Helare shortage in PF: what would bring you back?

[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.

[Kitsu]

FFXIV's PvE design feels safe, and safe isn't fun.

It doesn't feel good to save the day - it's painstakingly adequate. The abilities don't combo. The DPS rotations put me to sleep. I can't modify my healing abilities. And the server snapshots drive me insane. Why would XIV players that asked for complicated healing gameplay enjoy hitting boring buttons more often?

I just don't like healing in this game.

[Zolvolt]

Something that bothers me is that people are looking at the current tier as having more to heal like this is the more to heal that we needed. When you look at the current tier, the healing struggles mostly come from dps/tanks not mitigating or one of 2 healer errors.) Not casting a single aoe heal for particular mechanics: medica2/ASp hel2 or not casting succor/euk prognosis. Or not using regen for bleeds. Everything is largely still OGCD handles every mechanic. Exception being you need to do pre-shield a little more and you need to aoe-hot a little more. Its not like this is the more to heal that we are asking for.

[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

[ForteNightshade]

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.

You're trying to force a mutual exclusivity that doesn't necessarily exist. I can, indeed, be simultaneously entertained by other fights of a given encounter like its fight design or mechanical divisively while still having the role I'm playing (in this case, healers) boring. In fact, that often happens with tanks.

Take P1S, for example. I enjoyed running it for logs but if asked to rank the fight itself compared to other Savage encounters, it'd be near the bottom. My fun came from an entirely different metric.

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.

Not to the same extent they do now. Heavy Hand did next to nothing while we Invuln cheesed Pitless Flail. Even Double Impact only necessitated a single CD if both tanks were stacked, though we usually invuln cheesed that too.

The big difference with the current tier is tanks only throwing up a single CD like they would previously aren't mitigation the subsequent bleed which ticks based on the damage you take. Invulns are even worse. A Warrior who think they'll be clever and Holmgang Toxic Crunch will get absolutely shredded even with Bloodwhetting. They're now taking autos, on top of a bleed which has zero damage reduction applied to it and they're at 1HP. That isn't fun to heal because it inevitably results in panic spamming just to compensate for poor mitigation choices.

Let's not get started on the raid wides, many of which are lethal without mitigation. Something that WHM lacks.

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

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

You're cherry picking here. Taurus' immediate sentence after explains this. Healers are used to throwing out a single oGCD and it being enough. In every tier prior, this was the case. Breaking away from that muscle memory takes time. Just like how tanks are having to learn their invulns kinda suck right now.

There were going to be growing pains. Unfortunately, a lot of tanks and DPS aren't being patient with healers having to learn through those pains. Hence why healers are getting fed up.

A damage meta which Square Enix has unintentionally encouraged for years because they're literally made everything else not matter. Suddenly upping the healing and mitigation requirements after three years will take some adjustment time.

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.)

... how?

The Syphie argument is healers not wanting to contribute any damage whatsoever and to pointlessly heal when it isn't necessary. Healers struggling to optimize their damage output due to the upswing in outgoing damage this tier isn't remotely the opposite of that.

I can only assume you mean to imply healers don't want to heal. Hence the mention of it being a negative. Which is also incorrect. Healers aren't necessarily upset with the additional healing requirements but with their team putting all of the damage reduction burden on them while ignoring their own shortcomings. Say a DRK dies despite having thrown up TBN, Dark Mind and Rampart. They have ample reason to criticise healing. They did their job. Conversely, let's say that same DRK only use Dark Mind... on the physical Toxic Crunch. Guess who they're still blaming?

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.

People are putting their money where their mouth is. Something that hasn't been brought up is Yoshida's infamous response to healer criticism: "Just do Ultimate then." That alone likely caused its own exodus of the role from fed up players who are tired of their feedback being ignored.

As someone else put it, healers take the brunt of the blame for non-mechanical mistakes and their "reward" for being in a good group is spamming a single button 200+ times.

They were always bored even last tier, but it has started to reach a boiling point because the dev team isn't listening. I'd go so far as to argument even if healing is brought back down to Asphodelos or even easier, it won't increase the number healers. In many ways, Sage being the shiny new toy inflated the numbers and now that the shine as worn off, people are finding it more fun to play jobs with an actual rotation to fall back on.

For myself, I still enjoy healing but my enjoyment shouldn't come from how little I can avoid doing my actual job and slidecasting. That's actually what I'm looking forward to practicing in P7S. Not the outgoing damage because I'll have a plan for that but figuring out how to slidecast through Purgation without losing casts.

That's the sad state of healers. If your group is good, you spam one button. If not, you get blamed for their mistakes.

[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.

[Kansene]

Pains me to agree, but WoW has general class design (balance notwithstanding) that blows FF out of the water imo.

Literally everything else about that dumpster fire game made me feel awful just looking at the game's logo though.
Which is too bad, holy priest in BfA/SL is my favorite healer to play in any game except Legion Mistweaver.

FF is way, way better in most aspects to me personally, but healer gameplay is deffo not one of them.

[fulminating]

Removal of the two minute obsession, declaration of the shadowbringers rework being a complete failure, removal of all but the original jobs up to hw until they have sufficient staff to balance them properly and complete reversion of the endwalker changes for smn, Sam and warrior at the very least. Additionally I would like more transparency on exactly what each job is intended to be, with some concrete assurance/evidence that they are understanding the feedback rather than misinterpreting the root cause.

[T-Owl]

Pains me to agree, but WoW has general class design (balance notwithstanding) that blows FF out of the water imo.

Literally everything else about that dumpster fire game made me feel awful just looking at the game's logo though.
Which is too bad, holy priest in BfA/SL is my favorite healer to play in any game except Legion Mistweaver.

FF is way, way better in most aspects to me personally, but healer gameplay is deffo not one of them.

To be honest, I kinda feel like outside of the story, WoW is actually still doing a nice job in pve content compared to FF14, but class design is really their strong suit. Balance is an issue, but balance is also objectively harder in WoW compared to FF14 because there are many, many more variations to take into account.