Mr Happy Interview with Yoshida: Glare Mages

[Acece]

You say that and yet in every static, every savage weekly party finder clear I joined, every mount farm I was in, it was never the healers that were what we struggled to fill. It was the tanks and shockingly enough the ranged of the DPS that I always found to be wanting on. There are veteran healers I've played with since ARR who can't stand the role now but KEEP PLAYING IT even now, and are saying they may still hold their spots on statics in endwalker even though nothing excites them about the job.

The overtly casual players don't fill these positions. The vets do. They are the ones who give the most constructive feedback, but that feedback will never be listened to if they keep enabling the devs decision making.

I mean maybe, my static has been looking for a healer for a long time so I have to fill in. I started to practice e12s and almost all the whms I co heal with medica 2 after every mech, don't use cds, and also don't know mechanics. I think most healers filling in pf's these days are newer healers that started recently. It happens so often that I just started to heal because there are so many bad healers out there even at e12s.

[WhyAmIHere]

"There is a healer now with a much greater focus on DPSing."

So Phlegma III. You get to go melee for a couple of gcds and use the two charges, then go back to Dosis spam. Toxikon is a DPS loss unless you use it for movement, wich then becomes neutral at best. Addersting works against iself. If you barrier crits, your tank uses mitigation or the other healer shields the tank, your steady flow of Adderstings gets interrupted. You might not have the addersting for the next time you need to move.

That doesn't seem like a healer focused on DPS.

Basic Nuke: Glare III-Broil V-Fall Malefic-Dosis II
Use on CD: Assize-Energy Drain/Dissipation?-Minor Arcana 50% chance-Phlegma II
DoT: Dia-Biolysis-Combust-Eukrasian Dosis
Movement Tool: Afflatus Misery-Ruin II-Minor Arcana 50% chance- Toxikon II
Damage+heal (Not really a DPS tool since damage is equal to Nuke): N/A-N/A-Macrocosmos-Pneuma

I can't believe I am saying this but SCH seems more interesting in terms of DPS still than Sage. Barely. Phlegma III being the only "extra" that suddenly makes Sage into a super technical High skill job for advanced healer players. Energy Drain still gives you "choices" and interactivity the SGE kit doesn't really have. Kardia is essentially a target focused Embrace. Nothing else really interacts with it. If you mantain a steady flow of GCD nukes and damage spells, it will heal the target 170 potency every 2.5 seconds.

See you're getting it now! With sage, you can't just sit around and *just* heal! You've gotta actually do damage now to heal with sage! That's what people've wanted!

[glamazon]

Or just stop playing healers

[AnotherPerson]

Thank you. It's so weird that people are losing their minds over Sage and calling it the DPS healer and all that. It is really not that different.

It's a bit sad after looking through all job changes. In a vacuum, Adder's sting looks alright in the DPS toolkit, but... the more I look at the sage toolkit in comparison to other jobs from the lack of DPS options you would be regularly using.... the more upset I feel.

And by other jobs, I don't mean just healers. DPS & tank jobs are getting more healing / mitigation toolkits. PLD is getting healing on their spells, healing on their Sheltron (Holy Sheltron), and intervention got a buff. WAR had its nascent flash nerfed, but other healing skills adjusted + granting heals across the board. GNB's heart of stone is adjusted to be Heart of Corundum - which heals when the target drops under 50%/timer wears off + a second charge of Aurora. DRK got 2 charges of a mitigation shield that can be applied to a party member.

DNC got their improvisation skill buffed and also can apply a heal from the finish skill. RDM has a mitigation buff that also doubles as a healing buff. SMN's Phoenix now has their heal adjusted to be a very strong single target regen heal, but a heal you can target. Plus, now your pet can properly shield you with 2 charges of aegis.

Don't get me wrong, all these changes for these other roles are good - it adds flavor and some depth to the jobs! ... However, with these jobs getting more Heal-to-DPS skill balance, it makes healers seem lackluster in comparison. Are we still going to need to heal as much? Would this be another expansion where healers just spam Glare / Broil / Malefic / Dosis because of the frequent downtime? Macrocosm and phlegma is definitely a nice addition to breaking up this kind of spammable skill, but it's still one use every 120 seconds. Coupled with other party members helping to contribute with the healing requirements, it doesn't seem likely that we'll be alternating GCD heals as much. It looks like we'll be just spamming our attack skill + weaving an oGCD heal.

By lv 90 there isn't really anything left to learn for healing other than figuring out what's the best order to use your oGCD heals, but even then... using them wrongly or using a couple of extra GCD heals will still give plenty of downtime because everyone's HP is still recovered. At least, that's how it is in the current encounter design. Even the Continuation system from GNB looks a lot more interesting than what healers have. Why couldn't we just get something that doesn't affect healer's mindset to DPS by having an interactive DPS rotation that doesn't get affected from being broken in between by being forced to GCD heal?

Well, I'll probably still level the healers to 90 to try them out, but I'll probably be moving over to another role if encounter design is still the same as usual. Tanks look a lot more interesting to heal with instead with the lossless healing they provide.

[Jirah]

Someone needs to ask yoship to stop crippling the playstyle for “casuals” I’m a casual yet the pressure of healing is so light I’m starting to think this is a kids game

[Recon1o6]

Someone needs to ask yoship to stop crippling the playstyle for “casuals” I’m a casual yet the pressure of healing is so light I’m starting to think this is a kids game

at this point im wondering if they are crippling it for journalists too- it took ign 45 minutes to beat the dungeon. I initially looked at their vid so i could get some sage gameplay and switched off immediately upon realising the sheer incompetence as soon as the first pull. I was then reminded i needed to look whose vid it is before watching

-no tank stance
-no dpsing on sage
-roomwide aoe healing single target
-no comboing on reaper

and that was after 30s of footage before i switched off.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

I’ve been playing since 2.0 and I can say this version of SCH is my favorite. Maybe I’m a slyphie whatever that means but I love how simple it is. One look at sages multiple complicated buttons and gauges and I said nope. I think people’s desire for high skill ceiling jobs is fine but I think it should be limited. Let sage be the hard version and more punishing version of sch. Keep sch fun yet simple for the casuals who want to raid but not deal with job drama.

[Reiryuu]

I’ve been playing since 2.0 and I can say this version of SCH is my favorite. Maybe I’m a slyphie whatever that means but I love how simple it is. One look at sages multiple complicated buttons and gauges and I said nope. I think people’s desire for high skill ceiling jobs is fine but I think it should be limited. Let sage be the hard version and more punishing version of sch. Keep sch fun yet simple for the casuals who want to raid but not deal with job drama.

Why does it need to be limited? As long as you can clear content by doing the bare minimum (which is obviously what the devs want for healers), then any complexity or things to do above that shouldn't really matter. You have the options if you want them. There doesn't need to be any punishment. Just things to do when you don't need to heal besides spam a single button.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

Why does it need to be limited? As long as you can clear content by doing the bare minimum (which is obviously what the devs want for healers), then any complexity or things to do above that shouldn't really matter. You have the options if you want them. There doesn't need to be any punishment. Just things to do when you don't need to heal besides spam a single button.

Because the community tends to expect the same thing from each other. It’s not really a varying level between certain things other than positioning/rotation mastery unlike other games. So if they add more buttons people are going to expect you to know them even if it’s a “higher ceiling type thing”. This will still be forced on players. You cannot separate the expectations of a casual healer vs a veteran healer in a dungeon is what I’m saying. People will demand veteran competency as standard and if they don’t see it they will leave, troll, or groan the whole instance.

[TaleraRistain]

They've never directly talked about this, but based on how the healers have evolved over time, I can't help but feel that they just don't get how healers prioritize actions. I firmly believe they see your Cure, Cure II, Medica, Medica II, Adloquium, Succor, etc. healing spells as the core of your healing that you resort to most frequently and that we save OGCDs for emergencies. It makes so much sense when you think about their perspective that way. It couldn't possibly be more wrong, but that's what it seems to be like.

Think about this too, they divided healing into categories not unlike the categories of Melee, Ranged DPS, and Magical DPS for the DPS role. Look at the drastic differences in playstyle from one of those to the other. They seem to think that the difference in playstyle between "pure healers" and "barrier healers" is akin to that of the difference between Melee DPS and Magical DPS, yet the only actual difference between the two is basically whether they have a Cure II, Regen, and Medica II or Adloquium and Succor. These are some of our least used actions on the hotbar these days, and the designers seem to think they are role-defining.

It's painfully obvious they don't have a developer who mains the role to tell them these things. So they only see them from their tank or dps outsider perspectives.

As to the OP, I'm disappointed. Not because I wanted a more involved dps rotation. I've always hated that we had to dip into another role for things to do. I either wanted a greater focus on healing requirements so we're kept busy with that, or the same healing requirements but we can get more engaging play from maintaining buffs, debuffing, damage shields, crowd control, etc. Turn us into Support instead of flat Healer. But their answer seems to be "Screw you, you get to dps more but only on Sage, and we're not going to bother making the legacy healers engaging and interesting".

It's the first time in over 7 years I've considered hanging up my robes.