Has anyone quit healing?

[Adeacia]

As a healer main since mid HW, I struggle to make sense of the complaints in this topic.

One issue people have in most games is that they mistake more things to press as complexity. This is not the case. That's just busywork. Pressing one key repeatedly is no different than pressing 4.

I got really good at cleric stance dancing but didn't complain when it was removed. It was more of a hassle than anything.

People largely just fished for balance on the old card system, so they made every card balance, and people complain.

They adjust things based on how people play the jobs, and people complain.

At this point my belief is that people complain just for the sake of it. If they had nothing to complain about they would just complain about having nothing to complain about.

[CrimsonGunner]

As a healer main since mid HW, I struggle to make sense of the complaints in this topic.

One issue people have in most games is that they mistake more things to press as complexity. This is not the case. That's just busywork. Pressing one key repeatedly is no different than pressing 4.

I got really good at cleric stance dancing but didn't complain when it was removed. It was more of a hassle than anything.

People largely just fished for balance on the old card system, so they made every card balance, and people complain.

They adjust things based on how people play the jobs, and people complain.

At this point my belief is that people complain just for the sake of it. If they had nothing to complain about they would just complain about having nothing to complain about.

complexity comes from a few things:
1 manage your resources.
2.order and timing of skills to use
3.amounts of skills to use.

yes,complexity can also means having more buttons to press and more skills to do stuff with managing different resources making it interesting rather then just have 1 skill to do damage 1 skill to dot and 1 skill to apply a buff.

im not sure about cleric stance but the rest is just half assed solutions .

making all cards identical and deleting the varied buffs is just a lazy solution and from what i understand they reworked the card system so a better solution would have been to keep the varied buff and find a way to prevent fishing in the new system.

the adjustment of the jobs weren't good so that's why most complain, the solutions were half assed and could have been address with more thought and meaning while keeping healers with their unique game style intact.
those solutions show that SE didn't really listened to most healers issues or given proper thought on the matter.

sure people will complain just for the sake of it but right now most of those complains are kinda legitimate and not "boo make our class op AF" kind of way.

you may still not understand them but i hope it helped clarify the meaning of the complains

[Billythepancake]

As a healer main since mid HW, I struggle to make sense of the complaints in this topic.

One issue people have in most games is that they mistake more things to press as complexity. This is not the case. That's just busywork. Pressing one key repeatedly is no different than pressing 4.

I got really good at cleric stance dancing but didn't complain when it was removed. It was more of a hassle than anything.

People largely just fished for balance on the old card system, so they made every card balance, and people complain.

They adjust things based on how people play the jobs, and people complain.

At this point my belief is that people complain just for the sake of it. If they had nothing to complain about they would just complain about having nothing to complain about.

"I'm fine with current healers, so people complaining are only doing it just to complain" is probably the most dismissive thing I've heard, but okay. No, I'm not complaining for the sake of it, and I imagine many others are in the same boat. I'd have never made a forum account is healing was genuinely still fun to me, because I'm not the type to care about forums, but after playing scholar at launch, I wanted to try my best to get my voice out there and maybe have it reach someone who could change things for the better. I hate being filled with negativity, but I can't help it when they stripped my favorite job of everything that made it fun and interesting. As for "more buttons doesn't equal more complex" yeah, that's true, it it were like tanks or something where it was constantly 1-2-3 1-2-3, then yes that wouldn't be all that different from spamming 1, but healers rotation was dot and time based, meaning you had to watch timers and reapply them frequently, with those timers being different also meaning you couldn't do just all of them at once, Which was more engaging, imo, because you're much more likely to mess that up and therefore it makes it feel much more satisfying when you don't. If it was TRULY the same, why would people be complaining, with healers in end game at an all time low?

But, let's focus on not DPS stuff, how about stuff like the fairy for sch, you know, one of the 2 main mechanics that defines that class, and how it has been reduced to nothing but dissipation fodder at worse,and a glorified oGCD that doesn't work 50% of the time at best. Not to mention what they did to poor Selene. Was eos better in Savage? Absolutely, 9.99/10 times, but what about the other 99% of the game, where healing was so lax you didn't need EOS' higher healing? Personally,I always used Selene for those because, well, she made things go faster and her esuna was a life saver in a lot of instances.

For AST, the new card system makes that class almost impossible to play on a controller, that fact alone makes this new AST system terrible and in need of a rework.

[Saefinn]

No, I'm not complaining for the sake of it, and I imagine many others are in the same boat. I'd have never made a forum account is healing was genuinely still fun to me, because I'm not the type to care about forums, but after playing scholar at launch, I wanted to try my best to get my voice out there and maybe have it reach someone who could change things for the better. I hate being filled with negativity, but I can't help it when they stripped my favorite job of everything that made it fun and interesting.

I am going to concur with this. This is exactly me too. My forum visits were like once in a blue moon. Nor did I really ever complain, despite SCH moving away from what I preferred and what hooked me to it, I conceded that it happens, but at least I could still find ways to enjoy it and that my vision isn't necessarily shared by all.

But my lack of enjoyment started in SB and not ShB if anything. But at least DPS weaving made up for it.

I tried playing it again yesterday and still couldn't like it. Like you, I /want/ to enjoy it. It is not my nature to complain, but it's more constructive to look at what's wrong with something, look at what could make it better, what we like and didn't like and so on as feedback and keeping a discussion going until SE properly address it than to get complacent or just give up.

AST is about only healer I can find fun at the moment and I try to Nocturnal Sect more because it's less efficient and therefore I have more work to do.

[Sloprano]

As a healer main since mid HW, I struggle to make sense of the complaints in this topic.

One issue people have in most games is that they mistake more things to press as complexity. This is not the case. That's just busywork. Pressing one key repeatedly is no different than pressing 4.

At this point my belief is that people complain just for the sake of it. If they had nothing to complain about they would just complain about having nothing to complain about.

When first 5.0 came around Scholar felt even more stripped than in 4.0: I'll never forget the first time I ventured out in the Fringes, first "kill five of this wildlife" quest in hand. Found the doomed creature, applied two dots, put up shadowflare and..... spammed Broil. No cleric stance, (3.0) no Bio, no Miasma 2, no Aero, no Virus, no Heavy or slow debuff. 5.0 came along it managed to be even worse. Since 2013, I just played Scholar most of the time, it had everything I wanted. So when 5.0 came and I felt I couldn't sit idle by watching SE just keep trimming the actions I was also forced to acknowledge just why I'm always clamoring for dots, cleric stance, fairies, arcanist toolkit. And before I know it, I've written several texts rivaling the lenght of novels.

I'm just complaining since my fun is on the line. I played in HW too and it was the best time as Scholar I spent in this game. Then a bunch of stuff I liked was removed in 4.0, but some semblance was still there so decided to live with it. 5.0 for me was just Job identity and fun assassination. Fearing that in 6.0 I'll have one button that's a 1000 potency oGCD heal, another that's 1000 potency GCD attack spell and a cardboard-cutout of Lily placed on my shoulder I decided to complain because I feel the job that ultimately made me fall in love with the game has had so many things taken away from it. They were little things for sure, but it was when all those little things came together it made something great. As such, the list of missing things grew until I couldn't take it anymore.

I'm complaining because Scholar was a job that had near unlimited potential anywhere, and the joy was finding more and more ways to use it to your advantage. Soloing? Different dot durations kept you busy. Dungeons and Maps? Gottta keep a party alive, mostly throught mitigation, fairy management then see how much you can get away with in Cleric Stance. Almost everything was reactionary and it played so good. In contrast Fey Gauge takes 3+ minutes (less with Dissipation), to fill up. Only to forget it's there and finish a dungeon with 100 Fey power.

I'm complaining because I can't help but feel SE thinks it's doing me a favor by removing all these warts and incoinveniences from Scholar. What it's doing is removing the challenging and pursuit of improvement for me. Back then I could do a fight, learn when the unavoidable goes out. Next time I mitigate that. Next time again I might be in Cleric Stance because I got Eos ready. Now in 5.0, someone takes damage I use a oGCD and return to Broil III or Art of War. I've mastered it, no more fun to be extracted.

In the end I'm complaining because they took a job I felt was perfectly standing on it's own legs, then cut off those legs so it could fit into a Role-shaped hole. I'd very much like some evolvement of the job that's also reflected in the low level Duties that still exists, but what they've come up last two expansions have just made me want to go back to Heavensward. It's got healing for days, but nothing to spend it all on. It's got all the time in the world to do other things than healing, but only got Broil III. If you are having fun with current iterations of healers then don't let this complaining get to you, want you to know why I'm complaining. This is my way of hoping to one day be heard and bring about some changes I want to see.

[ForteNightshade]

As a healer main since mid HW, I struggle to make sense of the complaints in this topic.

One issue people have in most games is that they mistake more things to press as complexity. This is not the case. That's just busywork. Pressing one key repeatedly is no different than pressing 4.

I got really good at cleric stance dancing but didn't complain when it was removed. It was more of a hassle than anything.

People largely just fished for balance on the old card system, so they made every card balance, and people complain.

They adjust things based on how people play the jobs, and people complain.

At this point my belief is that people complain just for the sake of it. If they had nothing to complain about they would just complain about having nothing to complain about.

Pressing additional buttons is largely a psychological thing. People want to feel as though their preferred job has complexity even if it doesn't. Hence the illusion of choice. This isn't inherently a bad thing, and in fact, necessary. Case in point, selecting dialogue options in the MSQ is completely pointless because outside of one or two sentence literally nothing else changes. Your tone of response impacts nothing. And yet, a lot of people both requested and appreciated their inclusion simply because it connected us to the story better.

When I do little more than spam a single button on my keyboard, it feels very monotonous since I know I could more or less create a macro and auto-pilot the whole process. No one is under the delusion Aero II, Aero III or Bane made White Mage and Scholar somehow more complex. What they did, however, is make them more fun as it broke up the monotony of spamming Glare and Broil endlessly. The trick is making that "busywork" feel engaging. Astro's redesign fell flat for a lot of people because it lacks engagement. Not only are the cards incredibly weak, they cause clipping issues galore which used to be the one sore spot people had towards Stormblood Astro before 4.3. Sleeve Draw comes to mind; being a complete mess of an ability that now requires Lightspeed just so you aren't dropping Malefic III casts left and right. Simply put, Astro's new system isn't an illusion. It slaps you in the face.

And therein lies the rub. You need to disguise that busywork so it isn't readily noticeable. Take Dragoon, for example. It has arguably the most rigid rotation of any DPS yet is widely the most popular. Why? Because most of its kit feels impactful, and it hides that rigidness behind jumps, flips and cool animations.

You're also mistaken to assume people only fished for Balance. Unless you were top tier speed killing, Spear was a fine alternative; Arrow had its uses on certain jobs; Bole was good in dungeons or pug settings where you weren't necessarily certain how your tank might perform; likewise for Ewer needing more MP if things go awry. Stripping everything away to essentially turn Astro into a Balance bot goes back to what I said above about disguising complexity. Everyone knew Balance was the best card but having to consider other options or just making do with what RNG dealt you made the job feel unique. Without that illusion, it highlights only how monotonous everything became. Instead of thinking, "should I fish for better cards? will the tank maybe need this bole?" A lot of Astro are thinking, "I could just being playing WHM right now and not having to deal with this crap while offering more to the party."

[Punslinger]

Pressing additional buttons is largely a psychological thing. People want to feel as though their preferred job has complexity even if it doesn't. Hence the illusion of choice.

I think you're on the right track, rotational complexity is important, but I don't think it's about having an illusion of choice. If it were, people would stop playing the moment theorycrafters mathed out the optimal rotation.

Instead, I think it is about performing two different dances at the same time and keeping all the steps straight: the dance of doing your rotation without error, and the dance of doing the fight mechanics without error. It sounds simple, but it is the difficulty of executing both these things perfectly that is the heart and soul of MMO combat.

And this is why healing is soul-crushingly boring right now. Because all damage is scripted, all of the actual healing is part of the "fight mechanics" dance. Healers are only keeping track of the fight and when they're supposed to use their oGCDs. Healers don't have to do a rotation dance, because it's just refreshing a DoT every 20 seconds and spamming one spell the rest of the time. Imagine a BLM doing the same DPS it does today, but all of it is baked into a 1000-potency Fire 1 that they just spam endlessly.

Other MMOs solve this problem by making healing more reactive, including more random-damage mechanics in boss fights, and making MP a scarce resource. Putting actual decision-making in how to heal gives healers that skill-execution complexity that's missing from FF14. But FF14 can't do any of those things without a massive overhaul to the game design and to six years' worth of game content, so it's likely that Square will have to do what they did for tanks, and give healers a proper DPS rotation to perform during downtime. It's the only way to salvage the healer role given the corner Square has designed themselves into.

And all of the counterarguments that come from the Sylphies of the world, about how healers should be "real healers" and not "Green DPS," fall flat when you look at the tank redesign in 5.0. One can just as easily say that tanks should be "real tanks" and focus on aggro management and mitigation instead of DPS, yet Square has given every tank a real DPS rotation to perform. Mitigation, like healing, is done in response to scripted tankbusters. Mitigation, like healing, is entirely off the GCD. Mitigation, like healing, is a binary proposition: either you survive or you don't. So why shouldn't healers be given something interesting to do with all the GCDs they aren't spending on healing, when tanks were just given something interesting to do with all the GCDs they aren't spending on tanking?

[tesni_g]

Instead, I think it is about performing two different dances at the same time and keeping all the steps straight: the dance of doing your rotation without error, and the dance of doing the fight mechanics without error. It sounds simple, but it is the difficulty of executing both these things perfectly that is the heart and soul of MMO combat.

THIS.

When I advocate Green DPS options, it's because I see the fundamental design decisions FFXIV makes in its MSQ content, which is to say, it must be completely accessible to average players all the time, the whole way through.

And that's fine. Accessibility is fantastic.

However, that means healing can't be locked behind healing spell rotations--a learning healer will struggle to build the combos and therefore the healing required to finish the fight. An experienced healer will struggle to build the combos when the three learning players in their group make every mistake. Healers are gods in dungeons because it makes the learning experience more forgiving and smoother. I suspect this is deliberate, and they will not make changes that threaten MSQ completability.

So this is our reality. MSQ difficulty is exactly as it's meant to be. Enrage timers mean we need to fight, too. The only way forward that I can see, given what we already have to work with, is Green DPS. The world isn't going to change for healers--healers should be changed to better fit the world.

[Rilifane]

Instead, I think it is about performing two different dances at the same time and keeping all the steps straight: the dance of doing your rotation without error, and the dance of doing the fight mechanics without error. It sounds simple, but it is the difficulty of executing both these things perfectly that is the heart and soul of MMO combat.

This is really important.
Complexity doesn't come from the number of buttons you could press but largely from how difficult it is to push the right button at the right moment in a boss fight with mechanics.
Having multiple dots to keep track of doesn't add complexity through the sheer number of additional buttons but through the responsibility of having several different timers to watch, re-apply the dots at the best moment while not letting it get in the way of doing mechanics properly or healing. It's the required multi-tasking that adds complexity.
A simplified dps rotation has very low multi-tasking requirement making it feel boring.

Things like timers (both dots and cds), charges, procs or rng in general, temporary dps buffs (both own and others') and synergies add complexity without increasing the number of buttons because they add things to keep track of and require adjustment on the fly.

Healers were not only stripped of the majority of their dps buttons but also of almost everything that added complexity without relying on increasing the number of possible buttons to push.
Which is essentially a double-nerf to interesting complexity.

We have been green dps for years, that's not going to change because it would require a fundamental redesign of both encounters AND classes and Square Enix apparently likes the Green DPS role concept. The only issue I have is with the way they go about it. They want it but they don't fully embrace it.
I think healers are actually the easiest to make accessible while adding a high skill ceiling because of their two different tasks. The complexity can be tied to the dps rotations while keeping the healing alone accessible enough. As long as one isn't tied to the other, the risk of discouraging new players is pretty low.
Think of Cleric Stance: a lot of people didn't use it during their dungeon runs at all because they didn't feel comfortable using it. So they didn't and focused on healing.
Others liked the challenge of making the most of it while healing.
Both types of players had no trouble fulfilling their main responsibility. It was an option you didn't have to utilize in casual content but could, if you felt like it. Nothing more. And endgame content is a completely different matter, accessibility doesn't matter that much there.