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

[Renathras]

Violent snip

You know, I think I AM going to just ignore you. I replied to you there, you can go read the reply there.

EDIT: And so you know, your behavior is reportable...

But I'm going to move on and try to ignore you now. You're just being a bully at this point and ruining everyone else's attempt at having an honest and decent discussion. You don't want to make peace with me, fine. Be Putin. I'm more interested in having good faith discussions with other people.

[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.

[T-Owl]

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.

To be honest? I think one of the issues is how clunky healing actually is. In Effect, your heal spells would be your oh shit button if shit goes wrong and run out of other ressources, but healing casts are fairly slow in this game. There is also the issue that the entire Makro System is broken and mouse over healing is pretty clunky when seriously, mouse over healing should be the standart for MMOs right now. Outside of maybe very new beginners who haven't run into addons yet, you will not see people lovering themselves to tab target healing in WoW, because its just not an effective method of targeting very specific, changing targets. The way FF14 healing in general has evolved to work, use your cds first and your casts for oh shit moments, is also counter intuitive and something not teached to players by the game, because CBU3 is on full on copium that people don't hate and resent sylphies with a passion.

To all of you, if you see a healer in a dungeon who fully dedicates to healing and never ever dpsing, do you think "Oh, they're is so focussed on healing and supporting us, such a great person" or do you end up being annoyed because you know this will just drag the run?

[Renathras]

To be honest? I think one of the issues is how clunky healing actually is. In Effect, your heal spells would be your oh shit button if shit goes wrong and run out of other ressources, but healing casts are fairly slow in this game. There is also the issue that the entire Makro System is broken and mouse over healing is pretty clunky when seriously, mouse over healing should be the standart for MMOs right now. Outside of maybe very new beginners who haven't run into addons yet, you will not see people lovering themselves to tab target healing in WoW, because its just not an effective method of targeting very specific, changing targets. The way FF14 healing in general has evolved to work, use your cds first and your casts for oh shit moments, is also counter intuitive and something not teached to players by the game,

I honestly agree with everything here.

Cast time healing spells are, at this point, almost an afterthought, and not great at dealing with emergency situations, which are the situations you in theory are using them for. They work okay in scripted/expected situations, but you use oGCDs for those. I also agree that mouseover is nice for K&M players. I play with a controller, so...but I like FFXIV's targeting system with controllers, honestly. It's only awkward when trying to target someone not in a party with you.

To all of you, if you see a healer in a dungeon who fully dedicates to healing and never ever dpsing, do you think "Oh, they're is so focussed on healing and supporting us, such a great person" or do you end up being annoyed because you know this will just drag the run?

If I'm not healing, I'm tanking. And when I que for 4 mans, I don't do it if I am short on time. A run taking 5 mins longer doesn't bother me. If a healer is focused on healing (especially in lover level stuff), I'm perfectly fine with it. It means I won't die and can pull as much as I want. If they're only casting heals AND I'm dying anyway (like just targeting themselves and casting cure and letting everyone die), I suppose I might have an issue with that, but I've never seen it. If a healer is just healing, I'm fine with it.

EDIT: So to be clear with the answer - yes, I do think "They're so focused on healing and supporting us, they're a great/nice person". Though I also tend to think most people are nice unless given reason to think otherwise as my default setting. My assumption is that they're nice and probably nervous and maybe new, and I want to encourage them. So I'll usually also say something encouraging and give them a comm at the end. Especially if it seems they're relatively new. Everyone was new once, and the game doesn't really teach you that healers should be DPSers anyway.

[ty_taurus]

I honestly agree with everything here.

Cast time healing spells are, at this point, almost an afterthought, and not great at dealing with emergency situations, which are the situations you in theory are using them for. They work okay in scripted/expected situations, but you use oGCDs for those. I also agree that mouseover is nice for K&M players. I play with a controller, so...but I like FFXIV's targeting system with controllers, honestly. It's only awkward when trying to target someone not in a party with you.

It's very bizarre, the relationship between GCD heals and OGCD heals. The game never says anything directly about their relationship, but the way so many OGCD heals are gated behind higher levels, and the way a player would naturally think about GCD being a pseudo-limitless resource vs the cooldown-based OGCD heals... It paints a picture of GCD healing being your go-to and your OGCD heals being your panic buttons, but it's the exact opposite, and yet GCD heals don't feel like panic buttons at all. They largely have cast times, come at the opportunity cost of your damage contributions, and are what chews through your MP (which while not a challenging thing to manage for moderate-to-higher skilled healers, the players who would most likely feel the pressure to hit panic buttons are also largely the worst healers at managing their MP because they're quick to smack Cure III, or are the types of barrier healers that think the party needs to have a barrier on at all times).

Logically, it would make sense for GCD healing to be fast to cast as well as cheap--if not free on your MP simply because it has an opportunity cost of optimization. You can use them to feel safe and keep the party alive but your DPS output will drop as a result.

[T-Owl]

I honestly agree with everything here.

Cast time healing spells are, at this point, almost an afterthought, and not great at dealing with emergency situations, which are the situations you in theory are using them for. They work okay in scripted/expected situations, but you use oGCDs for those. I also agree that mouseover is nice for K&M players. I play with a controller, so...but I like FFXIV's targeting system with controllers, honestly. It's only awkward when trying to target someone not in a party with you.

I can't talk about controller healing, though I heard from a friend that it seems easier than current K&M healing, but if SE really wants to make healing more accessible, simplifying their toolkit, incoming damage and reducing their dps rotation is really a small step compared to how much a build in smooth mouse over system would help. Just letting Voodoo run in WoW is such a night and day difference in what plays more smoothly.

If I'm not healing, I'm tanking. And when I que for 4 mans, I don't do it if I am short on time. A run taking 5 mins longer doesn't bother me. If a healer is focused on healing (especially in lover level stuff), I'm perfectly fine with it. It means I won't die and can pull as much as I want. If they're only casting heals AND I'm dying anyway (like just targeting themselves and casting cure and letting everyone die), I suppose I might have an issue with that, but I've never seen it. If a healer is just healing, I'm fine with it.

EDIT: So to be clear with the answer - yes, I do think "They're so focused on healing and supporting us, they're a great/nice person". Though I also tend to think most people are nice unless given reason to think otherwise as my default setting. My assumption is that they're nice and probably nervous and maybe new, and I want to encourage them. So I'll usually also say something encouraging and give them a comm at the end. Especially if it seems they're relatively new. Everyone was new once, and the game doesn't really teach you that healers should be DPSers anyway.

To be honest, even with new players it seems to be common knowledge to at least throw some dps spells when there is nothing to heal, pure healing is really more of an entitlement issue, where I am like, Yeah, there are other games for that. And you usually can see who is a newbie, where I personally feel like it should be at least common courtesy to tell them that cure 1 is a trap. But in that case, I also blame SE for not teaching new healers how healing in FF14 is usually done and making White Mage such a noob trap. Because its not a skill issue, its just an issue of knowing how to play healers in this game. With Endwalker I tried it out myself, after never seriously playing healer I just picked up Sage and just by knowing that dps uptime will become important later on, it was easy to utilize an aggressive playstyle.

[ty_taurus]

To be honest, even with new players it seems to be common knowledge to at least throw some dps spells when there is nothing to heal, pure healing is really more of an entitlement issue, where I am like, Yeah, there are other games for that. And you usually can see who is a newbie, where I personally feel like it should be at least common courtesy to tell them that cure 1 is a trap. But in that case, I also blame SE for not teaching new healers how healing in FF14 is usually done and making White Mage such a noob trap. Because its not a skill issue, its just an issue of knowing how to play healers in this game. With Endwalker I tried it out myself, after never seriously playing healer I just picked up Sage and just by knowing that dps uptime will become important later on, it was easy to utilize an aggressive playstyle.

One of my friends is a casual player who took a break after 5.4 and returned to EW in 6.1. She plays as a SCH, and during Tower of Zot, while she was trying to remember some of her cooldowns, she felt pushed to spamming Physick on the tank to keep them alive during big pulls between bosses 1 and 2, and especially in the pulls between bosses 2 and 3. The tank literally died anyway even with 100% of her GCDs going toward Physick, which proves just how bad these tier 1 heals are at this point.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

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

Yet people did clear, a decent amount that is! W/ all 4 healers, which is more than enough of a tell that it's not overtuned for the difficulty it implies, healing wise. There are even unorthodox comps arising such as dupe healers that can still clear just fine. But moving on..

Here's what never sits right to me from that bolded part:

• First of all. No matter how easy they make the job/role/duty, there's always the outliers from the top and the bottom percentile. By continuously pleasing the latter, before long we'll be at the rock bottom with nothing left to mutilate but somehow still seeing folks failing. On the flip side, this also often hurts the players who invested the most amount of time learning and loving the ins & outs of their chosen job. Why do I waste my time trying to learn my job/role or the duty if the correct answer to this is to just complain endlessly until they take away that nuance? I am never a fan of dumbing down for this reason unless said contents are vastly overtuned for the difficulty they implied.
  
• Then second. That's EX/Savage+ content we're talking about; player should at least understand what exactly to expect out of it. I.e. knowing how to play adequately w/ their chosen job/role, hours of learning be it figuring out the mechanics, figuring out what's the best action to counter said mechanic, dying -many- times, etc. It's all part of the package. I think that's totally fine and they should keep it that way. It's a content where people will get f***ed up real bad many times, not every content is made to please everybody. Those mechanics, deaths, hours invested, all acts as indicators to let players figure out whether said content is for them or not. That is why it's so weird that they're trying to lower that barrier of entry, the very thing that lets their player figure out what content they're likely suited for. There are multitude other content outside these high ends to tinker about; they can even unsync those later on! They're not missing out on anything.

Regarding the bleedbusters.. honestly? I relish it. Partly because:

[...]We had all these fancy skills like[...]

This goes back to "why you give me all these fancy buttons if the tanks can just shrug it off with their own tools for the most of part"?

A mini example I remembered in Asphodelos tier, not once I ever considered to use 'Recitcogitation' in first two floors; not even normal Excog outside screw ups. It was largely reserved for 'Recitability' or Spreadlo.

P5S finally warrants some use of it. Granted it won't be too long until I'll cut back those out but man it feels ecstatic to finally have a different use for Recitation without needing to clear first two floors. Heck, even trying to catch the bleedbuster with Soil also feels great. My stacks no longer (at least for now..) went into mindless "hahalol 6 energy drains go brr brr".... and both of my previous and current statics aren't even mid-hardcore to begin with -.-

[Derio]

If you play PLD you know how janky its current kit is and how it really doesnt work well with the whole 2 minute burst window meta that the devs have developed. We have seen in almost every patch since EW release that PLD has seen some kind of adjustment.

While AST does need a rework, its kit is fine to last till the end of the expansion. DRG has reached critical mass so they need to rework the job inorder to be able to add things.

[T-Owl]

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...

On that one, if endgame raids having serious healing checks that challenge healers is driving people off the role, isn't that proving my point of the role having become the one of low expectations?

A second problem here is what the meta has deemed is bad.

That isn't a meta issue though. Thats a gameplay issue, that healers are designed in a way that in most situations outside of general party failure which should justify a wipe and some rare high end game healing checks, those gcd skills come at an opportunity cost that just makes them not worth it, because in 99% percent of gameplay situations, you can perfectly keep the group alive without spending a single gcd heal. I mean, I wouldn't call myself the best of healers but just by virtue of my boyfriend knowing what he does when he tanks I could get away in expert roulette dungeons without spending gcd heals. Not to forget that these gcd tools are kinda shit for half the healer classes in the game, try picking up bloodbornes living failures having rolled a tank as a sage with gcd heals when you've been out of ogcds.

Part of the reason is optics.

Then maybe the game shouldn't allow players to get away with so many mistakes. Like, just restrict all battle rezz in all encounters. Instead of punishing dps for failing mechanics, in most content death is an inconvenience to healers first and foremost. In WoW this problem in my opinion is less pronounced because the game doesn't pushes healers to fix the mistakes of others indefinetely. If you are lucky, you have a class with brezz and that one is highly limited by cd. If somebody failed mechanics, they failed. Though WoW in higher end dungeon content also pushes more responsibilities to tanks and dps, like cc and interrupts.