Healers in 5.0

[Semirhage]

Are we doing this "you don't know, you haven't seen the content, you don't know how it will play" nonsense from pre-Stormblood again? You can look at your tooltips and get the gist of how your kit is supposed to work. People are already piecing together rotations for the DPS jobs. Because they know from the tooltips how they're going to play. We *do* know how the jobs are going to play, content-agnostic. You start on a training dummy scenario and adjust based on how much you need to swap to healing to handle mechanics. What we know is that healer damage rotations are still (or becoming) almost as simple as it's possible to make a damage kit, and heals are still largely one-and-done single button presses with low interaction between each other. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what those two facts mean.

Shadowbringers bosses aren't going to cast some debuff at you that makes Cure 3 or Ruin 2 an interactive or dynamic ability.

[Kyohei]

The team basically wants healer jobs to purely heal...While dps jobs get to dps (with each job being completely different from one another), buff and heal.

[Melichoir]

snip

Depending how the skills fit into the content matters, not just the skills in a vacuum. You notice tanks now have AoE shielding, or that classes like summoner have their phoenix that applies a Regen? There's a lot of changes that are spreading the burden of certain roles. This could also indicate changes in the fight and how they operate. So yeah, waiting till the xpac drops before getting your knickers in a twist is actually a pragmatic PoV. Because argue all you want, til your blue in the face if need be, everything here is speculation and educated guesses at best. Not 100% concrete facts. Until the xpac drops and we get the 'live' version, this is all guess work.

For everyone who still wants to have a go at this, consider the changes to healers:

WHM - Getting some better DPS skills, some regens and insta-cast stuff. Its becoming more dynamic, thus rounding it out. Youll still be probably best healer, but you now have a bit more in the DPS compartment.
SCH - Youre getting greater potency healing and more job specific abilities at the cost of some of your DPS abilities. Theyre reducing SCH damage out put in favor of giving it more Healing output and being more healing directed. It still is the DPS healer, just not as DPSy as it was, but its granting you better healing capacity in return. Again, they are Rounding out the healer class to be more dynamic.
AST - Changes mainly to the card System allowing for less RNG overall, some 'lesser' changes in damage skills and healing.

These are just quick breakdowns, and can be found on reddit. Yes, there was a little bit of trimming from DPS on AST and SCH, but that was balanced against more healing and other changes in playstyle and management. If youre whole focus on SCH was to essentially just let Eos or Selene heal while you dps, that sucks. Go learn summoner. If you wanted more dps as a WHM, congrats, youre getting that. If you wanted less RNG in cards, GJ, thats coming your way. This isnt some attempt by the devs to say "Screw healers, we hate them! Lets make them ultra boring."

Lastly, It's worth noting that (if Im understanding things correctly) not all the reworks and skills have been released. Most of it has, but not all of it. Things are still subject to change when the xpac drops, such as potencies and CDs and the like. So as I said, gettign your knickers in a twist at this point is stupid. Just wait for the xpac. Be upset if you want, but this nonsense about "Woe is Healer, all is terrible, Screw you SE!" is a bit much. Calm down. Play the game when it drops. It still sucks, then find a new class or quit.

The team basically wants healer jobs to purely heal...While dps jobs get to dps (with each job being completely different from one another), buff and heal.

Pure healer, fromt what I understand, in Japanese context does not mean only healing - it means healers with more Shield/Regen abilities. If it was just about only healing, WHM would not have been given a DPS increase.

[Kyohei]

It's not just about the dps potency. It's about fun and game feeling.

Having a dps rotation within SCH, along with both fairies micro-management added much flavour to the job, just like having healing and raise does to RDM.
Having different cards with completely different buffs to play with also added flavour to AST, just like it does to BRD and will too to DNC.
My view is that dps are very different with their dps kit but also with their utility, and i hoped they would have treated healers the same way.

Including dps rotation along with fairy management and healing made SCH being a very fun job to play with always something to do, decisions to take, lots of micro-management aside from healing. AST had the cards to redraw, choose, burn, a lot of decision making too which makes it fun.
Taking these away for the sake of pure healing only is sad, and yes, pure healing in terms of more shield/regen. According to me these two are of the core toolkit of healers, but they need something more, just like dps got a core toolkit and something more.

[Rubiss]

SCH - Youre getting greater potency healing and more job specific abilities at the cost of some of your DPS abilities. Theyre reducing SCH damage out put in favor of giving it more Healing output and being more healing directed. It still is the DPS healer, just not as DPSy as it was, but its granting you better healing capacity in return. Again, they are Rounding out the healer class to be more dynamic.

This is just wrong. SCH is by no means a DPS healer in 5.0. WHM has more DPS going for it. SCH had they're aetherflow ruined. You have no way to actually use excess stacks by properly managing aetherflow. You're expected to spam lustrate to keep your fairy gauge going. Without Energy Drain or some sort of DPS move or buff that is built off of Aetherflow stacks, you are effectively lowering the skill ceiling to critical levels.

[Schan]

For everyone who still wants to have a go at this, consider the changes to healers:

WHM - Getting some better DPS skills, some regens and insta-cast stuff. Its becoming more dynamic, thus rounding it out. Youll still be probably best healer, but you now have a bit more in the DPS compartment.
SCH - Youre getting greater potency healing and more job specific abilities at the cost of some of your DPS abilities. Theyre reducing SCH damage out put in favor of giving it more Healing output and being more healing directed. It still is the DPS healer, just not as DPSy as it was, but its granting you better healing capacity in return. Again, they are Rounding out the healer class to be more dynamic.
AST - Changes mainly to the card System allowing for less RNG overall, some 'lesser' changes in damage skills and healing.

These are just quick breakdowns, and can be found on reddit. Yes, there was a little bit of trimming from DPS on AST and SCH, but that was balanced against more healing and other changes in playstyle and management. If youre whole focus on SCH was to essentially just let Eos or Selene heal while you dps, that sucks. Go learn summoner. If you wanted more dps as a WHM, congrats, youre getting that. If you wanted less RNG in cards, GJ, thats coming your way. This isnt some attempt by the devs to say "Screw healers, we hate them! Lets make them ultra boring."

Lastly, It's worth noting that (if Im understanding things correctly) not all the reworks and skills have been released. Most of it has, but not all of it. Things are still subject to change when the xpac drops, such as potencies and CDs and the like. So as I said, gettign your knickers in a twist at this point is stupid. Just wait for the xpac. Be upset if you want, but this nonsense about "Woe is Healer, all is terrible, Screw you SE!" is a bit much. Calm down. Play the game when it drops. It still sucks, then find a new class or quit.



Pure healer, fromt what I understand, in Japanese context does not mean only healing - it means healers with more Shield/Regen abilities. If it was just about only healing, WHM would not have been given a DPS increase.

I'm sorry Melichoir but I have to disagree with some things.
The whole complaint regarding WHM throughout HW and SB was exactly that. It only healed. You see, when you need to make content work for every healer you end up catering to the weakest healer. WHM was all about the big number heals which was basically wasted because nothing in the game required such a massive healing output and if it did then it would be unbalanced and would made WHM mandatory because the other healers wouldn't be able to keep up (and even then... SCH is OP. A single Indom can top up a party and guess what? it's oGCD so you can keep DPSing to your hearts content, but i'm not going down that rabbit hole)
So considering most of the healing potency on WHM was wasted, what else did they have to show for it? Almost endless MP that would only be needed if people mess up or... you guessed it. DPS.
Unfortunatly healer is that role that has its difficulty based solely on how well or poorly others perform.

I mean when doing 24 man raids I would play AST and I could solo heal most of the nukes on my own. There is this massive build-up to the epic boss special attack, everyone shields and heals.... and i can top up the entire party with Collective Unconscious and Earthly Star more often than not. The other healer might as well sit there twiddling his/her thumbs (or /dance).

Because of the way fights were scripted and the fact that normally things hit like wet noodles healers ended up having a lot of downtime so what some people decided to do? DPS because you might as well make things go faster. Gamers in general are all about efficient use of their time (not everyone can sit in front of their computer for 12+ hours)

Saying people getting "their knickers in a twist is stupid" is a bit rude. I don't agree with the people who are saying that their class is utterly destroyed because of the changes because I sit on the "let's wait and see" camp, but I perfectly understand why people are concerned about their favorite role. I don't main healer and even I'm worried for the healers.

Lastly, regarding that final sentence or yours, would you care to elaborate why you're fine with healers having shield and healing and less DPS capabilities yet every other job now gets to dip their toes in healing?
DPSers can heal and support, Tank can heal and DPS but god forbid if Healers dip their toes into DPSing. They should just stick to just healing! It feels like a slap on their face. Why was support moved from healing and shoved even more into DPS? Why?

edit: also if they don't change the WHM potency the "extra dps" i actually a dps loss. You're better off spamming the new equivalent of stone if you want damage

[Crushnight]

Depending how the skills fit into the content matters, not just the skills in a vacuum. You notice tanks now have AoE shielding, or that classes like summoner have their phoenix that applies a Regen? There's a lot of changes that are spreading the burden of certain roles. This could also indicate changes in the fight and how they operate. So yeah, waiting till the xpac drops before getting your knickers in a twist is actually a pragmatic PoV. Because argue all you want, til your blue in the face if need be, everything here is speculation and educated guesses at best. Not 100% concrete facts. Until the xpac drops and we get the 'live' version, this is all guess work.

My real big problem with the whole gutting dps skills for healing is, no matter what ShB content is like i very highly doubt they will change ARR, HW and SB content to be balanced around these changes for healers so even if ShB changes design on how much healing is required a new player who wants to play healer would have to get up to lv 70/71 to do ShB with 1 DoT 1 dmg skill and a boatload of unnecessary healing skills.

Low level roulettes will be way more boring for hlrs , ARR made pld the 1,2,3 meme this is worse by far, sometimes more buttons can be good there should always be a reasonable skill gap so that it is rewarding to push oneself if you wished

[SturmChurro]

Low level roulettes will be way more boring for hlrs , ARR made pld the 1,2,3 meme this is worse by far, sometimes more buttons can be good there should always be a reasonable skill gap so that it is rewarding to push oneself if you wished

Low level roulettes are already extremely boring for healers. At least for white mage, I am literally barely seeing much of a difference in the simplicity of it's "rotation". The changes haven't changed much, unless you think that aero was somehow a huge game changer. I don't necessarily agree with the healer changes, and I don't play the other two, at all - so I can't really give my opinion on it. I am not advocating that reduction of DPS skills is a good thing, but there was no complexity to begin with!

Also, for that matter white mage right now high level damage is just as boring as low level you just have one more skill to use every 20 seconds or so.

[GrimGale]

Well now the incentive to have a WHM is its ability to cast potent aoe damage with holy and afflatus misery.

The incentive to have an AST is still the cards, with now even more consistent dps increase.

But...what's the incentive to have a SCH? They get cool shields and heals but its nothing the other two can't provide. Is it the Chain Stratagem? 10% crit increase to a single target every 120 seconds? That seems kinda weak compared to the other two.

[SieyaM]

Everyone seems to think the answer to making gameplay for healers better is to just have more damage going out and I don't think that is the real solution. If everyone is mad about having DPS reduced to one or two buttons why would spamming one or two heal buttons make the gameplay any more engaging. There needs to be something different for healers sure and I am not quite sure what it is, but making auto attack damage high enough to eat through half a tanks hp is not going to make healing fun or more interesting, its going to just make them spam heals.