Paradigm shifting for healer needs to be fixed.

[Vlady]

I am not sure if it is an issue to anyone else and I really do not want to turn this into a healer should or should not dps thread but I am finding myself healing less and less in this game in content and more focused on damage dealing. Even with the accuracy loss for healers right now I am finding healers are constantly creeping (along with tanks) on the damage dealing abilities of some pure dps jobs like machinist and bards.

I really hope SE will turn a 180 to make the focus of healing the top requirement in dungeons and raids. Right now I just feel like I am becoming a primary damage dealer and a secondary healer in this game. Is it because balance is going out of whack with tanks/healers being able to put out higher dps numbers then they should or are raid patterns too easy to recognize when it comes to knowing when to heal? I am not against healing and tanking becoming more popular but it just feels like healers are stepping out of our bounds a bit too much since 3.0.

[Kabzy]

As much as I enjoy DPSing with my Scholar, I have to agree with you completely. There's something wrong when all I think about is maximising DPS when I go into the next Alex turn. Lets hope the second Alexander will bring us something new!

[Lastelli]

I like the current meta. 1 main healer and 1 hybrid dps/healer that heals only when necessary. There's nothing that needs to be fixed since there's nothing broken.
You can say that you don't like it and that you would like to see it change, but this is just how devs shaped their game.

are raid patterns too easy to recognize when it comes to knowing when to heal?

By raid you mean...Alexander Savage? It's the most difficult raid to date. Thordan is the most challenging ex trial as well, both for healers and tanks/dps (still quite easy though, but I do like it a lot). I think it's just that the end game community is getting better and healers are learning how to be more efficient. It's not like every turn of coil couldn't be solohealed anyway.

[DarkmoonVael]

I like the current meta. 1 main healer and 1 hybrid dps/healer that heals only when necessary. There's nothing that needs to be fixed since there's nothing broken.
You can say that you don't like it and that you would like to see it change, but this is just how devs shaped their game.

By raid you mean...Alexander Savage? It's the most difficult raid to date. Thordan is the most challenging ex trial as well, both for healers and tanks/dps (still quite easy though, but I do like it a lot). I think it's just that the end game community is getting better and healers are learning how to be more efficient. It's not like every turn of coil couldn't be solohealed anyway.

I think Thordan ex loses out to Titan ex in terms of difficulty at gear level when released. Also coil could be solo healed......after countless dozens of hours of practise and learning. Its disingenuous to try and use that as an argument, no one went into coils with one healer from the outset.

As for the current state of events in Alexander Savage, yes the emphasis on healers and tanks having to do all out dps as well as all out healing and all out tanking is a little bit of a design flaw. If they want this to be the trend, they need to severely blur the lines of the trinity, or do away with it for good. If they keep the trinity then they need to design raids to test your specific role within the trinity.

[Pomelo]

Totally read the title as if we can do paradigm shifts from FF13....loved that <3

[Lastelli]

I think Thordan ex loses out to Titan ex in terms of difficulty at gear level when released...

I cordially disagree. Titan was only a matter of coordination (and latency), the dps check was quite forgiving and mechanics in thordan in my opinion require way more coordination than titan.

Also, you missed my point about Coil, but that is my fault, I should've been clearer. After a few months from release, you could already see several groups clearing coil last turns with just one healer. It could be done, with a lot of practice and at max ilvl, yes, but it could be done quite easily. Now, the only A3S solo heal clear I'm aware of is from Elysium, and no A4S clear yet. How long has it been? 4-5 months, right? As a healer, I know that the damage going on in AS is much higher than what I had to deal with in coil.

[DarkmoonVael]

I cordially disagree. Titan was only a matter of coordination (and latency), the dps check was quite forgiving and mechanics in thordan in my opinion require way more coordination than titan.

Also, you missed my point about Coil, but that is my fault, I should've been clearer. After a few months from release, you could already see several groups clearing coil last turns with just one healer. It could be done, with a lot of practice and at max ilvl, yes, but it could be done quite easily. Now, the only A3S solo heal clear I'm aware of is from Elysium, and no A4S clear yet. How long has it been? 4-5 months, right? As a healer, I know that the damage going on in AS is much higher than what I had to deal with in coil.

My reasoning is that with titan you had stricter dps checks with both super bombs and adds as well as the precision needed with mechanics.

The damage in in Savage Alexander is greater compared to coils, but the abilities we have as healers are greater. Indomniability on Scholar really make stance dancing a lot easier with the ability to do a very powerful instant cast aoe heal. White mage now has low cooldown single target instant heal and aoe heal+mana regain. The damage has gone up, but not more so than our helaing output capabilities and out healing spells. With A3 savage and A4 savage, the gear check is clearly the highest we have seen in the game so far, solo healing these places will be difficult for anyone.

[Vlady]

That is a valid point of view I did not consider. The toolkit for healers now with instant heals and stronger burst healing has gone up immensely.

[AzureFlare]

Also doesn't help that party healing so far is really comfort heavy in any 8man, when the base AoE heals become more mana-efficient compared to their single-target equivalents as early as 3 targets (4 for AST), and stronger in potency per GCD as early as 2 targets.

[Miyu20]

I think that would make it a lot harder who on the newer healers who just started learning their class but rushed to 60 because " I WANNS TO heal SAVAGe with my Secondary class"
(Next part is just coming from what I heard, not experience)

And in response to what you are saying OP, A4S if you do not cheese Royal Pentacle or The Straff dolls is an extremely difficult fight for healers requiring a huge healing requirement. I think if you wanted to and were good enough, you could do A4S as it was intended and find out that Healing Output in Savage (at least for A4S at current gear levels) is what the raid was built around. That's why a lot of people still can't clear A4S. (Could be other reasons as to why though of course)

That's the difference between Coil Raids and Savage Raids which started from Savage SCOB is that the healing requirement is truly insane due to high incoming damage to party plus mechanics. I like the idea of Savage Raids but I think it should have been done like SCOB was and not make Normal fricking CT difficult but instead make it Raid difficulty with Savage being near impossible unless you're a really good group.

Some teams like the difficulty of Alexander though and their qualm is more with how specific battles played out. Creating a better raid storyline and more interestmadebattles go a long way into making a raid tier successful.

Biggest issue in my mind for first set of Alexander raids (Call this Binding Coil of Alexander) was that they made A4S so difficult that even extremely skilled groups are just getting clears. Because it has the name Savage attached to it and can't have echo or gear lockout removed from it yet. They catered to the World First tier of raiders and didn't think "Hmm, what would the other 99.99% who arent playing for world first think? Would they find this fun or too difficult? Fun or too tedious? A lot of people got it right when they said A3S should have been the final raid in this tier. Having the most fun raid in the middle is poor raid design.

In fact, people might be pissed if this Savage got echo at this point because it is "Savage."

Sorry for such a long post. These are my views.