Healer Q&A in PLL LXVIII

[IllyaPrisma]

So instead of teaching the lower performing healers how to play the game

And what exactly would you have Square do to assist/teach those low performing healers? Cooldown usage, openers and optimal rotations are all crafted by the player base. There is nothing readily available in-game on "How To" play any Job. That information needs to be researched externally for any player genuinely interested in improving their performance. That boils down to the player's interest level. Square's general assumption about adding more damaging abilities to Healers is: "If you have them, you'll be expected to use them". They absolutely do not want players being pressured or told what to do, but they also haven't created any in-game resources for the player to improve on their own. Combine this with predictable damage output, extended downtime between damage, homogenization and you get the mess of a Healer Role we currently have.

[Silver-Strider]

And what exactly would you have Square do to assist/teach those low performing healers

They could start by not backloading your primary healing toolkit. As much as everyone harps on about how great WHM is for beginners, the entire leveling experience boils down to having to unlearn everything you were doing as you reach certain milestones.

You want to limit how often you need GCD heals at endgame. WHM doesn't get a single oGCD heal until 50 and that's on a 3 minute CD.

You need to manage your MP. You have no MP management tools other than Lucid until you unlock Solace at 52. This leads people to fall into the Freecure trap as that is literally the only way to actually manage your MP at low levels, at least until you unlock Regen.

You don't get DPS tools because SE doesn't want healers to feel pressured to do so. Holy has a Stun that actively encourages you to DPS because it's the strongest Mitigation tool WHM has.

I have constantly suggested that they repurpose Fluid Aura, Stoneskin, Divine Seal and Protect as low level versions of Assize, Divine Benison, Temperance and Aqua Veil, while also lowering Afflatus Rapture/Solace to be unlocked at level 30 so that you could actually get a more realistic feel for the job in ARR content.

Do similar reworks for all healers and you at least have something to start with

[Deceptus]

And what exactly would you have Square do to assist/teach those low performing healers . . .There is nothing readily available in-game on "How To" play any Job.

Sure there is. From the Hall of the Novice:



It should be mandatory for any new player or boosted player.

It should also be expanded to have Hall of the Intermediate, and Hall of the Expert that can go in to the finer points, various aoe markers etc.

[Renathras]

And stop with the "there not being enough to heal", you've played this game long enough to know this is a heavily scripted system, you know it won't change much of how you play in the end. What healers need is more damage options and everyone needs to stick and focus on that.

Many healers don't want to be damage dealers. I know this is an "unpopular opinion" (it isn't in the community as a whole, it just is on forums and among high end raiders), but if I wanted to deal damage and have the ability to throw out heals from time to time, I could main PLD, WAR, or RDM, or arguably SMN (Phoenix, not lolPhysic)

I hate DoTs, upkeep buffs, DPS "press on CD" buffs/buttons, and complex rotations that I adhere to like a metronome. When I'm a healer, I want engaging HEALING. I don't mind if my DPS "rotation" is 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,1,1,1,1,... as what I find enjoyable is picking and employing the most efficient heals to do the job, and I just filler DPS when I have no healing to do.

And note, I CAN run complex rotations - I played old SMN pretty well and my tank of choice right now is GNB - I just don't find that overly enjoyable, especially not while healing. I find GNB enjoyable WHILE TANKING. I just get no personal satisfaction from "big damage". Zero. None. Not everyone in life is about big damage, and it boggles my mind how so MANY very OPINIONATED people seem not to get this.

The problem is healing, not damage. I wouldn't even mind if we had a spectrum from easy healer to complex healer (e.g. SB era WHM vs SCH), but the problem is the ones with the more complex rotation wanted to do more damage, so ALL the dps kits were nerfed. Congratulations... >_< Even WHM was a bit more interesting back then having Aero 1, 2, AND 3 to upkeep between Stone 4 spam. Again, I hate DoTs with a passion (and it aggitates me TO NO END that EVERY healer's kit is "1 DoT + 1 Spamnuke + 1 Special"), but that was largely okay with me as an example of allowing some healers complexity while keeping others simple.

[Semirhage]

I hate DoTs, upkeep buffs, DPS "press on CD" buffs/buttons, and complex rotations that I adhere to like a metronome.

Sounds like you want to watch a movie. I have recommendations if you'd like.

[Renathras]

I completely understand this take. I also think that the healer role is so, so badly designed that it's evolved beyond the ability to succinctly describe all of the wretched things about it. You could probably get across the rancidness of the design in a brief five page essay. But it's not one, or two, or even five summarizable problems you could bullet point out. I think that's also one of the big problems with discussing healer role issues here on this forum. There is no one-patch-solves-all fix.

This is probably accurate. And even if we could outline the problems, could we agree on them?

For example, we all can see that healer KITS vs encounter DESIGN don't mesh. But what's the issue? We'd have to identify that to lead to the solution.

To me, the issue is that encounters have VERY STRICTLY SCRIPTED spikes of big damage, and healers (excepting maybe WHM) have VERY POWERFUL oGCD heals. This leads to a situation where healers are DPSing most of the time, and when damage goes out, they faceroll across high potency oGCDs, heal all the damage (or have ticking HoTs to heal before the next damage spike), then go back to DPSing to maximize their parses. This is how the high end gameplay works, and more modern dungeons (old dungeons deviate from this quite a bit, especially before SB, and lower levels, a lot of Jobs don't have those powerful heals yet)

But what's the solution here?

The high end raiding community thinks the solution is "give healers a dps rotation on par with tanks and damage on par with Ranged". Well, that's _A_ solution.

Another solution would be to nerf oGCDs. Why are your "cheap" heals (oGCDs) more powerful than your "expensive" heals (GCDs)? Shouldn't oGCDs be used for patching up the party and smoothing damage spikes and GCDs be what you use to actually deal with high damage? If you look at it from a risk/reward perspective, "expensive" (in MP and time) heals should be more powerful, not less or approximately equal. And we have so many (again, excepting WHM) that healers can generally cover an entire Extreme or Savage fight with oGCDs if they have a proper "healing plan". Why is this even a thing? Healing without using a single MP on healing or a single GCD on healing? Does that seem like healthy game design? That just makes your healers all DPSers that weave an occasional healing oGCD between their damage rotation - which leads to the demands of giving them a more engaging DPS rotation since they're...basically DPSers at that point.

So even if we CAN identify a general problem, do we even agree on the solution?

So how can we ask the Devs to do so when even we cannot?

[Renathras]

Sounds like you want to watch a movie. I have recommendations if you'd like.

...and you talk about Yoshi P being dismissive to people...

Pot, meet kettle. <_<

No, I want to play a game. But I don't want to play a game as a damage dealer. You know this, so cut the snark a bit, eh? I'm treating this discussion and people in it in good faith, perhaps you should as well.

[Renathras]

Really, just stop.

Even if you were being legitimate and it was some sort of confidence issue, you know what your logs are. Saying you want healers to be simple because you're worried your 99's will become 95's is never going to be taken seriously and is an awful reason for class design to be boring. It just comes across badly, whether you're trolling or not.

Wait, so you're saying a person who is a higher parser can't complain about the Jobs being difficult?

So...what about a person with low parses? Would you take such a person's claims more seriously?

[ty_taurus]

Many healers don't want to be damage dealers. I know this is an "unpopular opinion" (it isn't in the community as a whole, it just is on forums and among high end raiders), but if I wanted to deal damage and have the ability to throw out heals from time to time, I could main PLD, WAR, or RDM, or arguably SMN (Phoenix, not lolPhysic)

But that is fundamentally NOT how healers play in this game. You would quite literally need to foundationally overhaul encounter design for every fight in the game to kill healer DPS contributions. It's like sitting down to play Mario Kart and then complaining that the game's too silly and that the items are unfair. Well, that's what happens when you choose to play Mario Kart instead of playing Gran Turismo. You're playing the wrong game, and it's selfish and entitled to barge into a game and demand it plays antithetical to its design because you don't like one aspect of it. If you want to play a healer that only heals, go play a game that supports that playstyle, which the only MMO I can think of that actually does this is Everquest.

[Grimoire-M]

But that is fundamentally NOT how healers play in this game. You would quite literally need to foundationally overhaul encounter design for every fight in the game to kill healer DPS contributions. It's like sitting down to play Mario Kart and then complaining that the game's too silly and that the items are unfair. Well, that's what happens when you choose to play Mario Kart instead of playing Gran Turismo. You're playing the wrong game, and it's selfish and entitled to barge into a game and demand it plays antithetical to its design because you don't like one aspect of it. If you want to play a healer that only heals, go play a game that supports that playstyle, which the only MMO I can think of that actually does this is Everquest.

And even then you have so many better support classes to choose from in that MMO that don’t deal direct damage OR heal at all. Resource attrition, AI manipulation, and Crowd Control are the hallmarks of that era. And it was far slower and more methodical than current MMO combat. Mostly due to hardware, but the design choices that ultimately formed the genre evolved out of MUDs and D&D.