Has anyone quit healing?

[Brandedblade]

*insert long rant here*

I take it you never have anything positive to say?

[Saefinn]

I take it you never have anything positive to say?

I take it you never have anything constructive to say.

[Billythepancake]

I take it you never have anything positive to say?

Nah, I do actually. I actually like some of the SCH changes, and I love recitation, but the negatives far outweigh the positives. I choose to focus on the negatives because those are what I want changed.

[Rilifane]

I take it you never have anything positive to say?

Nobody is denying that some changes were definitely for the better.
The new lily gauge is a major improvement over the old one and dealt with a basically useless job gauge and the mobility issues WHM often struggled with. Misery is a decent compensation for having to rely on GCD heals in certain situations.
The QoL changes for AST were godsent, making weaving feel natural and fluid. Same with the fact that you can hold cards indefinitely now.

But that doesn't mean healers as whole aren't facing some serious issues. Why else do you think so many people quit healing and healer queues are the shortest they've ever been, getting more instant invited than tanks ever did? A lot of healer mains like complex gameplay. Many dps mains chose the role because they want to relax, they don't want any additional responsibility safe for their own numbers while many healer mains know precisely what they signed up for, actively sought it even - only that a lot of what they signed up for is gone now.
Right now healers have the most downtime they ever had yet at the same time their filler acitivity is the most braindead it ever was.
They gave healers even more tools to quickly heal even huge amounts of damage while stripping them of all their filler options safe for one cast and one dot.

[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."

[Deceptus]

Let me put it this way, I'm a SCH. Before 5.0 I leveled as a SCH because I could do so relatively efficiently. Not as efficient as a SMN but I could do it and I did it because I loved the gameplay of a SCH.

5.0 was the expansion I said screw it and leveled as a SMN, because the difference in kill speed was night and day.

Shadowbringers effectively killed my desire to heal in almost all aspects and if they don't do some SERIOUS changes in 6.0 I won't be healing anymore.

[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.