My take on the simplicity of healers and the healer problem

[Payadopa]

As a SCH main, I don't want it get taken away and I'll definitely get upset if the solution is yet again "delete it" instead of working on the flaws. If someone wants to play SCH without ED then I'll kindly direct them towards SGE.
If the choice is only "get it taken away or keep it" then I'll always choose "keep it" because this and Dissipation is the last, sad bit of a skill ceiling we have left since it allows us to optimize a bit more even if the reward is boring. At least the path to optimizing it is still fun, requires coordination and a little bit of skill.
If they could rework it into something far better then by all means, go ahead.
But just deleting it? No. And from the reactions many other SCH mains seem to feel the same. SE has a habit of just deleting things without giving anything back. That is exactly the reason why we are where we are and part of the playerbase is definitely also guilty of pushing for just deleting something instead of reworking it into something better.

I could say the same thing about cards as an AST main. It's like the community wants everything as DPS centric as possible and then acts surprised when SE deletes stuff. At least let me keep Lord and Lady as RNG now that all cards are Balance and I'm pressing Divination on CD. Riveting.

[CStrife912]

Hello,

I'm a healer main that joined after the release of Shadowbringers and as a person who is used to the new alteration of healers I am mostly happy and generally don't mind the homogenization amongst their spells but I can't deny there are some issues.

Healing overall is a job that has a really low skill floor and no skill ceiling to keep more experienced players having fun with the role. Also the job design largely matches the hardest difficulty of the game (ultimates, min ilvl savage), where planning cooldowns around actually matters. This leaves the rest of the people with an overload of healing buttons with little to no use.

I have touched every piece of content in the game from casual to ultimate and played all 4 healers, so here are some things I'd like to see change in the future.

Fight Design:
1. More vulnerability debuffs instead of damage downs
2. More % damage raidwides or ones that require you to have a shield in order to survive
3. More 1HP drops that require a quick topping off before the actual damage hits.
4 An actual heal-through enrage not the 2 soft enrage aoes into hard enrage we currently have.

WHM:
1. A party wide shielding ability. - AST has shield, SCH/SGE have regen abilities, so I don't see why not.
2. Another aoe regen ability tied to lilies. Can even be as simple as reworking freecure to give a regen to Afflatus heals. This will make Rapture/Solace stand out and not be a Medica/Cure 2 equivalents but with a fancier effect and no cast.

AST:
1. Rework Astrodyne - I want the fantasy of buffing my allies, why on earth do I need a selfish buff?
2. Make Minor Arcana a card you can draw out of combat and allow astro to pick if they want a heal or dmg card.

SCH:
1. Remove/rework Energy Drain - it should reward you for healing not punish you for using your healing gauge for damage.
2. Make fairies unique again.
3. Allow Seraph's Fey Illumination/Whispering Dawn equivalent abilities to match the capstone ability that Seraph is meant to be, rather than it being the same but with a fancy new name.

SGE: I think it's a really good base that has improved over the patches and it can only be improved further with spells that build upon the fantasy of being this combat medic that heals by doing damage.
1. Give a spell that is locked behind a cooldown and it gives the whole party a Kardion like effect that heals them up for a limited amount of time while you're dealing damage.

This is my take on the issue surrounding healers and the things I'd like to see introduced to make things more engaging.

I agree on fight design aspects...healers would have to heal more if the content hit harder. It wouldn't solve the issue completely but making healers have to heal rather than dps would be a step in the right direction.

[ty_taurus]

On the topic of SCH's faeries, I've had an idea of a way to rework how they heal to make them a lot more responsive to actions like Fey Blessing and I'm curious how this sounds to others.

In this concept, Embrace is removed. Aetherpact's heal per tic is reduced to 150, it no longer consumes gauge, and the faerie can perform pet actions while the tether is active. This would have a 5 second cooldown, and your faerie can only be tethered to one person at a time. She will also follow whomever she's tethered to unless placed manually.

This effectively reworks Aetherpact into your faerie's uses of Embrace, which does a few things. First, it leaves her idle during most of the fight, allowing her to respond immediately to commands as Carbuncle does. Second, it allows you to funnel all her healing attention onto one person rather than her AI healing whomever she wants basically. It does slow down the rate at which she heals since it's based on the server tic of 3 seconds, whereas formerly and with SGE's Kardia, these can activate once per GCD of around 2.5 seconds. That said, the tics will always go off, whereas SGE's only occurs when they attack. So there are a fair amount of pros and cons to this concept. It's also possible that the tether's current particle effects are too bright to be up 100% of the time and might be frustrating to the tank, but this could be resolved by making the light bright when you first tether, but dims after the animation finishes, making it less distracting.

What are people's thoughts on a change like this?

[Niroken]

Playing WHM you can basically remove half the healing spells and I wouldn't notice in 90% of content. There is no way they can add more besides updating lower level spells with higher potency and new shiny graphics.

[Allegor]

Playing WHM you can basically remove half the healing spells and I wouldn't notice in 90% of content. There is no way they can add more besides updating lower level spells with higher potency and new shiny graphics.

Just wait till they remove Temperance, aka Largesse, aka Divine Seal, give it a new coat of paint, and put it back as a "brand new ability" for lv 91-100

[Deceptus]

Fight Design:
1. More vulnerability debuffs instead of damage downs

This is the opposite of what needs to happen.

Vulnerability debuffs punish the healers when the corresponding player messes up. Healers have to heal more for other people's mistakes.

Damage down punishes the player for the player mistakes. They are the reason they got the debuff, so they should feel the repercussions of said action, not the healer.

I already address how WHM had a shield ability before, so another history lesson. They did remove Energy Drain once and the backlash was so big they rushed to bring it back as fast as possible in the next patch. Scholars love Energy Drain and they get upset when it's taken away.

Healers are pissed when said ability is removed and not compensated for.

• Patch 4.0 lowered the MP gain on Aetherflow from 20% to 10%. Energy Drain helped make up that difference (it gave MP back at that time).
• When it was removed in 5.0, the MP nerf to Aetherflow wasn't reverted so SCH's had massive MP issues.
• It wasn't until 6.0 the MP nerf to Aetherflow was reverted (and Energy Drain was again nerfed in potency and kept the removed MP gain)

It also had the secondary effect of SCH lacking a non-healing Aetherflow dump. If people were full and your Aetherflow CD came up you used pointless healing and hit Aetherflow for the MP.

But ultimately, yes, Energy Drain needs decoupled from Aetherflow. Balanced accordingly, and put on a charge based system. IMHO it should function just like Sage Phlegma.

[ForteNightshade]

I don't agree with that because although I am not a healer main, I have observed healers planning cooldowns with eachother and having a learning curve. If you were at the skill floor, you would probably just spam cure into cure II instead.

These plans are only relevant near min ilvl for Savage and Ultimate. In both scenarios, they're better described as mitigation plans than healing plans because it isn't a lack of healing killing people in something like Dragonsong most of the time. It's a missed Reprisal or Samba. Which has been heavily criticised not only due to it running contrary to Yoshida's now infamous "just do Ultimate" claim but makes both Astro and White Mage feel less relevant. In fact, the best healing duo in all four Ultimates is Sage and Scholar because of how mitigation heavy they are.

I agree that vulnerability debuffs made expansions like Heavensward more challenging. From what they have told us, they moved away from it to damage downs to allow us to see further into the fight even if the rest of the party wasn't very good, while still making it difficult to beat because of lack of DPS. Players are more likely to greed a vuln than a damage down as well because of their obsession with DPS.

Their claim was vulnerability debuffs only punished the healer and felt unfair. Hence why they moved away from them. The actual reason, which they will never acknowledge publicly, is vulnerability debuffs were often never threatening enough to matter. Therefore, players either greeded or outright ignored mechanics. This led to the extremely rare example of JP copying NA for a strat: Uptime Soccer in E6S. Eating a vulnerable stack that could be easily shielded through was far and away safer than actually doing the mechanic. And that vuln debuff was meager enough to not even require a GCD shield. Not so coincidentally, the very next tier brought about damage downs.

I already address how WHM had a shield ability before, so another history lesson. They did remove Energy Drain once and the backlash was so big they rushed to bring it back as fast as possible in the next patch. Scholars love Energy Drain and they get upset when it's taken away.

The backlash was immense because Scholar had been completely gutted at the time they tried that and Aetherflow remained necessary for MP management. So you had Scholars basically throwing away their stacks because they always had to keep Aetherflow on cooldown, regardless if they actually needed to use their stacks for healing. Sage essentially did Energy Drain-less Scholar correctly.

A big problem with the dev team is they remove abilities without considering how it might impact the job. It's why Samurai players are still upset over Kaiten's removal. It's not that Kaiten was some revolutionary gameplay mechanic but it reduced Kenki to a boring "spam Shinten" gauge. This trend continued with Paladin. While I do think the change is a net positive, Goring Blade is downright lazy. Much of the backlash they've received wouldn't exist if more thought was put into these changes. Look at 5.1 Ninja for a good example of this. Some didn't and still don't like GCD Mudras but the complaints were far and few because they properly built the whole kit around them. Granted, 5.0 Ninja was such a mess any change was good but the point still stands.

[Midareyukki]

I know this is incredibly stupid. But just like how AST gets MP back on using cards, can't SCH just have MP gain on any Aetherflow skill they use? :T

Like...

idk how broken that'd be, but I also doubt we're building a meta around MP generation. If we are... the hell are we doing, how did it come to this???

[ForteNightshade]

I could say the same thing about cards as an AST main. It's like the community wants everything as DPS centric as possible and then acts surprised when SE deletes stuff. At least let me keep Lord and Lady as RNG now that all cards are Balance and I'm pressing Divination on CD. Riveting.

Because DPS is the only thing that matters in this game by design. It isn't the community's fault but the dev team's for never making anything else relevant enough to matter. People didn't arbitrarily decide AoE Bole or Ewer were useless because "rawr damage!!!!!" We recognized that casual content does comically little damage and MP management doesn't exist. So why would you ever want either? At the higher level, you cannot plan around RNG mitigation. If the upcoming raidwide is about to deal lethal damage, I need mitigation ready to go. Therefore, I'll rely on my consistent oGCDs and the party's overall utility. Bole nowadays would be rendered completely worthless in the same way Lady is because I'll always have something ready to go. Lady is 95% overheal. Hence why people hate it.

Now if you actually had to GCD heal regularly in this game, you could make practical use out of Lady since it's essentially freeing up a GCD. As that isn't the case, it's just a feels bad button.

[Deceptus]

I know this is incredibly stupid. But just like how AST gets MP back on using cards, can't SCH just have MP gain on any Aetherflow skill they use? :T

Like...

idk how broken that'd be, but I also doubt we're building a meta around MP generation. If we are... the hell are we doing, how did it come to this???

When Energy Drain was removed a lot of SCH's asked that exact question. Why not put MP on any ability that used aetherflow?

CBU3's Response?

Leave SCH the way it is and put that exact mechanic on the new job, Sage.