Major flaws in healing design.

[Absurdity]

Such backwards design. I've never played any other game where it's only fun to play when you're playing poorly. Games should reward you for playing well. Absolute disaster that healers in this game are punished for doing good.

It certainly is a backwards design, welcome to Shadowbringers.

[Sylvain]

Not sure how healer expecting a tank to survive a TB with only 60% of their health in savage is a design flaw...
It's a tank burster, it's meant to hurt and require proper mitigation and healing. If they consider doing 3 Rez is more optimal than hard casting one extra healing spell well too bad for their group .

[Saefinn]

Part of the problem here is that there is too much emphasis on trying to change game and job design to accommodate people who fail at the balance between DPSing and healing that they've dumbed down the DPS aspect and people haven't stopped making those mistakes

But the problem is actually quite simple, yet unresolvable for a very simple reason. People make mistakes. They are human. I like to think I have a good priority over healing, but I am capable of misjudging and if that happens, somebody dies, I also own up to it and apologize.

I'd be surprised if it is because that healer would rather DPS (if they did, they'd play a DPS), chances are, yes, they are trying to play optimally, which is also what your tanks and DPS might be doing, before 5.0 that'd be your tanks dropping tank stance, for both your tank and DPS that might be eating an AoE, but in those cases, it's all right, because your healer has your back. For example, some people will purposefully eat AoEs to keep their DPS up, I rescued a MNK out of an AoE yesterday only for them to run straight back into it (they weren't even in a position where they'd lose stacks)

Tanks make mistakes. DPS make mistakes. And healers will also make mistakes. Let's not berate them for it and instead help them learn from them and stop screwing with job or game design.

It is inefficient for a healer to keep everybody's health 100% of the time. We are playing a game where our performance is marked by rDPS and healing is also marked by out overheal too. And many people will strive to improve on that, because the end result is they are a more efficient healer and makes their contributions greater.

But you can misjudge a tankbuster, you can misjudge their gear, you can misjudge how well the tank uses their cooldowns. I mean, i've healed the same pulls over and over and found tanks whose health slowly drops, so I can do more DPS, I also see tanks whose health drop very quickly. If I am used to the former because I have mainly got the former and not the latter, then there is a greater chance I can misjudge it. I still prioritise healing, but you might think you have your healing in line. Even at 60% health the tank will be fine in exception of a tank buster, if your healer misjudged that tank buster, there's your problem.

And when you make a mistake you learn and do better next time.

But thing is, I am surprised for you to find it is THAT common, because my experience is the opposite, it is rarer. Though if you are finding it is common, it proves my points about dumbing down DPS on a healer not preventing it (and to give us a more complex rotation again)

[Rilifane]

Such backwards design. I've never played any other game where it's only fun to play when you're playing poorly. Games should reward you for playing well. Absolute disaster that healers in this game are punished for doing good.

I think as long as you're still on the road of figuring things out, it's fun. Learning how to reduce weaving and movement to a minimum on WhM and Sch, learning the burst windows of various classes on Ast, mapping out the fights on healers, seeing how low you can go to maximise oGCD effectiveness. Making plans and experimenting is fun but once you have your plan and can stick to it, it gets boring.
Even if things go wrong, trade a few Broil/ Glare/ Malefic for a few GCD heals and you're back on track. It's not even neccessary to change your oGCD mapping.

Part of the problem here is that there is too much emphasis on trying to change game and job design to accommodate people who fail at the balance between DPSing and healing that they've dumbed down the DPS aspect and people haven't stopped making those mistakes

But the problem is actually quite simple, yet unresolvable for a very simple reason. People make mistakes. They are human. I like to think I have a good priority over healing, but I am capable of misjudging and if that happens, somebody dies, I also own up to it and apologize.

I'd be surprised if it is because that healer would rather DPS (if they did, they'd play a DPS), chances are, yes, they are trying to play optimally, which is also what your tanks and DPS might be doing, before 5.0 that'd be your tanks dropping tank stance, for both your tank and DPS that might be eating an AoE, but in those cases, it's all right, because your healer has your back. For example, some people will purposefully eat AoEs to keep their DPS up, I rescued a MNK out of an AoE yesterday only for them to run straight back into it (they weren't even in a position where they'd lose stacks)

Tanks make mistakes. DPS make mistakes. And healers will also make mistakes. Let's not berate them for it and instead help them learn from them and stop screwing with job or game design.

It is inefficient for a healer to keep everybody's health 100% of the time. We are playing a game where our performance is marked by rDPS and healing is also marked by out overheal too. And many people will strive to improve on that, because the end result is they are a more efficient healer and makes their contributions greater.

But you can misjudge a tankbuster, you can misjudge their gear, you can misjudge how well the tank uses their cooldowns. I mean, i've healed the same pulls over and over and found tanks whose health slowly drops, so I can do more DPS, I also see tanks whose health drop very quickly. If I am used to the former because I have mainly got the former and not the latter, then there is a greater chance I can misjudge it. I still prioritise healing, but you might think you have your healing in line. Even at 60% health the tank will be fine in exception of a tank buster, if your healer misjudged that tank buster, there's your problem.

And when you make a mistake you learn and do better next time.

But thing is, I am surprised for you to find it is THAT common, because my experience is the opposite, it is rarer. Though if you are finding it is common, it proves my points about dumbing down DPS on a healer not preventing it (and to give us a more complex rotation again)

This is on point.
People make mistakes and they need to be allowed to make mistakes even if they are negatively affecting another players' performance at first.
A dps that greeds will eat stacks and additional damage, the healer can fix it bei either healing or (at worst) ressing them later. A tank that greeds or uses mitigation poorly eats additional damage, the healer can fix it. In both cases, people generally don't bat an eye. And I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with this. But healers need to be allowed to make mistakes aswell, even if they misjudged and someone dies from it.
That's how you learn and improve.

During ARR and HW when it was arguably most risky to balance healing and dpsing because of Cleric Stance, which could really screw you over if you accidentally locked yourself, healers still generally dpsed while healing and the amount of healers "refusing to heal" wasn't any higher or lower than now with the dumbed down design.

Shaming and berating people for making mistakes will not prevent them from making them. Only being able to learn to do better will.
No matter how much you dumb down design and make mistakes more punishing for the one making it, you will keep running into people who have yet to figure things out and will occasionally misjudge a situation.

Even if weakness and damage down had a much stronger effect, people would still greed. Even if healers had a lifebond with their tank and would immediately die if they die, they would still greed. Testing your limits is important. Even if our dps spells only had 10 potency, healers would still dps and test their limits.

And I strongly disagree with the notion that mitigation/ survival should be the sole responsibility of healers.
This is an MMO; we shouldn't live in our own little bubbles where we're only ever affected by our own actions. Encouraging teamplay by giving tanks and dps tools to mitigate damage or heal them is part of it. Besides, do you really think two buttons with 120s cooldown will suddenly make healer gameplay interesting when we spent almost every hardcast on dps? We don't need more buttons we only push every few minutes, we need more buttons we need to push constantly.

[Saefinn]

And I strongly disagree with the notion that mitigation/ survival should be the sole responsibility of healers.
This is an MMO; we shouldn't live in our own little bubbles where we're only ever affected by our own actions. Encouraging teamplay by giving tanks and dps tools to mitigate damage or heal them is part of it. Besides, do you really think two buttons with 120s cooldown will suddenly make healer gameplay interesting when we spent almost every hardcast on dps? We don't need more buttons we only push every few minutes, we need more buttons we need to push constantly.

This reminds me of when emnity wasn't just tank responsibility with skills for emnity dumps, if your tank struggled or heck there was a big gap iLevel where the DPS found it easier to get aggro, they could just drop that emnity. Emnity management wasn't just something tanks had. When you think about it, tanks could had other jobs help with emnity, dps have other jobs that can help with damage and healers have jobs that can help with healing, there's your teamwork right there.

And because of my experience playing healer, when I play DNC, I will Curing Waltz to help out if I see healthy look risky. I've also done it as a PLD, had a dungeon where the healer was having bad connection issues, he offered to leave, but between us we had the tools to keep going, so we did. When you look around, there are quite few jobs that can contribute.

[ForteNightshade]

Part of the problem here is that there is too much emphasis on trying to change game and job design to accommodate people who fail at the balance between DPSing and healing that they've dumbed down the DPS aspect and people haven't stopped making those mistakes

Unfortunately, the dev team's response to just about anything is to make things "more accessible". What they've (hopefully) discovered is going the opposite extreme also upsets people because now you're only real challenged as a healer in two fights; last tier of Savage and Ultimate. It's frankly inexcusable just how little healing is required yet they continue to try and focus on giving healers more healing abilities—or dumbing down other aspects so baby healers have less to focus on. But this, in turn, gives them nothing to strive towards. Which is why more and more healers who don't even touch Savage are complaining how boring the jobs have become.

[Vitreus]

Healers are the most simplistic they have ever been, so much so that people are complaining a lot more about being bored, if people still can't handle balancing both healing and dpsing, tough cookies, stop trying to come up with ways to punish the good healers more because others can handle it.

An example which would punish healers based on what you want, a tank is a troll gets hit by everything eventually healer can't handle the 16 stacked tank and they die, your suggestion has the healer die immediately because couldn't keep tank alive, if you changed it to dmg down welp your timer is healer mp as failing mechanics will still cause hp damage which have to be healed up, again punishing the healer for doing nothing wrong.

Your suggestion is just punishing healers for the sake of it because you have had bad experiences which i'm doubtful of having as much as you are claiming.

As for regen/shield healer thing, welcome to the healer forums, Whm had shielding they removed it, yet other healers keeped their shields and regens, SE's bad design decisions are talked aplenty with numerous ways to improve it.

While removing all mitigation/healing form non tanks/healers would increase our healing time(barely like 10% max so instead of 60%-90% we spend 50%-80%, riveting >_>), the core issue will still remain with the healers and healers will still say they are bored.

What baffles me is how the previous dps design was considered complex even in the slightest.

[Ilenya]

What baffles me is how the previous dps design was considered complex even in the slightest.

I presume because SE decided that it took away time from healing/paying attention to players HP?

[Vitreus]

I presume because SE decided that it took away time from healing/paying attention to players HP?

Probably they did say they want healers to focus on healing and not damage. The problem is that if you are playing your job right you are only doing damage during your downtime. You dps when you have nothing else to do. So if a healer is mismanaging their heals because they are focusing on doing damage, that kinda seems like the player getting used to playing their job. This change makes downtime an incredibly bore because it's single button spam and adding a dot twice a minute. And what's worse is that as new content comes out and we do said content we get stronger, and we get progressively more downtime because tanks take less damage and we heal more. So the gameplay gets progressively more boring the stronger we become.

SE either needs to give us some support role we can fill during out downtime, like buffing out allies, or return our dps kit.

[Ilenya]

I would *love* if we had more buffs/debuffs to work with as healers, but SE seems unwilling to even give us that, it feels like.