Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

Gotta love how some of the whiners here just can't believe there's more than one person posting to the forums who enjoys playing healers and doesn't agree with them. Oh, and they also can't believe that anyone who disagrees with them isn't a troll; they literally can't imagine that anyone could sincerely enjoy being a healer as the role is today.

Caricatures aside, this does seem to be the case. This thread is filled with instance after instance of people insisting that anyone who likes current healers is either horribly bad at the game, a troll, a new player who just doesn't realize it sucks yet, or some combination of the three. The unwillingness to consider that some people genuinely enjoy it is mind boggling.

I won't play psychologist over it, I just find it disconcerting.

For my part, I believe there are SOME open minded and compromise capable people here, and those are the people I'm more interested in talking to. Not the actual trolls who think they are fighting trolls (when you strayman falacy someone's position as those three people did mine, you're not a serious person, you're a troll). Those people are impossible to reason with and are beyond and immune to reason, compromise, argument, fact, or anything that doesn't agree with them 100% - even partial agreement isn't sufficient unless they're temporarily allowing it to make it seem like people who disagree less are more isolated (e.g. they take people in the middle and pretend like all those people agree with them even when they don't so they can ostracize people who agree with them less, but as soon as the less agreement folks leave, they'll turn on the middle for not agreeing with them ENOUGH)

But there are other people interested in genuinely brainstorming things, other solutions besides "more dps buttons = more skill/less boredom/better design", and those people are the ones to talk to.

EDIT:

Speaking of such caricatures:

Duh, of course they would be afraid, just like a parent would be afraid that their kid reads some flat eather's ramblings and actually believes them.

Appeal to ridicule is also a logical fallacy. As is guilt by association. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which fallacy this is.

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

You realize I'm also agreeing with others, right? So by your own definition, I'm not alone with my views, either. "appeal to consensus" is not a valid argument, anyway, but you don't even have that going for you. I'll not dignify your stupidity after that with a response.

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.

We don't all know.
It's not a fact.

The only time it actually is relevant is in content with enrage timers, which are the vast minority of the content in the game, and even then only in minimum ilevel gear. A first clear of Erik probably needed healers to DPS. In ilevel 600 gear, you could probably have both healers AFK the entire fight and clear enrage comfortably. If every Job in this game was a DPS, then there wouldn't be blue and green icons and roles named something other than DPS. This is such an absurd argument that needs to die so we can actually talk solutions.

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As for your first question:

This wouldn't be the first time they changed paradigms. Go do Crystal Tower fights at level circa 2013. The healing requirements and design were very different. Some fights had continuous tick damage that you couldn't address by cycling through a healing play of oGCDs...which you also didn't have. They haven't had to redesign that content with modern healing tools, they just left it in the game. Alexander Savage broke guilds. Those fights are still in the game (a bit nerfed back in HW, but they haven't been re-addressed since then, even with Jobs learning abilities at different levels and the like). How is that possible?

Because it just is?

If they did this, it would only be in Savage/Ultimate content, and to a lesser extent Extremes. They would leave the rest of the game alone because - why wouldn't they? They've shown a history of leaving normal content (non-Ex/Sav/Ult) alone when they make changes to design overall. No one will care if normal content is still easy because...it always kind of has been with only a few exceptions (like Aurum Vale when current). The challenge stuff has always been Ex/Sav/Ult, and that's where you'd get the changes.

Though admittedly a big part of it - as I've noted - is healers have oGCDs out the wazoo that are more than powerful enough to cover all healing needs without ever having to cast a GCD heal. I've healed entire 4 mans, 8 mans, even some Extremes without casting any GCD heal other than just for the hell of it in downtime. oGCD healing kits should not be that powerful while ALSO having so many oGCDs you always have one up for any damage that does come out excluding waves of party mistakes.

[MintnHoney]

You realize I'm also agreeing with others, right?

Now, see, you're trying to conflate agreement over the sentiment of wanting to and enjoying healing with agreement to your proposal and views.

But that's neither here nor there, I suppose.
Enjoy that kettle, I hear she's hot.

[Sebazy]

The only time it actually is relevant is in content with enrage timers, which are the vast minority of the content in the game, and even then only in minimum ilevel gear. A first clear of Erik probably needed healers to DPS. In ilevel 600 gear, you could probably have both healers AFK the entire fight and clear enrage comfortably. If every Job in this game was a DPS, then there wouldn't be blue and green icons and roles named something other than DPS. This is such an absurd argument that needs to die so we can actually talk solutions.

I think this point of view stems from the old quote of Yoshida claiming that healer DPS wasn't factored into things back in Gordias? I really can't stress it enough, that just doesn't stand true anymore, at least not in Savage. E8S was irrefutable proof of how things had changed, it was a fight that other than it's add phase really wasn't much of a heal check at all. And since the healing requirements were low it required eye opening amounts of DPS from the healers to beat the enrage.

Whilst current fights aren't nearly as bad, it's still a given that you will need something from your healers. Take P4S p1 as a current example:

P4S p1 requires a raid DPS of ~48000 to beat enrage

The world's 1st speedrun log has 52125 actual DPS done (including LB) if you subtract the healers raw DPS. That's a reasonably comfortable margin over the 48000 barrier, but note that the buff contribution from the healers was roughly 3000 of that, 2200 of which was from the AST's cards. Switch that AST out for a WHM and that margin just halved.

If we take a more average log, I scrolled to one that had a combined rating of 62% for the group as a whole, this clear had a combined actual DPS of 43200 minus the healers. That's not some cherry picked awful log, the DPS were evenly spread with 1 purple, 1 blue, 1 green and 1 grey.

The TLDR is that if you want to clear Savage in it's entirety, you will likely need some healer DPS even once you hit farm status.

Healers being a DPS really isn't that far off the mark. In solo content and MSQ we almost entirely DPS, in endgame dungeons we primarily DPS, in casual raid content we primarily DPS, really the biggest exception to the rule these days is leveling dungeons. This just shouldn't be the case, but it is.

Though admittedly a big part of it - as I've noted - is healers have oGCDs out the wazoo that are more than powerful enough to cover all healing needs without ever having to cast a GCD heal. I've healed entire 4 mans, 8 mans, even some Extremes without casting any GCD heal other than just for the hell of it in downtime. oGCD healing kits should not be that powerful while ALSO having so many oGCDs you always have one up for any damage that does come out excluding waves of party mistakes.

Agreed, SE have been steadily designing themselves into this corner pretty much from SB onwards and I think the healer board is just going to get progressively angrier until Yoshida's team start seriously thinking about how powerful healer's toolkits are relative to the majority of content we do.

[Absurdity]

Appeal to ridicule is also a logical fallacy. As is guilt by association. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which fallacy this is.

Maybe it is, I just don't care because I have yet to see anything from them that isn't just based on feelycraft or appeal to authority (the developers know best).

As for your first question:

This wouldn't be the first time they changed paradigms. Go do Crystal Tower fights at level circa 2013. The healing requirements and design were very different. Some fights had continuous tick damage that you couldn't address by cycling through a healing play of oGCDs...which you also didn't have. They haven't had to redesign that content with modern healing tools, they just left it in the game. Alexander Savage broke guilds. Those fights are still in the game (a bit nerfed back in HW, but they haven't been re-addressed since then, even with Jobs learning abilities at different levels and the like). How is that possible?

Because it just is?

Except it doesn't actually work. As you said yourself, the content was designed for completely different healing kits and the job changes over several expansions have made the content so laughably easy that we would go right back to the original problem, being bored as a healer in the majority of content, if they left old content alone while only balancing the job kits around the increase in outgoing damage in new content.


What a lot of the "give us more dps abilities" crowd are arguing for is a solution that makes healers more engaging to play in all content, not just the newest expansion fights, while also keeping the amount of needed developement time to a minimum.

[ThorneDynasty]

We don't all know.
It's not a fact.

Then you are quite simply misinformed. Most of healers' time is spent DPSing, by huge margin. Get over it, it's fact. "Increasing incoming damage" won't chance that, only a complete overhaul of the entire game would. Still waiting for a realistic proposal on how to go about that.