The Healer Double Standard

[LariaKirin]

Real quick (...okay, by my standards, anyway).
[...]

The expectations that healers parse high is not that prevalent in the wider community - healers DPS to different degrees at different skill levels. Healing is generally seen as difficult because of the responsibility you have.
The impact of a botched rotation or mechanic on a DPS is significantly less punishing than a missed heal. You have to care about all mechanics in the fight and there's alot more to pay attention to as a healer.
These challenges begin to fade the higher up the skill ladder you go, making the following statement true: "Healing is more difficult and more interesting at lower skill levels. Healing is less difficult and less interesting at higher skill levels".

Healing downtime becomes a problem (earlier) at higher skill levels because once your party knows the entire fight and has done it plenty of times, all that variability and unpredictability goes away. What you are left with is this game of "how many DPS GCDs can I get away with?".

Optimization begins to happen when you know the encounter well enough that it's trivial. The fun of optimizing broils (pun intended) down to a single goal: maintaining uptime on the boss.
For melee, this means taking risks with movement, doing the mechanic as late as possible, etc..
For casters, this means not interrupting casts by slidecasting and pre-positioning. BLM has a simple rotation, but is still one of the most fun jobs to play.
For healers, this means transforming as many healing GCDs into DPS GCDs as you can.

Optimization happens in two ways:
- Individual optimization, which is basically "how many DPS GCDs can I get away with?".
- Group optimization, which is "how many DPS GCDs can WE get away with?", to the point of everyone knowing their 42nd GCD and DPS/tanks going out of their way to save the healers 1 GCD.
In both of these cases, healing the encounter is a non-issue.

By removing "Heal GCD -> DPS GCD", you would be removing an important part of what makes DPSing on healer fun at higher skill levels.
By moving heals to OGCDs, you are exacerbating the healing downtime issues.

This is an exaggeration, because you have not suggested completely removing healing GCDs. We would be in the same place with perhaps different OGCD heals and different GCD heals. So I am left wondering what problem you are trying to solve. That is why I say that the interesting interactions you suggested can happen with what we have now.

The game's longer GCD relative to fight length coupled with the general mechanic lethality makes dropped Healing GCDs too punishing for how easy it is to do.

This is the root cause of those "they can't make content require too much healing" statements you see around. They're correct, but no one ever really seems to elaborate on why because I guess people think it's self-evident.

Why shouldn't dropped healing GCDs be punishing?

I disagree with the second statement. The reason why they can't make content require too much healing is because it is too variable and unpredictable, depending on your party. Player consistency would become more important and because consistency is not a strong point at low skill levels it would make the encounter too difficult.

Encounters would be either too hard at low skill levels or too easy at high skill levels - a product of SE trying to appeal to two groups that have different interests and expectations from the encounters in the game.

Real quick (...okay, by my standards, anyway).
GCD Impact
[...]
Making an explicit split in the time scales for "Healing" and "non-Healing" (however it's done) sets the expectation, up front, that you're going to be able to heal anything unless you run out of resources or hit the wrong button or aren't in range or are dead or whatever.

I want (what I consider) the (boring) bits of Healing in non-optimization-required content (read: DF, leveling dungeons and non-Extremes) to be so simple that someone just reacting to incoming damage with a slowish reaction time can still get their party past the attrition checks.
[...]

By setting that expectation you are exacerbating the downtime problem. OGCD healing is the cause of healing downtime.

No content requires optimization. It happens either consciously (people actively trying to optimize) and subconsciously (people know the encounter well enough that they do things they otherwise wouldn't in their first clear).

I do think healing should be nerfed (especially OGCDs) and it has indirectly through the disproportionate scaling of Health Pools. And while this would increase healing uptime - it would merely inflate it, not fix the problem. I do keep bringing up encounter design because that is the only way of adding unpredictability for higher skill levels, where this healing downtime issue is most prevalent.

[BahamutxD]

They got healing bad since the beggining and this is just a consecuence of it.

They are attemping to fix healing taking the easy routte- making the healer job weaker instead of giving a revisit to most encounters in this game to add heavier damage income to tanks and the party from random/unavoidable sources. Okay, reworking the whole game is too much? make it past level 50-60-70 and start giving healers spells to deal with that after those levels.

Force the healers to heal. Give them a bigger/varied healing kit - Earthly Star and Synergy from AST or Excogitation from SCH are a good example of interesting healing spells. Other MMOs have delayed heals, HoT healings, chain heals, heals that react to damage...

Just stop giving healers straight heals, specially if they are oGCD. That takes us nowhere and do nothing except for making the situation even worse.

[Miiu]

They got healing bad since the beggining and this is just a consecuence of it.

They are attemping to fix healing taking the easy routte- making the healer job weaker instead of giving a revisit to most encounters in this game to add heavier damage income to tanks and the party from random/unavoidable sources. Okay, reworking the whole game is too much? make it past level 50-60-70 and start giving healers spells to deal with that after those levels.

Force the healers to heal. Give them a bigger/varied healing kit - Earthly Star and Synergy from AST or Excogitation from SCH are a good example of interesting healing spells. Other MMOs have delayed heals, HoT healings, chain heals, heals that react to damage...

Just stop giving healers straight heals, specially if they are oGCD. That takes us nowhere and do nothing except for making the situation even worse.

If you're just looking at the healing toolkit. I'd argue that healers are not weaker. Not at all. They're insanely strong (looking at you SCH and WHM). AST is definitely one of the weaker healers when it comes to healing content they don't know. But all current endgame content can be healed easily by any healer combination.
We have so many tools to heal that we don't even need to use them all.

But don't get me wrong I am not saying that the current healer balance is by any stretch of the imagination without faults. And there are a some big ones.

[Crushnight]

I wouldn't worry too much about this happening.

Truly wish i could believe that but after SB where whm was barely touched for ages (Planary Indulgence) to just making things bizarre (Emnity reduction on a lot of heals but gave assize 45s cd which negated the emnity reductions), the battle design team do not have a good track record for adjusting healers period (20% balance for 30s anyone), so the bar is extremely low right now for Tuesday.

[fantasticm]

Truly wish i could believe that but after SB where whm was barely touched for ages (Planary Indulgence) to just making things bizarre (Emnity reduction on a lot of heals but gave assize 45s cd which negated the emnity reductions), the battle design team do not have a good track record for adjusting healers period (20% balance for 30s anyone), so the bar is extremely low right now for Tuesday.

I wouldn't use WHITE MAGE as an example of SE's responsiveness when it comes to adjusting healers LMAO! Obviously that goes without saying, WHM is the redheaded stepchild. But, historically SE is fairly responsive to SCH and AST complaints (even though they are a little slower when it comes to AST...). Given the amount of complaints on both sides of the pond towards these two jobs, and looking at SE's response to such in the past, I'd say the chances are very high of these two jobs receiving something, especially more than just MP adjustments.

Forgive me, I assumed you were simply referring to SCH and AST receiving adjustments. If you're hoping for anything for WHM other than nerfs, then yes, expect the worst.

[Yuyuka3]

I wouldn't use WHITE MAGE as an example of SE's responsiveness when it comes to adjusting healers LMAO! Obviously that goes without saying, WHM is the redheaded stepchild. But, historically SE is fairly responsive to SCH and AST complaints (even though they are a little slower when it comes to AST...). Given the amount of complaints on both sides of the pond towards these two jobs, and looking at SE's response to such in the past, I'd say the chances are very high of these two jobs receiving something, especially more than just MP adjustments.

Forgive me, I assumed you were simply referring to SCH and AST receiving adjustments. If you're hoping for anything for WHM other than nerfs, then yes, expect the worst.

Sad, but very, very true... which is why I'm so sick and tired about AST and especially SCH complaining. It always leads to the same end, WHM being the worst of the three. But by now, I'm rather sure that's what people actually want...

[Crushnight]

I wouldn't use WHITE MAGE as an example of SE's responsiveness when it comes to adjusting healers LMAO! Obviously that goes without saying, WHM is the redheaded stepchild. But, historically SE is fairly responsive to SCH and AST complaints (even though they are a little slower when it comes to AST...). Given the amount of complaints on both sides of the pond towards these two jobs, and looking at SE's response to such in the past, I'd say the chances are very high of these two jobs receiving something, especially more than just MP adjustments.

Forgive me, I assumed you were simply referring to SCH and AST receiving adjustments. If you're hoping for anything for WHM other than nerfs, then yes, expect the worst.

I honestly hope they do not touch whm at all only ast and sch and for sch only stuff linked to aetherflow like SB energy drain or a potential i'm going to say it dreaded second DoT, ast needs a lot more adjustments.

I have seen them take too long in the past to fix critical healer flaws, 3.0 ast was very weak healing wise were told this very quickly took until 2 weeks after savage to finally get healing potencies buffed that may seem like a short time frame being 6 weeks after expansion launch, but its primary role was left far undertuned for too long, then you do have that 20% balance card which did not see a nerf until SB savage it was a problem from its adjustment in 3.4 it shouldn't have taken to 4.05 to go yea we may have overdid the balance card. Excog was a problem for a fair few patches.

Whm is certainly the one they barely touch but i feel that is because its rarely the problem the other 2 healers are most of the time, sch rained supreme for the majority of this game's lifespan, ast has fluctuated from broken undertuned mess to I BRING THE BALANCE to i'm good thanks for the weaving potential with cards to my god why you do dis, whm has only grown but throughout HW and SB it's growth was not substantial enough to compete with ast darting up higher, i feel that if SE had given whm this level of pdps in SB i doubt it would have been considered as bad but hindsight can't change past try to change the future i guess.

[Hatstand]

For those who want to bring this to the attention of the devs, upvote the healer questions for the open letter. At the very least hopefully we can find out whether the devs have heard the outcry and are planning to do anything.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...43#post5092843

[Crushnight]

For those who want to bring this to the attention of the devs, upvote the healer questions for the open letter. At the very least hopefully we can find out whether the devs have heard the outcry and are planning to do anything.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...43#post5092843

Thank you for link ^^ got my hlr question and the question i really like a response to

[EpicOverlord85]

I miss none of these offensive spells except Bane. Less controller clutter the better.

As a fellow controller user I disagree, I want them all back. Three hot bars was all it took to fit all of my abilities and my pet abilities.