Whatever happened to “We don’t balance fights around healers needing to do damage?”

[Fendred]

Uh no.

First off, just to make this very very clear

**AST DOES NOT HAVE A DPS ROTATION**

Outside of it's two minute burst window it is close to the same as any other healer in this game. You spam your nuke, you keep a 30 second dot ticking and you try to maximise value from your 'DPS' oGCD (Earthy Star in AST's case).

AST's kit isn't bloated because of a DPS rotation. It's bloated because it's a horridly designed job. Celestial Opposition in it's current form is a poster child for Bloat, Undraw is a poster child for bloat, the whole convoluted split Draw/Play combo is a poster child for bloat. None of these abilities are part of the job's DPS rotation. (Before you say Draw, no it is not. You dogpile as many cards as you can into the 2 minute burst window, if you're just mindlessly pulling on cooldown, that's a you problem).

DPS rotations don't need to be bloated monstrosities that front load everything into a 10 second burst followed by a minute and 50 of monotony. You play Dancer, it's Endwalker incarnation was a perfect example of how a job could be super simple yet fun and engaging don't you agree?. There are lots of different ways to achieve this without the need for umpteen buttons.



There's one huge glaring (Sorry not sorry) issue with this point.

Everything is scripted, everything is timed, everything is memorisable. Designing jobs entirely around fresh new content is all well and good, but it ignores the problem of how bland things get once people have learnt the content.

And before it gets said. If the boss is doing enough damage to actually be threatening, chances are that mistakes will simple result in a forced death/party wipe. Classing other peoples mistakes as something healers need to be ready to react to is fine, but the content in which you can carry people through repeated mistakes typically puts out so little damage that A) You've got most of your kit up most of the time to just oGCD bomb them between nukes that it's irrelevant until the vuln stacks get them one shot right through it and B) If you've got multiple people making the occasional mistake, circumstantial 'splash' healing from the likes of Assize, Earthy Star, Lilies etc will typically do just fine given that unavoidable AoEs are usually a minute + apart and decided non threatening anyway.

People are not scripted events. People do not mitigate raid wides or dodge mechanics consistently. Additionally, healing is an active ability, not a passive buff or OGCD like a tank's rampart.

Also please read carefully. I never said that ast had a DPS rotation. I said that AST is the closest thing we have to a healer with a DPS rotation due to its card mechanics.

[Sebazy]

People are not scripted events. People do not mitigate raid wides or dodge mechanics consistently. Additionally, healing is an active ability, not a passive buff or OGCD like a tank's rampart.

Please read carefully sir:

but the content in which you can carry people through repeated mistakes typically puts out so little damage that A) You've got most of your kit up most of the time to just oGCD bomb them between nukes that it's irrelevant until the vuln stacks get them one shot right through it and B) If you've got multiple people making the occasional mistake, circumstantial 'splash' healing from the likes of Assize, Earthy Star, Lilies etc will typically do just fine given that unavoidable AoEs are usually a minute + apart and decidedly non threatening anyway.

Let me make this very very clear:

Mitigation barely matters at all in casual content. Someone forgot to Addle in Aglaia? Oh noes! About the only situation where it starts to have value is in dungeon trash pulls, but that's generally more a leveling dungeon thing and even then, mainly if people are under geared. Eating AoEs in casual content? Again, barely matters. I'll merrily sit in some dungeon trash AoEs as long as it's not multiple stacked and continue to AoE through it on my healer. Why? Because outside of key ones such as more dangerous cleaves or the Ochu bad breath, Asylum/Assize will take care of it. They aren't threatening in the slightest. Dungeon bosses even more so, I always get a chuckle when I see people griping about DPS and Tanks eating vulns from Expert roulette bosses. It makes literally no difference to me and if they are doing good damage then all the more power to them.

As for healing being an active ability. That's not entirely true. A WHM worth their salt will be blowing Assize on cooldown in combat as well as burning Lilies if they aren't Holy spamming. Sure, technically they are active abilities, but given that it's frequent healing that's coming regardless of if it's needed or not, it's functioning like a passive heal. WHM isn't alone in this regard.

[Fendred]

Please read carefully sir:



Let me make this very very clear:

Mitigation barely matters at all in casual content. Someone forgot to Addle in Aglaia? Oh noes! About the only situation where it starts to have value is in dungeon trash pulls, but that's generally more a leveling dungeon thing and even then, mainly if people are under geared. Eating AoEs in casual content? Again, barely matters. I'll merrily sit in some dungeon trash AoEs as long as it's not multiple stacked and continue to AoE through it on my healer. Why? Because outside of key ones such as more dangerous cleaves or the Ochu bad breath, Asylum/Assize will take care of it. They aren't threatening in the slightest. Dungeon bosses even more so, I always get a chuckle when I see people griping about DPS and Tanks eating vulns from Expert roulette bosses. It makes literally no difference to me and if they are doing good damage then all the more power to them.

As for healing being an active ability. That's not entirely true. A WHM worth their salt will be blowing Assize on cooldown in combat as well as burning Lilies if they aren't Holy spamming. Sure, technically they are active abilities, but given that it's frequent healing that's coming regardless of if it's needed or not, it's functioning like a passive heal. WHM isn't alone in this regard.

Oh, you're referring to non-savage content. I was talking about savage. Mitigations in savage are actually way more significant. There are times when a raidwide is going out and if only one person mitigates people survive at maybe 5-10% and that's with shields.

[Sebazy]

In random groups it was a complete crapshoot if someone could wall pull as a scholar because our healing resources were limited in a way that white mage was not. Of course when ilvl started to kick in things got a little better. White mage could save an underperforming group, but everyone had to be on top of things for scholar to do it. There were only so many charges to use on lustrate before we were out of gas.

Early SCH was a lot stronger at healing than people gave it credit for and a well played SCH could easily match a WHM.

The issue was that people were blindsided by Selene's tooltips. Her haste buffs were laughably misleading with people assuming that the huge haste percentages promised made her the absolute go to fairy (Go search my history on reddit, I got laughed off the FFXIV reddit for suggesting that EoS was actually a gain over Selene back then). The reality couldn't have been further away from this. Roused Whispering Dawn was an insane amount of healing on a pair of cooldowns that were up for every trash pull. Between that and Lustrate you could put out a huge amount of healing with no need to drop out of cleric stance. It was easily enough to compete with WHM on trash.

Oh, you're referring to non-savage content. I was talking about savage. Mitigations in savage are actually way more significant. There are times when a raidwide is going out and if only one person mitigates people survive at maybe 5-10% and that's with shields.

Eh no, I'm referencing both.

In Savage, mitigation is there to stop the squishier members of the party being one shot. If you can save the SCH/Sadge having to drop a Succor to reliably pass the AoE check then sure. But that's really only a progression issue. Again, even this tier, AoEs just aren't that frequent compared to what we used to see back in the day.