Is the "healing portion" of healers hitting a wall in EW?

DPS complexity issues aside, looking to the four healers today, regarding their healing kits, I simply can't see anywhere to go on 7.0 and beyond apart from animation/potency upgrades.

I don't play Ultimates, so I can't say how the full extension of the healing kits fare there, but for the remainder (given the group performing well), a portion of the healing kit feels like overhealing or redundancy. I wonder if they need yet a new healing oGCD in 7.0.

Is either a (much needed) healing redesign or (besides trait improvements) all that healers wil get next expansion are (also much needed) dps or support actions.

There are way too many oGCD heals in this game and not enough of them do anything interesting to justify their existence; the change to some powerful DPS neutral heals (like pneuma and macrocosmos) has been kinda good from the perspective of how healing works but the actual healing they bring is completely unnecessary.

They 100% need to delete some oGCD healing or pump up damage numbers because the system just isn’t working, let’s take SGE for example, SGE does not need 2 potent regens on a short CD, plus a medium and large burst healing, a small heal plus an extra mitigation and a small shield plus large heal for AOE on top of kardia as it’s single target upkeep, a 10% single target mitigation and a pulsing shield.

I can’t remember the last time I cast eukrasian prognosis not in downtime

healing actions learned beyond lv 70 or maybe even lv 60 are entirely superfluous. you can clear ultimates and the hardest historical savages with just soil succor and medica.
every healing action learned since shadowbringers only serves to enable more dps spam since theyre all mostly off global cd (except rapture)


in ultimates you also dont use much of the kit anyways. progging dsr and im overcapped on addersgall almost the entire time. literally only living liquid in tea actually makes me run out of ogcds and thats only one phase.


i wish they would just stopped adding standalone, fire-and-forget and superfluous healing actions and instead they started making more things synergize within the healers kits. "healers heal so lets make them have 90 healing skills" is counter productive to their goal.

A lot can be said about Blue Mages, but I feel that their healing model is way more interesting that the regular healers, because they have the other way around: a big portion of the GCDs need to be used with healing, but on the other hand, you have a ton of oGCD things to put in between.

I'd argue it hit the wall in ShB and as long as they're afraid to get rid of oGCD healing bloat their healing design is never going to get any better. Reduce some oGCD bloat, tune fights to not be so healer DPS intensive, make healers use their GCDs again, just do something. The current design direction is not sustainable.

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Originally Posted by Nizzi

I'd argue it hit the wall in ShB and as long as they're afraid to get rid of oGCD healing bloat their healing design is never going to get any better. Reduce some oGCD bloat, tune fights to not be so healer DPS intensive, make healers use their GCDs again, just do something. The current design direction is not sustainable.

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I would at least argue EW while still bringing in too much bloat was an improvement over ShB from a perspective of design of skills, pneuma, kardia expedient and macrocosmos were better than any healing design we got in ShB

They still need to gut oGCD’s but their recent skill design for healing has been better than ShB

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Originally Posted by QooEr

every healing action learned since shadowbringers only serves to enable more dps spam since theyre all mostly off global cd (except rapture)

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This is accurate. And frankly, this issue feels like a rabbithole that the players and developers keep pushing each others down further and further. I don't know who started it, although I have a feeling it's started by the developers.

- From the start: healer's contribution toward DPS only grew more and more as times goes by.
- This lead to: a portion of healer players adopt a DPS first and healing (a distant second). To them, a GCD heal is a "loss of performance".
- This lead to: the mentality of "regular healing" should not be used unless absolutely necessary. Hell, some of them don't use it anyway even when absolutely necessary.
- This lead to: a lot of grief for parties due to "selfish" healers.
- This lead to: SE decided to give more and more oGCD as a way to allow healers to greed while still keeping their party alive (mostly).

I feel our 1-50 abilities should have always been the bread and butter (like they are for every other roles), while the additional oGCD are more supplement to them. But as of now, the former is more breadgum on the floor not worth picking up unless you're starving (aka emergency situation), while the oGCD is the main course.

And I don't think they can change it tbh. As long as Healer DPS is treated as competitive instead of supplemental, gutting the oGCD kits just gonna lead to healing grief in duties. That ship sails, I don't think it can't be recalled unless they willing to build a completely new ship. The oGCD pool is bloat when you look at it from a healing angle, because we stop needing anything more since at least 2 expack ago as far as keeping the party heal concern. Rather, they are tools to let the healer DPS more and more. Not saying I like that, but that's what it is.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I would at least argue EW while still bringing in too much bloat was an improvement over ShB from a perspective of design of skills, pneuma, kardia expedient and macrocosmos were better than any healing design we got in ShB

They still need to gut oGCD’s but their recent skill design for healing has been better than ShB

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From the perspective of a SCH player, I'd say EW is about 50/50 just like ShB was.
In ShB SCH got Recitation, which is an amazing skill with multifunctional usage and synergizes amazingly with SCH's kit along with Regen on Sacred Soil being a great addition that makes you actually want to use Aetherflow on the ability instead of just ignoring it. On the downside, Fey Blessing is bloat and Seraph is arguably bloat as well.
In EW, SCH got Expedient which IMO is the best of the 4 healers capstone abilities, but we also got Protraction, which is more heal bloat.

I'd like to see them move more in the direction of Expedient and Macrocosmos and less in the direction of things like Lilybell or Protraction for sure though.

They don't seem to be completely out of ideas though. Seeing spells like Macrocosmos (That one being DPS neutral/gain on AoE, very unlike whatever they've been up to since ShB) or even Aquaveil are rather interesting to see added to healers. I'm definitely not against having CDs back, but I really don't know they're going to do from now on without removing old ones.
Maybe a triple cast equivalent or Largesse coming back (?)

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

This is accurate. And frankly, this issue feels like a rabbithole that the players and developers keep pushing each others down further and further. I don't know who started it, although I have a feeling it's started by the developers.

- From the start: healer's contribution toward DPS only grew more and more as times goes by.
- This lead to: a portion of healer players adopt a DPS first and healing (a distant second). To them, a GCD heal is a "loss of performance".
- This lead to: the mentality of "regular healing" should not be used unless absolutely necessary. Hell, some of them don't use it anyway even when absolutely necessary.
- This lead to: a lot of grief for parties due to "selfish" healers.
- This lead to: SE decided to give more and more oGCD as a way to allow healers to greed while still keeping their party alive (mostly).

I feel our 1-50 abilities should have always been the bread and butter (like they are for every other roles), while the additional oGCD are more supplement to them. But as of now, the former is more breadgum on the floor not worth picking up unless you're starving (aka emergency situation), while the oGCD is the main course.

And I don't think they can change it tbh. As long as Healer DPS is treated as competitive instead of supplemental, gutting the oGCD kits just gonna lead to healing grief in duties. That ship sails, I don't think it can't be recalled unless they willing to build a completely new ship. The oGCD pool is bloat when you look at it from a healing angle, because we stop needing anything more since at least 2 expack ago as far as keeping the party heal concern. Rather, they are tools to let the healer DPS more and more. Not saying I like that, but that's what it is.

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I mean if square gutted oGCD’s cut healers output damage but made the damage more interesting you could solve all 3 problems, if healers weren’t expected to contribute more than a single DPS between them but they had a nice DPS kit that GCD healing didn’t interrupt you could solve about every healer problem in this game

Take SGE, delete the heal off holos and the expiration heal of panhaima but make the shield last until it’s cracked, change pneuma to give mitigation rather than healing (you could even scale it’s mitigation based on your DPS combo) and bump physis up to 90 seconds. Then give them 4 attacks, a dot, a weak spam spell, a medium spell that combos off the weak spell, then a heavy attack on a 20 second cool-down which can be reduced by combining the light and medium attack, if you use all three in a row you get a small damage buff. Then make that entire damage rotation do about 55% of what dosis spam does now.

Doing all that would make SGE’s biggest problem the fact that kardia is a bit lacklustre

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Originally Posted by Nizzi

From the perspective of a SCH player, I'd say EW is about 50/50 just like ShB was.
In ShB SCH got Recitation, which is an amazing skill with multifunctional usage and synergizes amazingly with SCH's kit along with Regen on Sacred Soil being a great addition that makes you actually want to use Aetherflow on the ability instead of just ignoring it. On the downside, Fey Blessing is bloat and Seraph is arguably bloat as well.
In EW, SCH got Expedient which IMO is the best of the 4 healers capstone abilities, but we also got Protraction, which is more heal bloat.

I'd like to see them move more in the direction of Expedient and Macrocosmos and less in the direction of things like Lilybell or Protraction for sure though.

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Yeah SCH is about the only healer that got good spells in ShB so I didn’t really take them into account. Neutral is just a hot broken OP mess, the ShB lily system was a mess and horoscope is more heal bloat, SCH actually getting recitation was a very good change

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Originally Posted by Doragan

They don't seem to be completely out of ideas though. Seeing spells like Macrocosmos (That one being DPS neutral/gain on AoE, very unlike whatever they've been up to since ShB) or even Aquaveil are rather interesting to see added to healers

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I'll concede Macrocosmos as new
Aquaveil though is not. It's just an old skill that was returned, granted this is the PvP version of the skill but still.
Protect

Hell, ST mitigation skills on healers aren't new at all. Eye for an Eye, while proc based, was a ST mitigation skill that got removed years ago for being superfluous and it was much more unique than what Healers currently got, especially since it had special synergy with SCH since they could spread it to everyone with Deployment and had a reduced CD on it vs other healers.

Temperance on WHM used to be available at level 40 under the name Divine Seal. Did pretty much the same thing (minus the mitigation bonus) and was on a 60s CD as opposed to the current 120s CD. You could argue that Divine Benison was just an oGCD version of Stoneskin, which was removed in SB when Divine Benison was 1st added.

If all SE is going to do for healers is refurbish old, removed skills and give them back as "new" skills, why did they feel the need to remove them in the first place?

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

I'll concede Macrocosmos as new
Aquaveil though is not. It's just an old skill that was returned, granted this is the PvP version of the skill but still.
Protect

Hell, ST mitigation skills on healers aren't new at all. Eye for an Eye, while proc based, was a ST mitigation skill that got removed years ago for being superfluous and it was much more unique than what Healers currently got, especially since it had special synergy with SCH since they could spread it to everyone with Deployment and had a reduced CD on it vs other healers.

Temperance on WHM used to be available at level 40 under the name Divine Seal. Did pretty much the same thing (minus the mitigation bonus) and was on a 60s CD as opposed to the current 120s CD. You could argue that Divine Benison was just an oGCD version of Stoneskin, which was removed in SB when Divine Benison was 1st added.

If all SE is going to do for healers is refurbish old, removed skills and give them back as "new" skills, why did they feel the need to remove them in the first place?

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Seems like you guys are mainly talking about the problems WHM has but let us not forget Sage. Sage is king in this healing world we dps to heal or die trying. Sage in my opinion is better than SCH and AST .... Sage rocks this world.

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Originally Posted by sagacious

Seems like you guys are mainly talking about the problems WHM has but let us not forget Sage. Sage is king in this healing world we dps to heal or die trying. Sage in my opinion is better than SCH and AST .... Sage rocks this world.

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I mean I main SGE and SGE is still the poster child for exactly how to not design a healer. Bloated healing kit, “damage as healing” that just boils down to targeted fairy regen, “multiple DPS skills” that still get relegated to dosis spam, pretty terrible at shielding despite being a shield healer, ripped half its abilities off SCH

like honestly SGE flows like water but only really because it’s streamlined and slightly better ShB SCH

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

There are way too many oGCD heals in this game and not enough of them do anything interesting to justify their existence; the change to some powerful DPS neutral heals (like pneuma and macrocosmos) has been kinda good from the perspective of how healing works but the actual healing they bring is completely unnecessary.

They 100% need to delete some oGCD healing or pump up damage numbers because the system just isn’t working, let’s take SGE for example, SGE does not need 2 potent regens on a short CD, plus a medium and large burst healing, a small heal plus an extra mitigation and a small shield plus large heal for AOE on top of kardia as it’s single target upkeep, a 10% single target mitigation and a pulsing shield.

I can’t remember the last time I cast eukrasian prognosis not in downtime

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There are too many GCD heals in my opinion. We don't need any of them, so they could all be replaced with attacks.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

There are too many GCD heals in my opinion. We don't need any of them, so they could all be replaced with attacks.

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Most healers only have 4, they just feel redundant because there are too many oGCD’s, you can never delete GCD heals entirely, you have to have a fallback, GCD heals just feel bad because in 99% of content you have 8 oGCD’s that can do the same job

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Most healers only have 4, they just feel redundant because there are too many oGCD’s, you can never delete GCD heals entirely, you have to have a fallback, GCD heals just feel bad because in 99% of content you have 8 oGCD’s that can do the same job

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They could get rid of atleast 1, potentially 2 of those GCDs. They could and should simply scrap Cure/Medica/Benefic, just upgrade them to Cure 2, etc at some point. Physic is a bit more tricky because while you don't use it at max level either it is still somewhat needed by the time you get Adloquium, unlike Cure, but I'm sure you can find a solution to that as well.

If the GCD heals get acknowledged as a fallback and nothing more you could even get rid of the basic aoe heal, just combine it with the HoT version while keeping potency the same.
Sure it would lead to some unnecessary overhealing but since we're talking about healing spells that only get used in absolute emergencies you really don't need to consider "non optimal" use at that point.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

They could get rid of atleast 1, potentially 2 of those GCDs. They could and should simply scrap Cure/Medica/Benefic, just upgrade them to Cure 2, etc at some point. Physic is a bit more tricky because while you don't use it at max level either it is still somewhat needed by the time you get Adloquium, unlike Cure, but I'm sure you can find a solution to that as well.

If they GCD heals get acknowledged as a fallback and nothing more you could even get rid of the basic aoe heal, just combine it with the HoT version while keeping potency the same.
Sure it would lead to some unnecessary overhealing but since we're talking about healing spells that only get used in absolute emergencies you really don't need to consider "non optimal" use at that point.

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I recall something about cure/physick/etc being useful at some point in ultimate in the past because it's very mana efficient.

That said I agree there's too many ogcds and no incentive to use gcd heals. And for being a shield healer, I sure don't see any ogcd shields from SCH.

Leveling Sage right now and it's nuts. I will always prefer SCH as my healer though. <3 lily.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Most healers only have 4, they just feel redundant because there are too many oGCD’s, you can never delete GCD heals entirely, you have to have a fallback, GCD heals just feel bad because in 99% of content you have 8 oGCD’s that can do the same job

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The problem is that GCD heals are so strong, a lot of new healers use them as the first option, rather than the fallback last resort. Medica II at 1000 potency blows many oGCD's out the water. GCD heals could do with a small nerf or even a short cooldown so you can't just spam them to get through a fight, as well as heals like Cure I, Medica and Benefic being automatically upgraded to the stronger version as you level.

Lots of good oGCD's isn't a bad thing since more toolkit means more to do, weave and plan, the problem is the incoming damage we take doesn't justify them. I'd rather see unavoidable damage happen more frequently as well as bosses hit harder with auto attacks. Deleting too many oGCD's instead without changing damage intake results in simplistic, boring gameplay.

However, newer fluff filler like Krasis, Pepsis, Aquaveil, Protraction and so on can definitely just be deleted and turned into dps buttons.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

The problem is that GCD heals are so strong, a lot of new healers use them as the first option, rather than the fallback last resort. Medica II at 1000 potency blows many oGCD's out the water. GCD heals could do with a small nerf or even a short cooldown so you can't just spam them to get through a fight, as well as heals like Cure I, Medica and Benefic being automatically upgraded to the stronger version as you level.

Lots of good oGCD's isn't a bad thing since more toolkit means more to do, weave and plan, the problem is the incoming damage we take doesn't justify them. I'd rather see unavoidable damage happen more frequently as well as bosses hit harder with auto attacks. Deleting too many oGCD's instead without changing damage intake results in simplistic, boring gameplay.

However, newer fluff filler like Krasis, Pepsis, Aquaveil, Protraction and so on can definitely just be deleted and turned into dps buttons.

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They won't adjust damage because trash players can't adjust.

Removing excess actions makes more sense. Also they're not giving us more dps buttons. Sorry.

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Originally Posted by sagacious

Seems like you guys are mainly talking about the problems WHM has but let us not forget Sage. Sage is king in this healing world we dps to heal or die trying. Sage in my opinion is better than SCH and AST .... Sage rocks this world.

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Not really sure what this has to do with my post really. I'm just pointing out that Healers haven't gotten anything really new in awhile and most of it is just recycled stuff they removed, WHM just has the most examples of them is all.

Art of War is just the old PvP skill Aura Blast
Horoscope functions in the same way that SB PI did.
Lord and Lady of Crowns were changed in ShB to just be stronger card buffs but then changed back to their SB version as AoE skills.
Seraph is just Rouse with shield functionality.
SGE is literally just SCH with QoL updates.

None of this is new. Obviously, there are exceptions to this, with Macrocosmos, Pneuma, etc. but the majority of Healers toolkits are just rehashed crap from the past. What's the next expansion going to do for Healers? Give WHM back Stoneskin 2? Give AST back the stun on Celestial Oppression? Give SCH back their old Haste buff from Selene? Again I ask, why were they removed in the first place if all they're going to do is give them back as "new" skills?

Sage and Scholar are almost exactly the same. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't compared the actions properly. I got my Scholar hotbar and replaced it with Sage's version of the same actions. The only difference between them is that your abilities aren't delayed while the pet casts them and Sage has to unlock the dot and shields with Eukrasia. Sage heals while doing damage, but Scholar's faerie heals while doing damage as well. What Sage does that is unique is to buff the heal they do from dealing damage instead of things like Fey Union. They also have a gap closer (big reason for me to choose it sometimes).

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Originally Posted by Raikai

A lot can be said about Blue Mages, but I feel that their healing model is way more interesting that the regular healers, because they have the other way around: a big portion of the GCDs need to be used with healing, but on the other hand, you have a ton of oGCD things to put in between.

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Blue Mage healing is a lot better. I recommend it to dissatisfied healers.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Sage and Scholar are almost exactly the same. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't compared the actions properly. I got my Scholar hotbar and replaced it with Sage's version of the same actions. The only difference between them is that your abilities aren't delayed while the pet casts them and Sage has to unlock the dot and shields with Eukrasia. Sage heals while doing damage, but Scholar's faerie heals while doing damage as well. What Sage does that is unique is to buff the heal they do from dealing damage instead of things like Fey Union. They also have a gap closer (big reason for me to choose it sometimes).

Blue Mage healing is a lot better. I recommend it to dissatisfied healers.

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100% agree.

I think SE has designed themselves into a corner that I don't think they can get out of without reworking all the healers or rethinking how damage from mobs is dealt in fights. Unfortunately I don't have faith that they will do either and in the future you will get 2-3 more healing spells, no new dps spells, and content that still rarely requires GCD healing.

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Originally Posted by Imora

I recall something about cure/physick/etc being useful at some point in ultimate in the past because it's very mana efficient.

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its only useful when solo healing ultimates, and with the changes to lucid dreaming im not even sure if its that true anymore

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Originally Posted by QooEr

its only useful when solo healing ultimates, and with the changes to lucid dreaming im not even sure if its that true anymore

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Yeah I don't know about anything recent.

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Originally Posted by QooEr

healing actions learned beyond lv 70 or maybe even lv 60 are entirely superfluous. you can clear ultimates and the hardest historical savages with just soil succor and medica.
every healing action learned since shadowbringers only serves to enable more dps spam since theyre all mostly off global cd (except rapture)

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Understand that this is all anecdotal, ok? I can't speak for Ultimates, but I've had my entire healing kit exhausted during W2W pulls in dungeons.

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

This is accurate. And frankly, this issue feels like a rabbithole that the players and developers keep pushing each others down further and further. I don't know who started it, although I have a feeling it's started by the developers.

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The devs are in no such rabbit hole. They have stated multiple times now that this is how healing is. It is totally by design how things are. There are just a subset of green DPS players who will never concede to this style of play for healing in FFXIV.

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- From the start: healer's contribution toward DPS only grew more and more as times goes by.

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100% true

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- This lead to: a portion of healer players adopt a DPS first and healing (a distant second). To them, a GCD heal is a "loss of performance".
- This lead to: the mentality of "regular healing" should not be used unless absolutely necessary.

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False. Those players never adopted that mentality. They always had that mentality. Optimizers, or META. They do it with all roles in the game, including healing. We can't argue with them either, can we? How can you when 2+2=4 is their argument? We try with 2+2 =/= fun, but it does not compute. It does however, lead to bitter and spiteful healers and the dichotomy within the community.

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- This lead to: a lot of grief for parties due to "selfish" healers.

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See?

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

- This lead to: SE decided to give more and more oGCD as a way to allow healers to greed while still keeping their party alive (mostly).

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And this is the part of your post that really grabbed my attention. Why would you think this when the consensus among healer woes is SE devs don't really want healers DPSing, or focusing in too much on it? Greeding is the exact opposite of what they want healers doing. They even gave us an ability to yank DPS players who are about to greed themselves to an early grave because for some reason they have decided that shaving off a second or two is worth risking adding a minute or two.

Healer oGCD are there to support the healer. That's it. They can be used both to assist with offense, or support. It is up to the healer. What the meta does is force one style of gameplay unto healers, and then the very same players curse the devs for 'boxing' them into that corner. The desire to change up healing is nothing more than a ruse of the demand for the devs to add more offense to the healer's kits. All for the name of optimization because these players want/need more challenging ways in which to do so. Regardless of the varied skill levels and playstyles among the game's other healers. That's what they want, and the dev's response is, "No."

Now, don't get me totally wrong. I am not entirely in opposition to adding some DPS skills. I think they are a fine way to reward the healer, and the party. Skills like Misery and Astrodyne are absolutely wonderful additions to the healer kits, and this definitely needs to be extended to the other healers, particularly SCH. But offensive GCD skills that are a normal part of the rotation will never come back. Like, ever.

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And I don't think they can change it tbh.

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Of course they can change it if they wanted. But that is not the direction they have chosen to go. They've been clear about this for two expansions now.

Research healers in WoW and you can see quite a few possibilities that this game is missing. Healers in this game are actually way too simple, while wow has 6 healers that all have unique tools.

It taking them until endwalker to even have something resembling damage to healing conversion says a lot.

Healing seems to be a non-factor here when compared to other games. I find it interesting there's so many ways to top someone off with a single button, as opposed to games like WoW where it takes a more focused effort to heal someone back.

A Cure II crit heals for what? More than 50% of the target's HP? And that's without counting all the regens and off-GCDs options we have. You usually don't see those numbers in other games, generally speaking.

I think it's also very telling they redesigned the new PvP mode without healers in mind; in the sense that everyone is responsible for their own HP through the use of Recuperate. I sincerely believe the healer role has a weird identity crisis where the designers can't conceptually conceive anything other than damage as the one true metric to encounter designs.

I remember during the ARR Beta, Brayflox Longstop had a somewhat interesting difficulty spike where you actually had to use Freecure procs (gasp) to keep up with your MP management. Of course, they nerfed it when ARR was released properly, making Freecure lose its relevancy. Then again, I suppose ARR healer design was a lot different back then, with Cleric Stance being the defining factor between a decent and a great healer.

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Originally Posted by Raskbuck

Healing seems to be a non-factor here when compared to other games. I find it interesting there's so many ways to top someone off with a single button, as opposed to games like WoW where it takes a more focused effort to heal someone back.

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I can't speak for WoW, but I am also not sure how relevant it is because the healing in FFXIV is relative to the damage in its most punishing state. This typically translates to a 'two-strikes' you're out rule in FFXIV PvE content. IOW, get hit once, you're ok. Get hit again within a minute or two, and you're cooked. The healer has the ability to take away one of those strikes, or bring you back in case you do fail twice before they can fix you. Healers have more than one resource to help them with this, as for what should be obvious reasons, there are 3 to 23 other players they are looking after.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

I can't speak for WoW, but I am also not sure how relevant it is because the healing in FFXIV is relative to the damage in its most punishing state. This typically translates to a 'two-strikes' you're out rule in FFXIV PvE content. IOW, get hit once, you're ok. Get hit again within a minute or two, and you're cooked. The healer has the ability to take away one of those strikes, or bring you back in case you do fail twice before they can fix you. Healers have more than one resource to help them with this, as for what should be obvious reasons, there are 3 to 23 other players they are looking after.

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It's just a difference in encounter design, and neither is good or bad as it mostly depends on personal preference. My main gripe with the current healer design is that, once people have mastered a fight, it makes healers lose their relevancy besides handling the occasional AoE or Tank Buster that happen on a very scripted and predictable interval.

Just look at Aglaia for instance. It was fun when it first came out, specially fixing one of those two-strikes you mention. Nowadays it's mostly Glare, Glare, Glare, with the occasional off-GCD heal when an AoE comes. It obviously depends on the player's skill, and whether they are familiar with the encounter or not, but that's the general trend I see. Another example is how some groups prefer to run 1 Tank, 3 DPS for the Expert Roulette.

I like the whole "green DPS" meme as much as anyone else, but if I'm being serious for a moment, at that point I wonder why not just strip the role completely and just handle the healing responsibility to each person like in PvP.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

False. Those players never adopted that mentality. They always had that mentality. Optimizers, or META. They do it with all roles in the game, including healing. We can't argue with them either, can we? How can you when 2+2=4 is their argument? We try with 2+2 =/= fun, but it does not compute. It does however, lead to bitter and spiteful healers and the dichotomy within the community.

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It's totally computed.

- Selfish DPS does not take away things from others people.
- Selfish tanks used to take away things from other people, until they did away with the whole enmity management.
- Selfish healers take away things from other people the most, and giving them oGCD allows them to take less.

Basically, to me they're fixing healer pretty much the way they're fixing tank, let people greed their heart out without having to compromise their intended role. And before anyone jump in and say "but all classes can mess up mechanic if they tunnel vision!". Yes, but that's the point, while all role carry the same baseline responsibility, healers is the role with the extra baggage.

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Greeding is the exact opposite of what they want healers doing. They even gave us an ability to yank DPS players who are about to greed themselves to an early grave because for some reason they have decided that shaving off a second or two is worth risking adding a minute or two. Healer oGCD are there to support the healer. That's it.

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I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me here. It sounds like you agree, but want a more rosy interpretation of it. Yes, they don't want healer to greed, but preaching that ain't gonna change anything. If it's a choice between an attack and a heal, a lot healers would choose the attack and pray the co-healer will do it in their place. The oGCD eliminate that choice, so a healer can still attack and heal at the same time.

Like I said, it's very clear they're making healer go the way of tank, and how they harmonizing all 3 roles toward DPS. Tank used to have to pick a choice between DPS or tanking (emnity&damage reduction), which lead to a lot of shitty tanks, so SE eliminated that. Healers have to pick a choice between DPS and Heal (call it greed, meta, optimization idc, same difference to me), which lead to a lot of shitty healers, and we can clearly see they're removing that choice gradually.

This is why I said it's a rabithole. Players like to blame Dev, and Dev like to blame the players, but the fact is the class is what it is because it's meld to accommodate the player's desire.

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Now, don't get me totally wrong. I am not entirely in opposition to adding some DPS skills. I think they are a fine way to reward the healer, and the party. Skills like Misery and Astrodyne are absolutely wonderful additions to the healer kits, and this definitely needs to be extended to the other healers, particularly SCH. But offensive GCD skills that are a normal part of the rotation will never come back. Like, ever.

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I'm one of the (very?) few on this forum against the idea of healer having a DPS rotation, and would only accept it if it's designed in a away that the DPS and healing channel do not interfere with each others for reason I had stated above. In my experience, if they are to be again given the choice between DPS or heal, the majority of healers I ran into can not be trust to make the responsible choice.

I'd agree that the healing kits don't really have anywhere to go. Even as it stands now, healers have far more tools then are needed to deal with 99% of gameplay, with maybe only one or two phases in some ultimate fights actually requiring full use of the kit. The logical next step would be to add DPS actions instead and perhaps tie them in with the healing kits in some form, like how Lilies interact with DPS on White Mage, more stuff like that. After all, it's pretty clear they don't want to making the healing part harder, so it's either add DPS actions or just let healers languish in the trash bin.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Understand that this is all anecdotal, ok? I can't speak for Ultimates, but I've had my entire healing kit exhausted during W2W pulls in dungeons.

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my point is that the basic heals are sufficient. you can do a w2w pull with just cure ii, and you can clear any heal check in the game spamming medica. look at blue mage, they have like 4 healing skills and they can clear absolutely anything in the game.

also exhausting your kit doesnt mean you actually needed it. i can use every single heal i have in a single mob pull and that doesnt prove the contrary.

Raising damage doesn't fix healers needing to "heal" more. At some point, constantly being brought down to 1HP constantly gets boring and a lazy attempt at solving the issue.

Receiving damage is too simple. You get hit with raidwides and your only option is heal through it faster than it can kill you or stagger the damage with mitigation. All healers have in this game is healing with some mitigation via shielding or percent-based.

Asking for them to make us take more damage is lame af. They can turn up the damage that you're wiping if you don't spam Medica perfectly. That's not fun.

Unfortunately they designed themselves into a corner and they're not changing it up. Time and time again they have proven to us that they have zero interest in revamping healers.

you could say the same thing about tanks. besides drks being a teeny bit squishier there really isn't a difference between any of them. i think people expect too much from an MMO tbh and i also think a lot of people don't realize that they're gotten, y'know, good. if something seems boring/easy after you've played it every day for 5-10 years it's possible that you've just outgrown the role/game.

it might always seem like you're doing terrible because you have some mix-maxing jerkass parser who never sleeps to always compare yourself to -- but the reality is that the average person who doesn't play daily typically does have trouble keeping up with later endgame content.

if they add anymore oGCD heals...they may as well get rid of MP entirely. I hardly ever use and of my GCD heals. MP is practically a joke. I can rez like 6 people back to back and still have like half of my MP.

I do believe that healers have way too many healing options at the moment. Too much so that it's become bloated. I don't think nerfing the potency of the healing spells will be enough. Perhaps we should take into consideration of removing some healing spells. Perhaps we can start with Cure I/Physic/Benefic first? Maybe have some traits that upgrade them to their stronger spells at a later level (perhaps level 26). Would certainly help with button bloat.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Now, don't get me totally wrong. I am not entirely in opposition to adding some DPS skills. I think they are a fine way to reward the healer, and the party. Skills like Misery and Astrodyne are absolutely wonderful additions to the healer kits, and this definitely needs to be extended to the other healers, particularly SCH. But offensive GCD skills that are a normal part of the rotation will never come back. Like, ever.

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I agree with this. Healers need to be rewarded for healing whether it be some fancy DPS or support spell. I put a lot of credit to Sarixis a lot, but there are ways we can incorporate offensive GCD spells that are tied to healing. For example, let's say we bring back Fluid Aura for WHM, rename it to Water and add a new trait that is correspondent to this new DPS spell and healing.

Water (formally Fluid Aura)

• Changed into a 2.5sec GCD ability
• Deals water damage with a potency of 100
• Additional Effect: Grants Cleric Stance
• Cleric Stance increases damage dealt by 5%
• Duration: 30secs
• Upgrades to Water II/Water III/Banish/ Banish III at later levels with higher dmg output.

Conviction

• When an ally's HP is below 50% and is healed by a GCD spell, the caster is granted three stacks of Conviction
• Conviction Effect: Increases the dmg potency of Water/Banish by 200
• Acquired at Level 50.

These suggested changes will do three things.

• It would somewhat alleviate the 1 button spam
• Encourge less overhealing
• Rewards the WHM for healing

I've said it probably a thousand times and I'll say it again.

Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is as close to being objectively the most boring way you can design a job, and threads will take that statement and spiral off for twenty pages about "WELLLLLL, but you CAN'T have more than Glare Glare Glare because what if someone DIES to your GREED!? Then what happens? I don't know, you can't do more than that in your downtime it might be too SCARY! The devs aren't going to change this because they like it that way. Glare Glare Glare is good design! Omnomnom enjoy the pig slop, keep calling terrible design good!"

All of which is excuse-making for the most objectively garbage class design I've ever seen in an MMO.

If they want to go the more nuclear option, just remove healers as a concept and rename the role to Support.

Give them a proper DPS rotation like some people are asking, and their utility would consist of enhancing the party with damage buffs. Incorporate Haste and Bravery as their core spell kit.

Eliminate the cooldown on Second Wind and attach an MP cost to it, similar to how Recuperate works. Give everyone Phoenix Down as a General action, with an associated cooldown and MP cost to simulate Swiftcast + Resurrect.

And you know what's funny about all this? The core encounter design wouldn't even change that much. Unless someone in the testing team is a little too good at using Second Wind. In that case they might have to remove them from the team. :rolleyes:

This is just a poorly written piece born out of spite, from someone who enjoys healing and likes seeing those bars fill up. It's not meant to be taken too seriously.

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

I'm one of the (very?) few on this forum against the idea of healer having a DPS rotation, and would only accept it if it's designed in a away that the DPS and healing channel do not interfere with each others for reason I had stated above. In my experience, if they are to be again given the choice between DPS or heal, the majority of healers I ran into can not be trust to make the responsible choice.

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IMO I much prefer healer DPS and tank DPS to a lesser extent to only being required for the hardest content (Savage and Ultimate here). Encounters and healing should be engaging enough on their own merits and not require more DPS tools to be fun. Judging how the Role design team keeps taking away DPS toys from healers I wonder if they're of the same mind and are too polite to insist that healers heal.

Hint to the devs: If that's what you really want you need to stop coddling people who shouldn't be healing. Sure it should be accessible but you've simplified it so much that those motivated to play the role are so bored they're just not queuing. Instead of addressing the queue imbalance you've made it worse.

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Originally Posted by Raskbuck

I like the whole "green DPS" meme as much as anyone else, but if I'm being serious for a moment, at that point I wonder why not just strip the role completely and just handle the healing responsibility to each person like in PvP.

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Ugh, please no. GW2's little role-less experiment was wholly unappealing. My gripe has more to do with aggro management than healing but I find a solid trinity works best for the content that I like to do.