It is not possible to play without doing dps as healer? every day i find someone...

[Seraphor]

WHM certainly doesn't have button bloat anymore now that they've deleted Protect. And how I love it when I don't have to faff about actually pressing skills! Maybe next they'll make the monsters' HP go down automatically. The effect would be identical.

We still have bars full of skills. What actually happened is that they deleted one from the 'long duration' category where button bloat is not felt as much to free up a slot for the 'use repeatedly' category where it's felt much more, so it increased the feeling of bloat, and in so doing took away a fun and friendly way to interact with people while questing in the world.

Can't disagree more.
It reduced button bloat because it removed a skill you rarely use (once every 30 minutes) in favour of skills you use much more frequently (adding more fun to the job). And while WHM may have a lower skill count than other jobs, I'm talking about all healers, Protect was after all a role skill.
There was absolutely nothing fun about waiting around for 10-30 seconds at the start of every duty for the Healer to hit the Protect button and then forget all about it.

Imagine if every skill had a 30 minute cooldown and you just had to spam Cure the rest of the time. Such fun!
That would be button bloat, loads of pointless skills just taking up space instead of using that space for useful skills.

[Semirhage]

It’s called toxic casuals. FF 14 has a decent number of these people. We’re trying to give helps for other people to get better or asking a simple question like “can you pls dps a little as healer” get you answers like “you don’t pay my sub” ( classic one ) or that people say that you are a rude person that is a toxic elitist.

Like I’m pretty sure some ff 14 player get out of the bed in the night having nightmares about people giving them tips on how too get better at the game.

For all the reputation I seem to have as resident Healer Subforum Wicked Witch, the circumstances under which I would tell one of these people to bite me is surprisingly narrow.

• New? I'll let you know that there's a lot more you can get away with than you think. If you're not ready, that's fine.
• Nervous? I'll give advice if you ask for it. Practice helps a lot.
• Tired? Yeah, probably me too. Slowing down isn't the end of the world.
• Just running roulettes and aren't interested in the details of increasing your healer skill? Okay. I've played competitive games that I was uninterested in climbing that ladder too.
• Don't think you can hack the skill ceiling? Sure, it's one dungeon for me.
• Just don't want to? I mean, it's so easy to do it that that seems extra lazy, but I can't stop you.

All that? That's cool enough. Pretending as if spamming Medica 2 makes you a genius healer, much better at the game than dirty sweaty tryhard oGCD weaving healers? Scoffing at the idea that managing your resources to minimize losses makes you a better healer? Sneering at the idea that minimizing your healing is a skillful choice rather than negligence? Yeah, that's where I call BS.

And those positions I call BS on seem to be how CBU3 thinks healers "should" be played.

[vetch]

Can't disagree more.
It reduced button bloat because it removed a skill you rarely use (once every 30 minutes) in favour of skills you use much more frequently (adding more fun to the job). And while WHM may have a lower skill count than other jobs, I'm talking about all healers, Protect was after all a role skill.
There was absolutely nothing fun about waiting around for 10-30 seconds at the start of every duty for the Healer to hit the Protect button and then forget all about it.

Having extra skills you have to spam in combat isn't inherently more fun (as we see with DRK vs. WAR); it's just preference whether you'd rather have a job with the 'random bullshit go!' meme or not. There's nothing inherently 'fun' about waiting for tanks to turn on tank stance and scholars to summon the fairy at the start of the duty but it's such an incredibly tiny delay in exchange for some amount of desperately-needed playstyle variety.

Imagine if every skill had a 30 minute cooldown and you just had to spam Cure the rest of the time. Such fun!
That would be button bloat, loads of pointless skills just taking up space instead of using that space for useful skills.

I can imagine lots of situations, I'd prefer to imagine one that actually resembles having one more buff and one fewer spamskill, like we were talking about, though. Also you haven't said what the 30-minute skills are, so I can't decide whether they're useful or not. A 10% damage reduction (that I can toss on newbs while questing to be friendly) certainly sounds much more useful and fun to me than 'remember to mash this oGCD on cooldown'.

[Tint]

A 10% damage reduction (that I can toss on newbs while questing to be friendly) certainly sounds much more useful and fun to me than 'remember to mash this oGCD on cooldown'.

That never was actually a thing. Protect could only be used on party members and people did not invited people to their party just to give them the buff.

However, I miss Protect and the moment at the start of a dungeon when everyone was waiting for the buff to be applied. Was a little sense of group bonding.

--------

Hoooowever on the topic itself:


I have a similar problem with my left hand. Playing a DD and keeping the GCD rolling is difficult for me. I played for years with no issue and had to stop almost a year ago. But the hand is not getting any better and I miss the game and my friends, so I started to play again and hope I can get along as a healer.

I actually have written some macros which will hopefully help me out with the Glare spam. Of course I know macros are bad for dpsing, but maybe not in the case of a damaged hand.

[ty_taurus]

That never was actually a thing. Protect could only be used on party members and people did not invited people to their party just to give them the buff.

However, I miss Protect and the moment at the start of a dungeon when everyone was waiting for the buff to be applied. Was a little sense of group bonding.

Healers have lost a lot of things from the transition into Shadowbringers, but I think we get too caught up on the smaller things that really didn't matter. Protect was not a tool that added substance to healer gameplay. The most you really did with it was remember to reapply it on a raised party member, but the idea of a 30 minute buff that's designed to always exist on the party may as well not exist at all. If you have a race where every player gets a handicap where they start 10% closer to the finish line, then it's not a handicap. All you did was move the start line forward. If it were something that healers had to be cognizant of in order to maintain on the party through some type of gameplay interaction, that would be a different story. But set it, forget it is not meaningful gameplay.

I think we're largely fond of the old healers because they had meaningful gameplay loops. They had more DPS tools, more mitigation, more utility, and that's what we miss. Things like Protect and old Cleric Stance may have been there too, but they're not what made healing fun, and they're not what we're ultimately longing for.

[vetch]

Healers have lost a lot of things from the transition into Shadowbringers, but I think we get too caught up on the smaller things that really didn't matter. Protect was not a tool that added substance to healer gameplay. The most you really did with it was remember to reapply it on a raised party member, but the idea of a 30 minute buff that's designed to always exist on the party may as well not exist at all.

You're speaking your own opinions as if they're objective truths and acting like you know what should matter to other people. Would you suggest that, as a 'set-and-forget' ability, Eos/Selene should be deleted despite how much people love her and replaced with an automatic SCH regen pulse? It'd be 99% identical apart from the aesthetic and the single button press, so you'd be on board with it, right?

I think we're largely fond of the old healers because they had meaningful gameplay loops. They had more DPS tools, more mitigation, more utility, and that's what we miss. Things like Protect and old Cleric Stance may have been there too, but they're not what made healing fun, and they're not what we're ultimately longing for.

The person you're responding to literally just told you why they liked Protect and it was none of the reasons you gave.

[GoatOfWar]

I miss a lot more stuff about WoW than just the way it handles healer DPS.

I miss giving hour-long buffs to the random people I met in the world. I miss silly things like Pick Pocket and Noggenfogger's Elixir that don't do anything for sweaty DPS optimization, they're just there to be fun. I miss having actual pet and DoT classes. I miss the elite mobs that would patrol the leveling zones and scare me (Fel Reaver, my beloved). I miss having the choice to loot or not loot that low-level monster I just killed, rather than having its worthless hides and meat automatically dumped into my inventory.

Yeah, despite it's many flaws i think class flavor has been done way better in WoW. There's something for everyone. Druids, holy paladins, discipline priests and holy priests all have their own very unique and cool gameplay. But with that, balancing the game in respect to the encounters becomes more difficult. I am so disappointed by the way healers are treated by the devs in FF. They all feel like clones with minor variations. The one that seems the most unique in gameplay is progressively being dumbed down and homogenised (ast)

In other games i am usually the healer and i love playing the role for the most part. But FF completely falls flat on the healer department. I WANT to play a healer, but they're so lame in FF. You spend like 15% of your time healing at best, while you spend almost all of your time dealing damage. And i love optimising damage on the side as a healer in other games, but FF just let's you spam 1 button over and over and over again until drool is rolling down your face. FF is the only game where healers who mastered their role are punished with vastly inferior gameplay.

[ty_taurus]

You're speaking your own opinions as if they're objective truths and acting like you know what should matter to other people. Would you suggest that, as a 'set-and-forget' ability, Eos/Selene should be deleted despite how much people love her and replaced with an automatic SCH regen pulse? It'd be 99% identical apart from the aesthetic and the single button press, so you'd be on board with it, right?



The person you're responding to literally just told you why they liked Protect and it was none of the reasons you gave.

I mean feel free to put words in my mouth. That's how an effective conversation goes, right? That's good discussion etiquette.

EDIT: Fine, I'll actually respond. I imagine you probably care a negative amount given how abrasive your response is, but there are good discussion points to go over so whatever. First and foremost, I was not so much trying to respond to her directly and instead was using her comment as a jumping off point to address something that I think is important. A lot of us think back to pre-ShB healers quite fondly, and for good reasons. The healers from before ShB had flaws, but overall had far more satisfying gameplay loops and decisions to make, and discussing why those iterations of each healer were well-liked (except WHM for SB at least) is important to help communicate what our community wants from the healer role. That said, I think that generally, those of us who praise the older versions of each healer have a tendency to see the forest and not the trees and sort of lump all aspects of those healers together as equally important in what made those healers fun to play. In this example, lumping old Protect back with other aspects like SCH having DPS buttons, or AST's old card system, but I don't believe old Protect had really anything to do with old healer engagement. It's more the idea of having more forms of mitigation and utility rather than the button that, in a perfect world, you press once and never again.

If we were to return Protect and JUST Protect, for example, it would do approximately nothing to improve the current healer situation and really just make getting KOed marginally more punishing. If you were to return SCH's Miasma and Shadowflare and JUST Miasma and Shadowflare, that would immediately improve the experience of playing SCH in a more quantifying way. Why I think this is an important discerption to make is because in the microscopic chance that this feedback makes to so someone with even a modicum of power, I don't want them to think something like "oh if we just return Protect, the healers will be happy." It's really difficult to try and please us as a whole because we constantly bicker and clash on these tiny details, and I feel it's important to point out what was and was not actually effective at creating a better healer experience in the old days.

In regards to Eos and Selene, you're comparing apples to oranges. Embrace may be a set-it-forget-it type of action, but the concept of having different pets that enabled different actions made the old faeries far more engaging because you had the power of choice. That choice wasn't always well-balanced and I do think having Selene be different would require a different set of tools than the SB Selene tools, but that would make your faerie pet much better once again. The issues with old Selene though were that attack speed is just a bad buff that many jobs do not want you to give them. Changing that to a raw damage buff or a crit buff would be much better, though it makes Selene the blatantly superior pet and that's a problem. AoE Esuna would be a really cool and interesting form of utility if SE ever actually had fights debuff us, but there tend to be less fights that inflict debuffs than there are patches per expansion, so while it's a good concept, it doesn't really work in this world where SE's combat designers don't believe in cleansable debuffs. I'd say maybe giving Eos more healing power and Selene something like Expedient so that you have the choice of healing power or utility could be more balanced.

[Sani2341]

Would you suggest that, as a 'set-and-forget' ability, Eos/Selene should be deleted despite how much people love her and replaced with an automatic SCH regen pulse? It'd be 99% identical apart from the aesthetic and the single button press, so you'd be on board with it, right?

TBH, yeah, having the fairy be around permanently would be nice, esp. if she'd be automatically summoned again after a rezz.
Back in the good old days, there was an actual reason for having two summon fairy skills, as they both had different abilites, and thus there was a potential reason to switch between them mid fight.

These days, it's just another tax for SCH's biting it/punishment for being unattentive after changing to the job. There is absolutely no reason not to ahve the fairy out, and the only reason to switch between fairies for SCH is cosmetics, which SE solved long ago for SMN and ACN.

So yes, turning the fairy from a pet you need to summon every dang time or be locked out of half your kit into a pet that's there all the time you have a SCH job stone equiped would be a massive QoL improvement for SCH.

[vetch]

I mean feel free to put words in my mouth. That's how an effective conversation goes, right? That's good discussion etiquette.

Ok. You presume to speak for others about what you think they should want from the game and get upset that someone else speaks for you. Alright.

EDIT: Fine, I'll actually respond. I imagine you probably care a negative amount given how abrasive your response is, but there are good discussion points to go over so whatever. First and foremost, I was not so much trying to respond to her directly and instead was using her comment as a jumping off point to address something that I think is important. A lot of us think back to pre-ShB healers quite fondly, and for good reasons. The healers from before ShB had flaws, but overall had far more satisfying gameplay loops and decisions to make, and discussing why those iterations of each healer were well-liked (except WHM for SB at least) is important to help communicate what our community wants from the healer role. That said, I think that generally, those of us who praise the older versions of each healer have a tendency to see the forest and not the trees and sort of lump all aspects of those healers together as equally important in what made those healers fun to play. In this example, lumping old Protect back with other aspects like SCH having DPS buttons, or AST's old card system, but I don't believe old Protect had really anything to do with old healer engagement. It's more the idea of having more forms of mitigation and utility rather than the button that, in a perfect world, you press once and never again.

If we were to return Protect and JUST Protect, for example, it would do approximately nothing to improve the current healer situation and really just make getting KOed marginally more punishing. If you were to return SCH's Miasma and Shadowflare and JUST Miasma and Shadowflare, that would immediately improve the experience of playing SCH in a more quantifying way.

But, again, the person you had responded to told you why she liked Protect: for the small group bonding moment at the start. Interpreting other peoples' comments as a jumping-off point to find common ground has to start with actually listening to other people. You can't just assume everyone likes what you like and go from there. You especially can't do it when they've already directly counter-indicated it.

Speaking for myself, I like long-duration buffs because 1) I like buffs for flavor, 2) in other games I've played they could be shared with strangers to be friendly, and 3) they shift some of the prepwork and reduce the overall cognitive load during combat. I have repeatedly said as much.

And yet somehow in interpreting what "our community" wants for healers, you arrive at "I don't believe old Protect had really anything to do with old healer engagement. It's more the idea of having more forms of mitigation and utility rather than the button that, in a perfect world, you press once and never again.", a summation which completely reverses and obliterates my stated position and substitutes your own desires in place of it.

If I seem to be irritated with you, it's because I'm irritated with you.

Why I think this is an important discerption to make is because in the microscopic chance that this feedback makes to so someone with even a modicum of power, I don't want them to think something like "oh if we just return Protect, the healers will be happy." It's really difficult to try and please us as a whole because we constantly bicker and clash on these tiny details, and I feel it's important to point out what was and was not actually effective at creating a better healer experience in the old days.

You feel it's important for you to speak for everyone so that on the off-chance a developer listens to the forum, they'll listen to you and not, say, someone who enjoys buffs because they offer a little bit of group bonding or because they reduce combat APM slightly.

In regards to Eos and Selene, you're comparing apples to oranges. Embrace may be a set-it-forget-it type of action, but the concept of having different pets that enabled different actions made the old faeries far more engaging because you had the power of choice. That choice wasn't always well-balanced and I do think having Selene be different would require a different set of tools than the SB Selene tools, but that would make your faerie pet much better once again. The issues with old Selene though were that attack speed is just a bad buff that many jobs do not want you to give them. Changing that to a raw damage buff or a crit buff would be much better, though it makes Selene the blatantly superior pet and that's a problem. AoE Esuna would be a really cool and interesting form of utility if SE ever actually had fights debuff us, but there tend to be less fights that inflict debuffs than there are patches per expansion, so while it's a good concept, it doesn't really work in this world where SE's combat designers don't believe in cleansable debuffs. I'd say maybe giving Eos more healing power and Selene something like Expedient so that you have the choice of healing power or utility could be more balanced.

I compared Eoselene as she exists now, as a single-purpose regen pulse aura, to Protect, a single-purpose mitigation tool. That's apples to apples. But let's set that aside, because the old fairies are an interesting topic in their own right.

I would rather Selene be fed messily to a crab than see her old form brought back just to be given the Balance Jr. treatment that has lobotomized every other DPS buff in the game. In terms of game feel, it's deplorable that the only desirable substats anymore are crit, crit-but-worse, and potency. It's creatively bankrupt. Overall, and not just in the case of deciding what to do with Selene, I would rather the developers design systems that actually support more variety of gearing choices.

I wasn't here when TP was around, but I've read about it, and I think it's a bit tragic that TP went away and speed builds became almost viable... only to be shut out again by the ascendancy of the burst window wherein cooldown slippage is regarded as one of the worst sins you can commit and consequently skillspeed is once again roughly as popular as intestinal flu. This is not to say that Selene must have a speed buff to please me, only that she mustn't have a boring, same-y crit/potency buff.

As for AoE Esuna, I feel like it runs into the problem where, if so many important debuffs are going out at once that you actually benefit from having an AoE Esuna over the regular kind, it would make SCH a strongly-preferred job for those fights, and I think that's something the devs want to avoid, isn't it? (Not that I agree with that stance of theirs.)

So yes, turning the fairy from a pet you need to summon every dang time or be locked out of half your kit into a pet that's there all the time you have a SCH job stone equiped would be a massive QoL improvement for SCH.

That's not what I said. I suggested deleting her visually and replacing with a regen pulse aura as a purposely unpalatable example because I was arguing a point about job feel being important. Actually removing the cute beloved fairies would have a major negative effect on Scholar players because despite it being a mechanical QoL gain to do so, a lot players love the feeling having a fairy follower brings to the job. Likewise with the loss of Protect buffs to the people who liked them.