Disheartened healer annoyed with Shadowbringers' difficulty

[Shurrikhan]

You're mistaking have good dps(teammates) with dpsing as a healer when your tank needs heals. Holy til it's worthless is fine but all the matters is that everyone is still alive by the time your mana hits 0. Wall-to-wall pulls are largely about actually healing.

You'll heal more than you'll use holy that's for sure.

When? Where? With myself and my party geared only in AF, alongside a tank and dps geared similarly, it was still 80+% Holy spam during wall-to-wall pulls on our first ever run.

Maybe on AST this holds true somewhat, but not across the entire role, that's for sure.

[RopeDrink]

You'll heal more than you'll use holy that's for sure.

Er, no.

You will need to heal, sure, yet even if you are reduced to mashing CureII after having weaved all OGCD's between your Holy spam and left with no alternative, you will still have pressed Holy at an 80-20 ratio vs healing the tank. My last dungeon (before going on a crafting binge) was an EX-Roul (Twinning) with a solid DRK. The DPS was so-so, some of which died a few times due to probably being their first time, yet despite the mass-pulls dragging on longer than normal, it was a Holy AoE explosion party with only a few moments of needing to stop DPS entirely. This applies to all dungeons I had while levelling up, all dungeons I did to grind the tome Set, and all dungeons this week in full tome set.

You would need to head to Akademia (one of few with an early triple-pull) with a tissue-wearing tank for your comment to apply, which is one pull in all the ShB content and requires a weak tank to be remotely challenging -- and even then you WILL be casting Holy.

[Fawkes]

Don't believe me? I stream pretty regularly. Failing that, I could make some simple videos of me healing dungeons. Unless a tank is wearing tissue paper and/or being a mitigation scrooge, all you're going to see is holy explosions 24/7 with the odd Heal thrown in. Worse case scenario is DPS being asleep and mass-pulls going on forever, to a point where a tank eventually gets low enough to render you into cure-spam territory, which is quite easily remedied by oGCD's if you have them, but can (eventually) become a problem with enough damage and no backup buttons.

If you or anyone else has videos of something like a Duty Finder Qitana Ravel where you DPS even half as much as you heal, I would very much like to see that.

Either I lose the tank lottery 100% of the time or there are two different games out there called Final Fantasy XIV and we aren't playing the same one.

[NorthernLadMSP]

IMO, there is nothing different about the outgoing damage in this expansion vs. any other. You're leveling with tanks that are also leveling. Nothing I've seen yet proves it will be any different than all of the other years I've been healing in this game. The only difference is that SCH now has far less interesting ways of doing DPS in downtime and AST sounds so awful I don't even really care if I ever get it to 80.

[Schan]

well yes... there is a massive difference on how easy is it to heal once you're decked in tome gear + EX jewelery and weapons. I certainly noticed a massive difference when it came to AST. I went from having to use my whole kit + Bene 2 spam everytime and praying that the tank knew what they were doing (sometimes it wasn't enough even if i used everything) to... just having to use the oGCD stuff and the tank was fine.

it does get better OP

[HyoMinPark]

You'll heal more than you'll use holy that's for sure.

Not really. I leveled WHM recently and still Holy’d more than I Cure II’d. And this was with tanks doing standard double pulls in the leveling dungeons. It was night and day compared to AST, where I actually had to heal more than I could Gravity.

[Dualblade]

I'd say saying 80% is an exaggeration, for me it was closer to 50% of the time. Course I don't Savage raid nor is healing my most played role thus I'm not as comfortable when tanks get low on me.

[Schan]

From a fight design standpoint you still have way too much downtime. Titania EX can be done with just oGCD healing just like most previous fights.

On a practical min-maxing side your healing capabilities revolves around only using your oGCDs to heal and use the GCDs to DPS. It might not be what the devs want but it's what the players are doing with what the devs have given us. It doesn't help that from a kit design point of view they keep giving us strong oGCD heals. Basically our strongest heals have no cast time, are off the GCD AND no mana cost.You want us to use GCDs to heal? stop doing this. Seriously.

Furthermore we got the DPS tools removed / reduced and we are still stuck with the same if not more downtime because we're so focused on healing now. In return we get to spam 2 buttons if we don't want to sit around twiddling our thumbs. yaay...

I find it amusing how people kept trying to tell the devs there's no point in WHM being the healer powerhouse because nothing in the game required that much healing and if it did it would make WHM mandatory... only to have the devs double down on it and make every healer have tons of healing tools and give every healer the AST dps tools which was something no AST has ever wished for any other healer because of how dull it is.

They have been doubling down on all the wrong things.... again. Seriously one of the devs needs to be forced to play exclusively healer as homework since it doesn't look like any of them play healer. They also need to do a better job at comparing notes when giving roles similar skills. The disparity of strength between the "bubble" skill between healers is ridiculous.

[MerlinCross]

From a fight design standpoint you still have way too much downtime. Titania EX can be done with just oGCD healing just like most previous fights.

Possibly. I haven't leveled WHM yet or done EX but the sheer idea of just leaning on oGCD terrorfies me. I admit though I am very much a panic healer; the kind that throws out dots, maybe a couple damage abilities while still tossing a cure/heal, toss the AoE heal... and then semi panic when people start getting clipped by stuff.

While it might be possible for Healers to get away with oGCD doesn't mean every player of a healer can do so.

[Urthdigger]

Possibly. I haven't leveled WHM yet or done EX but the sheer idea of just leaning on oGCD terrorfies me. I admit though I am very much a panic healer; the kind that throws out dots, maybe a couple damage abilities while still tossing a cure/heal, toss the AoE heal... and then semi panic when people start getting clipped by stuff.

While it might be possible for Healers to get away with oGCD doesn't mean every player of a healer can do so.

It's just a matter of learning the fight. I don't fault any healer for playing conservatively and keeping players topped off while they're still learning a fight, but there are some things you notice after a while. Using Titania as an example, I just have to use one oGCD AoE heal for Bright Sabbath, and then another for Flame Rune a while later, and then I'm good as far as AoE heals goes until the add phase. For the tank, just toss one on them if they're getting low (and not even then if they have Excog, I can just let them go down to 50% to pop it), or if I see Divination Rune being cast (And honestly I should just learn when those are so I can toss one there.)

I encourage healers to DPS as much as they can, but that's not to say to neglect healing. Rather, I feel that any healer worth their salt has what it takes to learn a fight and learn to optimize their toolkit to heal people as fast and with as few GCDs and MP as possible.