The Healers should be reworked? New player perspective.

[Semirhage]

It is a NA forum after all. The community never get on point so we're the black sheep of the bunch...

We get ignored whether we're on point or off it, so who cares.

[Tigore]

Pretty much all I can add to the original post is something like this. The Healers' job spell use is largely dependent on how good the group's gear is, how well they can use their cooldowns together and how well they know mechanics to avoid damage taken. Once all of the above are above average, the level 90 kits start to revert back to the few button spam with healer DPS. We have had something like 6 months with similar gear requirements for the 5th to 8th set of 8 man raids, right? With a long time for all of us to catch up on gear, a higher percentage of level 90 player queues will have higher gear. We have had a lot of practice with similar dungeons too.

Even just using a recent level 90 expert roulette I did as WHM shows how little I had to use cooldowns. Everyone was over-geared for it. I had a WAR with me too which reduced my Regen usage to maybe 20 - 35% of the dungeon. It was only really needed for the start of the big wall pulls. After the enemies get stunned 3 times by me (Holy spam with Assize), 3 quarters of them were pretty much dead. At that point, the WAR was using the Equilibrium HoT and just needed me to use Divine Benison and / or Aquaveil on them. Both of those are oGCD, so I am still Glare / Holy spamming. For bosses, the tanks use their single target combos that heal themselves, so I am usually just responding to unavoidable AoEs or tank busters. It's down to mostly using Divine Benison again in between to patch up our WAR with his / her combo heals. There was only a couple DPS errors getting the DoT punishment on them which can easily be countered with Regen or Afflatus Solace at this point. The 2 errors pretty much just gave me something to do rather than inconvenience me as long as it's just one at a time. Even then, I would probably have used Asylum or Thin Air plus Medica 2 if it came down to that.

[Renathras]

I'm not a new player but my friends are. They're trying the game. One of my friends came from wow (i never played it before). He thinks that the MSQ and gameplay feels boring, he's doing it with a WHM. That he's only pressing one or two buttons the entire day. I told him that in higher levels the healers have more APM but... is it really like that? Maybe if you play SGE or AST but having to play the game for hundreds of hours boring yourself because you wanna play healer at higher level feels kinda idk... meh.

Best recommendation is probably to play Arcanist and unlock SCH/SMN. SCH is probably the most "has an answer to everything" Healer and also one of the more complex, and offers a DPS Job on the side that has a lot of utility. If they don't find SCH and/or SMN enjoyable at level 90, then they can pick up any Job from there that they want (Armory Bonus, yay!) and probably will have realized they'd enjoy a Support Job more, like DNC or RDM like as not (though both of those are supposedly simple as well - all the support Jobs in FFXIV are RELATIVELY simple, but this depends on perspective and player).

But ACN into SMN/SCH is a generally good suggestion for anyone who doesn't want to play a Tank and/or isn't married to being in Melee.

EDIT:

Osmond has the right of it (I know, I know...)

We get ignored whether we're on point or off it, so who cares.

This isn't saying as much as you think it is. Many of those points - as I noted before - are things even Healer mains disagree on. As I said before, part of the problem is Healers don't even agree AMONGST OURSELVES what our issues are and the solutions to them. The Devs aren't ignoring us, they just legitimately don't have a solution that will satisfy a lot of people. All the solutions from the pro-DPS or pro-complexity faction would piss off a lot of Healer players, and possibly a majority (given how casual the overall playerbase is), and the Devs likely know this. But on the other side of the scale, those are also the people who do most of the higher end content, which they also don't want to piss off and lose Healer players in that content.

They're in a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation. The only solutions that would avoid this would be a Talent/Spec system (which we aren't getting) or a system like my 4 Healers suggestion (which still manages to piss off the pro-DPS/complexity people), so there ARE no solutions that would work, leading to the uncomfortable "stay the course" path, which still bleeds players, just more slowly than any of the alternatives.

Even in that thread, there are Healers disagreeing. While this forum tends to bash them until they either leave in disgust/annoyance or just quit replying/fighting over it, the Devs can see all those posts and probably have better metrics than we do about what the overall Healer community wants.

In short, they aren't ignoring that thread, like as not, that thread isn't USEFUL. Or, at least, doesn't represent a majority and clear direction that a majority would support or that wouldn't seriously alienate large numbers of players.

...and one of the "major points" was about how Healer outfits are too girly. So...I'm not sure that thread is the damning trump card you want to wield it as.

I feel the same way about players who don't want to have any gameplay between instances of damage. When I sit down to play a game, I want to play the game. If I wanted to press only 1 button for 9.5 minutes out of every 10 minutes, I'd download Cookie Clicker.

If only people didn't employ hyperbole. We could have a lot of highly productive conversations.

Then you have to remind yours Man, that was HORRIBLE back then.

Ftfy

And yet people play Tanks and DPS just fine.

If you talk to people on the Tank and DPS forums, they insist to you that both are braindead Jobs anyone can parse 99 on in their sleep with no effort other than "reading their tooltips".

If you want to be honest, healers back then just made it more....difficult to play, kind of rewarding? I mean, WHM was just 1 button spam against adds. If raids with WHM and SCH, just pop cleric stance, 3+ DoT with various duration, do a few stones and ruins, only to reapply them again, pop cleric stance and repeat. Then had to for SCH, pop pet heal so it won't die every....what....a few seconds when a AoE goes off, then have to place it somewhere to it won't get clipped, but to where it can heal the tank, but don't heal the tank...just randoms. Used to be the time where you can actually order the fairy to heal the tank with a macro embrace+ruin, but that got removed real quick. Then you have to remind yourself to take off cleric so your AoE regen isn't nerfed. Man, that was a mess back then.

I'm just looking back, why do ppl want to suffer so badly lol. I get it, but geebus.

Exactly right.

[fulminating]

Ftfy

New Spreadsheet Links
Tank Spreadsheet
Melee Spreadsheet
Ranged Spreadsheet
Caster Spreadsheet
Healer Spreadsheet

Tell me again how much healers are enjoyed now

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Tell me again how much healers are enjoyed now

Slightly off track: after looking at the healers' then moving on to SMN's number out of curiosity, it's funnily depressing to see the job that has been raved for being so easily playable yet fail to deliver in term of enjoyment (according to that score at least!). What tragic... that this green role had already & still going through.

[ForsakenRoe]

Tell me again how much healers are enjoyed now

NGL, I'm seeing a whole lot of 'more attacking options' and not a whole lot of 'please make us have to GCD heal more'. Probably just coincidence right, or 'data is scuffed because it's not representative of the whole playerbase', or {insert mental gymnastics}

Slightly off track: after looking at the healers' then moving on to SMN's number out of curiosity, it's funnily depressing to see the job that has been raved for being so easily playable yet fail to deliver in term of enjoyment (according to that score at least!). What tragic... that this green role had already & still going through.

Super easy to access SMN rework gets a 4.5, super technical hard to optimize BLM gets 8.5, must be coincindental

Actually considering RDM is pretty high too despite being arguably 'fairly simple', I guess it indicates what we should have known all along: radically changing the playstyle of an established job is very wildly divisive. Which explains in part why healers are at 5/10, their playstyle got mangled going into 5.0

[Silver-Strider]

If you talk to people on the Tank and DPS forums, they insist to you that both are braindead Jobs anyone can parse 99 on in their sleep with no effort other than "reading their tooltips".

Everyone is pissed about the current state of the game for different reasons

Ranged and Casters are pissed because the large boss hitboxes mean Melee gets all the uptime in the world for free now that neither of the other roles can really compete with them since the justification of not getting 100% uptime on Melee is hardly true anymore.
Tanks are pissed because aspects of their job have been simplified to such an extent that the game does most of the work for them. Bosses either are stationary with huge hitboxes or reposition themselves to the center of the arena that your positioning as a tank is largely irrelevant so the only thing they have to do is mitigation and tank swap periodically as mechanics dictate. Then, there are still those that felt that Aggro Mechanics shouldn't have gone away mucking up issues even further.
Healers are pissed because their oversaturated healing kits aren't justified by any content in the game, forcing huge amounts of downtime that result in 1 button spam being your only form of engagement.
Then you have the problems people have with other aspect of their job, be it SAM still complaining about Kaiten, SMN's sayin their job has become too simple, MNK's complaining about the uselessness of skills like Anatman, DRG's worried they end up like SMN in 7.0, how constricting the 2 minute meta is, etc. that is no real wonder why the Doomsayers are having a field day on the forums.

There are a lot of problems with the game currently. I personally think EW has been the worst expansion, bar none. The other expansions had their issues to be sure, but job engagement was not one of them.

[ForteNightshade]

This isn't saying as much as you think it is. Many of those points - as I noted before - are things even Healer mains disagree on. As I said before, part of the problem is Healers don't even agree AMONGST OURSELVES what our issues are and the solutions to them. The Devs aren't ignoring us, they just legitimately don't have a solution that will satisfy a lot of people. All the solutions from the pro-DPS or pro-complexity faction would piss off a lot of Healer players, and possibly a majority (given how casual the overall playerbase is), and the Devs likely know this. But on the other side of the scale, those are also the people who do most of the higher end content, which they also don't want to piss off and lose Healer players in that content.

This is a fallacy because any DPS options they had could be entirely ignored by the casual playerbase just like the ignore anything else remotely complicated. The excuse that adding DPS buttons would prompt people to demand healers press them is just that, an excuse. People demand healers DPS and you don't see the dev team doing anything to prevent that despite them repeatedly whinging about it being "optional" and "not expected". Which is a blatant lie when several Savage fights have released that are mathematically impossible to clear without healer DPS. Furthermore, healers are the least played role in the game. The bar is so damn low they couldn't possibly screw it up. It's absurd to think they can't do better than spam your nuke 150+ times.

If that is the case, then hire new job designers with some creativity because who you have working on healers clearly lost theirs.

[IDontPetLalas]

When I hear "healers disagree, there are NO solutions that would work" I get this image of chicken little in my head- 'the sky is falling !!! the sky is falling!!".

I just find that unrealistic. It's just the normal course of business to have to deal with multiple and sometime diverging opinions and /or priorities for features and no matter what you do, you will not make everyone happy. What you try to do is think about a design that achieves some goals, you communicate them, and listen to whomever your target segment(s) is/are - in this case healers but also anyone else affected by those changes - likely DPS and tanks. If your design gets positive feedback - great- if not- you may well need to adjust.

This is how I would hope the dev team works, and I may be wildly unrealistic.

[ty_taurus]

NGL, I'm seeing a whole lot of 'more attacking options' and not a whole lot of 'please make us have to GCD heal more'. Probably just coincidence right, or 'data is scuffed because it's not representative of the whole playerbase', or {insert mental gymnastics}

Percentage of voters who want to see more healing actions (as of 4.22.2023):
WHM - 7.7%
SCH - 9.1%
AST - 4.4%
SGE - 8.9%

Percentage of voters who want to see more attack actions (as of 4.22.2023):
WHM - 83.2%
SCH - 84.8%
AST - 66.5%
SGE - 86.3%

Now, desire to see more healing actions is not the same as desire to require more healing. I was actually thinking that I don't really have an option for that outside of write-in responses, but it's also a role question rather than an individual healer question. But I want to think of a way to integrate that into future feedback threads in a way that feels appropriate.

Regardless, the desire to see more attack actions has actually increased slightly as more votes have come in from places like Tumblr and Twitch. I recall AST used to be around 61% or so, and now it's 66.5% for example. Also on the topic of AST, while the desire to see more attack options is lower than the other healers, the desire for more offensive support is higher at a flat 50%.