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

[Renathras]

I mean, no need to look too far beyond.

I'm curious if this is a "good" thing or not.

Some people may love this, but if it ends up where parties aren't able to make because no one can find healers and the raid scene gets relegated to a small % of of the player base again, is that a good thing? I'm not so sure...

EDIT:

I'll be honest I've posted some wild shit here since I've been posting since I was like, seventeen, but gosh. Coming back here always fills me with a certain level of serotonin as I watch people try to argue that what we literally used to have in HW and SB for healer gameplay was 'bad', and that somehow reducing it to a majority of your uptime being broil is good for the healer fantasy.

I'm kind of curious: Who's making those arguments?

I attack hyperbole a lot because (a) it's annoying as all hell (do you enjoy when people "simply" your argument into one you aren't even making and gaslight you?) and (b) it prevents any ACTUAL discussion because all it's doing is alienating people for no reason who might otherwise agree with you in part on various compromise solutions.

Who is making the argument that a majority of uptime being Broil is good for the healer fantasy?

Most "Sylphies" want to be doing more healing/buffing (not Glarspamming), and most players on all sides of the argument are arguing for some change-up to some and/or all of the healer kits, either through adding a buffing functionality, a different damage kit, a different healing paradigm, or some combination.

I'm not sure I've seen literally anyone argue that they want the majority of their uptime being nukespam. I'm not going to say NO ONE has done it, but I haven't seen it.

This is what annoys me so much. CBU3 has created an entire generation of healers that do not know what a proper healing challenge is, they don't know how to effectively use their toolkit or sometimes even what their toolkit can do in the first place, because they never needed to. They were exempt from failure for over 2 years and it really shows when they face anything that can't just be facerolled through.

A second problem here is what the meta has deemed is bad. Almost anything in the game can be beaten with Cure2 spam (single target) or Medica 2 + Cure3 spam (AOE; Medica 1 if spreading is required), but people are so used to not pressing GCDs, there's an aversion to even hitting the buttons. Hell, you guys call me a Sylphie, but when I'm hitting my Cure 2 button because a run has gone off the rails and literally everything else is on CD, I feel genuinely bad having to do so.

The meta has developed to so incentivizing not touching GCDs, now that we're having realistic options to use some, people feel bad about using them. Doing my weekly normals last night, I decided to just case Regen on Tanks when they got the bleed. Made it super easy to keep their health up. But I hadn't been doing it because I'd been trying to "not cast a GCD heal other than Solace/Rapture" for so long, it felt like committing some kind of crime/sin to hit Regen because it was lowering my DPS uptime/potency to do so. It's frankly a weird feeling, considering to hear people here talk, I'm a "Curespamming Sylphie", but if even I felt that way, I would wager others who AREN'T such "Curespamming Sylphies" feel that way as well.

People are feeling overwhelmed, not because we don't have the tools to do it, but because we've been Pavlov Bell trained not to use them.

That's what it boils down to, isn't it?
SE is scared of letting healers fail. It's fine for tanks and dps to be able to fail but for some reason, healers must be exempt from this.

Part of the reason is optics.

If a Tank fails, it's generally not in a way that's noticeable (like can you tell for sure a Tank didn't use a mitigation at the last second? If you do parsing or have the run down to a science with the same geared Tank all the time, maybe, but otherwise, not so much), and if DPSers fail, it's also generally not noticeable unless they screwed up a mechanic and were in a COMPLETELY wrong place. Again, outside of running a parse, there's no clear way to tell if a specific DPSer wasn't pulling their weight, wiffing casts, etc. You just hit Enrage (or get closer than normal), but you can't isolate that down to a single person.

Moreover, when Tanks or DPS screw up, the Healer(s) are the ones to fix that. If someone takes avoidable damage, the Healers have to heal them. If someone dies, the Healers are generally the ones raising them. So when healers fail (e.g. both healers die to a mechanic), the run is over if you don't have a SMN/RDM unless you're already at the Enrage cast, and (for "soft enrages" where the boss is also sending out damage waves) the party may still die to that before finishing the boss off. Healers as a "point of failure" are so much more detrimental to a run - and IDENTIFIABLY detrimental for ridicule - that it makes the role less forgiving by nature.

That's why SE tries to make it more forgiving, and they've even pointed out this is why they do it. Because they know when Healers fail, the party fails and the community is not good at NOT being total jerks about it. When a DPSer or Tank fail, unless it's extremely obvious, they don't suffer that same ridicule. And, further, when they fail, Healers can potentially salvage the situation anyway.

Not ALL, but a significant enough segment of the community has become so toxic about this that SE feels, since they don't want to have a game with a toxic environment for players, they have to address it.

I think a big part of it though isn't so much that people who play healer are just bad, but that XIV's extreme reluctance to dish out the amount of damage needed to warrant the shear amount of healing tools we have has left healers unprepared to handle them effectively. And the problem is that SE will likely see this stress and then dial it back for the remaining raids. Then they'll go "well we tried to make fights deal more damage but everyone complained."

They need to keep this threshold of damage consistent and trickle that down into more casual content (by which I mean, introduce things like bleedbusters and double raidwides that can still be easier to manage in casual content, but gets people in the mindset of expecting that kind of heal check.) Over time, people will get better. At a certain point, you need to remove the training wheels, and just because your healer-child falls doesn't mean it's time to screw the training wheels back on. You have to let people fall if you want them to learn.

This isn't a bad idea in vacuum.

But again, we run into the problem of the community being jerks about it.

In this game, people have become accustomed to a certain level of "success". We all know people will drop party or kick/blacklist people after a failure or two as it is. And moreover, many people in the community will defend that behavior - "They're in a clear group and don't want to waste their time" and the like.

But the consequence of that is, we can't have a punishing environment on the casual level because of that behavior. It's not like Burning Crusade in 2007 where you had to go to Capital cities and /shout chat or /trade chat to put together a party for Heroic dungeons, spend time traveling to the dungeon (because you can't just que on), and have already devoted an hour before you even START the dungeon such that people are willing to stick with things even if they go south. In FFXIV, if things go south, you leave and find another party/que for another run and are in again in under 5 minutes. And because everything is datacenter with random strangers, there's no community policing of toxic behavior like there was in WoW circa 2007.

That kind of game CAN exist and work, but it requires different game systems, different opportunity costs, and different mindset from the community.