AST (and DRG) had their improvements pushed to 7.0 PLD are getting theirs in 6.3

[Renathras]

The played reality though is, that currently the core appeal of playing a healer is being able to enter Savage and even moderately well with a far lower skill level than what is required of any other role. I bite my ass that I made the decission to jump back into raiding in Endwalker as a Healer, because returning to other, challenging roles really shows how the Healer role had get me used to playing on a lower difficulty level than the rest of the team.

/sigh

And this is the kind of nonsense hyperbole elitism that ruins everything.

From the fights I've done, Tanking requires both less skill and less stress than Healing does. Especially on WAR, but pretty much on GNB, too. Tank rotations aren't that difficult, and generally you aren't watching out for party health - if you are, things have already gone horribly wrong and it's likely about to be a wipe because you aren't a PLD that can Cover the healer while they recover the situation and the Enrage isn't lax enough for that to work into a clear anyway.

WAR is hyper easy, and most bosses require little if any positioning. The only thing for the OT to worry about in P2S is going to the right wall for the blue man mechanics and taking the tether away from the party. The MT grabs the boss and just...turns it. That's essentially it. Oh, and both use CDs for the double Tank buster. That's really it. Every other mechanic they deal with, all the other players are also dealing with.

P1S has roughly 3 Tank swaps, which can be invulned through. Otherwise, Tank faces the boss north to make your melee's life a little easier and they meet the same mechanic requirements as every other player. ESPECIALLY if using braindead strat for intemp. And if not doing so, only one of them really has to worry about it, and all players, including healers, have to manage their intemp stacks. Healing P1S is more difficult than Tanking P1S is.

This also goes for a lot of the Extremes. Healing ZodEx is more difficult than Tanking it is - the only unique Tank mech there is a single Tank swap that you do, what, three times? And HydEx can be solo Tanked!

While you can argue Tanking is more difficult in some fights than those, Healing is also more difficult in other fights than those.

.

No, healing is not just for lazy/bad/low skilled players to get carries. I'm sorry you feel that way, but that's you being either an elitist, wrong, or both. I've done Healing and then gone to do other, LESS challenging roles like DPS and Tanking and been shocked at how much easier they are getting to play on a lower difficulty than the Healers on the team, who have to be playing on a higher skill level.

EDIT: Typo

[Semirhage]

No, healing is not just for lazy/bad/low skilled players to get carries. I'm sorry you feel that way, but that's you being either an elitist, wrong, or both. I've done Healing and then gone to do other, LESS challenging roles like DPS and Tanking and been shocked at how much easier they are getting to play on a lower difficulty than the Healers on the team, who have to be playing on a higher skill level.

I wouldn't necessarily say it's for the lazy, at least not in Abyssos. But my brain cannot be engaged by a role that spends hundreds of GCDs pressing one button over and over and over and over again, with the occasional dip into a boring, noninteractive healing oGCD or boring, noninteractive GCD. The window where your ability to rescue flagging parties gets narrower the harder the content gets; mechanics that one-shot you for failure get more common, and a tight enrage that kills your party for more than one or two mistakes renders the safety net a great healer can provide less useful.

Healers get more boring the more skilled you get. More Glare GCDs is your reward for playing well. This is bad game design.

[ty_taurus]

I really can't wrap ahead around looking at the healing role as it is and saying, "Yeah, I like that. One DPS button I spend almost the entire fight mashing like it's a Mario Party minigame, that's what I want to play." Even if you're in the camp of not wanting more DPS complexity on the healers, wouldn't you still want your GCD to encourage you to heal and support more rather than mash one attack spell?

[T-Owl]

/sigh

I'm just describing the reality of the healer role. Its distinct feature compared to other roles are its simplicity. you are mostly spamming a 1 button rotation and instead of added complexity or at least business, additional skills you gain while leveling make the class easier, because you get more and more ressources to not stop dpsing thrown at you. I mean, someone else repleid to me with a massive amount of copium of how the healer role is actually harder than the supposedly easy dps, when it is just not. DPS have to perform rotations while at the same time engaging with boss mechanics and keep their cds properly alligned for their 1 minute and 2 minute burst windows, while healers for most of the time just have to care about 1 button spamming and weaving in their plentiful ogcd ressources at pretty set moments in any encounter, because all damage is scripted.

It is objectively the easiest job, compared to the rotations other classes have to kept memorize and perform together with moss mechanics. For other classes, additional abilities become additional bloat to manage, for healers they become additional healing ressources to not having to cast heals. And yeah, its an elitist viewpoint, because in this community, trying to play healers well and not rely on cure 1 spam is already a hardcore gamer move.

[Punslinger]

No, healing is not just for lazy/bad/low skilled players to get carries. I'm sorry you feel that way, but that's you being either an elitist, wrong, or both. I've done Healing and then gone to do other, LESS challenging roles like DPS and Tanking and been shocked at how much easier they are getting to play on a lower difficulty than the Healers on the team, who have to be playing on a higher skill level.

I have but three words for you: Pot. Kettle. Black.

[Renathras]

I wouldn't necessarily say it's for the lazy, at least not in Abyssos. But my brain cannot be engaged by a role that spends hundreds of GCDs pressing one button over and over and over and over again, with the occasional dip into a boring, noninteractive healing oGCD or boring, noninteractive GCD. The window where your ability to rescue flagging parties gets narrower the harder the content gets; mechanics that one-shot you for failure get more common, and a tight enrage that kills your party for more than one or two mistakes renders the safety net a great healer can provide less useful.

Healers get more boring the more skilled you get. More Glare GCDs is your reward for playing well. This is bad game design.

I guess I do want to ask something here - on the topic of hyperbole - do you really press only one button?

I'm not talking GCDs. I'm talking buttons.

When I heal encounters, on WHM, the braindeadest of the braindead, the following are all buttons I hit frequently (and by "frequently" I mean "multiple times per minute" for buttons with no CD or "roughly on cooldown" for buttons with a cooldown):

Glare
Dia
Misery
Rapture
Solace

Presence of Mind
Divine Benison
Aquaveil
Assize
Asylum
Lucid Dreaming
Tetragrammaton

Do you seriously not hit those buttons? And note my definition of frequently. LESS frequently, but still used, also include Temperance, Liturgy of the Bell, Thin Air, Swiftcast, Raise, Plenary Indulgence, Medica 2, and occasionally Holy and rarely Cure 2, and really rarely, Cure 3. So I frequently hit 5 GCDs and 7 oGCDs, and less frequently hit 4 other GCDs much more situationally and 5 more oGCDs.

And this is on WHM.

On SCH and trying out AST, I seem to find myself hitting a lot more buttons because there are a lot more tools, oGCD weaves, and for AST, buffs.

I get you ARE spending "hundreds" of GCDs on Glare (and Dia), but you're also pressing a lot of other buttons in the interim, are you not? Or are you one of those bad healers that doesn't use oGCD healing tools? (That's sarcasm: I know you aren't one of those.)

You can argue they're "boring", but "boring" is a subjective term, not an objective one. I find DPS rotations either boring, annoying, or both. I can't say I've seen a DPS rotation I would describe as "exciting".

I do agree on the ability to rescue getting narrow in harder content, though.

You say more Glare is bad game design, but what would YOU say is "good" game design? More DPS button presses? On a HEALER? Many would say that, in fact, would be the bad game design.

.

EDIT:

I feel like the main problem in discussing the state of healers is that it seems impossible for people to do it without (a) rampant hyperbole and (b) stating subjective opinions as if they are universally agreed upon facts. If you guys could move away from doing those two little things, the conversation could probably advance far better.

I really can't wrap ahead around looking at the healing role as it is and saying, "Yeah, I like that. One DPS button I spend almost the entire fight mashing like it's a Mario Party minigame, that's what I want to play." Even if you're in the camp of not wanting more DPS complexity on the healers, wouldn't you still want your GCD to encourage you to heal and support more rather than mash one attack spell?

That's the thing - I and others have said, many many times, that we would LOVE to see healers have things like short duration buffs (that aren't RNG based or CD based like AST) on healers. Imagine if, for example, AST's Cards had smaller buffs, but lasted 10 sec and there was no CD on Draw so you could just fling cards left and right when you weren't actively needing to heal. Some people would love that.

Many of us - including me - have also advocated for having "the dps one, the buff one, etc" when it comes to healers, using the fact we have 4 healer Jobs to appeal to different playstyles of healer.

The problem is the "dps, more dps, more dps buttons, less healing, less healing buttons, and anyone who wants anything else is lazy/bad/etc etc" crowd won't have it.

As _I_ have said a number of times, we have 4 healers, let's leverage that to appeal to different playstyles. Some healer players would love to be buff bots. Many would love to be debuffers, but sadly FFXIV's combat system doesn't work for that at all. Many want to be dps bots. Some want a complicated dps rotation on par with a Red Job. Some absolutely love the system AS IT IS TODAY.

We have four healers, let's have one of each flex into each of those roles and see where the community/players go.

I suspect the reason a lot of "dps and only dps" proponents dislike that idea is because they know, deep down, their playstyle is the less popular one and many more players would rather play EW WHM than HW SCH. But my personal position is that as long as they are tuned (just the numbers game) to be approximately equal in damage output (the "only metric that matters"), then it shouldn't matter if one presses 10 DPS buttons to get there or another presses 1, players will pick the one they like best and more people will be happy.

I'm just describing the reality of the healer role.

No, you aren't. You're describing a subjective take that also happens to be a pretty insulting one to anyone who doesn't prefer your playstyle.

Healers DAMAGE KITS are simple, but not their healing and mitigation kits. Further, are you seriously going to argue that SMN's 2 button "rotation" and WAR's 1-2-3, weave 3 oGCDs, keep up a GENEROUS 30 sec buff that stacs to 60 (and is completely automatic in AOE), and use button 5 to dump resources or in burst is somehow galaxy brain compared to SCH optimizing Energy Drain use? Or MCH's 1-2-3, smash other GCDs on CD, in fact use MOST things on CD, and occasionally line things up into burst with a few general pointers (e.g. don't use Hypercharge when something's within 8 sec of so of coming off CD)?

Further, what makes a role HARD or CHALLENGING or REQUIRE SKILL is how it must use its kit while performing boss/encounter mechanics. Healer damage kits are simple because mechanics often require them to use their NON-DAMAGE KIT to deal with said mechanics. DPSer rotations are not "hard" in FFXIV (as people are fond of saying), the "skill" comes in performing them while performing mechanics. You're ignoring the larger portion of the skill puzzle by completely ignoring mechanics and that healers often have to engage with mechanics as much OR MORE than other roles do. Healers have to be engaged with tank buster/swap/etc mechanics and also DPS blue man/etc type mechanics, often have healer specific mechanics that no other role is engaged in or connected to at all or with anything other than possibly pushing an oGCD 1-2 times in a given fight, if that, and they have to do all this while making up for other players' mistakes.

I'm confused how you think that's "easy".

I also like how you put complexity and business together. You're not talking skill. You're talking busywork and plate spinning.

I also like that you (sarcastically) admitted the take on you being an elitist is correct. The issue is you don't even know what that is. No one in this thread or arguing against you is a Cure 1 spammer. Note the list of abilities above I said that I use frequently and infrequently. I actually try to see how much of fights I can clear without using a GCD heal (or none other than Solace/Rapture, anyway) as a matter of course. Which is the opposite of being a Cure 1 spammer.

.

It is SUBJECTIVELY - to you and those that think like you - the easiest role.

You are, like I mentioned above in this post, confusing your SUBJECTIVE opinion with OBJECTIVE facts and insisting your SUBJECTIVE position is OBJECTIVE reality.

Again: This is why we can't have nice things or productive discussions. You guys need to stop stating your OPINIONS as FACTS.

I have but three words for you: Pot. Kettle. Black.

You have three words, but they don't apply here in any way. The latter part was a retort in-kind, a common discussion tactic to demonstrate the absurdity of someone's position by showing a reflection of it. The former is not a pot/kettle situation since I'm not an elitist tryhard, and the other poster even admitted it was correct to classify them as such (albeit with sarcasm)

[T-Owl]

snip

Can you like just not immediately being so aggressive? You sound pretty toxic and hostil right now, just because I pointed out the reality of healing roles. Its really uncomfortable. Healing roles just by nature of how they are effectively utilized in this game, which has nothing to do with elitism or skill and basic knowledge, become easier as they progress in levels, because while in other games you utilize your generic casts more often and may hold some cds for emergencies, in this one you use your limited ogcd cooldowns for general healing purposes and use your generic healing casts for emergencies. By virtue of most aquired abilities from level 50 onwards being ogcd cooldowns, you get more and more ressources to prevent losing dps uptime. The healer kit growing just makes healers objectively easier, while for any other classes, they get harder by additions to their kit because their general pace increases with more ogcds and it is more cooldowns which they need to keep properly alligned and rolling, while healer get more material to fill the gaps between their pre-existing cooldowns, which makes it easier to not prematurely run out of ogcd heals.

I mean, outside of very few mechanics with very high and rapidly incoming damage which needs to be planned out, what is hard about healers? They have to perform mechanics while pressing one button, with almost all damage being predictable and unpredictable damage being rarely recoverable from, if happening in a row.

[ty_taurus]

That's the thing - I and others have said, many many times, that we would LOVE to see healers have things like short duration buffs (that aren't RNG based or CD based like AST) on healers. Imagine if, for example, AST's Cards had smaller buffs, but lasted 10 sec and there was no CD on Draw so you could just fling cards left and right when you weren't actively needing to heal. Some people would love that.

Many of us - including me - have also advocated for having "the dps one, the buff one, etc" when it comes to healers, using the fact we have 4 healer Jobs to appeal to different playstyles of healer.

The problem is the "dps, more dps, more dps buttons, less healing, less healing buttons, and anyone who wants anything else is lazy/bad/etc etc" crowd won't have it.

As _I_ have said a number of times, we have 4 healers, let's leverage that to appeal to different playstyles. Some healer players would love to be buff bots. Many would love to be debuffers, but sadly FFXIV's combat system doesn't work for that at all. Many want to be dps bots. Some want a complicated dps rotation on par with a Red Job. Some absolutely love the system AS IT IS TODAY.

We have four healers, let's have one of each flex into each of those roles and see where the community/players go.

I suspect the reason a lot of "dps and only dps" proponents dislike that idea is because they know, deep down, their playstyle is the less popular one and many more players would rather play EW WHM than HW SCH. But my personal position is that as long as they are tuned (just the numbers game) to be approximately equal in damage output (the "only metric that matters"), then it shouldn't matter if one presses 10 DPS buttons to get there or another presses 1, players will pick the one they like best and more people will be happy.

I think you're misinterpreting this aspect. This game has 2 major aspects to all encounter design: The boss mechanics and your jobs rotation. Healers are denied that second half because they don't have a rotation. Much of the engagement any given player will feel as a healer is self-inflicted healxiety over seeing healthbars drop and not having the familiarity of the job enough to feel in control even when things turn out fine. Or it's a lack of fight design experience, such as when a new raid tier comes out, which means planning your resources in the form of content that actually asks you to use at least half of your healing buttons can be a process of trial and error--a process that is short lived.

As it stands, the current design of healers benefits none of the archetypes of healer players you listed at a higher level. 80-100% 1 button DPS spam does not appeal to players who want an offensive healer because they want a real rotation. It does not appeal to players who want to be support-focused buff bots because they're forced to continuously engage with the enemy rather than their teammates if they want to adequately contribute to the party. It does not appeal to players who want debuff-focused control healers because there are no debuffs to inflict. It does not appeal to players who want to power heal through large quantities of damage because there is no damage being delivered in most content, and even in savage once you've gotten familiar with a particular fight there are still wide spans of time between outgoing damage.

Why "more DPS" topics continue to thrive is because that is the most straightforward and easily addressable way to make the healers offer a legitimate gameplay loop given the combat system of this game. I promise all of these people would wholeheartedly appreciate other builds to each healer such as a dedicated buff healer if one could be made in such a way that respected FFXIV's encounter design and was able to feel balanced alongside the other healers, much like what I've talked about in the past.

The reason why those of us in this camp look at others not wanting the current status quo to change describe that as "lazy, bad, or low skill" is because the only logical explanation to why anyone would actively not want the current healer design to change is to preserve the current healer approach to content which, by design, excludes 50% of the expected player required engagement with content--having a rotation/gameplay loop. It comes across as "I don't want to work as hard as every other role. I want to continue not having to think about what buttons I press." There is no other logical explanation to this as, like I described earlier, the current healer design benefits literally none of the camps of healer players other than those who like that they can hit max optimization with virtually no effort outside of boss mechanics. It also demands that existing jobs not be allowed to grow and develop over the course of the game as some players never want to engage with anything other than the barest of minimums, and that feels very aggravating to the rest of us who want all the healers to feel engaging in their own ways. No job should have to be handicapped because some people are disinterested in putting in the other half of the expected effort required to play this game.

If we absolutely MUST have the no-effort-required healer, why not split CNJ off into its own thing: CNJ II? WHM gets to have an actual rotation with engaging tools and adequate utility, and CNJ II gets a stronger 1 button nuke that compensates for the loss of WHM's otherwise more varied gameplay style, lacks in utility and mitigation like current WHM does, but otherwise is capable of keeping up enough with the other healers to get through content. We can even ax Aero/Dia and it quite literally just has 1 DPS button. Would that satisfy you?

[Renathras]

Can you like just not immediately being so aggressive? You sound pretty toxic and hostil right now, just because I pointed out the reality of healing roles. Its really uncomfortable.

Can you like, not just immediately be so aggressive and rude? You sound pretty toxic and hostile right now, just because I pointed out you're not dealing in reality, you're trafficking in opinion. It's really uncomfortable.

Look, ceasefire/peace treaty/armistice?

All I'm saying is you AREN'T pointing out "reality". And no amount of times you SAYING so will make it true. You can say "reality" over and over again, you're still not talking about reality.

All I'm saying to you is what you are doing is talking abut your subjective opinion. You just want your subjective opinion to be objective reality because "____ is fact" has more weight with people than "I think ____". For my part, I'm fine with people having opinions, so I won't fault you for expressing them. I will fault you with insisting your opinions are facts when they are not. Fair? I've even explained why it's not fact to you as a courtesy already.

You having an opinion that healers are easy or boring or whatever is perfectly fine. It is your opinion, and opinions DO matter, but they also aren't facts. What this means is that they are not universal. Not everyone will hold that position, so healers should not be changed (or not ALL healers be changed) for that. See my longstanding position above about how we should leverage the fact (and it is a fact) that we have four healers (five if you count WAR) to encourage and enable different players' playstyles to have a place in the game.

It also doesn't help that your position is one which attacks the role and players in it, both unfairly and for no good reason. Doing so certainly doesn't help in the discussion, at the very least. Again, WAR is subjectively easier than SCH or AST. So is SMN. So is MCH. And some people might argue this is true of other Jobs/roles as well, but I'll stop with those since the cases largely speak for themselves.

Again, stop saying "reality" and "objectively" when what you are referring to is "opinion" and "subjectively" and I won't have any cause to contest you on it.

[T-Owl]

Toxic snip

Dude, you are literally gaslighting people instead of making arguments and call other people toxic. Sorry that I don't care about publicly calling out online abusers? No armistice, try self-improvement. But considering the fact that basically every single dedicated savage healer is telling you that healers played at a level were optimization matters are not fine and that the role is just not engaging or exciting the way it is designed right now when trying to optimize, I would say you prefer entitlement. Your entire argument after all is based aroudn the fact that you don't want healers to change because you consider having to perform a rotation that is more busy than pressing 1 too stressful and not rewarding, while somehow mental gymnasticing roles which have rotations that require more different buttons to be pressed to be easier. Thats trying to make people engage in doublethink, which again is an abuse tactic. Sorry, you are not the nice guy. Sorry, Healers are heavily flawed in this game. They lack distinct healing styles compared to any other mmo on the market outside of maybe some very oldschool ones and they get progressively easier and repepetetive due to getting more and more ogcd ressources which are, even in high end content, only situationally all required.