Every problem with the current iteration of healers.

[Billythepancake]

I think it's fair to say that many of us here on the forums, myself included, are unhappy and upset over the current iteration of healers. I know there are several threads talking about healer issues already, but my goal is to put every single healer issue into one thread and not have them split onto separate threads.

A couple of things that I do ask though:
Please be specific, don't just say something along the lines of "healers are boring now and I don't like them", not saying I disagree with such a statement, but it doesn't tell me anything, tell me why you don't like healers right now, be as clear and detailed as you can. Tell me about specific classes as well, tell me why SCH is boring, why AST sucks, and, especially, WHMs I want to hear specifics as to WHY WHM isn't as good as people want to think it is. I also ask when you tell me a problem, give me a solution as well, tell me what can be done to fix it.

Second point: please do not use this thread as a means of debates with others, I believe there are plenty of threads where people on both sides have argued with each other. I'm asking you here to talk to me, and only to me. If someone responds to you, or you see they respond to someone else, just ignore it. I can think of one person in particular that will attempt to bring toxicity to this thread and try to turn it into something that it isnt. If that does happen, just ignore and move on, I don't want a snowball effect.

Last point: if you have any positives, I want to hear those as well. As much as I dont enjoy the current healers myself, I'd be remiss to say that they messed up everything, and I have positives to say myself. Tell me, and again only me, what some of these positives are, what draws you to your healing class? Again, do be specific, I want details.

I want every healers perspective, but as a scholar main myself, I'm most interested in what AST and especially WHM have to say, because I know what the issues with SCH are by heart, but I'm not as well versed in the other two.

[YusiKha]

Most of all what I find is that there’s a large disconnect with our kits as a whole. Very few things interact with each other aside from gating a resource, and the things that do interact have the same consequence (ie aetherflow healing giving more healing via the fey gauge, horoscope proccing healing from more healing).
As well as several underwhelming interactions (only union and blessing using gauge) and straight up un-interactions (Seraph can’t use blessing, union, or be dissipated, neutral Sect only affects GCDs)

We don’t really have an incentive to use our entire healing kit outside of getting more DPS spells out in a fight, which has been made boring by reducing the thought required.

[Lodi]

Why I play healer (in general):

I want to be a fighter like everyone else, while making the group's health my responsibility. That's what I do in most games, I want to be part of the fight and at the same time take care of my teammates.
It's a balance between offense and support that I absolutely love to practice, because it feels rewarding to be a good support while actively partaking in a fight.


Why I don't want to play healer anymore in FFXIV:

1- Too much healing downtime, and too predictable damage. WAY too much. To the point where even in savages I'll spend 75% of my time just mindlessly attacking.

2- A ridiculously simple damage rotation, that doesn't change with my level. I end up pressing the same button over and over, from level 1 to 80.

3- Disappointing levelups. Every content plays the same except the higher it is, the more healing OGCDs I have, the less GCD healing I need to do, the more time I spend pressing the same button.

4- Being told to deal with it by everyone. Players telling us our healing kit is fine even though we want more dps skills. Devs pushing changes on us without asking, and then blatantly ignoring us when we try to offer feedback.

5- As YusiKha above mentioned, absolutely no synergies between our skills, and little originality. We could use them all in a random order and get the same results everytime, and everything is a variant of ST heal or AOE heal, with perhaps added regen or shields.

[FIDOISHERE]

All healers are lacking in this current expansion. they wanted us to heal more but they didn't get the entirety of each healers kit just right for this type of change. YES the can all heal just fine. scholar being an odd ball needing a potency change on a couple things but its still relatively easy.

White mage Personally speaking they've got it all besides party buffs. the damage is great. the Healing is great. what they do need however and which i feel like the only real problems are. they need more Party support. and the lilies need to be taken off GCD, and there needs to be other ways to expend their extra lilies if they want to use their blood lily faster and or want to use one before the gauge resets.

Simply put lets get another party based buff may it be single or AOE and the cost of a lily. why type of buff im not entirely sure its hard to provide a buff with how the current balance of the healers are and how the Damage dealers get more damage. i don't want to offset the balance even further here. the only thing that keeps coming to mind is some sort of single target Player buff that gives a small damage reduction buff. that or maybe just get a DoT out of it. nothing crazy maybe like a 15-20 second one.

God i don't know where to start on these other two without someone flipping a tit or two.

[FIDOISHERE]

Astro's Healing is actually pretty good. it feels great. it feels rewarding almost. what they currently lack is MP regen for their shield stance which takes a lot out of them and even if they want to contribute with Damage dealing. their current reworks of cards does not need a reversal. We are intended to heal more thus less damage from us healers as a whole handing out a card thats always a Damage buff is need not just a want. However in saying this. the card system feels a bit clunky. and the redraw mechanic and trying to optimize your divination is NOT fun. its a chore. they are way to occupied with their cards half the time trying to get the most out of them.

so what needs to be done? simple. some gentleman had a great idea over in the Astrologian thread in terms of a Solar, Lunar and Celestial draw method having more control over the cards you can draw. while they share recast timers. this guy has the right idea. because you can still get all 3 Symbols going for AOE buffs, this might be the possible best way to get the old card buffs back. but they said they wont bring them back.. so.. lets try and slam an idea on the table. i think the new draw idea from ty_taurus (#559 post over in http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...cussion/page56 good suggestion imo) should be used. 1 its still more control then we currently have. 2 we need different playing methods. Spire and Ewer should give mana back flat out, Balance and Spear should give a critical buff, Bole and arrow should be healing based (kinda the same from his post but just less added effects) . 1 this gives control to us if we need an extra spot heal at a moments notice or if we need mana back BAD, then the crit buff is an added bonus. we still get our symbols set for divination while we play our cards differently for that damage buff. i wish i could come up with better names rather then call it Defensive play and Offensive play. Defensive play giving all of the effects i mentioned earlier while Offensive play gives Astrologians other options for instant/Free cast Attacks. just like the old Lord card did. Spire and Ewer Should be Celestial strike for single target, Balance and spear Solar burn for a Dot, Bole and Arrow Lunar burst for AOE.

IMO, i think that would fix things if not definitely what ty_taurus said in his post.

[FIDOISHERE]

As for Scholar.. For being the weaker healer for healing and more shield based. they are lacking the healing potency in many areas, as well as the dps front being being a lil clunky and risky and easily punishable toward their healing. the fairies are pointless the potency heal of embrace is too low, yes its a perm Regen bascially. but their AOE regen does not compare to WHM or AST and their single target regen.

their dps kit took a hit. which im not too mad about. but they also took away the fairy kit which we have less to do then they nerfed the hell out of the fairy heal trying to make us heal with already weaker healing kit...

Weaker heals, Less support abilites, less Dps, all around undertuned.

give them miasma 2 back, make it cost a aether flow stack, cooldown 30 seconds. make it a burst on hit then let it leave a dot behind AOE. boom more damage another dot all in one. also make it ranged casted not close.

Fairies...

keep 1 get rid of the other for /glamour summon. or turn Selene into a DD fairy that attacks when you do like the Trance summons from smn. nothing over tuned just simple dot based damage to go with your broils or ED's ruin 2's let her use the same fairy skills having the same effects.

Embrace needs a potency buff to keep up with the current content. 3k is not enough 5k is plenty. so 150 to 200/250?

We need the AOE esuna back and AOE quicken, if possible the silence (im not fussed about that one though..) make the cooldowns longer. have them cost fairy gauge. let us spend the gauge on some thing else rather than aetherpact and blessing.


physic just needs a 50 potency buff and it'll be fine.

i feel like getting just those small changes will make scholar feel better that fairy potency increase and physic alone is enough to keep the tank up a bit longer and getting the extra fairy skills back will let us expend out gauge more during boss fights. the DD selene idea is very unlikely but it adds a full time DoT to our kit with still being able to use the fairy skills letting us adjust to more damage if need be and it dosen't risk us not being able to do our jobs.


however a lot of this is my opinion.. and i think others can make a better worded/shorter posts with either the same if not much better idea's. personally i feel like this is whats wrong with them and what i think can help by not going too far back and not going too far out of SE's vision of healers right now.

[kartana]

Lodi summed it up pretty well.

Too much scripted damage output, which leads to:
Not enough to heal. And a
Simple damage rotation which doesn't make up for it.

[Wawachume]

Scholar

I never really cared that much about pets, and while I like shield healing it wasn't what drew me to the class. What really made me like scholar was a) having a tool for every situation and b) the interplay between aetherflow, damage, and heals.

The latter has been largely, though not entirely, restored via the return of energy drain, so I'm mostly okay there. Though I would like out-of-combat aetherflow back. I feel like that change was made to benefit raids at the expense of dungeons.

As for having a tool for every situation...okay, here's the thing. I love how FFXIV gives me powerful heals so I can make a difference in a fight, where other games give me little piddly heals that make me play catch-up the whole time. But when you have overpowered heals, you also have downtime that gets filled with DPS, and you need some interesting damage skills if you're not going to become intolerably bored.

Right now, I think SCH now has too many heals and not enough damage spells. I have sacred soil, an overpowered regen bubble that seems like it belongs on white mage, and fey blessing, yet another oGCD AoE heal. Meanwhile, I spend too much of the fight using my three DPS skills, none of which is particularly interesting.

What I want is bane back. Bane was the perfect scholar spell, because it let you deal with a particular situation ("How do I get all these DoTs out without the tank dying?") using a highly specific ability.

If I could have my second DoT back in addition to bane, I would even be happy to lose art of war. Would it weaken scholar DPS? Quite possibly. But it would weaken it in an interesting way. Where WHM and AST spam nukes for their AoE, SCH would put out DoTs and let them tick. It would give strategy and reliability at the expense of raw power, which is kind of a scholar thing.

So I guess I'm happier with scholar at the moment than a lot of scholar mains. I just want bane, my extra DoT, and out-of-combat aetherflow.

Also, I kind of hate the new broil 3 and biolysis animations, which look like they came out of an Allagan facility. I want my Nymian and biological themes back.

White Mage

I almost don't want to comment on white mage, because I feel like I haven't played it enough, and I don't want to give suggestions that mess things up for the people who do play it. But there's been concern about white mage being left out of these discussions, so I'll just say two things.

First, I think a lot of healer balance issues have been caused by SE's unsuccessful attempts to balance personal DPS against rDPS, which appears to be impossible. Either white mage needs a group damage buff, or scholar and astrologian need to lose theirs. I couldn't care less which it is; I just think this issue is screwing things up and needs to be dealt with once and for all.

Second, I don't know what these "dia" and "glare" things are. Where are my rocks? I want to throw rocks. And also wind. The conjurer theme appeals to me more than the holy one.

Astrologian

My problem with astrologian in Shadowbringers is that it feels like a DPS class.

For me, healing in MMORPGs is about problem-solving, resource-management, and situational decision-making. You choose the right spells for the right situation, and there are so many considerations that you have to do it with fuzzy---i.e., intuitive---thinking.

For DPS classes, the job is simpler ("kill this thing"), so complexity is added via interaction between spells ("rotation"). This is more predictable and less situational, so it requires deductive rather than intuitive thinking.

The new card system feels like a DPS mechanic. Where Stormblood had card abilities, Shadowbringers has a card rotation. The object is no longer to choose the right card for the right situation, but to quickly execute abilities in the proper sequence. And that just isn't why I play healer.

Also, nocturnal astrologian feels weak to me. Its overpowered shields are a band-aid, trying unsuccessfully to hide the fact that the class lacks the tools scholar has (high mana regen, some direct heals) to compensate for the weaknesses of a shield healer.

[Nimloth]

I really like the idea of this thread, since it's trying to compound all of the issues into one place. I main a Noct AST and play it in savage, so I'm going to give my perspective from that point of view. I've posted some of these thoughts on other threads, but I'll restate them for this thread.

Currently, the major sticking point in AST is the current iteration of the card system. To be honest, I don't necessarily hate the new system, but I feel like the old system was more developed. For example, Sleeve Draw in the current system produces three cards in a queue which require the use of the "Play" oGCDs to resolve. Unfortunately, outside of lightspeed, this means that you need to squeeze these oGCDs in between your heals and spells one at a time. This becomes a problem when you need to use a healing oGCD, because you have to make the decision to either use the queued up card from Sleeve Draw or use the oGCD heal. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but the goal is to fish for the correct seals, so this creates a dynamic where you are using more oGCDs to try to align seals correctly or to convert the card into a minor arcana. It's extremely difficult to resolve sleeve draw without clipping a GCD, which makes the ability feel extremely clunky to use.

As to how I would correct it: I realize that some people may disagree with this opinion, but I think sleeve draw should apply a missing seal that you currently don't have. Then the cards produced by the ability should all be converted into minor arcana before they are drawn. This results in Sleeve Draw only taking 4 oGCDs to resolve with the application of a missing seal, which would make resolving these oGCDs completely reasonable in a 30-second window before draw comes off CD. The missing seal would help during openers in raids where you pre-draw before a pull, play the card, draw and play another card, then use Sleev Drawe. The change to Sleeve Draw would result in the missing seal being applied, which would ensure that divination going out for it's full value. I think this reasonable considering the ability is on a 180 second CD.

The second issue I have with the card system lies in playing each card individually; this requires a lot of clicking and can be taxing in raid situation. The move to a single card system has caused me to move my Play ability to 4 different macros, which plays cards to people in my 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th spots in my party list. I think it's a bit ridiculous that so many macros are needed to play cards to each individual person without manually targeting them. That being said, with the current iteration of the card system, I have no idea how to fix this without restructuring the entire card system.

The third issue I have is divination's short radius, for an ability that is on a 2 minute CD timer and results in a good chunk of our rDPS 15y is way too short for the ability. I think extending the radius to 30y would be more than enough to alleviate my concerns.

My fourth issue lies with Nocturnal ATS use of Aspected Benefic under the duration of Neutral Sect. Currently, Neutral Sect provides shields and regeneration despite what stance you are in. However, Aspected Benefic remains at 1000 MP for Nocturnal AST and 500 MP for Diurnal AST, meaning despite both stances having access to heals and shields, Nocturnal still pays more for the same benefit. The resolution to this would be to reduce the MP of Aspected Benefic to 500MP for Nocturnal AST under the duration of Neutral Sect.

My final issue is with MP generation. Currently, WHMs and SCHs have access to MP regeneration outside of Lucid Dreaming in the forms of Assize and Aetherflow/Energy Drain respectively. With the exception of Energy Drain, these abilities are frequently used as soon as they come off CD. AST has no form of MP regeneration outside of Lucid Dream, unfortunately, this means MP issues have happened to me a few times. This can be resolved by simply allowing Celestial Opposition or Draw to restore MP in a way that makes it equal to amount restored by WHMs


Moving on to the things I like

I've really enjoyed healing, it feels really good to setup Earthly Star and Horoscope to get value out of them later. AST is all about knowing when and where to setup up your ability, which results in very rewarding healing gameplay. Celestial Intersection gives us a nice little healing bump that is a free healing ability. Synastry is getting a lot of use in this
tier with the double tank busters, which makes it pretty valuable.

Outside of the issues above, I really enjoy playing the class, you always have the feeling that you are doing something, even though the cards are extremely weak now.

[GideonHighmourn]

AST healing feels *okay*, but the cards/card system doesn't feel rewarding enough. Overall, AST requires much higher APM than SCH/WHM for too similar a result, IMO. Also, MP management feels rather lacking for AST.

WHM feels much more polished and complete than it did before. WHM rewards efficient planning of lily usage with higher personal DPS while lowering MP usage. Still no rDPS utility, however, I'm alright with that position and don't expect it to change given the history of WHM and direction they took it with the new lily system.

I haven't played SCH enough to warrant having an opinion at this point.

Overall, though, healers seem "balanced" but not in a way that leaves any of them feeling unique. They're all way too similar at this point in terms of rotation/CDs. Also, as the number of oGCD healing options steadily increases, the amount of GCD healing required steadily declines; this leads to an increased amount of downtime that's now filled with an all-too-simple spam. While I don't see this changing at all in 5.0, I really hope that 6.0 will see a new resurgence in healer gameplay that results in more engaging class mechanics.

Healing potency in general is incredibly over-inflated, IMO. We pull wall-to-wall groups in dungeons and still barely have to heal outside of oGCDs. SE could slash healing potencies by half across the board and we'd still have plenty of healing downtime. Honestly, until healing actually obtains some modicum of difficulty, anything short of a complete restructure of the way healer class mechanics works wouldn't result in much changing.