Healers need an overhaul

[Lilapop]

Back in the old days, we had less healing oGCDs and STILL had more DPS skills than we do now and it played fine.
SCH had 5 DoTs (not counting Nukes, Energy Drain or Bane), 2 distinct Fairies to micro manage, and at most 10 healing abilities and played fine.
AST had distinct cards and ways to alter their cards to apply to everyone/extend their durations, etc. and played fine
WHM actually had Shields they could apply to everyone and despite having fewer oGCDS than either SCH or AST, still had at least 2 DoTs to manage, and STILL PLAYED FINE.

We didn't have 20+ healing abilities because we didn't NEED them but now we do have those 20 abilities and they're so stupidly powerful that you literally can avoid using half of them and still be fine. FFS, you can go AFK entirely and if the Tank is even semi-decent, you won't be missed because of how little damage there is to heal that they themselves can resolve with their own toolkits. The "Healer should Heal" mentality only works when there's actually something to heal, which has been lacking since HW IMO.

I don't want another unnecessary oGCD heal that I will rarely use, I want some god damn synergy within my kit to keep me entertained.
I don't want to Spam 1 Button endlessly in content, I want something that actually stimulates my mind.
I don't WANT to play a DPS role, I want the Healers that I fell in love with back.

thats fair, and we can agree to disagree here (most likely scenario), but if we have shield healers like sage, then why does white mage need to be the most potent healer and a shield healer? what's the point of sage if so? the amount of healing classes there are means they don't need to shove "everything" in one. white mage is the most potent, sage is less, but has shields, etc. like i said, a healer who knows their stuff will feel like theres not enough to heal, myself included. but the vast majority of the healers generally don't use their kits past cure, holy, and medica. quite a few don't even medica, and just cure. see where i'm going with this? they dumb it down so so much because theres more classes to divide the load amongst as well as players just being unable to work the painfully simple "rotation"

[Silver-Strider]

thats fair, and we can agree to disagree here (most likely scenario), but if we have shield healers like sage, then why does white mage need to be the most potent healer and a shield healer? what's the point of sage if so? the amount of healing classes there are means they don't need to shove "everything" in one. white mage is the most potent, sage is less, but has shields, etc. like i said, a healer who knows their stuff will feel like theres not enough to heal, myself included. but the vast majority of the healers generally don't use their kits past cure, holy, and medica. quite a few don't even medica, and just cure. see where i'm going with this? they dumb it down so so much because theres more classes to divide the load amongst as well as players just being unable to work the painfully simple "rotation"

Because mechanics back then required shields. I still remember the days of Coils when I would have to shield a Prey Target or they would die 9/10 times.
Stoneskin back then was JUST a shield, no healing component to it at all but unlike Divine Benison was on the GCD and could be applied to everyone and Raid Wide attacks actually hurt enough to warrant wanting to cover for people, especially DRGs because they had terrible Magic Defense and would legitimately die without it half the time, to say nothing of how punishing Death was back then because it would actually lower your max HP when you got revived.

As for the "Vast majority" that don't use their toolkits properly, this applies to every single role. Tanks that don't mitigate, DPS that freestyle their rotations are equally as guilty of not properly utilizing their toolkits but unlike Healers, Tanks and DPS haven't gotten lobotomized down to a single button rotation, yet. It's an asinine double standard in design that only applies to 1 role and is stupid to defend it just because bad players exist.

[Shurrikhan]

Stoneskin back then was JUST a shield, no healing component to it at all but unlike Divine Benison was on the GCD and could be applied to everyone.

Pretty sure Stoneskin II, the AoE Stoneskin, could only be used outside of combat, if that's what you mean by "could be applied to everyone" (short of taking 8 subpar GCDs to do so)...

But yes, Stoneskin was spammable, and on a tank it was pretty decent absorption if cast by a WHM (then worth 18% of target HP, up from 10%).

[Silver-Strider]

Pretty sure Stoneskin II, the AoE Stoneskin, could only be used outside of combat...

But yes, it was spammable, and on a tank it was pretty decent absorption if cast by a WHM (then worth 18% of target HP, up from 10%).

Stoneskin 2 wasn't usable in combat but Stoneskin 1 could still be applied in combat and was required for certain mechanics, like Prey in T10 of Coils and was useful to help mitigate Teraflare in T13 because it could stack with Addlo/Succor.

[Shurrikhan]

Stoneskin 2 wasn't usable in combat but Stoneskin 1 could still be applied in combat and was required for certain mechanics, like Prey in T10 of Coils and was useful to help mitigate Teraflare in T13 because it could stack with Addlo/Succor.

Gotcha; I just misread the intent of "on everyone," since having so much consecutive downtime to do that was pretty rare.




Also, sorry for the tangent, but... why do some shields still replace each other and others not when they could just deal with the available exploitation of stacked shields by simply... have only a single spammable shield be consumable in any given hit (using the largest, next largest, and so on)?

Got three shields (Galvanize, Catalysis, and Eukrasian Diagnosis) at once? Cool. But the tankbuster('s first hit) is still only affected by the largest, and the others at most help against whatever follows.

They ought to at least typify the likes of Galvanize and Eukrasian Diagnosis in that way so that one doesn't replace weaker shields with stronger ones so long as they have a different name; allow any number of them to be stacked, but as it'd only matter against consecutive hits (instead of stacking benefit against OHKOs), it wouldn't be uniquely useful and therefore not exploitable.

[MintnHoney]

Also, sorry for the tangent, but... why do some shields still replace each other and others not when they could just deal with the available exploitation of stacked shields by simply... have only a single shield be consumable in any given hit (using the largest, next largest, and so on)?

Spaghetti Code, muh servers, "we didn't know this was an issue," etc.

[Lilapop]

Because mechanics back then required shields. I still remember the days of Coils when I would have to shield a Prey Target or they would die 9/10 times.
Stoneskin back then was JUST a shield, no healing component to it at all but unlike Divine Benison was on the GCD and could be applied to everyone and Raid Wide attacks actually hurt enough to warrant wanting to cover for people, especially DRGs because they had terrible Magic Defense and would legitimately die without it half the time, to say nothing of how punishing Death was back then because it would actually lower your max HP when you got revived.

As for the "Vast majority" that don't use their toolkits properly, this applies to every single role. Tanks that don't mitigate, DPS that freestyle their rotations are equally as guilty of not properly utilizing their toolkits but unlike Healers, Tanks and DPS haven't gotten lobotomized down to a single button rotation, yet. It's an asinine double standard in design that only applies to 1 role and is stupid to defend it just because bad players exist.

yeah, and unfortunately for healers, dps/tanks playing their classes bad (tanks not mitigating damage properly/at all, tanks/dps eating aoes etc.) give more to heal, in a manner of speaking