Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[technole]

DSR is more mechanic finesse than a DPS or heal check. If you know how to properly heal all current endgame content, you'll be fine. It's the flurry of 'it's your turn to get this X and Y, now you're Z mechanic' that takes time, and in-between seeing new mechs, you pick up what heal buttons you probably should press and then it's just more focus on doing the mechanic that you hadn't personally gotten in the last 20 pulls.

While there are mitigation checks everywhere, like buttons need to be pressed by all roles to survive things but that's not difficult to flatten out with roles as you progress. Same concept of who is next to interrupt during The Vault door boss which introduces the concept of communicating who does what. Barrier healer has a few more buttons to press at heavier moments later in fight, but that's nothing we haven't already done like E12S diamond dust week 1 things. Where you plan some cooldowns being up, and/or deploy things to survive. There is a lot of downtime, so piety isn't an issue. Some things as a healer you might approach differently depending on party composition and what passive mitigation you have available. But if you made it this far, you know the drill, easily be planned as a group.

While it's Mr. Ozma's first ultimate since he had been taking more of an oversight role when he got promoted to lead battle director. He has a good body of work in the past like A5S, A11S, and E2S. If anything I'll take from it is you can tell he probably raids regularly as he knows the ins-and-outs of what people usually expect and made appropriate changes. Worthy of the hardest fight of the game for sure, just probably not from a healer check perspective.

[Roxus]

Abbreviated.

Let me rephrase some things. I have plenty of experience in Ultimates, this is not my first. I am saying a novice who doesn't know how to heal can pick it up and play fairly well in Ultimate (Of course, they must be well versed in the game). I never had an issue figuring out what was too little. I had issues figuring out what was too much, and even then it was by one gcd, and this never directly caused a wipe. My entire existence as the mitigation healer is spread out in other player's kits, as I alone cannot help the party survive most mechanics in the Ultimate. They gave every job a participation button so they aren't left out due to homogenization and job exclusions, which I get, but it also diminishes your value as the mitigation healer, especially in anything not Ultimate/some Savages. They asked healers to go play Ultimate because that somehow invalidates people's opinions on healers, so this is why I am specifically writing feedback based on the new Ultimate. Every single encounter that has a semblance of difficulty is a dance in this game where your memory is more important than anything else. That's because the battle system is stripped so bare that that's all they can do with it. And I will only speak for the statics I am involved in, but 20 pulls is a generous amount of pulls to have a single person get it. Most times everyone will understand the mechanic, but their execution will be flawed within the first few attempts. This is especially true in DSR because quite frankly it's just a remix of the previous Ultimates.

I'd like to add that I have touched AST for the first time since Heavensward in end game content when our pure healer had IRL circumstances and we needed a rep (a Sage is what we found). I am by no means an expert on healing jobs, but I found it rather easy to discard half the kit in my head and focus on the other half and fulfill my role. Forgive me for adding this after my initial post, I only realized after taking a nap and re-reading some things.

I'll respectfully disagree that A11S was well designed. You could skip most of that fight even early on, and was also partially the reason why such DPS thresholds were removed. The mechanics within were unique to it at the time, though, which I deeply appreciate. I agree that he most likely raids quite a decent amount. I also agree it's the hardest fight in the game currently, despite what I have criticized about it (that was more about the visual aspect, since many have voiced that they want you to focus on encounter design more than your job).

Reading the post above and re-examining what I wrote, I just wanted to add this. It's not a jab/attack, though I don't quite understand your second paragraph. If I am misunderstanding anything you wrote, I apologize. Thank you.

[MintnHoney]

Which basically brings us back to the problem that, unfortunately, Ultimate was not the healing-specific challenge that YoshiP alluded to, and, in general, healers need to be more engaged in all other content regardless.

[Nethereal]

Which basically brings us back to the problem that, unfortunately, Ultimate was not the healing-specific challenge that YoshiP alluded to, and, in general, healers need to be more engaged in all other content regardless.

But because Ultimate is more engaging in general technically healers get more engagement so~ YoshiP wasn't wrong.

From:
Someone who worships the throne.

[MintnHoney]

But because Ultimate is more engaging in general technically healers get more engagement so~ YoshiP wasn't wrong.

From:
Someone who worships the throne.

lol
/notenoughchars

[MintnHoney]

Just a reminder that Healers should still have rewarding and engaging gameplay in at least the majority of content, not just 3 encounters.
I'm not even sorry for the double-post.

[Deceptus]

If you want more engaging content on any job other than BLM, go play Ultimate.

Job design across everything has been gutted.

Funny how prescient this comment was in light of the new 6.11a patch.

[Avoidy]

In regards to all the people who want a more engaging system but seem at a loss about what the team could do:
In the last game I played, Tera, healers had a lot of responsibility for managing the group, and failure to do this could make the run really unpleasant. For example, every class in the game used mp to attack. Healers had spells that could restore mana. In essence, healers became a group's mana battery, and failure to use your mana skills off cd would lead to your party members running out of mana and being unable to attack during their bursts. Certain healers also had buffs to keep up at all times; one actually lowered the party's cooldowns on all skills that were used while the buff was up. Basically, you wanted to keep this running 24/7, and people had different rotational setups depending on which type of healer they were playing with, because one healer could change your CDs, while the other provided passive damage boosts. It was really fun. The way damage was processed was also different; you could take hits without it being detrimental. A good healer would heal you up right as you took the damage, so you could stand in bad for uptime and lose nothing with a good healer. Esuna in that game was also a skill you'd tap and it'd go off, and we didn't have to worry about annoying server ticks like in this game, so if you instantly cleansed someone of "slow," they wouldn't still be stuck with it. Then on top of that, you had an actual burst dps phase.

In this game, there's none of that! People just manage their own resources, you're not allowed to touch anyone's setup, and you're basically just there to heal raidwides or occasionally clean up a totally preventable mess.

[IDontPetLalas]

In regards to all the people who want a more engaging system but seem at a loss about what the team could do:
In the last game I played, Tera, healers had a lot of responsibility for managing the group, and failure to do this could make the run really unpleasant. For example, every class in the game used mp to attack. Healers had spells that could restore mana. In essence, healers became a group's mana battery, and failure to use your mana skills off cd would lead to your party members running out of mana and being unable to attack during their bursts. Certain healers also had buffs to keep up at all times; one actually lowered the party's cooldowns on all skills that were used while the buff was up. Basically, you wanted to keep this running 24/7, and people had different rotational setups depending on which type of healer they were playing with, because one healer could change your CDs, while the other provided passive damage boosts. It was really fun. The way damage was processed was also different; you could take hits without it being detrimental. A good healer would heal you up right as you took the damage, so you could stand in bad for uptime and lose nothing with a good healer. Esuna in that game was also a skill you'd tap and it'd go off, and we didn't have to worry about annoying server ticks like in this game, so if you instantly cleansed someone of "slow," they wouldn't still be stuck with it. Then on top of that, you had an actual burst dps phase.

In this game, there's none of that! People just manage their own resources, you're not allowed to touch anyone's setup, and you're basically just there to heal raidwides or occasionally clean up a totally preventable mess.

it's interesting to hear different perspective however we do have a certain amount of healers that can provide buffs already- SCH has recitation and AST has the card system. i like the PVP card system for AST, and that could be fun to add for PVE. SCh used to have differences in the fairies and I don't see why they could bring that back to add some different buffs. However that doesn't mean that groups should start asking for any one type of healer, just like any other job wouldn't like groups starting to be formed and excluding a specific DPS job or tank job.

Personally I wouldn't want to always be a group's "mana battery", resource management is part of each job's responsibility, that's not at all unique to this game, nor is having mitigation available to all roles, although the extent of that mitigation is arguably much higher for some roles than in some other games.

[Avoidy]

it's interesting to hear different perspective however we do have a certain amount of healers that can provide buffs already- SCH has recitation and AST has the card system. i like the PVP card system for AST, and that could be fun to add for PVE. SCh used to have differences in the fairies and I don't see why they could bring that back to add some different buffs. However that doesn't mean that groups should start asking for any one type of healer, just like any other job wouldn't like groups starting to be formed and excluding a specific DPS job or tank job.

Personally I wouldn't want to always be a group's "mana battery", resource management is part of each job's responsibility, that's not at all unique to this game, nor is having mitigation available to all roles, although the extent of that mitigation is arguably much higher for some roles than in some other games.

I'm aware that other healers have buffs, but since they're all damage oriented forms of support that you just sort of press once and then forget about, it can make things feel a little bland imo. In my ideal scenario, healers would feel maybe a bit more like bard, solely in the sense that they would have ongoing buffs to consider and way more spinning plates to make up for their abysmal dps rotation. But in order to do this, the entire game would need to be changed since like you said already, people basically manage themselves at this point. As just one dumb example, whenever I do any 4-man oriented daily content with friends, we just WAR/3DPS it. I know it's just dungeons, but that's also a massive chunk of the game where you straight up don't need this role at all depending on your comp, and it's not even a hard comp to set up. Meanwhile, in the game I alluded to earlier, healers felt necessary and vital to a team's success and quality of life in all forms of content, not just the top 1% of stuff that most people don't even bother doing.

But yeah, they'd need to change the whole game to make something like that work. People are too self sufficient as it stands. It's why I don't even bother healing anymore. I need to change my forum profile because it still says WHM, but I haven't played that job much in a while. I enjoyed AST for a bit, but then they went and gutted the fun from that as well. So now I play bard when I feel like supporting, and even that barely scratches the itch, so most of the time I just scrap the desire completely and play blm. I have more fun healing when I play Warrior at this point.