Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Dogempire]

I healed all the time in other games and during any raid or dungeon I DPS'd during a burn phase on the boss(es). I did; however, keep my eye on my tank as they were keeping aggro and healed as necessary. Should this not be the same way for all healers in this game too? I know I follow the same method of play so far on my WHM and SCH. Buff w/regen or equivalent, single heal/hot, cleanse as required, aoe for everyone, and DPS. Rinse and repeat. However, I do not engage in DPS when we're dealing with mobs, especially when tanks in this game love to round up 6 to 9 plus targets to tank and smash. That gets a bit trying in low level dungeons when your sycn'd down to 2 healing abilities! LOL

Honestly that's pretty much one of my issues with the healer changes, I never played AST but WHM had holy which (Correct me if I'm wrong and this is new to 5.0) also counted as an AOE stun, hence making it good to AOE dps as a WHM since you'd be giving your tank several seconds of 100% mitigation with the stuns, and SCH had bane which basically meant that you could throw all your damage over time skills on one mob, spread them to all mobs, and then focus on keeping the tank up while still contributing a lot of damage to the pull from your dots ticking.

WHM still has the AOE stun, but Scholar got bane taken away and replaced with Art of Ground Slap, which is a skill I hate so much because SE basically took away our fountain pen and gave us a crayon to write with instead.

[Allegor]

I want Aero III back :C

[Thoosa]

You know it’s pretty bad when you put up a PF on reset day for E9S and you’re waiting two hours for healers and the party ends up being disbanded because our can’t get anyone.

[Anhra]

WHM still has the AOE stun, but Scholar got bane taken away and replaced with Art of Ground Slap, which is a skill I hate so much because SE basically took away our fountain pen and gave us a crayon to write with instead.

What makes this matter even better, is that art of "war" is just a recycled skill from pvp that used to have a knockback effect. And it is also quite interesting how WHM is the only job allowed to have a additional effect on his AoE while also being allowed to possess a discount price foul spell. Meanwhile dedicated AST wept on the loss of the old card system and gravity losing its slow effect and SCH got miasma, shadowflare and bane removed, because lord forbid, if youre going to dps.

[Recon1o6]

What makes this matter even better, is that art of "war" is just a recycled skill from pvp that used to have a knockback effect. And it is also quite interesting how WHM is the only job allowed to have a additional effect on his AoE while also being allowed to possess a discount price foul spell. Meanwhile dedicated AST wept on the loss of the old card system and gravity losing its slow effect and SCH got miasma, shadowflare and bane removed, because lord forbid, if youre going to dps.

Blood lily is nowhere near as good as foul. You get foul every 30 seconds and its not conditional at all on the incompetence of your party members or tanks taking damage. Just based on your own ability to cast 2 spells within 30 seconds

I don't believe gravity had a slow? Unless it was pvp. I do remember it having decent damage of 250+20% less for all others back in HW which meant you could use it as a dps burst with lightspeed because it was better than malefic at the cost of being hideously expensive mp wise and slow cast time, both of which lightspeed fixed for its duration.

I completely agree with all points though, healers should not have lost all this stuff. We have to dps too, how else are we supposed to clear the msq? our damage shouldn't be this pitiful either, 140 potency is a tickle with current mob hp.

Please return Aero 3 with complimentary water magic, cards and time magic, dots+bane+shadowflare+fester and some actual potency sohealers can have fun too

[Floortank]

I

3. Change fight design from scripted to chaotic. The better the healer the more likely that they have mapped out any given fight which means they will have planned to use the most gcd damage spells with the least amount of healing, your fights are that scripted.

That change would make it very unfriendly to dps jobs, especially melee dps and tanks who derive a lot of their gameplay from responding correctly to mechanics that are already difficult when you know they're coming.

1. Nerf ogcd heals, literally all of them. We have an overabundance of them and they do so much healing that gcd heals are viewed incredibly negative, cure 1 and benefic 1 are considered button bloat because they don't do enough even with their proccs.

2. Increase incoming damage frequency by a lot more than currently. If you are giving us so much healing ogcds make us want to use them a lot more often so we need to use our gcds on heals more often.

You're asking them to bring back heavy MP management and to force people to spend a lot of time longcasting, prepositioning, essentially making healers play more like BLMs. Do you know how hard BLM is?

Healing has to be stable and delivering healing throughput can't be the hardest role in the entire game.

You would make the jobs boring and harder to play than they need to be. I don't think you have the credentials to be telling professionals they don't know what they're doing, as you don't seem to be able to sim out your own ideas.

[Allegor]

I completely agree with all points though, healers should not have lost all this stuff. We have to dps too, how else are we supposed to clear the msq? our damage shouldn't be this pitiful either, 140 potency is a tickle with current mob hp.

Please return Aero 3 with complimentary water magic, cards and time magic, dots+bane+shadowflare+fester and some actual potency sohealers can have fun too

Because of the notion that healers simply don't, or have no reason to, exist outside raiding. "Who in their sane mind would do the MSQ, side quests, blue quests, FATEs, dailies, Eureka/Bozja, etc as a healer when you could just DPS?! ....most healer mains, people who actually like being a healer, that's who.

[QooEr]

You're asking them to bring back heavy MP management and to force people to spend a lot of time longcasting, prepositioning, essentially making healers play more like BLMs. Do you know how hard BLM is?

i dont know how to break it to you but healers already preposition and slidecast to move, and its been like that since ARR. if anything white mage currently has worse mobility than black mage.

i honestly agree about the abundance of ogcd heals mudding down the experience. Not only are ogcds plentiful and strong, but the cooldowns are also super short. If i have a thoughtless free heal for every attack, theres nothing to plan anymore. if clearing fights without using gcds heals felt rewarding before, now it feels expected.

[Crushnight]

Snip because too long

Healers already slide cast and have been slide casting since ARR. Whm actually has it worse than Blm when it comes to movement, Blm has swiftcast, poly, triplecast, and instant procs from Fire and Thunders. Whm has Blood Lily, swiftcast and the 2 afflatus healing skills, 1 skill requires 3 uses of 2 of the other afflatus and they are only needed if no ogcd can cover the healing necessary, that is pretty damn restrictive. Sch fairs only slightly better due to ruin II.

If both sch and Whm got Ast's level of weaving ability you'd have a point but no 2/3 healers want to stay put more than a Blm and even Ast would rather stay still and do slide casts when needed than constant movement with every cast.


That OP is me trying to meet the developers half way with their goal, they want us to heal more, they want us to be more healing focused, that is why energy drain was recently nerfed.

Guess what that energy drain nerf was pointless, it did nothing but change dps output, no changes to any Sch's existing mindset of when they would use their stacks for healing, none.

The Shadowbringers changes were also along that mentality they want to enforce, guess what happened? We are dpsing more than even before, we are more bored when we do because it has been reduced to the barest possible, and they still have no idea why we healers have done things the way we have for over 7 years.

We dps more because our ogcds are more or as powerful and free compared to our gcd heals and you almost never need both so gcds go to dps. How do you counter that? By making them weaker or remove them, yes healing then becomes harder to do but it would fit their design mentality if wanting us to heal more

We dps more because we can plan all our skills around a fight to the second if we want. How'd you counter? randomness and a lot of it, would it be fun and rewarding? Oh my no but it would make us be more healing focused as we couldn't predict things(as for other roles I deliberately left them out because it would muddle the focus but yes more randomness would affect every role in a very bad way and guess what that shows how bad their design is when one of the better solutions to their problem of getting us to be more healing focused is to screw over everyone else)

So yes I can call them out on their bad design decision just like anyone else playing this game can, they don't have to listen but sometimes the community is right and the developers are wrong, this development team has a habit of being too stubborn sometimes (see Bow mage of 3.X, Mnk, Ast) and sometimes they need to be called out.

Last point I will make healers are already boring NOW, I think it is safe to say their approach to healing design is flawed already.

[technole]

Blood lily is nowhere near as good as foul. You get foul every 30 seconds and its not conditional at all on the incompetence of your party members or tanks taking damage. Just based on your own ability to cast 2 spells within 30 seconds

I don't believe gravity had a slow? Unless it was pvp. I do remember it having decent damage of 250+20% less for all others back in HW which meant you could use it as a dps burst with lightspeed because it was better than malefic at the cost of being hideously expensive mp wise and slow cast time, both of which lightspeed fixed for its duration.

I completely agree with all points though, healers should not have lost all this stuff. We have to dps too, how else are we supposed to clear the msq? our damage shouldn't be this pitiful either, 140 potency is a tickle with current mob hp.

Please return Aero 3 with complimentary water magic, cards and time magic, dots+bane+shadowflare+fester and some actual potency sohealers can have fun too

Malefic was at it's lowest point in 4.0, killing any story mob even in HW BiS 270 gear early on was a slog. That was part of the reason of the potency buff as we got through 4.x series, and of course the 1.5s cast to allow card weaving.

Gravity never had anything attached to it in PvE, and it requires a target which is also makes it more watered down than Holy.

Foul is dramatically better. Most players don't know that WHM Misery is only a partial "refund" for the lost DPS of using lilies and that 4 glares is more damage. The only way to ever really get ahead is using lilies during downtime, or getting the not always applicable fat return on AoE.

Glare + Glare + Glare + Glare = 1200p
Rapture + Rapture + Rapture + Misery = 900p


I do miss Aero 3, but this removal was aligned with the 2nd DoT removal on all healers. We all remember when they went too far and removed Miasma 2 on Scholar because they removed it's last AoE. Only to have to return it in a patch in the form of Art of War, or what I call pounding sand for the boring DPS it does now.