Has anyone quit healing?

[Truen]

I started playing in stormblood and was healing all the time. Now I tried leveling all the healers and these are my considerations.
White mage is still the same.. you just heal and press your dps button, which is fine, but not my taste.
Astrologian is a little less engaging than it was in stormblood because the cards feel... soulless, but it's still fine. The buff giving you both sects is a fitting addition for astrologian tho.
Scholar used to be my main in stormblood and it was a really cool class because you knew you were a dps with a green icon and had lots of tools for every occasion. Now you still have the healing tools, but with the loss of the dps ones... I feel like being a white mage with less healing and some more shield and ogcds. I loved to switch fairies once in a while depending on the party I had; it wasn't really that useful since Selene was weak anyway, but it was nice. Every time I see more than 2 mobs, spamming art of war gives me crippling depression.

Now I heal only to shorten the queue time if I don't have much time, but I play black mage otherwhise.

Yeah. They RUINED Scholars. It's absolutely despressing for me as well...the dot-based dps rotation was satisfying. What they were thinking, I'll never know. But playing the job now isn't fun; honestly, I hate it.

[Vitreus]

All these months later and the same glaring issue seems to be here. The changes made to the jobs increased our downtime while simultaneously simplifying what we do in our downtime. Spamming the same ability repeatedly only to refresh our DoT every 30 seconds is simply mind numbing. And what's worse is that every healer does the same thing. It's glare/broil/malefic and putting dia/bio/combust on the target.

Did we really need to remove a dot and bane from scholar as well as shadowflare so it could play exactly the same as white mage?

I understand if the devs suddenly want to change the healers to not use a lot of damage abilities. But then they need to give us something else during downtime in more of a support roll. Something. Because if they simplify it any further our downtime will consist of spamming a single ability.

[Mesarthim]

All these months later and the same glaring issue seems to be here. The changes made to the jobs increased our downtime while simultaneously simplifying what we do in our downtime. Spamming the same ability repeatedly only to refresh our DoT every 30 seconds is simply mind numbing. And what's worse is that every healer does the same thing. It's glare/broil/malefic and putting dia/bio/combust on the target.

Did we really need to remove a dot and bane from scholar as well as shadowflare so it could play exactly the same as white mage?

I understand if the devs suddenly want to change the healers to not use a lot of damage abilities. But then they need to give us something else during downtime in more of a support roll. Something. Because if they simplify it any further our downtime will consist of spamming a single ability.

Honestly I stopped maining WHM in 3.4 and even I'm baffled by the removal of aero 3.

[Recon1o6]

I found on ffxiv reddit yesterday a poll for job satisfaction. While it was based on reddit, it still gathered a surprising number of responses. Here's the link and graph for the full results but I'm just going to focus healers here

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...urvey_results/
https://imgur.com/a/ymqa7ju

several things were clear even though it was an unofficial survey.

1. Astrologian and Scholars are in the bottom 4 for player satisfaction. Scholar is number 2 most disliked job, Astrologian hovering between 3 and 4. Hardcore raiders like Astrologian a little more than the rest of the playerbase but even then its not much of an improvement despite the loud hardcore minority trying to tote it as an improvement. Sure does explain all the looking for shield healer parties on discord and reddit.

2. White mage's larger popularity compared to its fellow healers, is due to its improvements in lily from sb. But as Captain Price in mw1 says "Its not hard to improve on garbage"

3. White mage appears not to be so much liked, as least disliked or mixed feelings in comparison to all jobs. Every job higher consistently than it in all categories are jobs that have substantially higher satisfaction (gnb, drg, blm, pld)
The jobs that are approximately level with it are jobs that had base breaking reworks (mch, nin) and dnc

4. Changes to old abilities and downtime gutting has basically killed off the Ast and Sch playerbase, and it doesn't appear that any new healers are coming in to replace those that left in the 5.0 exodus. Who'd have thought? Clearly not SE

[Truen]

WHM is my favorite healing. The amount of damage you can do and the quick response to healing at the same time is perfect. AST would be second with the damage and healing. SCH I struggled to enjoy it. I love switching between healing and damage dealing on the fly. With SCH I felt locked more to healing. Maybe it’s just me and I didn’t perfect the class or something.

What damage? It's just casting Broil a million times while waiting for the Bio dot cooldown to reset. It's an absolute mess.

[MerlinCross]

What damage? It's just casting Broil a million times while waiting for the Bio dot cooldown to reset. It's an absolute mess.

It's boring damage but it's effective damage. Just what some part of the player base has seemingly been wanting, effective noticeable damage.

Question how many of them actually play it now that they have that though.

[tinythinker]

I am not a raider. I mostly do dungeons and normal trials. No interest in being a green dps. Yet, I also miss SCH having multiple DoTs, Bane, and Shadow Flare. They weren't remotely hard to use and felt fun to use.

*shrug*

[Rosa_Frandlia]

All these months later and the same glaring issue seems to be here. The changes made to the jobs increased our downtime while simultaneously simplifying what we do in our downtime. Spamming the same ability repeatedly only to refresh our DoT every 30 seconds is simply mind numbing. And what's worse is that every healer does the same thing. It's glare/broil/malefic and putting dia/bio/combust on the target.

Did we really need to remove a dot and bane from scholar as well as shadowflare so it could play exactly the same as white mage?

I understand if the devs suddenly want to change the healers to not use a lot of damage abilities. But then they need to give us something else during downtime in more of a support roll. Something. Because if they simplify it any further our downtime will consist of spamming a single ability.

But its not the same as WHM was, WHM also lost an aoe DoT. Don't you mean the AST DPS kit? Combust and Malefic. Ironically though now both WHM and AST have more aoe tools with Misery and Assize for WHM and Earthly Star for AST.

[Vitreus]

But its not the same as WHM was, WHM also lost an aoe DoT. Don't you mean the AST DPS kit? Combust and Malefic. Ironically though now both WHM and AST have more aoe tools with Misery and Assize for WHM and Earthly Star for AST.

I haven't played WHM in so long that I honestly forgot about aero 3. I cannot understand what the point of this simplification was. Were they hoping this would appeal to more players?

[tinythinker]

I haven't played WHM in so long that I honestly forgot about aero 3. I cannot understand what the point of this simplification was. Were they hoping this would appeal to more players?

I doubt it was about simplification to appeal to more players, or if so, it missed the mark. There seems to be shade thrown at casual players and those who don't raid, but, there was nothing confusing or hard about Aero 3. The lily system WHM has now isn't complicated, but it's far more complex that what WHM did previously, so if it's all about simplification why add that? Putting one or sticky DoTs on a target and using Bane wasn't complex or hard either, certainly no harder than managing the new tools SCH got. And the changes to Astro cards are almost a draw. Before you had to know which job would benefit from which card by how the mechanics of other jobs worked, as some loved more speed for instance but it threw other jobs off. Now you still have to learn and manage cards just in a different way. If learning what cards do and who should get them was too complex before, it's marginally better now but not by a large degree. I don't buy the "dumbing it down" idea as the main driver or logic behind the changes to healer jobs. They could just give us the current PvP bars for all jobs to do that

From a thread almost a year ago:

Mr. Happy said he noticed when he was with players (not the trust characters who are designed to take less damage) that damage seemed more intense/frequent and health bars were going down faster, so he asked Yoshi P about this during the opportunity for an interview. The relevant segment run from 3:12 to 5:57 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uFvDXs-rLk&

More or less from what Happy took away from the answer he received, SE wants healing to matter significantly more, but not to the point where healers never get a chance to deal damage in groups or to a point where new players or new healers are overwhelmed.

Plus from this link to a transcript from a different interview (emphasis in bold added):

Q: On to the Healers, Scholar seems to have lost a lot of DPSing abilities, we feel like this will be an adjustment where opinions will vary a lot. Can you go into detail on what the thought process was while deciding on changes needed to balance the Healers?

Yoshida: We believe trying to heal as little as possible and DPSing instead isn’t what a Healers role should be, so we adjusted all 3 Healers to be more balanced while keeping their original characteristics alive. Content can be cleared on any of the Healers, but Scholar in particular had a much bigger toolkit for attacking and player feedback on Healers always focused on the ease or difficulty of putting out DPS numbers. This is why we wanted to precisely redefine the role a Healer has while balancing all 3 and then giving them characteristics through their attacks. A big part was that we sorted out the remainders you had as a Scholar from being an Arcanist first. Please try to look at the changes as us trying to balance Scholar as a Healer and not just trying to lower the DPS output of a Scholar.