Dawntrail Healers need a rework

[Llynethil]

It's because healer jobs are made for everyone, not just top players.

Yes it gets more boring the better you become, but there are plenty of people out there who aren't on that level and they should be allowed to play a healing job aswell.

And no, you can't relegate one specific job to being the newbie one because either it will become so busted in the hands of higher level players it's the only healer you'll see in ultimates/savages or it's too newbie friendly and underperforms on higher level and never see it at all.

I get it, higher lvl players think it's too boring and lets say they make it more complex , but they fail to ever think about the lower skilled players, which most mmo players are lets be real and how it would affect them.

Mmo's already in general have this stigma of "healer and tank job hard", it's why you always see comments or posts from newer players who are afraid to do them and just go dps instead, not realizing tanking is by far the easiest and most braindead job in ff14 with healer not far behind.

That's why healers are the way they are in this game as are tanks, and honestly queue times show that it works, I feel out of all mmo's I played so far, queueing as dps is prob the fastest I ever seen in this game.

Like personally I think all tank job should have their self sustain absolutely gutted, it's the main reason I have nothing to do as a healer, the one guy who I should be healing a lot does it himself, hell they can even clear TOP with 0 healers because of it, how anyone thinks getting 2 more dps buttons on healrs will solve that is just beyond me.

Buuuuttt, if they removed it you're gonna see way less people play tanks because it'll reinforce the ol' mmo stigma I mentioned, which is what the devs seem to not want.

[Sebazy]

It's because healer jobs are made for everyone, not just top players.

...

I get it, higher lvl players think it's too boring and lets say they make it more complex , but they fail to ever think about the lower skilled players, which most mmo players are lets be real and how it would affect them.

Excuse the trimming, but don't you think the above is actually a bit of a misconception?

Look at it this way. What defines the difficulty of a casual or newbie healer in casual or newbie content. It's keeping people alive. Until you hit Extremes, Savage and Ultimate, no matter how much anyone screeches or tries to tell you otherwise, that's all that actually truely matters.

If the act of keeping people alive is made more challenging across all content, then the healer role will as a whole be more difficult. This is the skill floor being raised. If you can't meet that level, bad things happen (Aka wipes).

Now, look at what the people who have been braying for healer changes the longest here are saying or asking for. It's not a united front by any means, but it generally boils down to (In no specific order):

Less tank survivability/more tank healing required
More unpredictable damage
More DPS complexity
Getting our niches such as debuffing returned to us
More inter kit combination potential
More interesting buff mechanics
Basically anything that will stop us aiming to spend almost every GCD on Glare etc.

Now look at what the newer more casual people are most frequently asking for here:

More healing requirements

So who's not thinking about the lower skilled players here?

Every time I've covered the topic of increasing healing pressure overall, I've generally been sure to emphasise that simply increasing healing isn't the answer and I've repeatedly mathed out demonstrations of how much healing it would actually require to pressure our current kits. I've made it absolutely clear that whilst I'd love to have 24 mans hit like E12S part 1. That's entirely not feasible. But I absolutely mean it when I say that is what it will take to combat the absurd levels of HPS bloat we have in our kit now.

Sure, there are some suggestions that are just banal, but most of the more established suggestions aimed at increasing the healer skill ceiling have factored in newer and more casual healers or simply don't impact them in any real way beyond needless paranoia that they are going to get called out in Aglaia because they aren't spurting out orange logs.

[TheDustyOne]

It's because healer jobs are made for everyone, not just top players.

Yes it gets more boring the better you become

This is contradictory; if it gets boring the better you become, then it's not made for everyone, but only for new players to the role. "Made for everyone" would be a job that's simple to understand that isn't punishing for messing up while having enough depth for a veteran to play around with and find new ways to think about their resources and solve problems. That way both new and veteran players can now enjoy it.

Made for everyone is also not always a good thing, sometimes it's better to carve out an interesting niche that can appeal to different people simply for the sake of variety. Attempting to please everyone has a habit of pleasing no one in my experience.

Also relegating one job to being newbie friendly doesn't mean making it overpowered, otherwise all veteran tanks would be Warriors by now. Again, newbie friendly simply means that it's easy to understand and isn't overly punishing for messing up. Easy to learn, hard to master is the mantra of many good game designers, and accepting that "well, veterans getting bored because it's easy" is not something a good game designer should strive for. Likewise, a new player getting absolutely frustrated because the designer threw too much at them all at once is also not something a good designer should strive for, and no one asking for healer reworks is advocating for them to be THAT complex.

Tanxiety and whatever the healer equivalent is isn't a reason to have level 90 kits be the same as the level 4 kit. The reason for those 90 levels is to understand and learn that role to begin with and overcome the anxiety (and learn the specific job in the process). Babying new players even at level cap isn't conducive to growth, at some point they need to put on their big boy/girl pants and understand how something works.

[Connor]

Putting aside the fact newer players have like 90 levels to get accustomed to ‘healing difficulty’ before it starts to rise (or fall drastically as with current design lol). I still don’t think it’s right to assume every new player is going to be a headless chicken with no clue. People aren’t that generally bad, and when they are, they’re probably not going to improve anyway, so it’s not like ‘super easy design’ is suddenly going to make that minority all hyper-competent.

It also doesn’t address the glaring fact that healing in general is more difficult the lower your level becomes. Once you hit 90 suddenly healing requirement just straight up evaporate outside of like, Ultimates. If they really want healing to be designed for newer players, why have they left the difficulty bar so high when they’re starting out then drop it completely once they hit 90. Like, I’m pretty sure you literally have to think about healing more in Sastasha than you do in expert roulette lol

[IDontPetLalas]

It's because healer jobs are made for everyone, not just top players.

Yes it gets more boring the better you become, but there are plenty of people out there who aren't on that level and they should be allowed to play a healing job aswell.

Think about how you would pitch this job to your friend who you know is a very good MMO raider if you needed a healer for a static , hadn't played FFXIV and would get a skip

Your friend: So, what's it like at endgame they ask?

You: Kind of scary the first time, but then anyone can do it.
Your friend (suspicious):Anyone?
You : Sure, half the time you won't even need to heal anyway, you could even watch Netflix if you want
Your friend : uninstalling FFXIV .....

Given this or a job that allows for a top player (which I am fully aware I am not) I definitely want a job that allows, at level 90 for just a wee bit more skill.

[ForsakenRoe]

I get it, higher lvl players think it's too boring and lets say they make it more complex , but they fail to ever think about the lower skilled players, which most mmo players are lets be real and how it would affect them.

Speaking from semi experience, as someone who's actually posted one of these 'how to make it more interesting for higher lvl players' (including potencies and CD balancing), this line is almost insulting to a degree. Any of us who've put forth our thoughts on 'how to make the healers more interesting' has 100% had the goals in mind of 'keep it causal friendly, keep it intuitive to learn, give it room to achieve mastery'. If someone says 'high lvl players don't consider casuals when making their suggestions', that basically tells me that they haven't actually read any of those 'high lvl players' suggestions, they've made the conclusion and they're going to run with it regardless of what contradictory evidence there might be

As an example, my WHM rework I'm so proud of? It'd actually be LESS punishing to a new player than the current WHM is. It would have more room for mobility options, more access to additional healing tools, more ways to heal without losing damage to a crappy Medica1 cast, potencies rebalanced so that pressing 'the wrong damage button' loses less damage. And still, despite all of that, it'd also have more room for a veteran player to optimize on. More damage bursts to play around and shift timings of, to get them all into buff window like we do now with Misery.

Like, I’m pretty sure you literally have to think about healing more in Sastasha than you do in expert roulette lol

Did a 50/60/70/80 roulette once on SGE for tomes or something, got Hullbreaker (L50). We wiped because I had forgotten how hard things hit back then, and how backloaded SGE's tools are in it's kit. I wouldn't mind seeing dungeons scaled up so that THAT is the kind of pressure applied to our current kits. Issue is, 'spam Diagnosis' works at L50 cos you don't have much else. To be 'in line' with that at L90, 'spam E.Diagnosis' would not be enough, it'd require using OGCDs to supplement that healing. And THAT, to me, does not sound quite so 'lower skilled player' friendly.

[ty_taurus]

I get it, higher lvl players think it's too boring and lets say they make it more complex , but they fail to ever think about the lower skilled players, which most mmo players are lets be real and how it would affect them.

As Roe said, nearly everyone who has a problem with healers around here has discussed, at some point or another, ways of making the entry point for healers more accessible in addition to raising their skill ceilings. It's almost as if you have never read a single thing here.

It's because healer jobs are made for everyone, not just top players.

If the job were actually made for everyone, then why are so many players upset? The role certainly isn't made for everyone. It's not made for me, someone who exclusively healed throughout ARR and two expansions and used to champion the healer design. If anything, I feel more like modern design is designed specifically to exclude players like me.

[Llynethil]

As Roe said, nearly everyone who has a problem with healers around here has discussed, at some point or another, ways of making the entry point for healers more accessible in addition to raising their skill ceilings. It's almost as if you have never read a single thing here.



If the job were actually made for everyone, then why are so many players upset? The role certainly isn't made for everyone. It's not made for me, someone who exclusively healed throughout ARR and two expansions and used to champion the healer design. If anything, I feel more like modern design is designed specifically to exclude players like me.

If you guys would actually bother to read yourselves you'd see that I said I personally think with tank over the top self sustain gone at high levels you get to do more healing things at higher level, you don't affect low level at all because it already is the case there and noone has any problems there clearing prae or longstop and the likes, I'm agreeing that personally it would be more interesting to change up higher level healing but the devs have a different view of everything, so thanks to all for proving my point in the end I guess?

But I saw everything I need to know when people keep upvoting this right here: " Like, I’m pretty sure you literally have to think about healing more in Sastasha than you do in expert roulette lol"

If you truly think a 2 button dungeon like sastasha is harder than expert roulette to heal (which isn't hard to heal neither for me because like I said, max lvl tank sustain outside of drk is out of control but it has far more complex mechanics than the 0 mechanics of sastasha), you clearly know nothing about healing across all lvl's and barely play healer at all except maybe at max level.

[Sebazy]

If you guys would actually bother to read yourselves you'd see that I said I personally think with tank over the top self sustain gone at high levels you get to do more healing things at higher level, you don't affect low level at all because it already is the case there and noone has any problems there clearing prae or longstop and the likes, I'm agreeing that personally it would be more interesting to change up higher level healing but the devs have a different view of everything, so thanks to all for proving my point in the end I guess?

Neutering tank sustain alone isn't enough though. Take the current crop of 24 man raids. Get a WHM that's an eager beaver and rolls regen on the tank and the other healer is SOL unless they want to just overheal for the sake of it. Healing in general needs a pretty radical rethink at this stage. I've been saying it pretty much since Stormblood that SE are steadily digging themselves into an ever deeper hole.

But I saw everything I need to know when people keep upvoting this right here: " Like, I’m pretty sure you literally have to think about healing more in Sastasha than you do in expert roulette lol"

If you truly think a 2 button dungeon like sastasha is harder than expert roulette to heal (which isn't hard to heal neither for me because like I said, max lvl tank sustain outside of drk is out of control but it has far more complex mechanics than the 0 mechanics of sastasha), you clearly know nothing about healing across all lvl's and barely play healer at all except maybe at max level.

Perhaps now if you run it synced down with modern gear and all the potency bloat that entails then sure absolutely. On AST where you've got access to both a strong instant oGCD heal and Lightspeed? For sure. But I suspect Connor might be talking from experience from a time when it was a much stiffer test. There was a time when you didn't have a flat guaranteed 10k MP. There was a time when those mobs hurt far more than they do now and unlike newer jobs like AST, good old CNJ had no cooldowns, no oGCDs, if you fell behind for whatever reason and couldn't catch up it was very possible to have a tank death given how quickly they would get chewed up.

Look at it this way, if I think about some of the nastiest dungeon trash pulls this game has had in the ARR era and beyond, it's mostly leveling dungeons that come to mind. Tamtara's 4 spider pull in ARR beta 1, Brayflox and Aurum Vale's large areas full of potential adds, Dzemael Darkhold's larger packs and wandering adds, Dusk vigil and Sohm Al had some pretty painful packs, Bardams and Doma both had some truly frightful double pulls. The list goes on, name an expansion and you can probably name at least 1 levelling dungeon with mere trash that would merrily spit you out if you weren't awake and paying attention.

Meanwhile if we look at expert roulette dungeons, what trash packs are there that were a genuine test? The only one that springs to mind for me was the first pull in Akadaemia Anyder.

The reason I say trash rather than bosses is that frankly, most more notorious dungeon bosses were more of an overall competency test for the party as a whole. That stands true regardless of if we are talking about Charibert or Peacekeeper.

Say what you will about old dungeons, sure many of them had near 0 mechanics, but they did at least have teeth. At least when they aren't being curb stomped by ability and item inflation at least.

Meanwhile, it's mildly depressing that I can ditch my healing oGCDs from my hotbars and still merrily get a purple log in Expertos.

[AnotherPerson]

Did a 50/60/70/80 roulette once on SGE for tomes or something, got Hullbreaker (L50). We wiped because I had forgotten how hard things hit back then, and how backloaded SGE's tools are in it's kit. I wouldn't mind seeing dungeons scaled up so that THAT is the kind of pressure applied to our current kits. Issue is, 'spam Diagnosis' works at L50 cos you don't have much else. To be 'in line' with that at L90, 'spam E.Diagnosis' would not be enough, it'd require using OGCDs to supplement that healing. And THAT, to me, does not sound quite so 'lower skilled player' friendly.

Funny thing is that if damage was tuned properly where spam E. Diagnosis is not enough, we'd have multiple fail states - where a raise on a healer could just inevitably mean a wipe regardless because they lack MP to even cast E. Diagnosis, they lose all their healing resources (addersgall/aetherflow) on death, and the stats from weakness/brink of death debuff to stay MP positive.
Basically, the damage is forced to be low because the design of healers would be so unfriendly to failure otherwise thanks to how the job design of healers evolved.