Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[Silver-Strider]

It's because of this:

Enrage mechanics exist to be a barrier on skill, or group performance.

If healers had a complex DPS kit, during the prog or early phase, the vast majority of healer players will not be able to perform well in their DPS checks, with their focus undoubtedly shifted to healing & saving allies from their mistake. This we both understand.

Most grps would fail the prog and it would very likely be the fault of those avg healer players.

But devs want a higher clear rate. They would have to lower the enrage barrier to compensate for healers under-performing.

What is the outcome of that? If you think it through, with the pov that devs view the pressures placed on healers as already being "enough".

That's why personally, I think 1 out of the 4 healers, being SGE as its new, should have been devoted to a complex DPS healer job by the devs, to cater to players who seek that, while the other 3 healers remain "viable and fun" for the masses who play healers. Rather than having all 4 healers with a complex DPS kit and then changing their entire encounter balance around the lowest common denominator.

Trying to balance 1 Healer with a complex DPS rotation vs 3 healers with a basic toolkit would probably be a nightmare though. You either have a complex healer that does no more than the other 3 healers, making it feel needlessly weak when played at a low skill floor, or it would eclipse the other 3 and would result in being mandatory for serious raid progression while excluding the other 3 by default. It doesn't really sound like it would be easy to balance.

As for how to solve the problem with low DPS healers causing groups to fail, I feel like this could be solved by having more skills like Macrocosmos and Pneuma in the mix, offensive skills that are more useful for healing purpose since they're DPS neutral. WHM has lilies but Misery needs to be made DPS neutral in some way for that to work properly while SCH just needs a way to offer its old Virus status effect back and we'd have a decent starting point to work with.

[Halfgeeek]

Trying to balance 1 Healer with a complex DPS rotation vs 3 healers with a basic toolkit would probably be a nightmare though. You either have a complex healer that does no more than the other 3 healers, making it feel needlessly weak when played at a low skill floor, or it would eclipse the other 3 and would result in being mandatory for serious raid progression while excluding the other 3 by default. It doesn't really sound like it would be easy to balance.

This difference in complexity (skill floor & ceiling) already exist in other job roles. For tanks, melee & range dps.

Is balancing easy? Probably not if the goal is different & engaging gameplay, rather than further homogenization. But devs can do a decent job at balancing other jobs, if 1 healer were to be more for high skill floor/ceiling type of players, they could balance it.

[HyoMinPark]

This is likely more of a hodge-podge of thoughts, but just some things running through my mind on reading the opening post. I haven’t read the rest of the thread, so some of these might have already been said. But since it’s roughly one hour before my alarm for work was supposed to go off and I can’t fall back asleep, here’s something to pass the time.


I’ve played healers almost since I started this game. I started back in late 2015 as a DPS main (BRD), but AST was the third job I leveled because I loved the aesthetic. Throughout the years, I have steadily become far more of a healer main than a DPS main—and while I haven’t healed every piece of content this game has to offer yet, I’ve healed quite a lot of it. I’ve at least done most of the content outside of some of the Bozja stuff and PvP, so I think I have a fairly decent grasp on how a wide variety of content in this game is designed.

The main issue I have with the opening post—and it isn’t even something that I disagree with—is that it falls back on the “skill level” of the players in your party as to whether or not playing a healer becomes engaging or a snooze fest; not if the job is well-designed or if the encounter is well-designed but “how good/bad is my party”.

Like I said, I don’t disagree with this statement. I actually agree heavily with it—part of the reason I like healing stuff on Day 1 is because repeated deaths and wipes and getting hit by even the avoidable stuff gives me a reason to put my immense healing toolkit to use. It’s fun. It’s exciting. I actually feel like I’m performing my role versus just being a green DPS. But within it also lies the issue with this game, encounter design, and even job design: the developers cater to the lowest common denominator versus those who are actually passionate about the job/role.

I’m not saying that making things more accessible is bad, so don’t misinterpret here—but constantly ignoring the criticisms and suggestions from players that actively play a job/role so that you can cater to those who aren’t healer mains or who only casually play the role is. At that point, you are ignoring those who have passion for what they do; and that is why there is so much contention amongst healers regarding encounter design and job design.

This is a complaint I’ve had even outside of the healer role when it comes to DPS job changes. So many were made to close this skill floor and skill ceiling gap—but nothing was given to the jobs to really give back what was taken, or at least add some other layer of something to the job. The best example I have was the simplification of BRD from SB to ShB. The skill gap was closed with the changes to Repertoire—but at the same time, optimization was removed and replaced with…nothing. Iron Jaws became a boring ability, and BRD itself lost the nuance that made it fun for those who mained it, and sought to push the job to its limits. Partly in favor to address the power creep and crit-scaling, but also partly because there were aspects people thought “too hard”. And there in is another problem I have.
Well, and let’s face it: they also neutered BRD’s utility because DNC came to town as the new Support DPS—and apparently we can’t have two of those kinds of DPS???? Idek…

It’s very common on these forums for some players to cry about difficulty of this piece of content or playing that job role, etc.; and the issue with this is that, by making everything so easy that you could drool on your keyboard and win isn’t helping anyone. It isn’t teaching players to grow. It isn’t teaching them to become more skilled. It’s teaching them that, if they cry loud enough, things will get nerfed and they won’t have to actually try. Positive reinforcement of negative behavior.

In another thread I was in yesterday, I actually saw a response regarding EW trials that echos that: complaining that they were too hard, and someone chimed in that “Hey, eventually Royal Menagerie was nerfed so…” (it wasn’t nerfed, by the way; just outgeared since it had no item level sync during SB). The response? Basically, “Well, maybe if we keep crying loud enough, [Endwalker trial] will get nerfed, too.” I see this happen in healer discussions A LOT: “X content is too hard to heal, please nerf it”. And it’s bad. It’s wrong. Nerfing the content will not do anything positive for encounter designs or for player skill.


Re: increasing unavoidable damage—

I have to disagree that this has any bearing on any other role outside of healing in most content. As they won’t design unavoidable damage in most content (I’m not talking EX+ or Savage/Ultimate here) with stacking raidwide mitigations (e.g., Samba/Troubadour/Tactician, Magicked Barrier, Dark Missonary/Heart of Light/Shake it Off/Divine Veil) in mind, it will still fall back on only healer design and healer engagement. The reason why I want them to give us more unavoidable things to heal is because, well, we’re supposed to actually be doing that anyways. But, right now, I can go into level 90 endgame content (not much right now, I know), and heal ONLY with my oGCDs on SGE. At most, maybe I throw in a Zoe+Pneuma in there if I’m feeling particularly feisty—but otherwise, I’m using Addersgall. I’m not touching Eukrasia Prognosis or even Eukrasia Diagnosis outside of downtime (and that’s only because I want to proc Toxikon that I’m touching E.Diagnosis), and this is a problem. Obviously, other healers have to GCD heal if they don’t have the oGCD arsenal (e.g., WHM and to a lesser extent AST), but the base premise still stands: they aren’t doing that much of it.

The developers have LOVED giving us all these pretty healer tools. So now, give me stuff where I can actually make use of them without them being complete overkill. I’m not a SCH main—I’m the weakest at SCH out of the four healers, to be honest—but my main complaint about Seraph (outside of ability ghosting and her summoning delay) was that she isn’t even needed for most content (excluding high-end content here). She’s complete overkill that I pop because I’m, well, bored, and want to mitigate the crap out of a mechanic and laugh when we take zero damage. Not because it felt satisfying, but because I’m making fun of it. Occasionally you get that bad 24-man where using her isn’t an overkill because people have 2 to 3 vuln stacks each and your co-healer has died to X mechanic 5 times, is OOM, and you’re basically solo healing—but that is an extreme example. And why should I be searching for shite to hit the fan so that I’m feeling engaged on my role? Why can’t I feel engaged without shite hitting the fan?

So healers turn to asking for more complex rotations. If incoming damage isn’t going to be increased, then they want to feel engaged in doing what they’re doing 70-90% of the content anyways: DPSing. Now, personally, I’m not asking for even a full-blown 1-2-3 = oGCDs rotation a la a DPS job. I would be happy with just things to upkeep: more DoTs, a debuff, or a buff. One of the main reasons I play AST is because the cards at least give me something to do amongst the mindless 1-1-1-1-1 spam of Malefic—but that’s just AST. The other three…don’t really have that. I miss having 2 or more DoTs to manage on a boss (RIP Aero III, you will be forever missed). I miss having other things to manage. I’d be happy just getting some of that back if they aren’t going to up healing requirements because at least now I’m doing something more than 1-1-1-1-1 ad nauseam.

If they ever were to add in more DPS options, then it falls to other healers to learn these just as it would fall to any other role to learn theirs while also learning an encounter. In my opinion, there isn’t a difference between asking a healer to learn how to manage their DPS alongside managing their healing and responding to mechanics versus asking a DPS to learn their rotation while also responding to mechanics and being aware to use any sort of raidwide mitigation tools they may have when it is necessary.

I don’t understand why the healing role seems to be the only one that gets a free pass at things. And a great many things at that. No one tells a DPS “it’s okay to not learn how to use your mitigations or properly learn your rotation” or a tank “it’s okay to not learn how to time your invulns or other CDs”. No other roles is pardoned for only using 50% of their kit (or less). Why are healers so special? Why should those who don’t want to heal or learn to improve or who only want to cry about nerfing this or that so special? Why do they get a pass from so many?
Not that nowadays other things that shouldn’t get a free pass don’t get one…I’ve actually seen posts on Reddit where players have told DPS “it’s okay” not to AOE trash packs and tanks “it’s okay” to not use cooldowns (???) because this is a video game and blah blah blah…

I don’t think that a skill gap is a bad thing. If anything, the existence of said gap between a skill floor and a skill ceiling is healthy because you can have a middle ground of various ranges of acceptable play; and the upper levels are purely for those who want that additional something I mentioned earlier: that optimization and min-maxing they can squeeze out of their job for even more satisfaction if that is what they so desire. If there’s no disparity and everyone is forced to being on “the same level”, that’s boring design. And it’s unrewarding. And it leads to a lot of passioned players leaving said role/job due to disenchantment.


I feel like I’m just rambling/somewhat venting, and this post is very long—so I’ll wrap it up with a few last-minute things:

Statements like "they don't know what they are doing", "they don't get how healers are played".. it takes a level of ego to say that to devs who have proven to care about their game & playerbase.

I feel like part of this has some merit. It’s known that no one on the development team actually mains healers—they “main” either tanks or a DPS job. Not having someone with deep insight to a role is problematic for design; how are they to address issues if they have no insight on them. It’s also been a frequent complaint that, for their expansion media tours, healer mains—and really good healer mains—are not usually present/invited to the events, so they are unable to give the developers honest feedback about the role. It’s been severely neglected, and the disenchantment surrounding healers only increases as the years go by. I can say that with the utmost certainty after being on this forums since my join date of Feb 2016. I have a lot of criticism for EW’s Media Tour, as some of those invited were prominent Twitch streamers that don’t have a lot of experience in this game. One of them had only been playing for a short period of time, and didn’t even know of the toolkits of the other roles. Now, I’m not saying that you should know EVERY job inside and out—but when you ask “is Inner Release” a new ability, that’s…kind of bad.

Momo Sama is an astounding healer main. Always one of the best to seek advice from, and he has proven himself to be super helpful. I’ve sat in on streams he’s done where he will go through a log or analysis of a player if they link them to him, and give constructive criticism on what was a poor decision, what was a good one, and what they can do to improve their gameplay. He isn’t mean about it. He isn’t toxic. He’s honest and polite. This is phenomenal; and he wasn’t invited to the EW media tour. He wasn’t at the ShB one. And this is a problem. You have a very vocal, very skilled, and very passionate healer main—and you don’t seek out his advice? His feedback?

There’s just also been some really questionable things the development team has done in the past regarding healers and their design. SB Lilies are always a favorite of mine to bring up: the SB media tour already had healer mains saying “No, this is bad; please don’t do this”. And the response? “Just wait and try them out.” After SB released: “No, this is still bad; please change it”. “Wait until Savage”. Savage releases: “THIS IS STILL BAD PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF THE TWELVE CHANGE IT”. While they did ultimately make the Lilies more interesting (after two years of players outright ignoring the core job mechanic), it’s still not great. And with EW, there needs to be some adjustments to the reward for using your lilies now that the 1.5s cast times have removed using them for weave windows. Misery shouldn’t be a DPS loss to use. At least make it a DPS refund of some kind…

Anyways…my point is: the developers may care about the game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they know what they are doing when it comes to designing a specific job or role. They really need to seriously consider how the playerbase plays and handles healers—and I don’t think they should use the lowest common denominator for this. I think they need to look higher.

Ultimately, the role of healer can be easy, and boring, or vary to extreme challenge, and its entirely dependent on the players in your party, not you. Just keep this in mind, as it's some that the dev team clearly has in their minds.

I said this earlier, but I’ll just reiterate: I don’t think it’s good healer design to have engagement be so reliant upon “how bad is my random DF party today”. I do disagree with the assertion that this is what the develop team considers. I don’t think they consider the skill level of the party so much as they consider the skill level of the healer themselves, and cater to that more.

Anyways, my hour has passed, and it’s time to start getting ready to clock in for work. I may pop back in on breaks/my lunch or whenever our work VPN is being trash because not a day goes by that it doesn’t act up to read the rest—but here’s my two gil.

Apologies against for this massive wall of text. You don’t have to read it all—but it is most appreciated if people do. Also sorry again if it’s a bit rambly.

[Silver-Strider]

This difference in complexity (skill floor & ceiling) already exist in other job roles. For tanks, melee & range dps.

Is balancing easy? Probably not if the goal is different & engaging gameplay, rather than further homogenization. But devs can do a decent job at balancing other jobs, if 1 healer were to be more for high skill floor/ceiling type of players, they could balance it.

That's a lovely thought but considering that they haven't gotten healer balance right since HW, despite how homogenized Healers have become, I doubt they could balance a complex healer vs the simple ones.

[Deceptus]

So therefore, some have been vocal about the healer's DPS kit, they want a more complex rotation, not just glare/broil/malefic spam.

But beware when you ask for this. It will create another skill-gap for healers, that interact negatively with how well the other 3-7 players on the party plays. Because if the other players are lacking, and demand more healing to stay alive, it will cause many players to fail their new complex dps rotation.

Many healers just want something to do during the downtime other than 12222222222222. We literally have the same basic dps rotation from lvl 4 to lvl 90 and that's simply unacceptable.

5. Add % damage based on current health to unavoidable damage. Let's say for example that a boss has a raidwide that has a potency of 500 for the sake of this example. Instead, we could lower that to 200 but have it also deal 30% of each target's current HP as damage, not to be confused with max HP. This means raidwides can still KO players at low health, but it counters the issue of gear scaling while also softening the blow to something more survivable at mid health ranges. You could even make some exclusively based on current HP if you want specific raidwides to not be capable of KOing the party. We already have fights that reduce the party's HP to 1 at times. Pair that with max HP doom, and you can make healing more demanding without necessarily punishing them.

Percentage based attacks are a dangerous thing as they make unsynced content unsoloable later. The original Coils had them in 2.0 and are the reason some of them still can't be completed solo to this day.

I’m not a SCH main—I’m the weakest at SCH out of the four healers, to be honest—but my main complaint about Seraph (outside of ability ghosting and her summoning delay) was that she isn’t even needed for most content (excluding high-end content here). She’s complete overkill that I pop because I’m, well, bored, and want to mitigate the crap out of a mechanic and laugh when we take zero damage. Not because it felt satisfying, but because I’m making fun of it. Occasionally you get that bad 24-man where using her isn’t an overkill because people have 2 to 3 vuln stacks each and your co-healer has died to X mechanic 5 times, is OOM, and you’re basically solo healing—but that is an extreme example. And why should I be searching for shite to hit the fan so that I’m feeling engaged on my role? Why can’t I feel engaged without shite hitting the fan?

I'm pretty casual and I feel the same way about Seraph. For the most part, it's never needed.

Fey Union is in the exact same boat. Which makes the Fairy Gauge essentially useless as well.

And with EW, there needs to be some adjustments to the reward for using your lilies now that the 1.5s cast times have removed using them for weave windows. Misery shouldn’t be a DPS loss to use. At least make it a DPS refund of some kind…

Toxikon / Toxikon II is literally in the same boat as WHM Misery. It's a DPS loss to use it. Sure you can weave it and it's free, but it's less dps than Dosis on a Single target and with enough targets is worse than Dyskrasia.

It's all about opportunity cost.

[Liam_Harper]

We're treated as babysitters and a necessity, not a role that we're meant to have fun with. Dps are all about engagement and fun, healers are there to correct mistakes. The devs are so afraid of making that job of handling mistakes "stressful" but if healing was actually designed to be fun, why should it be stress? The more we get to engage with the role we chose to play, the more fun it would be. We wanted to be healers.

The mindset is so backwards to me. It would be like changing auto attacks to be 80% of a dps classes output so they don't have to "stress too much" over their job of killing the boss. They'd obviously hate it. They want their job. Dps would end up attracting players who don't actually like playing dps, similar to how healers have attracted many players who enjoy a free easy-mode in content.

Likewise, we want to play our job. We want raidwides, bleeds, boss autos and such to put our heal toolkit to the test. We want engaging damage to make downtime interesting. We don't want the developers to constantly try to design encounters so that we're asked to do our job as little as possible.

[Connor]

Isn’t the argument that ‘healers can’t have healing because pressure’ mostly redundant now?

Healers aren’t the only job that can heal anymore….or Raise, or Esuna, or…well, anything unique really. Dancer, Reaper, Summoner, Red Mage, Paladin, Warrior and Gunbreaker all have powerful healing for single target and aoe. Red Mages and Summoners can Raise. Bards can Esuna (which is honestly more of a joke than anything at this point but that’s another story lol). Machinist, Bard and Dancer can all do damage reduction, Bards and Monks can buff healing.

So saying ‘it’s not fair to add healing requirements because healer has to do everything’ just doesn’t make any sense anymore? I don’t understand how the devs can still cling to this argument when the healer very clearly isn’t solely responsible for healing requirements anymore

[EaMett]

Here's the thing. It isn't elitism, it isn't about majority or minority of players. It's about experience and poor design. If you have a lot of experience healing, even the worst pug group in existence is a very simple exercise. Healers have an upper cap to what they can accomplish, that's their mana pool. And that cap is relatively low. If the group is bad, you heal within that limit (aka, you focus where you spend your mana). This means that you don't rez prime offenders until you have the mana to carry the healing and get them up. Sometimes you might opt not to heal people because you have a higher priority, like using your mana to raise another rez class in case you bite the dust, If they end up dying to avoidable damage they can just sit there and reflect on what went wrong while they wait for a rez, etc.. etc..

If you've been a healer main for long enough you're going to be at that cap and then nothing will phase you. Reaching cap will happen faster than you think AND this being an MMO your average player will play long enough to get there. The problem with the design is that it doesn't account for those players (which is bound to be anyone and everyone who cares to main the role and get better at it). That isn't good design and the healer mains have been pointing it out.
Sadly, many many MANY good suggestions have been made in these very forums over the past 3 years to address the skill ceiling while maintaining the other aspects of their design, but not only have we yet to see any of these implemented, the devs have made changes to the classes that go in the opposite direction (reducing skill ceilings further), and sometimes don't even make sense (Misery scaling anyone?).

We aren't making a blanket complaint about healers. It isn't, it's a complaint about how healers play at upper tiers of skill. If you're a beginner, haven't been playing healer long, or don't main the role, then healers will be just fine. I think SMN is a lot of fun because I barely play it and it's dead simple. I wouldn't, in a thousand years, dare lecture SMN mains on how good the class is in their own forums. We're expecting totally different things out of the job, and they're the ones who carry it through content.
The reality is that the game is in dire need of healer mains and it isn't catering to those players at all. IIRC the other day I checked and 40% of statics I looked at were in need of a healer and honestly, I get it. I'm still taking SGE for a spin but if I could drop the role and stay with my static I would have, because I'm bored.

[Saimeren]

I've never understood the whole "I only use OGCD's to heal" or "I only toss out a single heal every so often" argument.

Every time I heal I have to actually heal. Some times it's rough and I have to spam everything I have just to keep the tank alive. Then he makes another pull and I have no CD's or OGCD's to use.

Tanks in this game are incredibly squishy. Their mitigation abilities barely seem to matter.

And that's before the Ninja decided to keep dpsing instead of moving away from the boss. Now I have to heal him too, because he refused to play the mechanics.

Healing isn't always the cakewalk that people seem to imply it is. Some times if players are decent and I get a good dungeon/ trial it can go really well, but that's only about 70% of the time.

I always get nervous when people ask for healing nerfs or tank mitigation/healing nerfs.

I might not be the best player, but I'm by no means a bad player, and I definitely need to heal more than "an OGCD every now and again."

[HyoMinPark]

I've never understood the whole "I only use OGCD's to heal" or "I only toss out a single heal every so often" argument.

Every time I heal I have to actually heal. Some times it's rough and I have to spam everything I have just to keep the tank alive. Then he makes another pull and I have no CD's or OGCD's to use.

Tanks in this game are incredibly squishy. Their mitigation abilities barely seem to matter.

And that's before the Ninja decided to keep dpsing instead of moving away from the boss. Now I have to heal him too, because he refused to play the mechanics.

Healing isn't always the cakewalk that people seem to imply it is. Some times if players are decent and I get a good dungeon/ trial it can go really well, but that's only about 70% of the time.

I always get nervous when people ask for healing nerfs or tank mitigation/healing nerfs.

I might not be the best player, but I'm by no means a bad player, and I definitely need to heal more than "an OGCD every now and again."

I think the difference between you and someone like myself that uses primarily oGCDs for healing is that you seem like the type of healer that thinks everyone needs to be 100% HP, 100% of the time; and I am the healer that only heals when it is absolutely necessary and I only heal as much as I need to to ensure people live. I’m not fond of overhealing for the sake of overhealing, and I actually try to let my HoTs do what they’re meant to do as opposed to blatantly negating them with needless GCD heal spamming or using way too many resources on just one mechanic. If you’re overhealing, then you aren’t healing. You’re just wasting your mana and your resources on nothing.

The only time people need to be topped up is before damage goes out. And they may not even need to be full health. Depending on gear and other mitigations present, you can have them less than full HP and still live just fine. It all depends on the type of content you’re in (dungeons versus something like Savage or Ultimate) and present mitigation (e.g., none or you have things up like Heart of Light/Dark Missionary/etc., Samba/Troubadour/Tactician, or Feint/Addle). Damage is scripted in this game, especially raidwides; and instances of back-to-back ones are uncommon in normal content versus higher-end content. Those that are usually have at least 10 to 15 seconds between, which is enough time for things like regens or passive healings like Earthly Star to top up party members before the next raidwide. I see a lot of healers that don’t allow these types of tools to do their job, resulting in massive overheals and wasted toolkits. I don’t know if they’re panicking or if they just think the other healer isn’t going to heal. It’s hard to say.

You seem very much like a safety healer—which is fine, but that doesn’t change the fact that healing requirements in this game are very low and have been for a long time now.

Tanks in this game are not squishy. If you think that, that tells me that you have tanks that likely don’t understand how to properly mitigate or utilize their self-healing tools—at that point, you have a bad tank. Not that the role itself if squishy. Tanks are extremely powerful in this game because they 1. Have so many mitigations readily available, and it takes very little planning for a good tank to know when to use them, and 2. The incoming damage they take is generally very low with few exceptions for a handful of dungeon pulls. Some have better mitigations or immunities than others (looking at you Dark Mind and Living Dead), but that doesn’t change the fact that tanks aren’t squishy. I have to wonder to myself if you’ve ever gotten a WAR in any sort of content recently because they virtually cannot die.

DPS do have the ability to safely eat mechanics and it be okay. If they utilize their own self-healing, this is less of an issue. Even so, you’re being disingenuous implying that this is some huge factor in forcing healers to GCD heal. Healers like SCH and SGE have so many oGCD tools at their disposal, they rarely have to resort to Physick/Diagnosis or GCD shielding even when DPS are eating stuff. If you have an extreme case, then it’s honestly a better use of your resources to just Raise them after they die with their 5 vulnerability stacks versus trying to keep them alive with them. Death usually purges the vulns, so less you’ll be spending on keeping them up in the long run.

If you get a decent dungeon 70% of the time, then that’s 70% of you runs being a “cakewalk”, as you say. Still the majority of the time you are smooth-sailing and not being incredibly challenged in terms of your role as a healer. That said, what I said in my wall-o-text still applies: why does this role so heavily depend on how big of a meme their party members are to actually feel engaging to play? That is a huge problem with the way healers are in this game, and has been for several years. I shouldn’t have to hope for a party of clowns just so I can perform my role.