Has anyone quit healing?

[SargeTheSeagull]

I’d love healer exclusive mechanics in 14. In one of WoW’s raids in Shadowlands there’s a fight where the boss will continually damage the dude you’re trying to rescue. Tanks and DPS have to take the boss down while healers have to keep Sunstrider alive. I’d love something like this in 14. Maybe if you keep the dude’s HP above a threshold the party gains a damage buff or something like that

[ty_taurus]

I’d love healer exclusive mechanics in 14. In one of WoW’s raids in Shadowlands there’s a fight where the boss will continually damage the dude you’re trying to rescue. Tanks and DPS have to take the boss down while healers have to keep Sunstrider alive. I’d love something like this in 14. Maybe if you keep the dude’s HP above a threshold the party gains a damage buff or something like that

Ifrit EX had Searing Wind. Throughout pretty much the entire fight, Ifrit alternates applying a debuff called Searing Wind to each healer. Searing Wind causes the healer to emit a point-blank AoE around them that deals damage and knocks back any of your teammates standing around you for each server tic during its duration. As soon as it falls off, the other healer gets afflicted with it. Healing in Ifrit EX forces the healers to manage quarantining themselves away from the group and thus cannot AoE heal easily during that time, and is made more complicated during nail phases where the party needs to run around the room destroying nails.

Leviathan EX had Briny Mirror. That was also a debuff that Leviathan would place on the off-tank and would be reapplied to have 100% uptime on the second tank. Every time you heal that tank, even if through AoE heals, hits you with a stacking debuff that gradually reduces your casting range and spell radius, which also shrinks the size of your AoE heals. If you heal that tank too quickly, you'll have so many stacks that you literally cannot heal anyone but yourself as your range and AoE radius become 0 and you need to wait for that debuff to fall off to heal again and would need to work with your cohealer to manage those stacks to prevent them from getting too severe.

[Silver-Strider]

Ifrit EX had Searing Wind. Throughout pretty much the entire fight, Ifrit alternates applying a debuff called Searing Wind to each healer. Searing Wind causes the healer to emit a point-blank AoE around them that deals damage and knocks back any of your teammates standing around you for each server tic during its duration. As soon as it falls off, the other healer gets afflicted with it. Healing in Ifrit EX forces the healers to manage quarantining themselves away from the group and thus cannot AoE heal easily during that time, and is made more complicated during nail phases where the party needs to run around the room destroying nails.

Leviathan EX had Briny Mirror. That was also a debuff that Leviathan would place on the off-tank and would be reapplied to have 100% uptime on the second tank. Every time you heal that tank, even if through AoE heals, hits you with a stacking debuff that gradually reduces your casting range and spell radius, which also shrinks the size of your AoE heals. If you heal that tank too quickly, you'll have so many stacks that you literally cannot heal anyone but yourself as your range and AoE radius become 0 and you need to wait for that debuff to fall off to heal again and would need to work with your cohealer to manage those stacks to prevent them from getting too severe.

I remember there was a way to Cheese Leviathan by having the healer get enough aggro to trick the system into giving them the debuff. I know I've had that debuff several times in the past before the offtank when I was a healer, that it made that fight infinitely easier since Regen/Fairy abilities didn't build up stacks so for the first minute or so, you didn't have to worry about healing either tank.

God I miss those days

[ty_taurus]

I remember there was a way to Cheese Leviathan by having the healer get enough aggro to trick the system into giving them the debuff. I know I've had that debuff several times in the past before the offtank when I was a healer, that it made that fight infinitely easier since Regen/Fairy abilities didn't build up stacks so for the first minute or so, you didn't have to worry about healing either tank.

God I miss those days

The way I "cheesed" it during ARR and HW was by macroing Embrace to Stoneskin and setting my faerie to obey. This would cause her to heal whenever I'd cast Stoneskin on the off tank. Back then, her potency was 300, and she was unaffected by Briny Mirror. Meanwhile Stoneskin, since it was not a heal, also didn't trigger it, so it was kinda like a reverse Adloquium.

[Renathras]

watch as they brand 7.0 as a "return to the roots of your journey!" kind of thing...

Honestly, I can't imagine them ever doing this. If they shifted the Job design back to Hw, they'd do the encounter designs as well. Can you imagine the outcry of modern raiders? "I have to run the gorilla?! BUT MY PARSE!!! Make someone else do it, like a Healer or the Ranged, no one cares about their pareses anyway!"

Personally, I wouldn't mind HW era WHM without Cleric, but that's just me. Aero 1, Aero 2, Stonespam, repeat. Same thins as today, just instead of 4 GCDs for Afflatus buttons per minute, it's 4 GCDs for Aero 2. No real change there. Though honestly, I like the Afflatus buttons better than Aero 2, but...having an actual reason to use Cure 2, Cure 3, and Medica 2 again wouldn't be so bad.

On the Class thing, I think they don't really want Classes. They were a holdover from character data being ported from 1.24 to 2.0 that required keeping it in the game, but Yoshi P and the Dev team seem to look on it as a necessary bandage, not a good design, which is why it hasn't been done with any other Job aside from ROG/NIN, which was apparently supposed to be a 2.0 launch Job but didn't make it. RDM is weird because it gets spells and Dualcast super early (even now when synced or doing PotD) because of how central Dualcast is to its identity. Imagine if your first 30 levels were you pressing 1-2-3 over and over with those weak unenchanted melee attacks... I can see the desire, but I don't see it happening for both lore and gameplay reasons. Though it would be cool to see Limsa's Musketeer guild actually realized as an in-game Class.

Healing absolutely feels bad because...

Well, not even all of them are those. For example, FFXI isn't designed for keeping everyone at 100% at all times. WoW has flirted back and forth with what it does. Indeed, that's part of the FFXIV healing problem - people need to be at 100% before every major mechanic since the mechanics easily do 80-110% (requiring mitigation) of party member health in some cases. The "heal checks" aren't about sustained healing, they're about blowing big CDs and pooled resources (AF, Lilies, etc) to quickly top people off in a hurry between multiple waves of damage. But now, we even have single press buttons that DO THAT like Lilibell, Seraph/Consolation, Macrocosmos (in though requiring a few other things), and Panhaima.

The problem is precisely because FFXIV's model requires people to be topped off before each mechanic. While it's true they don't need to be 100% right AFTER the mechanics (allowing some more gradual regen between mechanics) between HITS of mechanics, and before the mechanic starts, people have to be at full health. This is true of Extremes and Savages and basically all of them. Ex5 has long periods of no damage, but when the damage goes out, people have to be healed or they will die, and they need most of their health going into the mechanics and between hits (e.g. during the rotate phase or during the stack/spread/cross-lines-box attack) or they will die. Having a person at 30% health going into a mechanic means they die.

That leads to a healing model all about a healing plan of oGCDs that you smack rapidly in damage windows then don't touch any healing for the next 30 seconds. RARELY, a GCD will be thrown in, like Rapture or Spreadlo, but that's the exception instead of the rule. The rule is that GCDs are for damage, oGCDs for healing, and oGCDs do all of it.

While it's true that devs haven't explicitly stated...

Agreed with this. If they don't want fights to require Healer DPS, they need to loosen the Enrages so Healers don't have to do so to beat the checks in an average party.

Supposedly they don't design them to require a lot of Healer damage EFFORT - the whole reason they made the rotations so simple was so all healers could meet the requirement - but the real problem is the Enrage tuning itself, as we saw with Week 1 P8S that was sidelining even some DPS Jobs like MCH and Tanks like PLD (though also for mitigation on it) and WAR.

On one hand it feels good as a dps or tank.

I was with you until you mentioned complex rotations. TANKS? Complex rotations? Heck, half the DPS don't have complex rotations. MCH? SMN?? It's also weird to me that people feel like doing 0.001% of the boss's health bar "feels good", but to each their own, I suppose. I've always felt healing more impactful than damage dealing, personally, outside of quick burn adds, anyway. Things like Solus' shield are the only times I feel like I'm actually achieving something as a DPSer. And that mechanic felt pretty good on a Healer, too, due to the incoming damage making casting GCDs a useful way to counter that, actually feel impactful, and the healing there actually had to be done or people would die and the party would fail the check (ah, ShB Thin Air Cure 3 spam...those were the days...)

I think this is a "to each their own" thing, but I literally feel nothing when DPSing. And I mean on DPS Jobs. I'm just pushing buttons that do damage, and it's so boring. The only part of RDM's rotation I somewhat like is the melee/finisher combo, and when I get to Verraise people. I can't fathom how people play DPS Jobs without raises. It's so mind numbing and boring and just...bleh. So uninteresting. I'll do it on support DPSers when absolutely necessary, but give me a Healer any day.

But on the other hand it just feels...

It's more like "Top everyone off into this mechanic, blow some oGCDs during this mechanic, now spam Glare for the next 30-45 sec..."

Again, doesn't feel any better being a DPS or Tank to me, but to each their own. I honestly don't find "complex rotations" require thought in most cases. DPS rotations are either hectic Vegas wack a mole fests where everything's lighting up (or nothing is) like BRD, or are rigid rotations you practice for hours on a dummy and then do by muscle memory without thinking. Most DPS rotations in this game don't have actual thought behind them when it comes to execution, people have just convinced themselves they do for some weird reason. It's like people saying Old PLD was more flexible and had more choice than New PLD. Old PLD's DoTs were part of the rotation; there was never any point you thought "Should I Royal or should I Goring?", it was Royal/Goring/Royal/Goring/Requiescat; repeat. New PLD is simpler but ironically has more actual choices. The exceptions are proc based Jobs like BRD or DNC, since they actually require you to modify what you're doing based on inputs, so there's nothing rote about it. RDM and BLM to a FAR lesser extent, since (a) both can manage their procs a bit (Sharpcast/Acceleration) and (b) the procs are only slight deviations of their rotations (Firestarter is just a substitution for Fire 1 if in the Fire phase or for getting INTO the Fire phase you get it as a free instant instead of...casting...the same spell..., and Thundercloud is often a movement tool but in practice is just a button that nudges your rotation one GCD to the right; RDM's are just a Jolt substitution.)

I'd love to see that but at the same time I'm not expecting it...

Outside of Limited Jobs, every Job is designed to clear all content, so this will never happen. The "basic healer" would do as much damage (on average) as the "advanced healer", then the advanced healer players would complain, then their Job rotation would get nerfed again. This is how things played out from HW->SB->ShB.

They still can crit...

Huh. That's...kinda crazy, actually.

I'd bet real money that if HW DRK was released today (gameplay-wise, with updates to fill in the 30 levels it needs to get to EW level), people would, by and large, say 'yo this is sick actually'.

Maybe. It depends on how much damage it does in end-game content. That seems to be what people care about more than almost anything now.

Don't we have that already? The 'basic healer' is Conjurer, and the 'advanced healer' is White Mage? At least, that's what I'd have thought.

Can't do any "real" content on CNJ. I haven't tried, but I'm not sure what all you can que up for in just base Classes. Can you even que up for modern Extremes and stuff? I guess if you have the ilevel, but... I healed ZodEx as a CNJ (8 man all Classes clear - I think to date the only one on FFLogs...), and it's rather different having none of your post ARR tools and missing half your ARR tools. If CNJ was a full on thing capable of clearing Extremes and Savages which just had a different general flavor of healing from WHM, sure. But that doesn't exist.

...But the devs said one time, like 8 years ago,...

Which is why I, personally, always qualify it as "We don't have a stated position from the Devs on modern encounter design; the only stated position we have opposes it, but was also from most of a decade and two healer and encounter design paradigm shifts ago". By this I mean "We don't know what their intent actually is". We know what the numbers are, but that's quite a different thing. For example, the numbers have strongly encouraged groups not to bring PLD or MCH to raids, and in P8S launch, there were clearly some parties that could not clear the content. Even now, there are some party compositions that are considered clearly inferior in the current meta, which is why people have asked (even disregarding P8S as they said it was overtuned) what party compositions they're using to test.

Maybe there's nuance to what they said back then. Maybe they meant 'healer DPS was not a factor in EX trial enrages'...

Yes to nuance since that's true of almost everything, but it's VERY unlikely they were talking about Extremes. It's more likely they were just...really bad at balance at the time. And at some point, just decided "Screw it, just make all the Healer DPS easy and we'll balance for a general baseline of 40% of a DPSer or something".

Simply put, moving from hard enrages to soft enrages.

Honestly, that would probably be better for a host of reasons. Would be kinda funny seeing things like 3 Healer parties being a possible strategy, lol

I’d love healer exclusive mechanics in 14. In one of WoW’s raids in Shadowlands there’s a fight where the boss will continually damage the dude you’re trying to rescue. Tanks and DPS have to take the boss down while healers have to keep Sunstrider alive. I’d love something like this in 14. Maybe if you keep the dude’s HP above a threshold the party gains a damage buff or something like that

There was also the dragon in ICC, I think. FFXIV has somewhat done this on rare occasions, but more as a secondary thing. For example, healing Estinian during the add phase of the Nidhogg boss fight (the dungeon, not the Trial), healing the NPCs in the Bozja CEs, etc. So it's entirely possible to do it.