My idea for Healer 'engagement'

[Ersahi]

What I enjoy about healing is that I play the situation more than a rotation. If my party is good I do more DPSing, if my party is bad I tend to do a lot more healing. That adds variety in the same encounters which makes it a lot more fun for me.

If they add more layers to DPS that's fine, if they tune things towards healing more that's okay too. I just like having to pay attention to what is happening now, and not just playing each encounter exactly the same.

[Acece]

I personally like being a green dps, but they could use more healing and dps buttons. doesn't have to be one or the other. Healers in wow have to heal way more then we do but also have a more robust healer dps rotation.

[Arkdra]

"Fixing" healers isnt about giving us more dps options, its about letting us do our prefered job, which is healing. If SE wants to give me another dps button in the hopes that it will improve my life, its a waste. Just another thing to add into downtime. If they change things so I have to use the rest of my buttons... thats a win.

This doesn't improve anything though? It just means you end up spamming cure 2 instead of glare. It's still the same problem in the end which is that nobody wants to just be pushing the same button over and over (well except for worthless honest healers who already do just spam cure 1 over and over like complete reprobates) and that's all that upping the damage output in dungeons would do since proper cd and resource management is already the name of the game.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

Right now, you're weaving in heals between DPS spells. What would it look like if healers were busy casting various short buffs and debuffs while healing, instead of using one nuke?
The debuffs could be stuns, silence, pacify, forced march, turning mobs against their buddies for a few seconds. Then support jobs would use attack speed, critical hit, direct damage, evasion, cast speed, that would synergize, and tanks and DPS could exploit status effects for big bursts.

Or you could forego all this, play as usual, but you wouldn't be rewarded with as big numbers or as fast a run. There would be a payoff for good team play and paying attention to what your team mates do.

Healers could be a lot of fun.

[Ronduwil]

Out of curiosity what would you consider screwing those players over?

Like I quoted, it was the OP's idea that "trash mobs need to be dialed up in damage output." That would screw newer players over. It's already bad enough with the wall-to-wall pulls that are the norm in this game. Ungeared healers, especially in lower level instances, already have their hands full with ungeared tanks who wall-to-wall pull without even popping a CD. I'm sure that would be a non-issue if I were exclusively running with an experienced and geared tank from my FC, but I'm equally sure that it would be an absolute misery for a baby healer who's already struggling to maintain these paper tanks.

I agree that scaling is a horrible solution to a problem that doesn't exist. I also don't agree with the idea of adding filler skills. If you want a healing class that saddles you with a bunch of extra garbage to manage, the Astrologian with its cards is a perfectly acceptable way to go. I really don't want this game to go the way of WoW where the developers cater to long-time players' demands for more and more challenge to the point where the game is simply unplayable for anyone who doesn't want to treat an MMO like a way of life.

The way I see it, if you join the Balance Discord, min-max your character, practice on target dummies to the point where your rotation is on auto-pilot, and run exclusively with the same players in your FC over and over, you've turned the game into easy mode for yourself. It's not on the developers to make things harder on the majority of players who play rationally to compensate for a minority's obsession.

The OP's complaint boils down to, "Trash is boring. Make it fun." Given that trash isn't even going to give XP going forward, I think we're better off simply removing trash as opposed to buffing it.

[Ronduwil]

worthless honest healers who already do just spam cure 1 over and over like complete reprobates

I know better than to do that now, but I just have to point out that SE kind of trains new players to do this by causing Cure I to proc a Cure II buff. In most cases, when one skill buffs another, the intended mechanic is to spam the skill in order to proc the buff. How are new WHMs to know that this is an exception to that rule? It's kind of weird that most of the healing buttons you're given as a baby WHM are completely ignored at level 80. Seriously, they should merge the two skills and give WHMs a trait that promotes Cure I to Cure II instead. That's effectively the way it works now. In high level instances, Cure is a last resort anyway, for when you've gone through Tetragrammation, exhausted all the lilies, applied both regens, and popped Benediction already.

[Arkdra]

I know better than to do that now, but I just have to point out that SE kind of trains new players to do this by causing Cure I to proc a Cure II buff. In most cases, when one skill buffs another, the intended mechanic is to spam the skill in order to proc the buff. How are new WHMs to know that this is an exception to that rule? It's kind of weird that most of the healing buttons you're given as a baby WHM are completely ignored at level 80. Seriously, they should merge the two skills and give WHMs a trait that promotes Cure I to Cure II instead. That's effectively the way it works now. In high level instances, Cure is a last resort anyway, for when you've gone through Tetragrammation, exhausted all the lilies, applied both regens, and popped Benediction already.

On the one hand, yes, all of the above is correct and I completely agree. But on the other, the cnj class quests are all about how you need to do stuff other than healing lol. Also it's not like ast's and sch's don't do the same thing. But yes they do need to kill freecure for sure and probably just make it upgrade like the main dps nukes.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

the cnj class quests are all about how you need to do stuff other than healing

Imagine you could actually do other stuff. Use a water spell to pacify or silence a mob, make it unable to use skills/spells. An earth spell to slow the mobs down, to stun it, with a small chance to petrify (and the next hit shatters the mob).. that would be fun.
Scholars could cause diseases that have a chance to jump to other mobs whenever they get hit, and these diseases would do things like lower their damage, or a chance to heal the tank instead of hurting them.
Astrologians could do all the time magic stuff that used to be in their lore but never really got used. speed up the group, slow down the mobs. Maybe make a mob go "Benjamin Button", and it shrinks and gets weaker, and then has a chance to pop out of existence.

There are some crazy things that could be done to make healers more fun, and if you could do crazy stuff, more people would pick up the role for that kind of gameplay.

[EaMett]

I agree that scaling is a horrible solution to a problem that doesn't exist. I also don't agree with the idea of adding filler skills. If you want a healing class that saddles you with a bunch of extra garbage to manage, the Astrologian with its cards is a perfectly acceptable way to go. I really don't want this game to go the way of WoW where the developers cater to long-time players' demands for more and more challenge to the point where the game is simply unplayable for anyone who doesn't want to treat an MMO like a way of life.

Surely there's a middle ground here. The complaints are centered around the fact that current healers (in a game genre that is designed to be played over long periods of time) don't allow for much player growth. It's a design flaw, one that other roles don't suffer from, at least not on this level. Nobody is advocating for a savage tier healer with a crazy barrier of entry. SCHs would be happy to simply get the old scholar back. They wouldn't need much more. And even then, many of us acknowledge there might've been too much button bloat so cutting some stuff out would've been fine. But the current iteration of healers is a far cry from a satisfactory level of gameplay.
If you've ever seen a flow theory chart (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/...fig2_260037278), healers start off in the flow channel but quickly dip down into boredom. Adding features to the gameplay that don't impact beginner players too much but allow veterans to pull the maximum out of their gameplay is what this is about. Miasma II was a great example of this. A beginner player could ignore it and clip or use ruin II to weave ogcds. An experienced player could sort out the best place to stand, use miasma II to weave (but only if the dot wasn't on), deal with melee mechanics etc. It was a viable mechanic, the only thing to make sure of was that the difference between the two playstyles didn't create too big of a dps gap.

[Penthea]

Saw a lot people assume OP wants to be doing little other than healing and I want to dispel this notion as I think we're mentally in a similar or the same boat.

I enjoy that healer dps matters. I don't enjoy when healer healing matters very little. My favourite moments as a healer are when my job as a support demands a lot while also putting pressure on me to dps. I enjoy balancing the two roles at the same time. I don't enjoy spamming dps spells and healing only very occasionally. That's not balancing the two roles. That's being mostly a dps. On the flip side I don't want to be almost only healing all the time either. Yes I would enjoy it more than almost only dpsing but what I love is handling both roles at once. In most bosses in DF content I'm often bored unless something goes wrong. On bosses I spend 90% of my time experiencing only one part of my kit and it's not even the main role of my kit.

We're not supposed to deal with trash the way that we do. Chain pulling is a community generated aspect of combat. It's not intended by the devs. If it was then individual trash packs would be much bigger and/or would be far more punishing on party hp. But they're not unless more than is intended is actively pulled.

So in DF content healers either have to count on trash being intentionally handled in a way not intended by the devs, or have something go wrong on bosses to be presented with a remotely interesting situation. In DF content we literally have to wait for players to, for lack of a better phrase, play incorrectly in order to have some real fun.

I'm not saying "change all the DF content in the game!" because it's a stupid thing to ask for. The devs have better things to be dealing with than readjusting old content that isn't bugged. What I want is for future DF content to demand healers use their support kit more often. Trash is somewhat in an okay position due to how the community typically pulls them, but bosses are often so bloody boring unless poop hits the fan.

And again yes SE could make dps more interesting to reduce the monotony of playing a healer. But that wouldn't be forcing healers to balance both their offensive and support roles. If I wanted a more interesting dps experience then I would play a dps. What I want is for DF boss content to demand more use of support abilities so that I can enjoy balancing the duality of being a green dps and a healer more often. I really think something is wrong when DF bosses are so often the chill-out time for healers. It's almost laughable to call these entities bosses. Bosses of what? Bosses of not being a threat?

Making DF bosses a bigger threat on player hp isn't going to ruin the game or make the community have a fit. WoW's DF bosses demand more healing and yet players there can handle it just fine. There's no reason why players here cannot either. I'm not suggesting that the demand on support abilities should skyrocket. I just want to be dealing with incoming damage on DF bosses at least 25% of the time instead of a measly 10% or less. I don't think this is an unreasonable thing to want.