Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[QooEr]

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.

the only reason they cant get it right is because whm is stuck in a permanent lobotomized state.

sage, sch and astro are all balanced between them.

[Lauront]

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.

Speaking as someone who does not main a healer (outside of picking up one for PVP) and what puts me off about them, this is one of those things. Not only are you capable of putting out massive amounts of healing fairly easily, with a lot of content not even requiring it, but the other part of it, the dps rotation, is essentially 1 dot 1 nuke 1 gcd or some slight variation on that theme. Looking at it from a learning ladder perspective, content outside of the sort you mention (ex, savage etc) is trivially easy to heal through. You barely need to make use of much of your toolkit barring a few instants/OGCDs here and there. If you're not nurturing a base level of competence in your playerbase, this will seep through into harder modes as well over time, particularly if there is a threshold of clearing expected to consider them worthwhile to add as content (I realise Yoshi does not hold ultimate to this requirement.) If/when I decide to do raiding in EW, I think I'll probably stick to a dps.

As a point of story immersion (and this game prides itself on its story), it's gotten to the point where a lot of story fights can't really do a good job of conveying the boss's power - the Endsinger one, for all she was hyped up to be, felt like a total joke, and with some of the prior ones they needed contrivances besides mechanics to help make the boss feel dangerous. I almost want them to just implement trusts for trials and dungeons across the board, so that you can do a DF version as an alternative that isn't so utterly braindead in normal mode.

[Silver-Strider]

the only reason they cant get it right is because whm is stuck in a permanent lobotomized state.

sage, sch and astro are all balanced between them.

I beg to differ. While WHM has always been treated as the redheaded stepchild of Healers, AST has always been the problem child. Noct Sect was always a point of contention as being either too weak to compete with Diurnal or was too strong to invalidate SCH. Balance Fishing was so problematic that they completely scrapped the old card system and turned everything into Balance. Then on the few occasions that AST had problems, such as at the launch of ShB, they got buffed in the subsequent patch to Kingdom Come and remained there for the entirety of the expansion. Fast Forward to EW launch, where WHM is currently the weakest healer due to a combination of the Thin Air Nerf and Lilies becoming outdated and what does the 6.05 patch do for WHM? NOTHING.

Healer balance in this game is an absolute joke.

[Liam_Harper]

I'm fairly convinced the devs balanced healers based on popularity.

In their eyes WHM is great because people play it. Therefore they assume it must be fun. In reality, it's just that it's slightly more fun than juggling their poorly designed card or pet system, but still in an awful state.

AST and SCH are always less popular, but they have no clue how to design healers so they just receive endless reworks that make them worse or useless tweaks.

Now AST is more button bloated than ever and SCH's pet is still just oGCD's but clunkier that you snack on periodically, so we'll probably see even more full reworks for AST and nonsense SCH tweaks in upcoming patches while WHM remains completely ignored, before being nerfed again in 7.0 because it was the most popular healer all expansion so is clearly "too good".

[HyoMinPark]

I'm fairly convinced the devs balanced healers based on popularity.

In their eyes WHM is great because people play it. Therefore they assume it must be fun. In reality, it's just that it's slightly more fun than juggling their poorly designed card or pet system, but still in an awful state.

AST and SCH are always less popular, but they have no clue how to design healers so they just receive endless reworks that make them worse or useless tweaks.

Now AST is more button bloated than ever and SCH's pet is still just oGCD's but clunkier that you snack on periodically, so we'll probably see even more full reworks for AST and nonsense SCH tweaks in upcoming patches while WHM remains completely ignored, before being nerfed again in 7.0 because it was the most popular healer all expansion so is clearly "too good".

With regards to WHM, I’m not sure if the developers just ignore it because “well it’s WHM and people will play it anyways because Final Fantasy Staple/it’s Baby’s First Healer” or if they are just that caught up in their design philosophy of keeping it as the “pure, burst healer” that they won’t allow it to be anything else. It never fails every expansion to see it fall behind AST in terms of performance—even if it surpasses AST in popularity. But, then again, the dev team doesn’t have a designated “healer main” on it; and they also seem to neglect inviting actual healer mains to important events like expansion media tours to test out builds and provide feedback. I’m not really surprised anymore that WHM remains the same as ever—but I can’t tell how much of that is just me being jaded in general.

[RinaShinomiya]

or if they are just that caught up in their design philosophy of keeping it as the “pure, burst healer” that they won’t allow it to be anything else

i'd say its 100% their design philosophy getting in the way. A few years ago when asked why none of the complaints about Living Dead are being addressed YoshiP basically just said that it wouldn't with the job fantasy if the ability was any other way. Which is a different can of worms considering what they did to SCH and AST in 5.0 but whatever.

They definitely should've at least invited Momo to Mediatour though and I'm baffled he wasn't invited AGAIN.

[Liam_Harper]

Definitely their design philosophy too, but even then it wouldn't be impossible to design a Pure/Burst healer that worked, or a Living Dead that was less terrible. We have plenty of pure dps after all. There are lots of improvements WHM could get even if they were stubborn about no mitigation, raid shields or raid buffs.

I feel convinced the devs are like the forum Sylphies and look at things from the perspective of a GCD spamming overhealer. The fact Cure III is still a pitiful 6 yards, got the smallest potency increase with the new trait and Thin Air got nerfed makes me feel the devs legitimately thought "Old Thin Air + Plenary + Cure III = Healing God". I also feel they view Thin Air strictly as a cooldown for Raise and big GCD heals and are convinced we'll be using those frequently enough to justify it.

Things like no Assize charges, not even bumping Misery to 940 to show they notice it, Medica II having more potency on single target than Cure II, Holy causing clipping and so on make it seem like it's not just design philosophy, but more that they aren't even looking at WHM. All the focus went on Sage and misguidedly trying to fix AST's low player participation rate with buffs after wrecking its gameplay yet again.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

Speaking as someone who does not main a healer (outside of picking up one for PVP) and what puts me off about them, this is one of those things. Not only are you capable of putting out massive amounts of healing fairly easily, with a lot of content not even requiring it, but the other part of it, the dps rotation, is essentially 1 dot 1 nuke 1 gcd or some slight variation on that theme. Looking at it from a learning ladder perspective, content outside of the sort you mention (ex, savage etc) is trivially easy to heal through. You barely need to make use of much of your toolkit barring a few instants/OGCDs here and there. If you're not nurturing a base level of competence in your playerbase, this will seep through into harder modes as well over time, particularly if there is a threshold of clearing expected to consider them worthwhile to add as content (I realise Yoshi does not hold ultimate to this requirement.) If/when I decide to do raiding in EW, I think I'll probably stick to a dps.

As a point of story immersion (and this game prides itself on its story), it's gotten to the point where a lot of story fights can't really do a good job of conveying the boss's power - the Endsinger one, for all she was hyped up to be, felt like a total joke, and with some of the prior ones they needed contrivances besides mechanics to help make the boss feel dangerous. I almost want them to just implement trusts for trials and dungeons across the board, so that you can do a DF version as an alternative that isn't so utterly braindead in normal mode.

Speak for yourself, that boss my trial wiped on multiple times before we cleared it. It was EXTREMELY hard for a boss fight, that and zodiark.

[Ironthorne]

Speak for yourself, that boss my trial wiped on multiple times before we cleared it. It was EXTREMELY hard for a boss fight, that and zodiark.

Normal trials hard? No, your parties were just terrible.

[Shurrikhan]

1. Replace Vulnerability Stacks with Damage Dealt Down. When players make mistakes, their most common "punishment" is that they take more damage for a minute, sometimes longer. This actually causes more work for the healers and not the DPS or Tanks who make those mistakes. If we switched Vulnerability to Damage Down, then suddenly the punishment is largely on just the person who failed the mechanic. If this means the party fails to meet a DPS check, then yes it's a punishment on the party, but it does make mechanics easier to survive which would actually speed up Prog times regardless since your party would get more time to see more mechanics in a fight and start learning them sooner. This inadvertently allows designers to pump more damage into unavoidable attacks because they'd be able to exclude some amount of theoretical damage from overall calculations.

While this does partially take the burden off of the healer (and the one who stood in the AoE, in that they can cheese fewer future attacks for uptime under the Vulnerability design without being outright one-shot), it doesn't place it squarely on the one who stood in the AoE, either; it places it on the whole party, and now in a way that players who repeatedly stand in AoEs by mistake aren't as likely to notice or care about.

It gives the healer less work to do, but it also gives the healer less opportunity to have value by means other than Glare spam alone, decreases the perceived costs of accidentally standing in AoEs for those most likely to do so, and removes one element of advantage in overgearing a given fight.