Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[Semirhage]

I can speak for my experience and skill level, and nobody else's. I occasionally heal, and I try to avoid it whenever possible especially this expansion. I normally enjoy playing a healer in most RPGs, MMO or otherwise. I actively avoid it in this game for a multitude of reasons. Not least of which because I end up casting one boring spell, over and over again, literally hundreds of times in a given encounter.

I evidently do not deserve design that allows me to do something other than spamming one spell, not exaggerating, HUNDREDS of times in Savage and Ultimate encounters, often back to back to back to back. I'm an evil loud minority healer; I don't think "but more than one spell would be really hard for newbies" is an excuse for that. As huge as the skill gap is between unskilled messy runs and perfect Savage runs, there's also a huge difference between some elite 5d chess Dragoon 15-GCD rotation and one button. Over and over again. And over. And over.

I am incapable of fathoming how people cannot understand how casting one spell hundreds of times in the most difficult content this game has to offer is boring, garbage, horrifically bad design.

[Silver-Strider]

Healers just want something to do that doesn't involve spamming 1 button when there's downtime to warrant it.

We don't necessarily want more DPS buttons (I still argue for an AoE DoT be added so that Healers at least have an AoE DoT/Nuke to go alongside our Single Target DoT/Nuke but that's a minor thing really) but just some interplay between our toolkit for it to be more engaging.

Something that I miss about SCH was their SB trait, Enhanced Aetherflow, that allowed SCH to reduce the CD on their AEtherflow skill by 5 seconds every time they used an Aetherflow ability. It was a great trait that allowed SCH to be more liberal in their Aetherflow usage as instead of only having 3 stacks of Aetherflow every 60 seconds, it was now 3 stacks in 45 seconds. This made Aetherpact something that could be used more frequently as well since you built up your gauge quicker. This level of interplay between SCH's toolkit made for a more engaging experience as a whole because you got a plethora of benefits for SCH, from better MP management, to greater flexibility with their Aetherflow skills+Aetherpact and just more DPS uptime in general. It was a great tool and is greatly missed.

While SGE looks fun and AST looks to be heading in a more interesting direction as well, SCH and WHM sadly remain largely the same with no real adjustments to how their toolkit connects with one another. The Lily system is now being indirectly nerfed due to the GCD changes and potency adjustments also further nerfing its overall usage for WHM. As for SCH, while Deployment getting a CD reduction is great and all, it doesn't really change how the class is played.

Here's some suggestions to give both jobs a bit more interplay.

For WHM, make the Freecure trait offer a CD reduction on our oGCDs whenever Divine Benison breaks or expires. This would allow WHM to be able to utilize their few oGCD heals more frequently, which is somewhat of a sour spot for WHM atm, not to mention fix the trap trait that is current Freecure while still promoting a healer mentality to utilize your toolkit more effectively since you'll want to make the most out of the trait by keeping Benison on CD.
Turn Lilybell into a 3 costing Lily Skill with a significantly lower CD of 90 seconds (the same amount of time it would take for a WHM to accumulate 3 Lilies). This way, not only is Lily a DPS gain for WHM due to having an instant Misery with only 1 skill but it also makes the Lily system remain useful for WHM going into EW. Also, make Lilybell something that the WHM can control when it heals, in a similar sense to SCH's fairy skill that. Reduce the stacks from 5 to 3 to compensate for more frequent usage as well.

For SCH, its as simple as restoring Selene's old Skills and giving back the Enhanced Aetherflow trait. While the pain points of SCH would remain, it would at least allow SCH to get more out of its current toolkit without being terribly difficult to implement.

[ty_taurus]

You bring up some really great suggestions.

I like the ideas that shift from healer's responsibility to recover other player mistakes (someone takes high avoidable dmg), to the players themselves who made the mistake with a personal debuff. Less responsibility on the healer for these player mistakes opens up encounter designs to allow more healer responsibility on dps (perhaps more complex dps kit) or more healing in general.

I've always thought it was strange how little dispels are needed, coming from other MMOs and early FFXI (RDM main from 2003-2006) especially. Healers get Esuna quite early, but it's rarely ever required!

It's also very poorly displayed when debuffs are cleansable. A lot of less experienced healers, even ones that are picking up the role relatively well, will fail to cleanse important debuffs because it's just not telegraphed very well. Not all debuffs need to be removed, which is a valid criticism others have brought up before on the discussion about using Esuna. Either Esuna is a waste of time because the debuff doesn't have much impact, or it MUST be dispelled because it's Doom or something else that's essentially a death sentence.

I think Paralyze is a good example of a debuff that has some decision-making involved regarding weather or not you should remove it. its ability to interrupt casting is especially important as that could really screw over your BLM, your RDM, your co-healer, etc. but it's not as debilitating on non-caster jobs. It can cancel your GCDs possibly, but the paralysis needs to be timed pretty specifically for that to happen. Usually it stops you from moving for a moment and maybe delalying your next GCD a little. Bad, but not as bad as a BLM potentially losing their Fire 1 and dropping Astral Fire.

In a similar fashion, debuffs that weaken your damage output like Blind, Slow, or a straight up damage-down debuff like I mentioned above I think are good examples of usable debuffs because there's a choice involved. If the party is healthy, then removing them can be overall better for your party's DPS than a Glare or Broil, but if your party is looking pretty rough, you're not further punished for focusing on recovering since it only affects their damage output and not their survivability--or in other words, it's not compiling the difficulty on your ability to heal.

I think DoTs can be utilized a lot better to have a more important interaction with healer playstyles. If the damage is somewhat high but not too low, you do need to think about it, but because it's broken into smaller amounts over time, it's less stressful than something like a tankbuster, or at least it can be if we make debuffs more transparent. For example, there are Frostbite debuffs in certain fights that hit like a truck, but you wouldn't know this unless you saw the frostbite debuff icon next to that party member's healthbar which is really small.

I think it would greatly benefit the game to implement a QoL improvement on cleansable debuff display, and I would honestly just rip how FFXII does it. Here's how that looks:

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/fi...20121028161329

The main takeaway here is how the debuff overlays the character's HP bar on the bottom of the screen. We should have that and include the remaining timer on that debuff and make this apply only to debuffs that Esuna can remove. How it works during gameplay is the overlay has a slow flicker on it and will actually cycle through all debuffs on them one-by-one, which we could do as well if an ally has multiple debuffs that can be removed, though this is pretty rare with the exception of Malboros which we don't see these days. You can also see that the debuff name appears over the character getting hit with the debuff as well, which could be a nice touch to add visibility to the debuff getting applied as well. Lastly, the character in the image has a dark glow around them. Different debuffs have different effects on the characters themselves, and having some kind of particle effects for specifically DoTs that circle around a character or something that helps draw your attention to them would be good as well, even for non-cleansable DoTs. It just would add a lot more transparency with the effects in the game and allow the combat designers to integrate more debuffs without being afraid of it punishing the casuals.

[inhaledcorn]

Here's some suggestions to give both jobs a bit more interplay.

For WHM, make the Freecure trait offer a CD reduction on our oGCDs whenever Divine Benison breaks or expires. This would allow WHM to be able to utilize their few oGCD heals more frequently, which is somewhat of a sour spot for WHM atm, not to mention fix the trap trait that is current Freecure while still promoting a healer mentality to utilize your toolkit more effectively since you'll want to make the most out of the trait by keeping Benison on CD.
Turn Lilybell into a 3 costing Lily Skill with a significantly lower CD of 90 seconds (the same amount of time it would take for a WHM to accumulate 3 Lilies). This way, not only is Lily a DPS gain for WHM due to having an instant Misery with only 1 skill but it also makes the Lily system remain useful for WHM going into EW. Also, make Lilybell something that the WHM can control when it heals, in a similar sense to SCH's fairy skill that. Reduce the stacks from 5 to 3 to compensate for more frequent usage as well.

For SCH, its as simple as restoring Selene's old Skills and giving back the Enhanced Aetherflow trait. While the pain points of SCH would remain, it would at least allow SCH to get more out of its current toolkit without being terribly difficult to implement.

So, your suggestion for WHM literally brings back the StB Lily system in a more conditional way. Y'know, the system that no one liked that forced SE to change it to what it was in ShB because it was just the original Spear card that also no one liked?

Your Lilybell suggestion is cute, but, ultimately, doesn't really do much since, if the WHM has to use Solace or Rapture at any point, that pushes Lilybell's usage back. On top of that, you have to make sure you have 0 Blood Lily charged or else part of Lilybell's Blood Lily generation gets wasted. If it was one Lily usage with the 90s cooldown, I'd incline to agree it was a good idea, but 3 Lilies is just too much for this skill.

Restoring old Selene isn't as easy a fix as some people think. Selene was, in many cases, actually a DPS loss since she couldn't bring as much healing or defensive utility as Eos could, actually causing the SCH to heal more via GCD actions and Aetherflow actions. On top of that, the AoE Esuna and Silence, while useful, were niche at best, and the Haste buff threw many rotations out of whack due to attacks generating resources. Haste effects just generally don't work for most jobs in this game.

Restoring enhanced Aetherflow, again, really doesn't do much to address SCH's problems. In fact, it exasperates the "high punishment for death" problem. While it makes Fey's Union quicker to charge, it doesn't really change much that Fey's Union, as a skill, isn't exactly worth the effort, even with it now being easier to use.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

For SCH, its as simple as restoring Selene's old Skills and giving back the Enhanced Aetherflow trait. While the pain points of SCH would remain, it would at least allow SCH to get more out of its current toolkit without being terribly difficult to implement.[/QUOTE]

No because then raiders will make a elite rotation involving swapping Selene and eos during the same fight

[GrimGale]

Damage rotations on healers don't necessarily need to be hard to upkeep.
You can still design things around a single damaging core ability and add effects around it that make the process less monotonous.

Our nukes currently have no other effects than flat raw damage (barring SGE which causes Kardia to pulse, which ironically makes spamming it even more interesting).

With transforming skills, stacking charges and buffs, stacking debuffs it is possible to give these abilities the feeling of variety.

Imagine a nuke spell that gets faster to cast every time you use it. Or a nuke spell that applies a stacking debuff than you can then detonate with another ability. Or a nuke that buffs the damage of a different ability, or one that grants a key resource.

You don't need a complex rotation to make healing downtime feel more interesting.

[Saefinn]

I appreciate the challenge and difficulty of finding this balance. As for who is in the minority, I don't think we have fair data on it to say.

My view has always been to have a low skill floor high skill ceiling approach just because you can at least accommodate for a variety of skill levels and keep things interesting enough at the high end. The is one problem I can kinda understand and that's healers are typically expected to DPS and I get that if the rotation is more complex then it might be too much for some and they don't want that added pressure and personally I think that's not a design problem but a community problem, because for the vast majority of content you don't need to DPS let alone use your full DPS kit and I feel we need to be able to accommodate for those healers who're less confident or less skilled...because 1) we've all started somewhere and 2) some come into this game with certain handicaps.

With regards to more complex healer DPS play I don't think it needs to affect things like DPS checks, because it wasn't an issue when we had one and as I saw somebody post in another thread a while ago, "I'd prefer as 25 potency Bio and 25 potency Miasma over just having a 50 potency Biolysis" because we can rebalance the numbers.


However, looking at it from the devs' perspective, they're not going to do much about our DPS side and have made the statement they would to make healing more intense, but balance it in away that's not impossible for low end healers. But they have yet to achieve this. I feel like to do it in a way that's engaging for high end players will be tough for low end players. And Yoshi P has, however, pushed SGE forward as the healer for people who want these changes and whilst Sage definitely looks like a step in the right direction, I feel like they've done it all backwards and SGE will still have a Dosis spam even if it's in a better place for DPS variety.

And the reason I feel like they've got it backwards because I feel like the least offensive solution would have been:
- Kept and evolved on the design philosophies of WHM, SCH and AST instead of stripping parts of them down
- Made a new healer to accommodate the people who would rather than 1 button DPS spam (or don't mind it) because either they don't mind the monotony or they're at a skill level where they are still finding a challenge in the healing aspect of the game.

To my mind, it's a game with multiple jobs for each role, I feel like these systems are best designed to accommodate different difficulty levels between jobs. And we have had some level of that. EG: it used to be PLD was your standard typical tank class and straight forward and easy, WAR was like your DPS and tank hybrid that sad in the middle and then DRK was your more technical tank and was the hardest to play of the three.

[Misutoraru]

I think I am definitely the minority here.

I do not run savage or extreme with my heal. So my experience are fully on DF dungeon, 8/24 raid.
I never found having dps with heal engaging. Well I never like the green dps ideology, i briefly play WHM in some ex in ARR. Only fully committed to AST when HW came out, and I enjoy what AST had offer that time, a support healer with the versatile of switching between hot and shell.

Playing with DF is always a hit or miss, one run you have a perfect team I barely have to heal and next run I casting heal like madman. I believe this is the reason dev are so afraid to boost the incoming damage even though I think having 70% uptime in healing would be more engaging than casting dps.

With new expansion more oGCD healing skill with low CD and high healing potency, I can see dev is pushing away from “intense healing” further and further.

I believe the only way to satisfy most of the community would be revert some change, SCH back to the heal that pack with tons of dot, and AST being the healer that can cast buff and debuff. If the dev can balance between “selfish dps” and party buffing dps. They should have no issue balancing “damage output” for Healer, may be abit tricky for WHM identity. I think it will be the best resort allowing different play style of heal role players and not excluding anyone

[Recon1o6]

I'm one of those people who barely play hard difficulty stuff. I'll do an extreme or savage if I want the glamour or mount. So the majority of my playtime as a healer is, like yours op, dungeons, overworld, alliance raids, trials and normal raids.

Additionally unlike most people, I never really had a main job. I had a main from each role, but that's it. I hate parsers, I dislike big groups (4 man is great, 8 man? no thanks) but I like a challenge. I dislike people that don't know the basics of "dont stand in the orange" at level 20 nevermind level 80.

Yet I still made the massive summary of healer issues thread. Why is that? Because I love this game and seeing how it keeps falling from what was once my favourite game on my shelf.

There's a combination of factors that madde veteran healers like myself quit in droves over the last few expansions, and given you haven't had the experience yet as you said you're still new, some might be less obvious than others.

1. Healing kits are bloated in terms of power and number of skills and the fight design does not accomodate it leading to large amounts of downtime the higher level you go. For example, back in ARR medica 2 did 50 potency per tick and you still needed to boost your WHM with its self buffs in order to heal through intense healing phases.
You also had no ogcd heals other than benediction. Meanwhile now you have Benediction, Tetra, asylum, plenary and assize and that's just whm which has the least

fights are getting easier mechanically (bosses auto position for example) and gear strength means that what higher healer challenge the developers did in 5.4 and 5.5 was quickly eclipsed by ilvl. Even then bahamut, the final boss of the last current dungeon hits like a wet noodle.

The levelling dungeons are always harder because SE puts more skills in the higher levels than the lower ones. Astro and sch for example both have a massive 8 level gap between any new buttons

2. The none healing portions of the healers (Crowd control, buffing, debuffing and damage) have been completely stripped with nothing meaningful to replace it with
Did you know stone 1 used to have a heavy and Astro had a pseudo reprisal in the form of disable? Sch used to have debuffs like eye for an eye (functions like reprisal when an enemy struck the target of it)
Even astro once upon a time had 2 dots, 2 nukes and gravity

3. As others have already said, fight design punishes healers for other's mistakes and the lack of actual healing checks doesn't help matters

4. Healers have not been getting any meangingful additions to their job kits for several years now and old problems are not being corrected. Instead, we have been getting older skills removed and then readded later at a higher level, plus healer damage potencies are so low now.
Some examples:
-Temperance the levl 80 whm ability, is functionally identical to divine seal, a level 40 buff that increased healing by 30% every 60s that was removed.
-Seraph is actually a more glitchy arcanist ability called Rouse which buffed by 40%
-Holy used to have a potency of 240 in ARR. It got nerfed to 200 and now 140
-Celestial opposition used to extend buff timers and stun but was turned into an instant cast aspected benefic.
-Despite years of asking, dissipation still kills the fairy. It was the smn questline where this skill was demonstrated.

5. SE does not take healer feedback into account unless it fundamentally breaks the job and the 2 job designers do not understand their game
This might sound pretentious, but its not.
For starters, they have gone on record saying they dislike designing tanks and healers. During a forum questions piece in shb, they ignored the healer questions despite them being the most upvoted. They also skipped the healer slide in the shb media tour out of fear with lots of angry healers urging them to reverse course pre launch once the contents came to light

SE imposed on whm back in stormblood a "pure healer" style. Most of their skills got stripped and they were reduced to spamming stone. Hence the chucking rocks meme. It was very unpopular amongst the entire playerbase for a number of reasons.

Furthermore they repeatedly took away scholar's energy drain in sb and shb despite the fact it flat out breaks sch's kit without an aetherflow dump. (it cripples mp regen, fae gauge collection and more)
They appear to have learned their lesson in ew about this because as of the media tour, sch still has ED thank goodness.
They also in sb removed enough skills from sch in sb it had no reliable way to deal aoe damage so they were forced to give it back miasma 2.

However, their ignorance still shows. "We cannot think of anything to improve with sch" when in fact there's loads of things wrong with sch like the fairy glitching, dissipation, pet tax etc
They also added lots of self healing to tanks (except drk) and smn got a physick buff, but they have alrady said they wont up damage to compensate. So healers will have even less to heal now

6. The game flat out fails to teach how to play one's job, partly lack of tutorials, partly due to class quests being unchanged despite the absence or changes to skills. Therefore the only way to learn is through experience, and there is 8+ years of content, and veterans have been playing some-all of it.
Cure 1. Its got a freecure trait, its known as a noob trap because spamming cure 1 is a surefire way of letting the tank get melted past 40. You will only learn this by being yelled at, looking it up outside of game, or having a realisation in game that its inefficient.

To the game's credit, it does state multiple times that you do damage when you do not need to heal. Given how easy it is top the party or the tank off at the touch of a single button, this is relevant.

The astrologian unlock quest comes to mind, as one of the cards in it, due to being destroyed into 3/6% buffs than a bunch of fun different effects, if you follow the dialogue now results in you putting one of the cards on the wrong target.
It was the correct target back in sb and hw, but not now.

[Truen]

I'm new to the game, a filthy casual that plays for the story, crafting & fun side activities, and only experienced extreme content, perhaps getting into harder stuff later. All the group content has been through random queue / pug / pf.

So far, I've found playing a healer has been challenging, much more than being a tank/dps. As a healer, I can't control how well the other randoms play, but it's my job to keep them alive. (I've had tanks that chain pull in leveling dungeons, wipes in stone vigil, or entire party failing mechanics in extremes etc)

If its a pug with good players, being a healer is very smooth, people avoid avoidable damage, you rarely have to extra heal or rez. But if you have half the group constantly taking avoidable damage, it's.. challenging.

I can imagine you and your elite static, doing things near perfect, and as healers, you & co-healer only have to heal at various timings of the encounter, and not because a joe smith and jane doe ate huge avoidable damage, constantly.

And therein lies the problem. There's almost no middle ground.

Because of the way encounters dish out damage, and most are designed to be avoidable as a test of player skill, the gap between what a healer needs to do to clear said content is massive, entirely dependent on 3-7 other players.

Once you understand this, you realize it is very difficult to find that balance in healer design to cater to a wide range of players.

For example, some of you want healers to heal more, dps less, and one may think they should just make encounters throw out more unavoidable damage, or perhaps more random dmg. That will certainly force healers to heal more.

But is it rewarding to the other players?

The core skill-test in 14 encounters is positioning, timing, avoiding avoidable damage. Players feel rewarded when they manage to avoid that puddle, or resolve a mechanic to avoid massive busters.

The more unavoidable damage you throw at players, the less "skillful" they would feel, and the less rewarding the fight becomes because its now testing the skill of the healers, and not them.

It also keeps the content interesting longer for everyone else, as while they can gear up, get bigger numbers, more hp, if they are not playing well, eating avoidable busters will still get them killed. ie, over-gearing does less to reduce the skill requirement, when most of the incoming dmg is based on clearing mechanics.

This is precisely why encounters have some timed unavoidable dmg, while most are avoidable.

The negative side-effect is if your group plays really well, they avoid so much damage it leaves healers with.. glare/broil spam.

1/2

How the heck would a newb know what the minority/majority wants? Good grief. MANY healers are sick of spamming one spell 40% of the time--spend a few years here first before you start ballparking this bs. You've never even played a build before 5.0 LOL.