Healers need an overhaul

[GrimGale]

The thing is, while it is pretty normal to be spamming glare to the point of actually wearing down your mana pool from it in normal content, it is a totally different story in savage content.

If what I am reading in the website that shall not be named, the greyest parse of Astrologian has about 100+ casts of Malefic, just about the same as the greyest parse of Scholar or White Mage. Astrologian's opener is all about weaving in cards, then Astrodyne then Divination to match the burst timing of the raid. And while that might be bloated for an opener, (IMO it rather is, especially having fight again against RNG, even if minimized somewhat.) in terms of GCDs its pretty much as any of the other healers.

[WaxSw]

The thing is, while it is pretty normal to be spamming glare to the point of actually wearing down your mana pool from it in normal content, it is a totally different story in savage content. Astrologian's opener shows what would happen if healers had DPS abilities: The healer strains to adjust to incoming raid-wides by comparison to sage, whm and scholar. Normal mode content doesn't require the full use of the healer's toolkit, whereas savage content does.

That is not true at all, even in Savage and ultimates the glare spam is the predominant activity every healer does, what you mention are just burst windows that happens in very key moments of the fight and even during those a good healer with teamwork can heal, in fact let me show you a not optimized p8sp2 Ast run:


This fight has segments where no one can hit the boss and despite that fall malefic (ast's glare) is still over 40% of the total actions it does and around 70% of the total GCD count, there is no excuse to not add more dps actions to healers and Ast's proves it as well as any other healer or the pre Shb healer iterations where healers had said dps actions and they were capable of healing fine

[Deceptus]

That is not true at all, even in Savage and ultimates the glare spam is the predominant activity every healer does, what you mention are just burst windows that happens in very key moments of the fight and even during those a good healer with teamwork can heal, in fact let me show you a not optimized p8sp2 Ast run:


This fight has segments where no one can hit the boss and despite that fall malefic (ast's glare) is still over 40% of the total actions it does and around 70% of the total GCD count, there is no excuse to not add more dps actions to healers and Ast's proves it as well as any other healer or the pre Shb healer iterations where healers had said dps actions and they were capable of healing fine

And this ^^ is on the most active healer playstyle there is.

The other ones aren't that deep at all.

[Nizzi]

The thing is, while it is pretty normal to be spamming glare to the point of actually wearing down your mana pool from it in normal content, it is a totally different story in savage content. Astrologian's opener shows what would happen if healers had DPS abilities: The healer strains to adjust to incoming raid-wides by comparison to sage, whm and scholar. Normal mode content doesn't require the full use of the healer's toolkit, whereas savage content does. What I do find problematic with healers has specifically to do with scholar and astrologian. Scholar still has leftover heavensward design elements-- that is, they require the player to know when something is coming up to fully utilize an ability. In this case deployment tactics with a guaranteed critted adloq and ground targeting on their primary defensive buff. Sage by contrast is snappy and responsive. Astro's issue is really just ability bloat.

This is just absolutely nonsensical. No, AST's opener and 2m burst windows being spastic does not show that more DPS buttons would strain healers. There was not a single fight in all of Asphodelos (Savage) that required the full use of a healer's toolkit to the extent where more DPS buttons wouldn't work, not even Scholar. We can simply look back to Stormblood to see what a healer with more DPS buttons would perform like. Scholar had Broil, Bio II, Energy Drain, Miasma, Miasma II, Bane, Shadow Flare and Ruin II (4 more DPS buttons than it has now) and Scholar was completely able to heal all of Omega fine. The first two Ultimates came out in Stormblood as well, and again, Scholar was able to perform totally fine and was even meta throughout Stormblood. AST's opener is awful because it's oGCD heavy, it has nothing to do with "what more DPS abilities would look like", there's no basis in reality for you believing that.

Further, if you think Scholar's design elements are bad, just play Sage? For you, Sage is "snappy and responsive", but for me, Sage is absolutely the most boring job in the game, especially when juxtaposed with Scholar. I don't want to change Sage to fit me even though I think it's an incredibly sterile job, so there's no need to change Scholar even more than it's already been changed to fit you if you already like Sage, especially when the things you don't like about Scholar happen to be what a lot of Scholar players enjoy about the job.

[ASkellington]

This is just absolutely nonsensical. No, AST's opener and 2m burst windows being spastic does not show that more DPS buttons would strain healers. There was not a single fight in all of Asphodelos (Savage) that required the full use of a healer's toolkit to the extent where more DPS buttons wouldn't work, not even Scholar. We can simply look back to Stormblood to see what a healer with more DPS buttons would perform like. Scholar had Broil, Bio II, Energy Drain, Miasma, Miasma II, Bane, Shadow Flare and Ruin II (4 more DPS buttons than it has now) and Scholar was completely able to heal all of Omega fine. The first two Ultimates came out in Stormblood as well, and again, Scholar was able to perform totally fine and was even meta throughout Stormblood. AST's opener is awful because it's oGCD heavy, it has nothing to do with "what more DPS abilities would look like", there's no basis in reality for you believing that.

I would like to add that adding in dps is to increase the skill ceiling for veterans/midcore healers to aspire to.

If you are struggling to heal you aren't going to be worried about that extra dps button. The extra dps button is there for when you have time to be dpsing.

[currentlemon]

snip

I second this. I'm a new AST player myself and I'm not seeing that much difference with WHM or SGE (the latter I dislike). Yes, the card mechanic does sometimes alleviate the 1 button spam, but I feel like the cooldown on that ability is too long. I feel like it needs to be shortened for it to have any effect. Also been hearing suggestions that "Draw" and "Play" be reworked to GCD abilities. Not sure how that would work, but it is something to consider in my opinion.

[ASkellington]

I second this. I'm a new AST player myself and I'm not seeing that much difference with WHM or SGE (the latter I dislike). Yes, the card mechanic does sometimes alleviate the 1 button spam, but I feel like the cooldown on that ability is too long. I feel like it needs to be shortened for it to have any effect. Also been hearing suggestions that "Draw" and "Play" be reworked to GCD abilities. Not sure how that would work, but it is something to consider in my opinion.

I strongly disagree with having Draw/Play being on the GCD like Lillies or anything else. All it does is add unnecessary clunk and lower the APM. While there is some merit to the latter that isn't the way I'd go about it. Trading a Malefic for a card to me does not sound good and I can't imagine it would feel good either.

[Amarande]

I think the split nonsense needs to go.
Pure healers are currently basically shield healers without the good stuff (mit, free shields) while shield healers drown in regens and bring burst heals on top of mit and free shields. They didn't properly split the healers, they just made half of them straight up better. They either need to redesign the toolkits on a fundamental level to properly reflect the type or scrape their whole attempt at splitting healers into subroles. But since they want to make sure that even little Timmy who prefers to watch Netflix on his 2nd monitor needs to be able to easily spam all HP bars to full no matter which class he choses, you'll not see shield healers having a proper weakness - so they just ended up as "pure healer but better".

I feel like this is a situation SE has probably painted themselves into the corner on at this point because of past encounter design: the "knock everyone down to 1 HP and require them to be healed back to full in X amount of time" mechanic appears fairly often, and needs to remain doable synced. Because of this, shield healers still need to be at least close to regen healers in terms of how much actual HP bar they restore per GCD, which already makes it close to impossible to avoid this sort of power balance issue. (There have already been cutting-it-close issues with this in certain situations, particularly DRK+SCH pairing: in at least some patches, the SCH actually must hold back at least some aetherflow or cooldowns specifically for use when the DRK LDs, or they won't be able to heal fast enough to meet WD's requirement!)

I would like to add that adding in dps is to increase the skill ceiling for veterans/midcore healers to aspire to.

If you are struggling to heal you aren't going to be worried about that extra dps button. The extra dps button is there for when you have time to be dpsing.

If only the playerbase actually understood this well enough that "leave the other healer to do all the heals because you want to meter maid" faux healers weren't a frequent enough occurrence to be mentionable! (Not to mention the healer left in the lurch then gets seen as the worse player because the culture rates everyone based on damage, so if you're forced to solo heal it and have no time for damage buttons ...)

[Naoki34]

I'll just say that SGE is perfect !

[Somnolence]

I think I already posted this in this thread some time ago, so just reminding everyone that Blue Mage can handle Omega Savage raid healing by using only 3-5 slots out of 24 for healer spells. So it still has DPS tools like Moon flute burst windows.


Nothing in the raid design has chanced since to make this playstyle unviable.