Has anyone quit healing?

[LeonKeyh]

It's amazing what happens whenever the troll doesn't post for a while. We create Pariahs of people who agree with us on the problem but not the solution and refuse to discuss the solutions. Why the hell do people always need to find "an enemy"?

Increasing DPS complexity fixes the problem but also DOES create a merely "slightly different" DPS with quicker queues. Come on now, how could everyone not see and agree with that?

Seems less likely to me that they would increase the amount of healing required in encounter design personally, but doing that would make things more interesting. Only problem is that it would cause quite a bit of needed rebalancing I feel like.

I'd rather see "Healer" be replaced with "Support" and give them buffs like AST has. This would allow them to actually create decent support jobs without needing to be shackled by how it interacts within the DPS role personally, but can't we all just agree with getting something better?

[Irenia]

I see no reason why every healer needs to have indirect buffs as their main form of combat; it'd be fine to have a scale between "Aggro Healer" and "Buff healer". Both increase damage in different ways, since damage buffs are just damage skills with potencies proportional to party performance.

[Absurdity]

Seems less likely to me that they would increase the amount of healing required in encounter design personally, but doing that would make things more interesting. Only problem is that it would cause quite a bit of needed rebalancing I feel like.

Depending on how much the healing requirement is increased it would certainly also require a rework of the actual healing tools.



Right now healers MP economy is not designed for constant GCD healing, nor are the healing kits actually all that interesting when you look a bit closer.

A majority of our heals are just Cure 2, instant cast Cure 2, oGCD Cure 2, oGCD Cure 2 x2 or x5, aoe Cure 2 and oGCD aoe Cure 2. They are mostly just fire and forget heals with very little, if any, interaction between each healing ability.


Funnily enough the absolutely terrible Stormblood lilly system would be a lot more interesting in a game where GCD healing is common.

[LeonKeyh]

Depending on how much the healing requirement is increased it would certainly also require a rework of the actual healing tools.



Right now healers MP economy is not designed for constant GCD healing, nor are the healing kits actually all that interesting when you look a bit closer.

A majority of our heals are just Cure 2, instant cast Cure 2, oGCD Cure 2, oGCD Cure 2 x2 or x5, aoe Cure 2 and oGCD aoe Cure 2. They are mostly just fire and forget heals with very little, if any, interaction between each healing ability.


Funnily enough the absolutely terrible Stormblood lilly system would be a lot more interesting in a game where GCD healing is common.

Agreed, and that was what I was alluding to with the need for rebalancing. It would require faster resource generation (MP and Lilies/Addersgall and lower cooldowns on Aetherflow and CD heals) potency tweaks to all of the above, possibly charges added to some of the cooldown abilities that don't have them yet. There would need to be a lot of changes to go that route, changes that _I_ don't think SE is capable of.

That DOESN'T mean that would be a bad solution though, if they do it right. It just seems like they're less likely to mess up making DPS kits more complex since they've shown their ability to make some decent, fairly unique DPS kits.

If they would do a complete rework to the role, I would just rather they give all healers support skills like AST has, but then again, that removes AST's uniqueness, so every answer has its issues. But still fewer issues than what we have today.

[ThorneDynasty]

Seems less likely to me that they would increase the amount of healing required in encounter design personally

But how? There's nearly a decade worth of entirely scripted content with very sparse unavoidable damage windows. Even if ALL of them bring party down to 1 HP healers will still spend the vast, vast majority of their time DPSing. So how on earth do you "increase the amount of healing required" to the point where the whole healers-should-just-heal dogma any makes sense?

Ever job in this game is a variety of DPS. We all know that's a fact. So why pretend this game is something it's not? Not accepting the obvious is at the core of all the problems with the healer role.

[Renathras]

...

I think that MOST PEOPLE agree the situation isn't great. As much as I've been attacked for not agreeing that "moar dps buttons!" is the answer, I've stated many times now that I agree with the assessment that healing now is sub-par and could be better. I've even made SEVERAL DIFFERENT suggestions on how to deal with it, that could even be combined/employed together. For example, having a simple, medium complexity, and two high complexity healer kit Jobs, which could also be done while weakening oGCD kits, while also increasing frequency of smaller unavoidable damage would address all thee problems discussed.

...but since I'm not saying make EVERY healer complex with GNB's worth of DPS buttons, apparently I'm a "Sylphie" (whatever that is) and must be attacked and destroyed. And here I'm the one trying to approach a middle ground that will allow everyone to be at least somewhat happy. /shrug

Oh, and I do love healing's secondary function being buffing rather than damage. You'll get no complaint with me on that. I love PvP SCH's Adlo/Bio as buffing/debuffing utility.

I also agree that the line between DPS and healers is blurry as is, so pushing more that way is probably not healthy for the game's battle design, either. It's why I encourage variety instead of just making them all the same thing that pushes out the bulk of the player base.

EDIT:

Neat.

And it doesn't look like you're getting anywhere with convincing anyone on anything about your singular views, however, either.

So perhaps you should stop talking past people and making caricatures of their arguments and actually listening to THEM and what THEY are saying, not the strawman you want to PRETEND they are saying?

Overall, the idea here was to give AST GCD tools that would replace a lot of your direct DPS in order to simulate a more passive-focused healer so that people who don't want to be DPSing 80%-100% of the time with their GCDs have a healer whose playstyle respects the importance of DPS contribution, and that's really the key factor here. The content of XIV demands healer DPS contributions as often as they currently are. We can create a passive healer, but they MUST contribute still. They just need to be able to do that indirectly.

I don't disagree with this. My issue with AST (other than aesthetics) has always been the randomness of the card effects and the wacky APM to use them well. Making GCDs for that would be an interesting way of getting around that problem.

I remember one of my pitches for Chemist (before FFXIV's healers got all homogenized, so back in SB or so) was that they had the normal slate of heals, but then they had "short duration, weaker effect potions" (basically like tinctures) that they could throw on party members. Something like +3% stats for 10 sec, incurs a 60 sec debuff so they can't be chain medicated (so you have to cycle through party members, not just buff the SAM over and over again), with the class having 1-3 different potions each on a cycling 20 sec or so CD.

There are tons of ways to do this, but the takeaway is that there very easily could be a buffer healer playstyle. They're already more or less doing this in PvP.

[MintnHoney]

And it doesn't look like you're getting anywhere with convincing anyone on anything about your singular views, however, either.

Yes, because me agreeing with others, but not you, means I'm so alone with "my views."

So perhaps you should stop talking past people and making caricatures of their arguments and actually listening to THEM and what THEY are saying, not the strawman you want to PRETEND they are saying?

You know, there's this really neat little kettle I'd like to introduce you to. When it gets heated it makes noises, kinda like you, and I told them about you, they think you'll really hit it off together well...