Has anyone quit healing?

[ty_taurus]

Here's the thing for me. I really don't think I care what direction the team ultimately wants to take healers in. The problem I have is that I don't think they understand how to get there, and as a result, the changes they make don't actually do anything to move them toward their goal--it just disrupts the flow and design of these healers rendering their kits awkward, poorly balanced, and in some cases, antithetical to the rest of their own tools. The only real request is that regardless of that direction, that the healers have some level of depth to them that makes them more interesting to play and gives us ways to express our skill.

Complexity and Depth are two different things as well. You can give the healers depth at all stages of play without necessarily needing to make them complex, and what we really just want is that through-line of depth that makes our tools feel thematic, connected, and engaging at any stage of gameplay. A great example of what I mean is by making action interaction forgiving rather than punishing. Let's compare Mudras and Steps for a moment from the Ninja and Dancer respectively. Both have a similar implementation, but with Mudras, you must get them in a specific order or you screw over your DPS. With Steps, if you make a mistake, you can correct yourself, and the loss is negligible.

If they would just hire 1 designer who is an experienced healer who could parse through the goals they want to set for the healers and translate them fluidly and effectively into the healers in a way there current design team just cannot be bothered to do, it would make a world of difference for a fairly significant chunk of the healer community.

[Boizinho]

The only real request is that regardless of that direction, that the healers have some level of depth to them that makes them more interesting to play and gives us ways to express our skill.

Unfortunately the direction they have very obviously chosen is the direction with no complexity or depth at all. The main defining pillar of healer design in ShB and EW is a skill ceiling that is reached at level 4.

You know how Super Mario Galaxy technically has a "2 player" mode, but all player 2 does is aim at the screen to pick up and shoot star bits? That's what the job designers want the healer role to be. They want it to be the role you give to the absolute worst player in your particular group so they can feel technically included without actually doing anything. At this point we're about as close as you can get to a child being handed an unplugged controller so they can pretend they're playing the game with their parent without knowing any better. Every tank buster cast bar is the parent pointing at the screen saying "See that boss we just beat? You did that!" A token gesture to try to fool us into thinking we're participating in the same game that everyone else is.

Healers unironically feel like more of a "limited job" than Blue Mage does at this point, and it's intentional.

[Laphicet]

I've basically all but quit healing... I don't use them anymore, and instead have just been leveling everything else and using WAR and SMN for endgame stuff when I feel like it. The only time I heal is if someone in my FC asks for dungeon stuff, and that's only because nearly everyone else in my FC sucks at healing, even in dungeons. So I play healer on map nights and stuff just to see less shit play, because god knows I can't explain to them the basics of this stuff without people having a fit about playstyle and who pays who's sub. It's infuriating... but I put up with it because I love RPing with them all.

I will probably be picking sage up come EW tho... just to do endgame stuff and lock SCH/WHM (and possibly even AST if double shield comp is viable) out of parties, though. We need to send a message that we want more DPS focus on healers and we hate what WHM/SCH have become, so that's the best way to do it, I feel.

Other than that, I'm basically done with healers... and only use them in RP stuff...and even then all the healer changes have basically taken the wind out of my sails on the RP side... with how much AST's lore gets spat on with every class change and with how WHMs are Bishops now instead of their elementalist roots. And then I see NPCs like Dyunbu showing off the true potential of White mage and it just makes me unfathomably angry at what they've become. These NPCs can show the true power of these classes but we, the fucking WoL, can't do anything but piddly light magic, flower arrangements, and rock tossing? It just makes no damn sense. GIVE ME QUAKE! GIVE ME TORNADO! GIVE ME FLOOD! GIVE ME MY POWERFUL ELEMENTAL SPELLS! Let us show the glory of nature's power to the world. But no... we can't have that, because we need to "focus on healing" despite the content clearly not lining up with that, so we get gimped DPS kits and shitty downtime because the devs can't into healer design.

I'm just a SMN main now, basically, but even that's probably going to go out the window too with EW, seeing as once again, a class I just picked up and love is being butchered into a shell of itself, just like what happened with SB AST back when I just started the game.

[Recon1o6]

I got into TEA today, first time ever into that raid in about 18 months give or take and I heard something I hadn't heard in over 3 years: that of two healers discussing their healing options to make the best use of them with the entire raid.
I had to do a double take, and especially when the fresh healer actually said that it was awesome because he had to not use assize during dolls in order to avoid accidentally exploding one. (our dragoon kept blowing his up)

I queried the pair of them later about how it was to heal and both came back saying it was hard but fun since they had to pace out their healing while being able to adjust due to pepsiman's sometimes awkward mechanics. The one who had done more of the fight then clarified that while living liquid is probably the trickiest part all the way to wormhole, then it dips again until you get to perfect alex.


strange to think after mr static breaker's show that the fight goes down to the usual 60% or more is your glare/broil/malefic


It looked fun to heal. I had to go into the hardest fight in the game to find that as of shb.

[ty_taurus]

I got into TEA today, first time ever into that raid in about 18 months give or take and I heard something I hadn't heard in over 3 years: that of two healers discussing their healing options to make the best use of them with the entire raid.
I had to do a double take, and especially when the fresh healer actually said that it was awesome because he had to not use assize during dolls in order to avoid accidentally exploding one. (our dragoon kept blowing his up)

I queried the pair of them later about how it was to heal and both came back saying it was hard but fun since they had to pace out their healing while being able to adjust due to pepsiman's sometimes awkward mechanics. The one who had done more of the fight then clarified that while living liquid is probably the trickiest part all the way to wormhole, then it dips again until you get to perfect alex.


strange to think after mr static breaker's show that the fight goes down to the usual 60% or more is your glare/broil/malefic


It looked fun to heal. I had to go into the hardest fight in the game to find that as of shb.

Now if only that type of experience translated to the rest of the game, even if just to a more relaxed degree.

[Deceptus]

Now if only that type of experience translated to the rest of the game, even if just to a more relaxed degree.

Their point was, even in some of the hardest content, sycned or not, a vast majority of healers time is spent DPSing and not actually healing.

[ty_taurus]

Their point was, even in some of the hardest content, sycned or not, a vast majority of healers time is spent DPSing and not actually healing.

I was referring more to the need to pace out your healing during certain parts and that experience of actually communicating with your cohealer about covering certain aspects. Healing can be really fun when progging tough content, but that engagement falls off over time and through experience.

[MellowMink]

...I'm sad to admit that I haven't played as a healer job for a while now, mainly because I hit my boredom limit with how limited the DPS variety is despite the game currently incentivizing me to DPS for a large majority of most fights. I hope the Sage job addresses that specific concern and ends up becoming my new main job, but I'm still worried about the three existing healer jobs too.

Also, I wanted to respond to a point brought up on the forums earlier that Square Enix may be trying to improve healing requirements specifically for newer Endwalker content... That's absolutely not a substitute on its own if most instances for the main game and three earlier expansions aren't retroactively updated as well, especially with how likely many instance roulettes are with having older content appear. Since it seems extremely unlikely that Square Enix is going to also dramatically increase healing amounts for most of the game's past content, adding more DPS spell variety seems like the easier and more logical solution, with it also being a more fun one in my subjective opinion since I really like trying to optimize damage output alongside healing.

With all due respect to the game's lead designers, their personal philosophy of wanting healers to heal most of the time is fine to internally have, but to also enforce that onto all players (including those who want to do more DPS) without tolerating differing playstyle preferences honestly seems rude to me, and there's the bigger point that it doesn't matter what the designer preferences are if the current gameplay implementation doesn't support said preferences that they want to be subscribed to by all players. Reducing DPS variety alone does not lead to less DPS, only less variety in the same amount of DPS performed; it frustrates me that someone on the development team either doesn't realize that or doesn't seem to care...

I know I sound really pessimistic, and I again hope that the Sage job is really fun for me to play, but I feel like many healers with concerns have been unfairly ignored, and that's troubling to me. Maybe the media tour will reveal more DPS actions for existing jobs that weren't shown during the last live letter's job trailer and slides, but I don't think that's going to happen and don't currently have any reason to believe that's the case.

If any developers or designers do read this, then I thank you for taking the time to do so; I appreciate the hard work you put into the game, and all I really want at this point is at least an acknowledgment of this forum's reasonable concerns. They're shared by many healer (or former healer) friends of mine who don't have forum accounts too.

[Eloah]

I will never stop being a healer, because it is my name, lol. No seriously my name means healer, and by rules of RPG logic I must conform to my fate.