healers need a serious overhaul

[Crushnight]

All you had to do was use lucid on cooldown then, and still avoid peity. Peity was always useless and until they add a secondary function to it, it'll continue to be useless. Also this topic got moved from general, probably to "hide" the thread...

I doubt they are trying to hide the topic else they would've moved my own thread over as well, it probably is just the OP left little room to doubt that it should be moved to the healer sub section of the forums rather than remaining in general discussion.

Piety wasn't useless it just had less use mainly reserved for prog and pre-mp changes for Ast . Honestly the way they treated Piety this expansion is akin to TP in SB and I suspect as a stat it'll probably be overhauled AGAIN! >_> Gee wonder who could've seen that coming over a year ago, only most of the healer forums but not like we know anything about jobs we play or nothing.

I'm not salty(much) just exhausted with the most recent healer comments showing me that Yoshi P and his team still have no idea how we play healers and looking like nothing will change for 6.0 so this will most likely be the last expansion I pick up a cane, a sch book or a globe.

I'm actually dreading a new healer job trailer because it will firmly plant what there design is for 6.0

[Deceptus]

To be fair, they have brought up a stat squeeze at some point. If I recall, they aimed to potentially do so in 6.0. Either way, old content will need to be completely rebalanced for that. So if they did want to focus more on the healing aspects, that would be the time to do it.

This actually frightens me that they might do a stat squish.

WoW has attempted it a few times and every single time they do it there's issues with previous mob scaling. Every single time. I honestly don't trust the FFXIV devs to do a good job or get it right. They have burned too many bridges with this stuff in the past.

When they have "adjusted" previous content, they've messed it up. Generally this has been taking away old abilities or moving them around and giving them at different levels. Or removing an ability, renaming it, and giving almost the exact same ability back at a higher level (Stoneskin to Divine Benison, Divine Seal > Largesse > Finally becoming Temperance, Seraph is nothing more than Rouse renamed)

Healers not getting AoE until lvl 45-50? Bloody Dragoons not getting their first aoe until level 40. DRK's feeling clunky as hell before lvl 60/70. Meanwhile, jobs like DNC and RDM feel amazing at low levels because they were designed right.

[ItMe]

When they have "adjusted" previous content, they've messed it up.

Do you feel like they have messed up the Unreals?

[Crushnight]

Do you feel like they have messed up the Unreals?

The Unreals were not designed with our current toolkits in mind, they function as though we have our old level 50/60 kits.

Shiva unreal had large amounts of dead air but this was done due to how at level 50 you had to be more mana conservative if you were a Whm and sch didn't have the burst for staff phase. Tank swaps were further apart at lv50 too if she went Staff->sword->staff in between bow phase that second tank was tanking that 2nd staff with all the debuffs from sword, they had to because provoke was still on CD. So more healing was rng dependant(also add bow was much harder hitting in EX due to her always critting unless tank popped awareness yet in Unreal she doesn't) and you really needed to state if the scenario above happens sch focus the mt with CD weaves while Whm covers party, now, doesn't matter just Yolo the healing(inefficient yes but you can get away with it way more with Unreal than you could Shiva EX on their respective release patches). Sch has lost its weakness from back then and so too has Whm, yet the fight is the same what would've been a reasonable challenge back then is a joke now.

The only thing Unreals have to them is Dps checks, and that is on extreme primal level so meh to higher performing players. So to answer your question no they haven't messed up Unreal, they function perfectly fine, they just don't get how much they have changed jobs affects these old fights.

[BlueMageQuina]

I had a long thing typed up then the page refreshed.
This is already 9 pages so I feel like it’s beating a dead horse, so this will be shorter.

In short, I quite disagree with the OP on most things—the only things I agree with is that people play chicken with who is going to heal nowadays, which is annoying, and that it can be undeserved to be looked over as a healer based on the DPS parses a group sees about you.

But Healers can and *should* DPS when there’s nothing else to do—which is 90% of any fight. And in fact, the WHM toolkit—the class you claim to be—is built upon the premise of being the “DPS healer,” being given one of the highest potency, highest performing AOE attacks in nearly every expansion—Holy, Assize, Afflatus Misery, and Aero III may she Rest In Peace. If you are having issues DPSing, it’s because you have a playstyle issue, not because there’s a community issue.

(There is, in fact a community issue, but to clarify, someone’s inability to DPS well is a self-contained issue.)

If you are performing 90% of the healing parse, there is indeed the probability that the other healer just isn’t healing from laziness or bad gameplay. I agree that that’s possible. However, there is just as likely the probability that you are severely overhealing which I have found to be more likely the case.

I’ll use myself as the example here, though you can apply this to many end game healers.

If my cohealer is severely overhealing, I start holding back. It’s inefficient for me to heal if your plan is to top off every raidwide by multicasting or expanding multiple cooldowns. There are even some instances that don’t require either healer to heal at all when pall players are performing the bare minimum of mechanics, like Thordan normal. So remember that you are a co-healer, not a solo healer. Heal HALF of everything and no more than that, or there’s no reason for me to heal the party as well. Heal only half especially when I, your cohealer, am a WHM who literally needs the extra heals for the DPS that you’re angry about anyway, otherwise my lilies will overcap.

The overhealing which deters me from healing is a symptom of a great issue of lack of cohealing synergy. Cohealer synergy has only worsened in ShB compared to other expacs, IMHO, I I think it’s due to there being fewer veteran healers remaining in the role. Many healers new to the role or the game, play under the false presumption that they need to heal every bit of damage and top up every raidwide. No matter your fears of wiping, that is not the case actually. More lack of synergy that keeps me DPSing, for example, unless another raidwide is imminent, I’m not going to heal on top of an AOE Regen—that is a Medica II, an Aspected Helios, a Whispering Dawn, an Asylum, a Sacred Soil, a Collective Unconscious or a Celestial Opposition. Why? Why would I heal on top of a passive top-off of no raid damage is incoming for the next 90 seconds? I’m not even going to Regen on top of Diurnal Benefic or Eos/Selene if it’s unneeded.

It’s inefficient. Inefficiency may work for you but it’s not challenging, fun gameplay for me.

By level 80, all players should be trying to be efficient in practice in the first place, not overperforming where it is unnecessary by wasting cooldowns and wasting cast times. Negative waste is waste and all negative waste is bad. Increased DPS is the aspect of gameplay that we are able to count on to never be waste.

And I’ve said this long diatribe about overhealing just to indicate to you that it is the primary source of why many healers struggle to keep DPS uptime to get great damage, and why their cohealers are now focused on healing less. (a second, equally important problem to getting great DPS is that they don’t know how and when to position themselves appropriately; they move too often.)

I don’t agree entirely that people should be less interested in healer DPS, or that any role should be judged solely upon the role’s namesake and not its ability to perform other supporting functions in its toolkit well, or even that healers need an overhaul—(well, at least not an overhaul for the reasons you’ve stated). What I do think is that what you’re describing isn’t a problem with the function of gameplay—therefore needing devs to change something (overhaul)—this is a problem of playstyle—you, the player, not being able to perform XXX well for XXX reason.

I’m sorry if my previous sentence hurts your feelings, but I don’t think anyone else is being as honest and straightforward with you. If other healers can do great DPS while also doing the required healing, why can’t you?

Well, you can’t because you “don’t know how”—you are doing something differently than they are—there is a difference in actions and game logic between you—not because healers are broken and need an overhaul.

I thought this would be short. I lied.

[ItMe]

So to answer your question no they haven't messed up Unreal, they function perfectly fine, they just don't get how much they have changed jobs affects these old fights.

(Emphasis mine)
Why do you say that?
Considering how the team is a small group of people that haven't really been rotating in or out all that much, you'd think they'd have a pretty accurate idea of how much things have changed as they've changed the job itself.
What makes you say they don't?

We don't really have many examples in 14 of them updating old content, or updates to our kits making old content problematic, so I'm not sure where you're coming from on this. Am I missing something?

[Crushnight]

(Emphasis mine)
Why do you say that?
Considering how the team is a small group of people that haven't really been rotating in or out all that much, you'd think they'd have a pretty accurate idea of how much things have changed as they've changed the job itself.
What makes you say they don't?

We don't really have many examples in 14 of them updating old content, or updates to our kits making old content problematic, so I'm not sure where you're coming from on this. Am I missing something?

Because Whm used to have mp issues in long fights so gaps between mechanics were more frequent (shorter but more frequent) so when they upscaled Shiva EX to Unreal they only changed the damage output and not the frequency so the dead air is more apparent in Unreal than it was in EX.

Whm only had Benadiction as a ogcd heal for EX, for Unreal you have Assize,Asylum,Tetra, Plenary,Temperance,afflatus skills for weaving. Staff phase back in ARR was a heal check as you could have Staff->Bow->Staff which drained mp as all aoes were mp casts all single were mp casts except Benadiction, Unreal Shiva Asylum+assize+1 aoe heal get you through all but the last potential staff phase, Whm has fundamentally changed so much.

ARR we were closer to having that more balanced playstyle between dps and healing.

Unreals should've been the wake up call to show them why their healer design philosophy does not work for encounter design, but they still don't understand, they want us not to use Energy Drain and save stacks for healing so they nerfed it, we already were using stacks for healing when a fight mechanic needed it, that hasn't changed since ARR, hello developers yea our mentality over energy drain has been the same for over 7 years and you still do not get why, >_>. <-this is why I have little faith they actually know what they are doing with healers because they don't actually understand how healers function in their own game and battle content design does not harmonise with healer job design at all.

There is next to no way they are redesigning all battle content from ARR to ShB to better suit their healer job design, thus it is the healer job design that has to change to fit better to battle content, and they just don't else we wouldn't be complaining of 1, 2,1,1, 1,1,1,1,1,1,1.

[ItMe]

snip

Ah, excellent.
Thank you for the thorough reply.
I've still been getting frickin buried in Titan Unreal too much, having to panicked heal and chain res too constantly, to be able to step back and look at the design so clearly.

I don't know if we can expect Unreal to start influencing healer design until 7.0 though. Stuff needs to be started so far in advance that even if this was a wakeup call it's kinda too late to change their gameplan for 6.0. At this point that should all basically be done enough that they can't just overhaul a role when they're supposed to be double checking and finishing things up.

[elioaiko]

Healing has and always will be a balance of dpsing and healing. Your job as a healer is keeping everyone alive, not top them off and have regens going to waste. That is inefficient healing and honestly worse IMO.

Often times, especially in casual and savage pugs, I run into healers either heal too much, not handing me 50% of the responsibility. Healing is a collaborative effort, meaning you need to not waste your healing over your cohealer and vice versa. If you both waste your nice OGCDs on the same mechanic when both weren't needed and have nothing for the next mechanic, then that's a problem.

And hate to say it, every role is a DPS. Tanks even have to DPS aggressively as the healers do.

Of course your main goal healing but there will never be enough damage in this game for you to need to heal 24/7. That's unrealistic and not the encounter design. Even the most difficult content, ultimate, does not need you to heal all the time.

I also have no faith in the devs making the healing role any better and only making it worse. Throughout the time I've spent in this game, they've only stripped away what we have and rebranding it as new healing spells. The thing we didn't need.

What most healers are asking for is for engaging gameplay that isn't just glare/malefic/broil spam.

They even dumbed down AST's cards, which IMO, was good gameplay filler that isn't just spamming the same button. But forcing us to spam more healing GCDs is equally as boring.

[HyoMinPark]

We don't really have many examples in 14 of them updating old content, or updates to our kits making old content problematic, so I'm not sure where you're coming from on this. Am I missing something?

While not related to the Unreal fights, you can see how jobs like GNB affect the Ultimates. GNB is extremely powerful at level 70, and there was a noticeable difference in my UCoB group when our PLD went GNB. Job adjustments have also affected the Ultimates as NIN is by far the strongest melee at level 70 now (versus where it should be a job like SAM, but 70 SAM is actually the weakest in a fight like UCoB).

I healed UCoB on AST—and our level 70 healing kit now compared to back then is so much stronger. Between COpp giving free regens every 60 seconds and CU being 60 seconds, I had an oGCD answer for nearly every raidwide. Plus we got 3 uses of CU during Golden’s Ahk Morns versus the previous 2 you could get before due to the cooldown reduction.

The developers did mention that they had to “make adjustments” to the 70 Ultimates prior to ShB’s release. I can’t recall if they ever stated what the specific adjustments were—but the job changes going from SB to ShB and the new jobs have affected the fights. Item level scaling aside, a lot of the DPS checks in UCoB and UwU simply don’t exist at the same level they did even post their relative patch when we had the dungeon gear BiS for them (post 4.1 for UCoB and post 4.3 for UwU). Before, an average group could have Nael at 20~30% pre-Divebombs. My group—also skilled enough but definitely not min-maxed—was consistently getting her to 4% pre-Divebombs.

I wouldn’t call this a “problematic” situation. But it’s definitely a situation where new jobs and job adjustments have affected old content.