Helare shortage in PF: what would bring you back?

[T-Owl]

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.



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.

Wanna know what the joking irony is? Holy Priest has a more involved DPS rotation than most FF14 healers and it is basically the healer whose entire identity is being babies first healer. It has the generic filler in smite, a dot in shadow word pain, a stronger dps instant in holy word chastice but also a nuke with a short dot with holy fire and an execute in shadow word death. And holy word chastice has the benefit of having its 1 minute cd decreased with each smite and in the DF ptr there are some interesting damaging talents in a 30 seconds cd spell that increases the duration of your holy fire nuke and lets you use 3 without cd, therefore spreading it and one where the holy fire dot increases the dps of your filler. Balance affinity on the other hand gives you two dots, a dps spender and basically cleric stance to juggle around. So actually even less offensive oriented healers in WoW have more offensives which are more regularily used than healers in FF14. And Holy Priest isn't even that desirable half the time, but if it would be introduced in FF14 it would be the hardcore dps heavy healer. So your thesis of having your example of an absolute easy mode 1 dps rotation yet competetive dps healer in WoW is wrong. The difference is not how easy these classes are to dps but how well their healing synergizes with their dps. Some classes generate ressources or maintain healing through their dps rotation while others don't synergize at all and instead gain increased dps opportunities through proper maintenance and efficent healing, similarily to FF14.

And again, why are you advocating for your idea? Most Sylphies won't dps even without a dps rotation, having more things to press to dps would actually give them an additional excuse not to do so and in content where healer dps matters, players who can't perform a barebones and simplistic rotation, thats all anyone asks for, probably are not good enough for said content. If you can't press more than 1 button and weave a healing spell on the occasion, you wouldn't have the appropriate skill level to enter as any other role.

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.

Have you considered that the issue may be the difficulty spike and that the issue is, that SE didn't design encounters so far which would slowly raise average healers towards the appropriate skill level? I mean, imagine if you would let DPS players jump from their level 30 rotation where they barely got their 1-2-3 rotation immediately to their level 90 one, where they have to interact with gauges, burst windows and weaving. Guess how many DPS would jump the ship in that case. But then again, what do you want healers to be? Do you want them to be the role of low expectations which can enter high level content at a much lower skill level than any other job and are basically reserved for the least skilled members of a party or do you want them to be a job equally engaged and challenged on all levels of content as others? If its former, I think its the later, the issue is in the difficulty courve introduced by SE. And I can tell you, Healers so far are the only role which in its entirety get easier while leveling up, because their toolkit is fashioned in a way that instead of their gameplay becoming more involved, you get more and more tools thrown at you to weave while dpsing without a change in the games damage profile to let the added tools at your disposal be accompanied with added requirements in healing.

[ty_taurus]

Have you considered that the issue may be the difficulty spike and that the issue is, that SE didn't design encounters so far which would slowly raise average healers towards the appropriate skill level? I mean, imagine if you would let DPS players jump from their level 30 rotation where they barely got their 1-2-3 rotation immediately to their level 90 one, where they have to interact with gauges, burst windows and weaving. Guess how many DPS would jump the ship in that case. But then again, what do you want healers to be? Do you want them to be the role of low expectations which can enter high level content at a much lower skill level than any other job and are basically reserved for the least skilled members of a party or do you want them to be a job equally engaged and challenged on all levels of content as others? If its former, I think its the later, the issue is in the difficulty courve introduced by SE. And I can tell you, Healers so far are the only role which in its entirety get easier while leveling up, because their toolkit is fashioned in a way that instead of their gameplay becoming more involved, you get more and more tools thrown at you to weave while dpsing without a change in the games damage profile to let the added tools at your disposal be accompanied with added requirements in healing.

That's basically what I was trying to get at when I said "unprepared." The damage we've gotten this raid tier is fantastic. It ups the demand for healing a lot without dramatically changing the formula for combat, but it's also extremely new, at least unless you were raiding back during Alexander. But even then, healing was quite different in that time. People came from expecting one Panhaima would resolve all your problems, and now it doesn't. Your Earthly Star will now only get you so far, and that's not what the entire rest of the game has been like for years.

[TabrisOmbrelame]

It's kinda amusing to see what's going on right now.

Like a Patch earlier, some healer were complaining about "We have not enough to heal, healer is useless / Give us DPS button to press". And now that healer finally got something to heal, they just vanished, like it's too hard somehow. Don't get me wrong, for some people, this kind of damage is still not enough to entertain them, but like Rein_eon_Osborne said, the damage done by Tank Buster and Raid Wide comparing to the last tier is a huge jump in term of difficulty, that require a teamwork of a whole other level. If the last tier was a Savage, this one is a Savage + (Not Ultimate, cause we are no where near, but still, the difficulty take a good step up).

I know many people that just stopped trying P8S because they don't get it, or think they can't do that. "Too hard" they said. You say we have a shortage in term of healer, I think we have a shortage of everything actually in savage.

Going back to the main subject. I think that healer's need some "True" Identity. Getting Pure Healer and Shield Healer is good, the problem is, it's kinda the same things when you switch from WHM to AST, or from SCH to SGE. Identity isn't determined by the "Ressource" job use, like Lily for WHM or Fairy Gauge for SCH. We need something that actually make a Healer unique, like : "This one can do that, but this one can't". If WHM regen people, why AST is awfully similar ? Of course, their Ultimate heal is really different, like the WHM can withstand multiple Raid Wide (Aka Centaur 1 for P8S) with ease, but for an AST it's a little trickier.

Remember like how they were really different on P3S ?

WHM got the advantage on Fountain of Life, but AST can cheese the "1HP Heal malus" Mecanics (Because of the millions of damage taken)

Those two ability is a good step forwards tho, maybe we can try to imagine something out of this.

[ty_taurus]

It's kinda amusing to see what's going on right now.

Like a Patch earlier, some healer were complaining about "We have not enough to heal, healer is useless / Give us DPS button to press". And now that healer finally got something to heal, they just vanished, like it's too hard somehow. Don't get me wrong, for some people, this kind of damage is still not enough to entertain them, but like Rein_eon_Osborne said, the damage done by Tank Buster and Raid Wide comparing to the last tier is a huge jump in term of difficulty, that require a teamwork of a whole other level. If the last tier was a Savage, this one is a Savage + (Not Ultimate, cause we are no where near, but still, the difficulty take a good step up).

I know many people that just stopped trying P8S because they don't get it, or think they can't do that. "Too hard" they said. You say we have a shortage in term of healer, I think we have a shortage of everything actually in savage.

Going back to the main subject. I think that healer's need some "True" Identity. Getting Pure Healer and Shield Healer is good, the problem is, it's kinda the same things when you switch from WHM to AST, or from SCH to SGE. Identity isn't determined by the "Ressource" job use, like Lily for WHM or Fairy Gauge for SCH. We need something that actually make a Healer unique, like : "This one can do that, but this one can't". If WHM regen people, why AST is awfully similar ? Of course, their Ultimate heal is really different, like the WHM can withstand multiple Raid Wide (Aka Centaur 1 for P8S) with ease, but for an AST it's a little trickier.

Remember like how they were really different on P3S ?

WHM got the advantage on Fountain of Life, but AST can cheese the "1HP Heal malus" Mecanics (Because of the millions of damage taken)

Those two ability is a good step forwards tho, maybe we can try to imagine something out of this.

Yeah I think it's really cool when one healer stands out as having a really useful tool for a particular fight or mechanic like that. Macrocosmos and Expedient serve that purpose well. Lily and Panhaima kinda serve a unique purpose but they don't feel quite as special unfortunately. Benediction would work really well if we had more fights where you have to heal up a 3rd party, like in Shinryu EX, and I suppose it does combo well with when GNB or WAR use their invulns, but SGE kinda feels like its in a spot where it's great because of all the mitigation it brings, but doesn't really shine anywhere else.

[Renathras]

Wanna know what the joking irony is? Holy Priest has a more involved DPS rotation than most FF14 healers

No, it doesn't. Not optimally. The optimal rotation for Holy Priest is upkeep Shadow Word: Pain (if you aren't low on mana) and spam Smite as your filler, with Holy Fire on a short CD if you have an abundance of MP. That's actually one less single target damage button than FFXIV's WHM. Including Shdow Word: Death makes them equal, but you don't use Shadow Word: Death in "execution" much. Firstly, because it has a CD, and secondly, because it harms the Priest for that amount of damage if the target doesn't die, and healing isn't as free as in FFXIV where you can instantly and easily top yourself off while doing this by weaving an oGCD, as WoW doesn't have oGCDs like FFXIV does for that. While you can use some talents to add things like (basically) Earthly Star, those aren't optimal in all fights and aren't used in many cases. Likewise, Resto Druid with the Balance subspec has two spam nukes it alternates between and a single target and AOE DoTs. FERAL subspec has Cat Form-lite, but isn't optimal for Raids.

I know you want this to be true, but it really isn't. While SOME WoW healers have more involved damage kits than FFXIV healers, SOME have less or equal kits, and in Raids, using their mana for damage is suboptimal in that game unless they have a surplus.

This IS more true in Mythic Dungeons, but that's a rather different argument, not to mention lots of people don't like Mythic Dungeons OR the toxicity they've generated.

In fact, I went into a deep dive with you (I believe) over this once already, laying them all out, showing you the optimal rotations and priority systems based on Icy Veins, etc etc.

And again, why are you advocating for your idea?

I could ask you why you feel the need to respond to every one of my posts, even when I'm trying to mostly ignore you attacks, but it would be just as fruitless. Not to mention this is a loaded question fallacy: I'm not advocating for my idea here. The only thing I'm advocating is all you non-"baby healer" people better get your butts in gear and fill those PF healer slots if you don't want SE to go the other direction.

Most Sylphies won't

Where did I ever say I was advocating for Sylphies? By your definition of a Sylphie, I'm not even one, and my numbers and skill rivals your own.

players who can't perform a barebones and simplistic rotation, thats all anyone asks for,

(it isn't all your asking for...)

probably are not good enough for said content.

Strange, because they're good enough for said content in 6.1...

Have you considered that the issue may be the difficulty spike and that the issue is, that SE didn't design encounters so far which would slowly raise average healers towards the appropriate skill level?

I have.

I deem that unlikely because of the fact that there is other content in the past that has done so (e.g. HW and SB), and that if the argument holds that the majority of healers are like you - which you've said many many times now - and not like me, then you all should easily be able to adapt since this is what you've been wanting since it was taken away from you at the end of HW, or at the latest, end of SB/launch of ShB.

The fact is, it appears you've been wrong all this time about that - the majority is not the people that find healing boring. And the people who do are clearly not making up for the people either qutting healing or quitting PF healing.

But then again, what do you want healers to be?

When you ask this question for real, and without your stupid spin on the end, I can answer it.

If healing is so easy, as you contend, then we shouldn't be seeing a shortage of healers.

Basically this:

It's kinda amusing to see what's going on right now.

Like a Patch earlier, some healer were complaining about "We have not enough to heal, healer is useless / Give us DPS button to press". And now that healer finally got something to heal, they just vanished, like it's too hard somehow. Don't get me wrong, for some people, this kind of damage is still not enough to entertain them, but like Rein_eon_Osborne said, the damage done by Tank Buster and Raid Wide comparing to the last tier is a huge jump in term of difficulty, that require a teamwork of a whole other level. If the last tier was a Savage, this one is a Savage + (Not Ultimate, cause we are no where near, but still, the difficulty take a good step up).

I know many people that just stopped trying P8S because they don't get it, or think they can't do that. "Too hard" they said. You say we have a shortage in term of healer, I think we have a shortage of everything actually in savage.

Going back to the main subject. I think that healer's need some "True" Identity. Getting Pure Healer and Shield Healer is good, the problem is, it's kinda the same things when you switch from WHM to AST, or from SCH to SGE. Identity isn't determined by the "Ressource" job use, like Lily for WHM or Fairy Gauge for SCH. We need something that actually make a Healer unique, like : "This one can do that, but this one can't". If WHM regen people, why AST is awfully similar ? Of course, their Ultimate heal is really different, like the WHM can withstand multiple Raid Wide (Aka Centaur 1 for P8S) with ease, but for an AST it's a little trickier.

Remember like how they were really different on P3S ?

WHM got the advantage on Fountain of Life, but AST can cheese the "1HP Heal malus" Mecanics (Because of the millions of damage taken)

Those two ability is a good step forwards tho, maybe we can try to imagine something out of this.

[T-Owl]

No, it doesn't. Not optimally. The optimal rotation for Holy Priest is upkeep Shadow Word: Pain (if you aren't low on mana) and spam Smite as your filler, with Holy Fire on a short CD if you have an abundance of MP. That's actually one less single target damage button than FFXIV's WHM. Including Shdow Word: Death makes them equal, but you don't use Shadow Word: Death in "execution" much. Firstly, because it has a CD, and secondly, because it harms the Priest for that amount of damage if the target doesn't die, and healing isn't as free as in FFXIV where you can instantly and easily top yourself off while doing this by weaving an oGCD, as WoW doesn't have oGCDs like FFXIV does for that. While you can use some talents to add things like (basically) Earthly Star, those aren't optimal in all fights and aren't used in many cases. Likewise, Resto Druid with the Balance subspec has two spam nukes it alternates between and a single target and AOE DoTs. FERAL subspec has Cat Form-lite, but isn't optimal for Raids.

I know you want this to be true, but it really isn't. While SOME WoW healers have more involved damage kits than FFXIV healers, SOME have less or equal kits, and in Raids, using their mana for damage is suboptimal in that game unless they have a surplus.

This IS more true in Mythic Dungeons, but that's a rather different argument, not to mention lots of people don't like Mythic Dungeons OR the toxicity they've generated.

In fact, I went into a deep dive with you (I believe) over this once already, laying them all out, showing you the optimal rotations and priority systems based on Icy Veins, etc etc.

No you did not,can you stop making claims involving me that are not true? And again, you forgot Holy World Chastice, like I mentioned DF will include an additional ability to make Holy Fire used more frequently and another one to creat damage synergies with it, in return I left out the current covenant ability which are mostly damaging ones. And yeah, shadow word death does minor damage for rp reasons, which isn't a big deal with the damaging profile of this game. You also ignore the cds and durations of this abilities. Shadow Word Pain was unspecialized 18 seconds I think, holy word has 10 seconds cd, chastice will have depending on dps uptime one minute to like I think 15 seconds cd. Also there is holy nova too but thats just the aoe filler. But generally, you will not press smite as often as you would glare. It will get dps mechanics involving holy fire in a bit more than two months. If you would have done your research, you would know that I fucked up and forgot restauration shaman who has barebones dps, still more involved because it has shorter cds and dot durations. And generally I would argue that the incoming damage in most wow content probably would overwhelm people who already get overwhelmed in FF14.

I could ask you why you feel the need to respond to every one of my posts, even when I'm trying to mostly ignore you attacks, but it would be just as fruitless. Not to mention this is a loaded question fallacy: I'm not advocating for my idea here. The only thing I'm advocating is all you non-"baby healer" people better get your butts in gear and fill those PF healer slots if you don't want SE to go the other direction.

Because you're wrong most of the time, this conversation began a reply from you at a post from me to another person and you were toxically trying to co-opt my argument by spreading false information, which I consider rude and what you are doing now after initiating this discussion to be gaslighting, agan.

Where did I ever say I was advocating for Sylphies? By your definition of a Sylphie, I'm not even one, and my numbers and skill rivals your own.

When you were comparing Holy Priest, wrongly, with a Sylphie-WHM? And can you like prove that? Because your entire argument boils down to that you wouldn't be capable or too stressed out to fulfill the usually very low healing requirements if your dps rotation would be made up of one button. I stopped playing healers in FF14 and instead started to level up my DPS classes because I got burned out from the game entirely to the point of stopping to play the game for half a year because I got burned out and demotivated by the oen button dps rotation.

(it isn't all your asking for...)

I mean, it is? For Scholar, I think everyone is fine with their pre-ShB toolkit, for White Mage most people me included are just asking for a dumbed down version of the Black Mage rotation and I already stated that I would like it to be the more gcd and cast heavy healer, easy to learn, great performance, hard to optimize.

Strange, because they're good enough for said content in 6.1...

You are still not the voice of the silent majority of true healers who are suddenly beating those evil parser kiddies in healing and then the entire class room stands up and claps and everyone on reddit is taken aback and moved.

I have.

I deem that unlikely because of the fact that there is other content in the past that has done so (e.g. HW and SB), and that if the argument holds that the majority of healers are like you - which you've said many many times now - and not like me, then you all should easily be able to adapt since this is what you've been wanting since it was taken away from you at the end of HW, or at the latest, end of SB/launch of ShB.

The fact is, it appears you've been wrong all this time about that - the majority is not the people that find healing boring. And the people who do are clearly not making up for the people either qutting healing or quitting PF healing.

What do you want with Heavensword? That is 5 years ago, most of the players were probably not even playing at this point, the big hype surrounding this game really only started in ShB. And Extreme Healers back from HW are probably just healing this content fine? Like, this is such a non-argument, name me one example of a player who started ShB or Endwalker who may even be new to savage, where healers get through normal msq content one has to go through to become savage ready or even trials prepared to the incoming damage spikes or bleed mechanics which actually hurt like this? Wan't the last dot mechanic like in ARR?

When you ask this question for real, and without your stupid spin on the end, I can answer it.

If healing is so easy, as you contend, then we shouldn't be seeing a shortage of healers.

It is an intersection of super easy and non-challenging where people who would let others carry them through dungeons without investing more than an occassional heal cast would pick the role up while at the same time not being very engaging and as we see right now, rarely having healing requirements that are close to challenging, to the point where when healers have to heal for a bit they already get overwhelmed. So, SE basically pushed the role into one of minimum expectations where the slightest heal check will scare people away. Thats what people ask for more involved dps in the first place, because everyone knows high healing requirements are probably not here to stay.

Edit: And it really reached the point where the only thing I can recommend to my fellow healers if they are fed up with how SE treats them is: Maybe try WoW. It has great healer classes who are all different and exciting and it soon will get a new one. Seriously, healing just isn't worth it in FF14 for me, when I want to heal I go back to WoW.

[Dogempire]

Snip.

I think the issue here is that there's a difference between healing being difficult, and healing being engaging.

It's similar to Skyrim where with Legendary difficulty the only change is that you take 4x the damage and do 25% of your regular damage. Sure it's more difficult but is there really any tangible difference in gameplay other than how many swings it takes to kill something?

You can beef up damage numbers and force healers to use all their mitigation and heals, but at the end of the day you're just playing the same boring, neutered healer classes but they're infinitely more stressful in savage raids.

As for the healer shortage, that's kind of the consequence of ignoring the healing community as a whole and only really focusing on tank issues, melee dps issues, and black mage issues. It's been over two years and there's no tangible change to the role, so anyone who wants to actually have their neurons firing while they play has moved on to a different role altogether

[Supersnow845]

I think the issue here is that there's a difference between healing being difficult, and healing being engaging.

It's similar to Skyrim where with Legendary difficulty the only change is that you take 4x the damage and do 25% of your regular damage. Sure it's more difficult but is there really any tangible difference in gameplay other than how many swings it takes to kill something?

You can beef up damage numbers and force healers to use all their mitigation and heals, but at the end of the day you're just playing the same boring, neutered healer classes but they're infinitely more stressful in savage raids.

As for the healer shortage, that's kind of the consequence of ignoring the healing community as a whole and only really focusing on tank issues, melee dps issues, and black mage issues. It's been over two years and there's no tangible change to the role, so anyone who wants to actually have their neurons firing while they play has moved on to a different role altogether

At this point square has basically completely admitted they just don’t care about ranged classes, melee are top priority, tanks will get fixed anytime they ask and BLM gets by most of the time because it plays fake melee in PF, the 9 true ranged classes have been rotting in a corner since about 5.0 at this point and then people get surprised nobody wants to play them anymore