Healer dps is unfairly boring

[YusiKha]

For me, healers should be more support focused. Healers should have more buffs, more debuffs, an AoE Esuna (and more cleanable debuffs), more shields, etc.

For us to do what - ignore?
Because the encounter designers sure as heck won’t change a ‘winning’ formula.
And for certain they won’t retroactively change every single dungeon, trial, and raid to suit your design goals.

And what’s this with everyone clamouring for more overvaluing shields? As current design goes, shields are only used in 2 scenarios - lethal damage, and 1HP mechanics. Neither of which are common enough for us to require more.
In fact - if each healer only had access to shields as frequently as tanks (that is - 1 group shield every 90s), no content would change difficulty-wise.

[Patt]

For us to do what - ignore?
Because the encounter designers sure as heck won’t change a ‘winning’ formula.
And for certain they won’t retroactively change every single dungeon, trial, and raid to suit your design goals.

And what’s this with everyone clamouring for more shields? As current design goes, shields are only used in 2 scenarios - lethal damage, and 1HP mechanics. Neither of which are common enough for us to require more.
In fact - if each healer only had access to shields as frequently as tanks (that is - 1 group shield every 90s), no content would change difficulty-wise.

100% this!

Shielding as it stands is only useful, like mentioned, if it prevents a death or reduces the subsequent number of GCD heals. As a healer, your goal should be to do the minimum amount of GCD heals necessary while a boss is targetable.

As it stands, healing is already so simple to manage, especially with the influx of oGCD heals from 3.0 onwards. There is just SO much time for DPSing as healer in pretty much any situation you can find yourself in. A healer's dps rotation & ease shouldn't be balanced around the worst of the worst (speaking of tanks who don't use CDs in large packs :P) and instead be balanced around an average to ideal situation.

Take the latest Ultimate as an example. While phase 1 and 2 do have a pretty decent healing requirement, phase 3 and 4 are pretty much void of any real healing (the exception being the p3 enrage). Phase 4 specifically (Perfect Alexander), I think I do maybe 2 or 3 GCD heals while the boss is targetable; that phase is roughly 5 minutes long. Granted, the boss is untargetable for maybe 1/3rd of that, that is still roughly 6~9 seconds of GCD healing out of like 200 seconds of up time, or in other words about 3% of your up time is spent healing. This is not unique to Ultimate, and leads to a very boring DPS rotation endured by healers. Broil/Glare/Malefic spamming is not super engaging, and it would be really cool to see a step back to older, more complex (relatively speaking) DPS rotations that healers used to have.

[miraidensetsu]

For us to do what - ignore?

What if the Trick Attack buff was on SCH instead of NIN? It would be ignored? And can you explain to me why almost every AST main is crying for the cards being basically a flavour of Balance? Lack of utilities isn't what keept WHM from being Meta on SB?

If you want to make the healer gameplay less boring and don't want to make DPS mandatory, make them play with buffs. I doubt that the community would ignore, for instance, if there was a way for WHM apply a magic resistance down debuff on the boss. BLM, SMN and RDM would LOVE it. Who don't like bigger numbers?

[deadman1204]

What if the Trick Attack buff was on SCH instead of NIN? It would be ignored? And can you explain to me why almost every AST main is crying for the cards being basically a flavour of Balance? Lack of utilities isn't what keept WHM from being Meta on SB?

If you want to make the healer gameplay less boring and don't want to make DPS mandatory, make them play with buffs. I doubt that the community would ignore, for instance, if there was a way for WHM apply a magic resistance down debuff on the boss. BLM, SMN and RDM would LOVE it. Who don't like bigger numbers?

This wouldn't fix the problem. Each healer would simply have a buff or debuff they cast on a group every couple minutes. It doesn't change the dps rotation of 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1
If you say "make it single target" - thats actually bad. Now healers have to individually target and buff/debuff everything. Thats just awful gameplay.

[Mavrias]

Honestly lets go back to HW healer dps design i want my multiple dots back.

[YusiKha]

What if the Trick Attack buff was on SCH instead of NIN? It would be ignored? And can you explain to me why almost every AST main is crying for the cards being basically a flavour of Balance? Lack of utilities isn't what keept WHM from being Meta on SB?

If you want to make the healer gameplay less boring and don't want to make DPS mandatory, make them play with buffs. I doubt that the community would ignore, for instance, if there was a way for WHM apply a magic resistance down debuff on the boss. BLM, SMN and RDM would LOVE it. Who don't like bigger numbers?

My mistake, since you followed buffs and debuffs with an AoE Esuna (We had one of those - I only ever used it in Rathalos Ex), I assumed that the buffs and debuffs would be equally inutalisable, like ARR Miasma's HP recovery down.

Also what's with everyone trying to make WHM have damage support? I feel like every class rework or suggestion thread has that same suggestion.
Why can't WHM just stand on its own as the healer with Personal DPS? Especially since it's the first healer people have access to and it does a decent job of tries to push newbie healers to DPS (CNJ questline, Assize, Misery, Holy)

[CrimsonGunner]

My mistake, since you followed buffs and debuffs with an AoE Esuna (We had one of those - I only ever used it in Rathalos Ex), I assumed that the buffs and debuffs would be equally inutalisable, like ARR Miasma's HP recovery down.

Also what's with everyone trying to make WHM have damage support? I feel like every class rework or suggestion thread has that same suggestion.
Why can't WHM just stand on its own as the healer with Personal DPS? Especially since it's the first healer people have access to and it does a decent job of tries to push newbie healers to DPS (CNJ questline, Assize, Misery, Holy)

maybe you want him to be more like a black mage in the healer role and its fine that you want him to be but to others who offered him having buffs(myself included) is something that is missing on white mage.
it is weird to see white mage without shell/reflect or protect,they are his iconic spells and its just feel weird without them(at least to me).

[YusiKha]

maybe you want him to be more like a black mage in the healer role and its fine that you want him to be but to others who offered him having buffs(myself included) is something that is missing on white mage.
it is weird to see white mage without shell/reflect or protect,they are his iconic spells and its just feel weird without them(at least to me).

I have no qualms with defensive support (heavens know that all healers could use more of that), but offensive support doesn't need to be on all healers. Heck, I'd not weep to see Chain Strat go. Damage support can be AST's thing.

[Sloprano]

It's unfair in my opinion to people who main healers, how they have to go through solo content. What if they simplified the healing and made their dps a little more fun and engaging so they won't get bored out of their mind when going through solo content and will perhaps also have a much better time in instances since there you also dps more than heal and amount of dps healers put out is of pretty significant importance in high end content. My 2 cents, what do you think?

I think you are absolutely right, OP. Learned 5.2 is around the corner and this next live letter is where they're gonna talk about jobs and we can all excitedly wonder if this, THIS, is the moment SE will adress how they forgoed six years the diverse jobs with the straightfoward and iconic White mage, the unpredictability of Astrologian or the swiss-army knife of Scholar. Be as complex and deep, or simple and satisfyingly straighforward, something for everyone. Six years of skills and gameplay styles they all tidied up into a neat pile then set it on fire, rained on the remains and remade ash into the three jobs as White Mage with some cards, White Mage with some Fairy and White Mage with some White Mage.

The 5.0 HEALER BALANCE served no purpose because who are these changes for when they all play the same? Apply dot, spam your nuke, wait for damage to be applied, press oGCD, resume nuke. There is nothing more to work and perform towards.

If this kind of design was so important to them why not, as has been stated blistering many times before: Why not save all these groundbreaking ideas for the 4th healer. Was it for raiders? Even them sound bored here even in the toughest fight in the game. New players? They seem to get the rawest deal of all, getting their intelligence insulted with coming here to enjoy a healing job like they did in other mmos and then be told to do countless quests, solo duties, dungeons, trials and raids where everyone else is synced down and take so little damage it can be outhealed with potions. It will them take hundred of hours to reach the point where being ready with healing matters and until such a time they only have one nuke and one dot for this humungus amount of time spent in combat. I've had cnj sprouts joke and complain about wearing out their Stone hotkey in dungeons.

The underachievers who just enjoyed playing the job for what it was? I got Blue mage I suppose, but it's got a too big a hole to fill for how much effort SE seem willing to put in. And it's still missing a pet hotbar.

So the changes seem to be for noone. During ARR and HW I found WHM didn't have enough going on for me and AST didn't sit right with me. And that was fine. I didn't march on SE demanding these jobs get Arcanist abilities or a pet hotbar: I had Scholar for that. In the same vein I met people who found Scholar had too much going on and was perfectly happy with WHM for what it was. And met AST's who loved the random aspect and AST's who would hold up the party for minutes in order to get Balance or until their spouse shouted at them to "press 'Ready' already!" And players who switched between all effortlessly depending on what was needed. That was diversity! That was something for everyone. That was three jobs within one role designed right! Going their own sprawling directions and enjoying niches of how they restore health, mitigate damage or just generally work in combat. And for how many bazillion hours we are not only encouraged and motivated to, but downright forced to deal damage to do quests and unlock the rest of the game, that last point is very important for a Job to not be dragged down by it's role when all are meant to be able to play through the Story and actually feel like the Force of Nature the game constantly states we are. When I picked "Arcanist" class at the character creation screen and unlocked "Scholar" Job, at no point did it say "Congratulations! You unlocked Healer!"

[YusiKha]

Was it for raiders? Even them sound bored here even in the toughest fight in the game. New players? They seem to get the rawest deal of all, getting their intelligence insulted with coming here to enjoy a healing job like they did in other mmos and then be told to do countless quests, solo duties, dungeons, trials and raids where everyone else is synced down and take so little damage it can be outhealed with potions. It will them take hundred of hours to reach the point where being ready with healing matters and until such a time they only have one nuke and one dot for this humungus amount of time spent in combat. I've had cnj sprouts joke and complain about wearing out their Stone hotkey in dungeons.
The underachievers who just enjoyed playing the job for what it was?

I believe that the changes were for people who don't play healers - both to try to attract new healers and improve QoL for DPS/Tanks.

For newbies - if they're just getting started on healing there's a couple of 'trials' to overcome, first the nervousness of being responsible for the group's HP, and the eventual task of being asked to DPS
The overabundance of oGCD heals we now have allows newer players to have a 'safety net' of sorts in many emergency cooldowns (sidenote; don't use oGCDs like this, please).
The simplified DPS rotation skills means it's easy to take the step from no dps to some dps, and then as they improve further, mostly dps.

For non healers - most of the changes make perfect sense from other players' perspectives
"Why is the SCH only using Briol and energy drain?" says the scared tank on 40% hp, completely oblivious to Aetherpact healing him. "Please remove it so she can heal me!"
"I hate waiting for Aetherflow at the start of a fight!" says the PF monk "Make it only usable in combat!"
"The AST is only drawing spires! I want more damage! Give me a solo arrow!" says the BLM who only casts Blizzard 1.

Of course there is a fair amount of hyperbole there, but the main point is gotten across and I'm feeling spiteful.