Healers, then and now:

[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.

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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.