Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[Silver-Strider]

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?.

In what way is my suggestion more conditional exactly? In SB, you used Cure 2 to generate a lily and then any 1 oGCD would use all your lilies to reduce its own CD. My suggestion merely requires Divine Benison to expire in some fashion to reduce the CD of all our oGCDs. The difference between the 2 is that you aren't blowing a GCD for cure 2, you aren't blowing all your lilies just for a single oGCD CD reduction and the trap that is freecure is removed. I personally liked the CD reduction SB gave but felt it was poorly implemented since it was reliant on Cure 2 to have any effect at all. I'm merely suggesting that there be more interplay with Divine Benison because as it is, its just a shield we weave whenever possible and that's it.

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.

The Lilybell suggestion is to try and make the skill into something that is actually useful to use while also keeping the Lily system relevant in EW. With a 1.5 second cast time, the opportunities for us to weave in Lily abilities vs just casting Glare will dramatically be reduced and while we'll still periodically need to use a Rapture/Solace, there will be instances where we can stockpile 3 lilies, if for no other reason than a long transition period that gives us nothing to do but sit there and there was plenty of those in ShB that I can't help but feel will also happen in EW. Even if Lilybell cost 3, or even just 2, Lilies, it would either make it a DPS gain for WHM or a much smaller DPS loss than what the Lily system will currently be going into EW. If we have 0 Blood Gauge, then using a single Lily skill to get Misery is a DPS gain for WHM of 280 potency, whereas if there's 1 gauge, the DPS loss would be a mere 30 potency since we'd only be using 3 GCDs for Misery vs the 3 glare casts during the same time frame of GCDs (this is assuming that Misery remains 900 potency and Glare 3 is 310 potency). Either or, its a much more reasonable change than what Lilybell is currently looking to be with a 3 minute CD and no interaction with the Lily system at all.

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.

The thought process here is that, Selene in her current form is merely a glamour piece; Doing the exact same thing as Eos really just makes either or an aesthetic choice and that's really it. Restoring her old abilities would at least make it so that there's an actual choice in which fairy to use again and while she only offers niche utility, its still utility none the less. As for Enhanced Aetherflow, while not addressing SCH's problems, it does create more interplay with the toolkit as a whole, which is what I'm aiming to do. Death is equally punishing for all roles since you loss all progress you've made with your gauge to start with and any plans you may have had have already been derailed by the death, so I don't really see it as exasperating that problem any more than it already is.

[Sebazy]

I mean you did say come back in a few years. As someone who’s been here since day 1, i can say, old healing, which everyone seems to claim is better than current healing, isn’t as good as people remember it. While i will say old scholar was much better, multiple dots and bane, old whm was not as glorious. What did old whm have that it does not have now? Stone 1, which added heavy. Not good for party content, having a mob or 2 lag behind, not getting caught in aoe. Aero 1 to be used with aero 2. Was more dps to just stone instead of stacking the lower DoT. Fluid aura. Usually got used wrong, and you get better results just walking up to the tank. Cleric stance. Now i was good at stance dancing. The community as a whole, were not. That skill was why we had a lot of healers who would not dps. The dps without clerics was weak and not worth it. Many were too afraid to miss a heal having it on.

Hiya, a few corrections:

Aero 1 was a DPS gain over spamming stone as long as it went full duration. It was also instant cast and thus was worth loading up mobs in a pull in dungeons as your tank tagged them.
A lot of people don't realise but WHMs also had access to Thunder which was a similar deal to Aero, full duration? DPS gain. Yep, WHM used to have 3 dots right from the start of 2.0.

You're also glossing over the depth added through our kit's utility. Stoneskin was an under appreciated part of WHM's toolkit back when Infirmity was a thing, and it was borderline required and needed very precise timing during early T5 prog to keep tanks alive.

Virus and Eye for an Eye were also massively important debuffs, enough so that T5 progression teams would organise a virus rotation for Death Sentence.

Fluid Aura was a god send for caster trash that didn't want to move.

But all these differences pale before the single biggest difference between healing in 2.0 vs now.

With top flight WHMs, it wasn't about the spells you cast, it was about the spells you didn't. In Coil prog it was routine to see WHMs winding up and interrupting Cure IIs to be ready to pounce on burst damage where needed, but conserve vital MP when it wasn't. It really does sting that hitbox is gone and all my Coil progression recordings with it as it was a very different style of play back then.

Was WHM better? That's open to debate. But was very different to how it is now. Much slower and more methodical. You had more brute force and weren't bound by cool downs like a SCH was, but you were almost entirely bound behind a cast time for the majority of your kit. You had to be so much more aware and alert as a result.

[Kolaina]

Snip

I wouldn’t call them corrections necessarily as your post is mostly anecdotal. Your coil experience is different from mine. I also went through progressive coil before we were over powered or coil was nerfed.
I stand by what I said. stone skin as well as protect were removed and replaced with an increase of stats. Why maintain a skill we have to cast before every pull when it can be made passive. Protect was a button we didn’t need. Stone skin is now virtually divine benison. So I’d say it’s not lost.
Fluid aura for caster mobs is bad play on the tank. It’s been better to pull the melee dps to where the ranged mobs are sitting. No need to fluid aura.
I get the turn 5 reference but that’s ARR, we are heading into our 4th expansion. Classes need to evolve. Things happen to prevent skill bloat. Also, the general discussion, or at least in part is how well people can handle on your every day content. Not raid level play which promotes a level of play above your average, casual player looking to just have a lil fun and kill some time

[Sebazy]

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.

Is it really though? Levelling dungeons are probably the roughest time for this. But outside of that it's typically only challenging because you're overreacting to other peoples mistakes. You don't need to start bombing people with Adlos and Succors if a single Soil weaved in will do the same trick.

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.

I'm sorry but this just isn't true on multiple levels.

1) 'Elite' groups are rarely perfect outside of when it actually matters because half of us are goofing about and just taking it easy. My group's final E10S kill had 8 deaths. And amusingly, I ended that run at 10.9k DPS, my personal best is 11.7k. This is mostly the same group that got EU second and roughly world top 15 or so on BCOB Turn 5 and several of our members are easily still world progression standard.

2) What gives you the idea that 'Elite' players only ever do things as a full static?

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.

There is absolutely a middle ground, and most runs that aren't either Ultimate, Logs speed runs, early progression or blind progression with newer players fall into it. You're putting far too much stock into the two extremes here.

[glamazon]

I refuse to spam that one dps button. I will literally do anything but that and won’t do it now nor in the future. This is how I know they don’t want us to dps because if they did they would give us real dps tools.

[lulunami]

Hiya, a few corrections:

Aero 1 was a DPS gain over spamming stone as long as it went full duration. It was also instant cast and thus was worth loading up mobs in a pull in dungeons as your tank tagged them.
A lot of people don't realise but WHMs also had access to Thunder which was a similar deal to Aero, full duration? DPS gain. Yep, WHM used to have 3 dots right from the start of 2.0.

You're also glossing over the depth added through our kit's utility. Stoneskin was an under appreciated part of WHM's toolkit back when Infirmity was a thing, and it was borderline required and needed very precise timing during early T5 prog to keep tanks alive.

Virus and Eye for an Eye were also massively important debuffs, enough so that T5 progression teams would organise a virus rotation for Death Sentence.

Fluid Aura was a god send for caster trash that didn't want to move.

But all these differences pale before the single biggest difference between healing in 2.0 vs now.

With top flight WHMs, it wasn't about the spells you cast, it was about the spells you didn't. In Coil prog it was routine to see WHMs winding up and interrupting Cure IIs to be ready to pounce on burst damage where needed, but conserve vital MP when it wasn't. It really does sting that hitbox is gone and all my Coil progression recordings with it as it was a very different style of play back then.

Was WHM better? That's open to debate. But was very different to how it is now. Much slower and more methodical. You had more brute force and weren't bound by cool downs like a SCH was, but you were almost entirely bound behind a cast time for the majority of your kit. You had to be so much more aware and alert as a result.

This was also my experience playing WHM back then during Binding Coil of Bahamut with Titania.

You wanted Eye for an Eye on the main tank as much as possible so it hopefully transferred a debuff onto Titania. That means Death Sentence, Plummet, and Auto-attacks would hurt a lot less because sometimes all three attacks would hit the tank at the same time. Also Physical Virus on physical damage tank busters and Arcanist Virus on magical attacks.

You used to have to time GCD heals on tank busters to the point that the HP bar on the tank did not appear to move because being too slow meant the tank would die.

The MP economy for WHM was much smaller so freely using Cure II and Cure III all the time was a bad idea. Cure I was not a meme back then.

[Sebazy]

I wouldn’t call them corrections necessarily as your post is mostly anecdotal.

How is it anecdotal?

Full duration Aero and Thunder were absolutely a hard DPS gain, doubly so for Aero if you dotted up trash whilst on the move. No ifs, no buts. The math is right there.

Stoneskin was required for Turn 5 progression pre nerf because otherwise the tank would die either to DS or the auto attack that immediately followed it if either a virus was missed, pre adlo was missed or chipped pre DS or the pre infirmity Cure II didn't tick before Infirmity took effect. Progression with a tank in crafted and a couple of pieces of gear allowed for one missed debuff/buff. If 2 things were missed, that tank was probably going to die. This is from the perspective of someone who started to prog Coil in Darklight and Vanya with a week of it's release, It'd be interesting to know when you got the binds that tie achievement, mine was 23/11/2013 and it should have been a couple of weeks earlier but we slacked sadly.

Protect is a fair point, it was little more than fluff and busy work be that good or bad.

I do absolutely agree that the game needs to evolve though. If anything, I think Yoshida's team have been too conservative with the game as a whole since the tail end of Heavensward. They've settled upon a core gameplay loop that works and gets subscribers, so now all the big changes are aimed at side content it seems (Not that that this is necessarily a bad thing).

[Claire_Pendragon]

Ive said this elsewhere. Healers dont have to be complex in DPS. Just something other than spamming 111111.
Examples;
WHM: Every Stone/Glare has a 35% chance to proc a nuke that does 10 more potency. Trivial, and even ignorable. so they press a new GCD roughly every 7.5 seconds.
SCH: GCD Nuke does 10 potency less than Broil. Makes the next 2 Broils deal 10 more potency.
AST: Another GCD Nuke is ready every 8 seconds. (Used after 4 GCDs) 10 more potency. (Lights up too. I'd also make it instant cast to help make AST easier)(AST has enough going on, and is the other pure healer, thats why its such a simple/basic design)


These are extremely easy for any casual player, and if sh** hits the fan, and they panic/forget to press them, its no big deal. Savage content would still be won w/o using these spells by mediocre casuals, and the hardcore who want to min/max or not be bored, will still press them.
(IDK enough about SGE yet, so I'll refrain from commenting on its rotation)

EDIT: heck, you could also remove the DoTs as well. Most casual players would rather press a 1 2 combo, than a DoT, and then spam 1. (I know this would hinder Weaving for AST and WHM)

[Kolaina]

How is it anecdotal?

Full duration Aero and Thunder were absolutely a hard DPS gain, doubly so for Aero if you dotted up trash whilst on the move. No ifs, no buts. The math is right there.

Stoneskin was required for Turn 5 progression pre nerf because otherwise the tank would die either to DS or the auto attack that immediately followed it if either a virus was missed, pre adlo was missed or chipped pre DS or the pre infirmity Cure II didn't tick before Infirmity took effect. Progression with a tank in crafted and a couple of pieces of gear allowed for one missed debuff/buff. If 2 things were missed, that tank was probably going to die. This is from the perspective of someone who started to prog Coil in Darklight and Vanya with a week of it's release, It'd be interesting to know when you got the binds that tie achievement, mine was 23/11/2013 and it should have been a couple of weeks earlier but we slacked sadly.

Protect is a fair point, it was little more than fluff and busy work be that good or bad.

I do absolutely agree that the game needs to evolve though. If anything, I think Yoshida's team have been too conservative with the game as a whole since the tail end of Heavensward. They've settled upon a core gameplay loop that works and gets subscribers, so now all the big changes are aimed at side content it seems (Not that that this is necessarily a bad thing).

Ok sure, stoneskin was needed then. But it is no longer needed. Things change. You are living in the past. I also did coils in dark light gears. A lil bit of whatever the i90 gear was called too. You can try and flex but things change. The game has changed. Developers took many things into account, got rid of skills we no longer need, and made sure to tune the game in a way they were also no longer needed.
Idk what skills i took beyond sure cast and swift cast, but i could tell you, thunder sure wasn’t one of them. Maybe your group found it necessary, but we did fine without.
Let go of the past. Accept things change. Not everyone is playing at raid level. In fact, the vast majority of players are not.
As far as your anecdotal experience in coil, i mean i could go on about the plethora of alternatives to surviving. Shields. Lucky with a crit Aldo. Tank limit breaks. The stars didn’t have to align

[Sebazy]

As far as your anecdotal experience in coil

I take the time to explain and detail my reasoning and all you can do is try to discredit my points with buzzwords? Don't be lame, I'm sure you can do better than that =/

Stacking dots as a WHM was great as it allowed you to keep damage ticking whilst you were doing the cure II/interupt jig that was needed even for Caduceus. It was also a more efficient source of damage.

And no, I'm not stuck in the past. I just look back at it fondly. Was the game better back then? No not really, but the player base hadn't min maxed the game to an inch of it's life nor had SE ironed out all the quirks and oddities either.

I will add though, saying that the cuts to healer actions were just SE getting rid of skills we no longer need is selling that change a bit short.