Scholars used to be awesome; I hope 7.0 goes back to the basics.

[SweetPete]

No, I'm asking a question and trying to pin down specifics.

Note every time I say how bad SB WHM was and how EW is better, people insist that there are things from SB WHM they want. So I'm trying to pin down EXACTLY what that is.

And, likewise, with SCH and AST.

And outside of that, what specific ShB and EW additions - if any - they would want to see retained in any new designs.

.

Many people have made many statements, but specifics are what I'm asking for.

For all it was a big thing to people, Quickened Aetherflow is mentioned in passing somewhat rarely, and SB is made out as the height of healer design despite WHM sucking.

When I've said before "So how about EW WHM + Aero 3?" or "EW WHM + Aero 3 + 18 sec Dia?" people say no. Was there any OTHER good part of SB WHM that people are wanting back that's missing from that? What aside from 18 sec Dia/Aero 2 and 24 sec AOE Aero 3 are people wanting from SB WHM?

I ask the same questions and don’t really get specifics either. I see allot of forum post always talk about how amazing the healers were in SB and yes obviously they have been homogenized but I always ask what do they want and all I get is more dps options or more support/utility and then others say no and no one understands healers but no one gives better answers either. I’m just as confused as you are buddy lol. I think most of them are confused too and just following the trend of healers need more to do.

I did get a few good answers recently but still would like more specifics on what do the healer mains truly want from each healer. I’m very curious about this.

[Sebazy]

I was always pretty scathing towards SB's healer incarnations tbh. 4.0 SCH was barely functional at any level of content, AST took a significant backwards step in usability and WHM being decent out of the gate felt like more of an accident by virtue of Thin Air being precisely what they needed a year prior rather than anything else they got from that patch.

In my eyes HW was peak healer gameplay:

https://youtu.be/BLGUMzl2cV0

I originally recorded this for a thread in 2017 and requested commentary on it. At a cursory glance my active rate looks pretty top notch, dot uptime is solid, I'm extending multiple cards and buffs, getting good cleric uptime etcetc.

Yet even by my own admission, it wasn't that amazing a run, I could see plenty of mistakes myself and others were able offer lots of suggestions to squeeze a pretty significant amount of extra potency in there too:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post4123070

Despite how good that run looks today, it wasn't even close to the ceiling, it was upper blue from memory.

Even if you discount the sheer headroom for optimisation that we had in HW, the simple fact was that this gameplay was far more dynamic than anything a healer will experience in today's game. I had to adjust to the cards that were given to me, I was walking a tightrope with resources to the extent that 1 raise at a bad moment could leave me literally OOM and unable to cast and above all else, I was juggling a bunch of responsibilities, tasks and timers so even at the points where Alex Prime wasn't really doing anything, I still had plenty to keep me occupied.

The TLDR is that we had less power, less reach, less up front HPS, less mobility and far less resources to throw around whilst the act of doing DPS carried risks that needed to be managed in raid content.

Simply suggesting healers need more to do is a very fair point because when you boil it down, that's the crux of it all. I know full well I'm not going to get my cherished HW gameplay back, my demands aren't super high or anything, I just want something to think about and manage when I'm doing a snooze fest boss like the average 24 man this expansion.

[ty_taurus]

I really don’t understand where the confusion is coming from because the general consensus here has been largely consistent. Sure if you ask each person individually what they want to see there are different answers, but the overarching answer is, and has always been:

- Stormblood was generally a healthy midpoint between Heavensward and Shadowbringers—not too hard, but not too easy either. Now, there are some specific players who have waxed poetic about the complexity of Heavensward being even better and more fun, but still those players have talked about Stormblood being a good compromise.

- All of this specifically references Scholar post patch, I think 4.01 where Miasma II was returned and Scholar got some emergency balance buffs, and Astrologian after… I want to say 4.2? Is when The Spear was changed from cooldown reduction to critical hit. I’m on my phone right now so I can’t check with wayback. White Mage has never been praised for its Stormblood iteration by anyone to my knowledge. At most, I’ve seen talk about how some like the concept of the old lilies reducing cooldowns, but that’s of course the concept and not the iteration we received. That discussion is more about interest in the idea rather than actually requesting the change. Like “If SE didn’t give up on the idea immediately and actually tried to adjust it, it could’ve looked like this.”

- As for what people believe the healers need in order to fix their issues, naturally when we talk specifics, people are going to have different views and ideas. But again, generally speaking, the answer is D: all of the above. What would make healers fantastic would be: unique, modest DPS actions that amount to more than one spam and one DoT, debloating the healing kits of their excess free healing, make the healing actions kept offer more flexibility and interactivity, making adjustments to encounter design and non-healer sustain to go back to the balance between DPS and healing healers used to have, provide unique forms of utility for different healers that compliments their identities and gives them more defined strengths, and finding ways to connect all of these different aspects together into something that feels cohesive and rewarding when played well.

The reason why it generally comes down to discussions about DPS is being that’s the part of healer design that continues to be challenged by an even smaller vocal minority of players who are fundamentally at odds with how FFXIV healer design functions at a foundational level, and also because no one has any faith that SE will ever increase healing requirements at all both by not wanting to make fights harder and not wanting to take the healing away from the tanks. Just giving modest DPS rotations is a way to make healing not a completely miserable experience for those that have fought against the current healer design paradigm if that’s all we can get, but the other solutions would be appreciated too.

[Sebazy]

What would make healers fantastic would be: unique, modest DPS actions that amount to more than one spam and one DoT

Sorry to nit pick one detail, but I might as well get in there before someone else does

I don't even think this aspect of things needs to come specifically from DPS actions, 3.2+ AST did just fine with a worse DPS kit than it has now IMO. The reason is of course that it had so much else to keep the player occupied with than it does now.

I'd wager that if you dropped HW's card play and time extension mechanics over the top of today's AST and balanced MP costs to give a similar economy as we had back then (Aka MP was plentiful but only if you worked for it, you couldn't just push shroud on cooldown and forget anything else), I'd be the happiest healer on the planet.

[ty_taurus]

Sorry to nit pick one detail, but I might as well get in there before someone else does

I don't even think this aspect of things needs to come specifically from DPS actions, 3.2+ AST did just fine with a worse DPS kit than it has now IMO. The reason is of course that it had so much else to keep the player occupied with than it does now.

I'd wager that if you dropped HW's card play and time extension mechanics over the top of today's AST and balanced MP costs to give a similar economy as we had back then (Aka MP was plentiful but only if you worked for it, you couldn't just push shroud on cooldown and forget anything else), I'd be the happiest healer on the planet.

In group content, yes. But some of the AST main players have said before that even during HW and SB, Astrologian’s lack of DPS made a lot of solo content very grueling. So even then, I’d say a modest set of attacks would be appreciated then as well. Solo may not be the focal point, but there are a lot of pieces of content where fun solo gameplay is welcome. Deep Dungeons, Eureka/Bozja, bicolor gem farming… Something you could do to remedy this would be to have a way to spend certain support resources on additional GCD DPS tools that give them much stronger DPS for solo, so it’s not as much of a chore, but during group content it’s better to spend those resources on support instead. But I think if you did something like just make it spent on Lord of Crowns, and make the lord a way to burn cards for solo damage, that wouldn’t be all that satisfying.

You’d want something more intricate.

[Sebazy]

That's fair yeah, thinking back more, purely solo stuff as AST was pretty painful indeed.

[IDontPetLalas]

In group content, yes. But some of the AST main players have said before that even during HW and SB, Astrologian’s lack of DPS made a lot of solo content very grueling. So even then, I’d say a modest set of attacks would be appreciated then as well. Solo may not be the focal point, but there are a lot of pieces of content where fun solo gameplay is welcome. Deep Dungeons, Eureka/Bozja, bicolor gem farming… Something you could do to remedy this would be to have a way to spend certain support resources on additional GCD DPS tools that give them much stronger DPS for solo, so it’s not as much of a chore, but during group content it’s better to spend those resources on support instead. But I think if you did something like just make it spent on Lord of Crowns, and make the lord a way to burn cards for solo damage, that wouldn’t be all that satisfying.

You’d want something more intricate.

Grueling, yep, watching paint dry is more exciting

[Jovakim]

Note every time I say how bad SB WHM was and how EW is better, people insist that there are things from SB WHM they want. So I'm trying to pin down EXACTLY what that is.

Simple, the answer is Aero III.
Plenty of times I see people clamoring for that skill to make a comeback.

And to give you more, something that could apply to all healers: 18s DoTs and SB's Cleric Stace.

The 30s DoTs we have now are so incredibly long that, imo, it makes it easier to forget to refresh them. A shorter duration would not only break the monotony but would also give us more mobility, and more double-weaving windows.

The 5% damage buff from SB's Cleric Stance, albeit boring and unimaginative, would still be a little something to care about during burst windows. It would work perfectly alongside our 1.5s cats, well... except for current AST, too much to weave during burst windows.

[Aravell]

I did get a few good answers recently but still would like more specifics on what do the healer mains truly want from each healer. I’m very curious about this.

I can give you a detailed answer of what I personally want from the healer role if that would help, this might be a long one:

General things I want back from SB
I want MP management back, I want to think if I need to use something or if I can save it for later, we're severely lacking resource management after the simplification. I want more attrition fights and less dance fights, O8S is a fantastic example of a good attrition fight, DPS and tanks are the ones doing most of the major mechanics, healers are forced to heal through either being set to 1 HP (Heartless Archangel) or through sheer damage (Forsaken 2/Light of Judgement), we also didn't have many free tools back then, so we had to dip into GCD healing at times. I want party reliance back, we can use O8S as an example again, tanks during Trines are very much in danger of dying to autos unless they receive Palisade from the p.ranged or a Regen from the healer, parties should have to synergise to beat hard content again, not just do whatever in their own little world and just hope everyone else does the right things as well. I want the shorter DoT durations back, the DoTs being so long now makes them incredibly easy to forget and also fills all the DoT refreshes we would have had with more filler spam, contributing to the lame gameplay we have right now.

What I want back for WHM
I want the longer cast times back, WHM used to be the healer you have to think about movement for because they had the most to lose, I enjoyed having to think about where to stand in advance of mechanics. I want WHM to be the powerhouse again, I want them to be the healer that can counter stuff like Almagest in O4S, where they just instantly top people back up from near death.

What I want back for SCH
I want the choices of Aetherflow usage to matter again, Shadowflare and Sacred Soil used to cancel each other out, you were required to think whether or not you actually need that Soil or if you can just leave Shadowflare up and use the Aetherflow for Indom after. I want the fairies to do separate things again and also for them to be separate entities from us again instead of just being a delayed OGCD button, we used to be able to direct the fairy independent of our GCD, it made it possible to spot heal people who aren't the tank when they take damage and also useful to pop old Divine Veil without any cost to us.

What I want back for AST
I want unique card effects back, I want them to fill different niches again and be used to buff later cards if they can't fill their niche at the moment. I want to be able to use the card system for the entirety of the fight rather than be restrained to a very specific burst window where I drop all of my cards and then do nothing for the rest of the filler phase. I want the unique spell interactions that AST had with Celestial Opposition, where they could extend regens, card effects and also sprint. I want the cards portion of the kit to be capable of engaging the player for the entirety of the fight.

That's the general idea of what I'd like to have back from the SB era. There's other stuff I want back from HW too, but it's not relevant to the question.

[TheDustyOne]

I laid out what I more or less want from healers in the suggestions megathread here

TL;DR

• More downtime options, preferably more DPS options
• Increased healing requirements
• oGCD pruning (or otherwise not having them as readily available)
• Kit interaction between healing and DPSing
• More interesting MP management