Has anyone quit healing?

[Vitreus]

Tank changes in this Xpac have not been friendly to healers. The dumbing down of the role and adding a gunblade tank at the same time is just a recipe for disaster. I can barely make it through roulettes because my tanks are consistently brain dead.

The proverbial !@#$ is going to hit the fan if they try to add a fourth hero one day. The jobs need more of a healing identity than just "shield or healing over time". Someone once suggested giving astrologian the ability to stagger damage as a way to tie into the lore of changing fate which I thought was pretty interesting. They've never been able to properly balance nocturnal and diurnal sect.

[Saefinn]

The proverbial !@#$ is going to hit the fan if they try to add a fourth hero one day. The jobs need more of a healing identity than just "shield or healing over time". Someone once suggested giving astrologian the ability to stagger damage as a way to tie into the lore of changing fate which I thought was pretty interesting. They've never been able to properly balance nocturnal and diurnal sect.

I don't think there's so much an identity issue with the healers, however, there is definitely more options out there for ways of healing, which might be useful for when/if we get a 4th healer.

Arguably the healing aspect is fairly unique between the 3 healing jobs and still plays to the identity of their respective jobs. And this is where the 'but' comes in. Their identities are redundant and as a result they feel very samey. So in effect we get an oxymoron, unique, yet the same.

[CrimsonGunner]

I don't think there's so much an identity issue with the healers, however, there is definitely more options out there for ways of healing, which might be useful for when/if we get a 4th healer.

Arguably the healing aspect is fairly unique between the 3 healing jobs and still plays to the identity of their respective jobs. And this is where the 'but' comes in. Their identities are redundant and as a result they feel very samey. So in effect we get an oxymoron, unique, yet the same.

it isn't much unique if all 3 do the same skill with different animation,as far as SE done in terms of identity ,you might as well throw the lore out straight to the garbage with healers ,they are now same skills with the only different's are if its gcd/ogcd and animation.(its clear SE stop caring about their identity when their kit doesn't even show almost a shred of lore or connection to it at all)
seeing how SE actually talked about a fucking ass and how they will fix it instead of real issues being brought up ,let ignore the cards & skills that we lost or the identity lost this 5.0 changes brought to healers but focus on actual gameplay problems as pet ghosting or controller based players and AST card system ,this is damn infuriating especially since they actually bother to talk about issues for every other job and answer them.(i could have tolerated any other job issue being spoken instead of this 2b ass bullshit explanation )

i mean they even pulled 2 different solutions for smn/sch and gave summoner the option to have bahamut immediate casting when summoned while scholar seraph got a 2 second delay upon summon,i am feeling close to dropping being a healer in 14 cause SE keep showing they don't give shit about them.

[Reyna_Balmore]

I temporarily put healing AND tanking aside due to the bad decisions made of the role re-works, but I'm now naturally coming around to playing both roles again due to them not being reverted back anytime soon, if at all :\

[Saefinn]

it isn't much unique if all 3 do the same skill with different animation,as far as SE done in terms of identity ,you might as well throw the lore out straight to the garbage with healers ,they are now same skills with the only different's are if its gcd/ogcd and animation.(its clear SE stop caring about their identity when their kit doesn't even show almost a shred of lore or connection to it at all)
seeing how SE actually talked about a fucking ass and how they will fix it instead of real issues being brought up ,let ignore the cards & skills that we lost or the identity lost this 5.0 changes brought to healers but focus on actual gameplay problems as pet ghosting or controller based players and AST card system ,this is damn infuriating especially since they actually bother to talk about issues for every other job and answer them.(i could have tolerated any other job issue being spoken instead of this 2b ass bullshit explanation )

i mean they even pulled 2 different solutions for smn/sch and gave summoner the option to have bahamut immediate casting when summoned while scholar seraph got a 2 second delay upon summon,i am feeling close to dropping being a healer in 14 cause SE keep showing they don't give shit about them.

Oh there's definitely problems, in this respect you're preaching to the choir.

The point I was trying to get across is that if encounter design was designed to push us to actually optimise our healing ability better or to think more about what we're using, then we'd have separate experiences between WHM, SCH and AST. However, I see this as being a difficult and unrealistic goal for SE to achieve, which is why I'm actually in favour of removing the bloat. BUT in the very rare moment where it feels like I've been pushed to use my toolkit efficiently, I've liked it and it has felt less homogenised, but we're talking bad groups that facilitate that environment for me. In these moments I've thought "maybe I can see what they were trying to do". When I was levelling SCH from 70 to 80, I had a couple of dungeons where I was like "I might actually start enjoying this" and then had that soon taken away and go back to being boring again.


I'll try to justify what I mean better and bear in mind I am only specifically speaking about healing, not DPS or AST's cards.

If put adequately under pressure I'd expect to see people being more conservative with their oGCD's because they have a cool down, so they have to be more efficient with what else they've got. An efficient Scholar, as an example, might have to better manage and rotate their faerie/seraph skills and any damage mitigation. I might end up thinking about when I use Excog, I might think about when I might want to use Emergency Tactics or Deployment Tactics and then I might be more conscious about when I deploy Seraph. I might think about when I force a critlo. These are all things that WHM and AST don't have equivalents of. It'd be less thinking about where there is cross over, but more about how I am using it. Cross over isn't a bad thing, 2.0 SCH and WHM had some. FFXI SCH, RDM and WHM all had a lot. But it is how their other skills are used is where the uniqueness comes from, which I'd argue is missing.



And arguably this is where the problem lies. Those skills are practically redundant. Using them seems to be more to increase our down time where we can DPS, than feel a pressure or need to use them effectively.

Don't get me wrong, I also see the problems with the toolkit, but I don't think it's a wholly bad toolkit. I just think it's a hugely unsuitable toolkit that needs some work.

If they wanted to stick with the same healing toolkit moving forward, then they'd have to make it more useful, basically. If they wanted to persist with current game design and balance then the current healing toolkit is bloated and needs trimming - IE: see my rants about how BLU is more fun to heal because it doesn't have many healing spells.


On a side note. I keep seeing the controller player and AST one propping up. I'm a controller player and I don't get this problem. I wonder how many people know about Extended crossbars? Pretty much by holding down 1 non-awkwardly placed button you double what's easily/quickly available to you without page switching. As one who wants more DPS abilities on his SCH, I'm starting to feel SE should put this feature on default and give good instructions on how to use it so people don't complain about having too many abilities and give me back mine. :P

[RinaB]

On a side note. I keep seeing the controller player and AST one propping up. I'm a controller player and I don't get this problem. I wonder how many people know about Extended crossbars? Pretty much by holding down 1 non-awkwardly placed button you double what's easily/quickly available to you without page switching. As one who wants more DPS abilities on his SCH, I'm starting to feel SE should put this feature on default and give good instructions on how to use it so people don't complain about having too many abilities and give me back mine. :P

This seems to be a pretty common problem in general. I play on controller as well with AST and I have a bunch of free buttons I've used for food, mounts, emotes and a focus target number lol. some classes like machinist and warrior have so few buttons I wouldn't even know what to do with all the empty space. I'm pretty new to healing so I can't really say much on class changes but I do see a lot of people going on about nothing but dps. seems to me they wanted to put the focus back on actual healing instead of standing there dpsing for days.

I played wow for about 8 years and healed the last 2 of them and blizzard pretty much went the same direction albeit a bit too far in certain xpacs like mists of pandaria. for those who don't know what I'm talking about they essentially made tanks and party members get hit like trucks and healers had to heal their asses off with zero time to dps. however this game seems to be kind of stuck trying to figure out what it wants. tanks are easy mode joke now where the only real challenge is staggering mitigators and managing their cooldowns and healing is noticeably more difficult from 71-80 but it's more because certain spells feel weak and not because of content difficulty.

Maybe I'm totally wrong and need to main AST longer and continue to get more experience but that's just my current observation.

[Saefinn]

This seems to be a pretty common problem in general. I play on controller as well with AST and I have a bunch of free buttons I've used for food, mounts, emotes and a focus target number lol. some classes like machinist and warrior have so few buttons I wouldn't even know what to do with all the empty space. I'm pretty new to healing so I can't really say much on class changes but I do see a lot of people going on about nothing but dps. seems to me they wanted to put the focus back on actual healing instead of standing there dpsing for days.

I played wow for about 8 years and healed the last 2 of them and blizzard pretty much went the same direction albeit a bit too far in certain xpacs like mists of pandaria. for those who don't know what I'm talking about they essentially made tanks and party members get hit like trucks and healers had to heal their asses off with zero time to dps. however this game seems to be kind of stuck trying to figure out what it wants. tanks are easy mode joke now where the only real challenge is staggering mitigators and managing their cooldowns and healing is noticeably more difficult from 71-80 but it's more because certain spells feel weak and not because of content difficulty.

Maybe I'm totally wrong and need to main AST longer and continue to get more experience but that's just my current observation.

It's not so much the desire for DPS but the desire for more to do in our downtime. Whilst on paper it looks like the changes have more of a healing focus, the problem is that we are now in a position where we are healing too well, which results in less healing and more DPS. For Stormblood we had more DPS options on SCH/WHM and a card system people found more interesting on AST to break up that downtime. Fortunately playing AST you'll feel this probably less because you have more to do in your downtime versus SCH or WHM. This is also why if I am going to heal something for somebody that I'll pick AST, despite SCH being my baby. For us to have more of a healing focus with our current skills then the content would need to be adjusted to better utilise them.

It seems like an odd paradox, but my Blue Mage only has 4 healing spells and a buttload of DPS abilities and I have much more of a healing focus playing it than I do my Scholar, which has very few DPS abilities but a buttload of healing ones. Whilst I still get downtime on BLU, thanks to the DPS abilities the downtime remains interesting. On my SCH my downtime is spam Art of War or spam Broil with the odd Energy Drain or Biolysis, which is very uninspired because it feels like: 12111111111111311111111112111

With 70-80, some of the dungeons arguably were misleading to me because I felt like that I might end up enjoying healing in ShB just not any other content. The problem I found was once I was geared and everybody in my party is geared, healing was a lot easier again.

[Aurturia]

On a side note. I keep seeing the controller player and AST one propping up. I'm a controller player and I don't get this problem. I wonder how many people know about Extended crossbars? Pretty much by holding down 1 non-awkwardly placed button you double what's easily/quickly available to you without page switching. As one who wants more DPS abilities on his SCH, I'm starting to feel SE should put this feature on default and give good instructions on how to use it so people don't complain about having too many abilities and give me back mine. :P

The contoler concerns aren't really about the number skills ast has but about targeting party members, perhaps you ment to include something about macros? That is a solution that has been mentioned in these forums since shadow bringers launched but macros have stigmas attached to them so its not a popular solution.

[Saefinn]

The contoler concerns aren't really about the number skills ast has but about targeting party members, perhaps you ment to include something about macros? That is a solution that has been mentioned in these forums since shadow bringers launched but macros have stigmas attached to them so its not a popular solution.

Targeting party members is easy on a controller, just press up or down on your DPAD, I can do this plenty quick enough to target who I need. Granted, I know AST has to do it a lot more, but there's generally a structure to how your party is ordered. Tank -> Healers -> Melee -> Ranged. So if i get something like a Bole, I'll know to go 'up' from the tank I've got targeted to end up on the 'ranged' part of my list, as an example. It ends up being a quicker way of doing it/reacting in a fight where I might need to be quicker.

And enemy targeting isn't so awful and there are ways you can mitigate that, like I do when tanking, you AoE and then you can get the full list of mobs and cycle down the list with LB(L1) + Up or Down.

And I don't use any macros on my AST. Extended Crossbars is a feature available to controllers but it is turned off by default, but it's a really useful feature. Like anything involving the controller in this game there's a learning curve. And whilst there is a learning curve to playing controllers, they are actually very ergonomic and well designed, it's just a little confusing to begin with, but I think I'd struggle to go back to mouse + keyboard. So it's going to frustrate me if "controller limitations" ever becomes an issue should those limitations be because people don't know how can expand the usability of their controller (and in fairness, it's not exactly sign posted)

But what Extended Cross bars does is it allows me to access an additional page of my crossbars without me clunkily changing the cross bar page, it's just by holding down one extra button.
For example
If I RT(R2) + LT(L2) then I get the Right half of my Page 2 crossbar
If I LT(L2) + RT(R2) then I get the Left half of my Page 2 crossbar

There is also the additional option of double tap RT and double tap LT to get access to even more abilities. Personally this option doesn't flow for me and the Extended Crossbars is plenty for me. But they may be useful to somebody else.

It means I can set up my crossbars around those controls. I can have all of my healing ability on page 1, I have my DPS abilities on page 2 and any extra lesser used abilities there too. Because I can just hold down an extra button if I'm going into DPS mode and release it when I need to heal. But in effect it doubles my reach. And this works wonderfully when playing something like AST, SMN or NIN where I might be jumping around my crossbars.

[Crushnight]

Ast controller issues stem from optimisation.

In a 8 man party the max you have to press up and down on the dpad to target someone is 4, no matter how you adjust your party list this number remains.

Now in opener you have max 5 gcds to get out 3 seal Divination. 1 combust, 4 malefics.

Cards are rng 50/50 between range and melee.

Between every gcd in opener you have to press dpad up to 4 times to select party member, play/MA, retarget boss, draw (if sleeve draw has worn off), before you can malefic.

And this is if your lucky to not get a reseal and have to redraw.

So it is a lot of quick button presses in a short span of time with added rng factor with no way to mitigate it, that is creating the issue.

Casually playing this issue is nowhere near as apparent but the moment you try to really optimise Ast on controller it gets very awkward very fast and no amount of cross hotbars fix it, in fact mine are full of macros for targeting party members despite their delay it is certainly easier to deal with especially with mechanics or dumb dumbs on top.

The other solution to the opener people have come up with is ignore the seals and just get Divination out, which speaks volumes to the level of class design don't it.