Helare shortage in PF: what would bring you back?

[GrimGale]

"Oh no, my 150+ casts of Glarebroil per boss go down to 130+. Now that I am actually *engaged* with healing I just wont play healers anymore."

It's undeniable that there is more healing to do, but casting the odd Adloquium or blanketing the raid in a GCD heal a few more times doesn't make the healing process much more interesting IMO, considering we still spend most of our time just weaving oGCD heals between the tedious and repetitive nuke spam. Which by the way gets more and more prevalent the more gear and experience with the fight we get.

[Liam_Harper]

More challenge that comes from my role/ class instead of the stupidity of my party members.

Basically this.

Group mitigation can be the difference between an incredibly smooth 0 GCD heal run and tanks getting melted by the first tankbuster. While I'm all for having more to heal, I dislike when it's only because the tank is refusing to press basic buttons. Or when we got deleted by a raidwide despite a group having about 8-9 different mits they could have used and getting told "just GCD shield". In these cases it's not real challenge, it's just an easy fight artificially made difficult by incompetence.

There is even the fact that a lot of players don't actually know that Bleeds snapshot mit at the time of application. (So if you had 1 second left on a tank cooldown and took a 20 sec bleed, the tank cooldown would apply to the entire thing). There is a lot of late mitigation from people thinking you can just weaken the DoT ticks midway.

Besides that, co-healers are a big reason I avoid PF too. In the same way tanks and dps don't coordinate mitigation, co-healer coordination is non-existent too. It's just blind spam of heals on light damage, but nothing when heavy damage happens. No rez priorites, wasting my HoT's, not covering me if my resources run low.

Many player complained about healer's not having to heal so much and it becoming a boring role.
Now we have a raid tier that actually needs more healing and we get a healer shortage.

What's sad is while I've posted my own opinion of why I avoid PF, I feel like the real reason is healbots are struggling. The same self-proclaimed "REAL healers" who throw blind Medica II's and afk half a fight and will write up lectures about how dps healers are bad and they focus on keeping the group alive. They don't really know what to do on Purgation while they're constantly on the move or when 2 tanks take a bleed tankbuster with barely any mit. Headless chicken mode and a Medica II isn't cutting it.

This tier is actually very easy to heal, in a coordinated static it's a joke until p8s part 2. P6S is practically no real damage, just evenly spaced mit check raidwides that line up for your cooldowns.

[ty_taurus]

Agreed, the no 1 and 2 reason why people die is not that a healer focusses too much on dps.
It's either personal failure and standing in the bad, outranging mit or heals or party mit in general being crap. And I dislike this approach of "If someone gets more responsibility, I want more tools to take away that responsibility because I don't trush them" - not like healers or tanks have a mega nuke on demand if dps are bad or healers and dps can throw mega mit and aggro bonus if a tank failed to voke/ shirk or mitigate a buster and the boss suddenly turns to the dps that's 2nd in aggro.

We need to be able to fail. All of us. And yes, it will affect others. Dps being bad will prevent a kill. Healers being bad will prevent a kill. Tanks being bad will prevent a kill. It's highend content and for me, that's a good thing because it drives the point home that you better push that button or else.
Every time someone gets more tools to take away responsibility from someone else, that someone else is now free to play poorly. I don't think that should be encouraged and I'm against coddling healers even more by giving everyone tools to make the entire role even more superfluous than it already is.

On a side note: I WISH healers would be more focussed on damage, I generally see the opposite and they happily do half the damage they could without breaking a sweat. If people die from lack of healing, it's usually because those healers are simply bad, heal completely reactively even after countless pulls and don't notice when heavy damage hits and when the party is safe at low HP.

I saw this comment on a YouTube video as well... "Healers can't do their job now and you want to give them more to do?" So what? Let's just neuter every job in the game so that bad players can't trigger a wipe? First of all, there will always be bad players no matter what you do. Someone will not do mechanics right, or may not even cast all. Sure, maybe there are some thresholds of complexity that are too intense for this game, but it's a two way street. At a certain point, oversimplification stops making jobs accessible and just punishes the players that enjoyed that complexity. It's like punishing the class for the crimes of the one. It makes no sense, job design should not be dictated by the lowest common denominator.

Moreover, why is our community so afraid of failure? I understand it's frustrating to lose time over attempts at clearing fights, but it's a game. Not every attempt at a hard fight is going to end in success. Sometimes it's because you have someone in your party that continues to make the same mistakes over and over again. That's not a healer thing, it's a player thing. That's the nature of playing a game where hundreds of thousands of other people are playing at the same time as you.

[MisterNublet]

Give healers the tank treatment. Give us similar dps rotations and damage abilities.

[IceBlueNinja]

Make Blue mage a full time job and delete the other 4 healers. Blue healer stance is fun(joking on delete the 4 healers btw). I dont get how blue has such potential yet it remains limited.

[Rithy255]

Just remove then from the game summoners can physick it's fine!

Realistically, it's because the healing requirements are pretty harsh:
Ideally, you would want to give healers a small rotation or some more damage buttons, but tone down the healing requirements (a bit), it's something they should fine tune and find a good middle ground, I don't think most people really wants to play 1 button spam, but making Healing requirements harsher I don't think makes the job more "fun" for a lot of players just makes it harder and annoying if players aren't really trying to help the healers or mitigate well, obviously you don't need to even make healer rotations "complicated" just more interesting then whatever we got now.

Another problem I find is any new healer getting into savage gets babied in normal fights and wouldn't really know what to do in a harder fight, as a DPS and a tank generally you use most of your kit for runs, normal content teaches healers to spam their one attack button and throw out a OCGD here and there.

Making Healer more engaging is tough, it's more or less trying to make the job more appealing to pick up in the first place, I remember leveling White Mage and being bored out my mind when i maxxed it out I thought I'd at least have a few more offensive spells, more to do you also got to pull in the new players who will become healer players you got to balance healing in a way that appeals to new players, right now casual healing is so easy and forgiving then stepping into any of the new savage content is a massive shift in what you are going to be doing.

[Derio]

Probably the amount of dps who dont use their own mitigation tools or who dont even have feint or addle on their bar.

But it has to be the gameplay loop for healing. The one button spam is just bad. WHM and SGE are the only ones that have a big hitting move outside the 1 button spam but that is lackluster when you see what healers used to be.

Its sad because we do not see them adding anything to healers to keep them "Simple to jump in and play"

[Risvertasashi]

Its sad because we do not see them adding anything to healers to keep them "Simple to jump in and play"

I've kind of covered why I quit (and thus what would bring me back) in previous threads but... I worry that, if SE also thinks there's a shortage, they'll just go "Oh no we made healing too hard! Time to simplify again!"

Ok, so SE has apparently made healing a bit harder since I've left the role. At the encounter level. Appreciate the effort SE, but, well - pressing '1' "only" 200 times instead of 230 times (Or... as someone above said, 130 vs 150 if fights are shorter) doesn't really fix the fundamental complaint.

[Renathras]

I know what would drive me away: Healers having damage rotations. I'd quick healing in ANY high end content and the healer shortage would get worse.

Also taking inspiration from what WoW does. Same with Tanks. There is no denial that no matter its flaws, WoW at least cares about making Tanks and Healers interesting and unique from each other.

This is honestly not a bad thing, but keep in mind how WoW does this is by having variations in healers. For example, WoW's Holy Priest (and Resto Druid if Balance subspeced) play almost like a Sylphie WHM in FFXIV today. But they do this alongside having melee healers (Mistwalker, Healadin), and the heal by damage Discipline Priest (RIFT had the Chloromancer, too). And all these variations on healing are allowed to co-exist in the same game at the same time.

There's zero reason FFXIV couldn't do the same, especially since it already did this back in ARR where both the pure healer (WHM) and support heal/dps hybrid (SCH) were accommodated and played in high-end content at the same time.

EDIT:

Probably the amount of dps who dont use their own mitigation tools or who dont even have feint or addle on their bar.

But it has to be the gameplay loop for healing. The one button spam is just bad. WHM and SGE are the only ones that have a big hitting move outside the 1 button spam but that is lackluster when you see what healers used to be.

Its sad because we do not see them adding anything to healers to keep them "Simple to jump in and play"

This argument comes up a lot, but when are we talking about?

WHM has the same number of damage spells now as it did in the past, and one more than it had in ARR (or two more, depending on how you're counting). Don't believe me? ARR: Aero, Aero 2, Stone 2 (Stone 1 was a downgrade and not used), Holy, and Fluid Aura (150 potency damage and knockback/bind) on a 30 sec CD. SB removed the damage from Fluid Aura (not ShB), ShB just removed the knockback before EW removed the ability that in ShB people were already saying was worthless after people already said it was mostly worthless in SB. EW: Dia, Glare, Misery, Holy, Assize. We traded Aero 2 for misery (which actually interacts with its healing kit) and Fluid Aura for Assize (which is better in every way). This, btw, is ignoring in high end content in ARR until 2.5/late 2.4, WHM's typically did not cast heals and did not Cleric Stance dance - that's a HW thing people falsely believe was happening in ARR a ton. Meaning in high end content, in practice, the only spells WHMs cast were Cure 1, Cure 2, Medica 2, Medica, and Stoneskin (yes, Stoneskin)

By SB, WHM's kit consisted of Aero 1, Aero 2, Stone 4, Holy, Assize, Aero 3 (which most people used in AOE situations but not single target), and Cleric Stance had been turned into basically Presence of Mind but for damage instead of spell speed (the stance version was removed at thhe end of HW). Lilies were a worse Freecure where casting Cure 1 or Cure 2 had a CHANCE (around 20%, I think?) to reduce your CDs on Assize, Asylum, etc by...5 seconds. Yay? SB WHM fell so far behind AST and SCH that it was actually being blacklisted from parties. Even SCH and AST mains were weeping for WHMs. SB was probably the single worst time in the game to be playing a WHM, twirly staff Aero 3 casts didn't change that.

SCH, on the other hand, really needs its SB kit back. WHM should avoid its SB kit like the plague - the ShB/EW Lily system makes WHM amazing while SB WHM was garbage tier, as anyone playing at the time can remember. Lilies then were literally WORSE THAN Freecure. But SCH in ARR (even fairly early), WAS a frenetic, Cleric Stance dancing healer/dps hybrid support Job; as can be seen by boss kill videos and guides at the time. DoT uptime under Cleric was made possible by the fact Lustrate was a mini-Benediction, a flat 25% heal not based on Potency, so Cleric Stance was only a "choice" for SCH when they needed to cast Adlo or Succor. As such, SCH could maintain extended duration Cleric uptime, dropping out of Cleric for healing, then back into it for DPS. This was the exact opposite of WHM, which had to go INTO Cleric to deal damage and risked being locked out of essential healing if it did so at the wrong time. Cleric Stance "dancing" on SCH was easier, and wasn't really a "dance" since they didn't need to weave in and out of it, instead leveraging Lustrate and Eos for healing, as well as their WHM partner who was assumed to be healing most damage with their direct and powerful Cure and Medica spells anyway.

In other words, SCHs chadded on WHMs. But everyone thought this was great.

WHM today is honestly better than its been at any point in the game. Its not perfect, but its GCD healing Lilies contribute and translate to damage and it has as complex a "rotation" as it had in ARR, if not arguably moreso - at least you CAN cast damage spells in EW without too much worry which was not true in ARR where MP was tighter, and you can slightly optimize by landing Assize and Misery in burst windows, when possible, something ARR WHM didn't have a good parallel to.

SCH, on the other hand, has its kit clearly missing the DoTs since so many of its heals were designed to work while the DoTs were ticking and to support WHM's more direct healing. While SCH is a more powerful HEALER now, it lost something in the transition.

I haven't stopped playing healer,but have considered it.

I would really like
-some healers to have complex dps rotations
-some healers to just be labeled "the complex pure healer" or "the complex barrier healer"

Working soft-enrage heal checks into more fights. Usually these are reserved for the end of a tough fight but they should put these in the middle of the fight more. Hell, put 2 or 3 of these phases in per fight. Give me a reason to desire piety, I dare you.

This I kind of agree with.

Soft Enrages I like far more than Hard Enrages, because you actually can (to a point) fight through them.

I also agree on the variable rotations. We have two healers in each of the two styles, barrier and pure. There's zero reason we can't have one "complex" and one "simple" in each style. For that matter, we could just dump that, like how Tanks dumped the "Main Tank"/"Off/Support Tank" thing from ShB and just went to four shades of Tank in EW, having a gradient from WAR (easiest) through DRK, GNB, and to PLD (probably the most complex). We have four healers and could have healers work the same way with WHM (like today simple) through SGE and then to probably SCH then AST or AST then SCH. Or have both AST and SCH be complex.

Either way, this would accommodate everyone.

Next healer should be the Arithmetician so we can increase the lowest common denominator and get better healer gameplay.

I see math joke.
I like math joke.

Finally, the Mathmagician we've all been waiting for!

git revert every_healer_change_after_HW
git commit -m "Made healers stop sucking"
git push

So...no Lilies/Misery, Benison, Temperance, or Lilybell? No Expedience or Excogitation or...did we even have Dissipation in HW? No Recitation or Seraph, either. Also no SGE.

Imo, WHM is the best it's ever been in EW, SCH was its best in SB - both of which happened after HW. And for AST, when in HW are you talking about? AST I don't main and never have, but I recall it being garbage tier in early HW, then overbuffed and too powerful because no one was playing it, then settling into a "decent" place in SB where AST/SCH became meta because WHM was absolute garbage.

This tier is actually very easy to heal, in a coordinated static it's a joke until p8s part 2. P6S is practically no real damage, just evenly spaced mit check raidwides that line up for your cooldowns.

Herein lies the problem: Fights tuned for coordinated statics cause mass healer shortages in PF.

The converse, though, is rarely true - bored static healers still typically continue healing in their static. It's not 100%, but the losses are far lower.

[ForteNightshade]

I've kind of covered why I quit (and thus what would bring me back) in previous threads but... I worry that, if SE also thinks there's a shortage, they'll just go "Oh no we made healing too hard! Time to simplify again!"

Ok, so SE has apparently made healing a bit harder since I've left the role. At the encounter level. Appreciate the effort SE, but, well - pressing '1' "only" 200 times instead of 230 times (Or... as someone above said, 130 vs 150 if fights are shorter) doesn't really fix the fundamental complaint.

Unfortunately, based on the healer shortage and P8S being overtuned, I legitimately worry the next tier will be substantially easier. I just can't see the devs looking at the current landscape and finally concluding it's their healer design which is flawed. Nope. It's just too hard.