Has anyone quit healing?

[Irenia]

I've been thinking about how the devs separate the dps jobs from each other by changing the rhythm of the jobs. I've imagined in the past that every healer would need a complex dps rotation, but is this the case?

Imagine 4 healers:
1) easy heals and dps, but most dps power comes from buffing allies. Yeah, pretty much the AST identity.
2) easy dps, complicated heals. Has the most ogcd power, but access to these must be timed and planned, as they are not simple cooldowns you can press at any time when they are up.
3) complicated dps, easy heals. Big Deeps battle cleric which might be similar to putting a dps kit on current WHM or SCH.
4) intertwined heals and dps. The kit cannot be cleanly separated between healer tools and dps tools, since they bleed into each other.

These aren't exclusive; some buffing might be found in all of them, for example. I'd imagine this would be a ton of work, but it might be possible.

Or I might be going insane. Either or.

[IDontPetLalas]

Hey Okami,

I absolutely agree with you. Why I am writing this post are simple concerns that I have noticed recently. In my weekly kills I always see fewer healers who also heal but only cause increased damage. Now in the forum the idea is being expressed to make the Dps rotations more complete.

And for me this leads to three scenarios:

I) In the best case scenario, the DPS rotations are more demanding (here I see the WHM in focus) and people stay alive.
II) Due to the complexity of the DPS rotations, healers forget to heal and people die, true to the motto that ADpS is more important than the integrity of the other players.
III) Players are frightened by the high demands of the rotations and play the rotation "not DPS" optimized.

We have seen what happens when a healer becomes too complicated. The number of scholars dropped rapidly, and WHMs shot up.

Sorry, but I read this and went "whut"?

2- are you saying that healers are basically incompetent and would not be able to use any judgement?
3- I'm not sure of whether here you're calling out both the healers and game designers at being incompetent, since this would imply job changes that would be so complex that the average healer would not be able to incorporate a DPS rotation into boss or trash mechanics along with heals and buffs. Sorry if "incompetent" sounds a bit strong, but really, "frightened"-- of what? I really don't see what there is to be frightened of.

Finally, the last statement about people dropping SCH because it became too complicated for WHM ??? No, not all. Personally I changed to AST because I found it became more rewarding than SCH with the changes in Shadowbringers while still retaining some complexity.

[ParadoxHealer]

When you dumb down healers, you end up with less healers. The people who think having more complex DPS would reduce the amount of healing are the whole reason we have less healers now. The people who mained healers and love the challenge stopped playing or at least significantly reduced how much they play healing classes because healers were dumbed down. The classes went from being diverse and having different focus in mechanics to all feeling like a cheap copy of WHM. People don't want to play a class that does not have challenge and primarily feels like a pet class, which is exactly what healers became. I left for months, and I am back primarily playing DPS classes because at least there is some challenge and distinction between them. I miss the differences and the challenges of switching between the classes, but now the healers feel like they are two dimensional. I have given up hope of them ever being treated by the Dev's like a real class instead of a pet class, and when you read the way a portion of this population talks about them on the board, it is no wonder they are treated that way.

[Dogempire]

Hey Okami,

I absolutely agree with you. Why I am writing this post are simple concerns that I have noticed recently. In my weekly kills I always see fewer healers who also heal but only cause increased damage. Now in the forum the idea is being expressed to make the Dps rotations more complete.

And for me this leads to three scenarios:

I) In the best case scenario, the DPS rotations are more demanding (here I see the WHM in focus) and people stay alive.
II) Due to the complexity of the DPS rotations, healers forget to heal and people die, true to the motto that ADpS is more important than the integrity of the other players.
III) Players are frightened by the high demands of the rotations and play the rotation "not DPS" optimized.

We have seen what happens when a healer becomes too complicated. The number of scholars dropped rapidly, and WHMs shot up.

Honestly, I think that the lack of challenge players face nowadays not only in DF content, but also in the jobs they play isn't a good sign. Scholar was my first job I got to level 60 despite it being the hardest healer to play effectively, and you know what? It was hard, but I learned a lot of things and improved as a player because I dared to challenge myself to do more than play it safe and healbot while never touching cleric stance.

Scholar had one of the highest skill caps of any job in the game, and the best of the best scholars were basically gods at what they did. The current iteration of healers is frankly an insult to the people who pushed themselves out of their comfort zone to get to a skill level unreachable by most players, and devoted themselves to being effective at one of the hardest jobs to master.

Anyways, my point is that the people who were attracted to scholar were typically the type of people who want to challenge themselves to get better, to pick up something hard to master and play out of their comfort zone, taking risks with stance dancing and maybe accidentally tunnel visioning on dps rotations.

To me the 5.0 changes are an insult to anyone that mained Scholar pre-5.0, basically taking an expensive sketching kit and replacing it with crayon to draw with because the casual playerbase thinks that having more than 1 pencil to choose from is too hard and daddy SE says it's their turn to play with the scholar, but not the old scholar because that's too complicated, so dumb it down first so anyone with 2 braincells can basically hit skill cap within the first 2 weeks of playing it.

Impassioned rant aside, not all jobs should be accessible to the casual player, there needs to be a job or two for every role that a first time player can't pick up and immediately become good at unless they're willing to step out of their comfort zone to learn it.

[Semirhage]

Scholar had one of the highest skill caps of any job in the game, and the best of the best scholars were basically gods...
...Impassioned rant aside, not all jobs should be accessible to the casual player, there needs to be a job or two for every role that a first time player can't pick up and immediately become good at unless they're willing to step out of their comfort zone to learn it.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your flight attendant speaking. To your left you will see the Great Healer Circular Forum Argument funnel cloud in the beginning of its rotation. As we begin our descent you will see "More Complicated Jobs Deserve Higher Skill Ceilings" and as we touch down we'll catch "It's Only Fair If Higher Skill Ceilings Come With More Powerful Potential", and before the fasten seatbelt sign turns off you'll hear "But Just Because We've Defined Other Healers As Necessarily Both Duller And Weaker Than Scholar Doesn't Mean It Can't Be Balanced Somehow" at the terminal.

Thank you for flying FFXIV Forum airlines.

[Recon1o6]

Impassioned rant aside, not all jobs should be accessible to the casual player, there needs to be a job or two for every role that a first time player can't pick up and immediately become good at unless they're willing to step out of their comfort zone to learn it.

Well...no actually. You don't need any of them dumbed down accessible to the casual player, because the casual player, by the time they get to level 80 should at least be competent enough to use sufficient pieces of their kit to keep the party alive through their daily dungeons.
80 levels is more than sufficient to learn how to play any job thats not smn or blm properly (the former is a mess, the latter changes constantly)

even back in the previous two expansions where we had higher fun, complexity and skill caps, by the time you hit level cap, you had more than enough time to learn not to stand in the bad and learn a basic priority for your ogcds. If you did the hall of the novice or even got bored with nothing to heal, even better as you learned to dps during the plentiful downtime


We should expect casual players to at least know what each button in their kit does and not stand in the bad. Its the bare minimum once they hit level cap
That said, I do fully agree that we should have jobs that take longer time to learn/master.
Design the jobs for those who play the jobs damn it ><

[Risvertasashi]

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your flight attendant speaking. To your left you will see the Great Healer Circular Forum Argument funnel cloud in the beginning of its rotation. As we begin our descent you will see "More Complicated Jobs Deserve Higher Skill Ceilings" and as we touch down we'll catch "It's Only Fair If Higher Skill Ceilings Come With More Powerful Potential", and before the fasten seatbelt sign turns off you'll hear "But Just Because We've Defined Other Healers As Necessarily Both Duller And Weaker Than Scholar Doesn't Mean It Can't Be Balanced Somehow" at the terminal.

Thank you for flying FFXIV Forum airlines.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane >.>

[Dogempire]

Well...no actually. You don't need any of them dumbed down accessible to the casual player, because the casual player, by the time they get to level 80 should at least be competent enough to use sufficient pieces of their kit to keep the party alive through their daily dungeons.
80 levels is more than sufficient to learn how to play any job thats not smn or blm properly (the former is a mess, the latter changes constantly)

even back in the previous two expansions where we had higher fun, complexity and skill caps, by the time you hit level cap, you had more than enough time to learn not to stand in the bad and learn a basic priority for your ogcds. If you did the hall of the novice or even got bored with nothing to heal, even better as you learned to dps during the plentiful downtime


We should expect casual players to at least know what each button in their kit does and not stand in the bad. Its the bare minimum once they hit level cap
That said, I do fully agree that we should have jobs that take longer time to learn/master.
Design the jobs for those who play the jobs damn it ><

I mean you are right about that, you get a lot more time and get more gradual easing into your kit leveling 30-80 than you do 30-60, and by that point you know what everything does, but part of what I found fun initially with healing was the figurative taking off the training wheels and learning how to manage damage and healing, considering that if you mis-stepped with cleric stance and tried to heal the tank with it on, you could end up letting the tank die.

Current scholar compared to what it used to be is too easy, too safe, doing aoe damage isn't even fun because instead of spreading contagions and placing fire puddles we're just slapping the ground

[Dogempire]

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your flight attendant speaking. To your left you will see the Great Healer Circular Forum Argument funnel cloud in the beginning of its rotation. As we begin our descent you will see "More Complicated Jobs Deserve Higher Skill Ceilings" and as we touch down we'll catch "It's Only Fair If Higher Skill Ceilings Come With More Powerful Potential", and before the fasten seatbelt sign turns off you'll hear "But Just Because We've Defined Other Healers As Necessarily Both Duller And Weaker Than Scholar Doesn't Mean It Can't Be Balanced Somehow" at the terminal.

Thank you for flying FFXIV Forum airlines.

Yes because SE has never taken a role like say tanks with various flavors of difficulty levels to play effectively, and balanced them so that they're more or less even with each other, give or take a few hundred dps.

Everyone also knows that in order to clear savage and ultimate you have to run specific comps and that taking a non-meta but enjoyable class like say a dancer means that you'll never clear the fight and you'll always hit enrage. It's about numbers and parses, and not about giving people a healthy selection of classes with varying difficulty levels to choose from that they can get comfortable with and eventually want to raid with

[Risvertasashi]

Everyone also knows that in order to clear savage and ultimate you have to run specific comps and that taking a non-meta but enjoyable class like say a dancer means that you'll never clear the fight and you'll always hit enrage.

This is such a red herring.

It's never been about "this job is so bad it can't clear the fight." It's about what it brings to the table.

Take, for example, patch 4.4 (and really a lot of patches, but let's focus on the final tier of Omega just for simplicity's sake). White mages could clear it, but no one took a white mage by choice - only if they couldn't find the other healers - because SCH and AST were just better. More healing, more DPS, more utility, more mobility.

Patch 3.4 was the same. "But white mages were great for dungeons!". etc

So I say yet again: If the standard is only "can clear the fight", no job adjustments have ever been needed. For healers, tanks, and DPS. SE might as well have just left everything the same at the beginning of each expac.