The Healer Manifesto

[KarnSalander]

while we've seen tanks, melee and ranged DPS in the gorgeously animated expansion trailers released by Square Enix, the healer role is conspicuously absent!

Haha! I'm glad I'm not the only one that noticed that. Here is a post I made on Reddit earlier today:
Why do healers are not allowed to be hyped for any expansion?

If you think the discrimination isn't real, think of this: "1.0 Derplander was an Archer, 2.0 Derplander was a Warrior, 3.0 Derplander was a Dragoon, 4.0 Derplander was a Monk and a Samurai, 5.0 Derplanader is a Dark Knight... When will we see an expansion where the healer is the Hero?

[Stelaria]

I didn't really discuss individual job identity too much during all this, because I feel that all of the jostling between mains of the three different healer jobs is very counterproductive. From all I've seen, all it amounts to is complaints over rDPS utility, when what we've seen time and time again is that many rDPS-benefitting abilities are deeply toxic to the overall meta. Nowhere is this more exemplified than Trick Attack, and how much of endgame theorycrafting is devoted to extracting the maximum possible burst within Trick Attack windows - just another property of endgame raiding that lends itself to calculation and rehearsal over spontaneity.

It's because of that that I feel as if Chain Stratagem and the Astrologian's cards are also, essentially, potential problems and not resources to be envied. If the development team intends to continue adding abilities to the game that can boost an entire full party's damage output, then they ought at least be willing to clearly delineate specific roles - not jobs, roles - that do or do not have access to those abilities. If they decide that that includes - or even is limited to - healer, then so be it, but the balancing of such abilities is so extremely swingy in terms of meta that there's simply no reasonable option other than to make them a role action. (I also envision them being on a charge system so that burst windows are more mobile rather than every job having to plan all of its cooldowns and rotations around an inflexible schedule of burst windows.)

All that said, job identity is extremely important! The problems with the upcoming changes to healers aren't merely a loss of DPS skills - they go far beyond that. First of all, they're a loss of identity - Time Dilation, Celestial Opposition and the versatile cards used by Astrologian (for all that they had balance issues) exemplify that, though Scholar's loss of Energy Drain and Bane, and with them the element of planning and resource allocation (which was, apparently, deemed a 'dangerous' mechanic), is also extremely troubling.

The second issue is, however, even worse - the upcoming changes demonstrate a poor understanding of the absolute, fundamental basics of the healing role. As a DPS, there's no real upper limit to the amount of damage one can output besides the tank's enmity output (and enmity is ceasing to be a meaningful mechanic as of Shadowbringers anyway, for better or worse) (no, shut up, Leviathan, nobody likes you.) In other words, if all of the DPS jobs are now doing, say, 20% more DPS than they did before with the same gear and ilvl, that's great, you just clear 17% faster, maybe more if you're skipping mechanics that are bad for DPS uptime.

The changes to healer indicate that the designers naively believed this is the same for HPS. Clearly, this isn't the case. There's no reason to heal for even a single point more than the actual damage being output by the boss - but more than that, the higher the damage being output that we have to respond to, the *less* useful many of our tools become. Regen effects favour a just-in-time approach to healing backed up by gradual, modest regeneration ticks, and are much less valuable when healing downtime is low. Shield effects are excellent for managing extremely large single hits - tankbusters and raidwides - but their balance point is a prohibitively poor efficiency for use as a bread-and-butter heal in healing-intensive situations. oGCD shields change this paradigm slightly, but not appreciably.

What we're currently looking at in Shadowbringers is a paradigm in which all three healers have a completely massive, unreasonable HPS output, so large that we're looking at, essentially, the opposite of my desired raiding paradigm. We're looking at a paradigm in which either healers might never have to budget cooldowns even in tight situations because there are simply too many tools... or in which we'll be pushed to our limits on raw HPS without any concern for more complex or interesting mechanics. Imagine a world in which every boss has constant, heavy, but fundamentally uninteresting healer checks like Akh Morn. That's the kind of world that'd need to exist for the tools we've been given to be at all useful.

And guess what - that's also a world in which healers are more dependent on gear and ping than on skill. The higher incoming damage is as a percentage of the receiving player's maximum HP (and might I remind you, VIT materia is being removed), the more necessary topping off (and thus overhealing) are, and the tighter the response time becomes if that damage is sustained. And not everyone plays on an expensive commercial-grade fiber connection five minutes from the data centre. I personally am playing on a US server despite being in the UK on a fairly poor-quality, rural connection, and so latency management is very important... but even if that weren't the case, server-side issues still exist. Healers are already expected to be one step ahead of t he rest of the raid when it comes to learning fights - why add additional pressure we don't even have any way to control?

Yes, what I'm saying is that healers who are excited because their healing tools have been strengthened are perhaps making a mistake. Certainly, powerful healing answers are important. But each one we have is a contingency tool that reduces overall risk, and the very lifeblood of enjoyable healer gameplay is about managing risk. If we're too powerful, there's no risk to manage, and so the emergent, clutch situations that healer mains live for will simply cease to materialise. In short, it's not that these tools are bad - it's that they're too good.

One more thing - I've noticed a few naive players recommending a solution to the 'healer DPS problem' involving increasing our healing uptime via means such as more extensive need for Esuna. This isn't a good idea, and the reason why is plainly apparent to long-term players of MMOs - but I'll spell it out here anyway. In vanilla WoW - Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and the like - mechanics that placed dangerous debuffs on an entire 40-player raid were not uncommon, so much so that people raiding those dungeons would bring healers dedicated entirely to removing debuffs in those fights. This wasn't fun. In fact, it was such a mindless mechanic that addons that automatically targeted the next person in need of debuff cleansing were designed to make it even more mindless so that those healers could stop paying attention and watch movies. Basically, while healing is inherently a responsive play style - as I saw another healer say recently - 'Simon Says' gameplay is, in general, to be avoided. If you're playing 'Simon Says', then your resources are too plentiful for any sort of triage to be necessary.

[Anoin]

Amazing thread that discusses all the real problems with healers. People tend to get lost in the silly fight about who deals more damage, who does stronger healing and who has more raid damage. If only Yoshida read this thread, I think we would be moving in a better direction already. When I first saw the healer changes after the embargo was lifted, I was extremely salty and I was simply unable to analyze why I hated these changes as much as I did, and it seems a lot of people are still in that phase as well.

I hope the devs realize that they need to change their perspective on healers, otherwise this situation is never going to improve. Thank you for the amazing thread, you put everything I was feeling into words extremely well. I wish I had seen this thread before making mine about the exact same subject though.

[MadMonk]

However, there's something interesting to take away from this, which relates to opportunity cost The way I see it, there's only one solution that would actually satisfy everyone - that is, extremely stable healer DPS outputs that are irrespective of healing output in all but the worst triage scenarios

No. A good number of us want healers to actually HAVE to heal, and think that this green dps mentality is toxic and needs to die.

[Kabooa]

Please use the spoiler tag and post editing for exceedingly long posts like this. It makes going through them less painful.

["hb]["/hb] with " removed.

1. For example

You can easily use the bolded text to declare your idea, and then use the bumper to explain further within. In this way, you can convey your information with a simple summary to start, and then back it up here. Those interested will read, those not will not, but for those on the fence, visual presentation helps.

[Urthdigger]

No. A good number of us want healers to actually HAVE to heal, and think that this green dps mentality is toxic and needs to die.

Spoken like a true AFK mage

[Pbuckley818]

Op, this thread is so beautiful it brought a tear to my eye. TY for spending the time to write this wonderful essay full of excellent thought's and critique.

I would like to add that I really want to see more heal/DPS skills like Assize or Earthly Star. Be cool if Astro got a DoT that caused the subject to pulse healing to anyone who attacked it.

I still want my cards back, though. T-T

[Seraphor]

Really, a 6% damage boost for a healer or a 3% damage boost for a DPS... is about comparable.
Tanks may be a different story though, especially as it'll help them maintain aggro too, as well as dealing more damage.

[Greywolfamakir]

In short, Yoshi-P should give us a little more respect and make healer a role people want to play, not just for short queues or to help friends, but because healing is cool and enjoyable!

And like you have played Shaowbringers, you can tell us if Healers will be cool and enjoyable or they won't...but wait...ShB has not been released yet so...

I believe that people are turning their assumptions into facts, and that is by definition A BIG MISTAKE.


A big part of the post isn't really about Shadowbringers's changes, i know it, but that kind of "Manifesto" or posts have no sense since its based on information from sources that warn you "Development footage subject to change"...

[Deceptus]

No. A good number of us want healers to actually HAVE to heal, and think that this green dps mentality is toxic and needs to die.

In other words, anything I don't like is "Toxic" even though the way other people play has no bearing on how I have to play.

No one is forcing you to dps if you don't want to. If you want to be lazy and only use a portion of your kit, that's on you but if you're in group content it's expected that you pull your weight like everyone else is expected to.

A
I believe that people are turning their assumptions into facts, and that is by definition A BIG MISTAKE.

Many of us see the data available (mechanically) and make reasonable assumptions from that data. Of course potencies might change. And when it goes live we'll make more assumptions (what we'd like changed).

The last two expansions doing basically what's going on now gives us confidence that our assumptions are probably going to be right because they were then as well. SE is very consistent with what they put out.