Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

The fact stands that he still won’t call a spade a spade regardless.

It's probably more that he's not calling a spoon a spade (a subjective difference; it's not a spade, as you can tell by the fact even we don't agree) because he doesn't think it's a spoon and never goes in the kitchen (doesn't play Healers a lot) anyway.

Honestly, WHM will always be the worst SB Job in the game to me, and that's already a low bar. SCH lost some of its kit, but still had quite a bit of it. But the fact is...we aren't ever getting HW back. So if what you're telling me is people don't like middling complexity - they either want high complexity or total simplicity, but hate only having moderate complexity (all or nothing, basically) - then we're going to be in simplicity from now on, most likely. SCH was still dominant in SB (despite being the least played) is the most ironic part.

...

The problem is who actually represents all sides of the Healer community? If we replace "let's just not talk about Healers" with "let's bring on someone that hates current Healing in the game", that's no better since there's clearly a large portion of the playerbase that do enjoy current Healing in the game, or at least don't find it unpalatable to the point they've quit healing. We honestly need to represent both sides of that coin, as representing either side alone would probably make things much worse rather than better.

[ty_taurus]

So if what you're telling me is people don't like middling complexity - they either want high complexity or total simplicity, but hate only having moderate complexity (all or nothing, basically)

I really don't think that's true that people want all or nothing. People talk about the positives of HW, but I think the majority of those that frequent these forums understand and agree that going back to HW specifically not only won't happen, but also isn't really the answer. The tanks are frequently brought up, and I think it's a logical comparison because it showcases the kind of spectrum I think this community wants to see: Modest complexity with one tank that leans toward simple, yet not flat in WAR and another that leans toward complex, but not overwhelming in GNB.

Here's I think a great analogy for what many here are looking for. You walk into an Indian restaurant, and the healers are curry. How will you order your curry?

No Spice - N/A
Mild - WHM
Medium - SCH, AST
Hot - SGE
Indian Hot - N/A
Extra Indian Hot - N/A

[IDontPetLalas]

I really don't think that's true that people want all or nothing. People talk about the positives of HW, but I think the majority of those that frequent these forums understand and agree that going back to HW specifically not only won't happen, but also isn't really the answer. The tanks are frequently brought up, and I think it's a logical comparison because it showcases the kind of spectrum I think this community wants to see: Modest complexity with one tank that leans toward simple, yet not flat in WAR and another that leans toward complex, but not overwhelming in GNB.

Here's I think a great analogy for what many here are looking for. You walk into an Indian restaurant, and the healers are curry. How will you order your curry?

No Spice - N/A
Mild - WHM
Medium - SCH, AST
Hot - SGE
Indian Hot - N/A
Extra Indian Hot - N/A

I could definitely digest that

[Renathras]

I really don't think that's true that people want all or nothing.

...

No Spice - N/A
Mild - WHM
Medium - SCH, AST
Hot - SGE
Indian Hot - N/A
Extra Indian Hot - N/A

Agreed. It's the very reason I have an "all of the above" approach. Me personally, I don't like spicy stuff except Tex-Mex, and even then, more on the mild side.

No Spice - WHM
Mild - SGE
Medium - SCH
Hot - dAST
Indian Hot - nAST
Extra Indian Hot - ???

I think this is more what we should shoot for. That way, everyone gets the flavoring they want. (And let's be fair, SGE isn't harder than SCH and AST.

Sounds like we need to add Diurnal and Nocturnal back and then add in one more Healer and we'll be set for life. Of course, we could always move all these down a notch and make the new Healer the no spice one, either/or.

[ForsakenRoe]

Personally, I don't know if a curry with 'no spice' even counts as a curry, even korma has SOME spice to it, isn't a curry with 'no spice' just a stew?

Also I'd have several categories for this stuff

Access to Healing when everything goes wrong (so, 'Medica Spam to stabilize' situations)
'No Spice' - WHM
Mild - AST, SCH, SGE
Med - N/A
Hot - N/A
Regret - N/A

Access to Damage (including raidbuffing like cards)
No Spice - N/A
Mild - WHM/SGE
Med - SCH/AST
Hot - N/A
Regret - N/A

Overall difficulty to optimize (IE how hard is it to 'play perfectly', combining both 'optimal healing' and 'optimal damage')

No Spice - N/A
Mild - N/A
Med - WHM/SCH
Hot - SGE/AST
Regret - N/A

WHM is the bottom end of Med, bordering on Mild, due to optimization tricks that can be taken advantage of. 'Difficulty to use for a first clear' is firmly in the center of 'Mild', but 'difficulty to get an orange' should be closer to, say, 25% of the way into Med?
SCH is at the top end of Med, approaching 'Hot', because it'd presumably have multiple DOTs again
AST is around halfway through Hot. Knowing which card does what (yes I'd want different effects), how classes interact with those effects (better to put Crit buff on Monk vs the more geared BLM?), etc
SGE is also around 50% of the way into Hot, due to 'damage to heal' being the way to optimize and remove needless healing GCDs from your gameplay.

I don't think we can just rank the healer complexity we'd want as an 'overall' thing, because then we end up painting a picture of 'Yeh I think AST should have to get a degree in aerospace engineering in order to cast Helios'. Healing and Damage should be two different charts, as I think 'healing' accessibility, as in, when everything goes tits up and you need to recover, should be VERY accessible for all healers. Damage at that point is not a consideration, because people are getting slapped around by the enemy. Damage rotations should have some 'spice' to them, yes even for WHM, as we need to keep the gameplay interesting even when we have finished learning how the 'healing' half of the fight puzzle is over.

Lastly, there is the 'Optimization' part. This is what I'd like to see for 'it is week 14, how interesting are the classes to play in a reclear of P5S, when I have BIS and I know the fight forwards, backwards, over the Irish Sea?'

For example, the reason SGE is all over the place with it's spice levels, 'Mild' for damage, 'Mild' for healing, and 'Hot' levels for optimization, is that I want the spammable heals to be accessible (Prognosis etc), but 'optimizing' would be quite technical for the class, with the whole 'do damage to heal' thing. Like Disc from WOW, it'd have a high skill ceiling. Unlike Disc from WOW, you wouldn't have a panic attack from one person eating something they shouldn't have, as you'd have tools to fix unexpected stuff.

You could rename these charts to 'how well does the class deal with everything going wrong?', 'how tough is it to get your first clear of a fight on this class?', and 'how tough is it to push the class to it's absolute limits?'

Alternatively, move everything up by one (so Hot becomes Med, etc) and add a new healer that is MildMed for healing, Med-Hot for damage rotation, and 'Regret' tier for optimization. A third/fourth/(whatever they're at now) attempt at adding Chemist?


Edit: they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I made one:

[Renathras]

I think the problem with that is you have a lot of:

Flavor: X/Y

Instead of:

Flavor 1: X
Flavor 2: Y

That is, instead of spreading Healing Jobs out to cover more options, you're clumping them together. Imagine a store that, instead of having Small/Medium/Large/XL only sold Medium, Medium, Large, and Large. This means Small people are only able to buy stuff that's kinda big and baggy on them, or REALLY big and baggy, and XL people are ripping out of the clothes every time they bend over or anything.

I'm going with the working assumption we all agree that AST should have dAST and nAST again. So I'm treating them as two options, mainly because dAST having near-WHM direct healing vs nAST's preparatory actions like SCH or SGE, making it a bit higher on the spectrum. dAST has things like Earthly Star and Horoscope, of course, but also more raw healing.

Granted, five flavors from "no sauce" through "mild", "medium", "hot", and to "very hot" is probably sufficient to meet everyone's needs. Provided we DO have something in EACH of those slots... I'm also not sure the point of mixing types. Like saying to a person "You want extra hot? Alrighty, so I'm going to give you some extra hot...and also some mild. You know, because making it extra hot across the boa- What's that? You JUST want extra hot? Come now, surely you jest!"

[ty_taurus]

I think the problem with that is you have a lot of:

Flavor: X/Y

Instead of:

Flavor 1: X
Flavor 2: Y

I'm not really sure what you mean by this part.

Granted, five flavors from "no sauce" through "mild", "medium", "hot", and to "very hot" is probably sufficient to meet everyone's needs. Provided we DO have something in EACH of those slots... I'm also not sure the point of mixing types. Like saying to a person "You want extra hot? Alrighty, so I'm going to give you some extra hot...and also some mild. You know, because making it extra hot across the boa- What's that? You JUST want extra hot? Come now, surely you jest!"

What about the option to have the sauce on the side? Every job has sauce, but you can choose not to add the sauce to the dish?

[ForsakenRoe]

The reason I put stuff in the same category, instead of spreading it so one healer goes per category, is because I'm trying to illustrate more accurately where each should fall in my opinion. If we look at it another way, we could see it like this:

No Spice - 0%
Mild - 20%
Med - 40%
Hot - 60%
Indian hot - 80%
Extra - 100%

Then if I were to, for example for Damage (first clear, red bar), say WHM is Mild and SGE is Med, that implies WHM is 20% and SGE is 40%. But I'm aiming for more like, WHM 25% and SGE 30-35%. So they both are in the 'Mild' category (20%-40%). But just saying 'both are Mild' implies they're both at 20%, so I explained a little more with the extra detail, and the graph.

And the point of having multiple levels of spice for each healer is for the multiple levels of skill across the player base. You're a player who does EX roulette only? Look at the green bar, that's the kind of spice level you'd be working with. Want a bit more punishment, via Savage? You can engage more with the class, and experience the 'spice level' shown by the red bar. If you're a real spice-head, you can push to the limit and that's shown by the orange bar. But, as explained above, when everything is going to hell, you can fall back on your 'easy to access healing' at the cost of some damage, and the 'ease of access' is the green bar. Yes it'll probably cost you damage, but you're already losing damage if stuff is going wrong anyway.

Put another way, the bars could be interpreted as 'What is your main content you engage with?' Green is what is expected from you in EX roulette, Red is early Savage floors/'final savage floor in week 12 or so', Orange is 'pushing for week 1 clear of Savage tier'. The people who can utilize the Orange level can still make use of it in lower content like EX roulette, it's just not expected of them from a game-design perspective. The graph/tables aren't to say 'you get Hot gameplay AND Mild gameplay as SGE'. The Mild is your DPS rotation in a vacuum (ie vs a dummy), and the ease of accessing your Healing skills if things go south. IE, how easy it is to spam Prognosis, how easy it is to burst heal with Pneuma and Ixochole, etc. The Orange bar shows what the class is able to do, if you push it to the maximum. 'How complex is the class if you're trying to reach the mythical 'Zero damage-negative GCDS used' yardstick?'.

In SGEs case, this would be way more complexity involved the whole 'deal damage to cause healing' thing. The reason it's a massive difference in bar size, is because you'd be going from 'oh look raidwide, I guess I'll just Prognosis it' to 'I will not use Prognosis a single time, I will cover this healing required using my damage>heal conversion mechanics'. Which is a lot more complicated than 'Press [Prognosis Hotkey]'. If you are able to leverage that potential, because you're skilled enough to, the Red and Green bars are irrelevant to you. It won't matter if you're in EX roulette or TOP, you'd be playing at the Orange-Bar level regardless. Just that only one of those two pieces of content is demanding you play at that level, due to enrage timers.

Just as we get more and more used to spicy things by eating them, the idea is that healers are simple to get into, but have a long, rewarding path of learning to master them. Some people like milder curry, that's fine. Heck, one of my favourites is Kofta, and that's pretty mild. But sometimes I feel like a Jalfrezi or something.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this part.

I think Ren's come to the conclusion that we cannot have more than one healer per spice level, despite there being multiple curries per spice level. Like, you've got madras, jalfrezi, dopiaza, rogan josh, and they're all around a 3/5 spice level from most places

What about the option to have the sauce on the side? Every job has sauce, but you can choose not to add the sauce to the dish?

This. Also, I'm like 80% sure that if I rang up my local curry takeaway and said 'yeh can I get a Jalfrezi (3/5) but can you make it spicier?' they'd do it for me. Option to have more spice (complexity), but the base level is still accessible for people as the 'default' state. They don't provide the 'extra fatal super firebreath level of spicy' variant of Madras as the default, but if I asked for it, they'd provide that option. Just like how I think we should have a base level of 'spice' for the healers re: ease of access for healing tools, and then a 'optional extra spice' if you feel up for it.

We gotta stop talking about curry though it's making me hungry

[fulminating]

I’d like a rogan josh with some onion bajis please.

I’m a bit curious about whether or not all dishes should be a lamb biriani to start with, but those with more advanced tastes can produce a vindaloo from it.

[ty_taurus]

I think Ren's come to the conclusion that we cannot have more than one healer per spice level, despite there being multiple curries per spice level. Like, you've got madras, jalfrezi, dopiaza, rogan josh, and they're all around a 3/5 spice level from most places

I don't really see a reason to fight for the "Indian hot" or "extra Indian hot" categories because, in my head, I'm looking at that as HW level complexity (which it isn't really in contrast to some other MMOs, but as far as FFXIV is concerned, it may as well be. FFXIV is the Indian takeout in suburban America levels, shall we say, where the spice levels are skewed toward more gentle). And that's not to say that those levels of challenge aren't wanted or worth investing in, but rather, SE has already state they have no intention of returning to that. Now, opinions are allowed to change of course, but we still need to get through the first threshold of allowing healers to have more offensive tools and complexity at all.

All that said though, it's not illogical to advocate for a healer of each difficulty threshold, not because two medium difficulty healers is a bad thing, but just because we only have 4, and the more varied their playstyles are, the better theoretically. Who knows when or if we'll get a 5th healer, so covering as much ground with the 4 we have does make sense, but since we don't really need to reach beyond the higher end of the threshold, having a mild, a hot, and a couple mediums seems perfectly reasonable to me. And these are all general difficulty overviews.

Breaking it down into ease of gameplay in different categories is a valid way to further identify expectations with each healer. You could take it even further. How mild or how hot is each healer's capability in categories like:
- Burst Healing
- Sustained Healing
- Mitigation
- Utility (non-DPS)
- Buff Management
- MP Management
- Direct DPS

The list goes on. If I were a combat designer, that's probably something I'd outline in great detail to discuss with the other team members on how to approach a healer role rework. My dream reality is just to see the landscape for healers look like:
- The forgiving healer, simple at face value but allowed room to improve and has niche value (WHM)
- The balanced healer that has subtle complexity while still being fairly forgiving (SCH)
- The healer that feels like a DPS and is more challenging to perform (SGE)
- The healer that appeals to the audience of players that doesn't like healer DPS, and disguises their DPS as support to stay competitive (AST)

To compare them to other jobs in other roles:
- WHM is like WAR or BLM - Relatively straightforward, but perhaps offers room for development in terms of things like timing or mobility like with BLM.
- SCH is like PLD or RDM - Easy to comprehend, but a little more technical and a bit methodical or rhythmic.
- AST is like DRK or perhaps DRG - Seems more complex than it is, but isn't difficult to learn.
- SGE is like GNB or BRD - Modestly complex and feels more fast-paced.