Helare shortage in PF: what would bring you back?

[Renathras]

Note that the issue seems to be moreso PF...etc

Right right, but the COMPLAINT before was people being bored on healers. Now they certainly aren't bored, but what is the consequence of that? Blamed. Instead of being bored they're being blamed, and thus the non-baby mode healers are also not healing, and as a result, there's a shortage. It being in PF doesn't work as a defense as that's kind of the proxy everyone generally uses for there being a healing shortage in the first place - and was when healing content was easy and there was a supposed shortage. It seems the shortage is worse, not better.

You can argue it's because people aren't using mitigation, but that was true before and not causing this issue. Though I agree WHM desperately needs another, relatively accessible mitigation CD (Asylum or Plenary would make good candidates, imo)

It's not the game hasn't prepared people for this. It's that the parsing meta-game has convinced people that GCDs spent healing are bad, and so people have actively avoided them so long, they don't use them now that they need to. That is, people weren't unprepared for this damage BY THE GAME, people are unprepared for this damage because of the parsing/theorycrafting meta chase.

I do agree that more complex raiding with survival/mitigation being everyone's responsibility again isn't a bad thing.

The issue is, it won't "iron itself out" if SE goes high and right and reverts to the easier stuff because the non-baby mode healers aren't stepping into that gap left by the baby mode healers quitting. SE will read that as "Well, making healing harder causes healer shortages, so...let's make healing easier again". Which is why I say if people that want hardmode to continue don't stop playing their DPS alts and start healing in those PF groups sitting waiting for healers left and right...

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As I've said before, Reddit isn't exactly free from self-selection bias. It can't be boring AND blamed for other people's screw-ups at the same time. If it's being blamed for other people's screw-ups (and the things listed were lack of mitigation use, not people standing in the bad), then that means the outgoing healing is pretty strong and thus healing is harder, not "boring". The two can't be true, in this context, at the same time. The damage gulf between mitigated and non-mitigated is not 1 button spam on the one side and everyone dead blaming the healer on the other. Mitigation abilities mitigate 5-10% damage, not 50% or more which would make healing trivial in the one case and braindead in the other. The argument doesn't make sense.

EDIT:

And I've never understood "but your downtime kit works more or less like it did in ARR. Why would you want more?"

Because you don't understand - or want to understand - any position but your own.

When people are saying "But in ARR we had more!" as a reason for us to have "at least what ARR had", it makes sense to point out EW has as much or more damage spells on WHM than ARR did, thus negating and defeating that argument entirely. That's how debate works. Someone raises a point, and if you have a counter that defeats that point, you present the counter and defeat the point.

You don't understand because you don't WANT to understand.

You want WHM to have more damage buttons and will use any argument to support that, so when one of your favored arguments is defeated, instead of rationally accepting you cannot use that argument, you just quietly set it to the side and then attack the person who defeated it for something unlrelated.

My point has only been that ARR WHM and EW WHM are remarkably similar in terms of their DPS kits. So you can't use the argument "Make WHM like ARR again" to argue for more involved DPS kits. And that's ignoring where I pointed out in that other thread, using period videos from ARR, that WHMs did NOT, in fact, Cleric Stance dance, cast Stone a bunch, or keep uptime on Aero1/2 spells at the time. They largely DID only cast Cure 1, Cure 2, Medica 2, Medica 1, and a surprising amount of Stoneskin. WHM in ARR did not play the way you like or want WHM to play today, so appealing to ARR to support your desired WHM gameplay makes no sense.

ON THE OTHER HAND: ARR SCH did, in fact, play that way. Though imo SB SCH was better, and is what SCH should aim for. ARR SCH did use Cleric Stance, but they didn't "dance" in and out of it. They only left it to cast a rare Adlo as Lustrate was a flat 25% heal (unaffected by Cleric Stance) and Stoneskin was a flat 10% of target's HP shield (also unaffected by Cleric Stance), meaning in practice, SCH went into Cleric Stance much the way modern EW Tanks activate their Tank stance at the start of an encounter and just leave it on most of the encounter outside of tank swaps. That's effectively how SCH used Cleric in ARR.

SB SCH was just...honestly the best incarnation of SCH in FFXIV's history. And I say this as a person that dodesn't like DoTs and didn't care much for their damage gameplay, but I can recognize it was well put together. Add in Expedience and SB SCH would be standing tall today, too. They had two single target DoTs, an AOE DoT, an AF spell to spread DoTs, I think they might have still had Fester to deal extra damage based on whether you had 1 or 2 DoTs applied, not sure if they had Shadow Flare still (if not, throw it in here, too), but they would apply and use these DoTs while leveraging Eos' healing and oGCD spells to mitigate damage and provide enough healing to keep the party up while doing so, and had more control over Eos (even if clunk, via Macros) to make using her an active part of their healing model, without the silly Faerie Gauge and Aetherpack wonkiness.