The state of healers is affecting everyone

[Melichoir]

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Reasons are fine and dandy but dont think that all reasons are worth considering. Someone saying they dont like healing because of specific mechanics and design choices is vastly different than someone saying they dont think the spells are pretty. Just saying.

Speaking of SCH, I disagree. No, it hasnt lost its identity. Its core was a Healer with Pet management. Thats what it was from the get go. Being able to DPS was a byproduct of that design that people latched onto. If youre complaint is buggyness of the Fairy, thats an issue to put forward for the devs because that probably isnt an intended design choice, and goes back to the point that no one is saying the classes are perfect. Tuning and tweaking is still necessary. Unless its a thing where you tell your fairy to cast two things so she stops one action to perform the other. In that case, thats you mismanaging. This would be no different than being a monk, using Anatman, and then immediately moving after the cast. Furthermore, gonna bet that fairy healing is a lot more significant than you are giving credit for. The fact it doesnt heal as much as it used to (relatively speaking) probably has more to do with the fact they dont want the fairy to be the healer and you DPS. Again, SCH is a healer with pet management. Its not a DPS with a pet that Heals.

As for Selene changes, that again came down to balance issues when the class was changed. While that may not be ideal, They did not want SCH to have a broader buff kit provided, and streamlined it to be on par with other healers. From selene, the only worthwhile skill that you lost was Fey Caress, and Fey Wind (essentially an AoE Esuna) was not something they thought necessary because most encounters currently dont have tons of Debuffs to cleanse unless you mess up. Even with that consideration, it meant replacing Esuna so itd free up an GCD in case someone did mess up. Thats something they wanted you to probably decide on - remove teh debuff or use time to heal or burn up the aetherflow to heal and run Esuna. Beyond that, what were you wanting out of Selene?

As for the Argument that it comes from ARC, so therefore DPS is part of its design, again no, not really. ARC was a thing when they were trying out the idea of splitting two jobs from one single class. Think of it akin to Specs from WoW, or job roles from things like RO. Its the same idea conceptually. Thematically, it borrows some aspects from from Arc but specializes in a particular role for combat - in this case SCH is a healer, SMN is a DD. If you want to use the concept of ARC was a damage dealer, why did it have a tank pet? And mind you, in some early iterations, that tank wasnt a joke. It had functionality. If it was all about that sweet damage, there wouldnt be a tank pet. The issue with this idea of it was always a damage dealer as part of its identity is a contrivance people came up with when they had a byproduct of the class design. The problem, as a point, is that SCH could do good DPS AND good healing at the same time due to the fairy. From a purely balance perspective among healers, this isnt ideal. In content that is driven by DPS checks, this makes SCH much more optimal.

If you want to pull that "Lore" point, if your job is to be a medic, youre not going to be learning how to operate a tank, even if its something you mightve done in the past. You have a job, thats it. From a more pragmatic game design point, you want to keep those skills but have SE just nerf the damage so you are forced to consider if you even want to spend a GCD on them? Because the issue is SCH is a healing role, not a DPS, and that means trimming if they want it to be more inline with that and other healers. But this again points to the fact that the biggest complaint is having its dps trimmed, not that it can heal.

And thats the crux of the problem. You think it feels hollow because you are used to it being a damage dealer with a side of healing. Thats how many SCH approached the job - a damage dealer that has heals too. Its 'hollow' cause you dont deal damage like you used to. That to me is you preferring the big DEEPS with a side of healing, then you did healing with a side of deeps. Because if were gonna talk about it being an issue, most SCH wouldnt have quit healing; they wouldve migrated to WHM. Instead, the consensus is "I hate SCH now cause it sucks healing, so Imma go be a dps or tank. Healing is dead."

That point is misleading, because its saying that the issue with SCH is healing (which it isnt), and that they want to heal, but are instead going to go do a DPS class or Tank instead of rotating to a supposedly more powerful healer (WHM.) Beyond all this, its purely speculation. You hate the devs direction in design and call it laziness, when theyve been trying for 2 xpacs now to balance the healers and have pretty much failed - WHM getting the brunt of it mostly IMO. Its also why we didnt get another healer. Imagine balancing a 4th healer when the other 3 are so far out of balance. Now that the healers are a lot more balanced (with some caveat to AST, tweaking and tuning is still needed IMO), people are calling the devs lazy and terrible. Im sure if people are great at game design here, they wouldve offered ideas and been real about things, which wouldve actually acknowledged that nerfing some damage aspect of SCH was probably necessary. But from what I remember, it was dont touch anything in SCH or AST, and just throw a few dps skills or utility at WHM and all will be cool, with very little of those giving serious consideration to balance or power creep. But thats my assessment, and Im not silly enough to not know its not a popular opinion. Its ok in the end. If people hate SCH, they can play WHM for healing, or swap to a DPS. I highly doubt theyre gonna revert SCH or AST. Theyll tweak or buff them, but as it stands, the stats tend to point in the direction that healing and damage wise, the 3 healers are a lot closer to parity than they have been before. So changing them back probably wont be happening.

[Gaethan_Tessula]

I think it's a bit strange to argue any job, in a game where no content forces using healing GCD's even half the time, is "a healer with a side of DPS." That may be the intended design of the job, but Square Enix isn't providing encounters that fit that design. Especially in normal content where even below average healers should have a big chunk of downtime.

As people have said, "why not ask for more healing then?" Two reasons:

1. We have as well, or would, but have no faith Square Enix will do so. They've shown every interest in making tanking and healing easier over the years, not harder. Forcing more decisions on healing, more mana management, and giving less breathing room does not fit with that perceived goal.

2. Actually bringing triage back would require massive nerfs or cuts to the healing kits of every healer, or for encounter design to be changed in such a radical way that either a) the entire game would need to be altered or b) there's a point at which the encounter design does a whiplash. Those are huge changes that go down to core design, and one of them (only make new healing heavy encounters) does nothing to address the tedium of anything at lower levels which remains unaltered (and also ensures that new healers are actively misled about the nature of healing in the game).

So, instead, we ask for something that fits into the current design as applied (which is more important than design as intended this late into the game's lifespan). What fits into that design is a secondary role to play when no healing is needed. DPS is an easy answer, and is probably easier to balance than the alternative of giving every healer support kits with low duration, GCD support spells (which is actually my preferred option).

I mean, the other option I can think of is make the default party solo healer with the current kits. That still has its problems, but it certainly would force more healing GCDs and a playstyle closer to a traditional holy trinity MMO healer.

[Hyperia]

I still think they would get more healers if they made healing more interesting outside of instant cast OGC heals and DPS spam. Look at any other MMO and healers are usually too busy healing or doing utility. Sure there are times where they can DPS but those games made DPS expensive so they use it carefully. I'd go back to healing if healers went back to healing with a large kit and a few DPS abilities to be used sparingly. But I don't see that happening though. It wouldn't surprise me to see healers removed all together in 6.0 for self heals and AOE heals being given to the utility jobs like DNC, because they are still struggling to balance healers and cant figure out how to make 3 healers work.

[KadaRemnant]

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.

All i wanted to say is i love healing jobs and will contibue to enjoy them like many others i know.
But i learned too that in forums, no one can ever be happy no matter what.
SE needs to know some enjoy it and rarely post here because we are too busy enjoying the game.

And i am never bored.

[Billythepancake]

All i wanted to say is i love healing jobs and will contibue to enjoy them like many others i know.
But i learned too that in forums, no one can ever be happy no matter what.
SE needs to know some enjoy it and rarely post here because we are too busy enjoying the game.

And i am never bored.

I can be happy, if they gave me back SB SCH or something equivalent, I would stop complaining, or at the very least not complain nearly as much, and go back to enjoying the game much more. People complain because they want change, and the forums are the only outlet we have to do that. If Yoshi P gave me some sort of other outlet where I could be more direct with him and his team, I would gladly take it, but this is my only option so I'll use what I have and be as vocal as I can be until I either, A: give up hope entirely, or B: they change things for the better.

[Billythepancake]

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As I broght up, yes, pet management was a part of SCH identity, but with the uselessness of the fairy, as well as how unresponsive it is, that is largely out the window. a 3-4k embrace isn't going to heal much, especially when I can't even decide who it goes on. It could go on either the tank actually taking autos, or it could go on the DPS missing 10 hp, I dunno, I have no say in the matter anymore, Relatively isn't even the right word, it straight up heals less, it heals 3-4k now, when it healed 6-8k back in SB, and not only does it heal less, everyone has more HP. The entire point of the fairy is to save me and my co-healer some healing ,to take some of the burden off of our shoulders, and it doesn't do that anymore, especially considering it's main 2 abilities must now be weaved in, you know, on top of the other 1 billion heals I have, making her a glorified oGCD.

For Selene changes, yeah, EOS was certainly a better pick in most content, but instead of doing the harder, and better, option of, I dunno, making Selene actually competitive with EOS, they outright removed her. Would it have taken more work to do? Certainly, but why do that when you can be lazy and just remove her instead and say "muh balance". What I wanted from Selene was a choice that goes beyond cosmetics, and they took that away from me.

As for the whole lore thing, you aren't a doctor waiting at a camp waiting for the brave soldiers to come back so you can come heal them, you are on the front-lines with them, any combat medic will tell you the absolute best way to heal is to make sure your men never get hurt in the first place, a dead enemy does no damage, it's why medics are given guns along side the other soldiers. Yes, they can heal, it's why they're there, but they're also going to make sure they need to do as little healing as possible because it's the smarter thing to do. Seems to me like any tactician would figure this out much more quickly than anyone else, especially if you're supposedly the best one around.

As for me missing how strong SCH used to be, I don't miss it, because SCH is still as strong as it has always been, my issue isn't that I'm not dealing enough damage, my issue is that the way I achieve that damage isn't interesting. You saying SCH is now more healer instead of a DPS that heals some times, well, that's just wrong, because SCH is still exactly that, they just have a lot less buttons to do it with, and that's my problem. SCH wasn't meta because it had miasma or energy drain, SCH was meta because it has a million free heals and doesn't have to use GCDs to use it's big heals, which is now more of the case than ever. SCH is still meta, and it's still strong, it's just not nearly as interesting. SE can't just remove abilities and expect SCH to heal more, that's not how that works,so long as SCH even has 1 dps ability and has a billion heals it can use for free, they will continue to DPS muuuuuch more than they heal. They would have to redesign not only an expansion, but the entire game and the class itself in order for SCH to not do that. It's why I didn't swap to WHM, I don't give 2 s**** about the numbers, I fell in love with SCH for how it felt to play, not because it had big numbers
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Also, to bring this up, saying fairies being unresponsive is a glitch and that is clearly not what devs intended, so therefore, doesn't make the design lazy, I'd argue it's proof that they are lazy, because as devs, it is their job to make sure stuff is working, and they didn't. It is their job to play test and make sure that when you press a button, the button does the thing it's supposed to, and they couldn't see such a simple glitch to pull of that numerous people have complained about? Best case scenario is they genuinely missed it in play testing, meaning they didn't play test it nearly enough, worst case scenario: they didn't play test it at all, either way, it's lazy. And I'm inclined to believe it's the latter, because none of them could figure out "oh, SCH doesn't have energy drain, so most of the time you're sitting there on stacks with nothing to spend them on, this is a problem and we shouldn't let this be a thing" it took dozens of people complaining on forums and on YouTube for them to realize that. (not to mention how AST could barely even do its core job of healing come 5.0, they, again, couldn't figure out on their own how abysmally weak AST was, they had to, again, have people yell at them about how bad it was for them to realize it was a problem, that tells me they didn't bother even taking AST through the first couple of dungeons.)

[Sloprano]

All i wanted to say is i love healing jobs and will contibue to enjoy them like many others i know.
But i learned too that in forums, no one can ever be happy no matter what.
SE needs to know some enjoy it and rarely post here because we are too busy enjoying the game.

And i am never bored.

That is good, keep on trucking and let SE know if you enjoy it. I personally kick myself for not letting SE know how much of a good time I had with 3.0 before it was gone and replaced with what we have now.

snip.

But is this a move we should really endorse? The filing down of a job so it's so round and spotless it has no discerning features, no warts or inconveniences that you are repulsed by at first, but learn to work with and come to love, instead of worrying it might fit someones design of a healer. Someone out there went around with a clipboard, filling checkboxes as nuance after nuance of scholar was so polished until it filled all the critera of "approved Healer" to be shipped, but aslo very bland so it doesn't stand out. Are these just the traits we can attribute a job, "DPS" and "Healing"? Designed not as a seperate entity but meticulously so it doesn't overstep any imaginary boundaries for it's assigned Role.

What Scholar's identity is we can assuredly discuss to the small hours. From the job page on the SE page, Alka Zolka's interpretation, Surito Carito's memories, SE's current version or just the Scholar you played at a point in time. I know it's the job that made me fall in love with the game, the little job that could. Could do a bit of everything. Will disagree it was a Healer with pet management, from the go it used to have shields, buffs, debuffs, dots and a healing/support pet. It used to shoulder the majority of healing, but couldn't be trusted to use skills smart so you had to watch it, Embrace and Whispering Dawn skills had cast time and it could very easily die, leaving you almost in half. That was management, I find I have to barely think about Lily these days. It's still helping with a constant stream of Embraces, though weak Embraces, yet goes against what I saw early ARR where I found people treating Eos' healing as a bonus not as an extension of the job. In a weird twist of fate, bonus healing is what she turned into.

Selene was part of the job, moon aspect of Lily, ying to the yang, she was an option and asset. She saved many a PotD and HoH run with AoE cleanse after traps or silence on a chimera doing Ram. She wasn't useful in 100% of content, and that was fine. It gave you options. When trying to press yourself you could try running Selene instead of Eos in dungeons to see if the Fey Wind buff was worth it to kill things faster against your increased healing requirement. Efficient, optimal? Probably no. Fun? Oh yes. Removal of Selene stings because it was an aspect of choice, just knowing you had one, that made her so great. Then SE turned it's gaze on it and saw it was out of line with Healers then proceeded to beat it into submission. Now we have Selene's skin worn by Eos hoping we won't notice.

A well often posted opinion on the DPS was to just nerf the damage potencies. I played Scholar throught it's dot-heavy glory days and had tons of fun while having no idea how much damage I was doing or how much it was compared to others. If you tell me I was a herculean superpower that put black mages to shame I'd believe you. They could've reduced Ruin/Broil hard so it's role as filler spell would be even more prominent. Having the fillerspell become the cornerstone damaging spell the job is still baffling. The favorable way would be to design around a good playstyle and loop, not the numbers it's doing. Note: Not combos. What set Scholar/Arcanist apart was that all the dots and skills were independent. You could apply in order of Miasma 2, Miasma, Aero, Bio, Bio 2, but started to notice that you had to reapply M2 almost right after putting up Bio 2. This gave way to flexibility that fit so well with a job that could at any moment need to perform acute healing or debuffing if someone took unexpected damage.

If we're arguing semantics then at first-aid school you're thought not to enter any area with wounded if you might get hurt aswell, as a medic you're expected to drop whatever threat is around before treating the wounded. Even then we're more than medics, Scholar was tauted as the battfield Tactician. Living from moment to moment, always looking for oppertunities to exploit for benefit to you, your party and to the detriment of the enemy. Offering encouragement and magical benefits that bolstered those around it, having the Arcanist toolset further help this by both buffing your own forces and spread sickness and dread through the enemy ranks.

I can feel a "no true scotsman", or rather "no true scholar" argument forming in me. Truth is I don't have the numbers to say that Scholars of yore weren't number-hungry dps in green clothing for faster queues, that would rather let every party memeber die painfully than interrupt it's Ruin cast. In fact, in whole six years only seen two instances of a Scholar and a Ast happily Broiling and Maleficing along while everyone around were dead or dying, shortly after we wiped. Probably because I always ran as Scholar, and if co-healer wanted to throw stones or malefics then just meant I had more work to do, which is exactly what I wanted. If we're gonna worry that some might take advantage of a situation then we wouldn't get anywere with anything. Then as above, if Scholar's damage numbers was a problem, make it less attractive, nerf ruin or just flat take 10% potency of each skill. I'd probably notice I'd have to work a bit harder and those chasing numbers might look for greener pastures. See, it was the playtstyle, not any number or specific part that made the job for it. It was the whole coming together and getting the most out of it anywhere I went.

Balancing a game can't be easy and if they actually managed to do internal simulations where every healer made the same number then they should be congratulated. It's just a shame they sacrificed so much on the alter of Balance that everything I enjoy had to be taken away. Maybe God of Balance hates fun. At no point do I hold a grudge against the designers, it's their game and they can well do anything they want with it. But just finally getting to these forums after 5.0 I saw that Scholars now has the same concerns some whms have made since a long time ago: would like more to do. The single attack spell, single dot and ogcds was what initially put me off leveling white mage because I was having so much fun with Scholar. But instead of seeing how busy and engaging Scholar was and giving white mage anything more to play with, they already use the previous games as a free idea bucket, I'm sure there are several spells and skills that would be fun to have here too. Instead they stripped on job of everything and made it fall back in line when they could've stamped out the line and taken white mage and astrologian out dancing. Metaphors might be going out of hand.

In short: If you're having fun then let nothing I say convince you you are not. I'm stuck with experiences I want to get back to but see a company wanting to go further and further away from. Maybe when they release Heavensward Classic I'll keep posts to less than a short story.

[EaMett]

All i wanted to say is i love healing jobs and will contibue to enjoy them like many others i know.
But i learned too that in forums, no one can ever be happy no matter what.
SE needs to know some enjoy it and rarely post here because we are too busy enjoying the game.

And i am never bored.

I’m sure they know and nobody here is upset that some people are enjoying the healers. If anything it’s better for the game.
I’m sure they’re also aware that the amount of complaints towards sch and ast have drastically increased this expansion which indicates a real issue.

We are also aware that these changes mainly affect specific skill tiers. Casual healers or even non-healers don’t mind/like the changes because the classes were severely simplified and also because the content they do isn’t particularly challenging.

Career healers or people who spend a large amount of time on the role and look to improve their playstyle are the ones that have issues. Sadly, in a game like an mmo where customer stickiness is pretty solid that usually means pretty much anyone that cares to play the role consistently as they will eventually reach that stage given enough time.

For these players the healer role presents no lasting layered challenge. There’s no more depth, no complexity, no little tweaks or rotations to keep track of in order to optimize. Everything disappeared overnight with the release of shb.

If you need an example there are many we could give but let’s take the simplest one: the removal of our second dot. The dot was on a different timer from the other one. Most people at lower tiers of skill would just apply both at the same time for convenience. But once you got used to the play style and we’re starting to get bored with your class/role you could look into optimizing your dot application and only apply them right before they fell off (staggering them). This brought it’s own set of challenges.

So basically if you belong to the first group these changes are welcome since they just remove a stupid step, there’s nothing particularly fun about applying back to back dots. But if you’re in the second group it was a real nerf to your gameplay.

They’ve made many of these changes on release. Actually, for sch, if you count ED they removed pretty much everything with shb. Essentially stripping the class from what was fun to us.

[Tone19]

If they gave SCH a 60sec coldown, oGCD, aoe that used a aetherflow stack, say Miasma II or Shadow Flare, that would make a lot of SCH happy. Still though compared to other healers that would probably make SCH too good.
SCH also have RuinII, while this is just like spamming Broil, this is unique to SCH as we can DPS while doing moving mechanics. No other healer has that.

[EaMett]

If they gave SCH a 60sec coldown, oGCD, aoe that used a aetherflow stack, say Miasma II or Shadow Flare, that would make a lot of SCH happy. Still though compared to other healers that would probably make SCH too good.
SCH also have RuinII, while this is just like spamming Broil, this is unique to SCH as we can DPS while doing moving mechanics. No other healer has that.

Whm has that with afflatus skills although it’s gated behind ressources, they also have dia in worst case scenarios, and ast have lightspeed although it’s gated behind a CD (also I haven’t followed up on spread changes as of late so I dunno if they need to hold onto it or not) but initially those were meant to be the response to ruin II.

Obviously not as good, but it does serve to shorten the gap.