Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

That's where we're differing.

Meh, it's more in "you see damage, I see healing". When you reword "mitigation" (a term we all know") as "does damage"...I'm pretty sure it's the damage filter lenses you're wearing.

Regardless, as noted, Healers in PvP are neat because they play to the four archetypes, have lots of short CD abilities, and have a lot of multi-effect/packaged/bundled abilities. Which was my point.

This is the attitude issue people tried to point out.

It's not an attitude issue (on my part), it may be on your part. There isn't an attitude nor has there ever been one. No amount of trying to ad hominem discredit a person changes that. In my posts, I'm generally very matter of fact about things, with rare exceptions that I drip sarcasm after someone says something over the top. What "attitude" you're seeing is derived from your mind/viewpoint, not mine.

In this case, when you're so determined to make Healers out as DPSers that you refuse to use a well established term meaning "defensive gameplay" to twist it into "does damage", it kind of shows hwy it's nearly impossible to convince you otherwise. You're using such a broad definition of "does damage" that literally anything could be defined as doing damage. For example, if I set my controller down on WHM for 10 seconds so my MP would fill, you could define that as me "doing damage" since I can then use that generated MP on Glare casts. That is, by doing literally nothing, I MAYBE contributed to "does damage" because I generated a resource that can be used to deal damage. I've said this in some level before, but I'm trying to be direct and as unambiguous as possible to avoid confusion now: If we use definitions this broad, then every Job in the game is a Healer.

With a broad enough definition of "does damage", even taking no action whatsoever could be defined as doing damage. This is why such definitions are so broad as to be meaningless, and thus cannot be used for discussions or paradigms.

My problem is you stubbornly hold on to this, or worse, expand it over time. I wasn't being snarky. I was being honest - that's how we define the word mitigation. But saying "buffs, heals, and mitigates" wouldn't have gotten your "does damage" point, so you changed to stating the definition of mitigation instead of using the word mitigation, since the latter wouldn't have supported your position/argument.

It's really hard to deal with all of you taking such abjectly stubborn views of these things, but you imply snark or "attitude" where none exists. You know what the word mitigation is defined as. You purposely chose not to use it because it would have weakened your position. Which is especially odd since we've collectively agreed, in the past, that of the Healers, AST would be the best candidate for the "heals and buffs" of the four under either the "Change 3" or "more complex across the board" models.

As for PvP AST's buffs: Honestly, I just like that they're all pretty useful and designed to be used. They're AOE and you aren't playing a minigame to try to match seals or fish for one specific one, etc. And this is again where we differ: I like long turtle games. They feel way more epic to me than arcadey "run out, battle, die, respawn, repeat" squishy deathmatches.

The point is that you put forward a tone that smacked of 'I preach gospel truth',

You read A LOT into my posts that I don't put into them. You were the one that implied everyone was having trouble with it, leading to a massive Healer exodus. I was saying that people were able to deal with it once they made the paradigm shift away from status quo healing and that it was an approachable way to play if they did so.

Please - I'm asking this as genuine as I can and not being snarky - stop reading INTO my posts and just read my posts. If I feel like you aren't getting what I'm saying right while doing so, I'm clarify what I mean/try to explain it better so we're on the same page. You've done this several times, but you don't need to read into my posts things or tell me what I'm saying, because I'm not lacing my posts with implication nor am I being ambiguous or vague to mislead, trick, or trap.

I was just explaining your argument - your position was people were quitting over it because it was too hard for them to adjust to. I was arguing that it was only hard for people that refused to adjust. Recall, this was your position, not mine:

The issue of 'It's too hard to heal this fight' isn't an issue now that you don't need to heal as much,

...implying it was "too hard to heal" before people had geared up. I was contesting that with "No, it wasn't too hard to heal", which is what you say your position is now.

You'd be fine with halfway, I'd be fine with the same as this tier.

I'd be fine with either.

I will never cease to be amazed how you feel you need to put words in my mouth when I outright tell you what I feel so you have no need to. Me saying "we agree" means I also would be fine with this level going forward.

It doesn't matter how hard they make the boss hit, if they then make it just AFK for the next 30s.

Honestly, I have no idea why they do this. My guess is to even more coddle DPS players so they can do their rotations, but I have no idea.

A: Leaving one of the healers alone would cause it to be perceived by players as 'the bad one' or 'the one idiots play' or whatever.

No, only bad players would think that. And bad players think that no matter what. You can take any handful of Jobs in this game - it doesn't matter which, say BLM, SAM, and DRG - and morons will tell you one is the easiest and "the bad one" or "the one idiots play". Meanwhile, folks at The Balance and the like are crunching the numbers to see what their actual performances are and the Abacus Logs pour in to say what the average damage for the average player is and what the top end damage for the top end player is...and most PF groups don't care either way.

B: Anyone asking for 'more complexity should mean more damage' is probably a lemon,

Oh, I agree, but there are a lot of them.

Honestly, damage variance within a role/sub-role should realistically not be more than about 1%. If it's more than that, you get the "bad Job" arguments out of the woodwork, even though a 1% difference is entirely within the margin of mere RNG (did you get DHs or Crits at the "right" time or not, ect)

But yeh, I've gone through why I think leaving WHM behind in a 'role revitalization plan' is counterproductive, many times.

You've given reasons, and I've countered them. I've also suggested each of the other healers being the one "left alone" and you shoot those down, too. I suggested SGE (it’s new and has only ever been this way, and people wanting to play the “easy healer” could pick it up at level 70 if they haven’t already to make for an easy transition) and that was shot down. I mentioned SCH and that was shot down. The only one I haven’t mentioned is AST, because it’s not easy as it is (though 7.0 may change that with the dreaded rework), but regardless, it’s not just WHM, since you’ve also attacked any notion of any other.

The spec I play in WOW was in the top 10 mythic raid clears somewhere. Despite that, it's B tier on most tierlist websites and as such, it's hella hard to get invites for groups.

One thing I honestly love about FFXIV - FFXIV is not WoW.

Despite all the hand-wringing over “The Meta(TM)”, few groups actually care outside of world first (which aren’t usually PF anyway; they have Statics, and they also know that a “simple Job” can sometimes be the best for a fight) unless a Job is actively holding back its team because of low output. Meaning if it has comparable output/throughput, the people where it matters will bring it and the people where it won’t won’t care. SAM in SB and MCH in EW weren’t blacklisted because they were “the idiot one”. They were blacklisted because, mathematically, they didn’t bring the output to the party that their competitors did, and the margin was big enough to prevent clears. FFXIV loses out on some of the things WoW does (or used to do...) right regarding Healing, open world, etc, but in terms of parties and groups, it still miles less toxic, even now.

I won't say it's entirely a WoW problem that NEVER shows up in FFXIV, but when it does, it's based on output/throughput/performance, not on how easy the Job is. Top end players bring whatever is "best" to the fight, and don't care if it's "easy" or "hard". Midcore bring what they're comfortable with, and don't care if it's easy or hard. Casuals...don't care at all. Some Tryhard PF groups will care about meta output/performance, but not about easy. Again, MCH wasn't being blacklisted because it was easy. MCH was being blacklisted because it was mathematically inferior to DNC or BRD by a significant enough margin people felt it would endanger clears. If SGE had a 10 button DPS rotation and SCH had a 1 button one, but they did the same damage and had the same healing and mitigation (or both had enough to clear the fight, anyway), then they'd both be equally viable options. If anything, SGE might be the one blacklisted after people have experience with "average players" underperforming on it. But that's also pretty unlikely to happen on a wide scale if it has the tools it needs to do the job.

Why take my class, when the S rank spec is played by all the FOTM chasers and plentiful in the groupfinder tool?

This is a balance argument, not a “is it the baby/idiot one” argument.

On which note, could the reason your numbers dropped in SB be because everyone was saying 'WHM bad omegalul' and insisting on having AST/SCH for everything?

No, because the count is “Job is at max level on a character which has completed the MSQ”. If someone leveled WHM to 70 and it was bad and they leveled SCH or AST, this would make the Healer % go up (since they’re now being counted twice/thrice in the total, once each as WHM, SCH, and/or AST). The only reason the Healer % would go down is if they were leveling a different role, as now Healers would be a smaller percent of the total. You’d still have your WHM at 70, but now you’d have a SAM or RDM or whatever at 70, which would nudge the DPS % up slightly and the Healer % down slightly.

So no, it wouldn’t be because of that. What seems more likely is that people were leaving the ROLE of Healer and picking up another Role. Statistically, DPS, since it went from 52% to 54% to 60% from HW into SB. And it wasn’t into Tanking until ShB, likely due to the addition of GNB at least in part.

A part could have been Healers transitioning to RDM or whatever, though. But that indicates they didn’t like what SCH or AST were like and were leaving the Role entirely, making it not a WHM problem but a WHM, SCH, and AST problem.

So what we saw as we left HW and went through SB is players transitioning from Healers into DPSers, because apparently people didn’t like the healing/way Healers played in SB. This likely also dovetails with Yoshi P's statement at the time that they were making Healers easier in ShB since they saw the Healer population declining in SB. If people hated WHM but were madly in love with SCH's clunk and DoT juggling and/or AST's complexity, then we wouldn't have seen the Healer numbers decline (people would just have swapped away from WHM to SCH/AST), nor would we have seen Yoshi P trying to make the role more accessible. The logical conclusion is that Healer players did not enjoy SCH and AST's gameplay in SB, and many felt WHM was too weak or something, so they did what many have said they'd do if Healers were made more complex - they swapped to (likely the easier of the) DPSers instead, causing a massive Healer shortage and making ques even worse. Something the Devs tried to rectify by making Healers easier again in ShB.

A curious thing, btw:


WHM/CNJ SCH* AST SGE
207,962 243,895 132,102 0
489,836 353,104 407,454 0
529,288 414,201 460,305 0
567,482 466,521 498,606 0
713,135 616,590 655,684 563,011
985,025 850,625 894,615 851,406

WHM started off lower than SCH in HW, but surpassed it going into SB, and has been ahead of it ever since. Almost like SCH’s SB kit was, comparatively/relatively (both numbers went up, but in the “by how much” comparison) less popular than WHM’s SB kit. Which is saying something, considering how bad WHM’s SB kit was. Healers seemed to have disliked SCH’s gameplay and kit more than WHM’s. Interestingly, AST was ahead of SCH from late SB (and yeah, broken as all hells) and into ShB and on to the present, though SGE is right there with SCH and neither is that far behind AST.

There are several curious things here, one of which I said - WHM's kit seemed more popular than SB's SCH or AST ones - but also regarding the Lucky Bancho numbers, WHM's consistently have super high representation in terms of end-game weapons, but SCH (in JP)/SGE (in EU/NA) is second (though the two are pretty close), with AST usually in last and the least played/most rare Healer. This rough order of WHM >> SCH ~= SGE >>> AST is also seen in a lot of online surveys and a lot of anecdotal data (for example, when on Hunt Trains, count sometimes how many Dia vs Biolysis vs EuDosis vs Combusts you see on the boss - yes, there's a display cap, but there are a LOT of Dias vs the rest, and often no Combusts at all), 24 mans often have a healthy dose of WHM/SGE and sometime SCH, but AST is rare and it's somewhat uncommon to see more than one, if even one, out of the six healers, and so on and so forth. (All anecdotal, as noted, but it is interesting it comports with the survey data and Lucky Bancho data.)

Yet here, we see AST in second. Curious. Though the metrics ARE different; Lucky Bancho is "when their Lodestone page was crawled, what Job were they and did they have a ilevel 615+ weapon" (this was back before the Manderville ones were added, so BarbiEx, Tome, or Savage) vs FFXIV Census, which seems to be looking at MSQ completion on the character and what Jobs they have at level cap, but even so, if there were tons of ASTs, one would think statistically the player would log out as them like they logged out on the other Healer Jobs. Surely all the AST's aren't swapping Jobs before logging out just to monkey with datasets, after all.

[Silver-Strider]

WHM started off lower than SCH in HW, but surpassed it going into SB, and has been ahead of it ever since. Almost like SCH’s SB kit was, comparatively/relatively (both numbers went up, but in the “by how much” comparison) less popular than WHM’s SB kit. Which is saying something, considering how bad WHM’s SB kit was. Healers seemed to have disliked SCH’s gameplay and kit more than WHM’s. Interestingly, AST was ahead of SCH from late SB (and yeah, broken as all hells) and into ShB and on to the present, though SGE is right there with SCH and neither is that far behind AST.

The SCH drop can be explained as a result of SE starting their lobotomy of healers in SB. While WHM lost a lot of abilities that either became role actions (Largesse, Cleric Stance, etc) or were just straight up replaced with something (Stoneskin -> Divine Benison), it didn't lose any attacks really and its long standing MP issue had finally been resolved with Thin Air's inclusion, leaving the only real problem with the job being the Lackluster RNG nature of Lilies and Confessions that could fully be ignored since their impact to WHM's gameplay was practically non-existent. AST maintained itself for the most part in SB in terms of functionality as well. Sure, Noct sect was meh but at least it worked well enough to hold itself up and got some new card gimmicks to maintain its identity. In comparison, SCH just flat out lost several of its previous tools such as Shadowflare, Bane, Energy Drain, and Miasma 2 while Bio 1+2 were merged into a single skill. Couple this with Succor/Addlo getting cost increases that made it next to impossible to sustain with, even in casual content, that of course it's going to drop like a stone in the Ruby Sea. It was an effort in futility to play SCH before SE "fixed" it in subsequent patches by returning Energy Drain and Miasma 2 but the damage was done at that point and no amount of making Dissipation playable was going to magically bring back all those players that dropped the job.

There's nothing really curious about that at all.