Has anyone quit healing?

[Morningstar1337]

Oh yeah ARC was pretty strange at the time because of the branching jobs which meant that it wound up with a cure AND a raise, and inadverntaly allowing the former to be accessible on Casters (NGL it was helpful for soloing on BLM, but not so much in group stuff), which unsurprisingly was phased out with the Role skill revamp. To date the only ARC skills left on SCH are DoT's, Aetherflow and the res right?

[Mortex]

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:

Yes but the problem is even now a lot of fights don’t have decent heal checks. Like the only hard ones this expansion are e4s first week and ultimate Alexander 1 and 2 phase. The rest of these fights you as healer do dmg. Even week 1 shiva whas a joke healing wise and you were forced to dps a lot as healer to get through the enrage.

[tinythinker]

Yes but the problem is even now a lot of fights don’t have decent heal checks. Like the only hard ones this expansion are e4s first week and ultimate Alexander 1 and 2 phase. The rest of these fights you as healer do dmg. Even week 1 shiva whas a joke healing wise and you were forced to dps a lot as healer to get through the enrage.

I was referring to the idea of overall job simplification as the reason for the healer changes, which doesn't line up with what SE and and did, so I was highlighting the relevant portions for that. In fact, after the part where he talked about 5.0 SCH he talked about WHM:

Yoshida: Almost all healing spells the Whitemage had required you to cast, they had high healing potency, but you always where in a situation where you had to time your heals to the incoming damage and you had to precast your heal in most cases. You couldn’t start moving until you had finished your healing cast which left very little space for DPSing and the feedback we received indicated that this was causing more stress to the Whitemage players compared to players who played Scholar or Astrologian. Because of this our adjustments on Whitemage tried to focus on increasing possibilities for your next action and making it easier to move instead of just buffing DPS potencies. You can choose to use this mobility for DPSing or preparing for the next heal. In any case main focus for Whitemage adjustments were to increase mobility and give the player more freedom of choice for their next action. In addition, we felt like Healing Lilies were difficult to use efficiently, so we changed these to automatically start charging up once you enter battle. When a Lily is charged, you can use it for instant heals and increase mobility.

...[T]here is a thin line between stress and fun while playing.

The quote I shared above from Yoshi P also talks about healer feedback being all about dps, which he and the team wanted to change, presumably by pruning some things from SCH. There is an older quote, though, that says they don't make content that absolutely requires healer dps (as in it's technically impossible without it), but that doesn't mean they feel all groups can clear content that way or that it would be preferable.

They just seem to want to make dps feel less prominent for healers in their toolkits by having fewer damage buttons. Do damage, yes. But don't focus on it. Sending SE more feedback about doing dps than healing as a healer seems to tell them dps features on healers should be scaled back. That seems to be their perspective. Not attacking or defending their stance, but I strongly suspect this is a big part of the disconnect. The notion that healer dps isn't irrelevant or undesirable, yet should be presented in no uncertain terms as secondary to the design and play of the job.

Viewed that way, it makes sense that WHM increased in complexity (on average) over the last couple of expansions, while SCH gameplay complexity decreased and AST just kind of morphed weirdly but is actually more frustrating now button-pressing wise. If my summary of their perspective and goals is accurate, that is what players might be better off adressing rather than focusing on "SE is dumbing down healers" or "SE doesn't want healers to DPS". Some have and do, which is great. I don't expect every healer to agree with my take, but I feel it is worth sharing for their consideration.

So I suppose I would frame it to them like this:

Dear SE,

1. Healer gameplay cannot only look and feel fun when healing, even though you wish to emphasize healing abilities over damage abilities. While some healers spend a large amount of their time healing, others spend very little time healing due to the basic game design. Yes, some healers obsess about their contribution to DPS, but having boring DPS options - even if they have high DPS numbers - makes that part of being a healer boring both for more casual players and those who have the time and desire to maximize their DPS.

As you know very well as successful developers, there is the basic effect/throughput of a skill, like healing, damage, and CC, and there is how it feels to use based on animations, sound effects, and synergy with other abilities. While trying to standardize aspects of healing to improve balance between the jobs and give a baseline for future development is highly sensible, this must not be neglected for healer damage abilities.

For example, WHM is more complex now than in Heavensward and has some fun synergies with lilies that lead to dps opportunities with Afflatus Misery in addition to Glare and Dia and the occasional Assize. Plus Holy. Lots of Holy. It is simple in DPS terms, yet that has always been the WHM identity. The stereotypical desktop RPG and MMORPG style healer, like a properly geared Templar in Elder Scrolls Online or a Holy Priest in World of Warcraft.

For Shadowbringers, SCH has been brought in line with that WHM standard by having a similar number of dps-related abilities: Broil III, Biolysis, Art of War, and Chain Stratagem. Yet, it seems off to many players. Sure, some want previous abilities back, but it also has to do with job identity and gameplay. WHM incorporates two of its DPS abilities into healing (Afflatus Misery and Assize), which makes sense as it is "the healer's healer". But SCH has always had interaction between its damage abilities and a sense that it was a job for people who liked to strategize, which fits its in-game image.

In ShB there is no interaction for SCH. Biolysis doesn't affect how Broil III impacts targets (yet it could). Art of War does not affect Biolysis in any way or relate to Broil III (yet it could). Same for Chain Stratagem. And with WHM having more DPS-related buttons than WHM maybe SCH could get one more? Even with only four damage-related button, though, SCH doesn't have to be so flat and sterile when it comes to its DPS gameplay. Please consider how to make these more interactive with each other, and/or, perhaps even the Faerie?

AST has Malefic IV, Combust Three, Gravity, and its Card(s), the latter of which are all DPS buffs in Shadowbringers. Again, similar in number to the other healer jobs. Yet having all cards be DPS cards is something many players find boring, not to mention the number of button presses seems to some players excessive compared to what is accomplished. I won't go to into detailed suggestions as AST main have made many, but with the current card conversion system you could make all of the cards non-damage and nearly always useful but able to be recycled for something else. In a system where, based on player behavior, either card has to be a damage buff or none can, we've tried every card. What else do you have up your sleeve?

2. Per the above, even with fewer DPS buttons it is still really important for the DPS component to feel fun and engaging. Of course, as Yoshi P has stated, "[T]here is a thin line between stress and fun while playing." This is very true. I personally find some situations as a healer to be stressful that others would find fun. Not to mention that some players expect raid-level healer play in basic dungeons, which can add to said stress for new players and those who have limits on their skill progression as healers.

By reducing the prominence of DPS abilities in SCH and trying to solve the "fishing for a Balance card" issue in AST, an idea has arisen that you are trying to make healers extremely easy to play and lessen what other players would expect out of healer DPS contributions. Regardless of whether this was your actual intention, this perception of your motives is popular and comes up again and again.

There is, naturally, a desire to make all jobs accessible. That is only good business sense as well as good game development. Hence the old developer notion of lowering the skill floor so more people can jump into something at a basic level of play. The issue is always what to do with the ceiling. If it is too low, ambitious players with more time on their hands and a desire to improve will become bored and frustrated. This has happened to many healer mains in FFXIV with ShB. On the other hand, if the ceiling is incredibly sky high, newer healers or those with issues such as physical or time limitations may feel they will never be any good. I do not envy any developer who has to set a player skill ceiling.

Still, I feel that looking back to my initial point, there is room to bump the skill ceiling for SCH and AST a little for DPS. WHM to me seems fine given the space it is supposed to occupy, but SCH and AST need work. These considerations are especially important if a fourth healer job is currently in development for 6.0. If a small bump in the skill ceiling works well for SCH and AST, then maybe another small one is in order. In this way, you can arrive at something that still has your goal of healer standardization in mind, while also giving a concession to players who crave that higher skill cap. In any case, I respectfully wish you best of luck working with healer changes.

[EaMett]

Lets not forget that this is coming from the same person that complained that SCHs didn't heal and instead mostly just DPSed while off loading the healing on the co-healer..... All this exactly when SCH was the top healer in all content (read the healer that healed the most).
It was a vision of healers that came from a non-healer or very casual healer perspective and was simply incorrect.

The changes were aimed at doing one single thing. Decreasing the gap in DPS between an optimized player and an average player. If you simplify a class a lot you get less opportunity to optimize. That way, in their mind, average healers wouldn't be pressured into DPSing as much because optimizing dps wouldn't lead to as significant a gain as it previously did.
In SB it wasn't uncommon for optimized players to do on average about 50% more dps than average players (raiders). In ShB we're looking at about a 30% difference. But it hasn't really accomplished anything other than bore the optimized players and trample over cognitive flow game designs.

Instead of SE forcing their image of healers onto us, a design that directly contradicts their content design might I add, they should really just learn from this and give us more engaging gameplay and a proper DPS meta.

[Deceptus]

Pretty much covered this in a different thread months ago when SB released.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...11#post5008311

SE has a serious disconnect when it comes to healers. They have no idea what they're doing with them or what they want to do with them and it's clearly showing.

Instead of making healing more fun and engaging they dumbed it down for all three jobs and wonder why no one wants to play them.

IMHO 6.0 will be the make or break expansion for healers. We've been neglected for years now and when they went back to square 1 in SB, 6.0 will show what they can or can't do with a clean slate.

[FoxCh40s]

Pretty much covered this in a different thread months ago when SB released.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...11#post5008311

SE has a serious disconnect when it comes to healers. They have no idea what they're doing with them or what they want to do with them and it's clearly showing.

Instead of making healing more fun and engaging they dumbed it down for all three jobs and wonder why no one wants to play them.

IMHO 6.0 will be the make or break expansion for healers. We've been neglected for years now and when they went back to square 1 in SB, 6.0 will show what they can or can't do with a clean slate.

And my feeling is they will completely and totally fail. As a person who's been playing since ARR Beta and an Omni Healer, I have absolutely ZERO confidence in them after how bad they burned us in SHB. They clearly dont play healers, or have anyone on the team who heals (as is Sebazzy's opinion, one of which I agree with seeing the writing on the wall) and clearly dont want to f**k with it.

Look at how delicately and finely tuned Black Mage is and what additions were made to the job in SHB, and that's where you'll the see the clear lack of design capabilities between DPS and Healers.

Quite frankly, when 6.0 comes out and they make it worse, I may just be done with the game all together, as I am a Healer. I found Scholar so absolutley and mind numbingly boring that I did the one thing I said I would never do and become an Astro Main just for things to do during anything.

[Recon1o6]

Tbh, I think what SE needs is some new people on the job design team, ones that actually listen to the playerbase and focus on making jobs fun and engaging. Focusing on adding things to jobs and increasing difficulty of encounters to compensate for the players naturally being more skilled at level 80 rather than running everything into the ground for the sake of people who need to go do hall of the novice and got carried.
The current team's design methods are not fit for purpose. This laziness of scrapping functionally important abilities and fun skills and readding them as capstones is awful. Its fairly obvious that the 4 members of the current team are PLD, DRG, SMN and BLM mains since those jobs seem to be favoured the last 2 expansions. Or perhaps crafter mains.

At least one member of the team should main each role (healer/melee/range/tank/caster)

[Ayesafaile]

I've been a SCH main since Heavensward, but Shadowbringers has made me completely give up on playing the job outside of raiding with my static, as well as leading me to severely cut back on my time playing the game in general. If I am playing, I'd rather it be BLM, or WHM if I'm still somehow in the mood to heal or want a quick expert queue.

There's simply no reason to play SCH (or AST) in dungeons when WHM allows you to carry bad tanks with Holy's stun. I'd already started feeling this way in Stormblood, but Shadowbringers has put the final nail in the coffin for SCH. Homogenization and simplification have really killed my enjoyment when it comes to healing in this game.

[Deceptus]

There's simply no reason to play SCH (or AST) in dungeons when WHM allows you to carry bad tanks with Holy's stun. I'd already started feeling this way in Stormblood, but Shadowbringers has put the final nail in the coffin for SCH. Homogenization and simplification have really killed my enjoyment when it comes to healing in this game.

I mained SCH from 2.0 all the way to SB and I've swapped to WHM when I dungeon. I often tell new players that Holy is an on demand Hallowed Ground available for every single pull that has the added effect of damaging mobs.

It is literally the best form of mitigation in the game for any healer not facing a stun immune boss.

As I see it, there are not many reasons not to be a WHM in a dungeon. It's simply better than the other two.

[Sloprano]

Happy international worker's day everyone, hope you had some good time off. Everyone except the Healer Job designers at SE, as every day is day off for them. Fnar fnar.

Holy shit this thread has reached page 50. That is a lot of feedback and complaints that has gone completely ignored, well done.

<Everything Yoshida said>

Two months of this fucking virus causing so much overtime and instant confused anger flares up again coming back here reading the Director say something that has no grounds in reality. The biggest insult here is that they seem to think I was fretting over how MUCH damage I was doing, which I find laughable since I never bothered with a parsers. Because I was having so much fun with HOW I was dealing damage. And debuffing. And healing. And managing fairies. And on and on...

Can someone please check what version of the game the developers are playing? Because it must be a bugged build where you only have access to the single-digit number of fights in the High-End tab.

So to sum up:
* They wanted to Balance healers, numerically.
* Only place where Balance and party composition matters is in the High-End Duties.
* There are five or six fights being relevant at any time in that tab.
* Not DPSing makes the fights drag on, at times unclearable and not to mention incredibly boring waiting for the next unavoidable damage because it is 100% scripted.
* Means of said DPS is barebones, basic and unsatisfying.
* Because of Balance and how much fighting this game has, playing Scholar is such dull suffering in over a thousand combat scenarios spread base game and three expansions worth of:
Leveling to 80
Doing daily roulettes
Being downsynced
Dungeons
Guildhests
Trials
Coils
Trials called Raids
24-man clusterfucks
Fates
Deep Dungeons
World Quests
Four Eureka zones
+new relic area
Job quests
Role quests
MSQ hyped solo quests
...where party composition and being balanced matters for dick.


Why is the Director going on for Balance so fucking much? Where this balance matters is less than one percent of all the game has to offer of combat and for me even less.

Look at how delicately and finely tuned Black Mage is and what additions were made to the job in SHB, and that's where you'll the see the clear lack of design capabilities between DPS and Healers.

That is a very good point and one I took notice of: When leveling in ShB I often talked to some friends who did so with BLM, and every other level they would tell me they got a BIGGER or BETTER explosion with glee in their voice. In comparison I got: A instant healing cooldown, a trait to now an instant healing cooldown, a Bahamut-egi instant healing cooldown that eats other cooldowns and is delayed, a instant cooldown to heal more made flacid with Catalyze and finally a 20 potency buff to Broil. Take a guess how much healing I had to do vs. how many Broil III's have been casted this expansion. This is just not trying to hide the lack of imagination, SE.

The answer should be obvious: Do a Black Mage: Give Scholar it's dps base class, cleric stance and pet hotbar again, and I'll never be bored. But we live in modern time where a developer somehow still clings to the notion that a RPG JOB is to be defined by it's Role, and not it's name, theme, lore and, most of all, fun. What has befallen SE to be so archaic. It's not even anachronoxic, the first clerics in DnD could fuck up undeads in variety of ways and smash skulls with their hammers while also healing minor to major wounds. So what has gotten into SE that Savage Balance, that I don't even consider a selling point of the game, should take master, front and center stage to everything including to the detriment of enjoying the story.


What does Balance mean in Satasha? When the world quest asks you to go and collect five bear asses? When doing your daily grind for token tokens? When doing one of the million trivial encounters in the game? What the fuck does Balance mean when SE hypes up a story villian to the fucking moon and when you finally get to smack him they have the time of their life jumping around shouting exposition while awesome music plays and I can do nothing more than press ONE. SINGLE. SAME. BUTTON. endlessly, occasionally move, until he falls over? Because anything else would be unBalanced? Is that why Aetherflow and ED are at 45? Because pet Hotbar and Arcanist skills and debuffs would send the whole game careening into the ditch, catch fire and become 1.0 v5.0? Then this game needs a long sought after and much better foundation at it's core.

Since ARR, there have been a ton of fighting you just couldn't heal through, and nothing has changed since then except the murder of Arcanist skills. In ARR I had more buffs and offense than I had restorative skills. Yet I still kept every single party alive and the world didn't fall apart. What has gotten into SE? Have all their Healer Job Designers been replaced with calculators to whom the concept of fun is a logarithm function?

Did anyone catch the Shadowbringers Documentary? Wonder if we'll get a scene where they say "we had no clue about healers so we just deleted a bunch of random stuff and made them all white mage. It was hard work copy pasting so I took an early lunch that day."