The state of healers is affecting everyone

[Rasikko]

Protect never made any difference. It just gave the illusion of being useful.

[Melichoir]

Agreed. The main issue is that they will never change how these fights are designed. They said they would for ShB, hence the removal of almost all healer DPS options but we see how that ended up. They were banking on the hope that removing Protect and even more tank CDs would force healers to heal more, but then gave all of them more instant cast AoE oGCD heals on top of those they already had thus negating much of the need to force cast GCD heals.

Additionally, they’ve been designing fights around this order for the last 6 and a half years since 2.0’s reboot. For them to just suddenly flip encounter, role design and planning on its head after such a long time of doing the same thing over and over just won’t happen. Not when you realize how easy it is for them to design both fights and how classes work in those fights in this manner, sticking with what they know “works”, regardless of how much parts of their player base -us- dislike it.

Youre essentially complaining that the devs have a formula, which is something all MMOs have. The difficulty is working within that formula to come up with new things. If you want to complain about encounter design, blame the player base, not the devs. Because every time the devs like to throw a curve ball, there comes a torrential downpour of complaints about how 'hard it is' and 'stop making the game for the elite' and 'we need more mid and casual content. I mean theres literally a thread on the forum right now about if E2S is overtuned. While the consensus from posts is that its not, it makes me think of the fact that Encounter design has gotten 'easier' since A1S. From longtime raiders, the consensus that keeps coming up is that Alexander is the best tier for design and difficulty and that everything since then so far has been 'easier' and less interesting.

Protect never made any difference. It just gave the illusion of being useful.

Pretty much. It was something you had to cast from the get go and then leave it on. There was no 'skill check' for using the skill, other than losing it if you died. And that wasnt a huge issue unless most of your party lost it, which meant you had to many people dying anyways to mechanics so you had bigger issues anyways.

[KadaRemnant]

"Hunger isn't a real issue because I eat every day" that's your argument.

I think people should not always look back as how it was but how it is now. Changes are good. You have to learn it again and practice.
I learned and practice and to me, healing is really fun and most of my friends heal too and enjoy them.
When i queue, it doesn't take long as a healer it's sure, but as a dps and tank, the queues don't take long too.
It is different of course, but doesn't mean it is bad. If it needs a healing buff, i don't mind. But the gameplay is still fun.

[SturmChurro]

For me nothing really changed. I only played WHM before, and I still only play WHM. I did level AST to 80, and I plan on leveling my SCH/SMN to 80, but that is just to get them to 80 - not to play them.

[Liam_Harper]

Quite a few healers would. Unfortunately, the devs seem terrified of the prospect this might make healing too hard for baby players.

I'm not sure if it's just the healers the Devs feel can't handle it, or players in general.

To make healing more engaging you'd need to boss to hit the tank like a truck and to spam more unavoidable raid-wides, as well as more dots plus stack and aoe markers. However, in groups that eat mechanics, that constant unavoidable damage will polish them off immediately after, before the healer can get a gcd or two off.

Look at Titania Normal for example. Compared to EX it's stripped down to nothing besides the add phase and couldn't be easier to heal, but groups disband on it. They get hit by everything avoidable and fail everything that takes responsibility. The Devs can't double up on damage and mechanics when dps can't even manage this much.

[Billythepancake]

...

Here\\'s the thing I have an issue with about that argument being too simple, at least have a point to defend it. The people who argue they don\\'t enjoy healing will, more often than not, give reasons for it. As do most people who do enjoy it, but if your entire argument is "I like them they\\'re fine" with nothing to back that up, it adds nothing to the conversation and you may as well not have typed it.

As for the "scholar hasn\\'t lost its identity" thing. It has. The people who say its biggest identity was interaction with the fairy, which okay I can see that, that\\'s mostly gone too with how unresponsive and ,overall, useless the fairy has become. It heals almost nothing outside of Seraph,which is an extremely lengthy CD (and even those heals aren\\'t impressive, it just brings up her embrace to the same levels as Stormblood fairy, but she gets 2 weaker succors as well, not exactly exciting, which is a shame, because I love the idea of SCH having their own version of Bahamut, maybe next expansion she\\'ll actually have an impact. ) It can outright eat CDs too, like, you tell her to use both abilities, there\\'s a good chance she\\'ll only use one of them, but both of them are still going on CD, not to mention, they have to be weaved in now, so they\\'re over glorified oGCDs that take way too long to activate because they, for some reason, still have to go off pet GCDs. It needs to be one of the other, of it goes off pet GCDs, then it needs to be something I can do while casting,if it\\'s my oGCD, it needs to be instant regardless of what fairy is doing. Let\\'s also not forget what they did to poor Selene, outright gutted her and just made her a skin. At this point, the only constant interaction with the fairy is to use her for dissipation, so that half of SCH\\'s identity is gone. The DPS half is gone as well, a thing people seem to forget whenever they say "DPSing was never a part of SCH\\'s identity rada rada" is that, yes it was. SCH stems from ACN, you must start as an ACN, a DPS, to become a SCH,and as such, your very roots are that of a DPS, SCH has always been the healer/DPS hybrid, it was never designed as a pure healer, and them outright gutting that half is unforgivable. SCH, the giant nerd of the game, the one who is constantly learning and reading, is now the only job in the entire game to outright forget abilities as it levels up, explain to me how that makes sense in any way whatsoever. Why would a tactiction, the one that\\'s supposed to be the very best at it, mind you, throw away all of their offensive strategies just to have 1 big, head on, explosion. Why would you not either replace those offensive strategies with better offensive strategies,or keep them in your back pocket? Why is a mage, a super smart one, now forced to sit in the middle of a giant group of enemies for their main AoE instead of doing the much smarter spreading diseases from afar strategy, WHICH THEY ALREADY KNEW HOW TO DO? It makes absolutely no sense.

Is SCH playable? Sure it\\'s strong and it\\'s balanced, but the feel of the class is a hollow shell of what it used to be. And that\\'s just SCH, I\\'m just as happy to delve into what they did to poor AST, they did that class really dirty, all because they didn\\'t want to put in the effort on healers and took the laziest solutions they could. Damn shame.

[Billythepancake]

I think people should not always look back as how it was but how it is now. Changes are good. You have to learn it again and practice.
I learned and practice and to me, healing is really fun and most of my friends heal too and enjoy them.
When i queue, it doesn't take long as a healer it's sure, but as a dps and tank, the queues don't take long too.
It is different of course, but doesn't mean it is bad. If it needs a healing buff, i don't mind. But the gameplay is still fun.

I have learned to play with the new healers, and they're boring. I have done E1s-E4s hoping I could find something to enjoy there. After I learned the fights, it's the same boring thing. Spam 1 button, stop to heal once in awhile, back to spamming.

[Gaethan_Tessula]

I think people should not always look back as how it was but how it is now. Changes are good. You have to learn it again and practice.
I learned and practice and to me, healing is really fun and most of my friends heal too and enjoy them.
When i queue, it doesn't take long as a healer it's sure, but as a dps and tank, the queues don't take long too.
It is different of course, but doesn't mean it is bad. If it needs a healing buff, i don't mind. But the gameplay is still fun.

The implicit assumption that those who dislike the new healers don't know how to play them falls apart given many of the people complaining have already cleared some of the hardest content in the game. Or that the core argument of those who dislike the current healers is that they're boring because the experience is shallow.

I don't have much to learn or practice anymore, and that's the problem. No one's asking for healers to get buffed in terms of healing (at least post-AST buffs). If anything, healing is too powerful.

Is SCH playable? Sure it\\'s strong and it\\'s balanced, but the feel of the class is a hollow shell of what it used to be. And that\\'s just SCH, I\\'m just as happy to delve into what they did to poor AST, they did that class really dirty, all because they didn\\'t want to put in the effort on healers and took the laziest solutions they could. Damn shame.

Let's not forget about how forgotten WHM tends to be, always getting its skills redistributed to other jobs and/or resold back at a higher level with a new bell or whistle. Or how SE mistakes keeping a job approachable and easy to pick up for making it near braindead at high efficiency, especially given that sticking to and making that design the baseline for healers is what got SCH and AST into the situation they're in now.

[Billythepancake]

Let's not forget about how forgotten WHM tends to be, always getting its skills redistributed to other jobs and/or resold back it at a higher level with a new bell or whistle. Or how SE mistakes keeping a job approachable and easy to pick up for making it near braindead at high efficiency, especially given that sticking to and making that design the baseline for healers is what got SCH and AST into the situation they're in now.

Oh for sure,I know they have issues as well, I'm just not as well versed in WHM problems since I didn't play it as much as the order two healers, so I didn't feel the needs to bring it up. I do detest when people say it, or any class really, is fine because it's strong, completely ignoring any actual issues brought up.

[ForteNightshade]

I'm not sure if it's just the healers the Devs feel can't handle it, or players in general.

To make healing more engaging you'd need to boss to hit the tank like a truck and to spam more unavoidable raid-wides, as well as more dots plus stack and aoe markers. However, in groups that eat mechanics, that constant unavoidable damage will polish them off immediately after, before the healer can get a gcd or two off.

Look at Titania Normal for example. Compared to EX it's stripped down to nothing besides the add phase and couldn't be easier to heal, but groups disband on it. They get hit by everything avoidable and fail everything that takes responsibility. The Devs can't double up on damage and mechanics when dps can't even manage this much.

Why do you think that is though? Could it be due to the fact everyone prior to Titania borders on being completely braindead? Almost everything the game offers can be brute forced through with few exceptions. Even Shinryu nowadays can be done with four people because he doesn't have an ilvl sync. When you make so much content this easy, it creates bad habits since the game does nothing to suggest what you've been doing all this time isn't working. After all, you cleared. So why question it?

In regards to healing itself. This is also because our kits are, frankly, overpowered. I don't think it's inherently a bad thing people may die because of "intense" healing checks. They don't have to be crazy hard, especially for normal modes but I really don't think one healer should be able to AFK and make a sandwich. In most 8 man content outside Savage, you could.