Healing is now a state of permanent hatred.

[DiznypKC]

I'm not sure why you keep saying 'we' like you are the ambassador for Healers United. I never complained about the healer changes because I personally like to see how things will play out. There was definitely some healer things that needed to be adjust come ShB launch but as of right now I'd say the healers are more balanced then they have ever been. Again, I'm sorry that you are not having fun on the role you wanted to play but you don't speak for the majority of healers and neither do the forums. In my limited time being here I've realized alot of you are vocal but usually the minority in opinions.

Please don’t nitpick words and then admit that you haven’t been around very long.

A lot of us who’ve been maining healers since 2.0 and beyond, and are allowed to voice our opinions just as much as you.

I used “we” to make it less personal. “We” as in the group of veteran healers who aren’t enjoying this new iteration of healers. That is a group. It exists. And, frankly, it doesn’t really matter if, in your opinion, it’s a minority or not.

There are more retired healers out there than you may realize. Just because they aren’t rabidly posting on the forums doesn’t make them any less real. A lot of them simply gave up trying because other players harassed them or they simply believed that SE wouldn’t ever listen to them. The ones who are still around are tired of explaining the issues over and over again.

[Mesarthim]

I knew I forgot something, Selene and quickened Aetherflow. I'll just add those to the list because I'm not logged in to the game to remember everything.

[DiznypKC]

SCH:

WHM:

I stopped playing this at 3.4 but mostly...

-Fluid Aura has been progressively made more and more useless with each expansion
+Lillies are made better, overall handy mechanic over it's mostly useless Stormblood counterpart
-Aero 3, a handy AoE DoT, just... gone.

I'd elaborate more but I don't much feel like playing WHM. I preferred AST and SCH (I was an AST main from 3.4 to ShB launch and I want nothing to do with the job now, mostly because of cards). I feel like I got gutpunched for being an AST and SCH player.

Edit: Oh and not getting anything new for two expansions now. Everyone keeps wanting everything to be a DPS.

Thanks for the list. I’ll jump in for White Mage mains.

To preface, White Mage has been the forgotten step child of healers since Heavensward, despite Astro having a shaky launch. They were pretty much just a meme in Stormblood, only shining in dungeons and pretty much excluded from hardcore raiding groups who preferred the ungodly combo that was Scholar/Astro.

4.0 Lillies were useless/ignored, and Plenary Indulgence a joke until it was tweaked late expansion.

The only thing White Mage mains wanted was to be brought up to the level of Scholar and Astrologian. Instead, the two were brought down to meet White Mage, and all of them had a number of DPS abilities removed in favor of more healing/support abilities.

White Mage Specifics

- Lily rework gave us Afflatus Misery, but with it came a new set of issues: a) players were forced to use healing abilities to unlock it; b) those healing abilities made Medica and Cure II obsolete.

- Speaking of obsolete, they still... have... Fluid Aura. FA used to cause damage and knock back on top of its Bind. Each expansion took away from it, yet it’s still there like an acne scar.

- Plenary Indulgence was reworked, though whether it’s for the better or worse is arguable. I tend to forget it’s there all the time, because all it does is increase healing potency, just like Asylum and Temperence (?)

So basically the White Mage got a whole new realm of skills to keep them from having to focus on healing at a time when the devs said they wanted healers to focus more on healing.

*shrug*

[DiznypKC]

I should mention that all the majority of the White Mage community wanted was some actual utility. Instead we got stronger damage and stronger healing while our brothers got knocked down like three or four pegs. Some called it balance, others called it gutting. I just think there could have been a better way to go about it that would have kept the player experience entertaining.

[FoxCh40s]

Not to mention you cant even voice concerns on reddit like this without being blasted. People will deny all day on reddit that the healers are NOT the same relatively and argue semantics with you.

It just makes most of us veteran healers not want to say anything.

First time posting, I used to be one of those voiceless healer veterans, and decided to post.

All the concerns posted in here are spot on.

[Saefinn]

I'm sorry that you are frustrated and I'm sorry if what I said came off the wrong way but I simply can not grasp why people are so upset.

Lets look at what changed and maybe then you or someone else can point me in the direction I need to face because I must be missing something.

AST: Got the card system reworked. Lost cleric stance. Lost time dilation.

Only thing I see people complain about on AST are some QoL changes for some skills. Also some people dont like the new cards. Others have a problem with the opener on controller.

WHM: Lilies got reworked (?). Lost Cleric stance. (This is the healer I am least familiar with because I find it extremely boring with little to no challenge but with big reward with its blood lilies)

and then there is ... SCH: Prob took the most hits from the move from SB to ShB. Lost like 3 dps skills and cleric stance.

Now if you are speaking from a SCH perspective, I can sympathize with you. You lost skills but it was to streamline you with the other healers. So from what I've listed I don't see much that has changed (dps related) for healers in the move from SB to ShB.. Hell, AST dps skills are the same since SB. And WHM got a new dps skill..

Soo what is making healers so unfun for you all? Was it losing cleric stance or something? Or not getting enough dps skills?

I'd say, the problem is probably more HW->ShB, but SB was still enjoyable. I've healed since 2.0 and one trend I've noticed is that are our healing kits get more comprehensive the content does not match it. What we end up getting is an increased downtime. In making the healing kits more comprehensive, what we do in our downtime is made less comprehensive.

For losses, WHM has actually lost a lot. But their losses were gradual. SCH's, however, was sudden. WHM has had a history of nerfs, and there were improvements this time around, like Planery Indulgence was better and Lilies are less dumb, but not necessarily the improvements needed because more was taken away. Add that some of their abilities ended up being made into cross class without really getting anything back for them, as well as losing some too or the effectiveness of them.

The loss of Cleric Stance was twofold, one in that what it did was changed and then what it was changed to was removed, but its original version offered a dynamic of risk/reward we used to have as healers we don't have anymore, it was clunky but it could have been improved rather than removed. Scholar used to have additional status effects on their DPS abilities too, which was a part of their damage mitigation schtick, which as a nice added touch. AST could stun, SCH could silence and offer other types of CC through debuffs in their DPS skills, WHM could (and fortunately still can) stun - these all had their place.


AST on paper looks the least affected by the changes, but those changes remove some of the core parts people found interesting about the cards, there was the argument over balance fishing and the answer to that seemed to be...make every card the balance, no real RNG, no variety, no Royal Road dynamic, sure some argued there were times the cards they got were useless, but there's better ways of fixing that. No Time Dilation or the old Celestial Opposition (in the old way it worked) and these are all dynamics that added to what AST's could manage in their down time and how it felt to play. Heck, I loved Royal Road, because it reminded me of FFXI SCH with stratagems but with a little RNG, it was a nice depth of choice/utility to the card system, which has been replaced with 1 ability & effect. Sure 'balance' fishing is gone when every card is the balance, but now I have seal fishing, so this hasn't solved that problem. Just that every card is now useful. They could have just use the old card system and the new Lord/Lady system and no card would ever be useless. Can't use it? Minor Arcana and get a base use. Can use it? Sweet, may it work. For me, AST is in the best place of all 3 in terms of fun, because it has a higher APM and Nocturnal Sect is the weakest version of healing ATM so i have more to engage with as a result, hence I'll AST when I end up doing stuff as a healer, despite being a former SCH main. And it still feels like it's a shadow of its former self.

In effect, the feeling is that the healer jobs overall have been stripped. Sure there's more dynamics on their healing side than before, but the issue is that the content and potencies don't match them. So in effect, particularly with experienced healers (though not exclusively), we're in a position where healer downtime has increased over the years (and I feel it is the highest in Shadowbringers) but what we can do in that downtime has been stripped and thus we find it boring. This process wasn't just the changes from SB -> ShB, but some of the most drastic were made in this expansion.

I think if there was a push in content design to put more dynamic use of our healing toolkit, I don't think we'd be so bored. But in most case scenarios, light healing is only required and you can half-arse it.

And I think we'd be okay with the 'half-arse it' approach as long as there was more to do during this increased downtime. Because there'd be content that is hard where we can heal harder and moments where we might get a bigger use of that toolkit, such as a struggling party or an intense fight.

And the content where we're half-arsing it, a newbie healer, somebody learning or less confident might not be. They might benefit from that extra space. Because if the content and potencies were tweaked more to make full use of our healing skills, then it'd be a tougher learning curve. If we embraced that downtime IS a thing and filled it, the skill floor stays low, whilst raising the skill ceiling.

[Saefinn]

Not to mention you cant even voice concerns on reddit like this without being blasted. People will deny all day on reddit that the healers are NOT the same relatively and argue semantics with you.

It just makes most of us veteran healers not want to say anything.

First time posting, I used to be one of those voiceless healer veterans, and decided to post.

All the concerns posted in here are spot on.

I agree. The semantics is silly. I know that on a technical level, they're not homogenised. But in practice, they feel very much so, because you end up using similar skills in similar situations and for a similar purpose. The differences don't become apparent until you are pushed more. Like the difference between Adloquium and Regen doesn't matter when you think "I put that on tank to keep their HP up whilst I do other things". If you're pushed, then you might consider how you're using Adlo and Regen in conjunction with the rest of your kit, maybe Excog should be put down first? Then adlo? Is this is situation I should make use of Recitation? "I only have 1 Divine Benison, do I use that first and then follow with something else? Maybe Division Benison, Cure II, Afflatus Solace whilst Regen is still up." Hence I argue that actually we have good tools...we just to get to use them for their intended purpose much and thus all feels samey.

Contrast to SCH and WHM in 2.0, where the two jobs complemented each other and where SCH was weak WHM was strong and vice versa. It meant where they were weak, you had to find ways to compensate by optimising parts of your tool kit better. This is where they ended up feeling different. I loved when SCH struggled to top up health, because I had to think about it and utilise my faeries better and time things better to compensate when people took big hits. Back then we had less of a compehensive healing kit, but it was more fun because we had to cover our own weaknesses.

[DiznypKC]

Not to mention you cant even voice concerns on reddit like this without being blasted. People will deny all day on reddit that the healers are NOT the same relatively and argue semantics with you.

It just makes most of us veteran healers not want to say anything.

First time posting, I used to be one of those voiceless healer veterans, and decided to post.

All the concerns posted in here are spot on.

Lol I read through that thread. Those people were desperate to disagree with you, but anyone who can read tooltips can tell you the healers are the same.

[DiznypKC]

snip

Extremely valid point (and we’ll stated) for White Mage players:

White Mage saw most of its once unique abilities taken away, rebranded, and redelivered as Role Actions. That has been going on since 3.0.

[GrimGale]

Hard does not mean fun.
Casual does not mean boring.
Balanced jobs doesn't mean fun jobs.

And Making healers fun doesn't mean more Dps skills for healers.

Complexity makes things more interesting, Dps rotations are usually engaging because they require you to maintain a rythm of skills in sequence while dealing with mechanics. Simpler rotations have "procs" that require you to adapt on the spot and keep you on your guard.

In terms of healing gameplay, you don't even have a rotation and those "procs" are essentially the damage that you have to heal.

Its made worse by the fact that those "procs" that break up your monotony happen at very specific and rare times and you always deal with them in the same way only to go back to the skill spam.