Disheartened healer annoyed with Shadowbringers' difficulty

[RopeDrink]

Shadowbringers is but a step towards making things 'right' again by having healers actually heal.

Are we even playing the same expansion? Just did a run immediately after posting here and once again, with any remotely half-decent tank you will not be healing much at all as a WHM. Then there's the fact that fights such as EX Titania literally force-feed you the largest slice of downtime I have ever seen in a Trial of any difficulty. It's obscene how little a Healer actually needs to do for said fight compared to almost anything else. Either I'm the best WHM in the world, or individuality/skill/gear/playstyle is causing a huge gap between X Healer and Y Healer when it comes to discerning what is and isn't 'difficult'. I won't deny it's been (slightly) more challenging than previous expos, but not to a majorly noticeable degree.

This was the same for me when levelling as it is for me at max level, with the most freedom to do damage. The reality is that certain dungeons provide much more unavoidable damage and/or potential for more 'chaotic' moments where otherwise avoidable damage is just more likely to land a hit on some people - which are things that become less of a threat when a) People learn it properly and b) Gear progresses. Example being "The First Beast", where you have to contend with arena-travelling meteor patterns AFTER the normal unavoidable meteor drop THEN a 4x purple marker all at once before the 2nd Final Sky, which has plenty of AoE damage (unavoidable x2) with a constant risk of more damage due to positioning, and yet I see Dragoons tanking a fallen building down to 5% health in relatively standard gear.

In short, it is an illusion of 'harder healing' brought on by more frantic mechanics and moments scattered throughout dungeons with fancier mechanics than most are used to, at the EARLIEST point of a brand new expansion where gear is very just slightly above minimum IL (assuming you have got the full tome-set at the very least). A lesser (levelling) example would be 2nd Boss in Ravel which spews out constant AoE slams for unavoidable (and quite potent) damage for anyone in basic levelling gear. Without a single heal it will quite easily reduce most players to 20%'ish simultaneously over time, yet one Plane-MedII solves it.

When you see past these things, it is not all that different from Stormblood. Hell, even HSW, such as Tiamat or dungeons like the Aery... Basically any of the old bullet-hell dungeons that hit harder than wet tissue. I would be more fearful of HSW Vault or SB Mettle (before the class/stat rework) back when such dungeons provided a very high damage spike. Those could get nasty. ShB dungeons have been an absolute blast, yet also no major threat to me from start to finish regardless of the gear I had or level I approached the dungeon with. The only challenge has been mega-pulls by squish-tanks, which can be a test no matter what expansion you talk about.

[Xelanar]

Are we even playing the same expansion? Just did a run immediately after posting here and once again, with any remotely half-decent tank you will not be healing much at all as a WHM. Then there's the fact that fights such as EX Titania literally force-feed you the largest slice of downtime I have ever seen in a Trial of any difficulty. It's obscene how little a Healer actually needs to do for said fight compared to almost anything else. Either I'm the best WHM in the world, or individuality/skill/gear/playstyle is causing a huge gap between X Healer and Y Healer when it comes to discerning what is and isn't 'difficult'. I won't deny it's been (slightly) more challenging than previous expos, but not to a majorly noticeable degree.

This was the same for me when levelling as it is for me at max level, with the most freedom to do damage. The reality is that certain dungeons provide much more unavoidable damage and/or potential for more 'chaotic' moments where otherwise avoidable damage is just more likely to land a hit on some people - which are things that become less of a threat when a) People learn it properly and b) Gear progresses. Example being "The First Beast", where you have to contend with arena-travelling meteor patterns AFTER the normal unavoidable meteor drop THEN a 4x purple marker all at once before the 2nd Final Sky, which has plenty of AoE damage (unavoidable x2) with a constant risk of more damage due to positioning, and yet I see Dragoons tanking a fallen building down to 5% health in relatively standard gear.

In short, it is an illusion of 'harder healing' brought on by more frantic mechanics and moments scattered throughout dungeons with fancier mechanics than most are used to, at the EARLIEST point of a brand new expansion where gear is very just slightly above minimum IL (assuming you have got the full tome-set at the very least). A lesser (levelling) example would be 2nd Boss in Ravel which spews out constant AoE slams for unavoidable (and quite potent) damage for anyone in basic levelling gear. Without a single heal it will quite easily reduce most players to 20%'ish simultaneously over time, yet one Plane-MedII solves it.

When you see past these things, it is not all that different from Stormblood. Hell, even HSW, such as Tiamat or dungeons like the Aery... Basically any of the old bullet-hell dungeons that hit harder than wet tissue. I would be more fearful of HSW Vault or SB Mettle (before the class/stat rework) back when such dungeons provided a very high damage spike. Those could get nasty. ShB dungeons have been an absolute blast, yet also no major threat to me from start to finish regardless of the gear I had or level I approached the dungeon with. The only challenge has been mega-pulls by squish-tanks, which can be a test no matter what expansion you talk about.

I feel like this statement doesn’t apply to WHM at all—I spend more time casting Holy than I do using healing GCDs/oGCDs in dungeons. With AST, you’d maybe have a point, as they do have to work harder to heal trash packs in dungeons compared to the other two healers. But on single-targets, there’s still a lot of down time for healers to DPS, just as there has been the last two expansions. I don’t find the healing any more or less difficult, personally.

I cannot speak for Whitemages, but Astrologians definitely have to do more healing than before. Maybe I should add that 'before' for an Astrologian was 'stack HoTs on tank and then DPS' for basically every boss or add group during dungeons. I'm not talking about savage content or Ex Primals, but simply dungeons(which is what our TE is refering to in the opening post), because for my experience in those, I had to actually heal instead of ignoring any type of damage to the party since it would never be lethal anyways.

If Whitemages can still ignore everything resembling a heal then I probably should not have generalized my experience as an AST during early access.

[HyoMinPark]

I cannot speak for Whitemages, but Astrologians definitely have to do more healing than before. Maybe I should add that 'before' for an Astrologian was 'stack HoTs on tank and then DPS' for basically every boss or add group during dungeons. I'm not talking about savage content or Ex Primals, but simply dungeons(which is what our TE is refering to in the opening post), because for my experience in those, I had to actually heal instead of ignoring any type of damage to the party since it would never be lethal anyways.

If Whitemages can still ignore everything resembling a heal then I probably should not have generalized my experience as an AST during early access.

I agree with you that AST has a much harder time healing. I leveled it to 80 after completing the MSQ on DNC, and there were some instances where I struggled—it simply doesn’t have the potency anymore to upkeep a lot of DPS on trash pulls. It doesn’t help that some of our oGCD tools (CU, COpp) were either gutted or changed—I really miss COpp’s Stun and ability to extend regens. What we got in exchange for that is fairly weak for its cooldown. I leveled WHM after getting AST to 80, and it was night and day by comparison. I have yet to level SCH (focusing on BRD and crafters/gatherers right now), but I’ve heard it doesn’t struggle as much as AST does on pulls. With single-target, I believe all three healers are more or less the same, just WHM annihilates with its personal damage compared to the other two, SCH annihilates with its healing potency, and AST is weaker than both in terms of both aspects (but not a huge enough detriment that it’s unplayable).

AST does need some love at some point. I’m curious to see if the balance patch that will drop before Savage will involve potency buffs for it of some sort.