AST - Making an Easy Healer

[Renathras]

For those who didn't read the disclaimer:

There's been ongoing discussion about what to do with Healers as a role/whole. After a lot of talking and analysis, most everyone agrees that SCH and AST are in a bad spot. WHM and SGE are much more controversial, as they have fans in their present condition (where SGE and AST fans even think they need some changes)

Discussion has also been that Healing is an odd role where the better you get at your Job and the better your party/other players get at encounter mechanics and the more gear you all have, the less you need to do as a Healer in a given encounter. This has been framed as "The better you get at being a Healer, the less you have to actually heal, leaving you to spam your DPS 'rotation' which is mostly 2 buttons." oGCD healing, in particular, is so powerful and the CDs relatively short that almost all healing can be covered with no GCD healing, making our GCD heals vestigial and leading to DoT(Dia, Biolysis, Combust, Eukrasian Dosis) + Spamnuke (Glare, Broil, Malific, Dosis), with just a few minor deviations like Plegma or Afflatus spells.

One solution that has been proposed is to give all the Healers involved DPS rotations like Jobs like BLM have. But there are many people that play Healers because they DON'T like DPS rotations and do not find them an enjoyable reward for getting better at healing. Detractors say this would lead to an exodus of Healers who don't like damage dealing rotations, while proponents of the plan insist everyone would like more complex damage rotations on Healers, that FFXIV is more of an ARPG at this point anyway and everyone needs to accept that (despite FFXIV's history to the contrary), that the number of people leaving the role would probably be less than new people attracted to it, and that if you only do MSQ and never touch Extremes, Savages, Ultimates, Deep Dungeons, or basically any other non-MSQ content, you don't NEED to play at a high level so you could ignore those extra abilities if you just...don't clear any content. (They seem to think this is a good argument in favor for some reason...) They don't mind some Healer Jobs having a low skill floor, but they want them all to have a high skill ceiling, so no WAR or SMN equivalents that are both easy to learn and easy to master would exist under their system.


Another solution that has been proposed is to make Healing harder/more demanding, such that encounters match our healing tools. But this solution has detractors from people that don't EXACTLY like healing; they play Healers because they like playing a support caster role, which was epitomized by ARR/HW SCH which was very damage focused while supplying substantial support healing and mitigation between Lustrate - then a percentage heal unaffected by Cleric Stance - and Faerie abilities, and they enjoyed that playstyle and would like a return to it. The detractors point to a decline in Healers in 6.2/3 when P5-8S were released with harder healing, and state that reworking past encounters through the game to accommodate this (so that they aren't bored when doing old content) would require considerable Dev resources. Further, it would require the playerbase to shift their collective mindset away from doing damage being more important than anything else, and they note that the Devs have relatively little power to quickly shift overall player mindsets, and point to things like the removal of Energy Drain and P5S's early tier being met with criticism.

Still others find Healing fun and engaging as it is and enjoy it as it is, and want no changes made at all, or only very minor changes. Most of these people play the game and don't come to forums, though, so are not well represented, but everyone kind of accepts they exist, but think they'd simply be okay with whatever changes were made.

A fourth, compromise position has emerged, which suggests to change SOME of the Healer Jobs while leaving SOME the same. Namely, to restore SCH's SB era damage abilities, AST's SB era Card abilities (a novel suggestion is to do this as "Minor Arcana" for the utility Cards like defense boost or MP regen such that they aren't competing with The Balance), to give SGE a bit more of a DPS rotation akin to SMN or RDM's filler rotations, and to leave WHM largely as it is (giving it a shorter CD mitigation like adding a damage reduction to Plenary Indulgence and allow it's cast time GCD heals to also nourish the Blood Lily so they are actual choices and not DPS losses). In this way, all camps could be satisfied. Those wanting more downtime engagement have SCH and SGE depending on if they like a more managing things like DoTs and CDs (SCH) or more direct rotation (SGE) [one could think of this as how Ranged have BRD and MCH to appeal to the two player types], while those that prefer buffing their allies in interesting ways have AST, and those that prefer a straightforward healing model of strong and direct heals and simplistic downtime rotations have WHM. All of the different camps would have their needs met...well, other than they might feel limited to only one Job in the Role. But right now, several camps have NO Job in the role that satisfies them, so it would still probably be an improvement.

Proponents of this last model point to the other roles in the game and have each have a lot of Job diversity that appeal to different player types, such as WAR existing as an easy to learn and master Tank vs GNB as a more involved one or DRK as a busy during burst but simple during filler. Detractors of this compromise position dislike it because some of the Jobs wouldn't be tailored to their preferred style, and they think no one would want to play them anyway, and they believe if they find them boring, everyone would. Further, they tend to have a favorite Job, and insist that any Job "left the same" would either need to be a new Job (but not SGE, they insist, as it needs to be changed as well, despite having this playstyle for its entire existence in the game...) or some Job other than WHM (for those ones that love WHM and want IT to get the complex damage rotation treatment). The detractors genuinely believe that Healers as they are today are terribly unfun and that leaving any as they are would be a travesty and detrimental to players of that Job, and have tried convincing proponents of this idea that maybe they would just prefer a different Job other than WHM, for example, a Job that spent its downtime buffing instead of dealing damage.

...it was in that last vein that I wrote this thread, to see HOW AST would need to be changed to make it the desired class for such people instead of WHM and why that makes it not the logical choice for "leave it mostly alone" if this plan was implemented.

As such, this was NOT a proposal for how AST should be changed. Rather, this was showing how AST would have to be changed to make it the option rather than WHM.

Though as this led to confusion, I may attempt to use a different name to really consider the thought experiment more fully to its natural conclusion.