Healer Q&A in PLL LXVIII

[Lasciare]

I see a lot of complaining about these "no healer clears" or "all tank clears" but people not taking into account that these players are pretty good at what they do, and this isn't something average players are accomplishing. In contrast if you bring up the fact that maybe if people actually optimized on their job, they wouldn't feel like its just 1111, you get regarded as an elitist. If you really think healing is boring and all you do is 1111, you are either 1. standing around with half the CPM you should be doing 2. just bad at the job, or 3. This isn't the role for you.

Yes, the healers have issues. Yes, the current content is severely under-tuned. Was the game more fun with virus, protect, and cleric stance? Not really. If anything, it was a bit more boring because of the lack of oGCDs and the fact that healer DPSing was not common practice. I don't understand the visceral reaction people are having by being told to go play harder content when most have literally not cleared said content. At this point you are bored by your own volition.

[Semirhage]

Here we go again.

I've cleared an Ultimate. On a healer. My last clear had an abysmal personal damage rating. You know what I spent the absolute majority of my time doing? Stone stone stone stone stone. This is for several reasons.
1. Healing requirements are drastically lowered if people are executing mechanics properly. Since most mechanics in Ultimate just kill you if you don't do this, the probability that your party is going to reduce your healing burden is higher, not lower.
2. Downtime is 211111111. This has nothing to do with "low CPM". Are you high or something? Low CPM healers tend to spam their healing spells more, and spend more time overhealing. A SKILLED healer spends more time pressing 1111111. This argument makes no sense.

Is it truly that hard to wrap your heads around the idea that downtime is plentiful in ALL content, and that your downtime activity is literally Dia Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare? It's not even rocket science, the pathetic excuse for a "rotation" exposes itself through a two second skim of the tooltips. Healing. Is. Boring. It's boring in MSQ solo duties. It's boring in the field. It's boring in dungeons. It's boring in trials. It's boring in Savage. It's boring in Ultimate. All this energy directed into forcing oneself to believe that Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is "fun", or "self-inflicted", or a result of "playing wrong" in the face of all the blatant evidence in game and kit design right in your faces, I swear.

[WaxSw]

I see a lot of complaining about these "no healer clears" or "all tank clears" but people not taking into account that these players are pretty good at what they do, and this isn't something average players are accomplishing. In contrast if you bring up the fact that maybe if people actually optimized on their job, they wouldn't feel like its just 1111, you get regarded as an elitist. If you really think healing is boring and all you do is 1111, you are either 1. standing around with half the CPM you should be doing 2. just bad at the job, or 3. This isn't the role for you.

Yes, the healers have issues. Yes, the current content is severely under-tuned. Was the game more fun with virus, protect, and cleric stance? Not really. If anything, it was a bit more boring because of the lack of oGCDs and the fact that healer DPSing was not common practice. I don't understand the visceral reaction people are having by being told to go play harder content when most have literally not cleared said content. At this point you are bored by your own volition.

Precisely when you optimize the job is when they feel more like 1 1 1 1 1 1 spam, besides there is downtime everywhere. I could compare week 1/2 clears with my highest damage clears and the only difference is like a 2-9% difference in the cpm of dosis (in fact, will do), lets not act like pressing the aoe gcd of your job is a game changer when there is barely a difference

P1s: 56,76% dosis (week 1), 65,9% (highest)
P2s: 51,23% dosis (week 1), 59,25% (highest)
P3s: 49,56% dosis (week1), 50,17% (highest) [lets remember for this one that damage to adds is not counted]
p4sp1: 55,46% (week1), 59,15% (highest)
p4sp2: 55,11% (week2), 58,87% (highest)

The more optimized the more 1 1 1 1 happens and even if you don't the majority of what you do is just pressing 1 over and over and over again, this is not a cpm thing, nor a skill issue, its how the job is designed

[Dhalya]

There was a lot more to it than that, I can assure you.

Yes, we used to have more dots to manage, cleric stance and that's what healers want back, just more things to do especially in dps department and i fully agree with that.

Protect is imho a bad example, it was just an automatic thing to press, zero brain activity involved.
Mitigation? So WHM presses glare > temperance, SCH broil > soil, done. Before the scholar would press succor + soil and WHM just pray to god.
Again I think it all comes down to players experience and after years and years of playing and reading about optimization, even ARR fights would be fully mapped out by healers today, just by pressing a few more GCD heals.
As long as the fight has a predictable timeline, then after enough repetitions you just find the correct order of your spells to use and incorporating one esuna or cure II will not change much.

What we need is randomized incoming damage/randomized mechanics to keep healers on their toes.
Second option is fun dps rotation and keep the healing as it is now.

I just don't see how slightly more incoming PREDICTABLE damage changes anything, you just swap glare for medica, or one prey mechanic exactly at 1:25 where you just press one regen followed by one GCD heal.

[rewd]

One of the problems with healers is that this is the only role that is rewarded with boredom the better you get at your job/optimization.

DPS straight up get better because you see bigger numbers and things die faster. Tanks use less mitigation but they can optimize their respectable damage rotation and still have fun. Healers use less healing and keep spamming 11111111.

It's beyond me how someone could state that we only complain about 1111111 because we didn't optimize.

[Liam_Harper]

I agree with...your last sentence.

You very much oversell your Nerf GCDs while making a ridiculous caricature of the Nerf oGCDs case.

Not exactly. WHM is a unique case with lilies, but in general certain GCD heals are just far too good. As I said, AspHelios and AspBenefic are 1000 and 1500 potency. You'd very rarely need much else in any sort of decent group. Sure, you might have to jam out some Cure II's in a messy run, but that doesn't make gameplay exciting when you learn a fight. It's basically the Cure vs Cure II issue. You're told to ignore Cure because Cure II is more potency per GCD. If one heal is superior to the others, it becomes your main option.

It's not as simple as "nerf GCD heals, oGCD's are good" either. There are so many factors wrong with healing that fixing one aspect still leaves lots of other flaws and creates a few new ones. There's still too little incoming damage. Downtime lasts too long sometimes. There's the issue with 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 gameplay. However, I don't feel GCD heals should be stronger than oGCD's, they should be your last resort "ran out of resources" option. So even if you nerf oGCD's, I'd tone down Medica II, AspBenefic and the like until they're slightly worse than oGCD raid heals, so inexperienced players don't just lean on them as a crutch.

Also, how much do you nerf oGCD's? To be honest, things like Normal, EX and even the first 2 Savage bosses are just overheal war with a good co-heal even spamming dps the whole fight. You'd probably have to quarter their potency to get good players to lean heavily on GCD heals. In which case, newer players would 100% ignore them and lean on the big aoe GCD's if there were no other changes. Still doesn't fix 1 spam for downtime either.

Basically, it's a very careful balance with a lot of factors and issues.

[Silver-Strider]

Yes, we used to have more dots to manage, cleric stance and that's what healers want back, just more things to do especially in dps department and i fully agree with that.

Protect is imho a bad example, it was just an automatic thing to press, zero brain activity involved.
Mitigation? So WHM presses glare > temperance, SCH broil > soil, done. Before the scholar would press succor + soil and WHM just pray to god.
Again I think it all comes down to players experience and after years and years of playing and reading about optimization, even ARR fights would be fully mapped out by healers today, just by pressing a few more GCD heals.
As long as the fight has a predictable timeline, then after enough repetitions you just find the correct order of your spells to use and incorporating one esuna or cure II will not change much.

What we need is randomized incoming damage/randomized mechanics to keep healers on their toes.
Second option is fun dps rotation and keep the healing as it is now.

I just don't see how slightly more incoming PREDICTABLE damage changes anything, you just swap glare for medica, or one prey mechanic exactly at 1:25 where you just press one regen followed by one GCD heal.

WHM had Stoneskin for mitigation which was a GCD shield just like Succor.

Random incoming damage doesn't really do anything different than predictable damage because you just swap from Glare to Medica regardless if it's predictable or not.

[Irenia]

Random damage would make the GCD rhythm differ each run though, so that would be a plus, assuming nothing else changes in the kits. I'd imagine a fight with a main boss on a timeline, and random events inserted in to cause complications. You can learn and practice these events, but sometimes a DPS will be chunked before a raidwide and the healers have to deal with that.

That said, this still leaves easier content out to dry, so eh.

[Teno]

I see a lot of complaining about these "no healer clears" or "all tank clears" but people not taking into account that these players are pretty good at what they do, and this isn't something average players are accomplishing. In contrast if you bring up the fact that maybe if people actually optimized on their job, they wouldn't feel like its just 1111, you get regarded as an elitist. If you really think healing is boring and all you do is 1111, you are either 1. standing around with half the CPM you should be doing 2. just bad at the job, or 3. This isn't the role for you.

Yes, the healers have issues. Yes, the current content is severely under-tuned. Was the game more fun with virus, protect, and cleric stance? Not really. If anything, it was a bit more boring because of the lack of oGCDs and the fact that healer DPSing was not common practice. I don't understand the visceral reaction people are having by being told to go play harder content when most have literally not cleared said content. At this point you are bored by your own volition.

Gameplay was more fun with 0 oGCDs and more dps spells yes. If you're not pressing 11111, it means you are in the early phases of progging, and that's basically 1 hour of fun as a healer when you actually need to monitor people's health beyond predictable dmg. Once everyone is doing the strat it's 11111111111111.

[Punslinger]

If you really think healing is boring and all you do is 1111, you are either 1. standing around with half the CPM you should be doing

What do I do during the vast majority of the fight when no healing is necessary? Glareoilaficosis spam. Occasionally weaving an oGCD heal into that spam doesn't magically make the spam go away, or make it any more engaging.

2. just bad at the job,

LOL, that was a funny joke. Oh, wait, you were serious? In that case, let me laugh even harder!

Healing turns into 211111 spam specifically because healers optimize their play, moving their healing off the GCD. It's the people who suck at the role who spam their GCD heals endlessly, overheal like mad, and save their oGCDs for "emergencies" that never happen, because everything is scripted.

Compare the percentage of Glareoilaficosis casts in top-1% logs vs. bottom-1% logs for any Savage raid. Who is spending more time 211111-ing, the bad players or the good players?

or 3. This isn't the role for you.

So...healing is supposed to be the childproof role for the short-bus crowd? YoshiderP seems to think so, anyway.

I don't understand the visceral reaction people are having by being told to go play harder content when most have literally not cleared said content. At this point you are bored by your own volition.

Shorter Lasciare: "It's good game design for an entire role to be boring to play in 95% of the game's content!"

You Sylphies all read from the same script, I swear. And none of you, none of you, are able to answer one simple question: Why is it somehow okay for healers to be boring to play in the MSQ, dungeons, normals, EXs, and Savages, but not okay for tanks or DPS jobs to be boring to play in the MSQ, dungeons, normals, EXs, and Savages?

The double standard is as obvious as it is stupid.