AST (and DRG) had their improvements pushed to 7.0 PLD are getting theirs in 6.3

[Cygnia]

Synastry as a trait which can trigger when benefic/benefic II is used, perhaps?
Out of the extra healing, Celestial Intersection and Exaltation could easily be nixed along with Neutral Sect to provide a more prolonged alternative to the compromise that is the extra shielding Astrologian gained in the remodel from stance switcher to pure healer. Transform Celestial Opposition back into a non-healing ability; it could become what Disable used to be on an AOE scale while Gravity regains its slow debuff.
The cards are where things fall down, like Archwizard has pointed out. It's a quality that operates fairly well in tabletop (homebrew stuff whipped up by my GM, ignore the digression here) though substantially less so in an mmo. The most I can settle on there is flipping cards to become AOE effects and reducing their frequency in order to better serve non-damage based effects through buffing their effective impact when dealt...but as to *what* can be served up is a puzzler.
Sorry for not directly responding to those who have quoted me. Still a bit rusty with forum etiquette/don't really know what to say in response. I do appreciate it nonetheless, so er...thank you?

[Archwizard]

Synastry as a trait which can trigger when benefic/benefic II is used, perhaps?

I can't exactly imagine how that would operate. The point of Synastry is, much like Kardia, that you designate a target to receive healing as you perform GCD actions on other targets... so to trait the effect at all, you would need to have an alternative way to designate that target.
Going off your supposition as a hypothetical, I suppose there's an arguable possibility of, say, having Benefic/II put a Synastry buff on the target to make future heals transfer to them for a period... but then your immediate next cast of the same would just overwrite it and swap the target anyway.

And that's before you get to balancing it against Synastry's 2 min CD, which would be more trouble than it's worth to reproduce without the button.

You'd probably be better off just cutting Synastry and the beacon aspect entirely (an effect which is hardly ever used anyway...), and just putting a "Neutral Sect Cure Potency" addendum (or other CD, though the only other 2m CD currently in our possession is Divination) on the Benefic spells for the extra potency lost.

The major failing of Synastry in AST's kit, however, is that the job has relatively little reliance on its single-target GCDs for healing, which is why the effect is underwhelming in our kit. Compare this to WHM, for instance, whose healing arsenal is weighted heavily towards its GCD heals (Lilies, Plenary Indulgence, etc), or to SGE who could simply tack it onto the existing effect of Kardia or Soteria to add some flat cure potency to its healing spells and address its lack of panic-healing options. It simply fits better elsewhere, and AST's kit doesn't have much room for it anyway (even being muddled as a "unique gimmick" option on a job made of much more distinctive gimmicks).

[T-Owl]

Why doesn't WHM Work:

If I could add something, there is I think the additional element of WoW generally having a shorter gcd and generally more rng involved in enemy mechanics. On healing, there is also the different damage profile. There is more constantly incoming damage involved in WoW and healers have actually different healing profiles and toolkits to deal with incoming damage. Healing in WoW actually makes HoTs a good method of healing, because while it may not top off the group in spikes like a Paladins powerful instants do, they have the effect of generally smoothing out lifebar movements by countering chip damage with chip healing. In a Post Healer DPS world, there is also the difference that many modes of healing involve a certain maintenance of healing ressources, be it keeping up hots, glimmer of light or atonement.

And I would say another problem with the current healer design in FF14 is, that it is not only pushing anyone who cares about contributing into a glare spam rotation, being stuck in it isn't even a question of skill. The only times when healers face healing checks that can require high uptime in most casual content or even the majority of savage mechanics is when you pull wall to wall with a below average tank. Otherwise especially in casual content and the most in dungen content, which is what new healers will engage with the most, incoming damage is usually were scarse. Unavoidable damage happens in set intervalls. I would argue in dungeon content, your 80% number would be what a healer who purely uses gcd healers would end up with in boss fight with a casually competent group. High incoming damage usually happens when the group is repeatedly failing the mechanics, which I think can be frustrating as this pushes the healer into a position of being stressed into a carrier for people who probably should fail and repeat the encounter.

[ASkellington]

I can't exactly imagine how that would operate. The point of Synastry is, much like Kardia, that you designate a target to receive healing as you perform GCD actions on other targets... so to trait the effect at all, you would need to have an alternative way to designate that target.
Going off your supposition as a hypothetical, I suppose there's an arguable possibility of, say, having Benefic/II put a Synastry buff on the target to make future heals transfer to them for a period... but then your immediate next cast of the same would just overwrite it and swap the target anyway.

And that's before you get to balancing it against Synastry's 2 min CD, which would be more trouble than it's worth to reproduce without the button.

You'd probably be better off just cutting Synastry and the beacon aspect entirely (an effect which is hardly ever used anyway...), and just putting a "Neutral Sect Cure Potency" addendum (or other CD, though the only other 2m CD currently in our possession is Divination) on the Benefic spells for the extra potency lost.

The major failing of Synastry in AST's kit, however, is that the job has relatively little reliance on its single-target GCDs for healing, which is why the effect is underwhelming in our kit. Compare this to WHM, for instance, whose healing arsenal is weighted heavily towards its GCD heals (Lilies, Plenary Indulgence, etc), or to SGE who could simply tack it onto the existing effect of Kardia or Soteria to add some flat cure potency to its healing spells and address its lack of panic-healing options. It simply fits better elsewhere, and AST's kit doesn't have much room for it anyway (even being muddled as a "unique gimmick" option on a job made of much more distinctive gimmicks).

My fix to Synastry would be to allow single target oGCD heals to work with it (Exaltation, CI, ED) as well as GCD. If they aren't going to do it, axe the ability. The only reason why I'd WANT Synastry to work is for dual tank busters or perhaps to save two allies from a raidwide. It also would be more interesting imo to remove the extra charges for CI and ED for a Synastry that worked with them both.

[Renathras]

If I could add something, there is I think the additional element of WoW generally having a shorter gcd and generally more rng involved in enemy mechanics. On healing, there is also the different damage profile. There is more constantly incoming damage involved in WoW and healers have actually different healing profiles and toolkits to deal with incoming damage. Healing in WoW actually makes HoTs a good method of healing, because while it may not top off the group in spikes like a Paladins powerful instants do, they have the effect of generally smoothing out lifebar movements by countering chip damage with chip healing.

I agree with you on this stuff. I feel like FFXIV's encounter design is largely the problem, as it's gone into the major spike damage (WoW did this, too, in late Wrath and Cataclysm - where they said they were undoing it but forgot to tell the encounter design team they were moving to a triage model; healing in Cata was the worst and most stressful time ever for a healer in any game I've ever played and caused a MASSIVE healer shortage until late in the expansion) with lulls and has gotten stuck on that as the encounters have gotten to be more and more about "the dance" of tightly tuned mechanics that are satisfying when you get them done right (watching a party successfully execute P5S Squal/Surge LOOKS cool, but...), but the issue is that this level of tight tuning, movement, and damage profile has created a game where the healing tools - ANY healing tools, in fact (no healer from ANY game could be inserted into FFXIV and it really be a good fit) don't fit the encounters.

The encounters, while tightly tuned choreographed dances that may be satisfying to mechanically execute, don't fit in any game that really has a healing model to speak of. It's like FFXIV is a tab targeting MMO with Action RPG MMO style fight mechanics that would probably be more suited to something like GW2 or TERA, thus creating a disjoint vs the rest of the game and the Job designs themselves, which work just fine in the rest of it.

[T-Owl]

I agree with you on this stuff. I feel like FFXIV's encounter design is largely the problem, as it's gone into the major spike damage (WoW did this, too, in late Wrath and Cataclysm - where they said they were undoing it but forgot to tell the encounter design team they were moving to a triage model; healing in Cata was the worst and most stressful time ever for a healer in any game I've ever played and caused a MASSIVE healer shortage until late in the expansion) with lulls and has gotten stuck on that as the encounters have gotten to be more and more about "the dance" of tightly tuned mechanics that are satisfying when you get them done right (watching a party successfully execute P5S Squal/Surge LOOKS cool, but...), but the issue is that this level of tight tuning, movement, and damage profile has created a game where the healing tools - ANY healing tools, in fact (no healer from ANY game could be inserted into FFXIV and it really be a good fit) don't fit the encounters.

The encounters, while tightly tuned choreographed dances that may be satisfying to mechanically execute, don't fit in any game that really has a healing model to speak of. It's like FFXIV is a tab targeting MMO with Action RPG MMO style fight mechanics that would probably be more suited to something like GW2 or TERA, thus creating a disjoint vs the rest of the game and the Job designs themselves, which work just fine in the rest of it.

Wasn't Blizz increasing damage spikes back in the day basically the fault of discipline priests, because they were just too powerful in avoiding damage, so that other healers complained that there isn't much to heal? And in the end they turned Discipline into a dps focussed healer predominantly because they couldn't find the right balance for them as a shield healer, which is kind of an issue we already see in FF14, shield healers just being better than regen focussed ones which is only kept in check because shielding isn't that necessary in most situations of this game and a hugh dps loss. But are you talking about dungeons or raids here? In dungeons, it was predominantly a problem because they spiked up difficulty back to what they imagined heroics to be in BC, 5-man content for "raiders" while Wotlk had them move towards spammable casual content for people who don't raid.


But to be honest, I wouldn't say that the issue in FF14 lies with the mechanical dance itself, other MMOs have that too, its more that you scripted unavoidable aoes, tank-busters and the mechanical dance phases where failure often leads to death or wipe which are barely recoverable and inbetween just moments of tank and spank, which means outside of individual heal checks this game offers little in terms of ongoing damage for healers to deal with. And I mean, no healers could be inserted into FFXIV predominantly due to the more unique playstyle it moved towards of having a slow gcd and depending on class much gameplay happening inbetween it during weaving windows, but like genuinly, if you would insert any WoW healer into FF14 most of them probably would be just genuinly more exciting than FF14 ones. Even Holy Priest who, as I already pointed out, have more to press while dpsing then FF14 Priests. It doesn't help that FF14 not only has dps only happening scarcely compared to other games, healing is also really powerful, which further decreases requirements. I mean, come on, compared to others you can't deny that FF14 healing feels like being made for people who don't particularily enjoy any challenges inside the role and just want to be done with it with minimum opportunity to fail at anything.

[SweetPete]

I would love for them to use sleeve draw animation for regular draw. Please please please. It’s what I want so much.

[Renathras]

Wasn't Blizz increasing damage spikes back in the day basically the fault of discipline priests,

I might be remembering wrong, but I think no.

Disc wasn't really considered viable in BC or early Wrath. Holy Paladins were the Tank healers, and because of their hyper Mana economy with Holy Light, they were the automatic-raid-spot Tank healer (I did entire boss fights using only two main spells: Judgement of Light or Wisdom + Holy Light). There were attempts to try and make different Healadin builds - the most popular was hyper-tripling down on Spell Speed and making the rotation more focused on Holy Shock and Flash of Light, including the Glyph that made Flash of Light an AOE heal (if you used it on your Beacon of Light or something? I don't remember the details, just that it was a thing since PLD didn't have an AOE heal at the time - it got the light ray thing in Cataclysm's pre-patch), but none of them ever caught on because Holy Light Tank healing was just too good, and PLD's could do so infinitely without running out of mana, even after the crit hit nerf from 60% to 30%. The build was based on tons of Crit and whenever the Paladin Crit, they'd get 60% (later 30%) of their mana spent back. But Holy Light was just SO efficient, that this effectively meant infinite mana.

But, because Holy Light was both efficient and powerful, and every raid was guaranteed to have one, the encounter designers made boss damage to the Tanks super spiky, since it was the only way at all to make it even passingly threatening when Healadin Holy Light + the passive ticks of healing expected on the Tanks from the raid healers' splash heals and Druid HoTs could essentially completely fill a Tank's health bar. That's how the massive spikes came about.

Disc Priest was actually valued in Cataclysm because of a "perfect storm" of bad events: (a) The healer heals (including Paladin) were all nerfed and homogenized to 1x weak heal that had a medium cast time and low healing, 1x medium heal that had a fast cast time and super high mana cost, and 1x large heal that had a large cast time and medium mana cost (I'll get back to this), (b) overall kit and health restructuring (including but not just (a)) to implement a "triage" model where healers were supposed to be "comfortable" with people sitting at 50-70% health for large periods of time instead of rushing to top people of, and (c) ...someone forgot to tell the encounter design team, so damage was still hella spikey, making it an absolute nightmare to heal even 5 man dungeons.

In 25 mans, this made Disc an automatic slot because they could smooth those damage curves so you didn't have Tanks suddenly vaporizing even with every healer in the raid mid-cast on their "large heal with large cast time" because no one had the mana left to use the fast/medium/expensive heals.

Cataclysm healing was a nightmare until 4.4 or so. Whatever patch they added the Bronze Dragonflight 3 dungeons, things got better, but there was a MASSIVE healer shortage because of the disconnect between the class healing kits being a triage model with encounter designs still suck in the high burst damage demands of Wrath somehow still. I know you play WoW, so no idea if you were healing/playing back then or not...but god it was a nightmare. The 4.1 Troll dungeons were so bad, even I quit healing them. Ques for them just DID NOT POP because no one was healing. I would only heal for a 100% friends party, and I think that was happening in the community at large.

God it was bad.

I think what you're talking about - when Disc was changed into a "heals by doing damage" healer - was...I going to say at the end of Warlords of Draenor? I think it was the Legion pre-patch. It MIGHT have been Warlords itself (I didn't play that expansion much, just played a bit at the start and found it...very meh...), but I don't remember Disc playing with that model in Mists of Pandaria, so it was sometime after that where it changed. I did play one some in the Legion pre-patch and Legion, so I know the change HAD been made by that point.

Cata's problems were many, but the biggest issue was the kit vs encounter design. They wanted to encourage CC, but by the end of Wrath, DPSers had become super...lazy. About anything other than just dealing damage, anyway. So they didn't use CC and it was a mess. But it WOULD have been doable if the healers hadn't been so badly nerfed. The worse part is, that didn't even matter in the big boss encounters that didn't have adds (e.g. most of them), yet the boss encounters still had the wrong damage profile of high spikes that healers couldn't manage well because they just didn't have the tools to do so.

.

As for FFXIV: My issue with the encounter designs is that they're SO scripted that healing is more a spreadsheet of fitting in oGCDs for each attack and then just not needing to do anything else the rest of the time.

This raid tier's bleeds have put a twist on this, making spells like Regen and DPSer mitigation tools actually shine a little bit (though like WoW with Cata, players have been trained NOT to use all these tools...), but it's still bursty followed by long periods of downtime, which I think is the main issue. Note that the mechanical dance in WoW fights (at least, from 2 expansions back, the last time I played) had WAY less dance/movement from the healers/ranged/etc classes. You did have to move, but compare a healer's required movement in any FFXIV fight to most of WoW's fights and I think you might agree the WoW fights allow a lot more standing around. FFXIV straddles the line of action MMO/RPG while WoW is more firmly still in the Tab Target model:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWnt6OeSBZU

Notice how much just standing around there is - one thing I still like about WoW's raid design is it feels like raiding an enemy stronghold, complete with the rank and file guards. The closest FFXIV has to this (and I love them) are Eureka and Bozja raids, BA, CLL, DR/DRSavage, and Dal - but even in the fights, notice how often this Holy Priest is able to just sit and cast Smite. And also notice how they mostly ARE casting Smite, Heal, and Flash Heal as their bread and butter spells. Indeed, this Holy Priest is playing much like a FFXIV WHM, just with even less damage spells and using "GCDs" (WoW's basic equivalent) for the bulk of their spell casts, which are mostly single target spot healing.

But notice how much less intense the dancing is. You don't have ANYTHING like P5S Surge/Squall where you have the spread/bait/light party stacks (that all resolve in about 7 seconds and require fairly on the ball movement) or Ex4's charge+dodge+bait AOE circles as you rotate around her, Mario Kart, then have the Tanks spread the Flare markers and the party stack South. WoW fights have far less movement and mechanical "twitch reflex" mechanics like that, with the general mechanics being more based on the Tank, some rare waves of raidwide damage, and some small ground AOEs that people simply move out of and then go back to kind of turreting.

And I don't mean this as an insult - I actually kind of prefer that - just noting that it's pretty different which is why WoW has the healing model that it does, because it doesn't have that action-RPG tilt that FFXIV does.

If I didn't have major issues with Blizzard as a company right now, I might honestly be playing it...anyway, that's neither here nor there.

[T-Owl]

Snip

I'm talking end of wotlk, ICC, at that point Discipline Priest was crazy good, probably the best in the game, since it scaled better with gear than Holy. In BC, Discipline had been the pvp spec. If you remember, back during this times many classes had specs designated to be more useful in PVP and less viable in PvE.

On your video, the Holy Priest doesn't really seems that good, considering how he never uses chastice despite it being instant and stronger than smite, sits on holy fire for most of the time and isn't applying shadow wordain, so I think it is not really the great gotcha example you want it to be. What difficulty was this, like normal or heroic? If you want to get a better impression of a holy priest well played, here is a +30 pov, so a holy priest on the very high end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrJhCaXQmH4

I think this video really shows off where the toolkits seem similar to white mage but are really worlds apart. Like, how he applies dots at the beginning of fights if he isn't bursting with boon of the ascended, which I think really beautifully demonstrates why dots are actually hella good in a game that has high healing requirements and often allows you only scarce uptime, its instant set and forget free damage that keeps ticking even if things go busy. Again, your thesis that Holy Priest is just like WHM is just not true, its toolkit works better with a more healing intense game and it still has more than WHM to press for dpsing situations.

And WoW encounters work different because yeah, you can play still individually more, there are less flashy dense mechanics, instead the battlefield itself is usually more busy during the encounter, while in FF the mechanics when something are happening are extremely scripted and usually involve the entire group participate in them, instead of aoe damage randomly going on on random locations.

[Renathras]

Quote

Oh, I wasn't aiming for any "gotchas". I was just remarking on how it seems even less damage casting than FFXIV. Which I'd be fine with, because I like how much more the focus seems to be on actually healing as a healer.

I remember at the end of Wrath that Disc was starting to find its footing and be accepted in raids. As you say, it was the "PvP spec" at the time. Which was a step up from Vanilla and earlier BC where it was the "leveling spec", but only until level 40 or so, when you would respect to Shadow if you were planning to level yourself or Holy if you wanted to level in parties. Disc was picked up as "second tank healer" in late Wrath 25 mans, and 25 mans in Cata wanted a Holy Paladin/Disc Priest team for keeping the tanks topped up (because of the spike damage vs weaker heals), though I'm not sure what the 10 mans did. I think they went with either.

That video is 5 man, yeah? Dungeons, not Raids?

Healers function differently, it seems, in 5 mans vs 25 mans. For example, 5 man Resto Druid goes with Feral subspec and uses Cat form frequently, while in 25 mans, that's considered inefficient (and dangerous) and it seems the Balance subspect (which plays more like FFXIV healers) is preferred. Likewise, the 5 man vs 25 man Holy Priest builds seem to be different, too. At least, if Icy Veins is still the authoritative source it was when I played WoW a few years ago. DoTs also aren't really "set and forget" since you have to keep refreshing them. They're only "set and forget" if they have REALLY long (like 5+ minute) durations.

Agreed on the last paragraph, though. The WoW encounters seem a lot...I dunno, "slower paced"? "less hectic"? And I say this as a person that means that as a compliment, not an insult. I think it's a better general design. Stuff like Ex4 is cool from time to time, but that should be one of many types of fights, where in FFXIV, I feel like too many encounters are...like that.