Healers, then and now:

[Nizzi]

Agreed.

Thank you for this post!

It's...so weird having all of you agree with me on things (more or less), but kinda nice.

I honestly didn't really think about HOW MUCH the Broil cast time changed SCH. I played SCH (decently enough) in ShB, and I used Ruin 2 and stuff, but I guess it just didn't occur to me how often Ruin 2 WAS used for weaves that got removed with Broil having a 1.5 sec cast. Like...you don't think about it, since I guess we all think of Ruin 2 as "movement tool", but when you think of it as "weave tool for a Job that has tons of oGCDs", suddenly relegating it to movement only exposes just HOW BIG of a change that was. And then looking at the fact WHM still has Afflatus abilities to at least mimic the lost DoT refreshes, SCH has none, and that SCH casts more Broil IV in current fights than WHM casts Glare...and it's kind of eye opening.

Somehow, I thought WHM was the worst offender here. But by the numbers and looking at actual logs...I now see it's actually SCHOLAR that has it the worst.

I'm not even sure quite what to think of that...

This sort of thing continually happens to Scholar, it seems. The developers don't think about how taking away or changing things will affect its kit, and instead just go forward with the change and either say "Deal with it" or revert back. (See, Miasma II's in Stormblood, fairy changes/ DoT removal/ Energy Drain in ShB, now cast time changes in EW turning Ruin II from one of the most useful buttons in your kit to a borderline vestigal one).

Because of this too, I expect they'll likely remove Ruin II in 7.0 and add nothing in its place, leaving another gaping hole in Scholar's offensive kit without a single care for how it feels to play.
It's funny when you think about how because of the Misery potency increases, Afflatus skills now pretty much perform the same function that Ruin II + ED did for SCH in ShB in terms of lossless movement and if weaving is necessary (though in this case it'd be for double weaving because of the single weave slots now)
The Misery change to be neutral/positive in 6.1 was an immensely positive change for WHM and definitely did alleviate some of the "glarebotting" fatigue that WHM feels, meanwhile SCH is at the peak of Broilbotting that it has ever been at. Scholar went from a job that had 3 GCDs of lossless movement/weaving/break from Broil every minute to a job with 0 for the first time ever in Endwalker. That certainly seems like a bit of a problem to me, personally?

One thing that's also interesting to note too is that Scholar is the only job in the game that has not received a single new offensive skill from 2.0 on. Some people would count Chain (I do not, it's a debuff and changes nothing about Scholar) but Scholar has only ever had its 'toys' taken away from it continually. It's no wonder Scholar players, out of all the other healer mains, usually seem to be the loudest with their discontent over how the healer role has turned out. A job that was designed around maintaining your DoTs and using Ruin/Broil for filler between refreshing has been turned into literally just Broiling with no breaks. Riveting gameplay evolution over a 10 year period.

[Renathras]

But i think the biggest changes is "Healers need to gcd to heal" to "Good healer make few uses of healing gcd", and i'm not sure people would love to go back as using gcd for it. Personnaly I would dislike to.

Technically, WHM is still a GCD Healer, it's just not obvious since Lilies are damage neutral and instant cast, so it kind of "hides" it. WHM only has 4 oGCD heals, and of them, Assize is used on CD for damage, not held for healing, so Tetra is the only shortish one (60 sec CD) and is single target. Asylum is 90 and Lilybell is 180 sec/3 mins. There's not a LOT of healing required in the game right now, but there's a BIT more than THAT. Solace/Rapture fill the gap, and you get 3 of those per minute. They just made them not feel like GCD heals (no casts) and useful for your damage rotation and MP management, so people don't think about it, I think.

Ren stuff

Still don't think DoTs are terribly engaging and shorter is worse than longer...to a point. I think 30 sec is about right. Usually around 25 sec is when I start thinking "I haven't thought about Dia for a while...yup, about time to refresh". But that does work both ways, as 45 sec is a bit too LONG. That's about the time I've remembered to check it twice and it still not been up yet and I start to just totally forget it. If you want a high skill ceiling DoT, make it a 49 sec duration... <_<

9 sec? I don't THINK anything was ever that short, but I didn't touch BRD back then, so no idea. That's like...ever 3rd/4th GCD. o.O

Looks like only BLM survived all these years. Surely a coincidence, huh

I've said more than once that BLM is the Tardis of FFXIV, complete with anti-paradox shielding making it immune to changes in the timeline.

...somewhat ironic given the name of its level 90 capstone ability, but I consider that BLM just rubbing our faces in it.

I'm not really sure that the Monk fantasy is "striking like a piercing spear or arrow", but... I think it's more "offtank with meh defense but high health and a mix of offense and utility skills - not spells, we aren't dress wearing wizards! Oh, and we PUNCH people. With our BARE HANDS because who needs a weapon when you're a badass?"

Like, I tend to think of Monk (the archetype) as like Alya from Chrono Trigger, FFTactics Monks, Zell from FF8, or Amarant from FF9. Fist fighter, light armor, high HP pool, very high strength, abilities like Chackra (health and MP regen), line/aoe attacks, punch/kick techniques, and (rarely) a low % chance of working revive (FFT Monks actually had Revive, a lowish chance of success lesser Raise; Raise restored 50%, Raise 2 100%, Revive 20%). So a more physical, less magical RDM. Monks in MMOs alst have a history of being pullers (feign death) and/or off-tanks.

...FFXIV does none of that either, lol

.

As for Medica vs Medica 2; it's more that you can spam Medica (not the best choice, but it makes sense mathematically if you need the healing) but doing so with Medica 2 is actually an inferior result since you'd be clipping the HoT and since it costs more MP (not massively more, though, so...) Though...hm...is Medica 2's first tick up front or after 3 sec/server tick? It doesn't seem to have an up-front tick when I spam it, but on the other hand, the tick seems to consistently go off before the follow-up cast registers and they do approximately the same healing anyway. It just seems odd to have something that does less as an "upgrade". If Medica 1 already had the HoT and was weaker...but then it wouldn't be as useful if you need to spam it below level 50. Though if the game just had Medica 2 and Cure 3, I suppose that covers those bases well enough, though Cure 3's 10y range is only half Medica 2's 20y. Medica 1 to Medica 2 is a range upgrade, though, from 15y to 20y... And Medica 2 does cost more MP to cast. Upgrades costing more MP made sense when we had variable MP pools, but not when they're fixed at 10000 from level 1 to level 90.

I dunno, the more I think about it, the more okay with it I'd be, honestly. It still FEELS weird, but in a practical sense, it's not so bad given WHM still has Cure 3 as its other AOE and that, at worst, Medica 2 is about damage neutral. Though maybe drop the MP cost down to 900 with Medica 1. Because. That's why.

.

And I don't think Protect would step on AST's toes too much. First, because WHM had it FIRST anyway. Second, because AST already has 3 party mitigations per 2 mins between 2x CU and Neutral Sect. Temperance might be stronger than Neutral Sect, but if so, just give Neutral Sect a damage mitigation and call it a homogenized day. CI also does 10% reduction, which is why I specifically said that Pro-Plenary would do 5%. Still mitigation, but less so, as Temperance does 10%. And AST not being better than WHM at literally everything for once might not be a bad thing.

Why is something that doesn't automatically neatly align considered "clunk"?

I'm honestly not even talking about raid buffs, I'm more talking smoothness of play. I guess it depends on what you consider good cadences, but a lot of wonky numbers are weird to remember and disrupt rather than enhance play. Ever play a game where the controls were so clunky, every time you died, you could LEGITIMATELY blame the controls? That's what I mean when I say clunk. Stuff that just...doesn't work well and feels bad.

I've messed with the HUD a lot but never found a good way to have it show just the things I want it to show. And there are sometimes things besides my own that I do want to see, like Mug and Chain Strategem. I'm with Roe that they should have it on the "engaged target list" on the right hand side. That might honestly be the best way to do it. But in general, I've never seen a good MMO UI for DoT tracking. It's one of (not the only, but one of) the reasons I hate DoTs so much. I've seen add-ons that do it SO much better, though..."better" to the point of braindead and annoying "CHECK YOUR DOT! IT'S FALLING OFF!" type sound ques that ALMOST play the games for you (again, WoW abounded with these, and the community expected most players to be using them anyway, but especially players of DoT classes like Warlock)

I don't mind bleeds in a game like Remnant: From the Ashes, but it's also blatantly obvious when you have them on the targets because you see the string of damage numbers of a tick per 0.5 sec or whatever, so it's super easy to see when they've fallen off because the number string stops. No timer tracking, no add-ons needed; the game actually makes it apparent when your DoTs ARE and ARE NOT on the target. Also helps that a lot of DoTs actually change the enemy's model (e.g. progressive frost covering, coated in green if poisoned, little fires on their clothes/body if burning, etc)

HW seemingly ended on a very different development direction compared to how it started, I guess in reaction to how the average player took difficultly spikes seen in the likes of ThordanEX and Gordias.

I more or less talked this out as did Roe, so I'll kind of leave it for now other than to reiterate what I said above, more or less. As I said, 4.0 to present is essentially "A Realm Reborn, Reborn", and as Roe said, the Devs have already indicated they don't want to go back to 3.X. So using 4.X as the baseline makes the most sense.

As far as WHM itself goes. Yeah for sure, WHM is the best it's ever been in terms of relevance. I don't think anyone with any sense is going to deny that? I can think of 2 times in past expansions where WHM was a must pick for Savage (Gordias and Deltascape), on both occasions it wasn't because WHM was a powerhouse, but rather it was because one of the alternatives was just plain bad (AST for Gordias prog was a struggle right from A1S, SCH wasn't as bad but it still fell noticeably behind Noct AST in 4.0).

Right, but this is the first time it's kinda good in its own right, not just because its competitors were garbage. It may even be meta on some fights, I dunno, but it's definitely holding it's own well and is in the best shape it's ever been in both rotational and functional and feels ways, imo

Even so, it's still not perfect.

Nothing is, but I think it's close. I think the real thing it's lacking right now is that, while having no buff utility game, it ALSO has (almost) no mitigation game. This wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't the ONLY Healer this is true of. AST being a Pure Healer with 3x mits kind hurts, but this more affects the feels. Even 4 man bosses use big attacks at a rough cadence of needing 2-3 mitigations per 2 minutes or so, and even though it's "irrelevant", WHM is the only Healer that can't provide them. The Plenary change is honestly the only thing I think WHM absolutely needs at this point.

It's too mindless to play below Savage.

I mean, every Healer is. But that aside, I never understand this argument because I play it the same way I play it in Savage. The only real distinction is that I never have a need for Medica 2 or Regen, and only use Cure 2 situationally (mainly if I have 3 Lilies, a Misery ready to go, but it's the second wall to wall and a boss is about to come up and they're almost dead; would rather go into the boss full on resources and open with a Misery, so I'll Cure 2 the Tank in that very specific situation). But in terms of using oGCDs and mitigation and such, I do that (on all the Healers) even if I'm doing 4 man content. I make it a game to myself to go through dungeons not only using only oGCDs (Lilies aside) for healing, but also using most/all of them at least once to kind of cycle through them. I do the same thing on the other Healers, and it actually made me better on them, particularly SCH, since it got me more used to using the CDs I was much more rarely touching.

For sure part of it is a content design problem, but job design has to take a part of the blame as well.

I really don't think so, honestly. I think the problem is that content design has shifted, and Jobs were shifted partly with it, but not completely, leading to the disconnect. But I think that IS a combat systems and encounter design problem.

Taking away healer utility from ARR and HW was an awful decision.

I'm trying to think, but what utility do you mean? Protect? Stoneskin?

Just a small correction, WHM absolutely did not have MP issues in SB,

Hm...I may be thinking of HW, then. I remember some point WHM having REALLY bad MP economy. Other than 6.0, that is.

Thin Air did absolute wonders for the job

Okay, make that TWO things I think need to be changed about WHM: Old Thin Air I liked a lot. New Thin Air is growing on me as a Raise tool, but it's kind of clunky to double weave Swiftcast + Thin Air + Raise, especially if you have a macro on any of the three to try and prevent the other Healer from blowing Swiftcast (it never works, but, we do it anyway with the hopes SOMEONE reads /party...)

If you dropped the current EW Lily/Misery system onto SB WHM, it would have been highly competitive.

Fair enough. And more or less what I've said about how good WHM is right now.

The only real difference between SB and EW WHM is Aero 3 vs Lily/Misery and that our DoTs don't have wonky timers. Of those, readding Aero 3 and having it upgrade to Banish if they want to keep the Light/Umbral theme could work, especially if they combined Cure 1 and Cure 2. Though I still think it as a blast CD with 2 charges would be the better option than another DoT.

Quick correction,
Miasma II did 25 potency per tick over 12 seconds, giving it a total potency of 200 (only 30 potency less than Broil II) and making it a lot more useful as a weave tool (even for single weaves) provided you could afford the MP cost.

Was that a buff sometime during the expansion? I think it was 20 early on...but either way, you still end up with the same use-case - Miasma 2 if you were close to the boss and had ample MP for a DPS gain and needed movement or a double weave/unclipped weave / Ruin 2 if either of those conditions weren't met.

or a smooth alliance raid run at all given how gentle and infrequent damage taken happens,

I kind of scratch my head whenever people say this. People die in 24 mans all the time, so healing kind of IS needed. You can meet it with oGCDs most of the time, true, but it's definitely not "gentle" when attacks deal over half a party member's HP in damage. Standing in bad often isn't fatal but it's CLOSE ENOUGH to fatal that if they aren't healed they'll die to the next raidwide, or if they weren't healed from the prior one they'd die. And some of the unavoidable damage does hit rather hard. Halone's 3 hit AOE will knock a lot of players down in the 10-20% health range, and I'm not sure passive generation will heal them up before the next raidwide or not. Haven't tried it...

I don't disagree with making GCD healing useful. I very much agree with that, in fact. I think WHM is basically there, just that their non-Lily heals need to be brought into the fold. It's one reason I suggested before to remove Rapture and Solace and just make all their GCD heals generate 1/3rd a Blood Lily like that. SGE could do a similar thing with Toxicon, they just...don't want the barrier to be damage neutral for whatever reason. Probably to encourage more oGCD only healing. But both of them EFFECTIVELY have a solution to the problem, they just need a bit of a nudge.

SCH and AST, on the other hand...I don't even know how to begin. Maybe for AST every GCD heal generates a stack of Lord of Crowns up to 3 stacks or something? But maybe that'd be too boring and require them to rework Minor Arcana...

Though, strictly speaking, it's probably not BAD if there's an oGCD focused Healer. SCH in ARR and HW was quite popular for this reason. SGE could be today if it actually...had a DPS rotation to make that its actual core identity.

This sort of thing continually happens to Scholar, it seems.

I mean...you aren't wrong. It seems to just be "The Scholar Curse", since FFXI also had some weirdness with SCH. It's somehow (almost) always powerful, yet at the same time, always just has weirdness with it. And yeah, for all the talk people have of WHM being the boring one, the data and feels seem to show that SCH actually is. When we don't count oGCDs (which we don't for WHM, so... ...but we do for AST..........so....... /shrug)

One SLIGHT correction, though: SCH also got Miasma 2 in...HW, I think? It doesn't have it NOW, mind you, but it DID receive at least that. I think it was because the direction for SCH early on was damage based, but its damage was shunted to oGCDs instead.

One other thing: Afflatus doesn't really do ED for the simple reason ED is a competition between using a resource for healing or damage - something the Devs haven't liked since they first tried to remove it in 5.0. Some players love it, some hate it. For those who hate it, WHM is a more perfect version of that system. For those that love it, SCH's version they prefer, but there's no AOE version since Bane was removed. Oh, and you do have breaks. Exactly two of them, like clockwork, per minute. Riveeting, I agree. <_<

It really goes to show how you can have oGCD focused Healers, but they need to actually have their play centered around that - SCH did up until SB then got it wiffed - or alternatively, you can have a GCD centric focus, but you have to lean into that fully to make it work - ShB and really 6.1+ EW WHM for that example.

[Nizzi]

I mean...you aren't wrong. It seems to just be "The Scholar Curse", since FFXI also had some weirdness with SCH. It's somehow (almost) always powerful, yet at the same time, always just has weirdness with it. And yeah, for all the talk people have of WHM being the boring one, the data and feels seem to show that SCH actually is. When we don't count oGCDs (which we don't for WHM, so... ...but we do for AST..........so....... /shrug)

One SLIGHT correction, though: SCH also got Miasma 2 in...HW, I think? It doesn't have it NOW, mind you, but it DID receive at least that. I think it was because the direction for SCH early on was damage based, but its damage was shunted to oGCDs instead.

https://youtu.be/YSVK8LpHoi8
It did not, actually! Not to be pedantic, but Scholar had it back in ARR as seen in the linked Mr. Happy video from ARR. Scholar has literally never gotten a new DPS ability or anything to change its GCD gameplay, it's only ever had everything taken away from it.
SCH also has the least amount of GCD heals out of any healer (3) where every other healer has at least 4-5. So yeah, Broilbot away! You have the least amount of options out of any healer to alleviate that.

One other thing: Afflatus doesn't really do ED for the simple reason ED is a competition between using a resource for healing or damage - something the Devs haven't liked since they first tried to remove it in 5.0. Some players love it, some hate it. For those who hate it, WHM is a more perfect version of that system. For those that love it, SCH's version they prefer, but there's no AOE version since Bane was removed. Oh, and you do have breaks. Exactly two of them, like clockwork, per minute. Riveeting, I agree. <_<[/hb]

It really goes to show how you can have oGCD focused Healers, but they need to actually have their play centered around that - SCH did up until SB then got it wiffed - or alternatively, you can have a GCD centric focus, but you have to lean into that fully to make it work - ShB and really 6.1+ EW WHM for that example.

What I meant was that by making Lilies lossless, they mimicked what Scholar used to have with Miasma II/Ruin II + Energy Drain, which was a lossless movement tool or weaving tool, not that it serves the same function as Energy Drain. I like that Lilies are similar but distinct to Aetherflow, and I think after 6.1 they're in a very good spot for WHM. As sad as it is, WHM now just shows that if they listen to what the community says about healers, like with Lilies needing to be DPS neutral, it tends to work out fairly well. They absolutely, undeniably need someone on the team who focuses on healers specifically as the design across the board is fairly dismal. These jobs can be designed so much better, we just need people on the team that have a clear vision for what they want jobs to be and for them to stay true to that vision.

[ty_taurus]

I kind of scratch my head whenever people say this. People die in 24 mans all the time, so healing kind of IS needed.

When alliance raids are new, they tend to be a mess and require a lot of healing, which is totally fine. Alliance Raid mechanics aren't very hard, and the general community tends to get a good grip on them after the first several weeks. Sometimes you get a few deaths, but people aren't failing mechanics in droves like they do around the launch of the raid. SCH and SGE are very capable of relying entirely or almost entirely on OGCD heals at this point based on the team. It's more volatile than a dungeon run, absolutely, but I tend to get more instances where nothing really goes wrong in alliance roulette than ones where things do go wrong, even with the more recent raids.

I don't disagree with making GCD healing useful. I very much agree with that, in fact. I think WHM is basically there, just that their non-Lily heals need to be brought into the fold. It's one reason I suggested before to remove Rapture and Solace and just make all their GCD heals generate 1/3rd a Blood Lily like that.

If every heal is special, then no heal is special. There should still be some type of rhythm to using your healing to reward more skilled use of healing resources. This gives those that seek mastery a goal and something to engage with that also doesn't alienate those that don't as not following that rhythm shouldn't stunt your healing. In fact, the tools that don't follow this rhythm can be your strongest security heals that help you get out of a bind very quickly and easily, shortcutting that healing rhythm at the cost of losing a little damage. It creates choice and consequence which are inherently good design.

[Renathras]

I just try and find old videos of those days. Plenty still floating around on Youtube (mostly Mr. Happy but better than nothing).
Aero 1/2/3 all did exist together back in Heavensward. However, Aero 1 only dealt a total of 200 potency in comparison to Stone 3's 210 potency, meaning it wasn't worth keeping up in terms of rotation as Stone 3 outdid it in terms of damage. However, Aero 1 was still valuable as it granted movement and weaving windows as it was still an instant cast ability, which is something that WHM lacked outside of Regen and while good Regen uptime was important back then, if a Regen was already on the tank, Aero 1 was still a viable option.

See THAT, I would consider a choice.

Not because it's a DoT, mind you - Ruin 2 works this exact same way and is not a DoT - but because it was a trade-off. A bit less damage for a bit more mobility, each one being valuable in specific situations. Ruin 2 works this way. Enchanted Reprise (RDM) works this way. In theory, Scathe works this way but the damage loss is so great it...doesn't. Dia, when overwriting itself but used for movement, actually does this NOW, too, and is the only Healer DoT thatdoes due to the up front damage and that "some damage is better than no damage", though that's only necessary if you need movement and all Lilies and Swiftcast are on CD.

But yes, that would be a good example of choice.

It did not, actually! Not to be pedantic, but Scholar had it back in ARR as seen in the linked Mr. Happy video from ARR.

Huh.

When was it added? Was it with 2.0 or was it like Stoneskin II (which WHM got in...2.5, I think?)

Huh.

That's...actually sad. XD Maybe they thought SCH was just perfect the way it was. (Though, that may unironically have been somewhat true...)

What I meant was that by making Lilies lossless, they mimicked what Scholar used to have with Miasma II/Ruin II + Energy Drain, which was a lossless movement tool or weaving tool, not that it serves the same function as Energy Drain.

Oh yeah. That makes sense. I also agree that they SOMEtimes need to listen to players. As I quoted before: "Players are very good at spotting problems, though often not very good at coming up with workable solutions." SOMEtimes, they are good at coming up with solutions, but basically ALL times, they're good at correctly identifying problems. It pays to listen.

And I agree that they really need some Healer focused Devs. A pair of them, one of the offensive minded and one for the support minded.

When alliance raids are new, they tend to be a mess and require a lot of healing, which is totally fine.

That is when they're the most fun, yeah. I didn't say they were HARD. I more mean that they HIT HARD ENOUGH to wipe or to KO people. I think too often people hand-wave away non-Savage (or at best, non-Extreme) content as mere tickles that you don't even need a single heal to get through. That's untrue. It's just that the healing is low enough to be extremely easily covered by 1/3rd of your oGCD kit (or in WHM's case, Lilies)

If every heal is special, then no heal is special.

It's not about being special, it's about being viable. Casting Cure 2 is always the wrong decision outside of VERY niche cases like the 4 man one I mentioned above. Casting Cure 1 is never the right decision unless you're synced below level 30. We don't use GCD heals that aren't damage neutral in this game, because the damage >>> all mentality rules the day.

If it didn't, then exceptions make sense.

Now, there IS one alternative - and only one I can think of offhand - which is SPECIFICALLY Cure 3. It's extremely powerful when used well - though the times for that and executing it and situations that call for it are exceptionally rare, but they do exist. That's the only non-damage neutral GCD heal I can think off that actually has an argument to not be damage neutral because it can be used to save a lot of healing resources (which can then be turned into more damage later or earlier in the fight...so I suppose it's damage neutral in a way just not directly), but it's the only exception I can think of. Indeed, most of our other GCD heals are mimicked by oGCDs (or oGCD adjacent Lilies). Medica and Cure 2 are by Rapture (and Assize) and Solace/Tetra. Holos is by Celestial Opposition (and probably more, I don't know AST that well), etc.

[ty_taurus]

That is when they're the most fun, yeah. I didn't say they were HARD. I more mean that they HIT HARD ENOUGH to wipe or to KO people. I think too often people hand-wave away non-Savage (or at best, non-Extreme) content as mere tickles that you don't even need a single heal to get through. That's untrue. It's just that the healing is low enough to be extremely easily covered by 1/3rd of your oGCD kit (or in WHM's case, Lilies)

I agree, I love a shitshow roulette. My favorite dungeon is probably Pharos Sirius because everyone kills the Zu eggs in the second boss which causes her to enrage and start body checking people for nearly their full HP and stunning them. On the topic of light or heavy damage, it really just comes down to semantics. Whether or not we're describing the damage as high or low, the point is that each healer has a surplus of healing power in contrast to the general amount of damage we take, even if that damage is taking the party down to around 40% HP. And to a point, this isn't a bad thing. It makes storyline content, dungeons, alliance raids, and normal raids, very accessible to novice and intermediate healers, as well as other light content like treasure map dungeons and Bozja. But it also means it's very easy for expert and master level healers can accomplish healing requirements with a fraction of their healing kit.

Which leads me to the point of viable healing tools. Because you're right, you do want more healing tools to feel viable all the time. Healing on an expert or master level renders the majority of our healing tools as "unviable" or "unnecessary" currently, which amounts to the majority of actions each healer can access. On tanks and DPS jobs, you have buttons like Bloodbath that aren't always necessary, but that's not a bad thing either, because most of DRG's kit it always viable and always necessary, you just also have a pocket full of situational tools that can help you in a pinch. Meanwhile, it feels like the opposite for healers. The majority of your hotbar actions are situational, and only a handful are consistently viable: your DPS tools, your buffs (if you have them), and your primary healing buttons, i.e. Kardia, Kerachole, and Ixochole on SGE, or Afflatus Rapture, Afflatus Solace, and Asylum for WHM (I may be slightly off on that one, but those are the main go-tos I see of WHM when I play DNC).

This is why the main argument I and several others continue to bring up is having things that are always useful regardless of whether or not healing is needed, because it should feel more like the tank and DPS jobs where you're engaging with most of your tools consistently with a handful of utility or niche tools. So when it comes to whether or not all GCD heals should be DPS neutral, I still don't think it should be that free. You should have a selection of tools that make your GCD healing viable and necessary for when damage is taken, but not every tool should be free like that. Like the example with Cure III that you mentioned... it's something that we could improve on, absolutely, but having some really powerful safety net heals that aren't optimal but are exceptional at getting the player out of a stick scenario, they can still have a lot of value even if they're not regularly engaged with. Something you could do to better balance this with WHM's GCD library could look something like this:

Cure 1 - Make it instant cast, and attach Esuna to it. It's niche, but it merges two already very infrequently needed tools into one action and makes it easier to use when needed.
Cure II - Make it instant cast, and have the potency scale with the target's missing HP. It's not DPS neutral, but a much more effective tool at rescuing a single party member.
Medica - Replace it with an upgraded new spell that's instant cast, restores HP in an AoE with light potency, and also deals neutral damage to nearby enemies, like a GCD Assize with a high MP cost. Lily heals are more efficient for viable, DPS neutral healing tools, especially because Misery can be used to gain DPS, but this makes it a potentially viable tool for when lilies have run out, and gives you another tool to use with Thin Air.
Cure III - Make it instant cast with an even larger radius, and also scales with the target's missing HP. Still a DPS loss, but an even better emergency tool.
Regen and Medica II - Replace both of these with one OGCD ability that makes your next GCD heal apply a regen that's stronger on single target spells. It makes it so that you can add regen effects to your afflatus heals, or this upgraded Medica button. You could even do something fun like make Aero/Dia tics have a chance to shorten the cooldown by a few seconds, making your DoT feel more connected to your gameplay rather than just being a DoT for DoT's sake.
- Afflatus Solace and Rapture - Give them a cast time. This makes the instant cast nature of your Cure spells more valuable in certain scenarios. Your optimal heals are no longer the easiest ones to use, but not hard to use either.

Something like that gives each heal a more clearly defined purpose, and makes clutch healing with Cure II and Cure III overall more worth the loss in uptime and especially useful for prog scenarios.

[Sebazy]

I more or less talked this out as did Roe, so I'll kind of leave it for now other than to reiterate what I said above, more or less. As I said, 4.0 to present is essentially "A Realm Reborn, Reborn", and as Roe said, the Devs have already indicated they don't want to go back to 3.X. So using 4.X as the baseline makes the most sense.

Ruling out anything is a mistake at this point IMO.

Going back to a gameplay style where resources are valuable and somewhat scarce across the board is definitely something that should be at least considered even if it is associated with the 2.x-3.x era. Titan Unreal was a good demonstration of this IMO. Don't get me wrong, it's my favourite unreal so far and unless by some miracle we get Thordan again, I doubt that's going to change. But as fun as it was, it still didn't come close to how much of a measured panic the likes of it used to be back when they were relevant current content. We just have too much healing firepower vs anything the game currently throws at us that isn't just a simple one shot.

Right, but this is the first time it's kinda good in its own right, not just because its competitors were garbage. It may even be meta on some fights, I dunno, but it's definitely holding it's own well and is in the best shape it's ever been in both rotational and functional and feels ways, imo

Granted I'm out of the loop now but I'm pretty confident AST is still numerically superior as ever? It's just hot garbage to play and as such, finding good healers actually willing to endure it long term is the challenge. It kind of reminds me of EQ1 and FFXI Bards, both hugely valued, forever in demand yet criminally underplayed because both needed a very specific mindset to stomach playing for hours at a stretch.

WHM is straight forward with a powerful core kit, works well when played in a reactive manner whilst also having some of the lowest APM demands in the game. That's an enticing mix for less confident or newer players to the role as well as jaded old asshats like myself who just can't be bothered dealing with the RSI anymore

I mean, every Healer is. But that aside, I never understand this argument because I play it the same way I play it in Savage.

That's fair, it likely is an across the board thing for all healers. My point is that once I have a specific fight or dungeon down, I barely have to pay any attention to what I'm doing. I just repeat the script over and over until the farm is done or whatnot. I got lucky and got my Rubicant mount early, so helped a friend farm their 50 kills for the totems as well. It was a snooze fest TBH. About the only time anyone's mistakes or deaths could change much of anything was in the moments leading into Limit Cut where it was actually important to drop everything and get people up in time. Other than that? /shrug, swiftcast raise one and carry on glaring. For better or worse, Savage fights tend to be a little less forgiving. Vuln stacks are actually dangerous and there are far more mechanics that won't resolve properly with missing people. So I at least have to pay attention even when it's on farm.

Again, I do agree that it's a role specific issue vs something that's unique to WHM. Perhaps the lower APM and methodical pace of the job makes me feel it more. AST at least mixes things up in that regard with buff fluff mixing things up a little.

I really don't think so, honestly. I think the problem is that content design has shifted, and Jobs were shifted partly with it, but not completely, leading to the disconnect. But I think that IS a combat systems and encounter design problem.

I think that's a quite significant understatement TBH.

Healer design has gone in quite literally the opposite direction from encounter design. We have bigger heals, vastly more free heals and faster heals vs anything we had in 2.x-3.x. Yet almost all levels of content deal far less damage now vs what we used to face back in the day.

Remember that even a launch day primal in Titan HM had AoEs that would wipe a group if your healers weren't getting heals off between the stomps. Coil T1 dealt enough sustained damage on the tanks to potentially murder them in the space of a couple of GCDs towards the end of the fight. Meanwhile in Rubicant, the only dangerous AoE mechanics are conveniently spaced 3 minutes apart so I can auto heal them with Lilybell. Thanks Obama

These two facets of the game's design are so polarised vs each other that I think it's fair they are equally to blame for the currently situation. We've ended up as powerhouse healers in a game where everything eventually boils down to DPS numbers.

I'm trying to think, but what utility do you mean? Protect? Stoneskin?

WHM handling CC duty via Repose in the very early dungeon meta. This was mainly a thing during ARR's betas and rapidly died out on release once people learned the power of AoE. It was a great change of pace and something I'd love to see experimented with again.

Fluid Aura also counts. Like or dislike the ability itself, but it added depth to the job. Even after Repose lost it's value, FA was still both useful and interesting as you had to think to get worth from it, bet that positioning yourself to ensure you pushed a trash mob against a wall so it didn't get shoved out of the bunch, or even just bumping a caster into the AoEs.

Eye for an Eye was interesting as it wasn't as straight forward as many people thought it was. Between varying in effectiveness on different mob types and abilities as well as also being spreadable by SCH, it was a neat defensive CD with a few more wrinkles to it's game than the current crop.

Ontop of those, Virus, Stoneskin and Protect yeah. I acknowledge that protect wasn't popular, but as an Everquest Shaman and FFXI Bard main, I honestly miss the buffs.

Hm...I may be thinking of HW, then. I remember some point WHM having REALLY bad MP economy. Other than 6.0, that is.

You're probably thinking of 3.4 aka Alex yeah. WHM had a bad time of it and A12S really laid it bare. When I tried to prog it on WHM I was flatlining MP as the first adds popped. On AST I could play just as aggressively but still had plenty of MP in the tank. ( ~2/3rds full in this example )

TLDR, some fights had WHM standing around ARR style to conserve MP. AST and SCH both had the mp economy to keep their GCD rolling.

Interesting discussion though, that's the longest post I've made in some time

[ty_taurus]

Fluid Aura also counts. Like or dislike the ability itself, but it added depth to the job. Even after Repose lost it's value, FA was still both useful and interesting as you had to think to get worth from it, bet that positioning yourself to ensure you pushed a trash mob against a wall so it didn't get shoved out of the bunch, or even just bumping a caster into the AoEs.

There's a ranged enemy in the first couple pulls of Paglth'an that you'd have to deal with constantly back when it was a part of Expert Roulette, and I can only imagine how salty some WHM players must've been to not be able to shove him into the group of enemies.

There are other examples of one-off, or exceedingly rare tricks and gimmicks you could pull off that I definitely don't think deserve to have entire actions dedicated to given how unfit those tools generally are for the entire rest of the game, but at the same time, they're incredibly fun to pull off when you can. Things like Silent Dusk on the ADS mini-boss from Coils 1 (or other examples of silence), inflicting Disease on Garuda EX to reduce the healing she received from her green tether add, inflicting heavy on the adds for Amon or Living Liquid with Stone/Ruin/Stella....

[Silver-Strider]

There's a ranged enemy in the first couple pulls of Paglth'an that you'd have to deal with constantly back when it was a part of Expert Roulette, and I can only imagine how salty some WHM players must've been to not be able to shove him into the group of enemies.

There are other examples of one-off, or exceedingly rare tricks and gimmicks you could pull off that I definitely don't think deserve to have entire actions dedicated to given how unfit those tools generally are for the entire rest of the game, but at the same time, they're incredibly fun to pull off when you can. Things like Silent Dusk on the ADS mini-boss from Coils 1 (or other examples of silence), inflicting Disease on Garuda EX to reduce the healing she received from her green tether add, inflicting heavy on the adds for Amon or Living Liquid with Stone/Ruin/Stella....

I miss the days of yeeting the T9 golems with Fluid Aura so much and that 1 add in Paglth'an was just TAUNTING me every time I got that dungeon in ShB. I hated it with a passion.

[Renathras]

One thing that DOES consistently confuse me is how people think big brain and amazing gameplay should be attributed to abilities not at all deserving of it. I've said many times that Cleric Stance is the single most rose tinted goggles abilities out of all rose tinted goggle abilities in all of MMO history. But that aside...Fluid Aura? o.O Anything worth using it on were immune to it. And once the damage was removed, it became entirely pointless. I can't think of a single time I did Paglth'an where I thought "Man, I wish I had a KB for this one enemy in this one pack in this single dungeon". Granted, I'm not the kind of person that speedruns dungeons (I set no timers, I just play to enjoy them, so I don't notice if a run takes 30 seconds longer or not), so maybe that has something to do with it. The fact you guys even noticed that is so...not meaning to insult anyone, but just weird to me. And I'm a person that tends to be OCD about stuff, but I legitimately don't remember a single time noticing said add, much less feeling taunted by it or haunted by Fluid Aura (which I had long since ceased using by than anyway) not existing.

Like...I get that might be a legitimate thing with you guys......but REALLY? I can't think of a single time since Fluid Aura was changed or removed that I even thought about it. I used it in ARR and HW, but just for a smidge of damage or in some leveling dungeons. Most things I actually WANTED to use it on were immune to it long before it was changed or removed. It's just so weird to me that people care so much about abilities that, at best, took a few seconds to position before using, if that.

I've noticed this a lot in these discussions that people seem to think abilities were huge and major parts of their gameplay that I honestly rarely used because they just weren't. It's like the people saying Energy Drain is somehow the core of SCH when I legitimately removed it from my bar for most of SB-ShB because I never found it useful since I generally used all my AF stacks on more useful and interesting abilities, like Sacred Soil, one of my favorite abilities in the game thematically and in terms of gameplay.

Ruling out anything is a mistake at this point IMO.

I'm not making a judgement call on it. I'm just saying that the Devs are unlikely to do it since they've gone the other way 3 expansions in a row now (SB, ShB, EW). If they are having second thoughts on it, they haven't shared them, nor have their actions indicated it.

Going back to a gameplay style where resources are valuable and somewhat scarce across the board

Resources are valuable, they're just not MP. Resources now are measured in charges of abilities, shared charge gauges, and ability CDs. How scarce they are depends on the Job, though. Some are more than others. But they seem to, again, want to move away from that, not towards it.

As for Titan: Partly, but part of it is also how mobile ALL JOBS are now, because encounters now are tuned to be super heavy on "the dance". It's not just "Healers have so much healing", it's "DPS are too mobile". As I've noted before, BLMs can have something like 12-14 free movement casts IN A ROW if they want to burn all their CDs to do it. Sure, that's a lot of CDs, but when do you EVER need to move 14 GCDs in a row without stopping? And that's "the most immobile Job in the game".

Granted I'm out of the loop now but I'm pretty confident AST is still numerically superior as ever?

Not actually sure if this is still true or not.

Looking at P4S, P8S phase 2, Ex5, and TOP:

AST is in last place for nDPS, aDPS, and rDPS. In TOP (and only TOP), it's top in rDPS (and only rDPS), and only by a pretty small margin. The 100% AST is actually a good chunk above ALL the other Healers, and AST seems to have a long tail to the right, but its median is only SLIGHTLY higher than WHM (53.25 vs 53.02) and it has a longer tail to the left as well.

What this means is that VERY good AST players in EXCEPTIONALLY good parties of top end players playing the VERY most difficult content in the game that they've probably worked down to an art form CAN produce higher results. But the longer tail on the left as well means that AST is both harder to play and can often produce worse results than WHM.

If we're taking more average parties, more average players, or content people haven't spent literal weeks perfecting, WHM appears to have a higher maximum than AST does. So AST is better only in theory/on paper, and only when paired with exceptional players in top damage output Jobs.

I'm not sure how technical you want to get with it, but people are clearly playing AST, but it isn't producing higher outcomes except for top end players that are also on top end teams that have worked out encounters and their personal synergies down to an art form. I'm not sure that means that AST is, strictly speaking, numerically superior, as that depends on the party its attached to and even the Jobs in said party.

My point is that once I have a specific fight or dungeon down, I barely have to pay any attention to what I'm doing.

Has this ever...NOT been true?

Ex4 is far more demanding than Ex5, but once you get it, you get it. That's also true of P1S, P2S, and P5S (I haven't done the others, but I'd wager they eventually get the same). There are only so many times you can do an encounter before you get it down. Sometimes it's fewer and sometimes it's more, but it kind of ends up that way in the end one way or another.

I think that's a quite significant understatement TBH.

I mean, fair. But the reason I say Healers moved SORT OF with it is the way the abilities work. Go back to ARR. WHM had Benediction and Regen, SCH had 3x Lustrate and Whispering Dawn (and Embrace, I guess). Every other healing ability we had in our kits had a cast time attached to it, so we had to stand still and cast a lot. In HW......this was still largely true. WHM now had Assize, but even then it was used as much for the damage as the heal, and Asylum was a longish CD that didn't heal quickly. Tetra was the only oGCD direct heal added to its kit that was usable and frequent enough to do meaningful healing. Again, most healing was still static, and casting Medica 2, Cure 2, Adlo, possibly even Physic, and Succor in encounters was common.

Now, look at some fights today. Take Ex4, for example. There are some heavy movement phases that you don't have time to stand still long enough to cast a Medica 2. Granted, Ex4 was a PARTICULARLY mobile fight, but Savage encounters have similar levels of movement, and various parts of Ex1, Ex2, Ex3, and Ex5 do as well. And those are often the parts where you need the most healing. If we didn't have the tools we now have, some of these encounters might not actually be possible to heal. But, between HW and EW, we had tools added that addressed more mobility. Every Healer now has multiple instant cast heals, several shields, and at least 1 (WHM) or 3+ (everyone else) mitigations. Not a single one of which requires standing still for even a moment to cast. We always talk about weaving, but oGCDs don't TECHNICALLY need weaves. DPS loss blahblahblah - but you can just roll your face across your keyboard/controller and unleash half a dozen abilities while also moving.

This is more tailored to the modern ADD/ADHD movement heavy fights and is FAR less methodical than prior fights, making healing old encounters a breeze. Even when Solace/Rapture were "DPS loss" abilities, they were still quite useful as on the move bursts of healing, something WHM didn't have (outside of Assize which was used for DPS instead and Tetra once per minute) prior to ShB in any meaningful sense. I remember how much more MOBILE WHM in 5.0, even when Solace/Rapture had 30 sec charges.

So in this way, the Healers followed encounter design IN THE SENSE OF the dance and much higher movement requirements. That's why I say Healer design followed half-way.

...the other half, however, is the damage requirements, and that's where the disconnect is. Healers are tailored to work with the heavy movement, but they weren't adjusted to the lower damage. I believe this was intentional on the part of the Devs, however, to make Healing more friendly to all those people with "healxiety" (everyone knows "tankxiety", but "healxiety" is real as well) and get more people to try Healers out since so many quit in HW and SB because it was too hard.

Healers have also been made more damage-centric in a "damage >>> all" environment. I didn't say "DPS rotation-centric", I said "damage-centric". The designs are much more for doing more damage and spending far less time on healing requirements.

The irony is, the only part of our kit that DIDN'T follow along (Lilies aside) are the regular GCD heals...which is why "good players" literally never use them.

The other/final piece of the puzzle, though, is the rest of the party. PARTICULARLY the Tanks. Take EW Tanks and port them into ARR and HW and you'd likewise find the encounters trivial. Instead of managing agro and boss positioning, Tanks manage their CD suite. That (and that bosses don't crit Tanks anymore so much), combined with reduced boss autoattack damage (the heavy movement stuff comes with the effect of bosses having cast bars all the time, and for some odd reason, not auto-attacking while they cast), means bosses barely tickle Tanks. Which isn't a Healer issue or necessarily (partly, but not entirely) an encounter design issue, but that's rather a problem due to the evolution of tank big CDs.

Eye for an Eye was interesting as it wasn't as straight forward as many people thought it was.

E4E is another one of those rose tinted goggles abilities. The proc rate was so low (10%) that it could literally NEVER PROC, especially vs bosses, not to mention it didn't proc on casts. While some might call that "interesting", I remember times using it where it just didn't proc on anything, even trash packs, leading to it being a total wiff of an ability.

One thing I've ALWAYS felt on Healers, even back in WoW, is that healing should be reliable. It's the one thing in the game that needs to be (from the user) predictable. You can't be sure you'll get a lucky proc or crit when you need one. You might, but you might not. In WoW, I almost always avoided crit on my Healer builds because I wanted RELIABLE heals, not a slot machine where 50% of the time I'd get a crit that would save the day and the other 50% of the time, the heal wouldn't be big enough, the Tank would die, the party would wipe, and everyone would start blaming - usually - the Healer (me), and more rarely, the Tank for an outcome that was decided by RNGesus. Instead, I focused on reliable throughput and sustain stats, like Spirit (Intellect on Holy Paladin), Spell Power, Spell Speed, and MP5. The ONLY exception was in Wrath with Healadins because of the 60% MP restoration on crits and that they had Talents to boost their crit rate to an obscene number that was MORE OR LESS guaranteed. At that point, you just Beacon the OT, target the MT, then spam Holy Light for 10 minutes straight. I distinctly remember one fight where I just parked facing the wall with my camera, character facing the boss, did this and Judgement of Light on CD, and that was the whole fight. Don't remember which, but that was basically the optimal strat in that encounter for your Tank healer Paladin.

But yeah, I never cared for E4E because of that. You couldn't plan healing around it because you didn't know if it would proc or not. If it DID, it meant your healing plan was now overhealing that part of the fight. If it DIDN'T and you DID base your plan on it, now you had to blow more resources for that part of the fight. Contrast modern Arm's Length (which works 100% of the time) to see what E4E should have been.

Ontop of those, Virus, Stoneskin and Protect yeah. I acknowledge that protect wasn't popular, but as an Everquest Shaman and FFXI Bard main, I honestly miss the buffs.

This I agree with. I actually derive an almost giddy amount of joy in FFXI just casting buffs on random people I pass by.

Interesting discussion though, that's the longest post I've made in some time

Good talk, yeah. That's the point of the threads I've been starting lately. To really get in some discussion about what's going on, where Healers are, and where Healers have been. It's easy to just say there's a problem or throw out solutions tailored to one's playstyle, but I think more productive discussion really drilling down into things could be more helpful, and probably more interesting and enjoyable.

.

Want to fix healers? Give every job healing skills and abilities l. Already happened with tanks. Heal yourself.

Then they would finally have to give us a dps rotations and combos and something meaningful in a game designed around dps.

This seems...like the opposite of an actual solution.

Make the game into TERRA is probably a recipe for disaster. GW2 tried this and had to back off of it (in group content). Originally, GW2 wasn't going to have or allow for a Trinity system at all, but they've backed off of that over time as parties/players just made it happen anyway over time, and they eventually embraced it where their modern dungeons and encounters and stuff seem to do it. Which is rather jarring as a new player you go for like 40 levels with no real group content to speak of for that sort of thing, then you get smacked in the face with it when you get to the later game and realize you may not even have the class you want at that point when it's suddenly time to have a role and you might not have the one you want.