Has anyone quit healing?

[Semirhage]

Despite the fact that I put healing down this expansion (and am hesitant to level them to 80 lest I become a design success statistic), I'm occasionally tempted to pick it back up just out of sheer frustration. Playing a DPS is engaging and all, but the duty finder is so full of "healers" who are so inexcusably, horrifyingly bad at this game that it beggars belief. White Mages who never, ever cast Holy. Never using Thin Air or Lucid. Who stand off to the side, casting Cure 1 whenever the tank's HP drops at all. Never using an oGCD heal. Maybe using Dia/Aero once in an entire instance. Blowing through their MP bar just nuking the tank with Cure 2 over and over again. This isn't some rare made-up example, this was yesterday. I was on voice chat with some people who were marveling at how often it happens. All I could say was, you got your wish class designers. This is the type of healer you encouraged into the role. Hope you like it.

[LadyKairi]

I had quit healing at the beginning of the expansion, and only healed during savage/ultimate raiding. I had a long stretch where I was only logging in for my scheduled raid days. I started playing regularly again, and I just couldn’t do the dps thing anymore. I got so so so tired of wiping to trash packs nearly every dungeon I ran. I’ve now been playing ast/Whm and now leveling sch to try and mix it up, because I’m just so bored. I’d go play other games if it weren’t for my static, my house, and being an officer in my FC (and needing to be around). I really hope they make healers exciting again in the next expansion. I love my DNC, but I just have the worst luck with pugs lately.

[Gravagar]

...If they just gave SCH's DPS kit back that they had in SB I'd be happy with SCH, from the DPS angle anyway, they still need to fix that mess of a fairy WHICH WAS PERFECT IN SB, god, I don't understand that change in the slightest. "hey guys, let's have fairy on SCH, but, instead of it being an incredibly useful and responsive tool in their kit, what if instead of that, we just made it completely worthless? People will LOVE that!"

Stormblood fairy was SO GOOD. To me, the parallel cooldown (as opposed to "oGCD with extra steps, except it misfires sometimes") is part of what defines a SCH as a SCH. It's one of those things whose absence is just really upsetting to me, and is a big part of why I refuse to play it...

Despite the fact that I put healing down this expansion (and am hesitant to level them to 80 lest I become a design success statistic), I'm occasionally tempted to pick it back up just out of sheer frustration. Playing a DPS is engaging and all, but the duty finder is so full of "healers" who are so inexcusably, horrifyingly bad at this game that it beggars belief. White Mages who never, ever cast Holy. Never using Thin Air or Lucid. Who stand off to the side, casting Cure 1 whenever the tank's HP drops at all. Never using an oGCD heal. Maybe using Dia/Aero once in an entire instance. Blowing through their MP bar just nuking the tank with Cure 2 over and over again. This isn't some rare made-up example, this was yesterday. I was on voice chat with some people who were marveling at how often it happens. All I could say was, you got your wish class designers. This is the type of healer you encouraged into the role. Hope you like it.

Ugh... I want to be able to enjoy the crispy-smooth reworked deeps, but I have exactly this problem. If I don't do the job myself, it doesn't get done properly, and it just sinks my spirits. There have been bad healers before, but gods preserve us, it is incredibly obvious to me that the current design lacks breadcrumbs to guide you to greater levels of healer excellence. All of the worst complexity was kept, which new players get terribly lost in even at lv80, yet all the veterans left due to the depth becoming much more shallow. Recipe for sadness if you ask me- it's so hard to be the "good man who does nothing while innocent parties suffer" in order to play jobs I find more fun... :c

[Hysterior]

White Mages who never, ever cast Holy. Never using Thin Air or Lucid. Who stand off to the side, casting Cure 1 whenever the tank's HP drops at all. Never using an oGCD heal. Maybe using Dia/Aero once in an entire instance. Blowing through their MP bar just nuking the tank with Cure 2 over and over again.

The thing is, the game itself doesn't really tell you that and that's the problem.
We know better because we have been doing this for a while but in 1.0 and a chunk of 2.0 I was THAT healer.
Most of the kit was healing so I was healing. And I was waiting for MP to regen when I had nothing to heal.
I remember very well the first Bahamut raid. I was only putting my DPS dots and that was it.
Best contribution was to use a poisoning potion on bosses from time to time (yeah... that old).

Things changed overtime and the "healers must dps" came when the raid scene grew but the game never gave new indications that it was the way to go.
Even the team during newsletter would say that healer dps was not needed for encounters.

With this design, you really need other players (hello fellow mentors out there) to tell you that.
That's the major fail to me: WE as players need to convince others that they play their job wrong... Ouch!

[Semirhage]

The thing is, the game itself doesn't really tell you that and that's the problem.
We know better because we have been doing this for a while but in 1.0 and a chunk of 2.0 I was THAT healer.
Most of the kit was healing so I was healing. And I was waiting for MP to regen when I had nothing to heal.
I remember very well the first Bahamut raid. I was only putting my DPS dots and that was it.
Best contribution was to use a poisoning potion on bosses from time to time (yeah... that old).

Things changed overtime and the "healers must dps" came when the raid scene grew but the game never gave new indications that it was the way to go.
Even the team during newsletter would say that healer dps was not needed for encounters.

With this design, you really need other players (hello fellow mentors out there) to tell you that.
That's the major fail to me: WE as players need to convince others that they play their job wrong... Ouch!

I've got an advantage there, because I've always been a hyperaggressive healer in this game. I've played several MMOs in my day, and the base act of healing isn't very different between most Everquest-style tab target MMOs. Outside games where healers effectively had no offensive ability at all, I've found damage windows for years. Slinging DPS in this game was natural from level 1 conjurer. I still to this day have no idea where this weird "helpless anime waifu" healer trope came from, because the vast majority of games I've played have healers fully capable of respectable damage, both single and multiplayer, online and off. Not as much as a class with a damage focus, but definitely enough to hold their own.

[Morningstar1337]

I still to this day have no idea where this weird "helpless anime waifu" healer trope came from, because the vast majority of games I've played have healers fully capable of respectable damage, both single and multiplayer, online and off. Not as much as a class with a damage focus, but definitely enough to hold their own.

I think it came from the perception of clerics in general. Thinking that as medics (or vice versa), they must not want to partake in the combat and a few leaps of logic later, that they are incapable of it, even though that hasn't been in the case even in FF (Holy is a WHM staple after all). Ont thing to remember is that the original RPG healer was Dungeon and Dragon's Clerics, as in people of (usually pacifically-inclined) faith.

The healing role is also Female-coded going by the majority of healers in the franchise (Aerith, Yuna, Porom, etc) and outside it (Mercy, the Priestess in Goblin Slayer) so I wouldn't be surprised if sexism played a role in propagating the "helpless anime waifu" stereotype associated with them.

[Hysterior]

I still to this day have no idea where this weird "helpless anime waifu" healer trope came from

Well for quite a few people FFXIV is their first real MMO. If you played all the offline FF, white mages have pretty much always been associated with pitiful dps / low offensiveness skills
Your healer heals. I am not too surprised to see new people starting with this mindset.

[Semirhage]

Ont thing to remember is that the original RPG healer was Dungeon and Dragon's Clerics, as in people of (usually pacifically-inclined) faith.

That's part of what I don't get; clerics in D&D haven't been low-offense healbots for a long time. CoDzilla was a term that got thrown around 20 years ago (stands for Cleric or Druid). Named so because they were one-man-armies who could blast, heal, buff, and be ready to go again before their party finished drawing their weapons. This wasn't some niche thing; it was surprisingly easy to get close to that powerful by just stumbling around with different options on the classes at one point.

Well for quite a few people FFXIV is their first real MMO. If you played all the offline FF, white mages have pretty much always been associated with pitiful dps / low offensiveness skills
Your healer heals. I am not too surprised to see new people starting with this mindset.

I also recall Eiko being a powerhouse with rare elemental damage + Holy spamming, giving black magic spheres to Yuna because her magic stat was much higher than Lulu's by the time you get your first one, Aerith being a fantastic damage dealer because she also had a high magic stat, etc. White Mages are merely passive boring healbots whose purpose in the party is to stand around and occasionally cast Cure if that's the box one sticks them in from the get-go, as the class designers for 14 seem to have done.

[Mortex]

The problem in ”old times” were ( Not remembering 1.0 because I did play there but i forced myself to forget this mess ) were that healer after some time did realize that you don’t have to stand afk and more or less sleep and sometimes heal. Like bahamut turn 1 too 4 were designed for no healer dps. The moment that did happen the entire fight did broke ( twintania being a good example) and they fixed that later with nael and other fights. Until healer dmg became so strong and the players learning the boss rotations and downtime to optimize the dmg output that it became a mandatory thing for week 1 savage kills. And it is still to this day mandatory and despite this we still got a 1 button dps rotation so people focus more on healing in fights were no healing is required and downtime is massive and then we don’t get even better interesting healer mechanics ( and no I don’t count white hole or heartless archangel and some 6 man Esuna stuff intresting ) like e1 too e 8 atm have no healer mechanics except Titan jails that even punish healer and give them nothing too do except stay in a spot that is a wide as hell. In TEA dps had (even being a dumb and rng heavy mechanic) dolls. Healer like I said do get too Esuna 6 people and heal huge amounts of dmg that even decreases the further you go into the fight. And i have still no clue why not make a combo system for healer dmg wise . If you don’t want too deal dmg in a fight, people won’t do it even if it is a one button rotation and people that want too do dmg are getting massively punished and bored to death to they point a lot of good healer rather play dps because they have atleast more then 2 buttons to click

[Mortex]

And i don’t kid you not that after being healer in a static week 1 clear group in ShB for the entire time my 1 key on my keyboard effectively said “screw you” and did broke down and I whas forced to buy a new one. A keyboard that I did clean and did kept it more or less maintained throughout ending arr ,Heavensward and stormblood until now because playing healer in progress and hammering the 1 key all the time for over 20 hours a week ( and yes week 1 progress we do for savage is 5 hours every day what is tame and non week 1 is 3 hours on like 3-4 days)