is on cooldown.

As an aside, I realise that SE might not want to put Ewer back in the game as it was, since mana management is now an individual responsibility. As such, I think they could change Ewer so that it works differently depending on who it's played on. On oneself it's a mana regen. On others it's a HoT, which would also have the effect of letting the AST conserve some mana by not healing for a beat or two. When used in AoE, Ewer would still have the mana regen effect for the user and the HoT for everyone else in the radius.

Lack of reliability on defensive buffs:

This is something I can also see as a valid problem, and while I always managed it by putting aside a bole or ewer for later (if I thought I'd need one), that does lock you out of that part of your kit, and only works for one emergency.

My suggested fix: Force the Fates. I've mentioned this a few times before, but this would be a cooldown which could be used instead of play (using it would also put play on cooldown). Upon activating Force the Fates your basic moves would change to be the icons of the cards, much like the basic dancer moves change into steps, and you could choose which card to play. The card that you select would be removed from the current bag, so you wouldn't be able to randomly draw that card until all the other cards had been drawn (since last reset) or shuffle is used, but you would be able to choose a card that had been previously drawn since the last bag reset, so drawing a card randomly doesn't mean that you won't be able to access it when you need it. I'd be happy putting this on as short as a 1 minute cooldown, so that you could choose every other card you draw. This would mean that ASTs could have reliable access to mana regen and damage mitigation while also maintaining the "make the most out of what you draw" aspect of the class with every other draw. Also, if you didn't need any extra defence, this could be burned for balance after balance. As a QoL thing, I'd probably have the Force the Fates button itself turn into the balance icon, since this will probably be the most common usage, and it will make things easier. I'd have to test that out, though, and make sure people weren't accidentally double pressing and getting an unwanted balance. Also, interacting with the shuffle cooldown from before, this would mean that theoretically, if you draw regularly before you force the fates and draw the card you then choose both times you might end up only using 2 cards before you shuffle, whereas if you force the fates first you have to use at least 3.

Positives

SCH:

Healing kit still feels good, apart from the unresponsive fairy, even if it feels a bit bloated with more heals than I need.

I genuinely like Art of War (as opposed to Holy or Gravity) because dancing out of AoEs while trying to keep everything in range is fun, and allows for weaving heals well (due to being able to keep target on the tank and its instant nature). I actually wouldn't mind this being our primary AoE instead of Miasma II, but would like Miasma II to return as a pure DoT, whether AoE or single target to be spread with Bane. The Art of War animation could be better, but I'm less fussed about animations than about functionality. They can fix this after literally everything else.

WHM:

Presence of Mind. Honestly my favourite button in the whole game. I love that it can be used offensively (spam a bunch of glares); defensively, if you've fallen behind in healing (thin air, presence of mind, and spam cure 2/3 like your life depends on it); or for a combination of offence and defence, depending on your read of the situation.

The stun on holy is very nice. I got great satisfaction in Palace of the Dead saving my party from mobs by knowing their moves and starting my holy early enough to interrupt them. I would quite like WHM to have an instant interrupt (on a cooldown) as well. It would be a nice little niche for them to have, as something they can bring that the other healers can't.

AST:

It's pretty. I'm sure there are other positives, too, but I haven't found the motivation to play new AST enough to find them.

This may get an edit or two if I think of anything else, but that's it for now. Thank you to anyone who got this far for reading my essay.

Where do I even begin?

1. Healer oGCDs are WAY too powerful relative to the amount of incoming damage. When healers can solo-heal UCoB and UwU, and when GCD heals are a last resort instead of a bread-and-butter tool, that is a clear sign that something is wrong.

2. The healer DPS kit is boring, because it broils down to spamming one button, until expanse contracts, eon becomes instant, and you find yourself staring at a perpetually-brightened sky.

3. Support has been largely moved to ranged DPS. AST's Balance-Bot card system makes it a lesser DNC, while SCH's utility is a cooldown that they push once every two minutes. If healers are going to have significant downtime during fights, then why not add in more support? I don't think most healers would mind if half of the GCDs currently being spent on Stone spam were repurposed for buff/debuff gameplay.

4. Square, and far too many players, have bought into a false "regens vs. shields" dichotomy. SCH has Whispering Wind and auto-Embrace. WHM had traited Stoneskin back in ARR, and has Divine Benison today. It is silly, in a game where healers try to use their GCD healing kit as little as possible, for people to define the healing classes by what their least-used heals do.

Too many players say, "There's regens and shields, what more can be done?" I dunno, how about some or all of the following:

- A trait that turns half of your DPS into healing on the party member nearest the target?
- A cooldown that creates an object that players can interact with to get healed?
- A reactive heal that acts like a mini-Excog, jumping to a new party member whenever it goes off, up to five times?
- A trait that, when you die, makes you invincible and immoble for 15 seconds but allows you to continue healing with zero MP cost?
- A cooldown that throws out a healing boomerang, healing players it passes by as it flies away from and back to you?
- A cooldown that's like Wildfire, but for healing?

That's all stuff that WoW already has.

That's not even getting into other things that could be done, like delayed heals, or movement-speed buffs, or a healing spell that gives some of your HP to the target, or a cooldown that "rewinds" your target's current HP to the highest level it was over the past 5 seconds, or...

5. There is very little interaction between the various parts of a healer's kit. You use your oGCDs, you use your GCDs if necessary, and that's it. If you look at other MMOs, their healers tend to have a lot of "Heal A does X% more healing if target is under the effect of Heal B" stuff. Healers are meant to combo their abilities into each other to maximize healing. Think about GCD heals getting a boost on targets that already have a regen. Or shield breaks having a chance to proc a free Aetherflow. (Or AST using Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition to extend card buffs, regens, their own Lucid Dreaming...man, wouldn't that be a cool idea?)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Punslinger

Where do I even begin?

1. Healer oGCDs are WAY too powerful relative to the amount of incoming damage. When healers can solo-heal UCoB and UwU, and when GCD heals are a last resort instead of a bread-and-butter tool, that is a clear sign that something is wrong.

2. The healer DPS kit is boring, because it broils down to spamming one button, until expanse contracts, eon becomes instant, and you find yourself staring at a perpetually-brightened sky.

3. Support has been largely moved to ranged DPS. AST's Balance-Bot card system makes it a lesser DNC, while SCH's utility is a cooldown that they push once every two minutes. If healers are going to have significant downtime during fights, then why not add in more support? I don't think most healers would mind if half of the GCDs currently being spent on Stone spam were repurposed for buff/debuff gameplay.

4. Square, and far too many players, have bought into a false "regens vs. shields" dichotomy. SCH has Whispering Wind and auto-Embrace. WHM had traited Stoneskin back in ARR, and has Divine Benison today. It is silly, in a game where healers try to use their GCD healing kit as little as possible, for people to define the healing classes by what their least-used heals do.

5. There is very little interaction between the various parts of a healer's kit. You use your oGCDs, you use your GCDs if necessary, and that's it. If you look at other MMOs, their healers tend to have a lot of "Heal A does X% more healing if target is under the effect of Heal B" stuff. Healers are meant to combo their abilities into each other to maximize healing. Think about GCD heals getting a boost on targets that already have a regen. Or shield breaks having a chance to proc a free Aetherflow. (Or AST using Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition to extend card buffs, regens, their own Lucid Dreaming...man, wouldn't that be a cool idea?)

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THESE were the issues the healer rework should've addressed and kept in mind, not gutting the DPS kits in a misguided attempt to 'FORCE' players to heal. (when point #1 shows the fundamental flaw of such a plan).

Albeit I fear the uproar (and prob so does SE) if after ALL the shit they've done to Healers this expansion, they also gut their potencies. Though its a step that needs to be taken OR they need to embrace the Green DPS situation.

Thanks for making this thread, Billy. With the lack of a Feedback forum and I'm not sure if the devs read these forums at all I'm hoping to understand better what other people enjoy about their healer jobs, both in previous and current iterations. It might not get our tools back, but it's fun to write about.

SCH

TL;DR: I can only speak for Scholar, as I haven't played Astrologian or White Mage enough to know how they feel, but I feel all Healer's problems stems from that SE seemed to design healers around a scenario that doesen't exisist unless everything goes very wrong. Sure in normal Trials and Alliance, enrage timer is very lenient to non-existing, but this all feel like it was made to accomodate Savage and Ultimate, where you can't afford a death most of the time. As Tanks, our role isn't DPS, but as Tanks we are expected to do a lot of it fighting in Solo Duties and Quests. Being assured that healer DPS wasn't factored into fight designs I don't think is the reassurance for giving us something more than one DPS button with the occasional other to press. If we could get a Cleric Stance variant that turned all our healing spells into being able to hurt mobs then I'd be on board for making a majority of our skillsets healing spells.

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I'm pretty bad at analysis as I barely remember what potencies my skills have, such I cannot rightly say if we're doing more damage on Scholar now than we to in previous expansions. I've been more interested in how it feels to play. Barring the time and resources it would take to make something new and interesting for the healer jobs, I'm all for reimplementing all Arcanist skills and a Cleric Stance stance with healing penalty as Scholars way to fall back on if there's no healing required.

Having played this a long time there was one side of the game I've been seeking out recently: Fights where everywhere can go wrong very fast, like E4 or any 24-man. Where I'm constantly ressing healing and waiting on cooldowns to pull someones healthbar out of danger from the next raidwide. That or in higher floors of HoH and PotD where mobs hit like trucks, standing in aoe or cleaves means death and there is a random element of patrols and traps. These are moments where I often can't think of doing anything but healing and ressurecting. Unforunately, these are a small fraction of the entire content wherein I can use the skillset of a Scholar and in everything else I can calmly heal it up because I know it's coming. It also happens it is exactly this content the game wants me to run countless times in order to gain tomes, level up characters, progress Fates and if I want to help someone in lower levels. I would really like for them to find this fun first and foremost.

Reason for the thrill seeking above is that I enjoyed that too back in 3.0, but then it was another side of the Healer playstyle for me. I could easily and quickly swap between modes. If I ran Sohm Al for the 30th time I had gotten a feeling of how tanks used to pull, so I would follow close, see how they settled in, make precautions and then activate Cleric Stance and see how much of DPS abilities I could get off before the tank's or DPS's HP got low. This was all the while I had Eos doing her part with Rouse, Whipsering Dawn, Fey Illumination and Fey Covenant inbetween my GCDs. The suite of damage and debuff abilities along with Eos was huge so it was a great fun game of seeing how much or what I could squeeze in before that mob was dead or someone needed healing. I wanted to be responsible, so always tried to gauge how fast the tanks HP was going down before turning on CS and saved at least one Aetherflow until AF was off cooldown again.

This wasn't exclusive to level 60 dungeons either, thanks to Arcanist getting a lot of it's skills before level 30 and Cleric Stance was a level 8 CNJ skill meant I could stay busy even in trivial content like Halatali while Eos could even take care of most of the healing. Did it make Scholar overpowered compared to the other healer jobs? Most probably as we could shoulder almost all healing on Eos. What I really think they should've done is bring the other healers up to where Scholar was: access to a dps class' multitude of skills at lower levels and give them something much earlier to deal with healing in leveling dungeons. Like Regen could be unlocked at level 15 for Conjurer. If classes are problem, then I can see them just letting Jobs absorb classes and have them start at level 1 as all new jobs do.

Thing was, at any time I could drop the DPS act (Cleric Stance notwithstanding) and turn into Triage mode after Alliance B suddenly got wiped out. I enjoyed DPS and Healer aspect both of the job. After the Small Sundering in 4.0 and the Great Sundering in 5.0 the DPS part is not longer enjoyable as a couple Broil III delivers seems to do what a lot of keyboard dancing took back then. It was not about the amount of damage, it was feeling of making use of everything I had, sometimes for a marginal improvement. After 5.0 I tried dedicated DPS jobs, the thrill of having many buttons to press is there, but it gets dull fast with nothing to heal. Scholar is now fun when I'm so busy can't think about doing damage, but gets dull there is nothing left to think about than doing damage. Which I'm afraid happens a lot of the time these days.

That they now are looking to condensate the 2.X Quests gives me hope they haven't forgotten there are Duties under level 71 that people still run and they could turn them into a bowl catharsis where you eagerly await all the ways you can mess up a pack of mobs with cornerstone abilities unlocked very early for not just healers, but all jobs.

I think perhaps the rate of damage taken and HPS is not meaningful enough. Healing is quick, and damage taken can also be quick. DPS jobs do their thing stretched out over time. Healers do their thing in moments. They don't really have a combination of things to go through in a surge of tank or party damage. As the game is if there were more healing it would just be more spamming the same thing, except in a more stressful way. I don't think healers should have to be casting heals all the time, but that the actions they use have a longer relevance/meaning. Maybe a bit less reactionary and more balancing of HPS/incoming-DPS with defensive and restorative actions over time.

With the amount HPS in this game the gap between 10% HP and 100% HP is quite small, relative to the amount of damage taken. This drifts away from the way the game is, but if that gap was effectively much larger, and HPS and general incoming damage compared to smaller/varying portions of HP, with all our healing actions adjusted/changed/redesigned for such gameplay, maybe it would be more interesting and meaningful (not with our healing actions as they are). To be able to see and experience the management of HP levels with the actions you use.

As it is HP levels change very quickly and don't have much life/movement beyond their quick restoration and chunks of damage. Basically I think maybe healing tasks and effects are too instant, and are not much perceivable.

Addition: With the smaller portions part I mean some large amounts of damage staggered/spread out over some time, rather than just instantly. And not that quick massive damage couldn't also exist as it does now

I originally played as Conjurer/White Mage to level 60 mid/later Heavensward. I really enjoyed the healing role and comparatively found other roles boring and uninteresting. And I actually particularly liked lower level healing (20-30), and also the Cleric Stance play. When I leveled Scholar as a second job I enjoyed it so much that it was my most played and favoured job until the early access of 5.0. I find healing jobs to be the most low stress and relaxed feeling jobs to play as, even with the party responsibility.

Scholar could manage healing with patient ways of healing, and big immediate ways of healing. I think key parts of the Scholar experience were quite particularly Lustrate, Indomitability, all the fearie actions, and several options to help mitigate incoming damage or sustain HP. I enjoyed stacking Adloquium and Stoneskin, especially in advance when in a dungeon, jumping into into Cleric Stance to use damage spells for a bit, then drop Cleric Stance to replenish the tank again (/repeat). In a boss battle it was fun to feel in control of HP, with Whispering Dawn and Embrace restoring a large amount of HP in a patient but sure way, or in another/clutch moment I could use Indomitability with an at-request explosion of more HP. (I got excited writing and thinking about these things)

With the changes and additions in 5.0 I feel like the Scholar job feel has shifted into something much different. A lot more oGCDs clash with GCDs, and I have felt like the Broil III was a large change of character, with it's look and sound, giving a strong and different character to the job. It immediately sat unwell with my character and experience of the job. Although weeks later when I tried playing again I resolved to be kind of okay with playing with it, I ultimately caved in again with the play experience change in faerie ability execution and jamming lots of oGCDs between GCDs.

From the beginning of the early access of Shadowbringers I have started and stuck with White Mage. I was quite interested in the new Afflatus actions and how they interact with how I play, and the experience of the job with less oGCD clash as it is a more GCD focused job. The new Lily system was kind of familiar after playing Scholar previously. Similar to Aetherflow it supplies instant cast single target and AOE heals, through Afflatus Solace and Afflatus Rapture, like Lustrate and Indomitability. I found the new spells very pleasant to use, and especially gentle and low stress in feeling. Afflatus Misery is such a big hit yet I really like how it feels so gentle to use.

As it is I much rather playing White Mage than Scholar, but I couldn't compare how much immense fun I've had with Scholar in the past. It was a different time at a different level of experience. However, the amount of 5.0 expert roulettes I've done is the most I've done since the final Heavensward expert roulette (Sohm Al (Hard) and Baelsar's Wall).

WHM:
1) Nothing to do but spam Glare all day long. Healing is reactive, the whole role is designed about being reactive. It's horrible, we need something proactive to do other than spamming one button. There are many ways that reactive healing could be more engaging, like simply having heals way weaker so that it's actually a struggle to keep the tank alive, but ultimately as both tank and healer gear up the need for healing will always go down. That's when we need something proactive to do, no more one button 'dps rotations'.

2) People telling me WHM is fine because it has the best numbers out of all healers. Couldn't care less about numbers, those can be hotfixed in a small patch. What WHM, and actually all healers, is lacking is fun gameplay.

3) Healing sets that look good on male characters. Can we have some?

Thinking on it some more, most of what's wrong with healers ultimately comes back to the oGCDs. Healers have gotten more of them with each expansion, yet fights have not increased their damage output (relative to player HP) to compensate. As a result, healing has gotten easier and easier with each expansion.

Using WHM as an example, back in ARR, it had one oGCD direct heal: Benediction. Its other oGCDs were Divine Seal, which was a precursor to Largesse, and Presence of Mind. Both of which interacted with GCD heals to make them better. Shroud of Saints was a proto-Lucid for MP recovery. And that's it. That's the sum total of WHM's 2.0 oGCD toolkit.

Now, in 5.0, WHM has the following direct heals in its oGCD toolkit:

- Benediction
- Asylum
- Assize
- Tetragrammaton
- Divine Benison

That's five oGCD tools ready and available to deal with scripted tankbusters and raidwides. That's not even counting further healing-boosting oGCDs like Temperance or Plenary Indulgence or Largesse.

If you stop and think about it, actually, almost all of the new healing abilities added since 2.0 have been oGCDs. The Afflatus spells are on the GCD, but that's it. SCH and AST didn't get any new healing GCDs to play with. It shouldn't have been hard to add a couple extra healing GCD spells that interact with the existing kit in some way, yet it never happened.