A summary of healer issues

[AmiableApkallu]

I quite literally have wiped due to not having enough mitigation in the first tier of this savage when I was running PF as a SGE because of DPS not using Feint/Addle. Savage content is a group effort, so I don't really care if you're a tank, DPS, healer, crafter, gatherer, blue mage, whatever... you should be paying attention to your team. Perhaps I could've blown all of my cooldowns/barriers, but then I wouldn't have had them for later mechanics.

Savage content (on launch) is quite literally not a "it'd be nice if…" situation.

Finding the order in which to push your buttons while under the stress of mechanics is the definition of cooldown-based MMO gameplay. Any job that denies the player that functionality is designed antithetically to the genre that it's in.

Jobs don't exist in isolation. They exist within a combat model. The two have to work together. You want jobs to change to fit the current combat model? Fair. I merely pointed out an alternate take, that the combat model should change to fit the current jobs. And really, that's a change that would benefit everyone, not just the healers, because if it is really about "the stress of mechanics", then let's see how everyone does when there's enough randomness that they can't plan out all the possibilities in advance.

I mean, the combat model, with all of its predictable scripting, is boring. Piling on more DPS buttons to push will certainly give healers an opportunity to expend more of their attention span and effort, but, my two cents, is unlikely to actually do anything about that boredom unless you introduce BLM-like failure states that are recognizable in all content (which is something that most all of the jobs lack).

[Semirhage]

Jobs don't exist in isolation. They exist within a combat model. The two have to work together. You want jobs to change to fit the current combat model? Fair. I merely pointed out an alternate take, that the combat model should change to fit the current jobs. And really, that's a change that would benefit everyone, not just the healers, because if it is really about "the stress of mechanics", then let's see how everyone does when there's enough randomness that they can't plan out all the possibilities in advance.

I mean, the combat model, with all of its predictable scripting, is boring. Piling on more DPS buttons to push will certainly give healers an opportunity to expend more of their attention span and effort, but, my two cents, is unlikely to actually do anything about that boredom unless you introduce BLM-like failure states that are recognizable in all content (which is something that most all of the jobs lack).

Which is a fair point!

However.

What are you going to do about skill gaps? There will always be one, and it'll always be larger than you estimate. One person will struggle bus their way through an Extreme. Another will breeze through it. Same with Savage. This is normal, because you can't tune an encounter to be played absolutely perfectly (or even close to it) and expect most people to even attempt it. What's the upper quartile of that list of people going to do when they've mastered their healing game? What's a new player practicing their skills going to look forward to? Spamming Glarebroileficosis. Spamming Glare isn't fun. It's not a suitable reward for mastering your class. Even if you shake up encounter design to make healing more dynamic and fun, the reward for being good at it still sucks donkey balls.