Do you want healers to be reworked from the ground up?

[Veis_Alveare]

It's kind of funny, this thread has sort of exposed perhaps the single commonality amongst both the "give us more interesting dps rotations" camp and the "healers should need to heal more" camp; the idea that we need more to do.

So long as it isn't shooting me in the foot in solo instances I'm not opposed to a more healing-focused sort of gameplay in theory. Don't get me wrong, there is certainly some satisfaction to being top dps in something as an AST, but if I had no choice but to heal more that would be fine. That's what makes learning new higher end fights so fun, since we don't know how much to heal yet we need to heal more and in varied ways until we can plot it all out.

The kicker is that there is a big portion, largely comprised of the "healers should heal" group in my experience, who would be entirely unable to keep up with much of an increase in healing requirements. This is also likely what keeps SE from following through on such a design.

Princess McHealsalot may have leveled WHM to 80 and touched nothing else. They are bad, like, really bad. No dps, spamming Cure, 100% Medica II uptime sort of bad. They fill in their gaps with dance emotes kind of bad.

Now if SE makes it so that we need to actually use our kits to get through more casual encounters... what happens to Princess? They literally don't know what they're doing or how to use any of their tools, they save literally everything for eMeRgEnCiEs that don't happen often enough for them to build any reflex memory to be able to pull off a clutch Benediction.

SE has painted themselves into a corner at this point. We can't have nice things and it is literally their own fault for enabling as hard as they have so far.

[Recon1o6]

snip.

Its something that quite a lot of "Healers should only heal" camp think that the "combat medic" camp doesn't want when in fact the opposite is true

Both sides want to heal more, but the combat medic camp is going one step further and looking at what they do when they don't need to heal and when they are levelling, doing solo duties, FATEs and the like. Everyone has to do those regardless of which camp they are in. Its also noticable that a few solo duties have had HSOH camp complain they are too long. Well...if healers were combat medics, they won't feel as dull and long because we could actually do something more than spamming our only attack button.

SE has put themselves into this mess that much is agreed on. They stripped too much dps potential alienating the CM camp and the HSOH camp still aren't incentivised or forced to learn to do more than spam cure and sit around bored before complaining "its too hard" or "I've got nothing to do in this solo encounter" because the skill ceiling is too low and scripted.

Funnily though, when the HSOH camp complain they want to do more, but they STILL sit around doing nothing instead of casting one of two damage buttons they have.


Nobody disagreed with getting more incentives to play healer, but SE made things so braindead in the name of accessibility that it almost killed the healer role's veteran population at Shb launch, and still very few new healers are staying with the job at 80 because they enjoy it rather than the instant queues. Those that don't get bored to pieces spamming cure 1 or malefic or eos's many glitches because they haven't got a decent levelling kit. Especialyl with downtime not changing at all after level 4

SE might not like it, but there is such a thing as too easy. Players should want to get better at using their whole kit. They should look forward to having new skills and abilities to use as they level rather than leaving them off the hotbar because they are redundant. They should look forward to having a fair challenge and be able to recover as a healer after a poor mechanic failure.

[Liam_Harper]

They could also nerf dps spells and that will probably stop the glare spamming tunnel vision healer. However instead they’ll probably just stand around doing nothing, so they’d have to counter that by handing out more aoe damage more often which some may find equally as boring, but at least healers would have an identity in this instance as in, healer job is actually a healer, rather than a dps with some healing spells and is green, instead of red.

They could nerf dps spells down to 10 potency and the "glare spamming tunnel vision healer" would still spam them, because in reality they're usually competent players who want to contribute anything they can to their team instead of wasting time overhealing.

More aoe damage would be great, but I'd imagine from experience it would actually be the healbot who would suffer most because they tend to have no mapping or toolkit knowledge. The glarebot sees a string of high damage incoming in 5 sec, refreshes Dia, weaves a Plenary, Temp, Glares, Raptures, weaves Asylum, Tetra's someone low, Raptures, Benisons the tank, drops a Lucid, yawns and resumes Glaring. The healbot reacts about 3 seconds after the damage, drops a Medica II, panics because it isn't enough and the boss is casting aoe #2, goes headless chicken mode and tries to Medica, 4 dps die.

Funnily though, when the HSOH camp complain they want to do more, but they STILL sit around doing nothing instead of casting one of two damage buttons they have.

Personally I feel it's just that the HSOH camp want their style of playing (spamming GCD heals randomly at the slightest hint of damage) to be the correct way, so they can justify it.

[Limonia]

Princess McHealsalot may have leveled WHM to 80 and touched nothing else. They are bad, like, really bad. No dps, spamming Cure, 100% Medica II uptime sort of bad. They fill in their gaps with dance emotes kind of bad.

Now if SE makes it so that we need to actually use our kits to get through more casual encounters... what happens to Princess? They literally don't know what they're doing or how to use any of their tools, they save literally everything for eMeRgEnCiEs that don't happen often enough for them to build any reflex memory to be able to pull off a clutch Benediction.

But why would the devs take those kind of players as an example for designing healers? I don't see ANY reason why making healers having to use more than Cure I and Medica II would be bad. Why do those kind of players get a free pass to afk and not put in any effort at all? For example, let's take alliance raids. Tanks are easy as well, but they often do get markers that they have to point away from others or have to tank adds, and if they ignore all that it can lead to a wipe. But healers don't get any of that. As long as they don't forget to keep up Medica II it's totally fine? Why? If tanks have some responsibility other than pressing random buttons, why not healers as well?

I also don't think that those really bad pure healers would be too overwhelmed and unable to keep up if they had to cast Medica I every 30 instead of 60 seconds or so. Raid-wide AoEs are quite spread out in normal modes anyway, and I don't think they would even notice how many seconds are in between the party members receiving damage. Nothing would change for them, because they don't really have a feel for the fight and when what happens anyway. And there is always a second healer as well.

It's more of an imagined problem by SE than a real problem. At least that's what I think.
Fights don't get harder if the phases at full HP just get shorter, without more deathly mechanics happening. The only thing it changes it that good healers don't sit on their oGCD heals that long and would even need to use a GCD heal here and there. The bad healer only uses their GCD heals as a reaction to the party not being full anyway.

[Veis_Alveare]

(snipped for length) The bad healer only uses their GCD heals as a reaction to the party not being full anyway.

Don't get me wrong, morally I'm with you. I don't agree with the idea that healing needs to be 100% accessible to everyone all the time. I'd love it if we needed to heal more as well, anything to break up my Malefic spam.

It's SE that appears to disagree with this.

I will say I've seen some things on the off chance I play as a solo tank or dps in casual stuff. Like I've been using the normal raids this expansion to work towards my GNB mounts and so I've queued alone for them a fair bit.

The number of healers I've seen who have been more or less unable to deal with e6n is really kind if eye opening. It's not that there's a truly overwhelming amount of damage coming out (there isn't) or that healers have an inordinate amount of extra stuff to do (they don't) but even things like just healing through a heftier raidwide like Ifrit's attack can deplete their MP quickly (chaincasting shields or HoTs) and I've even taken to spot healing/mitigating dps who take avoidable damage with Aurora/HoS because people often don't get enough healing to survive unavoidable damage.

I'd be totally down for that, it makes me use some key binds I don't normally, if it were because these healer's were dps-happy and just trusted me to help with my oGCDs that I have but it's just like... they're just bad. And they need help or people will die.

Again, I think that's fine. I'm all for raising the skill floor a bit, I just think SE is like... very opposed.

[Thoosa]

And tbh if nothing is done, it will just encourage the good healers who can balance healing and dps to leave the job (and they have been) and savage PFs will be full of glare bots expecting to face roll the content as they have done for everything else (and were probably lucky enough to be carried by their co healer).

Some good healers will stay but will be bored quickly after the ilevel increases and just end up in the same place again.

If you can currently get 11k or so as whm by pressing glare, dia and assize occasionally, why not get 19k playing blm or sam which have a much more complex rotations and generally get more mechanics than healers? :P