Helare shortage in PF: what would bring you back?

[Renathras]

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.

I do have a question about this:

Why are healers - who complained healing was too simple and braindead in P1-4 - not healing in P5-8?

What I mean is, the people content with P1-4 are obviously quitting because they think it's too hard. People said the folks saying it was too easy would come back if it was harder. Most of you who don't like simple healing seem to like that P5-8 is harder. So why is there a shortage if all the "want it to be harder" people are now healing?

Is it because the number of "want it easier" healers is actually the larger number?

Not asking to be pointed, just curious what the reason is. I get the DPS rotations haven't changed, but the difficulty has, and that was supposedly the complaint - that healers were too baby mode easy. Well that isn't as true now, so why haven't the non-baby healers stepped up to fill in the gap left by the baby healers quitting? Or are there simply not enough of them to fill a hole that large?

EDIT:

And the reason I ask this is it's actually significant:

If not enough "want it harder" non-baby mode healers step in to fill the gap, so the gap actually gets bigger, SE is likely to make future content easier, seeing that making it harder actually made the healer shortage worse, not better. So for anyone who DOES want healers to be harder, you guys need to start (if you haven't) healing this tier. Because SE is probably looking at this as the "medium" step. So while people who want it harder AND want complex DPS rotations on healers don't have the DPS rotation piece, if they don't step into the gap created by the harder piece in large numbers, SE's likely reaction is to revert, not continue changing.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

More challenge that comes from my role/ class instead of the stupidity of my party members[…]

I currently play healer and it was a deliberate choice and doing all the number crunching for a static is fun. But I rarely do it in PF nowadays because every little scratch gets either healbotted into oblivion by someone pushing random healy buttons that make HP bars go brrrr or we just get one shot because nobody mitigated.
Current PF healer quality is a huge turn off for me.

The last time I PF’ed with any actual competent healer was a Co-SGE in Hydaelyn EX where they made a comment in party chat during one of our prepulls: “WHM, I just want to let you know. Thank you for healing.. responsibly.”. Rare time. I didn’t had enough time to type so I just emote’d them back before the pull start & I deliberately disconnects into oblivion after we rolled the loot. Never met them again since. It was around the time WHM was so disastrous some PF started to block them from joining.

Other time? I went in as NIN/RDM/DNC in most of my recent PF errands & it cringes me to no end just how many times I see shields went away not consumed, 4+ Healer HoT stacked, Asp Helios after Asp Helios sound effect being casted, nonexistent Feint usage in 3 melee parties, nonexistent Reprisals, WARs relying solely on Bloodwhetting thinking it kept them invisible at the face of tankbusters... All these are often the ‘farm’ runs that are quite painful to deal with.

The list goes on… /playdead

[Azuri]

I will laugh so hard if we just get Recuperate in PvE by 8.0.

[Raraka]

what would make you want to heal?

Option 1) A clock-like hud element similar to the BLM one that tracks my DoT time left, or a way to put my DoT icon separate from the rest of the debuffs in and increase its size (Seriously why isnt this a thing already?)

Option 2) If someone pays me to play healer I will do it, but I dont see people offering gil for someone to join their group so... yeah, not gonna subject my own funds to pay for the food and pots of a role I dont enjoy

[Semirhage]

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)

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

We've had four expansions and the better part of a decade go by, and the reward for healing downtime not only has barely evolved at all, but has been further compacted into more spamming of that boring nuke than ever before.

"But your downtime kit is stuck in ARR" is not the gotcha people think it is.

[ty_taurus]

I do have a question about this:

Why are healers - who complained healing was too simple and braindead in P1-4 - not healing in P5-8?

What I mean is, the people content with P1-4 are obviously quitting because they think it's too hard. People said the folks saying it was too easy would come back if it was harder. Most of you who don't like simple healing seem to like that P5-8 is harder. So why is there a shortage if all the "want it to be harder" people are now healing?

Is it because the number of "want it easier" healers is actually the larger number?

Not asking to be pointed, just curious what the reason is. I get the DPS rotations haven't changed, but the difficulty has, and that was supposedly the complaint - that healers were too baby mode easy. Well that isn't as true now, so why haven't the non-baby healers stepped up to fill in the gap left by the baby healers quitting? Or are there simply not enough of them to fill a hole that large?

EDIT:

And the reason I ask this is it's actually significant:

If not enough "want it harder" non-baby mode healers step in to fill the gap, so the gap actually gets bigger, SE is likely to make future content easier, seeing that making it harder actually made the healer shortage worse, not better. So for anyone who DOES want healers to be harder, you guys need to start (if you haven't) healing this tier. Because SE is probably looking at this as the "medium" step. So while people who want it harder AND want complex DPS rotations on healers don't have the DPS rotation piece, if they don't step into the gap created by the harder piece in large numbers, SE's likely reaction is to revert, not continue changing.

Note that the issue seems to be moreso PF than the actual challenge of healing the content. I've seen some discussions on why people aren't joining PF, and if the response isn't that healing is boring, it's that they're tired of getting blamed for wipes when the party dies to raw damage, and that too many tanks and/or DPS aren't helping with mitigation and proceeding to blame the healers for not mitigating enough. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that a lot of PF healers are probably WHM, and WHM doesn't have party mitigation beyond exclusively Temperance which is on a 2 minute cooldown. Aquaveil and Benison can help a lot with the tankbusters, but not the raidwides. WHM really needs the rest of the party to be on top of the ball with mitigation, or the party isn't going to survive. Being with cohealers that aren't healing enough is also something getting brought up. A lot of people feel that they're getting blamed for things out of their control as healers.

When you break it down as to why these things are happening, it's because the game has not prepared anyone for this level of damage. Tanks have not had to deal with mitigating bleedbusters or auto attacks, and healers aren't prepared to deal with that damage unmitigated. It's asking for a lot more awareness of each player's own tools, which is understandably resulting in the ball being dropped by many players, especially newer players who's first savage tier was the last one. I think it's something that will iron itself out if we stick to keeping this level of damage output in harder content, and trickle some of the mechanics down into more casual content in a way that's more managable, but shows you that those mechanics exist.

EDIT: This post has 150+ upvotes on Reddit on the subject:

"Because healers are a boring job that gets all the blame for other people's fuck ups.

When you're not being blamed for tank deaths caused by eating un-mitigated tank busters and the spicy DoTs, you're being blamed for party deaths cause by eating unmitigated AoEs with DoTs. When that's not happening, you're being blamed for deaths caused by your co-heal refusing to actually heal. 4 people died because numbskull DPS#2 aimed a tether at the rest of the raid? "Where were de eels? You don't cast shields now? Shit healer."

And if everything is going well, everyone is mitigating well, your co-healer is helping and AoEs are being Addled/Feinted ... well then you get to spam 1. Wooooo"

[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...

.

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.

[ty_taurus]

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...

.

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.

People were and still are bored of healing. The newest raid tier has shown to be a lot of fun to actually heal from the feedback I've seen. The issue is that PF specifically is getting frustrated due to parties hitting walls and not progressing. It is about the game leaving the players unprepared.

Before this raid tier, you ddint' need to mitigate auto attacks. You didn't need more than an occasional Benison or Soteria or Exaltation, etc. on the tank. Now that those things are required, it's pushing people out of their comfort zone, which is something the community would gradually get used to if we maintain this demand for healing. People wanting to use their GCDs for damage is not the issue. It's expecting that one OGCD is enough when it won't be, and trying to break from the muscle memory that you might need to use 2, or weave in an OGCD after a GCD heal. We don't have the preestablished expectation that this is what's necessary for that kind of healing, and the other roles not using mitigation because that mitigation wasn't essential before is making it tougher on healers to keep up with the damage while still trying to optimize their DPS, because their DPS is also required in order to beat the enrage.

People wanting to maximize the value of their heals so they can maximize their DPS contributions is not the evil that you think it is. It's the natural flow of how players get better at a role and is not to be demonized because 'it's not the healer's job.' It's going to require experience and getting familiar with a more intense requirement of healing to smoothen out the issues people are facing, but its other players blaming you when its not your fault that is driving people away right now. And people are also upvoting comments about healing still being boring in spite of these healing requires. The number 1 comment on the current healer sortage Reddit doesn't offer much information, but it's:

"Not that fun, getting majority of blame even when DPS/Tanks dont mitigate"

With nearly 300 upvotes.

[AmiableApkallu]

its other players blaming you when it's not your fault that is driving people away right now.

"I am already healing you. Move away from Mitigate the damage!"

[Renathras]

People were and still are bored of healing. The newest raid tier has shown to be a lot of fun to actually heal from the feedback I've seen.

But that's my point - if the new tier is "a lot of fun", it can't be BORING at the same time. See what I'm saying? Either it's a lot of fun OR it's boring. Generally speaking, things that are a lot of fun AREN'T simultaneously boring to the person who is feeling fun from it. The only way it can be both harder/more fun to heal AND more boring to a person is if said person doesn't like healing. Like if content is more fun to heal but a player is playing BLM, or even RDM with Vercure that they aren't using, then it might be boring to them.

The issue is that PF specifically is getting frustrated due to parties hitting walls and not progressing. It is about the game leaving the players unprepared.

Except PF groups had to use mitigation in P1S and P2S, meaning they were "prepared" for it - by the game. It's only the meta chasing parse thing that has convinced un-prepared people.

Now that those things are required, it's pushing people out of their comfort zone, which is something the community would gradually get used to if we maintain this demand for healing.

But how's that work when healers quit?

People wanting to use their GCDs for damage is not the issue.

Except it IS when they're more focused on DPS burst weaves than on mitigation weaves.

and trying to break from the muscle memory

...which is a result from the parse meta game.

is making it tougher on healers to keep up with the damage while still trying to optimize their DPS, because their DPS is also required in order to beat the enrage.

This sounds awful close to an argument from the Sylphie side of the table, just forewarned. That is, that healer DPS being calculated into Enrages and healers being expected to DPS while healing is a negative thing. (I know you didn't intend it that way, but the argument is not far from it.)

People wanting to maximize the value of their heals so they can maximize their DPS contributions is not the evil that you think it is.

I never have said it's evil. I have said it's resulted in a lot of bad play and perverse incentives being called good play when it really isn't, it was only allowed by bad game/encounter design.

but its other players blaming you when its not your fault that is driving people away right now.

It's probably also making healing "less boring" that is driving people away right now. We don't have any solid poling on this, but players are citing what you said above (being blamed) AND players are also citing the higher healing requirements (being harder) AND people are also (in organized groups/statics that don't have the first problem) citing it being boring - though this group largely hasn't quit healing, they just don't PF in the first place since they have Statics.

And people are also upvoting comments about healing still being boring in spite of these healing requires.

Which, again, makes no logical sense. Well, unless we're talking about static healers.

What percentage of the FFXIV playerbase is 400, btw? What's 400/3,000,000 * 100%?

.

My point is, they've made healing "less boring" and people are quitting in droves. The argument "healing is boring and causing a shortage" no longer adds up. It seems that making healing "less boring" has CAUSED a shortage, not the other way around.

Which also dovetails with what I said: If the people wanting "less boring" healing don't quickly step into the gap and put their money where their mouth was, if there are continued PF healer shortages, then SE is likely to revert the changes, not continue forward with them. So if you want healing being "less boring", those who feel that way, anyway, you collectively have to step up and fill those empty PF healer slots. People who don't want "more exciting" healing sure aren't going to do it for you.