SE FINALLY ANSWERED THE HEALERS COMMUNITY LONG ANSWERED QUESTION

[Saefinn]

I feel like for it to be a fair assessment it'd need to be a long term playthrough of healer and not just high end prog, but roulettes, Bozja, Eureka, MSQ and so on. And with a good gear but doesn't have to be BiS.

There's a honeymoon period with any job and with healing I think it'd require getting to that point where you have a lot of down time and somebody who doesn't play healer or doesn't play it much isn't necessarily going to find that because they might be thinking more and it's less second nature.

[Aword3213]

its important to note that also healers are a job conditioned by party performance (mitigation, not taking extra damage, etc) this can hurt their performance heavily

agreed. It's also the stance SQEX is currently taking. It may be part of the reason they denied us the return of complexity of 3.0 healers.

Thinking we have to have that stupid rotation just because we have to manage healing is something that is proven wrong when over 70% of the time we're dpsing, we simply do not manage constantly the heals, in fact doing that is the exception at any level of difficulty, we're dps that sometimes throw heals instead of healers that sometime dps yet we're denied the rotation we deserve.

Spending over 70% of time dpsing does not proof anything other than itself. Healers in SB spent over 70% time dpsing, too. Just take a look at fflogs. If anything, Each Healer is still able to contribute around 10% of total raid damage, same as in SB, which means healers didn't change much. (I'm joking of course)

The reason we are not constanly managing heals comes from many factors. The amount of oGCDs we have is one of them. Imaging turning all of our oGCD heals into GCDs and potencies are adjusted accordingly . Our time spent on dpsing will surely go down. Of course, this is not my suggestions nor my idea for improving healer gameplay. To solve the issue we currently have, there are many factors that need to be looked into. Asking for dps rotation is not the only solution.

if you want to value the skill of a healer look at their efficiency not how much they heal because any low skilled player can reach high healing parses yet none of them are efficient.

HPS goes down as you get better, that is true, but that does not mean the lower the better. There are still bare minimum healing required due to unavoidable mechanices. If you think you are a good healer because you have minimized you healing, what you actually did may be throwing your burdun on your co-healer.

you can always ignore them and play like today while you're learning

You cannot ignore them if you fail to pass enrage checks, and that's where skill floor exists. Those healers who contribute 0 dps do not exist in early prog, at least to my understanding. They are only allowed to do so once they or their party geared up. However, if we put gears into consideration, DPS can mess up their rotations all they want since they can still clear the content anyway. I'm not saying their current design on healers is good. Your explanation on dots is great and I agree that dots are better suited for healers. My personal experience on healers in other games all rely on dots, too. However, whether what SQEX did to lower the skill floor on healers lead to quite the opposite is another matter.

I snpped more than I should. Character limit is driving me crazy

[Aword3213]

I guess one problem is that I don't really see how it was that much more difficult. I don't think we've had a complex or complicated DPS. This is because it's never been a rotation in a traditional sense, you just go out what you could when you could, I think the real 'challenge' came with Cleric Stance more than anything and they removed that but it was a risk/reward mechanic they've since removed.

Because I don't think

Adloquium -> Bio -> Bio II -> Lustrate -> Miasma -> Whispering Dawn -> Bane -> Shadowflare -> Virus -> Ruin -> Ruin
Regen -> Aero -> Aero II -> Cure II -> Aero III -> Medica II -> Assize -> Stone III/Holy -> Stone III/Holy -> Stone III/Holy

Is that much more complicated to pull off than:

Adloquium -> Biolysis -> Broil -> Lustrate -> Broil -> Whispering Dawn -> Broil -> Broil -> Broil -> Broil -> Broil
Regen -> Dia -> Assize -> Cure II -> Glare/Holy -> Medica II -> Glare/Holy -> Glare/Holy -> Glare/Holy -> Glare/Holy

When you've memorised the order you're going to do your DPS spells in, then it's a case of doing them in between heals. Then the only other thing you need to keep an eye on is your DoTs, which you're already doing with Biolysis/Dia/Combust.

There was no imperative to get off a DPS rotation as quickly as you can like in a DPS job and it was pretty lower pressure and a "use them if you can" kind of deal just as it is now because your healing took priority and you wouldn't lose out on missing a combo or a cooldown (or wasting a cooldown), and not casting a Broil instead of a heal is still a DPS loss just as getting a DoT off later is a DPS loss, but only for the damage those heals took away.

I agree and I don't think they're that difficult.

The fights in FFXIV are mostly about memorization. I personally have no problem with complex or difficult rotations on healers. To me, the harder the better. I'm not the person who shy away from difficulties.

My reply was only about the conflict between the stance SQEX is currently taking and the suggestions people are making.

I threw many Likes on lots of post making suggestions. We all want healers to be engaging. I don't mind it being your way or my way, but the reasoning behind it must ring true.

"Asking for more dps options because it's boring." I understand the sentiment and I support you

"Asking for more dps options because it does not affect the skill floor." I doubt it, hence my initial reply

[WaxSw]

agreed. It's also the stance SQEX is currently taking. It may be part of the reason they denied us the return of complexity of 3.0 healers.

This is a stupid excuse to say the least, you're conditioning an entire role feel by something outside them that may or may not happen, while healers do not need to go back to 3.0 there is a huge amount that can be done and they refuse to do that would improve the job.

A job shoudn't be engaging only when you're in a party with clowns

There are still bare minimum healing required due to unavoidable mechanices. If you think you are a good healer because you have minimized you healing, what you actually did may be throwing your burdun on your co-healer.

Something that the metric of healing do not show, you cannot take healing in a vacuum and call it a day, what if their cohealer is simply bad or too anxious to optimize? what if their cohealer have something like a diu ast which boast higher healing potency per gcd? there is a lot of factors that can contribute to that and while chadding is a thing and no one who has parsed high as healer will tell you otherwise the hps metric alone is not a proof of that.

Spending over 70% of time dpsing does not proof anything other than itself.

Its a proof of bad design, a job well designed shoudnt condense a rotation which is over 70% of what they do on 2 buttons, maybe 3 sometimes, its braindead and boring and its the core issue of the shitty healers we have now, a lot of low quality downtime in high quantity

Asking for dps rotation is not the only solution.

This is something that has been discussed here for years now and some people still don't get it. If the problem of healers is high quantity of low quality downtime you have 2 aproaches, either you increase the quality of the downtime or decrease the quantity of it, what you say about dps not being the only solution or making ogcd heals gcds is reducing the quantity, an approach that in this game woudn't work and probably the worst because:

1-You still have low quality downtime, so some portions of your kit are still braindead.
2-The quantity of downtime is tied to external factors like how frequent damage and how much the party dodges/mitigates, meaning that in less punishing encounters we'd still have the same problem that healers have today.
3-Reducing the ogcd would mean healers are more static than ever before limiting encounter design
4-To that approach to work devs should pump up the damage on all the content if they wanna mitigate the point 2 which would increase the healing floor while not actually increasing much the ceiling (less accesibility)
5-To that approach to work devs should rework the entirety of the content of the game consuming an unrealistic amount of resources

We don't ask for a dps/utility rotation because we want to be dps, we ask for a dps/utility rotation (not same number of buttons as a dps but something more than what we have now) because in the current state of the game is the only realistic way to fix the healers.

You cannot ignore them if you fail to pass enrage checks, and that's where skill floor exists

Content with meaningful enrage is basically Extremes and above, one is not learning the class there if you're ignoring them and doing 0 dps there you don't deserve to be in that content and that statement remains true wether you have 1 dot or 1000, also " DPS can mess up their rotations all they want since they can still clear the content anyway." simply no, if you get a party where all the dps are lacking in rotation you won't clear something that has enrage and has not been overgeared, they're also punished and far more than healers for not doing their damage rotation, especially in things like week 1 savage or ultimates, bad dps don't have a place there the same way 0 dps healers don't. The only time you'll see a bad dps clearing something with enrage is because their party picked up their slack the same way they would have to if there was a 0 dps healer.

Proof of the first statement of "You don't deserve to be in that content and that statement remains true wether you have 1 dot or 1000": A party with 0 dps healers woudn't be able to meet the enrage of E8S even if the other 6 members were the top 1 of their respective roles geared with BiS, 0 dps healers are not the skill floor of savage

[Saefinn]

I agree and I don't think they're that difficult.

The fights in FFXIV are mostly about memorization. I personally have no problem with complex or difficult rotations on healers. To me, the harder the better. I'm not the person who shy away from difficulties.

My reply was only about the conflict between the stance SQEX is currently taking and the suggestions people are making.

I threw many Likes on lots of post making suggestions. We all want healers to be engaging. I don't mind it being your way or my way, but the reasoning behind it must ring true.

"Asking for more dps options because it's boring." I understand the sentiment and I support you

"Asking for more dps options because it does not affect the skill floor." I doubt it, hence my initial reply

I acknowledge the conflict in stances. However their stance does make things difficult and there is no easy way to resolve the problem this way. There are ways they can alleviate the problem with this approach and I think to do it to a point that it satisfies bored healers it's not going to be a very accessible job and it's a problem Yoshi P acknowledge in his comments.

The reason they avoid the DPS solution because they don't want to put that pressure on less skilled healers, but your DPS contribution as a healer can be minimal up until maybe EX onwards and Wax says, if you're at that point then you're of an appropriate skill level.

I know you disagree that it does not affect the skill floor, but I don't think it does because of the barrier to entry for a healer is that "DPS is optional" and it grows into "DPS doesn't have to be great" and it's only at the highend that it is "DPS needs to be good enough to keep up".

I don't mind them offering an alternative solution, and a part of me is hoping this stat squish will help, but at the same time I can already seeing this being a repeat of ShB and that things pretty much scale in the same way. And I feel like they're making it a harder job for themselves than it needs to be.

However, I feel like the compromise could be:
- Improve our DPS options
- When they've found a solution that works without DPS, then reduce our DPS options.

And we will know they've found a solution because our downtime will shrink and we DPS less and less. So the DPS options just hold us over until they've nailed it.

[Aword3213]

you're conditioning an entire role feel by something outside them that may or may not happen, while healers do not need to go back to 3.0 there is a huge amount that can be done and they refuse to do that would improve the job.
A job shoudn't be engaging only when you're in a party with clowns

It shouldn't. SQEX think they have made healers engaging by increasing healing intensity to compensate the loss the those dps tools. Some poeple like it, some don't. I don't, though I can adapt.

Some poeple consider 1 button spam as a punishment for optimization. On the other hand, some people consider it as a reward because they only need to use 1 button to achieve the same 10% dps contribution as in SB. Some people think min-maxing your stat to achieve super high damage on 1 specific skill is thrilling and rewarding. Some people think it's dreadfully boring. We can see these poeple in other games. We can see these people who have fun time running only profane healer in Bojza. You can deal high damage spamming one button alone, so why not?

SQEX now puts themselves in an awkward postion that, by adjusting the amount of offensive options on healers, they risk offending either group of people

Something that the metric of healing do not show, you cannot take healing in a vacuum and call it a day, what if their cohealer is simply bad or too anxious to optimize? what if their cohealer have something like a diu ast which boast higher healing potency per gcd? there is a lot of factors that can contribute to that and while chadding is a thing and no one who has parsed high as healer will tell you otherwise the hps metric alone is not a proof of that.

Now you're the one conditioning healer contribution by something that may or may not happen. That's also where SQEX 1 button mentaility comes in.

3-Reducing the ogcd would mean healers are more static than ever before limiting encounter design

Not neccessarily. It depends on the kits and the encounter design

4-To that approach to work devs should pump up the damage on all the content if they wanna mitigate the point 2 which would increase the healing floor while not actually increasing much the ceiling

They obvously don't mind increasing the ceiling regarding healing. They said it during ShB, and they reiterate it in media tour

5-To that approach to work devs should rework the entirety of the content of the game consuming an unrealistic amount of resources

If it is needed and neccessay, they should consume those resources nontheless. If we are taking resources into account and thus affecting the request we are making, then we should not asking for dps options too because it takes them a lot of effort to balance
around the kits, the roles and encounter design.

However, it seems to me they don't mind spending resources on enhancing healing aspect on healers.

if you get a party where all the dps are lacking in rotation you won't clear something that has enrage and has not been overgeared,

I did mention gear, didn't I?

[GrimGale]

One avenue for more engaging 1 button spam, if you'd still consider the idea, is to give Healer's offensive spells more interactivity with other resources and abilities.

At the moment, the offensive spells we have are extremely basic. They deal flat damage. That's it. Your DoT deals damage over time, that's it. Your AoE deals flat damage in an area and for exclusively WHM it stuns enemies. (Which is a good thing in this case btw.)

No procs, no gained stacks, no interaction with any of the healer gauges, no interactions with other DPS abilities or healing abilities, beyond the Bloodlily or Addersting. (Which is essentially the unlocking of mobility tools, those being more situational than ever with the new shortened cast times.)
No combos, or priming and detonation of abilites.

If your Nuke spellsand your DoT had some sort of interaction that changed the pace of the 1 button spam, it would feel at least less monotonous.

[WaxSw]

SQEX think they have made healers engaging by increasing healing intensity to compensate the loss the those dps tools

Something that hasn't happened, healers nowadays dps even more than in previous expansions

SQEX now puts themselves in an awkward postion that, by adjusting the amount of offensive options on healers, they risk offending either group of people

Its simple in reality, give more dps options, more dps options still allow for 1 button spam as well as more complex playstyles, 1 button spam only allows for 1 button spam only and limits all the players. If people like to 1 button spam with more options they'll be able to do it, if what they care about is being optimal while only 1 button spamming then they're lazy and to begin with they shoudn't be listened cause for the sake of the lazyness want to hijack a role and push it to the ground. Not even counting how its not mmo gameplay to spam 1 button over and over, its bad design.

"some people consider it as a reward" a reward is not something you get that often, a reward must have some work behind like how midare setsugeka for example is a reward from getting the 3 sen, when your main nuke, the "reward" is the most used action in the encounter being in some instances used 10 times more than the second most used action then its not a reward, its the baseline.

Now you're the one conditioning healer contribution by something that may or may not happen. That's also where SQEX 1 button mentaility comes in.

You're mixing messages here, I'm talking about how to judge the skill of a healer you have to take a lot of things into account not only the heal and dps number. SQEX mentality doesn't have anything to do with this and if anything comes from wanting to cuddle the newbies instead of allowing good healers to easily show their skills.

Not neccessarily. It depends on the kits and the encounter design

Less ogcd=more casts=more time healers have to stand still=more limitations in how mechanics can hurt the party as healers have to cast the heals, even if they don't have to cast them and are instant cast reducing the amount of ogcds limits more how bursty some mechanics can be as healers only have said gcds to heal, ogcds are flexible, gcds are not.

They obvously don't mind increasing the ceiling regarding healing. They said it during ShB, and they reiterate it in media tour

They do when they've disregarded increasing the healing in all the content as that high intensity mode would need, also they said it in Shb just to not fulfill the promise when we're still healing very very little for all the healing kit we have. At this point is clear for any veteran healer, they are unwilling to increase the hps in anything but the highest savage and ultimates.

If it is needed and neccessay, they should consume those resources [...]

The point is its not needed, is the most expensive option and its plagued with tons and tons of troubles, which leads me to...

dps options too because it takes them a lot of effort to balance

Nowhere close, not even in the same dimension as reworking 8 years of content to allow for a new healing model. I think you don't understant that for the high intensity heal some people want they should rework everything in the game from Sastasha, to ultimates and everything inbetween that is insane and saying balancing lets say 3-4 dps extra options per healer takes the same amount of time and resources is a blatant lie. If they can do it with tanks they can do it with healers.

However, it seems to me they don't mind spending resources on enhancing healing aspect on healers.

Its not about enhancing the healers only, healing is something external, you don't heal if there is no enemy doing damage to you, you don't heal in a dummy fight for example, to increase the healing kit and having it in a way that makes sense the encounter design has to follow and current design doesn't do it, this is another problem that the high intensity healing has, they would also have to rework the healers to allow to tackle said intensity which leads to not only rework all the content in the game but also changind all the healer roles, as I said previously this is insane to ask for when there are cheaper options resource wise.

I did mention gear, didn't I?

In how healers are the only punished when they mess their rotations, which is where my point is, we're not special snowflakes and are punished as much as everyone else for not doing our part in the party, a healer lacking skill is a much as liability as a dps lacking skill.

Besides as I've said, if you're in a encounter with a dps check (something that happens in endgame only) you're not learning your rotation anymore and you shoudn't be cuddled in that enviroment too, at that point you've taken the baby wheels out of your bike so you gotta deal with it.

[Aword3213]

give more dps options, more dps options still allow for 1 button spam as well as more complex playstyles, 1 button spam only allows for 1 button spam only and limits all the players. If people like to 1 button spam with more options they'll be able to do it, if what they care about is being optimal while only 1 button spamming then they're lazy and to begin with they shoudn't be listened cause for the sake of the lazyness want to hijack a role and push it to the ground.

True face revealed eh? Straight calling people lazy because they have different perference.

They did not hijack anything. People don't just ask for 1 button spam and SQEX simply oblige them. SQEX made this decision first. People then came to like it. Not the other way around.

the "reward" is the most used action in the encounter being in some instances used 10 times more than the second most used action then its not a reward, its the baseline.

Depend on how you look at it though.
"You handle the healing splendidily. Now you no longer have to worry about that many buttons to keep up with 10% dps contribition. Good job for keeping the party alive"

Less ogcd=more casts=more time healers have to stand still=more limitations in how mechanics can hurt the party as healers have to cast the heals, even if they don't have to cast them and are instant cast reducing the amount of ogcds limits more how bursty some mechanics can be as healers only have said gcds to heal, ogcds are flexible, gcds are not.

It's rather convenient when it suits your agenda.

How did those people heal back when they didn't have much oGCDs to work with I wonder.

saying balancing lets say 3-4 dps extra options per healer takes the same amount of time and resources is a blatant lie. If they can do it with tanks they can do it with healers.

You just won't know how their resource work unless you work for them. Besides, they would rather spend more time on adding new healings actions, and a new healer to boot. It seems SQEX opinion on resource is contrary to yours

we're not special snowflakes and are punished as much as everyone else for not doing our part in the party, a healer lacking skill is a much as liability as a dps lacking skill.

I'd say healer death is more punishing though. Healers are people, too. They need time to get familiar with mechanics and they make mistakes too, but their death usally means team wipe.

at that point you've taken the baby wheels out of your bike so you gotta deal with it.

I kinda agree with this sentiment. Unfortunately Yoshida want savage contents to be accessible to as many people as possible. However, beware of what you said though. As current healers have no problem clearing all contents, SQEX or current healers lovers will also tell you to deal with it if you don't like it

[Sani2341]

How did those people heal back when they didn't have much oGCDs to work with I wonder.

I can't speak for everyone, but me and those I know usually enjoy when Healers have a meaningfull choice of Healing or DPsing with the next GCD. Much more interesting to have to decide if people (mostly the tank) will be fine for another GCD + heal casttime or not.
Granted I was not aroudn back when FFXIV had a low oGCD Healer Design, but I Have played enough other MMOs where that was the case to say I enjoyed Healign more when I had less.

However, beware of what you said though. As current healers have no problem clearing all contents, SQEX or current healers lovers will also tell you to deal with it if you don't like it

And people will.
Though for a lot of the experienced crowd they are likely to 'deal with it' by quiting healing, or heading to a game that offers a healing experience closer to what they like.