Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

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

I meant ForsakenRoe's post. Stuff like:

Mild - AST, SCH, SGE
...
Mild - WHM/SGE
Med - SCH/AST
...
Med - WHM/SCH
Hot - SGE/AST

With all the other categories being "N/A". My argument there is "What's the point of having other categories if not actually using them?" and "Isn't that leaving the people who like the other flavoring levels out in the cold with nothing they can enjoy?"

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?

Sure, if it has the exact same performance. Otherwise you aren't leaving the sauce on the side, you're removing part of the dish.

EDIT:

- 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.

Honestly, I would have said WHM/WAR are like SMN, BLM is more like SCH, and RDM is more like SGE. And it's funny, but to this day, I don't find GNB to be the hard one. I'd more say DRK is, but maybe that's the "seems more complex than it is". I also find SGE easier than SCH or AST...

.

Also, can we talk about wings instead? I don't think I've ever had a curry in my life. Like the kid in FLCL, I don't like spicy stuff.



I like Sweet BBQ and Teriyaki.

I guess you could say, "I like my Healer Jobs like I like my Wings: Sweet, mild, and enjoyable."

[ty_taurus]

Honestly, I would have said WHM/WAR are like SMN, BLM is more like SCH, and RDM is more like SGE. And it's funny, but to this day, I don't find GNB to be the hard one. I'd more say DRK is, but maybe that's the "seems more complex than it is". I also find SGE easier than SCH or AST...

I didn't use SMN because something that seems widely agreed upon is that it feels incomplete and has not reached the standards many former SMN players and DPS players in general hold for the role--not reaching DNC's level of complexity, which is otherwise viewed as the easiest DPS job. Given how the job was essentially reanimated from the ground up in EW, I'd consider it an educated guess to assume that EW SMN is really meant to something of a "clean canvas" to build out of in future expansions. Now I won't say that 7.0 SMN will be the new NIN or anything, or be as complex as it was in ShB and prior, but I just don't know what that landscape will look like.

Meanwhile, BLM is actually not a complex job in a vacuum and has one of the easiest rotations, I would say on the level of DNC. Where BLM's difficulty comes in though is that while it's not the immobile turret it was once upon a time, a big part of BLM optimization comes from fight knowledge, or in other words, knowing how to effectively use its mobility resources--Triplecast, Thundercloud procs, Between the Lines. It's core rotation is really just:

Blizzard III > Blizzard IV > Paradox > Fire III > Fire IV > Fire IV > Fire IV > Paradox > Fire IV > Fire IV > Fire IV > Despair > Repeat. Keep your DoT up, use your Xenoglossys, maybe extend this an extra Fire IV > Despair if you have Manafont up, and that's the core of your rotation.

[Renathras]

I didn't use SMN because something that seems widely agreed upon is that it feels incomplete and has not reached the standards many former SMN players and DPS players in general hold for the role

As with...everything...this is highly subjective. SMN is also one of the most popular and played DPS Jobs at present, the most played Caster in surveys (Lucky Bancho and FFCensus) and logs, and the most taken Caster in the latest Ultimate. That's probably because, collectively, a goodly amount of people actually enjoy it. It's straightforward, effective, and brings decent damage and functional utility to the table, just like WHM does. (Not PERFECT - functional.)

I'd also note WHM feels incomplete as well. People who talk about this stuff in depth seem to generally agree WHM is "missing something", either party buffs or another mitigation tool or SOMEthing. So they're in the same camp. I'd hazard a guess there's a different reason you wanted to compare it to BLM rather than SMN...but I'll keep that to myself, I suppose. Suffice to say, WHM, WAR, and SMN are "the easy ones". Arguably DNC, but Ranged in general aren't "hard" and are considered somewhat easy. Which is odd to me since BRD just makes no sense to me to play in practice, and it and DNC just don't work with my brain. On the other hand, I find MCH perfectly understandable and easy to execute, so...I just don't play it much because I hate playing Jobs without a Raise if I can avoid it (unless I'm Tanking, anyway...since there's just no option there, lol)

My going assumption for 7.0 SMN is "Phoenix triggers the other three "mainline" Summons, and they'll have their own variants of the 2 button theme, and/or they might have the Summons use Ruin 3 or the Enkindle command; there's a lot of room for them to go with it if they want to. Personally, SMN doesn't feel "incomplete" to me, people just want it to be more than it is, is all.

People say BLM's rotation is easier, but RDM's and MCH's are both easier to me. BLM has a lot more optimization going on, even in Patchwerk fights. It's not the core that makes a rotation. It's all the extra stuff. NIN has a super simple core rotation. It's identical to WAR's; 1-2-3, -4 every 30 seconds, and has a gauge spender at 50 gauge. But I'd wager most people would argue that NIN isn't as easy to play as WAR. That extra stuff - Ley Lines, Aetherial Manipulation/Between the lines, optimal Sharpcast, Triplecast, Swiftcast use - and there are a lot of things to optimize in the rotation in general, including the Ether business. Same with NIN. Mudras, TCJ, Phantom, Forked/Fleeting, Kassatsu, Meisui, Trick, Mug (granted, that one's super easy now); the stuff on the side. The core rotation isn't hard. Some people even describe it and DRK in the same vein as two Jobs people think are hard, but what it is, is that they have a lot of actions at once in burst, then have a pretty boring maintenance filler that's borderline braindead. WAR and SMN (and WHM) just go with the borderline braindead all the time to keep things consistent, which is what a lot of people love about them.

It's one of those "If it was easy, everyone would do it". It appears easy...ish...but is actually more complex with a lot of optimizing. This makes it far more akin to SCH than to WHM.

I think my personal list would be:

WHM, WAR, SMN - Straightforward, you don't even need a guide to see how to play it more or less optimally.
SGE, GNB, RDM, MCH, DNC - Might look a smidge hard to some people, but is actually pretty easy with just a bit of nuance; quick paced combat style.
SCH, PLD, probably BLM, maybe BRD, MNK - There's a bit more going on here, but they're easy to pick up, with room for optimization for those interested in delving deep, with some mechanical rigidity but also flexibility.
AST, DRK, most of the Melee - Seem complex, have a lot of nuance, not hard to play passably, but require research and practice to really dig into and optimize to their full potential.

SAM might be in the first or in the second group, I don't play it enough to know. RPR is supposedly pretty easy, but I haven't touched it. DRK isn't HARD, but it's mechanically rigid. I'd put it in the SCH group except that its mechanical rigidity doesn't really have flexibility, which is what some people like about it. It's a lot more like GNB in the sense of having a super rigid rotation, but I'm not sure it has the quick paced combat style (then again, I haven't played it in ages and mine's a couple expansions behind, so the top end might throw a bunch of oGCDs that make it higher...)

I'd like to find an updated APM list for P5S (I figure the first boss fights are where people have figured out well what they can get away with so we can get a more average APM, and they tend not to have tons of untargetable phases and mechanically as intense phases, so we can see what a closer-to-Patchwerk fight would map out as), but I've never figured out how to wring APM out of the Abacus.

I definitely think most people would put WHM, WAR, and SMN in the same general camp. While BLM technically has a lower APM, SMN's is also on the low end, and it's far less mechanically complex. And despite sayers of nay, it is a complete Job, it's just not Old SMN.

[ForsakenRoe]

With all the other categories being "N/A". My argument there is "What's the point of having other categories if not actually using them?" and "Isn't that leaving the people who like the other flavoring levels out in the cold with nothing they can enjoy?"

To illustrate the gaps between each healer, and the relative position compared to the 'absolute minimum and maximum points'. If I were to leave out all the N/A categories, we'd have, for example:

Healing complexity when everything has gone wrong:
No Spice - WHM
Mild - the other 3

Okay, what, in this context, does 'Mild' refer to? 'Not much', yeh, but without the N/A, you can't tell where the chart ends. Back to curries, some places rate with a 1/2/3 chili pepper system, others with a 1-5. Without the context of the N/As being there, can you tell if me saying 'SCH is Mild' refers to it being 20% (1-5 system) or 33% (1-3 system) level of spice? A 13% difference is quite the potential jump.

Your own picture, of the wings ratings, has the same thing going on: The arrows for each 'sauce' don't line up uniformly with either the 'sections' of the graphic, nor the dividing lines between them. They seem to pick and choose where to be placed, unable to choose whether to be aligned with one or the other. Which is the point, the graphic (and the N/A fillers I had) are there to illustrate the comparative position between each of the entries. You can tell by the relative positions that 'Honey BBQ and Buffalo are roughly equal levels of spicy'. If the N/A categories were not included, it'd be much harder to interpret the relative positions.

Just because a category in a ranking system exists, doesn't mean something MUST be in that category. If I had to rank 3 games, and said they were 2, 3 and 1 respectively, trimming the 'unused categories' kills the context. Is it a ranking of their position, ie the third game listed is my favorite? Is it a 'rating out of 5' or 'out of 10'? A 3/5 game is very different from a 3/10 game

[ataren3]

So I have 3 different characters across 3 different datacenters. Back in 2.0 I went summoner. I dabbled a tiny bit in SCH because they shared xp and got to experience cleric stance which I thought was kind of neat. I had to manage when to heal and when to assist with damage with OG Titan EX.

Back in HW I restarted and went WHM. I liked the class so much that when Shadowbringers was about to come out (I missed a good portion of Stormblood) I made another new character to play with friends and went WHM again. I enjoyed Stormblood WHM just like I enjoyed HW WHM.

Then Shadowbringers made healing way, WAY too simple. I thought "No big deal... I guess. I still like the class even if my damage is a 1 button mash. I can at least have fun with the healing aspect, trying to play nice with an AST that went Diurnal or Nocturnal." Endwalker comes out and I still main WHM up to the end. But I realized how little healing I was ACTUALLY doing. 90% of the content (dungeons, trials, raids) didn't really require me to actually focus on healing for a minute. Usually an Assize here, an Asylum there and nearly everybody's topped up. I'm essentially spamming one button with re-applying a DoT every now and again. Then the raid comes out and I'm like "Ok here we go. I know at the very least savage usually has more healing." And it did... very little. I had to worry about an extra lily here or a temperance at a specific spot to keep people alive. I still wasn't really "healing" as a healer.

So I say screw it and go MNK. Have an absolute blast as MNK with how challenging it can be and the fact I'm not spamming one button and actually being aware of certain parts of the fight. Would it be worth re-applying the DoT here? Can I fit in a kick right before the boss goes untargetable? New savage comes out and I decide to give healing another go. Then realize they added bleed DoTs to nearly everything. Surely this time I actually need to do... you know, the class I play?

Nope. Just the same old same old. I'm spamming one button and maybe throwing out a heal. If they don't mitigate properly I actually have to worry about applying heals but I'm still not actually healing for 90% of the fight. So I'm done with healing until there's a rework. I just hate the fact that I selected a class, who's literal role is to heal, and even in savage content I rarely do my job. I'm just a much crappier DPS that has more than one bloodbath or second wind. I don't focus on heals I focus on damage to meet the check. Because that's the way they're all designed. They're not designed to make sure I keep everyone healthy. They're designed to make sure I'm spamming my DPS almost as much as a DPS is.

[Renathras]

I don't focus on heals I focus on damage to meet the check. Because that's the way they're all designed. They're not designed to make sure I keep everyone healthy. They're designed to make sure I'm spamming my DPS almost as much as a DPS is.

This seems to be much more of an encounter design issue than anything. Encounters need more lax enrages, less big spikes of damage and more gradual but consistent damage that needs to be healed, and Healer oGCDs need to be nerfed majorly, probably as much as by half. Doing those things would take us back to the ARR/HW combat design.

...

Thing is, the wing spices actually exist all across the spectrum. They don't have the green mild section and have NO SAUCES IN IT. Your list looks to me a bit more like this:



It strikes me that (a) you seem to think that there's basically no such thing (at least in a realistic sense for what the Devs will implement) as spicy, and (b) that most things are just flavors of "medium". I think my issue with that is that it doesn't really make for a usable scale. Basically you have an absolute scale based on your belief on what is easy and hard, but it doesn't really have any meaning in the sense of what's realizable, and is thus not granular. It's like looking at only the visible part of the electro-magnetic spectrum when someone else is trying to lay out the whole spectrum for discussion and note the importance of having representation across the entire spectrum. Or, perhaps, you're trying to use the Rankine temperature scale while everyone else is trying to discuss normal Earth temperatures, or about -20 up to +120 F. Sure, you have stars at 5,000 K and you have absolute zero K at around -273 C, but including those ranges just to ignore them doesn't help the discussion much. Firstly, because it's still subjective (in this case) and so not really agreed upon. And secondly, because if we submit those ranges exist, then we have to address that some people may want them anyway, and need to fill them, as it were.

I'd also note that I'm not sure people realize how much things have changed over time. For example, how many abilities did WHM have in ARR? If you made an actionbar set of just ARR abilities (double use for ones that had multiple forms, like put Glare in two spots for Stone 1 and Stone 2), it's a bit less than we have now. And the chiefly used abilities were just a handful of them.

CNJ: Stone, Cure, Aero, Cleric Stance, Protect, Medica, Raise, Fluid Aura, Esuna, Stone 2, Repose, Cure 2, Stoneskin, Shroud of Saints, Cure 3, Aero 2, Medica 2
WHM: Presence of Mind, Regen, Divine Seal, Holy, Benediction
Cross-Class: Limit of 5 (with Job stone equipped)

That's 27 vs the 30 we have today. Moreover, some of those were not really used in combat unless things were very strange (Stone 1 and Protect being the big ones). And (someone) we still have Esuna and Repose today. We've added Rescue as another "don't really use", but the main spells consistently used could fit on one crossbar tab. I even remember having extra room (once I started using a second tab) so that I could have some key abilities on both tabs. WHM and SGE fall JUST short of being able to fit all their buttons on two crossbar sets today. SCH and AST can't do it unless they leave off some things entirely.

The mainly used abilities were Stone 2, Aero, Aero 2, Cure, Cure 2, Medica, Medica 2, Regen (and recall while DoTs were shorter, HoTs were longer), Shroud, and Stoneskin for Tankbusters. A lot of the CDs were "reserved" for "emergencies" by the average player still, Presence of Mind was often used as a healing CD not as a damage one, and WHM's oGCDs were mostly modifiers (PoM, Sroud) as opposed to healing oGCDs, of which it had exactly one, Benediction.

Even doing < level 50 stuff now on WHM requires a different approach as you don't have oGCDs or Lilies, especially if you have a relatively new DRK Tank.

[Sebazy]

On the topic of how different sub 50 content feels to play…

A huge part of the problem in my eyes is that the content design team seems to be stuck in a rut of designing mid tier encounters where healers don’t really seem to have a place to the extent that seemingly every needs to start with a limp AOE raidwide to try and assure us that they haven’t forgotten healers are a thing.

Simply put, our kits have gotten an order of magnitude faster. All 4 healers are capable of dumping significant amounts of aoe HPS with little to no windup time. Meanwhile encounters have gotten an order of magnitude slower with castbars routinely long enough for multiple GCDs with ease. Whilst BarbEX seemed to be a positive step forward in pacing, the current primal is almost as bad as E8S, it’s slow long and ponderous fight and out side of 2 mechanics, it deals so little damage that you can take the cleave tank buster as a healer with some coordination.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the current class design is awful, but the way they design mainstream endgame content is just as much to blame for how boring things are.

[ForsakenRoe]

spice and temperatures

Again, I am not just saying 'this is where the healers should be, overall', I gave three separate 'player optimization levels' for each. The chart has those empty categories both to better represent the relative position of each healer to each other, as well as each healer's potential depending on optimization. I didn't put a single thing in 'I regret ordering this' tier, but it is there specifically to illustrate that 'Hot' is not the maximum level. If I were to rank other roles, I'd put something like Old PLD or MNK's Orange bars into 'Regret'.

You're looking at the grading system in a very different way from me. I'm looking at it as 'what if we have the healer red bars be 'Korma, Kofta, TikkaMasala, Madras', two are mild, two are medium. I don't want to get chewed out for 'attacking arguments that you didn't say' or whatever, but it sounds like you are trying to cram a healer into a category, just because the category exists. That one of them MUST be completely bland zero-spice and on the flip side, one of them MUST be 'I cannot feel my face this was a mistake' spicy. Not every curry place even does Naga Chili type dishes, some only do up to Vindaloo (which in my graph is 'optimizing SGE or AST'). But I put 'Regret' tier on there, to explain that Vindaloo is not the pinnacle of spice levels. There's pain beyond that too.

Maybe it's best to ignore the text I wrote, and just look at the graph. It's a lot more granular on the relative positions of things, where each healer falls within a tier, etc

[Renathras]

Don’t get me wrong. I think the current class design is awful, but the way they design mainstream endgame content is just as much to blame for how boring things are.

Agree/Like.

This is my contention as well. It's also why I think it's odd people say they can't change encounters to require more healing without breaking the entire game's history, since we've very clearly changed encounters to require LESS and no one demanded they backdate such changes to Second Coil Savage or anything.

My belief is that Healers have too many oGCD heals, and they're too powerful. Because of this, we never need GCD heals, which leads to our "filler spam" being so prevalent. In ARR and HW, that filler was broken up a lot more. Part of that was due to shorter duration DoTs, yes, but part of that was also due to having to hardcast GCD heals. WHM still did this as late as SB (and still does it today if we count Lily heals, but most people don't, or only do passingly)

At the same time heals were getting more powerful, encounters were getting to where they required less and less of them when players were performing mechanics effectively. This is a second piece of the encounter design problem - pass/fail mechanics. In older content, you didn't want to repeatedly fail mechanics, but fails weren't an outright death sentence. They instituted Twice Come Ruin in Bozja so people would stop blaming Healers when they died to their own screw ups, and Damage Downs in Savage paired with the damage hitting so hard, you'd probably die anyway. But this meant heals had to be even bigger to save people, which meant heals were WAY too powerful when people WERE doing the mechanics correctly. This is because, when damage was being avoided, the actual unaviodable damage was both dropped lower and made less frequent - the bosses are casting all their big avoidable stuff, so if people avoid them, there can be long periods of time where people legitimately need no healing.

Finally, damage was designed to come out quickly in sharp spikes, requiring powerful oGCDs for the stuff that wasn't avoidable, because you couldn't hardcast heals fast enough during the big healing checks and so had to rely on oGCDs. Which, again, made the healing far too powerful when not in one of those healing check periods. Encounters were also designed to require far more mobility and dodging (compare most any Coils fight or ARR Ex to stuff like BarbEx even P5S, or any of the Ultimates), meaning relying on hardcast heals was not always an option, necessitating adding even more oGCD healing tools (or rarely, like Solace/Rapture, GCD instants with some kind of CD/limiting resource/charge preventing their being a standard use spamable healing tool for the non-movement sections) to deal with the often heavy healing requirement that came during heavy movement phases.

What healing Healers did need to do, they could now do via oGCDs because they had so many and they were all so powerful, resulting in the "one button spam" since heals are now just weaved between GCDs.

.

It's a complex problem, but only one piece of it is Healer design (too many and too powerful oGCD healing tools), with the other part very much being encounter design.

You're looking at the grading system in a very different way from me.

Agreed.

I'm looking at them as overall "how to play the Job well" designations.

I think I'm looking at it from the perspective I think the middle-to-hard performance should be what the designs are based on, since I know the Devs don't like big gaps between lower and higher players, and because anything less than Extreme can be cleared with a party of all Classes (in other words, discussing how easy or hard a Job is in "casual" content is irrelevant, since a dipping bird could clear casual content). Hell, I took part in probably the world first Zod Ex all Class clear. XD

So my view is based on "How wide is the distribution?"

Whereas your view seems to be more based on "What are the 25%, 60-ish%, and 99% flavors?"

"difficulty" is best reflected in Abacus data by how wide the distribution is. The narrower the distribution, the easier a Job is. The centerpoint of that distribution being close to those of its peers is a balance argument (in theory, the Devs should move that up or down to where they're all in a similar place, but...they often don't), or sometimes, the high end (if they were "perfectly balanced", the top end should in theory be equal across all Jobs in a role/sub-role, but if a Job is hard enough few people reach the top end, it can sometimes be a little squirrelly since the Devs also have to keep it somewhat balanced in the middle for more average players).

It's like looking at WAR vs the other Tanks and seeing how (relatively) thin its distribution is, owing to it being the easiest one to play.

So I'm thinking of these flavors in terms of that distribution's width. Small = no sauce up to wide = extra spicy.

Whereas you're trying to think of it based on "in this content, what is required in terms of difficulty". So we're using different metrics, yeah, I'd agree with that. My metric is based on the Devs' oft stated argument for accessibility, and yours seems to be based more on "you must be this tall (have this much skill) to ride these rides" kind of a thing. (Not saying that's good or bad, just the difference seems to be more or less that)

[ForsakenRoe]

While eating food (yes it was spicy) I came up with an analogy to follow the food-related discussion here: I am looking at the class not as the spicy sauce of the curry, but as the meat (or veg) that goes into the curry. WHM is Chicken, SCH is Beef, etc. The 'spicy sauce' and 'how hot the spice is', in my mind, is referring to the amount of optimization the player wants to embrace. Just like how we can have a Chicken Korma and a Chicken Vindaloo, and they're wildly different levels of spice, I'm trying to illustrate that we can have a WHM Korma for 'expectation of skill when doing EX roulette' and a WHM Vindaloo for 'expectation of skill when parsing 99s'.

Following on from that, some people throw around the statement 'if you dont like X right now, you can always play another job/role/game'. In curry terms, that's like me saying 'I'm not a fan of this Chicken Vindaloo, it's too spicy for me' and getting hit with 'Ok stop eating all forms of chicken and get beef instead then'. But the chicken isn't the problem, the vindaloo spice is. So instead of being told to go eat beef, or king prawns, or whatever the 'house special' is, instead, I'm asking for the option for the four meats (healers) to be available in multiple sauces. So if someone likes super spicy levels of spice, and likes Beef, they can get that combo. If someone likes it mild, and prefers King Prawns, they can have that. Maybe this would take a little bit more work from SE to balance, compared to 'OK, AST is going to be the gigabrain healer, there is no 'simple' way of playing it, it's balanced around gigabrains only', but if they want to win back the trust of a lot of players on the whole healer role thing, they need to put in work to prove they're listening 'for real this time honest'

I've always been asking for the 'barrier to entry', ie the absolute minimum skill level required to clear the casual content, to be super low and accessible. For example, if things go tits up for a SCH, they can sometimes feel like they're screwed. Succor is pretty weak in HPS, you have one Indom (which may well be on CD), Aetherflow gates your stronger skills, you might have spent it on Energy Drains already, if you die you lose your fairy, fairy gauge, Aetherflow, AND your MP. Compare that to SGE who has Prognosis to spam if needed for an extra 100p of pure healing per cast, Pepsis can give a one-off 450p AOE heal by breaking the shield, you don't have the risk of 'I spent all my stacks on damage' because they don't do damage, and if you die, yes you lose your stacks, but they continue to generate even while you're dead. This doesn't mean SGE is 'better' necessarily, but it does illustrate what I mean. It's got 'more accessible healing in panic situation'.

So for SCH, for example, maybe we could have Cleric Stance dance back in a sense, with Tactics being the 'identity' of the class. Emergency Tactics would sacrifice all shielding from the associated skills, to empower the pure HPS throughput. 'Defensive Tactics' (name WIP) would be the opposite, pushing more towards powerful shielding, at the cost of actual healing. Heck, maybe this could change up the Aetherflow spenders too, giving the choice between a pure HPS Indom, a shield-granting Indom (does not stack with Galvanize), or one that is half-and-half using a more Balanced Tactics. There could also be a kind of 'Offensive Tactics' for something, maybe it changes Eos into Selene, with unique abilities like 'Fey Wind (reworked): Makes party have bonus autoattack speed' or such. We can't have haste with the 2min meta, but flat damage seems kinda boring. I guess it sounds kinda like Battle/Berserker/Defensive stances for Warrior in vanilla WOW? Though I guess the thought is basically 'well what if AST sects, but on SCH instead'

oops tangent, back to curry talk