Shadowbringers Healer Role: Complaints, Feedback, and Suggestions

[Grimoire-M]

In my opinion, the purpose of more oGCD healing buttons is so that healers can DPS harder. Healer DPS is a reward for knowing how to use our oGCD healing kit effectively to spend as little GCDs on healing as possible. Healers should have at least a second DoT (AoE, except SCH, which should have two single-target +Bane) and a 1.5s cast time to make weaving oGCD more viable and to encourage healer DPS in a more subtle way.

Personally, I also want to see any timer overflow on WHM's Lily generation to auto-feed the Blood Lily and SCH's that spend Aetherflow on healing to grant a free Energy Drain. Again, you're still encouraging the use of healing by rewarding the healer with something else. I want more interactivity between the healing aspects and dps aspects of a healer's kit. Like, why is Freecure on Cure I? Why isn't it on Stone/Glare/Holy?

Have to disagree on all of these personally. Let SCH and WHM have their own solutions to movement and weaving without making them into AST clones. Ruin II is functional and minimalist and buffing it properly to kill hard clipping and would have indirectly nerfed Energy Drain and feels much more in tune with how SCH actually plays. WHM is the only one of the three that needs a DPS option to move around that compliments Lilies.

Also never do ‘Free Blood Lilies’ or ‘Free Energy Drain’. These abilities have trade offs that are worth keeping around as is just for that tension alone. If you want to reward healing efficiently use a new ability to do so that can further act as a tax for using those DPS options.

[elioaiko]

While we have a plethora is oGCDs, I don't mind them because GCD heal is just so one-sided. It's boring. There's no interesting mechanics for GCD healing. It's ST direct heal/shield/regen and vice versa for AoE options.

For the nature of FFXIV encounters, oGCDs are the only things that feel remotely interesting healing wise. Excog, Star, and Assize feel good to use and don't punish you for using them. GCD healing on the other hand, while is necessary is punishing if used unnecessarily (DPS loss and MP waste).

AST is fine with the niche of 1.5s Malefic, but I would like Lightspeed to have 2 charges for a slight lower duration.

SCH tbh really needs it's dots back. They felt different and it was nice to balance them while weaving your oGCDs inbetween. And if I'm being honest, SCH should have gotten Fester, not SMN. It rewards SCH for healing like Lillies (which is basically Aetherflow if you think about it).

WHM for life of me needs to be rid of this turret nature. It's horrible design and even BLM has better movement than it. In a game where you're severely punished to drop a cast vs surviving a mechanic. None of this "but prepositioning if you're good" even then you still need to do slidecasting which doesn't feel good and frustrating sometimes. If BLM gets options for its movement, then WHM should as well. In a game where you have to move for mechanics a bit and even a lot, it's clunky. Not to mention clipping from needing to weave. Yes you can use a lily but if Misery weren't a dps loss and the heal wasn't needed, it still feels bad. WHM should get procs for a second DoT. Or an instacast DPS spell (like Further Ruin) from accumulating Glare stacks or from Dia ticks.

[Ayesafaile]

Good post. I've been so thoroughly unsatisfied with healer gameplay in Shadowbringers that I've stopped playing the game. I was already unhappy in Stormblood, but they managed to double down on poor design choices for a second expansion in a row with no acknowledgement of feedback from players.

The current healer jobs feel like they are designed for people who don't play healer, such that should they (for whatever reason) decide to play one there is almost no room for failure.

Is healing in Shadowbringers challenging? No. Healers have far more tools than necessary to accomplish their job. Mobile/instant healing is abundant, mana issues almost non-existent, threat generation a non-issue. This is the easiest it's ever been.

There's little incentive to improve or become a more efficient healer when the reward is simply more casts of a filler damage spell that you're already casting dozens upon dozens of times in a fight.

[Doriann]

Either we have far too many tools at our disposition, or everything has been "dumbed down". I don't even mind damage anymore, there's just so much off GCD, instant cast or anything now, on all three healers. Why should I even bother with pre-galvanizing the whole party as a scholar, when I have 4-5 party heals at my disposition, or the other 4-5 from the 2nd healer? Not even to save mana, since mana is very, very hard to run out nowadays, especially on WHM. Why had astrologian be dumbed down so much, one of its identities was the card system which has been reduced to two options (not to mention that since HW they turned WHM nearly irrelevant).

The changes to how healers do damage is ridiculous. We have been spending more time dealing damage than actually healing/mitigating damage since early Stormblood, but at least then we had somewhat of a rotation or more things to do. Now everything boils down to single-target damage + single-target DoT. WHM lost aero3, SCH oh my god lost miasma, miasma 2, shadow flare. The current SCH plays more like a nocturnal sect AST than an actual SCH from previous expansions, where they had to proactively shield people to reduce the incoming damage, since that was their main focus - damage mitigation.

Now all healers pretty much play the same. WHM has always been about regen and filling bars, so not much has changed, except that mana is endless unless DPS are really doing a bad job at taking damage/dying. SCH, why even bother shielding? Just do an emergency tactics -> Succor / fey union / indomitability / whispering down / Seraph. What is even the point in shielding anymore? not like it makes a difference anyway. Big fights are basically a big chunk of damage here and there, followed by the 1-2 "rotation" (I refuse to call this a real rotation) and if you mess up you're more likely dead than in need of heal. Why should I waste my time galvanizing the party when it's better to just pop one of my endless party heals and keep Biolysis/Broil on boss? I don't remember the last time I actually had to use Physick on someone, since ET -> Adloquium or plain Adlo makes it obsolete, especially since the fairy can't be killed, or just throw an ET -> Succor followed by Indomitability or wait the 2nd healer do a party heal with regen (which surprise!! everyone has it)

Continuing on my scholar feedback (more like a rant I suppose), why in the world we had to lose control of our pets? What is even the point in having a "pet" if we are allowed little to no control over it? Fairies are basically undestructable turrets that you leave on the battlefield to heal random people - and this has ZERO risk whatsoever, they have been turned into a somewhat passive skill that reads "every X seconds, someone in your party is healed with a potency of 400". This is a very boring design. Positioning the fairy in order to secure her buffs across the entire party felt rewarding, it felt like we were using SCH to a maximum. Lastly, never would I imagine that I'd miss the ability to macro our heals with the fairy's - for those who don't understand me, around HW we used to macro Physik/Adlo so whenever we casted this, the fairy also healed our target, effectively turning both Physik/Adlo into a Cure2/Lustrate. Yes, this might seem a bit "too much" for many, but at least we had the CHOICE to do so - now we have nothing, just wait for the fairy to do so.

Oh, something else: Aetherflow sucks. We only use it to dump on energy drain for some laughable impression that we have a rotation. just delete it altogether alongside with ED and give Lustrate a cooldown.

Astro card system is still bad and not interesting.

Lastly, healing has never been as boring or uninteresting as it is now, and I have been around since 2.0 when Titan used to knock you down from your chair due to server latency. It is awful to spend the majority of any savage/extreme fight only pressing 1 and 2, and occasionally pressing 3 during dungeons for AoE. Healing needs a redesign so that we either spend the majority of our time actually healing or mitigating damage (assuming galvanize actually becomes worth using again) or give us more tools for damage. WHM and SCH have been my favourite jobs since the release of 2.0 but now, while WHM did got better (because it pretty much never had anything in the beginning), SCH has become so massively uninteresting and mind-blowing "plain" or "boring" that I cannot force myself to play it anymore. It really sucks that despite me liking this game very much, and ShB has been the best it has evern been, playing my favourite jobs makes me want to quit the game and actually do something interesting with my time. If Endwalker doesn't bring massive changes to the way healing and healers work, I don't see myself even leveling my WHM past 80.

[LilyPendragon]

For example, you could have an OGCD. Let's call it "Pope Stance".

Just here to throw my support behind any ability called 'Pope Stance'

[Liam_Harper]

Have to disagree on all of these personally. Let SCH and WHM have their own solutions to movement and weaving without making them into AST clones.

I'm not sure why cast time is seen as a class identity rather than a basic function tbh. It's sort of like claiming melees or phys ranged are clones of each other because they all have instant abilities. Shorter cast time (or significantly more free weave) opens the potential to design all sorts of abilities to combo and weave, dps, utility and heal because now you can make them flow and work properly.
Asking the Devs to leave WHM as a turret with maybe one more weave because "it takes a braincell to optimize around the clunkiness" is actually shooting ourselves in the foot, because a clunky clipping turret has no room to receive a wide toolkit of engaging dps, weave and oGCDs. A mobile WHM has room to add anything they like and could be far more rewarding to optimize.

I also really dislike the words "tax" and "punish" in class design. Dps and AST don't punish you for simply playing your role, they "reward" you for playing it well and the punishment is mainly for making mistakes. Being rewarded simply feels better than constantly being slapped on the wrist for things you have to do like avoiding a mechanic or using a heal.
To compare, it would be like placing tank defensives on the GCD, giving them no potency and making them break combos. Sure you could mitigate the impact with smart play, which gives the illusion of it being a skill based system, but it'd feel frustrating to play.

I'd just like healers to flow, feel good to play and reward me when I play well.

[Lastelli]

I'm not sure why cast time is seen as a class identity rather than a basic function tbh. It's sort of like claiming melees or phys ranged are clones of each other because they all have instant abilities. Shorter cast time (or significantly more free weave) opens the potential to design all sorts of abilities to combo and weave, dps, utility and heal because now you can make them flow and work properly.
[...]

I'd just like healers to flow, feel good to play and reward me when I play well.

You can fix WHM and SCH without giving them the AST treatment though. What you said may be true, but at the same time it's also true that cast times do define how some jobs play and contribute to differentiating jobs in the same role. Also we shouldn't forget that AST has a quicker cast time because it has a significantly higher APM count when compared to the other healers. An easy way to help WHM whould be something like giving them a dps neutral instant dot with a 15 seconds duration, that would be more than enough considering how little weaving they have to do. As for SCH, they could just slightly buff ruin ii and/or get a little more creative with AF damage interactions. Think of something like the following: every time an AF stack is used for an healing oGCD, a stack of "disaster" is gained. At 3 stacks, ruin ii is changed to "catastrophe", a new instant cast offensive spell that places an aetherial mine below your target that explodes a few times, dealing damage to all enemies in its vicinity. This would make for a little more interesting gameplay flow for SCH: you'd still want to minimize ruin ii usage, but you'd gain 1 more instant spell for every AF use and you'd be rewarded for using AF stacks for healing instead of feeling bad because you had to "waste" them on healing skills instead of energy drains. ED would remain an emergency measure to deal with mana issues and in an optimized scenario should be avoided.

Anyway, the point is that giving SCH and WHM a quicker casting time would just be a bad move. Both of them are already terribly boring and trying to maximize uptime is their only form of optimization. Take that away and there would be absolutely nothing interesting about them. AST at the very least has cards management. That might not seem like a lot, but optimizing cards distribution based on the burst windows of your dps is at least something to think about and may be occasionally challenging, especially when cards distrubition happens during non-trivial mechanics.

[QooEr]

I'm not sure why cast time is seen as a class identity rather than a basic function tbh. It's sort of like claiming melees or phys ranged are clones of each other because they all have instant abilities.

its probably because the healer dps "kits" are so shallow and simplistic that anything even slightly different is being mistaken for identity.

that said theres plenty of other, more interesting ways to open up weave spots. im not in favor of clunky classes, but rather of each class having a creative way to make them not clunky

miasma ii was one of my favorite approaches because of the complexity it brought compared to ruin ii. having frequent instant or low cast time skills and/or procs like firestarter/thundercloud baked into the rotation also works

[Rilifane]

If fastcasts are considered class identity now, the standards must be really low after the Shb changes. Not that I'm surprised.
AST got fastcasts not as part of it's identity but out of sheer neccessity and it is an admittedly cheap solution that adds nothing to its class fantasy but it works. There is no rule stating that a class should only have as many weaving slots as they need. RDM has far more weaving slots than they ever need, BLM has more weaving slots than they need and it's only when people go at AI playstyle really hard that they need to plan carefully.
WHM does not even have enough to function while SCH has less than it needs to flow decently well as a healer without forcing their co heal to carry the healing.
Of course there are other solutions like a 1-2 combo with the 2nd being a fast cast that can be used without combo but at lower potency than the first skill and/ or is instant if combo'd. Or making Assize an 1,5s and adding charges (would also serve to make Assize finally interesting for healing and use it according to needs rather than blindly keeping it on cd). Or making Misery available at 2. Or add another dot with a shorter duration. Or add a proc to dot ticks that gives charges for using an instant cast.
But right now the reason why they couldn't add more interesting oGCDs to WHM if they wanted to is the severe lack of weaving slots.
In an ideal world I'd take a unique way for each healer to deal with weaving and movement on top of interesting oGCDs and class mechanics in general. But fastcasts isn't a class identity, it was a quick and easy way to take care of a neccessity.

[KDSilver]

AST got fastcasts not as part of it's identity but out of sheer neccessity and it is an admittedly cheap solution that adds nothing to its class fantasy but it works.

I'm won't be debating about if WHM and SCH should have the same treatment, but we have to remember something indeed.

Malefic-type spell used to be 2,5 cast time.
It changed to 1,5 because AST was clipping very hard.

So it was not intended to be in its "identity".

Meanwhile, Benefic, Cure and Physick all share the same 1,5s cast time.