Shadowbringers Healer Role: Complaints, Feedback, and Suggestions

[Semirhage]

On the flipside, now healing requires basically zero brainpower and has chased out a decent portion of people who actually enjoyed playing them before.

[Rilifane]

It was quite the barrier to entry too.
Out of all the people in my FC (around 10) only 2 of them had even touched healer (one out of a sense of obligation) and it was largely because of cleric stance.
Now that cleric stance is gone most of my FC heals and loves it. If they don't main it, it's their secondary job.

Except it wasn't.
Cleric Stance had fairly low impact at lower levels because DoM gear had Int and Mind, making learning healer quite easy and Cleric pretty much optional. It was perfectly fine to dps without using it or only occasionaly at most for a long time. It only became relevant at higher levels when gear no longer had both stats, meaning you did signifcantly less damage without it but by then people were past the point of "entry".
The community knew about the risks and drawbacks of it and I'm disinclined to believe that it was only on my data centre. If a healer didn't or rarely used Cleric Stance it was much more accepted than a healer not or barely dpsing now.
And certainly not when someone stated they're not yet good at juggling dps and healing.
It was great when people used it but the community wasn't nearly as adamant about healers going full green dps as it is nowadays, so when someone didn't feel comfortable utilizing it as much as they could, it was okay.

It's a common mistake to not set sensible priorities when learning a class but that has nothing to do with wether something is actually an entry barrier or not. Wether it was fun or not is debatable, that much I can agree on. But setting the priorites wrong or trying to focus on too much at once is a player mistake, not a game mistake.
If the came to enjoy healing after all, good on them. But to get some people to enjoy it, many veterans were permanently driven away from that role and the decline in healer quality is quite noticable. What remains are mostly people who didn't have a genuine interest in healing and only do it for the queue time because it's now easy enough to while netflixing.

[Deceptus]

SCH needs something to do with it's Fairy Gauge.

WHM and AST build up their resources for a big BANG and SCH gets . . . a bigger regen? In fact, that's most jobs other than SCH. Build resources, use on a cool flashy ability. Maybe if Fey Pact was strong it wouldn't be so bad but it's not. There are times I went entire fights without using it because it's just not needed.

I wouldn't mind seraph draining it if it's potency was actually worth it and could be still build mid call.

[Mesarthim]

I sometimes forget Fey Blessing even exists because not only does it use the gauge but you barely notice its heal. That and none of the capstone abilities really synergize with each other. Between Dissipation, Fey Union, and Seraph use one and the other two cannot be.

A slightly-weaker-than-physick aoe heal on a 60 second cooldown that uses the fey gauge barely. How exciting.

[ItMe]

Except it wasn't.

You say it wasn't, but it literally was what stopped my FC from trying the healers lol.

Cleric Stance had fairly low impact at lower levels because DoM gear had Int and Mind, making learning healer quite easy and Cleric pretty much optional. It was perfectly fine to dps without using it or only occasionaly at most for a long time. It only became relevant at higher levels when gear no longer had both stats, meaning you did signifcantly less damage without it but by then people were past the point of "entry". The community knew about the risks and drawbacks of it and I'm disinclined to believe that it was only on my data centre.

Maybe cleric didn't matter until high level, but ultimately that's what we would be playing it in. No one was gonna pick up the class just to use it in lower level content, and we all looked at cleric stance, saw the "risks and drawbacks" as you put it, and none of us wanted to wrestle with it in high level stuff.
It was our barrier to entry in that it stopped us from trying it.
(Perhaps I didn't use that phrase properly...)
And this was all added to because our obligatory clerics who were begrudgingly levelling healers... didn't enjoy healing largely because they hated cleric stance.

If a healer didn't or rarely used Cleric Stance it was much more accepted than a healer not or barely dpsing now.
[...]
It was great when people used it but the community wasn't nearly as adamant about healers going full green dps as it is nowadays, so when someone didn't feel comfortable utilizing it as much as they could, it was okay.

The tanks in my FC (myself included) were regularly chewed out by randos if we had tank stance on in levelling roulettes and normal mode trials... so none of us wanted to mess with cleric stance lol.
I'm glad you had better experiences and matched with more understanding people, but man we did NOT.

[Semirhage]

Cleric stance, while admittedly clunky and ultimately in need of replacement with something that doesn't occasionally glitch out with this game's horrific netcode, was seriously not the math lady meme rocket brain surgery this forum seems to believe it was. It was a button. That increased your damage. And decreased your healing for a minimum of five entire seconds. Was it prone to stickiness? Yes. Was it possible to press it at a bad time and get people killed? Absolutely. Did it add an impossibly complicated layer of bigbrain to the role that killed most of the interest in it? Please. Healing, like tanking, isn't nearly as popular as damage dealing because it's an often thankless task that requires multitarget spatial awareness and rarely involves the same consistent satisfying crunch that big hits deliver. "Cleric Stance is scary" is a red herring. Healing is "accessible" now because it's a set of DPS classes that've been lobotomized with the death of a thousand cuts. The damage rotations could be managed by a sufficiently trained cat, the combo of few party-wide hits and absurd universal self-sustain means healing is mostly an occasional leisurely break from bonking that 1 key, and managing debuffs is now a red DPS thing so that's out the window too.

Cleric Stance wasn't the boogeyman that kept most DPS mains from trying healer. They're trying it out now because the role is now just easymode DPS classes.

[ItMe]

"Cleric Stance is scary" is a red herring.

Maybe, but it sure scared us.

[Shalan]

Well of course it would make someone nervous! It made me incredibly anxious at first too.
If you haven't interacted with something before it can be intimidating, but that doesn't mean it's bad or that its removal is necessarily good, even if the removal makes it more "accessible."


For the longest time, positionals on MNK intimidated me, but eventually I bucked up, got down, and started playing the role and forced myself to use them. Doing so not only allowed me to overcome my hesitation to the class, but made me a better player overall. I would never dream of asking for or celebrating the removal of such a mechanic just because it made something more accessible to me. Doing so would be stifling my growth and removing a mechanic that adds to the gameplay.


It's the same with cleric stance. It was intimidating at first, and I had some discomfort with using the ability. But eventually I got the hang of it and fell in love with the ability and healing in this game.

[ItMe]

but that doesn't mean it's bad or that its removal is necessarily good, even if the removal makes it more "accessible."

I never argued that it was bad or that it's removal was good.
Someone said:

Cleric stance wasn’t interesting satisfying or fun

And I just chimed in with my own frustrations (it was scary).

Now everyone is jumping on me like I was trying to beat up the idea of cleric stance.

[ForteNightshade]

Cleric Stance wasn't the boogeyman that kept most DPS mains from trying healer. They're trying it out now because the role is now just easymode DPS classes.

People often forget healers back in Heavensward, and especially ARR, had nowhere near the ridiculously overpowered kits they do now. Benediction alone was on a five minute CD. Tankbusters were also far more frequent, thus you were expected to actually, ya know, heal the tank more. Healing has become remarkably easier than it's ever been. Hence why you see so many complaints from players at all skill levels they have little to actually heal.

The combination of accessibility on both tanks and healers have reduced the role of both roles into gimped DPS who occasionally play the role they signed up for.