Why is Warrior a healer in all but role?

[yesnt]

So, I'd rather see SE work on spreading the fun around and keeping all classes valid, than invalidating healer or stripping down warrior.

And what would that look like for a healer?

If you give me DPS buttons, I could as well play DPS.

[ForteNightshade]

I dare any "healers aren't needed" to switch to a healer, run any of the dungeon roulette except leveling and then not heal at all.

The design of normal content is very much tuned for a party four randos, one of which is doing it for the first time, one hasn't played in a year and forgot and one is busy learning to juggle and is forced to play with one hand. And in such an environment, healers suddenly become relevant enough. Sure, a party of 3 red + blue or 4 red is faster. But if you're making a premade party and optimizing to run a generic dungeon in this game, you are not doing it the way a normal player would. All normal content is trivial when you got preplanned group and proper communication, healer or no healer.

Not only do I do this on the regular. I have gone into Savage PF and used zero GCD heals while my co-healer used only four. Which weren't even necessary because we had regens. Now I haven't experimented with that as much this expansion, but the point remains the "but the rando!" argument doesn't exactly hold water. Yes, if you get bad players who stand in everything or whatnot, then a healer is invaluable. However, if those randoms are even mildly competent, you'll be standing around spamming your one button DPS ability in casual content more than anything else by an order of magnitude. And while you'll heal more come Savage, it's still significantly lower than it should be. Which wouldn't necessarily be a problem if healers were given other options. Instead, you're spamming that aforementioned button.

Just for reference sake, in a San d'Ori run, out of 398 casts throughout the entire raid, 80% of my actions were spent on Glare III, Dia and Glare IV. In fact, I used Sprint more than I used any GCD heal in all four encounters. That alone says everything about the state of healers.

[Oizen]

Paladin is a stronger healer than WAR is, and is also the sole reason healer-less ulti clears exist.
Dungeons are so comcially under-tuned that you don't need a healer regardless of comp to clear them.
But people aren't willing to admit that yet.

[Araxes]

So I've been seeing the "Healer not needed." comments again when people start talking about warrior.

As a healer main I kinda take issue with this, If another job is able to completely invalidate the existence of a role I actively enjoy.. Then it's kinda pointless to play that role and thus leaves me with one less thing to enjoy.

Enter stage right: Warrior.

Warrior has 2 HoT's in the form of equilibrium's buff and shake it off's secondary effect, one massive heal (again in the form of equilibrium), A party member heal in the form of nascent flash, and a self heal/shield/damage reduction in the form of bloodwhetting.

That just feels like too much at this point, feels as though SE might as well make my role (healer) into a DPS job and give every single job a self-heal, just remove the holy trinity at this rate.

I really didn't want to contribute to the "Healer strike" mentality that I saw back at dawntrail launch but at the same time it really is an issue people downplay.

Warrior needs a complete rework for the sake of the rest of the games balance.

People asked for easier Gameplay and accessability. Now we have 5 Button PvP with no Gear and PvE Content tuned to not require Tanks or Healers. (In some cases, even ultimates get cleared without heals)

I guess people have to be more careful of what they ask for.

[ForsakenRoe]

Surely a solution for Tanks' (especially WAR's) comical access to self-healing, a solution where a Tank still feels like they get to be incredibly surviveable, while also giving Healers back the job of 'actually restoring the HP of allies'...

Is to convert most/all of the 'heal self' actions of Tanks, into 'apply barrier to self'?

Yes, it runs the problem of 'oh that's DRK's thing, that'd be homogenization!', but DRK's playstyle shares a lot of elements with WAR now and has done since 5.0, so that ship has sailed halfway round the world already

Consider the following effects for WAR:

Shake It Off: Applies 2 effects: A barrier equal to 20% of the target's Max HP (buffed to 20% to compensate for the 300p heal being folded in), and 5 stacks of Shake It Off (over time), a Barrier effect equal to a 100p heal. The 'over time' effect works like Haima/Panhaima, and when one barrier breaks, the next takes its place. This keeps the action being useful for the same purposes that the devs used to justify the heal and HOT (it wasn't good for mitigating party-wide DOTs or multihits), but makes it actually 'mitigate partywide DOTs and multihits' instead of healing through them. Also, I'd remove the 'consumes Thrill/Damnation/Bloodwhetting to boost potency' thing, it's so small as to be almost unnoticeable, and can just screw newer players by eating their 40% mit at a bad time if they forget it does that

Equilibrium: Applies a 1200p Barrier, and 5 stacks of Equilibrium, a 200p barrier effect. Works like Haima, when a layer of barrier is broken, the next takes its place. I've heard a certain bald streamer complain that WAR's lacking in the mit department compared to other Tanks, and Holmgang's shorter CD is the bandaid for that. This would give them another tool to use on TBs, and/or to help vs Autoattacks in place of something like Rampart (so you can save that for the TB instead)

Bloodwhetting: Applies a 400p Barrier on use (it already does this, Stem the Tide), and mitigates damage by 10% (or 10%+10% for the first 4 sec, as it currently does). Dealing damage to an enemy with a weaponskill applies Blood Frenzy, a Barrier equal to a 400p heal, for each enemy hit. If multiple enemies are struck with a single AOE attack, the barrier's effect is multiplied by the number of targets struck (so hitting 10 enemies means a 4000p barrier). The barrier effect lasts for 9s

Nascent Flash: Does the same thing as Bloodwhetting, but given to an ally. Both the ally targetted, and the WAR, will receive the effects of Blood Frenzy (what we currently know as the big heal)

Damnation: Applies 5 stacks of Damnation (over time), a Barrier equal to a 300p heal. Works like Haima, when a layer is broken, the next takes its place

Thrill of Battle: Can actually stay the same, the self-healing caused by your Max and Current HP being boosted by 20% does not cause the issues we're seeing

With this, WAR is still incredibly tanky, and self-sufficient. Even moreso than currently, arguably, due to being able to throw up an Equilibrium for just about every TB. However, it isn't completely invulnerable. Bloodwhetting would allow a dungeon-running WAR player to be effectively immortal for the duration of BW (8s), and the 9s after due to the barrier it applies. But that totals 17 seconds of duration, and Bloodwhetting's CD is 25s. There's an 8 second window, where the WAR is taking damage to their actual HP bar, and doesn't have a way to heal that damage back to themselves. They can delay death for a damn long time via skillful gameplay, but they cannot delay it forever. That's what Tanking is meant to be about, with Healers being the other half of the equation, using that borrowed time to apply Healing, and further extend how long the Tank can stay alive for, to then buy time for the DPS to do their job, and kill the enemy.

Plus, this would actually play far more into the WAR 'fantasy' than the current form does. The concept of a Berserker, even looking at real life examples, was about how they'd get so angry/blinded with the battle high, that they'd ignore the pain they're sustaining. Its far more thematic for a WAR to 'fight through the pain via self-barrier' IMO, than this weird 'being so angry that your wounds magically mend themselves' idea. If anything, that was DRK's thing with Abyssal Drain and such, but I guess WAR co-opted that too (after co-opting Reprisal as a role action, and the idea of a gapcloser after DRKs looked like they were having too much fun using Plunge)

[RedLolly]

And what would that look like for a healer?

If you give me DPS buttons, I could as well play DPS.

The issue from the healer perspective is that tanks having the level of self-sustain they currently have makes most of each healer's tool-kit redundant, and we don't have an elaborate DPS system to make up the difference. Most healers ask for better DPS options because A) it could make solo content a little more interesting and B) tanks losing most of their self-sustain seems like a less likely outcome. The only time you get to dig deep is in bleeding edge content or cleaning up a disaster.

We used to have more DPS skills per capita as healers, and had to do things like stance dance Cleric Stance, but tanks were also much squishier and also had to stance dance from their aggro and DPS stances and make effort to keep aggro off of their team.


I've been doing the Panda raids on my Scholar. Excog and Eos are really all I've needed to keep my tank up, with Indom for raidwides. Chain, bio, broil broil broil broil, bio, broil broil broil.... you get the idea.

[Absurdity]

Paladin is a stronger healer than WAR is, and is also the sole reason healer-less ulti clears exist.
Dungeons are so comcially under-tuned that you don't need a healer regardless of comp to clear them.
But people aren't willing to admit that yet.

Probably also the fact that the matchmaking enforces the tank, 2 dps, healer setup, so people never notice how superfluous healers actually are in dungeons.
If you had the option to matchmake tank + 3 dps even the average player would notice it.

[Hyperia]

Probably also the fact that the matchmaking enforces the tank, 2 dps, healer setup, so people never notice how superfluous healers actually are in dungeons.
If you had the option to matchmake tank + 3 dps even the average player would notice it.

That’s already in effect, healers are getting more dps in their kits than heals. I got the latest dungeon in my EX roulette and it was comically bad how little I had to heal. As such, it was holy spam and glare.

I would really enjoy if they made dungeons more dangerous as they were in the past.

Pull 12 mobs in an expert? Sure, it’s a snooze fest. Pull 12 mobs in deep dungeon without pomanders on floors 91+, are you insane? See the difference? They can do it, they just need to break from the formula.

I am not expecting this though as the game’s current course is to make content in 15 minute chunks, the days of a 30 min dungeon run is long gone. If anything, they may convert expert into a 3 boss random roulette with no trash and be done with it. That is what they are doing with Criterion.

[IOwn92FCHouses]

I am not expecting this though as the game’s current course is to make content in 15 minute chunks, the days of a 30 min dungeon run is long gone. If anything, they may convert expert into a 3 boss random roulette with no trash and be done with it. That is what they are doing with Criterion.

The reason things are like this in the first place is because most of the player base can't handle what you are requesting. You can run 10 experts today and half the players you meet don't use CDs (healing, dps, or tank mit), don't know what uptime is, can't figure out how a mechanic works after seeing it, don't know how their rotation works, etc. Square is forced to design dungeon content against players that legitimately struggle to play their jobs. That struggle with dungeon content tier difficulty.

It's a miracle that we saw dungeon mechanics ramp up a bit with this expansion. Unless Square finally says "git gud" and allows players the horrible experiencing of possibly wiping, what we see today won't meaningfully change.

[ForsakenRoe]

The issue from the healer perspective is that tanks having the level of self-sustain they currently have makes most of each healer's tool-kit redundant, and we don't have an elaborate DPS system to make up the difference. Most healers ask for better DPS options because A) it could make solo content a little more interesting and B) tanks losing most of their self-sustain seems like a less likely outcome. The only time you get to dig deep is in bleeding edge content or cleaning up a disaster.

The other big points as to why some (me included) would prefer more DPS actions include 'it's way less effort for the devs to bring back old actions we used to have (eg by bringing back Miasma to SCH, since the animation/code still exists for NPCs to make use of)'

But the biggest thing IMO, is the extra interplay within the kit that it'd open up. WHM has Misery and Afflatus, a system where you use healing actions to prepare a damage action. We could see the reverse on other healers, especially SGE via Kardia, wherein dealing damage helps your healing in some way. SGE's Kardia having more modifiers, like making the healing AOE for a time, converting it to a Barrier effect, etc. Or how about SCH having multiple DOTs, and DOT ticks charging the Faerie gauge so that you can use Fey Union more often?

There's 3 basic categories a new action can fall into IMO: Damage, Healing/Mitigation, and Utility. By heavily trimming how many Damage actions Healers have in SHB, the devs painted themselves into a corner, closing the door on 33% of the potential design space for a new action. It's why they said 'we didn't really know what to add to SCH' in EW's media tour, when showing Expedient off. Meanwhile, if we didn't remove all the DOTs from SCH, we could have seen... IDK, a new gauge element where DOT ticks charge up a burst damage move such as Meltdown (or Kaustra as it was known in FFXI)

It's a miracle that we saw dungeon mechanics ramp up a bit with this expansion. Unless Square finally says "git gud" and allows players the horrible experiencing of possibly wiping, what we see today won't meaningfully change.

Funny thing, you can design Jobs, especially Healers in particular, to have an incredibly low skill floor, and still have complexity for the players like me. It's precisely because we have lower Job kit complexity, a lower skill ceiling, that SE had to compensate by ramping up the difficulty of encounters. Problem is, I (in the days where I didn't know my Job, SCH at the time, so well) could 'opt out' of the complexity, by not using all of my DOTs, not using Cleric Stance, etc. and we'd still clear the dungeon. A less skilled player going through Dawntrail's MSQ isn't going to be able to 'opt out' of the complexity of the Elevator Boss in Origenics, and the Trusts move to the 'safe spot' far too late to watch and copy them, so late in fact that if you moved with their timing, you'd get killed by the snapshotting.

SE traded 'optional complexity' for 'mandatory complexity', and the only way for a player who can't keep up, to avoid the now-mandatory complexity, is to just avoid doing that content. So that results in everybody being silo'd off into their own tiny worlds, based on what difficulty level of content they're comfortable with/find engaging. SE's now made a scaling-difficulty encounter with Quantum. They wouldn't need Quantum, if optimizing your Job kits was the 'scaling difficulty' element of the encounter, as it was in the past! They're inventing solutions to the problems of their own design, problems that they created for themselves

Imagining a rework to the Healers wherein there's more damage actions. Let's say, WHM's Dia is reduced to a 12s duration (potency adjusted to compensate), and a new action, Banish, is added with a 15s CD. If Johnny Roulette gets through his run of Meso Terminal by using Medica3 and Regen, and basically zero damage buttons, I heavily doubt the number of players who complain about 'why aren't you using your DOT, why aren't you using Banish' would be statistically significant. And if someone did say such things, they're breaking the TOS and can be reported