Has anyone quit healing?

[fumofu]

As a casual SCH player i'm quite happy with changes. It feels very busy, but not too complex. At least for running dungeons, which is really fun as SCH, even if rest of party is playing not so well, which I actually prefer, cos then I get to feel more like healer and not a green DPS.

As for raids (normal and 24) I don't really feel any difference. Full party is incredibly hard to heal and SCH feels really weak at that, so there's no change in how it was pre 5.0 and how is it now.

[Liam_Harper]

Starting to feel I'm the only one who still likes healing and mains it.

I mean, the dps situation is a mess, we badly need more abilities and I'd love more to heal in encounters, it's silly how little they ask of us ...so, admittedly it's not in a great spot. But I enjoy it far more than tanking, which is just a watered down dps rotation with a cd a few times a fight, or dps which is on strict set rotation. At least healer changes with the situation, mistakes or deaths can happen at any time and you adapt and react to it. Until your group learn the fight, that is. Sadly it's the messy early progression runs that are most fun. I like WhM's healing toolkit though and feel they did a great job with it.

Overall, I feel there's a lot that needs to be done with healing, but I still like it enough to stick with it.

[Crushnight]

Starting to feel I'm the only one who still likes healing and mains it.

No your not the only one, I personally don't like current iterations except whm but that's just me. If there were so few people SE would've been forced to change them as most current content needs healers XD, so there is a healthy enough number of healers around for SE to play the long game. They are no doubt very aware of healer complaints at this point, but with no way to address them they keep silent, unfortunately that just agrivates people more as they feel ignored on top of disappointed.

The big issue SE need to address that is universal for all healers (most likely next expansion) is improving the reward that is healing downtime. How? We are divisive about, but it is the single biggest sticking point against all healers the downtime when playing well sucks badly in the healers' current form.

[Saefinn]

No your not the only one, I personally don't like current iterations except whm but that's just me. If there were so few people SE would've been forced to change them as most current content needs healers XD, so there is a healthy enough number of healers around for SE to play the long game. They are no doubt very aware of healer complaints at this point, but with no way to address them they keep silent, unfortunately that just agrivates people more as they feel ignored on top of disappointed.

The big issue SE need to address that is universal for all healers (most likely next expansion) is improving the reward that is healing downtime. How? We are divisive about, but it is the single biggest sticking point against all healers the downtime when playing well sucks badly in the healers' current form.

Although I think the "what" is something people are divisive on, but if what they fill it with is engaging, I expect those who have a different vision would complain less, accept the compromise and maybe be happy "its not what we wanted, but this is miles better than what we had but its enjoyable at least) .

[Crushnight]

Although I think the "what" is something people are divisive on, but if what they fill it with is engaging, I expect those who have a different vision would complain less, accept the compromise and maybe be happy "its not what we wanted, but this is miles better than what we had but its enjoyable at least) .

Exactly Saefinn, most people would be content with improved engaging downtime however it comes about be it through heals (personally pls no we are overloaded as it is but if made me think and adapt more than just press here then I probably wouldn't complain), dmg skills(easiest to add also laziest imo), buffs/debuffs (hardest to sort out but could be most rewarding). So long as the current downtime is improved people will be more appeased.

[FoxCh40s]

As a compromise.

Offer people more tools to learn and improve. Accessibility doesn't just have to come from dumbing down stuff. Perhaps put a requirement to use these if need be. Learning and getting better if anything can be a rewarding experience, being good because it's easy is not.

Maybe add a beginner level healing job if need be that lacks complexity and have the remaining ones vary in complexity but be more complex and not feel watered down.

If SE wants to make stuff easier and more accessible there's options available without screwing with those who favour more complexity.

We HAVE a beginner Healer, it's called Conjurer, which is near braindead in terms of what it can do, and people STILL cannot handle even that.

Forgive me if I've reached the anger stage, but I'm just done with Square ass backward way of doing things when it comes to making the game "more accesible".

People who enjoy a game will play it regardless of how hard it is, and making it too easy and homgenizing it only hurts the audience and fans rather the effect they wish for it to have.

[Saefinn]

We HAVE a beginner Healer, it's called Conjurer, which is near braindead in terms of what it can do, and people STILL cannot handle even that.

Forgive me if I've reached the anger stage, but I'm just done with Square ass backward way of doing things when it comes to making the game "more accesible".

People who enjoy a game will play it regardless of how hard it is, and making it too easy and homgenizing it only hurts the audience and fans rather the effect they wish for it to have.

Fair point, but if they were going to make the kind of changes we got I'd /rather/ have it been on a new healer, all the people who're singing praises for the changes, would have got a healer with the simplicity they're after without it screwing with any of the pre-existing healers. Satisfy broader demands than narrower ones.

In terms of more tools to improve, this could tie in with the Hall of the Novice, but the Hall of the Novice really only covers pretty basic stuff. I suggested in another thread a "training log" where you complete a series of dungeons good for practising your role. Because one thing that worked great IMO back in ARR when everything was balanced to ARR content was that the content was good at easing you into your roles gradually with the odd bit to push you a little harder when you were still learning. Stuff is no longer balanced that way. Hypothetically a training log could help give a similar experience to anybody learning a role. Because to me accessibility is not about making thing simple it's about an accessible learning curve. Which I think would be better and more beneficial to those who're less experienced at healing than making healing easier. The log can also come with useful information for each dungeon in the log.

It's not a fleshed out idea so perhaps flaws no taken into account on my part, of course, but it's an option as an extension of the Hall of the Novice. In an ideal world the Novice Network would be providing a really useful environment to beginners too, but when I was last a mentor, I found it was the opposite. Because access was granted to people who take the title of mentor as an achievement rather than with the idea they want to help new players.

[Kalise]

We HAVE a beginner Healer, it's called Conjurer, which is near braindead in terms of what it can do, and people STILL cannot handle even that.

Forgive me if I've reached the anger stage, but I'm just done with Square ass backward way of doing things when it comes to making the game "more accesible".

People who enjoy a game will play it regardless of how hard it is, and making it too easy and homgenizing it only hurts the audience and fans rather the effect they wish for it to have.

I mean, this is an issue for MMO's in general. They often simply dumb down mechanics and gameplay to try and appeal to the lowest common denominator (I.e. Billy No-Brain) rather than actually facilitate TEACHING people how to play.

Like, we have the Halls of the Novice which is a good beginner intro to classes. But it's not mandatory and so people don't and likely won't access it (Since it is kind of out of the way)

We could have also gotten "Halls of the Intermediate" "Halls of the Artisan" and "Halls of the Master" to teach people up to Savage level of character mechanics. Heck, these could be made mandatory in order to access Max Level Roulette, Expert Roulette and High End Duties respecitvely while rewarding a box full of min ilevel gear for said content (So, currently, a bunch of 430, 450 and 470 gear respectively)

To say nothing about the wasted opportunity called Job Quests, which could have been used as a way to teach people how to use their newly acquired skills but from what I recall, all of like 2 quests actually do so (One really early one for PGL which gets you to stack Greased Lightning on target dummies around Ul'dah and a NIN one that gets you to use Raiton/Katon against single/multi targets)

Though, part of this comes down to how MSQ progress is locked behind duties, so they cannot make basic duties require any actual ability to play, due to the number of people who just play the game for the story. However, there's no excuse for why optional content such as Raids has to boil down to being idiotproof...

But yeah, it's super annoying that Devs mention how they don't like how big a skill gap there is between the top and bottom tier players and instead of actually bothering to teach the bads how to play, they opt to crap on the people who actually know what they're doing by removing anything interesting from job kits...

[Liam_Harper]

Forgive me if I've reached the anger stage, but I'm just done with Square ass backward way of doing things when it comes to making the game "more accesible".

Agreed.

The problem with making the game more and more accessible is that a lot of the players struggling are the ones who put in the bare minimum and don't like effort. They don't bother learning more than they have to and get frustrated after one failure. Lowering the bar simply lowers the bare minimum, so they put in even less effort and still fail because they're putting in less than before. The developer sees that some players still struggle and lowers the bar yet again. It's not a difficulty issue though, it's an issue with player effort.

Just look at some of the complaints today. NPC solo duties with just 4 buttons are too hard. Crafting is too slow after they buffed exp x3. Items that are 10 times cheaper than in the past are too expensive. Savage is too hard. The EX boss they added a halfway checkpoint to is too hard. Thunder God Cid was too hard. E7N is too hard. Dps as a healer is too hard. It'll be a never-ending cycle of nerfs.

[Truen]

There was a conversation in the game prior to the 5.0 Hell-changes that gutted the SCH and AST classes--and that conversation predicated around the assumption that 'green dps' is bad. Looking back, man I really resent those people. This is THEIR fault. Every healer class should have a dps kit that involves more than spamming "Broil" and cycling a single dot.

IF I need to heal more and dps less, that's my job as a healer to adjust; but, to have my tools taken away from me because it's assumed I'm not bright enough to strike a balance between healing and killing...that's insulting.

And, ironically that's what these changes, and SE's prolonged silence on the issue, really have been to me--an insult to the time I put into the SCH class. They ruined it on many levels and severely hurt my ability to trust they're capable of understanding what it's like playing the jobs they're designing.

I know many people who play SCH on my server. And, while I know there are going to be people show up and profess how much they love the job, I've never once met one of you in the game itself. Hatred for what the SCH job has become is fairly ubiquitous within the communities I belong.