A summary of healer issues

[Deceptus]

The attitude was much the same before 5.0. Everyone said, "wait until the release..." And, well we had no choice but to wait. It then become very clear healers were just as bad as we expected. Going into 6.0--I feel it's either going to be just as bad or even worse. Sadly, build 4.0 healers (the best we've had so far) will never return so long as Yoshi is part of the discussion. He's worked hard to change healing healing into a homogenized, 1-dimensional affair.

For the past two expansions the same situation has played out:

1) It's just the patch notes, wait until you actually play it
2) It's just early access / beginning, wait until you hit max level
3) It's just max level, wait until you get gear
4) You're geared, but you're clearly playing it wrong.
5) 6-12 months down the road after tons of negative feedback, SE offhandedly acknowledges it and promises a "rework" for the Xth time at the next expansion.

[Liam_Harper]

The attitude was much the same before 5.0. Everyone said, "wait until the release..." And, well we had no choice but to wait. It then become very clear healers were just as bad as we expected. Going into 6.0--I feel it's either going to be just as bad or even worse.

I don't get what people who comment "wait until release" base it on either. There has been no sign at all that they've listened to the feedback or plan to make significant changes. The few comments they've made bring up concerns rather than relief.

-"We hear feedback that healers don't have enough to heal so we increased damage" - The result following this was e12s needed more healing but E9-11s were easy. Normal was mind-numbingly easy. Alliances were easy. EX was being solo healed.
-"We want you to use Aetherflow to heal more" - Changed nothing except increased Ruin II weave tax and made Dissipation a joke. Still nothing to heal.

AST reworks simply made AST ridiculously OP. Piety still worthless outside of prog. WHM still clipping. SCH pet still ghosting. Still no sign of a healer designer on the team. Sage showcase only had an aoe and single target nuke. No dev comment at all so far on making dps kits more engaging.

Where does the faith in the devs come from?

[Raminax]

Where does the faith in the devs come from?

From, what I'd assume, hobby/casual healers. I don't want to sound like a crazy going "No True Scotsman" or "Gray parsers lel", but...

They don't care about White Mages clipping out their ass, because they don't care to play at a level of 95% or higher activity rate.

They don't care about the Energy Drain nerfs, because they don't care to plan out their Aetherflow usage - just pop Indomitability or Sacred Soil immediately upon raid damage.

They don't believe Astrologians are busted, because they don't care to go particularly deep on any analysis - tooltips show that they sorta have the same-ish potencies and MP costs as the other healers? Look, balanced!

They believe healing requirements are just fine, because they don't have the energy to map out the fight's timeline to see that, yes, you can get away with murder on nearly all of them.

Like, I'm personally under no illusion that I'm a god tier gamer myself, but being a teensy bit of a tryhard shows me that there's a lot of apparent issues. And while I understand we can't balance everything around Savage or Ultimate levels of tuning, I genuinely don't understand why Squeenix has this irrational fear of healers having some sort of skill expression or risk of failure. Why is it that the tank role can get a slide with the message of "Results may vary depending on player skill.", while the figurative message that healers seem to be getting is "Don't be sad, we'll make it impossible for you to mess up!"?

Edit: Might come off as unnecessarily agressive - I don't mean to be elitist or any such. Not wanting to play at tryhard level is fine, but I do feel that Squeenix seems to especially cater to people completely uninterested in healing.

[Allegor]

true stuff

I'm a casual player and agree that healers (WHM specially) are too....childproof, to put it mildly. I think they work under the notion that nobody wants to play a healer, but it's still an essential raid slot.

GNB is popular supposedly because it feels like playin a DPS, rather than a tank. Why can't healers get the same treatment is beyond me.

[Deceptus]

Where does the faith in the devs come from?

Longtime players of this game know the devs aren't infallible. They do listen, they're just extremely slow to act and at times completely misread the playerbase.

As I've said before in ARR and HW WE, the players, were literally told we were playing the jobs wrong despite providing mountains of feedback.

ARR Warrior, we were playing it wrong. Despite the job not being able to tank properly

HW Bard, Bow Mage, we were playing it wrong. Despite using the cast ability barely increased dps while making them stationary.

[currentlemon]

snip

So basically, the devs are just stubborn as hell or they completely misjudge the situation and make a bad decision based on their misjudgment. Huh. While it is irritating that the devs never seem to learn from their mistakes when it comes to job design, it does get me somewhat hopeful that they realize what they did to the healer jobs was wrong and will work to fix things in 6.0. But I'm still expecting the worst.

[EthanMoonkin]

Great post. Commenting to increase thread activity and thus hopefully views from devs. I share almost all the same frustrations.

[Derio]

OP pretty sums it up very nicely. I choose to play WHM over the other 2 healers simply because WHM dps kit is slightly better than the others. AST and SCH just feel gutted and extremly boring.

I hope they do something but at this point I doubt it. Healers will still be spamming their one button ability. Not sure if JP players are happy with the state of healing.

[Acece]

They have doubled down on bad design in ShB, at least the redesigns updates. So having no faith in them now completely makes sense. Tbh I don't know how casual oriented people play but after coming back a year later and seeing healers change mostly for the worst is kind of mind boggling.
After about a month of not doing any savage I'm kind of at a lost of what would you do as a casual healer to think that healing is fine as is. In most content you're spamming your nuke/aoe and maybe pressing a gcd heal to help a mistake (that is of course if they use their full move set). So having a intensive healing kit does almost nothing fun wise for you. I really just want to have a "dps rotation" so my brain doesn't decay while playing healers
I'm joining up a static again to see if I can clear the raid tier so I can at least see how heal intensive e12s is because the first and second tier was boring as a healer.

[Recon1o6]

Tbh the only reason I'm expecting sage to be in a better position than the other 3 healers is because its made of the other 3 AND its a new job so they will attempt to make its gameplay slightly more engaging as part of marketing, thats why gunbreaker being dps esque is so popular- because it plays different from the other tanks while being highest dps for optimisers