The Healer Double Standard

[kidalutz]

I see the problem as follows.

SCH and AST are complaining that thier jobs are no longer engaging. The reality is AST lost nothing to its dps rotation not a single thing for DPS was lost with them. What they're complaining about is the loss of different card effects and being able to prolong utility usage of party buffs to an almost indefinite degree What SCHs are complaining about is the loss of 5 buttons and old energy drain. What both SCH and AST are failing to see is that is the very same crap WHM has had to put up with since the ARR days. Former bestie was the one who talked ime into join ffxiv after I got tired of WoW like myself they main healers in every single MMO they played. I get it I get the complaints I really do SCH in 3.5+ was a blast and AST though nowhere near as enjoyable.( Sorry AST RNG buff cards that get burned for stronger effects usually several draw CDs in a row was more frustrating than engaging SCH was epicly more fun to do. )

That said WHM players have put up with the same thing from the very beginning WHM players asked for the job to be made more fun we got more effin heals and diminishing returns on our one actually good AoE on top of a nerf to its damage. AST and SCH meanwhile were having the time of thier lives and really really didnt seem to give one iota of a care about WHM aside from a passing one aside from those that actually leveled all three and even then it was just to say that yeah WHM is boring. So the fact that there are several WHM mains saying sucks dont it shouldnt even be remotely surprising.

That said I have said before all the endless complaint threads about upcoming changes IF when the new content came out and it was the same as ever that I would join the chorus And so I have kept that promise but those of you that are doing the SHC AST thing need to understand every complaint you have about the classes no longer being engaging was something WHM mains have dealt with since DAY1 I fully agree all the classes should be engaging both in healing and damage /damage mitigation I farther feel all the AoEs that each brings to the table should have some kind of effect to help the party like Holys Stun I think AST AoE should have a Slow and Scholar AoE get a buff that blunts the enemies damage for a few seconds by increasing party members sheilds by a 1/4 of the damage done but the effect only can happen once every 90 seconds I also think that a couple less healing buttons and a couple more dps buttons would help as well. the cards should be all AoE but bring back the effects and have the old tp increase one restore MP slightly faster. give WHM an AoE magic barrier so they can synergize with SCH and AST and for the love of god either remove the stupid water thing or give it back it's damage again.

[Trunks]

Oh yay, let’s cheer for bad game design because you choose to stick with a job you apparently found boring all those years...

I'll be honest, thinking on it now, why is it NOW suddenly a problem WHM is too simple, when it has always been the simple big heals healer?

Oh this is too rich. We have been complaining with varying regularity since they got rid of Cleric Stance, gutting any semblance of unique gameplay. It got worse with Stormblood, when we got another massive slap in the face as everyone got nifty Job gauges and we all disabled our useless Lilies. For all of Stormblood, people said, "just wait for the next expansion! New healer! Rebalancing!" Ha.

Well, here we are, and now it's "why didn't you quit your garbage class sooner, you big fat faker?" Good grief.

FWIW, I'm going Black Mage now. That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to be a White Mage again, if it didn't put me to sleep (literally - ask my static).

[Jerichai]

Oh this is too rich. We have been complaining with varying regularity since they got rid of Cleric Stance, gutting any semblance of unique gameplay. It got worse with Stormblood, when we got another massive slap in the face as everyone got nifty Job gauges and we all disabled our useless Lilies. For all of Stormblood, people said, "just wait for the next expansion! New healer! Rebalancing!" Ha.

Well, here we are, and now it's "why didn't you quit your garbage class sooner, you big fat faker?" Good grief.

FWIW, I'm going Black Mage now. That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to be a White Mage again, if it didn't put me to sleep (literally - ask my static).

Yes, you're exactly right, healer game play has been dumbed down consistently since HW. That you can see this makes it all the more bewildering that you're seemingly cheering SCH getting dumbed down further as some sort of "just desserts" situation. It's literally a sign that SE is willing to continue to make healers more and more mindless to play. Just because you choose to stick with WHM despite recognizing the damage dealing aspect of the job has been boring for years now doesn't make the SCH and AST players somehow villains in this story facing righteous vengeance.

Also throwing works in people's mouth is straight childish my dude. Never called you fat or a faker. Just said if you were unsatisfied with WHM's gameplay, you were always at liberty to play the other two healers at any point. The existing SCH and AST players didn't force you to stay on that job.

[fantasticm]

That you can see this makes it all the more bewildering that you're seemingly cheering SCH getting dumbed down further as some sort of "just desserts" situation.

I think it's less cheering and more bitter realization that WHM will never be fixed for the better, if this is SE's true answer to healer adjustments. It's difficult to be happy about anything after getting repeatedly kicked in the crotch for years and years. But hey, at least we still have Fluid Aura. My man Fluid Aura... trusty guy. Like an old dog, he's not what he used to be, but I love him all the same. He reminds me of better times.

[Jerichai]

I think it's less cheering and more bitter realization that WHM will never be fixed for the better, if this is SE's true answer to healer adjustments. It's difficult to be happy about anything after getting repeatedly kicked in the crotch for years and years. But hey, at least we still have Fluid Aura. My man Fluid Aura... trusty guy. Like an old dog, he's not what he used to be, but I love him all the same. He reminds me of better times.

And to be completely fair, I can totally get that disappointment. Despite it's huge potencies, WHM hasn't really developed a very interesting identity in all the time since ARR. Combine that with the mechanical clunkiness and issues with general community acceptance, I can totally get why WHM players can feel a continued sense of dissatisfaction and hope one day SE can truly overcome that.

What I can't get behind is the seeming glee some WHMs have expressed on this forum and others over the disappointment SCHs and ASTs have expressed over having large parts of their job upended and dumbed down. It just feels petty.

[fantasticm]

What I can't get behind is the seeming glee some WHMs have expressed on this forum and others over the disappointment SCHs and ASTs have expressed over having large parts of their job upended and dumbed down. It just feels petty.

It's petty, but I can't say I don't understand it either. After being ignored by SE for so long, even something as negative as schadenfreude can feel like real relief. It's a sorry sight, but just like WHM's current advantages, it won't last. I sincerely doubt anyone would feel so bitter if it weren't for the fact that WHM was in the unique position of having their requested fixes eternally ignored, all while seeing AST and SCH get picked up when they were struggling... sometimes sooner than later, and sometimes not. But later is better than never. Obviously this is no one's fault other than SE's, but they are unreachable for us peons, and it is only human for people to take out their frustrations on the nearest targets.

As of now I am in a unique position between pessimism and optimism. I am optimistic AST and SCH will see fixes and that this sort of hostility will not last, because I am pessimistic that SE will return the healers to The Stormblood Status Quo.

[Trunks]

Yes, you're exactly right, healer game play has been dumbed down consistently since HW. That you can see this makes it all the more bewildering that you're seemingly cheering SCH getting dumbed down further as some sort of "just desserts" situation. [...]

Also throwing works in people's mouth is straight childish my dude.

I feel like you must be conflating me with some other poster(s) here because I have never expressed the opinion you're attributing to me. What I have expressed is utter exasperation. Let me spell it out very, very plainly so there can be no confusion. White Mage has been suffering from This Problem for the better part of 3 years. We wanted This Problem addressed by giving White Mage an interesting mechanic of its own that allowed us some engaging gameplay a la the Astrologian cards or fairy micromanagement. Instead, SE gave This Problem to SCH and groin-kicked AST with steel-toed boots. Now, there's a growing sense that the severity of the backlash is going to cause SE to fix These Problems for SCH and AST, while leaving us to press our two buttons. It's even worse because the ShB changes have brought all the Sylphies out of the woodwork to talk about how WHM is just the bee's knees now.

There is a complete lack of trust that SE can touch healers with a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer. SCH expressly does not need buffs, as it's likely already on par with WHM for rDPS contribution in Savage content. AST expressly does need buffs but, forgive us, we've just spent two years either rerolling AST or being replaced by them. All it will take is a few potency changes and we're back where we started.

Edit: So, to be completely clear. Yes, I'd love to see SCH have its gameplay issues addressed. They're badly needed. No, I don't want to see AST in a garbage heap. But by the Twelve I really wish fixing both of those things could be a priority for White Mage for once.

[Yuyuka3]

I see the problem as follows.

SCH and AST are complaining that thier jobs are no longer engaging. The reality is AST lost nothing to its dps rotation not a single thing for DPS was lost with them. What they're complaining about is the loss of different card effects and being able to prolong utility usage of party buffs to an almost indefinite degree What SCHs are complaining about is the loss of 5 buttons and old energy drain. What both SCH and AST are failing to see is that is the very same crap WHM has had to put up with since the ARR days. Former bestie was the one who talked ime into join ffxiv after I got tired of WoW like myself they main healers in every single MMO they played. I get it I get the complaints I really do SCH in 3.5+ was a blast and AST though nowhere near as enjoyable.( Sorry AST RNG buff cards that get burned for stronger effects usually several draw CDs in a row was more frustrating than engaging SCH was epicly more fun to do. )

That said WHM players have put up with the same thing from the very beginning WHM players asked for the job to be made more fun we got more effin heals and diminishing returns on our one actually good AoE on top of a nerf to its damage. AST and SCH meanwhile were having the time of thier lives and really really didnt seem to give one iota of a care about WHM aside from a passing one aside from those that actually leveled all three and even then it was just to say that yeah WHM is boring. So the fact that there are several WHM mains saying sucks dont it shouldnt even be remotely surprising.

That said I have said before all the endless complaint threads about upcoming changes IF when the new content came out and it was the same as ever that I would join the chorus And so I have kept that promise but those of you that are doing the SHC AST thing need to understand every complaint you have about the classes no longer being engaging was something WHM mains have dealt with since DAY1 I fully agree all the classes should be engaging both in healing and damage /damage mitigation I farther feel all the AoEs that each brings to the table should have some kind of effect to help the party like Holys Stun I think AST AoE should have a Slow and Scholar AoE get a buff that blunts the enemies damage for a few seconds by increasing party members sheilds by a 1/4 of the damage done but the effect only can happen once every 90 seconds I also think that a couple less healing buttons and a couple more dps buttons would help as well. the cards should be all AoE but bring back the effects and have the old tp increase one restore MP slightly faster. give WHM an AoE magic barrier so they can synergize with SCH and AST and for the love of god either remove the stupid water thing or give it back it's damage again.

Thank you for speaking sense and actually paying attention to WHMs over the years.

Oh this is too rich. We have been complaining with varying regularity since they got rid of Cleric Stance, gutting any semblance of unique gameplay. It got worse with Stormblood, when we got another massive slap in the face as everyone got nifty Job gauges and we all disabled our useless Lilies. For all of Stormblood, people said, "just wait for the next expansion! New healer! Rebalancing!" Ha.

Well, here we are, and now it's "why didn't you quit your garbage class sooner, you big fat faker?" Good grief.

FWIW, I'm going Black Mage now. That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to be a White Mage again, if it didn't put me to sleep (literally - ask my static).

It's utterly frustrating, isn't it?

[Brightamethyst]

IWhat both SCH and AST are failing to see is that is the very same crap WHM has had to put up with since the ARR days. Former bestie was the one who talked ime into join ffxiv after I got tired of WoW like myself they main healers in every single MMO they played. I get it I get the complaints I really do SCH in 3.5+ was a blast and AST though nowhere near as enjoyable.( Sorry AST RNG buff cards that get burned for stronger effects usually several draw CDs in a row was more frustrating than engaging SCH was epicly more fun to do. )

That said WHM players have put up with the same thing from the very beginning WHM players asked for the job to be made more fun we got more effin heals and diminishing returns on our one actually good AoE on top of a nerf to its damage. AST and SCH meanwhile were having the time of thier lives and really really didnt seem to give one iota of a care about WHM aside from a passing one aside from those that actually leveled all three and even then it was just to say that yeah WHM is boring. So the fact that there are several WHM mains saying sucks dont it shouldnt even be remotely surprising.

No one is "failing to see" that. We all know this. That's what the complaining is all about. Almost every single healer comment and suggestion in the past few years was about making WHM more interesting and bringing it up to AST/SCH levels. Literally no one asked for SCH and AST to be brought down and all healers made equally boring. That is the exact opposite of what everyone wanted and expected.

[TonberiScholar]

That said WHM players have put up with the same thing from the very beginning WHM players asked for the job to be made more fun we got more effin heals and diminishing returns on our one actually good AoE on top of a nerf to its damage. AST and SCH meanwhile were having the time of thier lives and really really didnt seem to give one iota of a care about WHM

Not every SCH main didn't care.

I called that WHM was going to have problems back before Stormblood.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...55#post4173955

Just no one really listened.

The expectations that healers parse high is not that prevalent in the wider community - healers DPS to different degrees at different skill levels.

While everything you said here's correct, my word choice was bad.

By "my standards" I mean "this post will be a little less excessively long-winded than my usual".

I didn't quite stick to that, but....yeah.

So I am left wondering what problem you are trying to solve. That is why I say that the interesting interactions you suggested can happen with what we have now.

I don't believe that they're willing to redo all their previous encounter design to accommodate "more healing is required", and kits that get stripped down to fit a "more healing is required" model will end up even being even more intolerably boring in everything that isn't new than they are now.

I know old content, by default, is generally considered trivial. But building old content around one set of healing-required levels and new content around a different one will exacerbate that very quickly.

So basically every "fix" (that's a bit generous, I don't know how well these'd work) is trying to fix what I can without touching their baseline set of encounter design principles, as they relate to Healer-role Jobs.

Which are, roughly:

- Encounter damage is generally spiky but infrequent
- Most mechanics, if you mess them up, are not designed to be consistently healed through
- Mechanics you can brute-force heal through are few and far between
- Increasing healing efficiency leads to (through various direct and indirect methods) overall increased party DPS
- The penalty for bad healing generally isn't "you all die due to attrition"
- The penalty for bad healing is generally "you didn't heal the survivable mechanics, people died and you don't meet Enrage".
- Healer "growth" is a path from healing inefficiency (low active time, wasteful MP or cooldown use, missed save opportunities) to healing efficiency
- It is possible to be at maximum healing efficiency and still not be able to complete some encounters
- It is possible to be quite inefficient at healing and still be able to complete most encounters
- Encounter execution "growth" is separate from "Healing growth" and involves dealing with mechanics
- Encounter growth will often stonewall parties even when the Healers have peaked at the level of efficiency their personal skillset allows

Would you agree with the above, or have I missed something? I'm kinda reverse-engineering their design principles based on how I see them create encounters, but that doesn't mean I'm correct about it.

Why shouldn't dropped healing GCDs be punishing?

I disagree with the second statement. The reason why they can't make content require too much healing is because it is too variable and unpredictable, depending on your party. Player consistency would become more important and because consistency is not a strong point at low skill levels it would make the encounter too difficult.

Encounters would be either too hard at low skill levels or too easy at high skill levels - a product of SE trying to appeal to two groups that have different interests and expectations from the encounters in the game.

Dropped GCDs have to be punishing. The problem is, the amount of punishment they inflict is relatively standard across both "easy content" and "difficult content".

Dropping a Healing GCD when it's not needed doesn't really matter. Dropping a Healing GCD when it's needed can be lethal to the party.

Healing through GCDs is a blunt instrument that scales too well at lower levels and too poorly at higher levels (as a proportion of your used combat time).

It's fine in easier content to sit and watch until you need to start pre-casting or reactively casting a heal. That "wait and see" method is incentivized because not doing what you should when you should is lethal, but not doing anything the rest of the time is non-lethal, usually.

oGCDs were added as a safety net for easier content but they end up being used to get around GCD use in harder content.

Encounters are tuned by making the Savage/Extreme version and then removing mechanics to make the normal version.

If the Savage/Extreme version started off requiring GCD-locked healing at points, or random damage that's designed to not be healable with oGCD tools, that'd mean that the Normal mode fights would have to be designed entirely differently, beyond just removing mechanics.

And that will make "easier" content too difficult for most Healers at that level to complete.

That's what I mean about the "dropped GCDs being too punishing for healing" thing. You can't break your actionable windows into smaller/more frequent windows, so you have to design the available windows based around the "difficult" version and then remove mechanics to add more windows.

But (like you said), consistency is a skill that's generally harder to pick up at lower overall skill levels.

And making content require more healing through GCDs would greatly exacerbate the "healing is harder at low skill levels" thing.

By setting that expectation you are exacerbating the downtime problem. OGCD healing is the cause of healing downtime.

I disagree with this bit entirely.

Healing "skill" would still end up at minimizing the use of GCD heals even if there weren't any oGCD heals in the game. There would still be downtime, there would just be a little bit less of it.

Even if it ends up being a rather distorted point of "every Healer only melds Spellspeed and Piety", people would find a way to create healing downtime even without oGCDs.

Removing oGCDs would be a bigger problem at the low end (it takes away recovery tools) than at the higher end (they'd just optimize GCD healing better).

And due to the actionable windows thing I mentioned above, you can't set every encounter to require even something like 50% of all potential actionable GCD windows to require healing. People would drown.

oGCDs existing or being completely removed won't change any of that.

No content requires optimization. It happens either consciously (people actively trying to optimize) and subconsciously (people know the encounter well enough that they do things they otherwise wouldn't in their first clear).

This is another problem with my word choice, I think.

It's a very low level of optimization in some cases, but "optimization required" content is anything with a DPS Check or Enrage you have to pass.

Anything with a lose condition other than "everyone runs out of HP at the same time", basically. I was trying to find a way to refer to anything with time pressure because that's generally one of the things that separates "normal modes" and "savage" (amongst others).

I just didn't do a very good job of it.

I do think healing should be nerfed (especially OGCDs) and it has indirectly through the disproportionate scaling of Health Pools. And while this would increase healing uptime - it would merely inflate it, not fix the problem. I do keep bringing up encounter design because that is the only way of adding unpredictability for higher skill levels, where this healing downtime issue is most prevalent.

I mentioned this above (I think), but every fix I'm talking around assumes they aren't going to revamp all their prior content to fit a new content design standard.

And making Jobs that don't fit with your old content is a problem that just gets bigger and bigger with content accretion.

I'd rather a fix that manages to fit within their existing content design philosophy/standards/precedents while still addressing the downtime issue.

I think the root solution would be to change healing from a healing minimization/DPS optimization problem to an attrition problem (both in resources and time), and have downtime tools be split off as a separate resource or a non-resource-consumer.

You're still rewarded for doing DPS that way (because that helps you not run out of resources), but you'd also be rewarded for efficient use of healing tools.

Swapping from mostly flat GCD spells with some oGCDs to a set of defined/standardized oGCDs and GCDs that interact with the Job's kit/mechanic/downtime in some fashion (charge up Lily nuke, provide buffs or something else) would be the way I'd prefer they go about doing it, but it's not the only way.

But no matter what they do, here's my main "wants" or "points" that I feel they have to acknowledge:

- The things you do in healing downtime should be interesting, useful, optional to survival and able to be stopped if you need to go back to healing.

- The things you do in healing downtime should have some positive effect on your healing uptime

- Healer growth should scale from "watching when to use your healing uptime tools and avoiding your downtime tools" to "using your downtime tools to support your uptime tools"

- If they have to homogenize for balance, I'd rather it be done on the oGCD level than the GCD level. The former has far less an impact on content "feel" than the latter, since you spend far more time in combat using GCD abilities than you do oGCD abilities.

- Healer Role healing downtime should be used as a distinguishing tool between Jobs because it's easier to do that without breaking random Healer DF team viability