Have we given up on SCH?

[BunnyChain]

First they break it, then fix the most glaring issues. GG, kthxbye.


Healers were their lowest priority since the beginning, because they can't market them apparently. Y'shtola went BLM because being a healer is not cool enough. Can't put a healer on the cover of an expansion, you know! That would be absolutely ridiculous!

[Schan]

Wow you people are getting pretty jaded now o.o

[Lodi]

Wow you people are getting pretty jaded now o.o

For the record...

SCH:
-Merging of two dots
-Removal of unique dot spreader (Bane)
-Replacement of unique aoe dot by generic aoe (Miasma II > Art of War)
-Removal of Fairy!Largesse (Rouse)
-Removal of MP management/aetherflow spender tool (Energy drain)
-Removal of one of the two pets and all its attached abilities

AST:
-Removal of unique buff extenders (Time Dilation & Celestial Opposition)
-Removal of card management tools (Spread & Royal Road)
-Replacement of 26 possible card uses with 1
-Button bloat (Draw turned to Draw & Play, Undraw has litterally no use)
-Disappointing numbers (the healer that requires the most work, and yet is the weakest class in the entire game)

WHM:
-Removal of aoe damage & dot (Aero III)
-Useless skill made even more useless (Fluid Aura)
-Job gauge whose only purpose is to ignore the newly implemented charge system
-Addition of two new skills that are just free and instant cast versions of existing skills (Afflatus Solace & Rapture)
-Continued the tradition of taking a WHM skill and giving it to every healer (Repose)

General:
-Removal of three defensive abilities (Eye for an Eye, Largesse, and Protect.)

And what did we get again...?
Ah yes, a hundredth upgrade to our main spells, identical dots for each class and standardized aoes, so offensive gameplay across all healers is exactly the same now.
Oh, and we got maybe one or two interesting OGCDs.


Yes, I am jaded. My excitement pretty much died when I saw these changes, went back up when playing the story, then died again as soon as I remembered how boring the role has become.
And each passing Live Letter without a single word on healers only comforts me in my decision to stop playing this cursed role.

I wanted to have fun while healing, but apparently SE thinks healing should be as easy and mind-numbing as possible. So be it then, I'll go play something else.

[Saefinn]

Snip

And that's just the changes from SB to ShB. I still miss the days when SCH had 3 single target DoT's, their DPS moves had status effects on them and we had better handicaps to better differentiate how healers felt to play and WHM being the healiest healer actually meant something. And I even miss stance dancing with Cleric Stance.

Only thing we've got back is Energy Drain.

[QooEr]

And what did we get again...?
Ah yes, a hundredth upgrade to our main spells, identical dots for each class and standardized aoes

dont forget AST's "upgrades" to malefic and combust are what they used to be at lv 70 in SB cuz they decided to retroactively nerf all of asts dps since lv 1 for absolutely no reason.

also the new standarized aoes were also a huge nerf for holy and gravity, because apparently not taking forever in dungeons is a bad thing

[Deceptus]

Wow you people are getting pretty jaded now o.o

I became jaded when my DPS rotation boiled down to one dot and one filler spell from lvl 4 to lvl 80. That's boring AF.

It's one of the main reasons I hardly ever play AST. I know other AST's and they wouldn't wish their pre ShB dps rotation on anyone.

It's beyond clear after 6 years that the Developers either:

A) Have no idea what to do with healers / balance them properly.

B) Don't care to balance them properly.

Either option is equally bad.

And then people wonder why no one plays healers and there are is an extreme healer shortage in endgame content.

[Gemina]

I became jaded when my DPS rotation boiled down to one dot and one filler spell from lvl 4 to lvl 80. That's boring AF.

It's one of the main reasons I hardly ever play AST. I know other AST's and they wouldn't wish their pre ShB dps rotation on anyone.

It's beyond clear after 6 years that the Developers either:

A) Have no idea what to do with healers / balance them properly.

B) Don't care to balance them properly.

Either option is equally bad.

And then people wonder why no one plays healers and there are is an extreme healer shortage in endgame content.

I don't think it's either because healers are more balanced now than they've ever been. People just seem quick to think otherwise because they're bored, salty, w/e. Did the devs homogenize them in order to accomplish this balance? Yeah, they did, and I feel it was necessary because what they were working with was a total mess of six years fiddling around with healers instead of actually dissecting what was wrong with them. What was crystal clear to me, was healers like SCH were very far from their vision of the role, while WHM was closer to it.

The issue is encounter design gives healers a ton of downtime. The conundrum is the devs don't want to fill this time by giving healers a more complex DPS arsenal, or a true rotation, but they also don't want to change up encounter design to give them more to do. In this sense, I can totally understand why healers are frustrated. But when your answer to the problem is, "Give me more DPS skills", or if healers want to continue to focus on their DPS "rotation" as the elephant in the room, I can say with a lot of confidence that your focus differs from where the dev team is placing theirs, and your continued disappointment is imminent.

This does not mean I think healing is just fine, because it's not. The main point however is a lack of DPS skills is hardly the cause of the problems we have and more like a symptom of poor encounter design. To just give healers more DPS skills is to sweep the problem right under the rug and head right back to where we were before ShB, and that's not going to happen.

[Deceptus]

I don't think it's either because healers are more balanced now than they've ever been..

Balance doesn't equal fun. Right now healers are boring.

The issue is encounter design gives healers a ton of downtime. The conundrum is the devs don't want to fill this time by giving healers a more complex DPS arsenal, or a true rotation, but they also don't want to change up encounter design to give them more to do.

This is exactly right. The stated developer vision is to make healers more healing focused but they're not willing to change the battle design to meet that vision. IMHO, that goes back to developer competency. You can't say you want to do something and completely fail to do it. Not partially fail, they have completely failed their stated vision.

Healers today are doing almost exactly the same amount of GCD's healing as they did before, just now their dps rotation is boring. If SE doesn't make healers buffers / debuffers their only other option during downtime is to do damage.

But when your answer to the problem is, "Give me more DPS skills", or if healers want to continue to focus on their DPS "rotation" as the elephant in the room, I can say with a lot of confidence that your focus differs from where the dev team is placing theirs, and your continued disappointment is imminent.

Personally I think they need to shift healer downtime from dpsing to buffing / debuffing.

[Gemina]

Not partially fail, they have completely failed their stated vision.

Healers today are doing almost exactly the same amount of GCD's healing as they did before, just now their dps rotation is boring. If SE doesn't make healers buffers / debuffers their only other option during downtime is to do damage.



Personally I think they need to shift healer downtime from dpsing to buffing / debuffing.

I wouldn't say completely failed. I am much more inclined to say that they are working on it, but in order to get healing where it needs to be, homogenization of our healers was necessary. Wipe the slate clean so to speak to have fresh ground to work on. It is still early into the expansion and if anyone thought they would get healing right out of the gate or even by 5.1 might be new to the game, or otherwise unaware of how things have worked in FFXIV historically.

Two months in now, the dev team should have solid data from not only savage, but content outside of it to start making some decisions. Player feedback is important as well, and they do take it in when it is constructive and not whiny rants filled with 'I' statements. I just think we really need to stop demonizing the dev team as far as healing goes. They are not sitting in recliners, smoking cigars laughing at the misery. They want to get it right to where it fits their vision and is also fun and engaging for players. It is just really difficult because of the way encounters have been designed since early 2.0.

[Schan]

I became jaded when my DPS rotation boiled down to one dot and one filler spell from lvl 4 to lvl 80. That's boring AF.

snip

And then people wonder why no one plays healers and there are is an extreme healer shortage in endgame content.

It's fine and understandable to be frustrated and upset over the changes. It's not fine to ooze sarcasm and demonize the devs and starting to spit vitriol (not saying that you are in this particular instance).
It's fine to complain and list the issues the jobs have. it's not fine to

"just keep taking the punches, they'll MAYBE stop and pat you on the head a year or two down the line"

No. Complain. Some form of feedback is reaching them be it by number crunching ( which is what companies rely on heavily) or what the community managers tell them (apparently they sit around reading stuff and making reports). It's their choice to take it on board or not. We must not be completely jaded. On the flip side we are very good at listing problems but not as good at listing solutions and even then I doubt they would look into the English forums for that. Futhermore even when people list their ideas there are several people for or against them just in the forums (which is a tiny sample of the population) so how can they figure out which ones are ideas that will be accepted by the majority of players?

I am particularly sad with the lack of communication but then again there is a lot of stuff to fix this expansion and technically healers were part of the urgent priorities of "stuff to fix" once the expansion rolled out. It's not what people wanted but the tweaks are there and they did help.

I don't mean dev shifting goal posts. Goal post shifting is what people do when the point of their argument hasn't been proven when a goal post set is hit, so they move the goal post and tend to ad infinitum.

Well that's nice and dandy except for the fact that this is a forum. I would agree with you if you meant a person is goal post shifting but applying that to a whole community with different expectations is a bit too much and for me on an argumentative point of view has no value.
What I do is try something out, complain, hope my complaints are part of the majority that are reaching the devs' ears. If it is, cool. If it isn't I need to deal with the fact that my opinion was part of a minority and I need to suck it up.

I'm not down with the "clean slate" theory because that basically means we're just a beta test over the course of years to develop the role so that in 7.x it might feel complete.

I mean... as an online game it will never be complete because otherwise they wouldn't be able to give us more content. Cuz you know... it's complete.