Where are all the healers?

[s3ystic]

Harassed if you DPS. Harassed if you don't DPS. Harassed if you watch cut-scenes. Harassed if the tank pulls too much and runs out of your heals. Harassed if the tank pulls one at a time because you should be able to heal as he pulls the whole map. Gee, i wonder why people just don't hop into PUGs more often to heal?

[Edgedy]

Make a raid where heal checks are hard, then make it so that you nerf the healers ability to mitigate damage and keep the party alive. Sounds legit.

[Tiva]

P.S. If any healers are looking for a static group...my static is currently looking for a permanent whm/sch (primal data center - progression on OS3 - seen enrage multiple times). Having trouble finding good pugs (both healers and dps [5/8 static missing ninja/bard/healer].

Make sure you are using other resources other than what you mentioned to look for players. If you aren't, then that may be why you can't find any. The methods you listed are the least efficient and most annoying ways to find reps/find groups. Join the recruitment discord for your data center and make sure you post weekly on the recruitment reddit. I've never found a rep using the pf. It has never happened. We repped about 5 of our members last tier and found them all through discord/reddit. It can also be hard if you have weird raid times. Standard raids are run tues/wed/thurs (or some slight variation of that) in the evening. If you raid on weekends or you raid during the day or too early, you will have trouble finding reps and may need to consider changing your raid times. Best of luck.

[Xionaz]

I'll admit... healing in FFXIV is cancer at times. Being judged on how much DPS you can put out in Savage content gets pretty old after awhile. Why should I have to worry about mechanics and keeping the entire party alive... while putting out 1.8k steady DPS? Seems like a lot more work for the exact same payout that an AFK DPS does.

[GeekMatt]

I mained PLD from 2.0, Ast from 3.0, and back to PLD in 4.0 for 2 reasons; 1) PLD feels awesome right now, and 2) AST might be strong and the things added to the job are all fantastic, but the actual changes to healing in the game made AST feel significantly less enjoyable.

In 2.x I really really enjoyed WHM mp management (didn't do it much in HW), but managing MP on AST in 4.x is not fun—it's not a matter of difficulty it's a matter of what I'm actually doing on AST from moment to moment and what I need to be focusing on which ultimately leads to my enjoyment level of the job, and it's just not enjoyable to me. The job feels rigid and clunky to me compared to HW where it was fluid, and the issues are more to do with the overall changes to healing in the game. DPSing is significantly less fun, having to swap Role Skills in and out all the time is not fun (especially Protect or esuna), and having to manage MP so much more is just a distraction from the mechanics that make up the job. The one thing I'm truly happy for is that we need to heal more than we use to.

My only issue with AST itself (outside of the overall healer adjustments) is that we can be very dependant on Earthly Star, which is an ability that I love, but until you have the timings down it just feels like another clunky factor (which you're often dependant on) to playing the job.

[Kerrigen]

Healer main for 3.x here who has swapped to dps.

For me I'm just really bored with the role as a whole.[...] healing is honestly the most boring role in the game to me. Taking away cleric stance and gutting the dps variety of the class made it so that most of the time you are just spamming one button.

This is on top of everything else people have mentioned about pressure [...] You can have a hell of a lot more fun tanking or dpsing.

Exactly the reason why I decided to switch away from being a healer main as well. Healing just isn't engaging enough in this game. If you care about your contribution at all, you spend far too much time throwing rocks versus actually healing, and there are very few interesting mechanics and interplay in the healers' toolkits. It's by far the best role to carry groups in this game, but I don't see myself going back to it in any serious manner if they don't make healers' gameplay loop more engaging.

[SaitoHikari]

I actually switched away from White Mage to Bard BEFORE Stormblood, but what I've seen since doesn't even make me want to consider switching back ever.

For me, the issue is due to several things that combine into a crap fest.

- There's a huge population of damage dealers. Most of them suck. So I go as one myself, so the healers and tanks I end up with don't have such a rough time. Bards are basically built to blast through mass pulls anyway (with Nature's Minne essentially being a single target Mantra on a 45 second cooldown, Palisade, and Troubadour Paeon providing 10% phys damage reduction).

- Healer damage got nerfed overall, even if it's a lot easier to DPS and heal at the same time. Mobs turned into damage sponges and DPS damage contribution went up (or at least is supposed to, looking at the average DPS in DF, this sometimes isn't the case). As a consequence, healers don't contribute as much to shortening run times nearly as much as they did during HW. This ironically puts far more stress on the healer and tank when they're paired with two below average DPS, because now that mobs tend to hit really damn hard and especially with the whole MASS PULL META, the healer has to work overtime to keep everyone alive longer AND will still get screamed at by the party for not DPSing when the healer is actually TRYING to, but can't. This ended up with healers essentially adopting tank mentality - only really running with statics for roulettes.

This is one thing a parser would actually HELP with, to make people realize that healer damage barely means anything anymore (at least for dungeons) compared to what the DPS could be dishing out instead. And we could take it upon ourselves to help the healer in the first place! I've run into healers in EX roulette that could dish out 2k+ DPS in a mass pull, but I imagine it's only because I used my Bard abilities to make it safe for them to do so in the first place.

- The whole job meters thing doesn't really add to healer gameplay nearly as much as it does for the DPS and tanks. For the healers, I find that, for WHM and SCH at least (haven't looked into AST yet), the meters only really add as gates to using their shiny new abilities, while the DPS meters generally allow the DPS to use most attacks as usual but with bonus effects (though there are a few that are still gated, the WAY they're gated is still more interesting than what healers get). For WHM, the lily gauge only gates ONE skill, while providing barely noticeable benefits to other abilities of which they can't even control which ability they want cooldowns to be reduced on, unless they hold onto their abilities until the desired one comes off of cooldown for use. For SCH, you have a ton of abilities that add to the meter, and it's only used for ONE skill. It feels poorly slapped together, and reeks of the devs just giving them gauges for the sake of giving them gauges.

I know none of this really answers for savage groups, though. But I imagine that on top of all of the above, the reason why there aren't as many healers for savage groups nowadays is because a lot more damage is thrown out compared to what I saw in Alexander Creator, and mechanics are generally more punishing than they were before (failing one almost always leads to a death now), and for some reason healers are still blamed for everyone else screwing up mechanics.

(I also want to say, as an off note - something I've noticed is that the three jobs that are commonly considered to be the most in trouble for this expansion (SMN, MCH, SCH) all happen to be summon-based. All three are also considered to be more complex than most. Gee, I wonder why?)

[Rai_Takara]

Not many people want to sit on an awful job and pretend to have fun with it.
SE obviously didn't spare WHM or SCH a second glance this expansion, while they cradled AST to absolute perfection. It's essentially a better WHM and a better SCH. That leaves the only healer that actually feels strong and important to play as AST, and not many people like they'd playstyle.

SE really dropped the ball with healers. Many of us were expecting sweeping changes because of no healer this expansion, but they actually put less effort into them this time than they did in HW.

Idk about you but I think the healer balance is the best it has been since midas. Even better because you can bring whatever healer you want and you'd be just as competitive minus the few groups competing for the #1 spot in speed kills. There's just no blatant, pick x comp or it's not even close. WHM/SCH, AST/SCH, AST/WHM, all are in a decent spot from the looks of things.

Other than us healers rarely stepping into pugs because of it being a crapshoot most of the time, I think a good chunk of healers might be trying another job for a change. Considering this expansion brought some neat changes to many jobs with the job gauge feature. So I can't blame career healers wanting to try out new things in a new expansion.

[Divada]

I main AST, I'm frankly too afraid to join any groups for Savage. Healing has become incredibly stressful in SB. Mana management has been destroyed with the changes to spear, my Whm and Sch are horrible to play as, so broken. I heal only for friends now. Even in DF groups, tanks pull half the zone and then get nasty when I can't keep him alive even tho i've burnt every CD I have. I can't begin to imagine the abuse healers are getting for fails in Omega. Even local Pf pickups on Gilgamesh abuse me. Just not worth it.

[iSkelliot]

I refuse to heal without my specific tank/group, and if I need- without a cohealer I can work with. As a Scholar, I don't need a Nocturnal Sect Astrologian who thinks they should stay in that sect overriding my shields and messing me up.