#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForsakenRoe]

it'd force them to rethink the regen/shield healer split at least

The split has been a bizarre design decision from the start. I have no idea why they did it. The only possible explanation I can come up with, is 'they did it so that the WHM players could say 'I will focus on just healing''. It closes so many design options off from the Pure Healers, like Stoneskin is gone, Noct Sect is gone, etc. And in a game so focused on mitigation and 'have enough damage reduction to avoid getting oneshot by this', this basically results in Pure Healers feeling somewhat less useful compared to the Barrier Healers. If SCH/SGE shields stacked (Galvanize/E.Prog), I'd expect that every hardcore Ultimate/week 1 Savage group (ie with players who use 'the strongest option' rather than 'their favourite') would run SCH/SGE. because Mitigation is just so much more impactful in raids (unless 7.2 changes something)

It's a fine balance to walk between 'the classes feel homogenized' and 'the combat feels homogenized' but I'd argue that allowing all healers some form of GCD AOE Barrier (eg bring back Stoneskin, and readd Noct Aspected Helios in some form to AST), while a small 'homogenization' in the short term, allows for a lot of diversity in combat design. Say a raidwide applies a bleed, but if you apply a barrier, the bleed is negated (the raidwide still does damage though). Do you A: Regen through the bleed, B: Apply a Barrier, negate the bleed, and heal up the raidwide damage? The choice wouldn't just be 'which healer am I playing', but also 'do I have the resources to tackle this in the way I hope to?' For example, a SGE has Panhaima and Holos as OGCD options to apply a Barrier. But if those aren't up, do you still go for the barrier option via E.Prognosis, even though it costs a GCD? Or do you use Physis and Pneuma to heal through the bleed instead?

Instead of a hard split, I don't know why SE didn't go with a sliding scale. For example, they want WHM to be bad at Barrier/Mitigation. Sure, that's fine, just make it be the healer that's the furthest along the scale towards the Pure side. But that doesn't mean it should have zero options for AOE shielding (no, Divine Caress doesn't count), because then you can't make certain design elements (eg, the example above with the raidwide bleed).

If you have a sliding scale like:

Pure ------------------------- Barrier
WHM > > AST > > SGE > > SCH

Then it's super easy to add a new healer into the mix. You just adjust its design to balance the amount of Pure Healing (ie burst healing actions like Star, Cure3, Pneuma, etc) versus how much access to Barriers and Mitigation it has (eg Expedient, Soil, Panhaima, Holos, etc). So, my suggestion would be, have a healer that has two 'stances', ala AST sects - a heavy focus on HOTs in one stance, and a heavy focus on (rather than a standard Barrier like Succor) applying a buff to allies that staggers part of the damage taken out into a DOT. The HOT would counteract the DOT, stabilising the HP level of the party. And thus, said healer would slot into the scale at the very middle, between AST and SGE. If said healer were partied with an AST or WHM, it'd be able to focus more on the mitigative side of its kit, and if it were with SGE/SCH, it'd focus more on the HOT side of the kit.

But let's say SE decides that actually, AST should be the midpoint, because they're bringing back Sects. Then, the new healer could have more of its kit designed to be Pure in nature and less Barrier related, and then it'd slot in between WHM and AST.

Divine Caress, SunSign and Seraphism make it feel like they're silently acknowledging that the split doesn't really work very well, at least

[Azurarok]

oh absolutely. All it did was make WHM directly compete with AST and limited SGE to be safe-mode SCH

I don't think it was ever actually a working idea given you can get matched with 2 pures in raidfinder.

[Connor]

Thinking on the pure/healer split it’s always been weird to me that the devs have never acknowledged the other split in healers. That is to say, the fact there’s two ‘raid buff’ healers (AST,SCH) and two ‘personal output’ healers (WHM,SGE)

Obviously the difference is only like 1-2 abilities, but then it’s not like the pure/healer split wasn’t always paper thin too lol except maybe ARR and HW.

Given that one would logically expect that the ‘raid buff’ healers would be oriented around support/utility than direct healing, while the personal output healers would be oriented around direct healing and managing their own dps mechanics. But then you look at AST and SCH and there’s things like:
- Macrocosmos
- Neutral Sect
- Seraphism

…so I guess they’re going for a more ‘balanced’ (lol) approach where AST and SCH can output high potency direct healing as much as the ‘personal output’ healers. Similar to how the pure/shield split lets the pure healer use limited shields?

Naturally you would expect WHM and SGE would have raid buffs to compensate to keep it balanced that way, right? They have:
- Dia Potency +10
- A second, unstackable DoT

Ok so maybe not. But then, surely their own healing/dps mechanics would be more in-depth and complex to give them an edge against ‘raid buffers (who are also mega powerful direct healers lol)’?
- Toxicon
- Afflatus Misery
Wait a minute these are (supposed to be?) healing mechanics! I guess theres Psyche lol.

Like, it’s hard not to see why people generally favour SCH+AST combos over any combo involving a White Mage / Sage. I think anyway. That’s not even going into things like Sage being Scholar with a fake moustache or White Mage having relatively little going for it overall.

But ultimately I just think it’s funny that not only is balance between pure/shield split is kind of a mess right now, but balance between the other ‘buff’ vs ‘no buff’ split they have (but don’t acknowledge) is just as much of a mess too lol.

[Moqi]

The split has been a bizarre design decision from the start. I have no idea why they did it.

I like the idea of the split but they basically took away all the shields from pure healers and kept giving pure heals to shield healers for basically free.

[TheDustyOne]

The split has always rubbed me the wrong way and felt like an excuse to not give WHM some shields or mitigation and to rip Noct from AST. I'd rather have it so every healer is capable of regens, shields, and raw heals, but in varying capacities. Sure, make WHM the obvious choice for making the HP bar go up fast, but don't have it unable to protect a party from heavy hits. Let SCH be king of shields, but don't make it incapable of dealing with heal-from-1 mechanics.

Yes I know SCH is also practically king of raw heals at the moment, that's another problem that Square has made.

[Maltothoris]

Thinking on the pure/healer split it’s always been weird to me that the devs have never acknowledged the other split in healers. That is to say, the fact there’s two ‘raid buff’ healers (AST,SCH) and two ‘personal output’ healers (WHM,SGE)

The thing we have to remember here is that the other selfish for dps had something to try and help keep them above, success not withstanding. Samurai has its big hits and auto crits with a few buffs to help, viper has multiple fast hits with its ogcds, MCH has reassemble with other moves having a shorter cd compared to brd and dnc, BLM has the most multipliers with enochian, maim and mend, and the fire stance. WHM and SGE just have higher hitting moves in regards to their nuke. I think we can expect another buff to their nuke at least if not in 7.2, then most certainly later on.

[Supersnow845]

The selfish healers either need their nukes buffed every patch or they need some kind of internal multiplier that scales with gear creep over the expansion because right now the selfish healers are always behind and square takes hilariously long to even attempt to balance them. AST+SCH is still like 20% ahead of every comp deep in an off patch where people who are good at aligning raid buffs aren’t even playing the tier

Right now the two divisions of healer are just “the good ones” and “the bad ones”. You want to be a raid healer (one point to SCH and AST) and you want to be a shield healer (one point to SCH and SGE) so SCH>AST/SGE>WHM and what do you know that’s exactly how the healer balance of combined contribution to the raid has been since ShB

[Shurrikhan]

AST+SCH is still like 20% ahead of every comp deep in an off patch where people who are good at aligning raid buffs aren’t even playing the tier

20%? Hyperbole? Else, the amount seems pretty fight-varied but never more than ~8% between the top AST-SCH combined rDPS and the next non-AST/SCH comp's.

More generally... there's... only two AST+SCH pairs in the top 20 for Healer Combined rDPS.

The most seen healer among the top 20 for healer combined rDPS... is Sage, in 14 out of the top 20, followed extremely closely by WHM at 13... while AST is only in 7 of the top 20 and SCH only in 6.

Even in 7.05, AST+SCH was only 4 of the top 20 versus, say, 8 WHM-SGE comps.

[Supersnow845]

20%? Hyperbole? Else, the amount seems pretty fight-varied but never more than ~8% between the top AST-SCH combined rDPS and the next non-AST/SCH comp's.

More generally... there's... only two AST+SCH pairs in the top 20 for Healer Combined rDPS.

The most seen healer among the top 20 for healer combined rDPS... is Sage, in 14 out of the top 20, followed extremely closely by WHM at 13... while AST is only in 7 of the top 20 and SCH only in 6.

Even in 7.05, AST+SCH was only 4 of the top 20 versus, say, 8 WHM-SGE comps.

I have no idea how that “all stars” is calculated. When you swap from “all stars” to looking at the top combined healer DPS of each individual fight SCH+AST is all 20 of the top 20 in 1 out of 4 fights and more than 15/20 in the other 3 and in 7.05 was the all the top 20 in every fight. I can only assume the best performers in one specific fight may have not performed terribly well in another so the group that was in the top 50 in all 4 got a higher ranking than someone who got 1st in one fight but didn’t even crack the top 500 in another. But that just shows individual player consistency not the average strength of the job

As for AST+SCH being 20% ahead that was my bad that was from 7.05 where they range from 12% to 22% ahead. It’s closer to 5-10% in 7.1

[Aravell]

The split has been a bizarre design decision from the start. I have no idea why they did it.

The pure/barrier split was very likely created as a distinction to justify their current design of the 4 healers, because the raid finder does pick 1 pure and 1 barrier healer from queue for savage fights, if they didn't do the split, some comps would be near unclearable. Imagine doing M3S in the early weeks and raid finder gave you GNB/DRK/WHM/AST.

That said, the pure/barrier split issues wouldn't even exist if they didn't keep trying to force the healers into the tiny little box with no design freedom allowed.