Just remove healers.

[Nadda]

I believe we're on the same page in terms of giving healers more DPS options. Apologies for the confusion.

My point was looking at those healer free runs they all required a specific stacking of classes which isn't intended design to bypass healings necessity for most. This is a bit different than 1 Healer runs for trials and raids since why not! Perhaps a middle difficulty is in order to necessitate 2 healers, but I digress.

I'm talking specifically.
EX1 2 Reapers 4 Dancers in one. (why exactly this)
E4S 1 Dancer 5 Summoners another. (why exactly that?)
In both cases a tanking core of 1 Paladin and 1 Warrior both with the most sustainablity.

There are ways to optimize a run so that you can bypass mechanics. But these are exceptions. Exceptions being the rule is a Fallacy. I must reaffirm.

What others are arguing is that this should be the future of the game if you are to remove Healers. This is what you will have class stacking. Hegemonization. If you give people enough time they will optimize the fun out of anything. Soon the social expectation will become "well why aren't you playing x job, when y job they do more damage, or they give off this buff.. or with this comp we can complete this content 2 minutes faster. It will be ... Easier. I'm not inviting them they don't play x job, they don't have a high enough parse to..."

Sacraficing gameplay and bonds for convienence.

Reminds me of World of Warcraft and I would not suffer it here. It is a dead end.

[Icecylee]

What others are arguing is that this should be the future of the game if you are to remove Healers. This is what you will have class stacking.

Right, you wouldn't just outright remove healers without doing anything else. You'd give everyone a self heal, and maybe expand a tiny bit on the other heals that are already present on other classes or beef up tank sharable cooldowns slightly, which would *open* up what's possibly without having a dedicated healer, not constrict it.


That said, I suppose the one good thing about this thread lasting so long is that instead of getting a ton of pushback and 'no healing is perfect as is dont change anything, i love standing around picking my nose and casting one spell every twenty seconds' we're instead getting "compromises" saying what we really need is... the stuff people have been asking for for literal years, so, incremental progress there I guess! Now we just need the devs to start paying attention...

[Nadda]

I understood the idea of giving DPS self heals but wouldn't that make the game even worse? Because we're not really addressing the core problem here. The fact these encounters aren't doing enough damage. We're removing the healer element because for one thing tanking and healing is so powerful the bosses pose no challenge so why have the healer along right? Or I suppose that's supposed to be the idea. That still wouldn't open up things. Because then you'd want the jobs with the most utility. It narrows things down further. Most Damage, Most utility.

Everyone just nods (not saying you of course) and goes "yeah yeah, just cut out all these jobs and their class quests in a patch, Put up a Wooden placard over the Conjurer's Guild that says 'Gone on Vacation' " It's humorous because they'd never cut out White Mage from a final fantasy game.

As I said in a previous post when given the option to build characters however you want in MMOs in those kinds there will always be natural gravitation toward the trinity. The idea is someone will always want to support the party and take the DPS loss so someone else can DPS more. I say again. Someone will intentionally take the DPS loss so another player can DPS more.

Would for every single DPS to have a self heal, would they all be instant? A Regen perhaps and would they do enough to basically undo the damage they took? Since fights are so choreographed this would infer everyone stops for a split second to use their heal cool down button when there's raid-wide damage. For a split second no damage is occurring. We removed the healer but we're removing a crucial element of the player interaction that contributes to the team through healing.

The fights are too easy I'll freely admit that. Now instead of addressing that issue, we're going to make it even easier by giving everyone a self-heal? What's the point in playing a game like that? I saw one person suggest having mobs simply do less damage. The demand should be to raise the bar to test the limits of our power. The paltry healing you can give yourself shouldn't be enough to suffice. It needs to have more kicks. A tank buster in EX shouldn't be so easily shrugged off.

Instead of raising the bar for ourselves, we'd be lowering it.

The flaw of the design is that the game is too lenient and forgiving, it wasn't made so as to just be easy for Healers but for everyone else as well. As I've stated mistakes happen more often than not. Should everyone have a raise? Where would it end? Are we to cut out all the things that hamper us until we are self-satisfied? For what purpose would there be for a group if I could go it alone?
What is a game where the challenge can be overcome by a single healing cool down? How could one be satisfied?

My dream is for real challenges that will test my limit. Such should be the wish of any adventurer.

[Renathras]

As I said in a previous post when given the option to build characters however you want in MMOs in those kinds there will always be natural gravitation toward the trinity. The idea is someone will always want to support the party and take the DPS loss so someone else can DPS more. I say again. Someone will intentionally take the DPS loss so another player can DPS more.

I think I agree with most of your points in this thread. MOST. (I happen to like simple rotations and hate DoTs. I'd rather at least some healer DPS kits stay the same or maybe someone get a 1-2-3 like MCH to change things up but not be
DoT + spam")

But the rest I agree with.

Bosses don't deal enough damage and oGCDs are so powerful that healers aren't taxed on the healing side of things, so they feel they need to perform on the DPS side and their kits just aren't made for that to be interesting.

The core issue you have half correct - the lack of damage output by enemies. I say half because the other half is - how powerful oGCDs are so you really don't HAVE to use GCDs on heals in most situations.

PvP has put healing on people (as have other games) and what we tend to see is either people don't use it (Second Wind in PvE) or people spam it (Recuperate in PvP) to the point it becomes too powerful anyway. So it's either a DPS loss no one uses (because a lot of DPS have the mindset of doing damage, not healing), or it's too powerful and makes content trivial. Neither is a good thing.

And also you're right that people will gravitate to the Trinity. Or in rare occasions, a Quaternity (Tank/Healer/Damage/Support). Guild Wars 2 started with no Trinity and the idea everyone is their own tank and healer, but what ended up happening was some people would gravitate to healing anyway for dungeons, so eventually they just broke down and made it part of the game.

[Renathras]

You are not being forced to include Ninjas in your groups to be able to play the game. You are, however, forced to bring a healer. What if I want to play the game with my friends, but none of us want to play a healer? Should we just have to give in and knowingly subject one another to mental torture?

What if none of you wanted to play tank? What if none of your friend group wanted to play DPS?

After trying all of the melee DPSers, I dislike them all. I've yet to find ONE that I like. For casters, I dislike BLM and am neutral on RDM. SMN is the only one I like. For Ranged, I don't care for DNC or really BRD. I'm neutral on MCH. So out of all the DPS in the game, I like SMN and find MCH and RDM tolerable. Should we remove DPS from the game because I dislike them?

Most of the people in my friends group play healers and tanks. We all have a DPS alt because we "have to" for when we want to do things and the tank/heal slots are full. Tanks are also far more often AIN than healers and the hardest slots to fill in most parties. When I look through PF for Ex and Sav, healers tend to fill before tanks, so CLEARLY many people like playing them and the slots aren't hard to fill. Just because you and your friends don't like them doesn't mean the rest of the community doesn't.

This is a problem here because the healing role is so absurdly homogenised

I hate this argument.

The healing ROLE is not homogenized. The healer DPS kits are MOSTLY homogenized. The healer healing kits aren't AT ALL homogenized. They all have different tools to confront various situations, and they all feel different to play when you actually need to heal. The issue is the game doesn't require enough healing, so people get stuck with the dps rotation. And they could fix that just by something as simple as one having a 1-2-3 combo like MCH, one having 1-3 DoTs, another having a DoT and spam spell, and another having some kind of combo point generator and spender system. They've made them the same because, for whatever reason, they decided they wanted that.

EDIT:

I want to put together a group for a raid.

Good thing you are not playing ALL EIGHT POSITIONS AT ONCE, then, isn't it? Because there ARE people that like those other spots. And that will play those other spots. And that may not like the things YOU like. So we all work together.

Imagine if there was a raid where all you did was heal. Where there was a lot of AOE damage and there a weakened Dragon and the goal was to heal it before the time ran out and its Doom ticked down, killing it and wiping since it couldn't power up to defeat the big bad. Now all those Jobs YOU want to play are USELESS. Shall we design the game that way, to actively exclude you and your preferred playstyle?

No, of course not. That would be absurd.

The game is designed to where everyone just about can play it.

I do agree that they could mix up the healer DPS kits a bit AND/OR make healing matter so they actually have to lean on their GCD heals, breaking up Glarespam. But remove healers? No.

So. Remove the healing role and improve the defensive toolkits of the remaining jobs to allow them to do without.

Hard.
No.

Besides, you'd also have to redesign ALL PAST FIGHTS/CONTENT since people are still leveling through the game, new players joining all the time, people clearing old content synced or at level, and so on. And you know the VERY FIRST thing that would happen if you ever removed healers?

...people would be complaining about no healers and asking for them to be added to the game.

.

Any dungeon content? Liberal use of Clemency on big hits kept DPS alive, on top of any utility/mitigation I could throw up to supplement was more than adequate.
Normal Raids? Cleared every single Eden Raid with my PLD playing healer after both healers died on more than 1 occasion.
Alliance Raid? Unless a fight has an enrage mechanic, not really a problem there either.

You're using the ONE Tank with a (rather powerful) spamable heal talking about content with no enrage mechanics (that effectively doesn't need DPSers, either). Not sure that's a good general statement. To be fair, at this point, you can all-tank almost any content in the game. That doesn't mean we should remove DPS as a role.

The reason why we're not happy playing a healer is because we remember a time when there was more to do as a Healer. We had multiple DoTs to manage and a small DPS rotation between those DoTs, Cleric Stance and our Nuke. We had to actually manage MP in the past. We had to actually use our GCDs for more than just Filler Spam. We needed to shield prey mechanics. We needed to rotate Virus/Disable between Healers to make sure the party didn't die to a massive raid wide. Nothing of that has been retained so we went from having a solid workload that actually felt rewarding to pull off to having our job outsourced to Tanks/DPS roles and having the bare minimum to do.

WE"RE BORED!!! It's that simple.

A constant problem with modern society is people speaking for themselves claiming that they're speaking for everyone.

"WE" is clearly not talking about all healers, as many of US disagree with you. DoTs aren't challenging or engaging to people like me, for example, they're BORING. And Cleric Stance dancing (I've been playing and healing since 2.3 or so) was tedious as all hells, not fun nor engaging gameplay. The main change to our DPS kit between then and now is we cut out a lot of the tedium and clunk. The only healer that really ever has had an engaging DPS kit was RDM. That's not a typo.

Managing MP (for non-SCHs) was "stop casting damage spells and don't use AOE heals for 10-20 seconds". The other things you mention were mostly oGCDs (Virus, for example), which wouldn't be any different to today's gameplay of you spamming Glare and rotating in some filler oGCDs.

And as I said above, the REASON for all this? Because of a healer shortage because it was "too hard" and because of people complaining about it. Incessantly. SCH would still have 4 DoTs today if SCH's all through SB hadn't complained - incessantly - that they had to do more work than WHM and got only the same damage numbers. Because people that say they're "bored" and "just want more buttons to hit" always end up saying "Okay, I hit more buttons than that other guy, so I should be doing more damage" once they have those buttons.

Imagine if we gave SCH its DoT kit back and SGE got something on par with SMN/RDM level DPS rotation. Both would start complaining almost instantly that they aren't outdamaging WHM and they need potency buffs because they're doing "more work" even though the entire change would have been predicated on "we don't want more damage, just some more buttons so we won't be bored".

.

Are you sure about that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gi05HqdMSs - Ultimate Coil done with 8 tanks

Tanks which have more mitigation than DPS (e.g. can survive without healing what a DPSer could not) and self-healing to augment their mitigation played by top end players that specifically put their team together, likely know the fight VERY to EXTREMELY well, and were willing to endure wipe after wipe to make it happen if need be...is not exactly comparable to the typical experience of running content in this game by the VAST majority of the playerbase.

Also note the words of the person who posted it: "By far the hardest prog I have ever done."

Besides, if anything, this is an argument that we don't need DPS in the game, isn't it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdDxjXMMWgU - E4S (when current) done with 2 tanks and 6 dps

...of which 5 of said DPS were massive healing Phoenix summoning SMNs. And again, the same above about optimizing, highly skilled players, etc etc applies. How is this representative of the game as a whole or 99% of the playerbase who aren't in the top 0.1-1.0% of the playerbase? It's TECHNICALLY possible, but that's hardly saying it's GENERALLY possible. Oh, and...they picked the two tanks with the highest healing in the game, and one of which that can spot-heal party members. That's not exactly making your argument for you.

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1qL4y1J7Mh EX1 (Spoilers EW) done with 2 tanks 6 dps

Again we see WAR/PLD. This time with the - before the later patch nerfing it - broken RPR and 4x DNCs (Healing Samba). This is requiring yet another insanely niche comp. How this is different from the ones above is that Ex1 only requires a single tank swap and your party having a good danger dorito. It's not that hard of a fight, so it again isn't making your case for you.

The idea you don't need healers doesn't seem that nonsensical...

In extremely niche circumstances, with parties explicitly built for it, with high skilled players who have done a piece of content to death and know it inside and out, sure. But again, this same argument could be used to say we can remove DPS from the game.

The idea you don't need healers in general is pretty nonsensical. That you have to find extremely niche cases with extremely high skilled players that are also insanely bored and dedicated to making it work is the exception proving the rule, not disproving it.

[Renathras]

The finest examples of Dunning-Kruger on these forums, all jumping on the OP without even attempting to understand what's being said, is the chef's kiss of this thread.

I think people understand it just fine.

They simply disagree with it.

The thing is, what is boring to one person is not to another. I find DPSing either mindnumingly boring OR clunky and tedious OR stressful to the point I feel like I'm doing a job that needs a mental health plan. None of that is engaging or interesting to me. I find tanking and healing to be far more fun since it means I'm actually reacting to situations and using my abilities in response to what's happening or anticipation of something, not simply being a dipping bird set on a keyboard pressing the same buttons in the same sequence over and over again.

.

Understanding != Agreeing

Moreover, most of us do seem to be saying to do something to spice up a few of of the healers' DPS kits while probably/possibly leaving at one alone (let's face it, WHM) for people that prefer that playstyle as-is right now. But there's a pretty big gulf between "add a few more DPS buttons for healers" and "remove healers from the game, give all Jobs self-healing and defensive CDs, and then go back and rebalance every fight in the game's history to accommodate this new paradigm...because OP and his friends don't like healing."

.

EDIT:

<snip>
If an entire role could be seamlessly removed by giving everyone just two more buttons, without redesigning ANY of the game's content, it is redundant and should either be removed or completely rebuilt.

This is the same thing for Tanks, though. There are games that do this very thing. Every DPS has a movement ability like DNC to dodge telegraphs, there are no tankbusters, little unavoidble damage, and every class has a self-heal button. The only thing the game would require to remove Tanks is to remove cleaves (thus facing doesn't matter anymore) and remove tankbusters (thus Tank-level vitality and defensive CDs are not needed anymore). Alternatively, give every DPS a self-heal and a mitigation CD - you know, the very things you're arguing for? - and then we could remove Tanks.

If an entire role could be seamlessly removed by giving everyone just two more buttons, without redesigning ANY of the game's content, it is redundant and should either be removed or completely rebuilt.

This argument LITERALLY HOLDS FOR TANKING AS WELL AS HEALING.

Your argument then only comes down to "Well, tanking damage rotations feel different than healer ones", not "Tank is needed and Healer is not".

You also focus exclusively on healer DAMAGE ROTATIONS. You know HEALERS, the role that HEALS. You ignore their HEALING kits entirely. Within those damage rotations, healers weave HEALING oGCDs. And, as it turns out, those HEALING oGCDs work differently, are not homogenized, and feel more distinct than the Tank damage rotations and mitigation kits do (Tank mitigation kits are THEIR oGCDs are and MOSTLY samey)

Healers and Tanks are inverses of each other. Tanks have somewhat varied GCD kits but near-identical oGCDs, healers have somewhat varied oGCD kits but near-identical GCDs.

.

Yeah it's cool that you can't clear P3-4S or DSR without healers yet but 1 to 6 people are forced to play these roles for casual content or else the queue will never pop, and I sure don't want to spend the next 30m in Aglaia pressing Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil Broil, so where do we go from here?

I'm REALLY confused why you people think "I don't want to do this, thus no one wants to do this" is an argument.

There are something like 3-6 MILLION other people besides you that play this game. Statistically, 20-30% of them play healers. YOU don't have to press "Broil Broil Broil...", someone else will do that. And, fyi, anyone that does that is a bad healer (you DO have to do things like weave oGCDs or everyone dies. Try any current fight - and I mean normal 8 mans/Aglaia - without a healer casting a single heal. See if your party survives or not. Oh, you can use Second Wind. But nothing else. Good luck.

.

- Every single fight this tier has been solo healed in i580 crafted gear. Yes, even P4S.
- P1S and P2S have been cleared with only tanks. Clearing with DPS and Tank would be even easier.

So you're saying we can and should remove the DPS role? Since, clearly, it isn't needed with PS1 and PS2 being cleared with no DPSers at all, right?

Oh, it's "even easier" with DPSers? Well, it's "even easier" with Healers, too. That isn't the argument. The argument seems to be if it is at all POSSIBLE to clear without healers, we need no healers. So this means we need no DPSers, too, right? Just boost Tank damage and we can remove the DPS role from the game. All DPSers can be told "You're Red Tanks".

This is the highest level content excluding Ultimate. Anything below that you don't need a healer whatsoever.

Extremes are lower than Ultimate. You need healers for most of them unless you have a REALLY optimized group comp and a LOT of good and highly geared players. I'm sure it's possible to clear Zod with just SMNs and RDMs + a tank or two, and Hydaelyn would only need 1 tank, but you'd have to have an insane comp to do it. For that matter, all the P_S that have been cleared with solo or no healers had pretty extreme comps. I remember some Eden clears like that which were essentially 1 tank and 7 SMNs or something like that using Phoenix (and PLD healing) as their "healers". Sure, it's possible, if we remove every Job from the game besides PLD and SMN.

Savages are also below Ultimates, and as even you noted, PS1 and PS2 have been cleared with just Tanks, but P3S and P4S? Moreover, things can be cleared with just Tanks because Tanks can take a beating AND have passive regen. DPSers do not. Meaning if you traded one or two of those Tanks for DPSers, the DPSers would be tanking the floor since they wouldn't be surviving and self-healing for enough to survive without healers to heal them.

Dungeons? Even DRK has cleared all of them with three DPS. EX? They were killed the first week of Endwalker without healers.

This is a stupid argument. PLD can solo most dungeons in the game. If not ALL dungeons in the game. You don't even need the DPS. There are only a few with really lax "enrage" type mechanics, and some of those can simply be invulned through (in fact, all of them might be). Meaning a party of all Tanks can clear 100% of the content in the game. When are you going to start asking for DPS as a role to be removed and every Job to be made into a Tank?

With all that said, do I think healers should be removed? No. There is clearly a large enough portion of the playerbase that enjoys the style of gameplay they're supposed fulfill. The issue is the dev team is so afraid little Timmy or Sally might struggle, they continue to design everything around the lowest common denominator. Not your average raider who, while lacking experience, is still a decent play; a green parser if you will. No, it's the person who can barely handle simple mechanics and usually dies once a pull. That's who they're catering content to. And it's why healing suffers so much in this game. If you're average, you're already playing above expectation.

The reason they're doing that is because there was a healer shortage in SB. Ultimately, that's the reason healers are the way they are today. And that was back when - for those who don't recall - healers DID have more complex DPS kits. It was taxing and overwhelming for people to do while also pushing prog and they'd get a lot of flack in casual content like 4 man dungeons (the most casual thing in the game, just about) if they weren't constantly casting their spam spell and refreshing their DoTs without fail.

The community, effectively, brought this on itself, collectively. The people who complained that casual healers weren't dealing enough damage, the people complaining about folks not using Cleric Stance, the people complaining that SCH had to do more work than WHM in its DPS but didn't get bigger numbers, the people that chewed out healers for daring to heal instead of deal damage, etc.

COLLECTIVELY, those are the reason we have the current healer system we have today.

.

I have all healers at 90, and I can confirm that sage does spam one button over and over again, only with the edition of that one skill in between gcds. Other than that, just like every other healer. Sage is also played identical to scholar, gotta love the originality!

Been playing and healing for nearly 9 years now. WHM and SCH in every expansion to date, picked up SGE as well. SGE doesn't play at all like SCH. It's mind boggling people genuinely believe this. Its kit functions rather differently. The only thing they're at all similar in is their DPS kits, and those aren't even that similar. SGE has Toxicon (when EuDiagnosis shields break) and Plegma whereas SCH has Energy Drain (for dumping excess AF or using with Dissipation for more damage) and Ruin 2. None of those spells are at all the same. You can try to claim that Bio/EuDosis and Broil/Dosis are, but that's saying half their damage kit is different, which...doesn't really make them the same.

Besides which, their healing kits aren't really similar. They do have some similarities - a single target no CD heal, a single target with some kind of buff, an AOE, and a party shield - but how those all but Lustrate/Ixo (I think it's Ixo...SGE spell names, ugh) and Indom are the only ones that work the same. Kura and Sacred Soil work differently, and not merely in the placement. Seraph works differently than Panhamia, and SGE honestly has nothing like Recitation+Adlo+Deploy, but SCH has nothing like Pneuma.

"But those aren't buttons they hit every GCD!", you might say - what do you think you're hitting BETWEEN those GCD buttons? Surely you don't sit on your thumbs for 2.5 seconds after hitting Broil and hit literally nothing else ever, do you?

What do you hit?

Those oGCD heals/mitigations.

Those things that are different from healer to healer and make them very distinct.

You're hitting on average something like 1 of them every other GCD on average, with some double weaves here and there.

Yeah, if you hit literally NOTHING ELSE other than Dia/Glarespam, you might be bored. But do you genuinely never hit Tetara? Benison? Assize? Asylum? Do you never use Solace or Rapture? Are you basically admitting to being a bad forcing your co-healer to carry the team as you let them all die?

Because I've yet to do content where both healers can only hit Dia/Glare (or their equivalent) the entire fight and still clear it. You legitimately DO have to heal. You can do so largely with oGCDs, but if you try to clear an Extreme or Savage without actually pressing anything other than Dia/Glare, I can't see how you wouldn't have a dead party outside of some insanely niche stuff. Eos might be able to solo heal some 4 mans for SCH, but even that isn't a guaranteed thing.

And this is, of course, before we start talking Prog or mistakes. This is just talking about avoidable damage. Don't heal through Zod or Hyd's multi-hit attacks. Don't use a single thing that restores HP, I mean. Watch what happens.

.

It IS much more more exciting, not only gives a bit of room for failure but also those 1-2-3 combos have something else attached to them, be it resource generation/different effects that tied into each other/positionals/branching paths, those tools are far more engaging than spam 1 button over 100 times per instance

It...really isn't.

The thing a LOT of people have a problem with is understanding that what THEY find engaging others often may or do NOT. I mean, even I do it. We all do it. But 1-2-3 isn't particularly more engaging than 1-2-2-2-2-2-1-2-2-2-2.

I do agree that there are oGCDs and stuff that DPSers have to weave and make things more interesting...but this...is true...of healers, too. Indeed, it's how healers do the vast majority of their healing now.

But, this is also one of those reasons I genuinely do support different playstyles. The trick is convincing people jugging 7 DoTs that they should be content doing no more damage than the guy with one DoT and a filler spam spell since this is preventing them being bored, not about damage or performance. If you can do that, then we can have nice things. The reality is, the 7 DoT Job players will complain and many players will swap to the 1 DoT Job.

For all the moaning about ShB and EW RDM, and EW SMN, being "too easy", why is it that so many Ultimate clears have SMNs and/or RDMs in them? Why so many world firsts? Why so many Savage statics?

...because easy is actually a benefit in some cases, like Prog or World First races or Ultimate fights. When you have two things that produce more or less identical outcomes, you pick the easier of the two to do in general. We've seen this a LOT on the abacus and through FFXIV's history.

[Renathras]

In summary:

MAN you guys say a lot! XD

Also, I looked at the Abacus and see BLM's with 70+ Fire IV casts (and less than 20 of anything else) for Eric on all the top teams at the moment. While that isn't 130+ that the healers have for their main nuke, unless you guys are also going to suggest BLM is boring and needs to be removed, it would seem "times pressing a button" isn't the best measurement.

.

But on the whole:

1) No, we aren't removing healers. That's dumb. And even if it wasn't, you aren't going to convince the Devs to ditch the Trinity or swap "Healing" to "Support". Go play GW2 or something if you want that (even it adopted the Trinity, though)

2) Healers are still needed for quite a bit of content and useful for the content they aren't explicitly necessary for.

3) Yes, high end players trying niche strategies can do so with unorthodox compositions, but this can also remove tanks and DPSers from the party, so that isn't what the game should be based around.

4) Yes, it would be nice for at least some of the healers to have more involved DPS kits, provided some were left simple and also that the players getting said complex kits would go into it knowing they were harder just for the sake of "challenge" and "not being bored" and accepted they would do no more damage or otherwise have higher performance by executing them. Something at least SMN/MCH/RDM/BRD/DNC level wouldn't be out of the question (especially for a Job like SGE that heals by doing damage anyway)

5) Each of us speaks for ourselves and ourselves alone, not some nebulous "WE" or "US" that is secretly the majority of the playerbase. The most Likes I've seen on a post are 30 something. We're playing a game with 3-6 million (somewhere in there) other people. 30 isn't even a statistical blip.

6) I hope you all have a good morning/day/evening/night. (Just because we disagree doesn't mean we have to hate each other!)

EDIT: Almost forgot:

7) Healers press more buttons than their DoT and spamnuke. You can't simply ignore all those oGCDs are buttons pressed, too.

.

And before you ask/comment with snark: In between ques, because I'm bored, and because I felt like it.

[NemuNemu14]

Words that make my post too long for the forum.

SGE does play like SCH in my opinion though. I use addersgall skills and a ogcd skill, like how i use aetherflow with a fairy skill. I feel SGE is just a bit too similar to SCH because of that. I mained sch in Shadowbringers along with Bard so it was rather easy for me to pick up SGE and heal a tank doing wall to wall no problem. Yes there are a few differences, and SGE even has exclusive skills like some DPS but other than that, it just feels really similar to me. Also for healers in general, I'm always weaving ogcds in my gcds. I'm not good at explaining, but I'm always using assize on cooldown when I can for that extra damage, and other ogcds. I prioritize my ogcd heals over gcds too. And yes, I use my dots too. I don't heal when I don't have to, such as when I know a dps will survive the next mechanics. I didn't mention EX or Savage, I'm just talking regular content, though I've healed extremes, and to me it was really easy. No, I don't make the co-healer do all the work lol, I have no idea where you got that from at this point.

But honestly, all healers aren't actually unique as you make it out to be.. They aren't super complex, and I just want to do other things aside from occasional dot, occasional ogcd dps skill, and the classic spamming one button dps gcd.. I enjoyed Astro's multi-tasking and all the card options in Stormblood. I just really don't want jobs to made incredibly simple. I hate the whole barrier healer and pure/regen healer thing. I want something new!

[Renathras]

<meaningful words, worthy of a reply>

I guess it mostly comes down to what you consider "similar". To me, it's "how does a thing work and achieve its effect". Otherwise, I could claim every Job in the game is "similar" based on "You have <at least two> buttons that you press for damage, with a specific order doing more damage than another (optimal rotation), you have <at least one> healing/shielding button you press to reduce the likelihood of a wipe, you have <at least one> mitigating/defensive ability button that you push to also reduce the likelihood of a wipe". Distilling it to that level of shadows in a cave "true essence", every Job in the game - indeed, every class in ALMOST ever MMO - are "similar".

So to me, what makes something different/unique must come from how it actually plays out. Yes, WHM has a DoT and a spamnuke and a CD (Assize and also Presence of Mind) and a combo-point-like damage ability (Misery), and yes, there's an optimum ordering of pressing those buttons to do the most damage. That doesn't make WHM play like RDM, which also has several buttons that do damage with an optimal order of pressing them to do more damage, nor like PLD which has several buttons that do damage with an optimal order of pressing them to do more damage.

When I look at healing oGCDs, a lot of them work differently. Even the ones that ARE supposed to be more or less the same (like Aquaveil and the AST version and the SGE version; SCH doesn't EXACTLY have one - its version increases health and healing done, not mitigation). The AST and SGE versions are the opposite of each other, and the SGE one requires a resource spent to use, and the WHM version doesn't have a heal but instead has a higher mitigation amount. SCH, instead, has mitigation in other forms, several of which use its pet.

EDIT:

Lilybell...sucks; but there's no denying it's DIFFERENT than Macrocosmos which is different from Seraph which is different from Panhamia. Lilybell and Panhamia are the only two of those that are similar, and they both work completely distinct from each other. Expedient is entirely unique. Icarus is entirely unique. Presence of Mind is different from Lightspeed. Neutral Sect is amazing compared to Plenary Indulgence, even if they two have a similar mechanic involved.

Even comparing their base GCD heal kits, the only similarity across the board is the basic Cure 1/Physic/Benefic 1/Diagnosis are more or less the same. While AST just has better versions of WHM's other GCDs, WHM then has Cure 3 and Lilies. On the shield side, Adlo is not Cure 2 (and is beastly powerful for not being Cure 2), and is stronger than EuDiagnosis while also being spreadable and having guaranteed crits every 90 seconds. But EuDiagnosis is instant. SGE also has a Medica 1 whereas SCH does not (you can shoehorn one in with Emergency Tactics, but it's a bit different). EuPrognosis can also be used on the move while Succor cannot be.

Eos can be placed in the center of the field, and this can do far more than it might initially seem to make SCH less impacted by movement mechanics or mechanics that require the SCH to be away from the center, while SGE doesn't have that capacity other than pre-use of Panhamia/EuPrognosis. Pepsis and Emergency Tactics, in theory, do similar things, but they also work completely opposite each other, with ET being quick to access (short 20 sec CD) but less outright useful while Pepsis is slightly slower, but can be used if there is any shield at all left for a post-heal.

SCH and SGE play so differently, it's shocking to me how people think they're the same. It took me a good 30 mins to just set up my SGE bars how I like so they'd SOMEWHAT benefit from my SCH muscle memory (I still don't have all the names down, lol) SCH is a preemptive healer, SGE is a control healer. SCH is more reactive if needed (better for Prog) while preferring to set things up in advance, SGE is strong with advance knowledge and a controlled environment but weak when things go off the rails. It's like an inverse WHM.

.

The only things they share REALLY are their BASE GCD heal kits (single target heal, stronger single target heal [variations], and AOE heal [variations more distinct]) and their BASE GCD damage kits (DoT + Spam; even their AOEs are different with only SCH and SGE being mostly the same.)

.

Now, points of agreement:

I do agree that their BASE GCD KITS are similar (healing) and identical (single target GCD non-CD/conditional damage), but this is honestly a small part of their kits. The vast majority of their kits are distinct.

The problem is: The encounter design doesn't have us using them outside of prog/first few weeks of new content.

I didn't say they are super complex. But they are different and distinct. When I heal on WHM or SGE, I often find myself missing things that SCH has that I've learned to like over the years. And I guess I just don't care that much about damage, so slimmed down DPS kits don't bother me since I derive fight enjoyment from the heals that I use, not the damage spells I cast.

I feel the same way when I Tank. My damage rotation is boring on all the tanks that I've played (GNB, PLD, WAR), it's just something I do in between actually needing to do "tank things" like mitigate, swap, position the boss, etc. It's "busywork", not "fun". That's how I feel about damage dealing in general. It's why I hate playing damage dealers. And why it boggles my mind that people want to turn healers into damage dealers.

Though I do agree that having some options - sometimes I WANT to just spam 1-2-3 mindlessly like everyone else here seems to want to do (when I feel that way, I play SMN or play tank in non-tank swap fights) - isn't a bad thing. When I first heard about Kardia, I was thinking, "Oh, cool. It'll play like RDM or something and each hit will heal, so the "healing" playstyle will be moving Kardia between targets and occasionally using oGCDs, right? Sure, I'll never want to play THAT, but at least people complaining about being bored and wanting to have a dps rotation will have one they can be happy with."

I was a bit surprised when they launched with THE SAME EXACT DoT+spam as the rest of the healers, though.

[WaxSw]

It...really isn't.

The thing a LOT of people have a problem with is understanding that what THEY find engaging others often may or do NOT. I mean, even I do it. We all do it. But 1-2-3 isn't particularly more engaging than 1-2-2-2-2-2-1-2-2-2-2.

It IS, by its nature a 1-2-3 rotation demands more attention than just pressing one button a difference that increases when we add all the side effects the 1-2-3 rotations have (branching paths/resource generation/buffs...) its a more involved gameplay than just pressing 1 all the time

I do agree that there are oGCDs and stuff that DPSers have to weave and make things more interesting...but this...is true...of healers, too. Indeed, it's how healers do the vast majority of their healing now.

Which we rarely need and the game barely asks us to properly use it? The log I posted previously was from P4S a last Savage floor and even there the total non dps actions I used werent even 25% of my total rotation, go check any dps or tank and you'll find that while they have fillers in the gcd combo their whole rotation is far more present than the supposed "rotation" we have. There is also a whole another problem from there, if the healing is our rotation then we're the only role that is denied to perform it and be impactful in the majority of the game's content as the healing checks are non existent and the incoming damage is ridiculously low.

But, this is also one of those reasons I genuinely do support different playstyles. The trick is convincing people jugging 7 DoTs that they should be content doing no more damage than the guy with one DoT and a filler spam spell since this is preventing them being bored, not about damage or performance. If you can do that, then we can have nice things. The reality is, the 7 DoT Job players will complain and many players will swap to the 1 DoT Job.

Balance is a useless argument when the fun and enagement is not there, first make all the jobs more diverse and fun and then balance them like they did with the dps (disregard difficulty, basically a job should be appealing for what it brings and how fun it is) but in any way shape or form 1 nuke 1 dot should be the peak of the gameplay of a mmo healer.

For all the moaning about ShB and EW RDM, and EW SMN, being "too easy", why is it that so many Ultimate clears have SMNs and/or RDMs in them? Why so many world firsts? Why so many Savage statics?

...because easy is actually a benefit in some cases, like Prog or World First races or Ultimate fights. When you have two things that produce more or less identical outcomes, you pick the easier of the two to do in general. We've seen this a LOT on the abacus and through FFXIV's history.

Or... because blm does not give an swift raise which is extremely valuable in prog scenario? Because Blm has been for a long time the job that is the hardest to get into (and despite that hasnt been dumbed down as healers did) and as such has a lower playerbase? Because Rdm has more partywide mitigation and Smn can help with the healing? Because the trio mechanics favours jobs like Smn early on?

In reality a lot of those player simply pick the jobs they like and proof of that is that TEA and P4S world first had a BLM simply because the player liked it and the same goes for many of those Smn and Rdm

Besides that argument of yours could be twisted very easily, if players want easy, then why Sage (which is an easier Sch) hasn't been present in either P4S WF and DSR WF? Why is that Whm hasnt been present there either? Why DSR WF had a Mnk instead of the more simple Rpr?