Healers - Before we complain we should learn the game.

[_forgotten]

The heal check at the end of P4S was really nice.

[LuciaMirain]

The heal check at the end of P4S was really nice.

And it will be basically gone as the group gears up and clears faster.

[SpiralMask]

I must again rise from my grave to post my 2gil: healing is intensely, soulcrushingly boring. especially so if you're an experienced healer (know fights well to mitigate/ogcd everything) and/or in an experienced group (not taking much incidental damage). that's your 'reward' for nearing the skill cieling: pressing a single button over and over (and over).

previously, AST and SCH had a [thing to do] when healing wasn't needed; those being that AST had cards/RR/duration and effect modifiers that actually wanted real moment-to-moment decisionmaking to fill their downtime, and SCH had a suite of DoTs to keep spinning when healing wasnt required (facilitated by design via their powerful OGCD healing kit and shield spells). WHM didnt have anyhting requiring brainspace because SE wouldn't let i be anything other than the "newbie-friendly/simple healer", which was a problem raised again and again since 2.0 (and most especially when AST was introduced in HW).
SE's solution to WHM lacking a downtime activity? removing AST and SCH's (i cannot stress how badly shafted AST got due to this, losing not only it's card diversity, but basically any interaction with cards whatsoever, and any mention of time-related magics or effects--and then EW saw literally half of their healing options removed from the game, as well as entirely scrapping a large portion of the class' quests and lore because of these changes).
so now AST/SCH have powerful kits to enable downtime and nothing to fill that with anymore. and WHM still has nothing to fill their downtime with.

the new kid on the block in SGE has the same stripe of problem: they have SCH's suite of powerful OGCD options (almost point-for-point) and technically have six whole dps skills to spend their downtime on! that are numerically identical and all fight for the GCD, making them effectively 6 of the same button anyway--even their shiny capstone laserbeam is the same wimpy slap. (and has the oddest MP issues, that i am occaisionally hoping that my teammates get clipped so i can get a bit of MP back while lucid is on CD...)

rather than seeing things removed, i'd like for healers to have [something to do] for their downtime to spice up the current glare-wasteland, even if not dps options--give AST more meaningful card or effect/duration interactions again, give SCH some meaningful resource management (since the devs have made it very clear that SCH is not allowed to have DPS options, to the point that even energy drain as a stack-dump is constantly under threat) via the currently-vestigial faerie guage, perhaps bringing back some of selene's skills as gauge spenders or somesuch (perhaps passing around enemy debuffs to mirror AST's party buffing niche? would fit with the class lore of weakening enemies and shielding allies over actual healing), give WHM some elemental-themed stuff to throw onto the field since their conjury roots have been all but dug up at this point, SGE could use some actual diversity in it's DPS kit if it's supposed to be the dev-allowed "DPS healer" (perhaps making toxicon or phlegma an OGCD--i'd say not both, but one or the other would be welcome personally).

something, anything to fill the void of ones.

[Saefinn]

Gotcha!! I think people have been here championing the idea of a higher skill ceiling on healers for so long that they're just trying every approach in the book. From leveraging tank self-healing to offering up a variety of rework ideas. ED isn't in the best of states right now either and probably needs some kind of adjustment tbh.

Pretty much. Anything that is a symptom of a problem I think people will jump on and throw it out there. But people have always managed to do some crazy seeming feat.

But I think it still at least highlights a few things that are consistent with the game's design. When people are skilled or/and know what they are doing the healing requirement is low. And I think it is a problem people would accept if they simple had more to do when they're not healing. However, it's a solution to the problems the devs have said they won't do.

It's why I've managed to enjoy SGE because it has a learning curve and I've managed to sit at that point where I don't think I am playing the job as well as I could, but I am now really reluctant to get better at SGE because I know there will become a point (as others have shown) where you have a bigger downtime and I stop enjoying the job.

And I've generally been an advocate for the idea of "low skill floor, high skill ceiling" but the more resistant they are to the solutions that offer that, the more I feel like I should advocate making the healing more engaging in all content for the higher end of the skill spectrum.

I am a semi-casual, so I'm generally trying to find enjoyment out of my roulettes, normal raids, alliance raids, maps, solo content and in stuff like Bozja and Eureka. EX & Savage is a "once in a while" affair for me.

And then it is disheartening to hear of people finding after prog that EX & Savage is still an issue. I've only done prog on the 2 EX's so far, but no farming parties or anything like that.

But then it is because it is the game's design. Ultimately it is design to favour healer DPS but now they refuse to give us the tools to make that engaging after taking away the basic kit we did have.

[GrimGale]

Healer skill floor is keeping people alive in any content.

Healer skill ceiling is healing as little as possible while dpsing as much as possible.

You go from spamming heals, overhealing and wasting resources, to essentially the opposite, where you try to minimize healing and maximize DPS.

These two are not condusive to each other.

[IttyBitty]

A role being really strong in non-endgame content is not a good reason to "Remove X capability."

P1N is, quite literally, endgame content. It may not be savage, but uh, most things at endgame aren't? It's as endgame as it's going to get for a vast majority of players.

Any given job or role should never be able to solo current endgame content that is meant to be faced with a full party. Hell, they probably shouldn't be able to in light party content either. The fact that any are speaks of a critical failure somewhere in both role/job design and encounter design on a wider scale.

If the only counter to "Playing a healer feels really bad right now" is "but week 1 prog exists if you want to enjoy yourself" then they may as well just remove healers entirely because that's a pretty awful enjoyment to boredom ratio for anybody with even a decent grasp of the role, and it only gets worse the better you get.

[Rilifane]

I’d prefer more soft enrage-esque heal checks where boss AOEs steadily deal more damage and you need to consider mitigation on top of allocating your oGCD resources properly. Not mind-numbing Cure II/etc. or AOE heal spam in a sub-10 second window.

E4s last phase, E8s WL2 and E11s Cycles are the types of heal checks I enjoyed. I think they were designed fairly well because:
- they hurt (they could do with hurting a bit more, though)
- damage came in both single megahits, dots and multiple hits
- intervalls between damage slightly varied
- it included playing mechanics, movement and considering heal range
- for WL2 damage increased throughout the entire mechanic
- for Cycles some randomness

That's what I want to see in a heal check. Terminal was a heal check but easily the most boring one in ShB because while damage increased over time, the damage intervalls were so short you simply spammed your way through and it was fine. And you just stood neatly stacked, healed like mad and that was it. E3s Black Smoker was a sort of heal check made boring because of the party split, killing any interaction between the two light parties and because it was just single hits on each person soaking + tankbuster. E7s waves & colors were just too much "stand still, get healed" because switching colors was doable with a single step, it was too short and didn't hurt enough. The rest of the bosses either didn't even have a proper heal check at all iirc or it was so short, it was simply one quick damage spike and it was over.
Some GCD heals were necessary on the 3 abovementioned (at least without outgearing it) and the entire mechanic stretched out for so long that mindlessly spamming them would've drained every healer. So it was part of the heal check to know exactly when not to heal.

Just standing there and spamming heals isn't a heal check for me, it's trading one 1 button spam for another and is just as boring for me.
A proper heal checks includes playing mechanics, keeping an eye on range, preferably some randomness and increased damage over time like a type of soft enrage.
Unfortunately, the heal check is usually the last mechanic a boss has and is the first that gets skipped. Just skipping 1 of 3 Cycles made the whole mechanic way easier because you had more resources for 1st and 2nd Cycle; if something killed the party, it was usually the 3rd because everyone frontloaded their resources.

Not that it's bad enough that heal checks are the first mechanic to get outgeared, they also get skipped first. Can't stress out the poor healers.
Another problem is that we'll never see them in casual content so for that type of content we still need other ways for healers to feel fun and engaging.

[_forgotten]

P1N is, quite literally, endgame content. It may not be savage, but uh, most things at endgame aren't? It's as endgame as it's going to get for a vast majority of players.

Any given job or role should never be able to solo current endgame content that is meant to be faced with a full party. Hell, they probably shouldn't be able to in light party content either. The fact that any are speaks of a critical failure somewhere in both role/job design and encounter design on a wider scale.

If the only counter to "Playing a healer feels really bad right now" is "but week 1 prog exists if you want to enjoy yourself" then they may as well just remove healers entirely because that's a pretty awful enjoyment to boredom ratio for anybody with even a decent grasp of the role, and it only gets worse the better you get.

Slap an enrage on normals at 30 minutes and problem solved.

In regards to lack of engaging content after week 1, yeah, this is a problem I have w/ the game. Gear dropping is always going to make hard content easier. This is why Ultimates are so much fun. The real sad part is we haven't had an ultimate since patch 5.1. Which, if we did get DSW in 5.5, I bet we would not be this unsatisfied with healers at this time. Unfortunately they cater to the greatest common factor, the casual. So we get the scraps that we get. :/ At least unsubbing is healthy and praised in this community.

[Saefinn]

Slap an enrage on normals at 30 minutes and problem solved.

In regards to lack of engaging content after week 1, yeah, this is a problem I have w/ the game. Gear dropping is always going to make hard content easier. This is why Ultimates are so much fun. The real sad part is we haven't had an ultimate since patch 5.1. Which, if we did get DSW in 5.5, I bet we would not be this unsatisfied with healers at this time. Unfortunately they cater to the greatest common factor, the casual. So we get the scraps that we get. :/ At least unsubbing is healthy and praised in this community.

It's not problem solved.

Unfortunately the solution is the one the devs refuse to do.

I think rebalancing how gear affects stands and how stats are balance may help. But there is a fundamental problem in the design: the better you get as a healer and the better people get at the content you're doing, the less you have to do.

So current healer design seems to be best suited for persistent incoming damage, which in fairness, healers can find themselves in, but it is situational, group dependent and player dependent. But when everything is done right...the game design is DPS biased, and healers are in a very lackluster position to find that engaging.

Though I don't view it as a problem, but simply a by-product of playing a healing role and it is true for any RPG I've played. But what normally happens on those jobs/classes/characters is that I have something else to do instead...and we do have something to do instead, just it can get very dull. Giving healers a secondary function and more to keep them occupied when they're not healing is the best solution and given how FFXIV is designed it is inevitably going to have to be DPS related. AST at least is in the best position for this approach, but they have watered it down since conception, but then AST's positioning here is why I swapped to it in ShB as SCH lost its position here.

[EaMett]

Energy Drain doesn't add any class complexity it's just a dump skill that doesn't force you to overheal or god forbid simply pressing the AF button while still having stacks. It always baffles me to see how many Scholars believe this button that punishes their main oGCD healing toolkit somehow makes the class more complex when in reality is just causes anti synergy. Which Scholar is plagued by.

Shadowflare used to give SCH complexity, you couldn't have it and Sacred Soil active at the same time so you needed to know when to use which. Since you'd be locked out of the other for 15s. This trade-off was especially true once SS got a regen effect. but by then Shadowflare was gone. Now neither SMN nor SCH have it. Miasma & Miasma 2 were removed from SCH persumably due to the debuff limit causing SMN grievances but now SMN doesn't have any DoT. And while it's true that reaching the limit with a party full of Summoners probably was easy, having a DoT orientated healer doesn't even come close since you always only have 2 at most, not 5. Despite this SCH did not receive Bio III or Miasma I, II or III this expansion. Because managing 2 dots is apparently too big brain for healers. Actual complexity is forbidden on healers according to the devs. ED exists because it isn't complex.

Agree but want to add one piece to the puzzle here. ED does indeed only encourage you to do what you normally would when optimizing. So in that sense, it's not adding any complexity, just allowing you to dump the stacks you have left after you optimize. But it does play a significant role in healer pair priorities. Placing SCH's stack oGCD healing at the back of a healer comp's toolkit (right before afflatus, but afflatus needs a rework which they sadly didn't get in 5.08 because... Same old really).
I feel like having SCH healing backloaded like this makes sense from the "tactical healer" perspective. You usually need to upfront your SS even though your priority comes behind that of other healers. The dichotomy there sells the healer's flavor IMO.

With that said, I think SCH really needs a rework. It's weird to say out loud considering it's also really efficient right now.