5.0 healer catastrophizing is illogical - Change My Mind

[Mortex]

I'm not a healer main but trying to understand my healers thoughts on why they are upset. After reviewing and thinking as critically as I can, I can only arrive at the conclusion that it's really not all that bad - more or less it's just that people expected something different.

Much like the tanks got homogonized treatment in their CD rotation, healers got homogenized in their dps. They pretty much all have one dot, one spam and one aoe. They all do basically the same base potency with whm edging ahead, and I assume that AST lags a bit behind because of their slightly faster cast time? Either way, it is a dumbing down in a way but also balancing them in that aspect. It hurt SCH the most, but I think they will be OK outside of possible MP drain being too high if they want to spread Bio around before spamming Art of War.

Otherwise, AST healing kit itself is mostly unchanged or upgraded. Cards were simplified, as most people have stated you were always trying to draw balances anyways so now they'll be crapping them out left and right and get to manage seals or whatever else instead. It's not the end of the world.

Outside of obvious complaints about SCH being stripped of it's DPS kit, I think WHM has the next most to complain about. The 2 new heals should've been off the GCD. The charge time for lillies is 30 seconds anyways, just make them 30 sec CDs and it'd probably solve most if not all WHM complaints, at least a major one. Quite honestly I don't see why they haven't done something to consolidate the cures & medicas like most other 1-2-3 abilities get upgraded. I'm sure there's some logic behind it, but I haven't spent enough time on healers to know one way or the other. It's getting into a different topic altogether, but seems like it could be loosely related if it allowed to them to add other types of heals or support abilities.

In hindsight, it might've been better for DNC to be a healer because it would've allowed (or perhaps forced) them to make more interesting utility kits for the other healers to compete. Since they decided to make it a DPS, it seems reasonable to assume they didn't want people stacking DNC buffs with AST buffs and so forth, so they just gave them all to DNC instead. I'm not saying that's a good choice, but it's a somewhat logical conclusion to arrive at if we are just looking at the facts.

I’d did the exact opposite for tanks before only pld and war ( shake is still a small shield) would reduce raid dmg and reprisal couldn’t be used a lot of times because the dmg source whas a separat entity. Now tanks need to react and work together atleast in random groups. For healer the exact opposite happened you just have 1 healer with more, less or non raid utility and that’s it.

[RyuDragnier]

I'm seeing a lot of knee-jerk reactions here. I'm not going to say they're unwarranted, but guys, we don't know how the meta is going to be changed until SH comes out and we see endgame. Everything comes down to one, and only one thing, will we have to heal more or not? Until then, all this unnecessary doomsaying and bickering does nothing but make the healing community look incredibly childish and petty. Calm down, think logically, and wait until launch.

[Kolsykol]

My only problem really is the SCH AoE prune.
Art of war doesn't look like fun, and SCH as of right now is a lot of fun to AoE with imo.

[zuzu-bq]

Very good post and I'd like to directly complement the OP rather than joining the current discussion if you all don't mind.

For WHM's rDPS, people forget pDPS is part of rDPS, and if they're high enough they can overcome buffs. Misery is a great addition to WHM because it basically refunds 2 or you 3 GCD heals you've spent. And going by Media Tour number... a lot more GCD healing will happen from now on.

For AST: Everyone complaining complexity is gone while not realizing the complexity was shifted, not gone. Trying to lend a 3 Seal Divination in 10s at encounter openners will be challenging.

My only legitimate complaints to all the changes being... Nocturnal Sect still looking bad, maybe Disurnal+WHM isn't that bad anymore now that Neutral exists but still... They had a chance of empowering Noct throught the Celestial skills but they seem very week on their side (the death of manual embrace being the biggest buff to Noct really). SCH has simply too much horsepower in OGCDs and thats just not fixing the issue we've had since Heavensward, but if numbers are anywhere close to the test builds we've seen footage from, it will require a lot of tought and cooldown cycling (more similar to WoW healing cooldown management in that regard for SCH) which may be a good thing. Sacred soil regen is probably a bit too strong though. This last one isn't a complaint really? But I'd have liked to see a charge system in any of WHM actions, that's more of a personal wish more than anything.

The only complaint I see tossed around that is probably valid is how damage rotations got too simple but uh... I don't know, play a DPS frrom now on if that's the case. If you end up having to press a lot more healing abilities you'll be alternating from Damage to Heals more often to a simpler 1 spam accomodates it better, so now all we need is to see how it will play out in the field work. And for that, we have to wait.

[Ceasaria]

For AST: Everyone complaining complexity is gone while not realizing the complexity was shifted, not gone. Trying to lend a 3 Seal Divination in 10s at encounter openners will be challenging.

Excuse me ??
And even if this is the very little complexity left of AST, it's every 3 min...

But I agree with you about nocturnal stance & Sch case.

[Saefinn]

My issues aren't even to do with how effective the healers are as healers or DPS, but as how they are to play and what I like as a playstyle from a healer perspective. To me homogenisation is blurring the lines between what I felt made the jobs enjoyable and over time I think I've found myself enjoying being a healer less over time. Stormblood I played healer a lot less than I did for ARR or HW and I get the feeling I'm gonna find it less appealing in Shadowbringers, but I will be fair and give it a go to make a final conclusion on whether I enjoy it.

Healing already feels homogenised and they're homogenising the DPS more now. It's positive there's more Scholar shielding and I will see how that plays out. But to me the nerfs it has needed are to its actual healing output. This might be me speaking as a 2.0 Scholar, where I loved the fact keeping health up was harder but I could mitigate damage to make up for it and there were ways I felt i had to optimise both healing and mitigation, even in dungeons (because I could then weave DPS between). Even its DPS moves put debuffs that helped reduce enemy damage (and enemy healing) output. But these became less effective over time, particularly in endgame and ended up removed entirely. But I enjoyed playing Scholar like that. The other aspect I enjoyed was it's a DoT mage and now that's gone too.

Whilst I think it is good they've not forgotten shields are Scholar's thing, but I expect it's still gonna feel the same to play and having played all 3 healers, I've never really felt that much different when healing between the three from a heals perspective - some different flavours, sure, but it feels like there's a lot of "this is AST's equivalent of this" or "This is SCH's equivalent of that".

I would have loved to see more emphasis in Scholar's evolution in damage reduction through buffs and debuffs and use that approach to balance it rather than trying to balance it by bringing up its healing output to render White Mage's identity as "Healiest Healer" meaningless. But they're changes that already exist. To me, that'd be more exciting to play. At the moment it feels like they're taking away more things we like in their attempt to balance the healers.

[Hustensaft]

I'm happy that the core healing kits are being homogenized. Makes it easier to balance healers and introduce new ones later. I don't get the doom and gloom though.

Yes, we're all looking forward to the 4th skin of generic homogenized healer toolkit.

For AST: Everyone complaining complexity is gone while not realizing the complexity was shifted, not gone. Trying to lend a 3 Seal Divination in 10s at encounter openners will be challenging.

Calling RNG complexity...

[Cled-cat]

I'm happy that the core healing kits are being homogenized. Makes it easier to balance healers and introduce new ones later. I don't get the doom and gloom though.

Homogenisation shouldn’t really be seen as a good thing unless the only deciding factors for you between the healers is wether you’d want to see some pretty flowers, stars or faeries litter your screen while providing near-identical gameplay. How can they be called different jobs at that point, and not simply re-skins? Where do we draw the line between “homogenising” and straight up just re-skinning all the healers to fit a very particular and repetitive mould? It’s certainly the “easier” way to balance healers, but incase you couldn’t tell from the huge amount of general discontent, it does very little to inspire satisfaction or hype for many healers. You don’t get the doom and gloom since you’re likely in the minority here.

[EriShvakh]

For AST: Everyone complaining complexity is gone while not realizing the complexity was shifted, not gone. Trying to lend a 3 Seal Divination in 10s at encounter openners will be challenging.

In terms of APM maybe. In terms of gameplay you play two different seals and they pray for 3rd one that you need.
You're also forgetting that besides savage, there is other content in the game where playing AST will be trivial bordering on boring.

[Saefinn]

Homogenisation shouldn’t really be seen as a good thing unless the only deciding factors for you between the healers is wether you’d want to see some pretty flowers, stars or faeries litter your screen while providing near-identical gameplay. How can they be called different jobs at that point, and not simply re-skins? Where do we draw the line between “homogenising” and straight up just re-skinning all the healers to fit a very particular and repetitive mould? It’s certainly the “easier” way to balance healers, but incase you couldn’t tell from the huge amount of general discontent, it does very little to inspire satisfaction or hype for many healers. You don’t get the doom and gloom since you’re likely in the minority here.

Pretty much. I know healer balance is one of their big challenges, but homogenisation just makes them feel...the same. For a game series that has generally prided on job identity and there being wealth and diversity in its jobs and job system homogeny is not something that'd gonna be well received. I know the balance is hard, but there are other ways of helping address that. Given how they've approached balance here, I'm happier they didn't introduce a 4th healer, although I wanted one to be announced, because I'm not sure the team yet know what they want to do with healers overall. I think Astrologian's introduction was a testament to that back in HW when their solution to balance was to give it a White Mage stance and a Scholar Stance, because in ARR the Scholar and White Mage balance was in a really good place.