Is the "healing portion" of healers hitting a wall in EW?

[Raskbuck]

And I've seen the "combat medic" players satisfied to the detriment of the players who want to engage with the healer role by actually having to heal for long enough.

I can relate to this. I've adapted to the modern style as much as anyone else, and I've seen people ridiculing Sylphie a million times since ARR for wanting to only heal. Unfortunately there's not many options for people who legitimately enjoy just healing, since the game - and modern MMOs in general - are just not designed around it.

I wish that wasn't the case, but it is what it is. Clearly a lot of people enjoy the combat medic style.

Edit: Yes, I had fun spamming Cure and then resting in FFXI leveling parties. But now you whippersnappers are spoiled with your out-of-combat regen filling your HP in 5 seconds. (I'm just being playful. I realize times change).

[Sebazy]

Ew.. No it didn't, and if they add multi-dots back in I'm out. I'll never touch healers again and I know plenty of people with the same mindset.

Which begs the question, why wasn't it an issue for the ~4 years that the game had healers playing this way? Don't get me wrong, I don't think all the healers should get 3/4 dots back, but returning one of them back to that, SCH would probably make the most sense so that it's a play style option makes a ton of sense. Get some diversity back into the role. Give Sadge the procs, have WHM focus on generating burst through Lily/Blood Lily usage whilst AST sinks GCDs into a deck building mini game for card buffs.

At the end of the day I don't want a gun breaker healer. I just want content like Aglaia to be engaging. At this point I really couldn't care how SE do it as long as they do *something* as it's just beyond boring now. I've hit the point where I just can't stomach queueing casual content on my healer anymore as A) There's barely anything to heal & B) My other options are mash /beesknees or mash glare.

You're absolutely spot on with your pattern, I mean look at how just about every fight opens with an AoE like it's pretending that the fights actually going to somehow be involving. However pleases appreciate that there's a difference between wanting some DPS complexity for healers vs simply wanting healers to do more damage. Relative healer damage is the lowest it's ever been in this game since 2.0 but people aren't complaining about that. It's the tedium that's the problem.

[Silver-Strider]

I know what the situation is...

Do you though? The Healer should Heal mentality was already dying in ARR, according to you, and literally everything that SE has done has gone against it; From removing Healer support tools like Stoneskin from the GCD, to lowering the amount of healing needed to clear content, to reducing the cast time of DPS skills to 1.5s to allow weaving our oversaturated oGCD heals in between DPSing (a courtesy not really extended to Healing GCDs) and even just the MP discrepancy between DPS and healing goes against that mentality so why try and support it?


Seems like a waste of effort to try and install a mentality that never existed whereas DPS on Healers was previously supported but got removed.

[Atma]

Which begs the question, why wasn't it an issue for the ~4 years that the game had healers playing this way? Don't get me wrong, I don't think all the healers should get 3/4 dots back, but returning one of them back to that, SCH would probably make the most sense so that it's a play style option makes a ton of sense. Get some diversity back into the role. Give Sadge the procs, have WHM focus on generating burst through Lily/Blood Lily usage whilst AST sinks GCDs into a deck building mini game for card buffs.

At the end of the day I don't want a gun breaker healer. I just want content like Aglaia to be engaging. At this point I really couldn't care how SE do it as long as they do *something* as it's just beyond boring now. (...)

(...) However pleases appreciate that there's a difference between wanting some DPS complexity for healers vs simply wanting healers to do more damage. Relative healer damage is the lowest it's ever been in this game since 2.0 but people aren't complaining about that. It's the tedium that's the problem.

More complexity without more damage is illusory complexity. As for DOTs, I can't say definitively. All I can say is that I didn't play healers during that phase at all because of that stuff. I will stop if it comes back. So I mean it was an issue, it just wasn't an issue for me. No one should be forced into juggling multiple dots just cause they want to heal.

I would love for the content to be more engaging too, I simply fundamentally disagree with the notion the answer is in expanding healer DPS responsibilities. It is my opinion that the forums have a loud and vocal advocacy of players who, for lack of a more elegant way to put it, want to play DPS but play healers because they just don't want to deal with queues. Which is fair, but it's also not fair to force that mindset on the people who are interested in healers as *healers*

I want meaningful decisions in healing, I want more randomized instances of damage intended to keep me on my toes, I want more debuffs or situations that come up that require me to take action. OGCD heals should be the emergency option, not the standard.

If you want expanded DPS options - WHM and Sage do it right. They have damage abilities that are fueled by, and triggered by, the results of them actively using their healing toolkit which ultimately goes into a damage ability, Afflatus Misery or Toxikon. Those are examples to me of "healer dps abilities done right, not just adding more abilities. AST is a bit more dubious with their cards leading up to Divination which I *guess* is kind of damage in a roundabout way. You could talk me into shifting my mindset about expanding the healer DPS toolkit if and only if the abilities gained in question are enabled by the results of actual healing actions that would naturally occur from them adding more need to actively heal.

[Atma]

Do you though? The Healer should Heal mentality was already dying in ARR, according to you, and literally everything that SE has done has gone against it; From removing Healer support tools like Stoneskin from the GCD, to lowering the amount of healing needed to clear content, to the reducing the cast time of DPS skills to 1.5s to allow weaving our oversaturated oGCD heals in between DPSing (a courtesy not really extended to Healing GCDs) and even just the MP discrepancy between DPS and healing goes against that mentality so why try and support it?


Seems like a waste of effort to try and install a mentality that never existed whereas DPS on Healers was previously supported but got removed.

It was dying because players killed it it off. The "I wanna DPS" healers got their way by forcing their "not DPSing = bad" mentality into standard discourse. It was originally really only super viable the way people run dungeons when they healer outgeared the instance. Then it became the normal even when you didn't, which likely probably fueled part of the lowering of overall damage because again, "healers that don't DPS are bad." - it's not maybe the tank's gear makes them take hits like wet toilet paper, or maybe the healer is fresh to the instance and hasn't gotten a meaningful gear drop in a while (or heavens forbid both at the same time), or maybe just a dungeon where the game's gear scaling goes wonky (Bardam's Mettle). Nope, not DPSing = bad so you better be doing it.

Why try to support it? Because again, the current trajectory is unsustainable. Let's give you your way - they add healer DPS abilities. How many expansions can we go of them doing this before they're indistinguishable from DPS classes except for healing cooldowns instead of damage cooldowns? And even then at that point, then healers will just start complaining about "just being subpar DPS and we need DPS cooldowns too." It's not a forward looking mindset, it's at best asking for a band-aid for a sucking chest wound.

Edit: I'm hoping criterion dungeons successfully beat the present speedrunning mentality out of the playerbase. If people launch into that content pulling multiple packs and don't get pounded into the pavement, they're too easy.

[Rilifane]

Look, here's the situation, because I know what it is. People want "Gunbreaker, except a healer", and think that's the solution to this problem. But the problem is, they've gotten attached generally to the one that they like, so they want "Gunbreaker, except a healer" done to all of the classes. While I would certainly argue that Gunbreaker improved the tank situation because it got some DPS to finally just play a tank, I don't think this is the right solution because there is a different mindset within people who classically enjoy the healer role. All we can do is speculate because frankly it's impossible to know, but my belief is you lose more than you gain on that trade.


... I actually have to split this into two posts because it's too long.. hah...

No, people want to contribute.
Stop making it into a "you all just secretly want to play dps" when that's not what people are asking for. Many people asking for more dps buttons would prefer to have healing requirements drastically increased. Not just a little bit so it warrants using one oGCD more per fight but rather to a level where tank selfheal isn't nearly enough and you'll regularly have to dip into GCD heals to keep them alive.

Will that happen? No. Plain and simple. We're being realistic here. SE has done everything since ARR to go away from that healer model and they outright stated for years that they will not increase the healing requirement nor do anything else that affects fulfilling their primary role and the skill floor.
If higher healing requirements are out of question, as SE made quite clear with their changes and their explicit statements, we have support and dps left to contribute in our downtime. Support, however, has also constantly gotten deleted or replaced by general 2min raid buffs.
Tell me: what are our options? Realistic options, objectively speaking? We can have our pipe dreams but let's be realistic here for a moment.

You don't know the situation at all if you think this is about making every healer into a dps because we all just secretly want to play dps but can't admit it. Preferring a different route for healers is fine, being hostile towards people that aren't even against that is not helpful though.
Many healer mains have asked for years on end for higher healing requriements and repeatedly got shot down in PLL and other official statements. And most of these people have simply given up on asking for it and instead went for a compromise or their 2nd choice which is doubling down on the green dps route if SE stubbornly refuses to give us more to heal.

If it was entirely up to me, I'd have Cycle/ Terminal/ WL2/ CC level heal checks on dungeon bosses. Frequently. With lots of random damage flying around.
But it's not up to me.

It was dying because players killed it it off. The "I wanna DPS" healers got their way by forcing their "not DPSing = bad" mentality into standard discourse.

Why try to support it? Because again, the current trajectory is unsustainable. Let's give you your way - they add healer DPS abilities. How many expansions can we go of them doing this before they're indistinguishable from DPS classes except for healing cooldowns instead of damage cooldowns? And even then at that point, then healers will just start complaining about "just being subpar DPS and we need DPS cooldowns too." It's not a forward looking mindset, it's at best asking for a band-aid for a sucking chest wound.

Again: people want to contribute and want others in a teamplay-based game to also contribute.
Picking your nose, doing the /beesknees or overhealing isn't contributing and naturally, it's not exactly appreciated if 3 of 4 people constantly push buttons and one person stands there semi-afk and waits for things to happen. If contribution would be possible by healing more, by providing buffs etc. it would be entirely fine but SE took that away so all everyone has left to contribute once the laguahbly low healing requirements are met is currently dps.

[Nevermind]

My personal opinion before reworking healers and their abilities I say who ever Is in charge of fights needs to make the healers do something, healers by design are reactionary type of class, you heal after the damage Is dealt, SCH and SGE are similar but react to the mechanic before It goes off In general although with the amount of OGCDs they can pretty much do either or.

They need to make fights have more constant damage, the only time I actually feel like a healer and not a malefic/glare/broil bot Is sections like Add phase or FoF In P3s and thats because constant damage Is going out requiring ME to do something obviously Im just using ogcd's still but If more instances existed like that throughout the fight eventually my OGCDs would run dry and require me to actually use GCDS. Mechanics are so telegraphed and for some reason devs hardly decide to change It up for Example almost every double tank buster can be invul'd, tank swapped, or soaked together. Why not make it a god damn penta tank buster that can't be swapped, sure invul could soak a hit or two but if the devs did some tinker and made the busters spread out the healers would at least need to work on the last two busters. Im ranting but you get the idea, the devs themselves need to branch out and try new things that FORCE healers to do something about it because as it stands all a healer does Is press 1 ogcd and the mechanic is resolved

[Atma]

No, people want to contribute.
Stop making it into a "you all just secretly want to play dps" when that's not what people are asking for. Many people asking for more dps buttons would prefer to have healing requirements drastically increased. Not just a little bit so it warrants using one oGCD more per fight but rather to a level where tank selfheal isn't nearly enough and you'll regularly have to dip into GCD heals to keep them alive.

As much as I would reply in-line to this, the order to address some requires a lot of jumping around.

You don't know the situation at all if you think this is about making every healer into a dps because we all just secretly want to play dps but can't admit it.

I don't think 'everyone' is that way. But I don't think capitulation is the answer. However, I think *enough* people are like that to make the next statement infeasible -

Tell me: what are our options? Realistic options, objectively speaking? We can have our pipe dreams but let's be realistic here for a moment.

The realistic option is just stop healing. If the healer pool were to even remotely begin to dry up because people didn't just slog through it despite being disgruntled about the situation then eventually at some point they'd have to finally reconsider their hardline stance. But enough people will never do so, because plenty of people *do* want that. I saw how many people jumped to SCH when it was introduced and the Faerie was sufficient healing for content and people rejoicing over "green DPS". That's practically where the term originated. You can ask all you want, that easily ignorable. Forcing the matter is the second choice, but you will never get it to happen because too many people are opposed to the notion.

Accepting more DPS actions and more DPS responsibility will feel 'good' for exactly 2 weeks before they just bump up monster HP to compensate if they give more damage or after the coat of paint rubs off when you realize you're just pressing more buttons to contribute the same amount if they keep it on-par with where it is now. It's a lose/lose situation that just sets back everything. The only thing that will ever get to where it actually feels like we are contributing is to continue to apply pressure until there's a paradigm shift.

I'm not going to even attempt to organize such a thing, because I'll just get shouted down for having the audacity to think healers should heal. I've already had enough bad experiences with this community on that topic, I'll spare myself the grief.

[IDontPetLalas]

snip
I would love for the content to be more engaging too, I simply fundamentally disagree with the notion the answer is in expanding healer DPS responsibilities. It is my opinion that the forums have a loud and vocal advocacy of players who, for lack of a more elegant way to put it, want to play DPS but play healers because they just don't want to deal with queues. Which is fair, but it's also not fair to force that mindset on the people who are interested in healers as *healers*
I want meaningful decisions in healing, I want more randomized instances of damage intended to keep me on my toes, I want more debuffs or situations that come up that require me to take action. OGCD heals should be the emergency option, not the standard.If you want expanded DPS options - WHM and Sage do it right. They have damage abilities that are fueled by, and triggered by, the results of them actively using their healing toolkit which ultimately goes into a damage ability, Afflatus Misery or Toxikon. Those are examples to me of "healer dps abilities done right, not just adding more abilities. AST is a bit more dubious with their cards leading up to Divination which I *guess* is kind of damage in a roundabout way. You could talk me into shifting my mindset about expanding the healer DPS toolkit if and only if the abilities gained in question are enabled by the results of actual healing actions that would naturally occur from them adding more need to actively heal.

it is an opinion to claim that adding additional DPS or other skills that are not heals means that other people want those skills just because they want to skip queues. Now that may certainly be true for some players, and even so- so what? are you going to balance a job around the fact that some people do that? That also applies to people who play tanks - are you going to design tanks around that too? doesn't make any sense to me.

i understand that you may not want to juggle more dots, i'm not a big proponent of dot classes myself. that being said i wouldn't object at all if one healer had multiple dots since some people do enjoy that. i can understand that you want more challenging heals, however se has already said that this won't be done so we should have options to keep us engaged. that means that damage and buffs is the way to go.

i don't see what you mean by whm or sge does dps right. both are rather disappointing in their current state, and adding more dps abilities only if fueled by healing - what do you do once someone is healed- stop dpsing? no thanks. this would be even worse applied to anyone who wants to play their healer outside of group content.

[AetherStar_26]

The big issue is that people are trying to force what they want onto the game without realizing the game at its core is going to always be do as much damage as possible as long as enrages exist. I wouldn't say there's a healing/healing oGCD bloat because every healing option exist for a reason. Whether it be for recovery during a bad pull or to allow u to output more dmg through efficient healing. The biggest issue is that making healing more complex in this game runs the risk of many fights in normal mode being unclearable in Duty Finder. The most engagement you will get with this role will always be in savage and Ultimate because the average player will never be at the level needed to play a healer effectively. It seems to be intended that a healer needs to know when to heal and when to DPS rather than doing one over the other