Wedging healers into a pure healing role may have some advantages.

[Brandedblade]

it's like the devs are allergic to fun and innovation, yet addicted to regressive design.

Wow. Just. Wow. I'm sensing quite a bit of projecting here.

[Lyth]

I'm not entirely sure that everyone means the same thing by "intensive healing".

I mean, you could quite easily create a fight where players are healing for 90% of the time, yet doing so quite comfortably. There has to be a failure condition, otherwise there is no challenge, and no accomplishment.

When you look at older games which do this, the failure condition is "attrition". Your party generally doesn't die because you don't heal them in time. They don't die because you don't heal them enough. They die because you run out of resources, and then your heals dry up.

It reminds me of the original version of FF1, where your WHM would have like 6 Cure 1s and 2 Cure 2s to use in the entire dungeon. And it wasn't over when you beat the boss. You then had to have some resources left over to climb back out. I still have bad memories of my Fighter and Black Mage clawing their way out of the fire pits of Mount Gulg after defeating Marilith, dragging the shattered husk of my team with them on the long canoe ride back to town.

It's also built for a different pace of game. Think early Warcraft's MP5 gear, rotating your active healers so that they can recover MP, picnic breaks after every pull. It's also much more gear dependent than skill dependent.

In FFXIV, the failure condition is "timing". In that way, it's a bit closer to how healing works in a PvP game against human opponents. The boss isn't trying to wear you down. They just want to burst you into oblivion so that the annoying little healer won't be able to mend the team's wounds back up again. Your team dies when you don't respond in the allocated time window.

So how do you make a fight like this more challenging? It still isn't healing uptime. You have to decrease the time interval for a follow-up attack, and increase the frequency of the bursts.

To be fair, I think tank design is partially to blame here. You have savage fights with maybe five tankbusters. Four of those can be managed with invulns between your two tanks. The remainder gets mitigated with an obscene amount of defensives, because let's be real, there's nothing else that we need to reserve them for.

It also feels like there are less cleaves nowadays. Cleaves are what make your on-demand mitigation moves more interesting, and what spice up the damage patterns for healers. P1 Nael felt oppressive the first time you fought her. It wasn't the Ravensbeaks with their 2 second cast window that did it. It was the unmarked Ravensclaws that hit you for more than half your health which you had to predict. And let's not forget the joys of Sword Oath Sheltron vs. Living Liquid's cleaves. I don't think tanking ever felt so good (outside of A7S, but I'm biased towards fights with lots of positioning and movement).

I can't comment as much on the healing side of things, but I think unless you see a significant nerf to tank invulns, and a change to fight design in favour of more intricate damage patterns, you're probably not going to see a satisfying healing challenge soon. Which is fine for most of the playerbase. I suspect that it's a case of "be careful of what you wish for."

[ForteNightshade]

I like how everyone for the healer changes are either extremely bad healers or don't play healers at all, and the ones against it actually play healers and are good at their job.

Really puts things into perspective. It's fine if you either don't care about healer changes or are not effected about healer changes because you never learned what optimizing on a job is, but at least let the healers who knows what they're talking about get their feedback and opinions out to SE without a "shut up everything is fine" remark every other post.

Unfortunately, the dev team thinks that by constantly listening to those players, it will increase the healer pool. If anything, I fully anticipate Healing in Need to dominate this expansion; relieving tanks for the first time ever.

Because she's making a bad assumption. I can speak for myself as someone who does do all of the dps/ogcd weaving/optimization/yaddi yadda and I'm still overtly optimistic about the changes. Whm got their extra mobility and even a nuke to help mitigate their dps loss from healing, sch had its rotation streamlined and redundant skills removed, and ast, while its illusion of choice was removed, gained consistency with its rdps contribution.

And all three healers became extremely simplistic in their design. White Mage received yet more healing—to the point it's currently being speculated optimization will involve burning Lilies regardless if necessary just to get to Misery. If this turns out true, we now have Assize nonsense where you aren't using it as a heal but damage half the time.

Astro, meanwhile, has become completely brain dead. "Illusion" of choice is better than toss out out half your cards on a Samurai and the other half on a Black Mage. If you get your Seals early, enjoy mindlessly Minor Arcana for the next three minutes. Were Boles situational? Yes. But they could have expanded on that instead of making cards basic.

[Brandedblade]

Unfortunately, the dev team thinks that by constantly listening to those players, it will increase the healer pool. If anything, I fully anticipate Healing in Need to dominate this expansion; relieving tanks for the first time ever.



And all three healers became extremely simplistic in their design. White Mage received yet more healing—to the point it's currently being speculated optimization will involve burning Lilies regardless if necessary just to get to Misery. If this turns out true, we now have Assize nonsense where you aren't using it as a heal but damage half the time.

Astro, meanwhile, has become completely brain dead. "Illusion" of choice is better than toss out out half your cards on a Samurai and the other half on a Black Mage. If you get your Seals early, enjoy mindlessly Minor Arcana for the next three minutes. Were Boles situational? Yes. But they could have expanded on that instead of making cards basic.

Well my apologies that this game isnt catering to your personal needs then.

[Knoahl]

Wow. Just. Wow. I'm sensing quite a bit of projecting here.

Interperet how you like, you seem to also do the same. lol

[Loki]

I like how everyone for the healer changes are either extremely bad healers or don't play healers at all, and the ones against it actually play healers and are good at their job.

Really puts things into perspective. It's fine if you either don't care about healer changes or are not effected about healer changes because you never learned what optimizing on a job is, but at least let the healers who knows what they're talking about get their feedback and opinions out to SE without a "shut up everything is fine" remark every other post.

Don't worry when we will waste more than 45min for a simple dungeon or will have more difficulties than right now for some HL content, the people you are talking about will agree too that all those changes sucks or will yell on their healers for not helping with dps XD

[Brandedblade]

Interperet how you like, you seem to also do the same. lol

Hey. You're the one calling the game regressive, I'm sorry not every aspect of this game can cater to you.

[Knoahl]

Hey. You're the one calling the game regressive, I'm sorry not every aspect of this game can cater to you.

I am calling the game regressive, it's an opinion, the systems are going backwards, healer design is not improving. Thus why so many people aren't happy. "Anyone can have an opinion"... Also you don't need to apologise to me, you're not the development team/combat team lol!

[ForteNightshade]

Well my apologies that this game isnt catering to your personal needs then.

It isn't catering towards a lot of people. Which is why the healer forums have been on fire. For someone who supposedly optimizes, you certainly don't give off that impression.

[Hustensaft]

I think that when you choose a healing role that should be 75% - 90% of what you're doing.

We're currently at 20-30% healing... To reach your 75-90%, you'd need a massive increase in raid damage taken outside of your generic dancy mechanics. That is never going to happen.

And even in the case it's going to happen, what glorious gameplay would accompany it? The GCD healing kit of all healers is just as copy-pasted as the DPS toolkit it. You can either spam Broil/Glare/Malefic or Cure/Physik/Benefic or Helios/Succor/Medica.... in the end it's the identical button on all three classes.

The truth is: the GCD toolkit, wether healing or dps, of all healers is atrociously bad designed: