Has anyone quit healing?

[ty_taurus]

Oh my god, you're...frustrating. >_<

Dude, just no.

You CANNOT use one questline to insist it was some message to the playerbase but ignore one that completely negates that argument. You said one healer questline tells you, in effect, that Raising people is bad and damage is more important than Raising - as that would be the message from "don't use Raise without using Stone, Aero, and Fluid Aura first" - which is you completely misunderstanding it wasn't even Raise, it was Transfusion. You can't appeal to that then turn around and ignore contradictory evidence because it suits you.

You're taking it too literally. The way games set up storytelling and lore is naturally meant to guide the player. The Conjurer questline is not saying "If you combo Raise out of Stone, it won't reduce your HP to 1." It's saying "stop trying to run before you can walk" and trying to deliver the point that you can't just ignore your DPS spells. If you were to play a game where your character enters a cave, and your companion character spots bandits, or soldiers, or something, and says "Oh-no, if we get caught here, we're screwed. We have to get passed them without them noticing." What does that imply about the gameplay you're going to encounter? Conjurer is the beginning of the White Mage. The questline is teaching you the basics of your jobs future gameplay: learn to balancing healing with your attacks and protection abilities (White Mage had Protect and Stoneskin back then of course). Inversely, Arcanist taught the Scholar to use their different pets (Never did NG+ for those so I have no idea what they tell you now), and taught you how to use your offensive tools already. Scholar gained all of their healing late and taught you how to use your newfound healing abilities that you haven't had the chance to practice yet.

The videos were to show you how people played at the time, which disagrees with how you are saying Healers were played at the time. It disproves your position that Healers have always been played as Green DPS. And note that those encounters, on release, were very difficult with high damage output. That's probably why they brought three healers to a Titan fight. And as I've said, there are plenty more. How many do I have to link before you admit that?

What does that have to do with developer intent? Your argument is that how some players played is indicative of what the designers wanted from the playerbase, or what the combat encounters would allow you to do, but that doesn't make sense. My original post was about what the game was built for and what the design team tried to create when designing fights. There were Black Mage players back then that just used their blizzard spells because they wanted to be ice mages like in WoW. Does that immediately mean this was the intended way to play Black Mage just because some players did this?

Except it doesn't:

- No tight enrage timers.

- No slate of oGCD heals for Healers to use to weave in between damage abilities.

- Few DPS spells for Healers compared to damage dealers of the era.

Note I said "The combat didn't say it". Past tense, not present tense. You're using present tense to argue that ARR fight design did a thing that ARR fight design didn't do. P8S was not in ARR. Ex4 was not in ARR. Healers that have more oGCDs than GCDs were not in ARR

What part of those examples prevents you from DPSing? Are you telling me if something isn't absolutely required in order to complete an objective in a game, that that can only mean it was not intended for the player to use? If that's true than I'd like to redirect some interesting examples to you...

The Legend of Zelda BoTW completed without climbing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK6ub-Z7snI
Pokemon Crystal defeated using only a Sunkern (Including the battle with Red at the end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TQXBvsgQnU
Final Fantasy X Final Boss (the last one you can game over with) beaten on a no sphere grid run [spoilers]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvHHdgy4Hxs
Cyperpunk beaten without killing any enemies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZqvZVHT3Ts

If it was true that the intent of game design is defined by the barest of minimums necessary to complete that content, then sure, your argument holds water. But that also means that from the above examples, BoTW is intended for you to never use climbing, Pokemon is an RPG intended to be defeated with just a Sunkern, the sphere grid is not intended to be used in FFX, and Cyberpunk is intended for you to let AI companions defeat enemies for you.

My point is, sure, DPSing as a healer was slower and more methodical back during ARR. And I would actually love to get back to that. I want healing to be about making choices between offense and healing rather than just use offense and weave healing as needed most of the time. It was more fun having to decide when it was okay to attack and when I'd need to cast Adloquium. Imagine casting Adloquium or Succor outside of savage. What a novel concept. But that is not the omission of the player's ability to DPS, pointed out by your video examples where the WHM players literally stand still more than they even heal, or just cast Cure on tank with full HP or near-full HP.

No, I don't think the designers were intending that you'd have maximum DPS uptime, but the structure of fight design in FFXIV very clearly establishes that Healers are meant to contribute when they can, I think there was just a much greater emphasis on the "when they can" part.

And secondary question:

Why is it so important to you that you're right about this thing you're wrong about?

Couldn't I say the same to you? What's stopping you from moving on? I'm trying to explain that you're misunderstanding what my point was. If the game design didn't want you to DPS, you wouldn't be able to. Instead, you had a selection of offensive tools and time to use them. Whether or not the player was willing to take advantage of that doesn't matter because that couldn't possibly have influenced how the game was created, especially since there were no healers playing that way back when ARR was in development, unless someone at SE can see into the future.

[Renathras]

Yes the game was built like that

The game wasn't. That's kind of the point.

As for Toxicon - they could both be GCDs and it would be a combo/interaction system though, yes? Just with a lower APM.

(nobody has ever been one)

...okay, when did you join the game? BOTH WHM and SCH were GCD healers in ARR. WHM (and I think dAST and possibly nAST, but I didn't dabble with them at the time) were in HW. WHM was in SB. WHM was in ShB. WHM is in EW. WHM has never had enough oGCDs to heal high end content effectively via their use alone. Lilies are GCDs, and a goodly chunk of WHM's healing. The top WHM I found on the Abacus fr P5S did ~38% of his/her healing with Rapture. And presumably that's a player that has learned to minimize unneeded healing. P8S-2 is interesting, in the top team and top WHM (WHM/SGE comp) did 25% with Rapture...and 20.5% + 8.5% with Medica 2 and its HoT, oh, and 1% with Regen, a GCD, for a total of 55% of his/her total healing with GCD heals.

CLEARLY some Healers - including top teams - have been GCD Healers. WHM has never not functioned on a GCD healing paradigm, and SCH and AST did in the past). I get sticking to your guns, but you have to admit that your absolutionist position isn't correct. If you said "Several have not been", you would right, though. SCH has had a heavy oGCD focus since HW, and probably since late ARR, and AST since SB, and SGE its entire existence.

...but that's how they've been feeling for 2+ expansions,...

Not ALL of them. That's my point. As for Deep Dungeon; from what I understand several aren't terrible, they just take some thought. AST is the worst in the game for DD though, apparently. Low personal DPS (WHM and SGE have higher), no passive healing (SCH and SGE have), and its buffs don't boost its own damage enough. Doable, people have done it, but the least desirable. This is why WHM and SGE are considered functional at it, SCH meh, and AST pretty terrible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab-zwGUL__0

...but when talking about solo content, people are talking about MSQ and solo instances, not DD.

Surely the fact that SCH was super DPS heavy in ARR, while WHM was left to 'healbot' in stuff like First/Second coils (Final was where people started DPSing a lot more I think), proves that 'healers should DPS' WAS always the accepted paradigm the community ran by?

Couple things here:

We're talking about the Dev design intentions at the outset of 2.0, not the community standard. Moreover, WHM being "healbot" would prove that "Healers should DPS" was not the paradigm. If it was, there'd be no "healbot". WHM and SCH would both have been going balls to the wall DPS, which wasn't the case. This indicates, at best, the community paradigm was that SCHOLAR should DPS/support heal while WHITE MAGE should be a strict healer. Basically, it means more or less the opposite of your take, and at best, means a nuanced hybrid of it, which I've presented before.

But that wasn't the community standard until late in ARR, not in 2.0. Moreover, it wasn't the Dev design intent based on how encounters ran (no tight Enrages, no required Healer damage), a position they went on the record with in HW (even if it didn't fit the actual encounters).

And given that groups were doing things like three healer WHM/WHM/SCH runs, it's not at all clear "optimizing damage" was the accepted community standard at the time. The push for "more DPS" didn't get stronger in casual content. It was actually a huge point of contention that it was being pushed by a small segment of the community, so much so Cleric was eventually removed entirely.

I started in 2.3 and I never heard that healers were "supposed to DPS" or "how different healing was in FFXIV" until mid-HW. That's when people were actually talking about it across the community. Before then, it seems to have been a somewhat niche conversation among the raid community that no one else was in on. Now, I personally used DPS spells if my MP allowed for it and healing wasn't needing to be done (unless MP is tight, I've never been a fan of taking no actions, which is also why I thought WoW doing the "healer damage spam spell costs no mana" was such a great move, since you could fill dead time with it without compromising your healing - something FFXIV did NOT do, which is what you would do if you were designing a game for Healers to do damage...). I even remember running a dungeon lateish in HW as a PLD (leveling my 4th and last Job I'd get to 60 before SB came out) and running into a dungeon with a SCH, SMN, and BRD, and none of then knew what DoTs were. The SCH didn't cast any DPS spells or enter Cleric. Of course, back then, people actually talked in dungeons. They said they were new, so I went super gentle. I also explained to the SMN and BRD how their DoTs worked (and I had ARCher at like level 20 at the time, so my knowledge was limited; I did have WHM, SCH, and SMN at 60 though), and to the SCH that they could use Bio without needing to cast or go into Cleric and they could plop down Shadow Flare and I would drag the enemies into it. ...got 3 comms for that run and some thank yous. But the point is, it was hardly universal in the community that this was "the way to play".

Yeh, and of the three solutions,...

Debatable. Again, the status quo is widely accepted by the bulk of the community, and it's not at all clear what such a change would have. You also don't understand the premise. Me saying change 3 and leave 1 isn't an agreement that the current design is flawed. It's me believing that some people aren't satisfied with the current design and an attempt to appeal to them while also appealing to the people who are satisfied with the current design - in other words, to please everyone.

The alternative is to change none of them - not to change all of them. You mistake what the alternative/status quo is.

[Teno]

snip

I played the most in ARR, and this is where I raided the most. We had no choice but to use a GCD for healing but that still didn't mean we were gcd healers. Optimizing the fairy was more prevalent. Even with the optimal paper str tanks back then we only just dropped a juicy gcd here and there. Majority of the time was spent dpsing, all the way to bahamut, including for the healbot whm. If anything, people had more trouble accepting str tanks as the norm.
The only thing that was frowned upon was if people died because a healer was in cleric stance (hence the change much later on). And that was usually in pugs.

As for deep dungeons yes they're bad, because you're really essentially a spam bot. The notion of job is very diluted for a healer as a result, especially with sustaining potions. Tanks make up for it with better survivability, better offense, and generally more to do. It's just griefing playing a healer, and masochist considering the gameplay in solo content. Some people like Auroramoon pull it off but they're outliers.