Feedback on the current 5.0 design philosophy for healers.

[Yoshiyuki]

After playing the healers for myself starting from Shadowbringers early access, I'd like to give the dev team my thoughts on the changes.

I've been a healer main since 2.0, with AST as my favorite since Heavensward launched. While I understand the criticism against the role so far, thankfully the jobs aren't outright broken like AST was during 3.0. Having played broken-AST during Alexander Savage raids, I can safely say that we're not at that point again. That's a low bar, but it's something.

This new philosophy of making us heal more is fine in theory, but in practice, it ends up feeling more tedious than it needs to be. Our healing has scaled poorly since Stormblood compared to the outgoing damage. Having healed through the current extreme trials and getting them on farm, I feel as though I'm healing at similar intervals compared to older content, but it's like I have training wheels on all of a sudden, even though we're a higher level now. I actually feel weaker at level 80 than I did at level 70 as a healer.

We should feel stronger, with more to heal and better ways to do it, while feeling uniquely like an astrologian, white mage, or scholar (or chemist in the future, hint hint)

This has also led to the wide misconception that healers are supposed to struggle now because of the adjustments. I'm honestly at my limit with bad tanks who think it's normal that they take so much damage. Playing ping pong with a squishy tank's health pool is not my idea of fun, especially when they feel entitled to their mediocrity because of the new healer design philosophy.

After leveling a tank myself (dark knight), I'm even more annoyed, because even when I pull wall to wall in dungeons, I can find ways to cycle my cooldowns and not take much damage at all, on top of doing incredible DPS. I have way more fun as a tank, because it's so satisfying to mitigate damage with minimal healing, and put out good DPS, all while managing the skills I have at my disposal. If I am taking too much damage, it's my own fault for not doing something correctly, and so I'm quickly able to correct it -- it's not the game, or the math punishing me for no apparent reason.

I love astrologian to death, but I don't love the reality of being a healer in FFXIV.

Until something changes for the better, I'm switching my main to dark knight. And even then, I probably won't go back, because I have little faith that the devs won't botch the healers again down the line. This new healer philosophy is too misguided.

If the current encounters make us heal more, then our healing should be more powerful to compensate. As of right now, only white mage fits well with the 5.0 philosophy, despite feeling overtuned compared to astrologian and scholar. White mage should and ought to be the power healer as part of its class identity. Astrologian and scholar can be successful while being their own thing, within their respective class identities: right now, they are trying to be budget "pure healer" white mages, and it's not working.

I will speak more on astrologian and white mage. I'm purposely not touching scholar that much because of the negative changes, and I'll explain why.

Astrologian
I got to level 80 with my astrologian first. Outside of dungeons with Trusts (which was slow as hell: usually 40+ minutes with Gravity spam), it was decent at best and infuriating at worst. Decent, because I like the idea of quickly throwing out buffs while weaving the cards in between DPS spells. It's fun. But the infuriating part is that the buffs themselves don't matter that much for the amount of effort it takes to weave, and DPS, and use the myriad of tools we have just to keep the party alive. Our healing and personal DPS don't even compensate for the weak buffs, which makes no sense at all.

+ Beautiful effects and animations, as always
+ Fun execution of quick, on-the-spot decision making and buffing
+ Neutral Sect is great for its healing power, with an acceptable cooldown
+ Separating Draw and Play helped to give us more cards to use
+ Two charges of Essential Dignity!
+ Celestial Intersection wonderfully fills a gap in our healing toolkit
+ Minor Arcana and Divination at level 50 makes synced content more enjoyable
+ Gravity at level 45 is amazing for the same reason

~ MP management is tolerable, but only if we use Lucid Dreaming on cooldown at all times
~ Collective Unconscious is "fine" compared to the below issues:

- Divination needs a shorter cooldown, or it needs to have its cooldown swapped with Sleeve Draw -- these two abilities don't synergize well at all outside of our opener, when they should have a more symbiotic relationship
- Celestial Opposition's low healing could be better compensated with a shorter cooldown, or higher potency
- Nocturnal Sect is still subpar, even with a white mage partner as it's designed for -- this is really only for when you're with another astrologian and they put up Diurnal Sect faster than you did
- Horoscope is too weak for what it offers compared to Earthly Star, both of which have the same cooldown (60s)
- Our cards are too weak for how much effort it takes to weave and keep throwing out buffs
- Our personal DPS is too low, and does not make up for how weak the cards are
- Our healing is too low as well; lower healing should either accommodate high buffing/DPS potential, which we don't have -- the removal of Largesse is particularly troubling here, because we're not always playing content at level 80 with Neutral Sect (mass pulls in level 71-77 dungeons, for example)
- For as lovely as all of our tools are, it's ridiculous that we have to use so many just to keep people alive, making everything feel like busywork
- Removal of time mage elements -- Time Dilation, and Celestial Opposition's effect durations and stun -- takes away too much from our class identity, and a large part of what personally drew me to the job in the first place

Divination may have a long cooldown to give room for RNG not blessing us with three different seals within the current 180s window. But seriously, with three charges of Redraw, it is extremely rare that I don't get three different seals within three minutes. And if I don't have the three seals within three minutes, I'm going to get impatient and not care by that point. Really, most of the time I'm sitting on the three seals while waiting for Divination to come off cooldown, while I can only use Sleeve Draw for Lady or Lord cards that won't make much of a difference anyway. This feels counter-intutive.

Giving us back our time mage tools is one fix that could address some of these problems. If we could extend Divination for buffing, or even Neutral Sect for more healing throughput when necessary, that would help bridge the current gap, and give us our class identity back. I also really, really miss that stun effect for mass pulls in dungeons. Ultimately, let player skill determine how powerful our abilities are. This will help the job feel more rewarding overall.

As of right now, astrologian is too much work without much payoff. Either increase the payoff, or lessen the busywork needed without cutting away our tools (see scholar). I would like to be able to choose my tools wisely when needed, and not feel pressured into using all of them within a short period of time, all the time.

White Mage
This job is off on another planet compared to the other healers. It's clear that the devs prioritized WHM as the gold standard for their vision for healing in 5.0. Playing WHM, I feel strong and damn-near invincible as a healer -- but only because the other two jobs are so weak in comparison.

+ Crazy DPS
+ The Afflatus skills feel (mostly) rewarding, and I appreciate the callbacks to FFXI
+ Improved Lily mechanics compared to 4.0
+ Powerful healing, with or without Temperance
+ MP management isn't even a thing, especially with Thin Air at level 58 now

~ The GCD on the Afflatus abilities takes some getting used to
~ I could get by just fine without Plenary Indulgence in its current state

- Aero III removed. Why couldn't this have been upgraded to Diaga (AoE Dia) instead?
- Afflatus Misery damage is locked behind healing that may or may not be needed, depending on player skill, forcing overheal
- Just delete Fluid Aura at this point
- Holy spam not as strong as before -- yet this wouldn't be so bad if we had Aero III back as Diaga to fit with the new light-themed spells
- Hardly any party utility outside of Temperance

Aside from the few cons, White Mage is in a great spot. Keep it here, and bring the other two healers up alongside it in the name of balance. However, white mage could really do with just a little bit more utility without stepping on astrologian's toes, while keeping the other two healers within the pure healer philosophy.

Scholar
I have less to say about scholar in terms of pros and cons, but more to reiterate about class identity, balancing, and helping to reward the player.

The main stinging point is the absolute gutting of our DPS kit. Couldn't we have at least kept Bane? At least that? There was no need to strip scholar down to a barebones kit to "balance" its DPS with astrologian and white mage. Art of War spam during dungeons is not fun, especially when it costs more MP than Holy and Gravity, without enough of a potency boost to make up for it. The DoT management was part of our class identity going back to arcanist. We simply need this back, because it's unreasonable to expect players to suddenly be okay with fewer tools at our disposal.

The new healing abilities are incredible because they are very scholar -- Seraph and Recitation fit well, but the Sacred Soil trait would work better if we learned it much earlier than level 78.

Aetherflow feels strange -- like with Afflatus Misery, why do we need to overheal, depending on player skill, just to use our charges? Why don't we have Energy Drain anymore for DPS and for even a bit of MP management, and more importantly as an Aetherflow spender? Why is Aetherflow unusable outside of combat?

Making Eos and Selene the same would have been an easier pill to swallow if we hadn't lost so many other things in the process.

These changes pick away a lot, because they take away from our feeling of strategizing, of micromanaging (without feeling like busywork), and a general sense of preparedness.

--

If we must all be pure healers, then give us ways to be that while still integrating our toolkit within our class identity. This keeps the healers from feeling too homogenized, and helps to maintain balance between the three jobs. There will always be some homogenization between healers, but maintaining class identity can help to cast an illusion over the sameness.

The devs proved that they can pull this off well enough with tanks. In fact, the current design philosophy for tanks is much more successful because the devs adapted (adjusted) to how we play tanks. The same idea needs to come over to healers. Balance the healer jobs around how we play healers, instead of yanking us somewhere that feels weak and oppressive in comparison. At the same time, there is no need to change too much: we don't need to be green DPS in the same way that tanks are now blue DPS.

Mathematically, a skilled AST should be able to buff the party to make up for their personal DPS not reaching WHM or SCH levels, while holding their own in healing situations, not necessarily as a power healer, but as a job that does not feel weak.

A skilled SCH should be able to strategize their shielding accordingly, spend Aetherflow charges wisely without forced overheal, manage their fairy, plan for optimal Chain Strategem usage, all while maintaining their DoTs for middle-ground DPS in between AST and WHM.

A skilled WHM should be able to power heal and DPS, while offering a little bit more additional utility to make them as attractive as the other two healers.

All three healers can have powerful healing kits -- as long as the math respects our growth as players, and as long as the rest of our kit feels unique to each job. The devs can do this by adding to our toolkits: adding more of what works (Afflatus abilities), and only taking away what doesn't work (things like Fluid Aura). Otherwise, there is no balance, only a philosophy from the devs that we should play their way or not at all. Those near-constant adventurer-in-need bonuses for healers don't even matter to me when tanking is so much more satisfying, personal, intense, and rewarding.

[Ekimmak]

The aetherflow combat requirement is most likely so that people stop holding up the raid so they can start with a full deck.

... I don't see why they can't just have something like "5 second cooldown outside of combat". It might be more work, but surely that's better than breaking SCH's legs off.

[Endeleon]

The aetherflow combat requirement is most likely so that people stop holding up the raid so they can start with a full deck.

... I don't see why they can't just have something like "5 second cooldown outside of combat". It might be more work, but surely that's better than breaking SCH's legs off.

People keep saying this, but in all my time I have NEVER seen a raid or anything wait for a Scholar's Aetherflow cooldown. Y'all need to stop with this nonsense. It's never happened. Not in EX, not in Savage, not in Alliance.

[Enla]

People keep saying this, but in all my time I have NEVER seen a raid or anything wait for a Scholar's Aetherflow cooldown. Y'all need to stop with this nonsense. It's never happened. Not in EX, not in Savage, not in Alliance.

Maybe they mean for SMN? I do remember people in the Healer forum speculating the nerf was to SMN and that SCH got slapped with it as well due to the dual nature of Arcanist. Likewise I've never had anyone wait on Aetherflow. The only time that's happened is when I'm completely out of MP and am trying to get at least back to half before continuing, but that's happened... Three times in group content I can remember? Normally if I'm out of MP I just stop casting for a bit to top myself up of late.

[HyoMinPark]

Very well thought-out post about the healers, and especially AST. I have to agree with most of what you wrote (though, I would put CU in the definite cons category when one compares it to the new Sacred Soil trait SCHs get at level 78). Small correction, though: Sleeve Draw has the same CD as Divination. It’s 180s now. I believe it’s used during your Divination window (under most circumstances outside of the opener to get your seals for the first Divination), but it begins to make the opening sequence for AST kind of clunky. A lot of double-weaving and throwing out cards—which I’m normally fine with—but you have to hope your MT is safely in the hands of your co-healer sometimes because you’re too busy juggling. And the payoff for all the busy-ness just doesn’t feel worth it: +6% for 15 seconds is just...sad. I don’t know of any other way to describe it.


I leveled AST to 80 after finishing the MSQ, and I have to say it was a shock. I also felt as if I was unnecessarily wearing training wheels, and that becomes even more obvious as I go through the same content on WHM. My healing felt noticeably weaker, as if I was having to work twice as hard to achieve the same results prior. The cards were so underwhelming that sometimes I didn’t bother with my “Always keep Draw on CD” mentality that I’ve had since I picked up the job in HW. I felt kind of worthless sometimes.

Celestial Intersection is nice, but I really dislike Horoscope, and wished it functioned closer to the new Plenary Indulgence on WHM, where you get that second healing after using Helios/Aspected Helios. Yeah, it would probably be overkill sometimes, but it would be much better than Horoscope > Helios > press Horoscope again and, if not, oh crap it just fell off. Neutral Sect is also really nice, but it sucks that it’s only available at level 80.

I’m leveling WHM now, and it’s night and day for me. Honestly, I may end up switching to a WHM main after AST being my go-to healer for 2 expansions now. I can comfortably heal and DPS in dungeons, even with larger pulls. Holy may not top the charts like it used to, but I still feel powerful and the Stun is very useful as mitigation on the tank for autos. Misery requires unnecessary healing sometimes, but at least it feels satisfying to do. Nothing in AST’s kit has really hit me with a sense of satisfaction from 70 to 80. Just...disappointment. And it honestly makes me really sad.


I can’t say much on SCH, as it’s always been my least played healer and I haven’t touched it yet in ShB. But most SCHs I meet echo the same thing: it’s boring and unsatisfying to play now.

[ForteNightshade]

This new philosophy of making us heal more is fine in theory, but in practice, it ends up feeling more tedious than it needs to be. Our healing has scaled poorly since Stormblood compared to the outgoing damage. Having healed through the current extreme trials and getting them on farm, I feel as though I'm healing at similar intervals compared to older content, but it's like I have training wheels on all of a sudden, even though we're a higher level now. I actually feel weaker at level 80 than I did at level 70 as a healer.

About this. You actually are weaker, technically speaking. The theorycrafters have deduced healers don't scale whatsoever from Stormblood. You heal for precisely the same as you did at level 70. In fact, because the new scaling does not apply outside Shadowbringer content, you'll be stronger synced below 71 if I recall correctly. I wouldn't inherently have an issue with this if it were spread evenly across all three healers, however, AST suffers significantly. Even SCH suffers, albeit more on its gameplay feels boring. At least it can heal—something AST seemingly can't at the moment.

[Labyxt]

Very well made post, I agree with all your points. In general it feels everything hits more, everything mitigates less and everything heals less. I find the role way less enjoyable than in SB, and having to run content with tanks that don’t understand these changes and expect us to do miracles doesn’t help. I fully expect to see healers become a less played role more and more. Going in detail with specific classes I can only talk about Astrologian, being the only healer I have at 80 for now as well as the class I main and (used to?) love.

- Earlier I could just Earthly Star + Largesse + Aspected Benefic and then just spam Gravity to help meltdown the pull. Now I get to cast it once per pull, twice if I’m lucky. If I can’t have back the former then there has to be a middle ground.
- Celestial Opposition is a joke. It feels SO weak and the range is so short. It’s just a bad skill right now.
- Horoscope is meh. It’s not the worst but it doesn’t feel great. Making it heal automatically when the timer expires like Earthly Star would be a nice start to save the skill.
- Celestial Intersection is nice, it feels weak (like the the rest of the toolkit) but it is a nice addition.
- Essential dignity. What I can say about this skill, the two charges are welcome but.. it’s lost all its power. You can see the difference in healing a low health party member before and feeling great, and doing the same now and seeing the bar barely go up. You had 1 HP, now you have 2, how cool.
- Neutral Sect, while I hate the name I like the skill. Still, due to how weak healing feels normally, this becomes just a replacement largesse with some utility at the end of the day.
- Nocturnal Sect feels bad. Really, just bad. The shields feel almost non-existent.
- MP management feels fine. You have to use Lucid and Lightspeed on cooldown to not run out but I don’t mind that, especially welcome Lucid’s shorter cooldown.
- Give us back the Time Mage aspects. No reason to remove them, unless they plan on releasing a proper Time Mage. For now, I miss those skills a lot and it takes away a lot from the class.

Now, some of these flaws are due to AST’s skills themselves, some due to the healer changes in general but let’s get to the focal point: THE CARDS. I don’t like the new system, at all. The old system felt great, fishing AOE balances was the best thing ever, and even with bad RNG there was fun in saving it. Now it’s just.. bland? It feels like a chore. And I hate having to use cards on the wrong roles because I need the seal (because if you dare to minor/redraw I guarantee you won’t see that same seal you needed for the next 10 minutes). The duration of the cards is so short too and when you’re finally done collecting th seals.. Divination is... disappointing to say the least.

So despite the wall of text of complains I will still main healer and AST in particular because I’m too attached to it being the job I main since years now. I hope they will somehow fix it. Somehow.
Side note, is it just me or there are only White Mages around in Party finder now? Been farming the Extremes and have yet to co-heal with a single SCH or another AST. In Light, at least.

[Raven2014]

This has also led to the wide misconception that healers are supposed to struggle now because of the adjustments. I'm honestly at my limit with bad tanks who think it's normal that they take so much damage. Playing ping pong with a squishy tank's health pool is not my idea of fun, especially when they feel entitled to their mediocrity because of the new healer design philosophy.

After leveling a tank myself (dark knight), I'm even more annoyed, because even when I pull wall to wall in dungeons, I can find ways to cycle my cooldowns and not take much damage at all, on top of doing incredible DPS. I have way more fun as a tank, because it's so satisfying to mitigate damage with minimal healing, and put out good DPS, all while managing the skills I have at my disposal. If I am taking too much damage, it's my own fault for not doing something correctly, and so I'm quickly able to correct it -- it's not the game, or the math punishing me for no apparent reason.

Didn't you just identify the "real" problem here, as much as verifying it yourself?


And that is part of it comes down to tanks. I have had dungeon where I spent most time DPSing, and there are dungeons where even spamming heal is not enough to keep the tank alive. Samething with both of the EX. There are group I barely have to do any heal, there are groups that I just can't keep up with the damage people taking. Note that this was the same issue with SB, when it was launched there were a cry of SCH being underpower, but when I ran the class, I didn't feel any differently than healing in HW. It's just aside from WHM, both SCH and AST would struggle with badly geared tank or low skill tank. And if we're being honest the chance is pretty high you will run into tanks that are BOTH of those at the beginning of an expansion back, just like how those Shrine gear tank got their face beaten to the ground once they get to the third dungeon at the Steppe. If you are as good as a tank you describe yourself, let's say there are two of you then tell me if you are a healer healing yourself as tank, do you think it would be same as you healing a bad tank?


WHM, being a raw throughput healer (rather then utility healers like the other two) will ALWAYS feel powerful at the beginning of an expack, because that throughput allows it to compensate for the group's short coming (ESPECIALLY the tank). I seriously hope SE will not make any balancing attempt until we're through the first savage tier, after people settled down with their class of choice (instead of fair weather) and see how they all performance in a equivalent and synronize manner, there is too much knee jerk reaction ATM). This has always been the same script playing at the beginning of every expansion (with the HW AST being extra bad).

There will be always difference between theory-craft and actual practice, no matter how much detail and thought put into a post, it needs to be trial in real fights first. Another example of this is when I popped over the DPS forums, there are longs, detail post complaining about MCH on DAY I (like seriously, day 1, people complaining about ability based on how it feels at lvl71). And while at first glance most of those posts have faily solid reasoning, now that I got MCH up myself, I looked back and feel half of those complains are just people not understanding the class well.

[Jandor]

Looking at tanks, then looking at healers, it just seems a bit bizarre.

Tanks got tanking tools standardized across the board, the differences in gameplay come mostly from their damage dealing kit with a little bit of tank flavour.

Healers seem to have gone the other way, offensive kit has been made much more similar (and smaller) with the differences coming from the healing tools.

I don't know whether it would have been a good thing or not, but I fully expected them to go full green DPS mentality before details started coming out. After 6 years of 'healers should DPS' the last thing I expected was what feels like a rather heavy handed attempt to enforce 'healers should heal'.

[Fawkes]

I don't really have much faith in them to be able to fix/balance healers. They could figure out tanks because at the end of the day it's a DPS with enmity and big HP. I don't think they understand healers at all.


I don't really see a benefit in removing fluid aura though. Like, yeah, it's mostly useless, but it wouldn't give me more room on a hotbar if they removed it, it's not exactly taking up prime real estate right now as it is. I wouldn't see removing it as a positive unless they added something better in its place, but they'll probably just delete it and give us another heal. And even if they did remove it and give us something better, it would be something at level 82 or whatever, so it would still be better to change fluid aura into something useful so that low level content isn't as much of a wasteland of abilities.