A summary of healer issues

[Roeshel]

The funny thing is that, in the past, Yoshi-P and his crew would vehemently disagree with you. At least according to a particular slide.

Then again, what room do I have to trust what they say and write anymore, considering where we are now.

If they really said that Fun > Balance they must have been joking. It is completely irrational statement to make for a game. Lack of balance leads to very frustrating situations. People in general don't have fun when there is no balance. It is only the very small minority who are going praise an unbalanced state of the game as something better than the more balanced state of the game. Boring gameplay is actually far less detrimental than the lack of balance. At least they got their priorities straight in Shb.

[HollyJolly]

I kinda disagree. I like to have another healer in raids because I'm not sure I know what I'm doing in most of them.

In the lower level ones I can get hit and still live, but the higher ones I might die and then I'd need another healer to help me.

I also don't want to do damage. I want to do healing. Thats why I made a white mage first so I could do healing instead of damage.

If ur a healer and want to do damage then I dunno they could make a job that does both better, but I just want to do healing.

Maybe they can make more damage so I can just do healing stuff. Ya the solo duty and quest was kinda long, but after my white mage I did a monk and it was so damn hard I gave up on it and didn't level it up until more than a year.

I just want to do healing. Why are you telling them to make me do damage. Stop speaking for me I just want to do healing when I play a healer.

[BaconBits]

That's nice and all, except every single class in this game is a dps in some way, shape, or form.

Tanks are just beefy blue dps that can take tankbusters without melting like a snowcone on a hot summer day, and have more defensive cooldowns than anyone else. Their responsibilities are making sure enemies aren't running rampant, facing bosses with fat cleaves away from the party, and not eating vuln stacks like candy off the ground.

DPS are DPS, their only responsibilities are not eating aoes like an all you can eat buffet, and executing their rotations with more competency than your average chimpanzee. Any buffs and/or debuffs they make use of should be looked at as a bonus, because a distressingly large amount of DPS players won't even glance at stuff like feint/addle, and getting a summoner to sacrifice their swiftcast to resurrect someone is like pulling a tooth out of a baby.

Healers are of course green DPS, but with a "rotation" so mind numbingly dull it's insulting. Apply dot, spam nuke for 30 seconds, reapply dot, spam nuke for 30 more seconds, repeat until the heat death of the universe. Sure, their primary responsibility is to keep the party alive and kicking, provided said party isn't doing their absolute best to leap into an early grave. But once you're sure they're not going to die within a nanosecond of breaking eye contact from their health bar, then what? Do you just stand there with your thumb plugged firmly up your rear and do some good old fashion Bee's Knee's? Or do you go back to throwing rocks at the enemy like an ornery school kid? If you pick the first option, I will not hesitate to Dragon Kick your rump into the Milky Way, and out of my party.

[Recon1o6]

I just want to do healing. Why are you telling them to make me do damage. Stop speaking for me I just want to do healing when I play a healer.

What else do you do when there is no need to heal that contributes to beating the encounter? You can't heal your way past a dps check which this game is filled with.

Furthermore, if you do the hall of the novice which is the tutorial, even the game says throw in damage as a healer.

As you get more skilled at healing and learn the fights more, you need to heal less because you know your kit better and you don't need to watch out for as many mechanics because you know how to solve them and avoid death.

You don't ask a tank to just sit there pushing no buttons after getting aggro with his tank stance on. So you shouldn't sit there as a healer waiting for a hp bar to drop. Do some damage.


Finally, my very first problem that I mentioned in the thread was that there's a lack of dps buttons. If more dps buttons were added, you wouldn't be any further obligated to push them. But while they are not there, the majority of us that do damage while healing feel their absence, particularly when all 3 healer jobs were able to use them. Plus they make the solo duties faster and more entertaining

[Irenia]

If they really said that Fun > Balance they must have been joking. It is completely irrational statement to make for a game. Lack of balance leads to very frustrating situations. People in general don't have fun when there is no balance. It is only the very small minority who are going praise an unbalanced state of the game as something better than the more balanced state of the game. Boring gameplay is actually far less detrimental than the lack of balance. At least they got their priorities straight in Shb.

I disagree. Enjoyment is king, but balance, or lack thereof, can impact that. And for each person, the degree of this impact is different. This is the dilemma in game design; each person has their own criteria.

On the other hand, your statement reads odd to me; making it seem like you would rather play a balanced game you are lukewarm on than an unbalanced one you otherwise enjoy. After all, I would not spend any time on a game that I did not enjoy, even if it is the most balanced.

Did you mean your enjoyment comes mostly from balance? How do you feel about the game's need to add new jobs each expansion, since that mere act makes things less balanced? Don't mean to sound aggressive, it's just this idea is truly baffling me.

[Liam_Harper]

If ur a healer and want to do damage then I dunno they could make a job that does both better, but I just want to do healing.

I'm a healer that wants to be useful. Damage is useful. Overhealing is useless. Simple as that.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I kinda disagree. I like to have another healer in raids because I'm not sure I know what I'm doing in most of them.

In the lower level ones I can get hit and still live, but the higher ones I might die and then I'd need another healer to help me.

I mean is it really the end of the day? Wipes means you have something you can learn and get better. Surely players are not staying incompetent from day 01 & never improve, aren’t they?

I also don't want to do damage. I want to do healing. Thats why I made a white mage first so I could do healing instead of damage.

Sylphie?

If ur a healer and want to do damage then I dunno they could make a job that does both better, but I just want to do healing.

Maybe they can make more damage so I can just do healing stuff. Ya the solo duty and quest was kinda long, but after my white mage I did a monk and it was so damn hard I gave up on it and didn't level it up until more than a year.

Sure. First SE needs to ramp up the incoming damage & add some randomness to encounter so that I can be more wary & actually use all these healing spells that I almost never press. That’s the least they can do to make me heal more alongside my co-healer.

Second, if they want to get rid of our damage spells, then get rid of damage requirement from our job quests…. Oops! Can’t do that either! We still have MSQ which are shared across all jobs! No dps means no clear! How I wish my Cure II can damage enemies now!?

Fun aside: I too, like healing. But effectively it’s a team game. Overheals doesn’t help my party; 1 extra Glare/Broil/Malefic does, and the more I can squeeze it in, the faster the encounter will end and the less healing -you-, my cohealer, need to throw out. Win-win, isn’t it?

I just want to do healing. Why are you telling them to make me do damage. Stop speaking for me I just want to do healing when I play a healer.

Yep, definitely Sylphie.
They are the reason why I deliberately leave most of the ‘lower lv raid/trials’ cohealer solo heal their way through. Sometimes even the ‘high lv ones’ . I.e. What am I supposed to do when they choose to overtop my Whispering Dawn with their Plenary-buffed Medica II + Asylums? Cast more Succor? Nah no. Next time raidwides happens I’ll just Broil away. They wanna heal? I’ll let them do that. I personally don’t like to play the ”Who gets to heal more!?”-game.

[AngeliouxRein]

@Holly

You…might be better off on the general forums where there is two other people that states they also only want to heal but refuse to acknowledge all the changes that would be needed for this playstyle to properly exist in this game.

I’m not sure what game, or if there is one, that healer mains like you are coming from where you only healed but I’ve never played a game where healers only healed. Hell the first mmorpg I played, the healers were ice mages with only two heals. One aoe and the other a single target. That was it. This is the first time I’ve seen healers with an unnecessary amount of heal spells. Speaks even louder volumes when even raiders that main healers STILL complain they have nothing to do unless they do a specific fight.

[ASkellington]

I kinda disagree. I like to have another healer in raids because I'm not sure I know what I'm doing in most of them.

In the lower level ones I can get hit and still live, but the higher ones I might die and then I'd need another healer to help me.

I also don't want to do damage. I want to do healing. Thats why I made a white mage first so I could do healing instead of damage.

If ur a healer and want to do damage then I dunno they could make a job that does both better, but I just want to do healing.

Maybe they can make more damage so I can just do healing stuff. Ya the solo duty and quest was kinda long, but after my white mage I did a monk and it was so damn hard I gave up on it and didn't level it up until more than a year.

I just want to do healing. Why are you telling them to make me do damage. Stop speaking for me I just want to do healing when I play a healer.

I also want to do healing when I play a healer. The thing is though, when I get good at my healing class there is not enough healing to justify what I want to do. Its as simple as that. Healing every 1hp missing or one block is just as boring as spamming our 1 button nuke.

I want to correctly use EXOG here cause if I use it too late or too early its not gonna be up when I need it. I want to rely on using Regen/Aspected Benefict to heal the tank from the last tank buster cause I need Benediction/ED a few seconds down the line. This, is what I mean when I say I want to be a healer. This is not how the game plays. The game plays to where you can pretty much heal in w/e order you'd like with malms of leeway to the point where instead of being forced to use a gcd, your oGCD is already up and ready instead of still being on CD. Ergo, if you know your oGCD is going to heal how it needs to cause the next raid wide is too far away to actually care do you either

A. Stand there and wait for said raid wide

or

B. Do damage

There is not enough outgoing damage to justify doing nothing but healing.

[Lyth]

...

I think the reason why balance matters so much is because players are torn between playing what they know provides more value to their team, while simultaneously wanting to play a job with gameplay/aesthetics that they are attracted to. I think that there's a middle ground that you need to strike between making jobs feel unique, while also giving them the capability of solving the same set of problems (ideally in unique ways).

The other issue that crops up is that players just get tired of seeing the same comps being used in skilled play expansion after expansion with the same interdependencies. Heavensward was particularly bad for this. Pretty much every comp was running WAR/SCH/NIN/DRG, and the remaining four slots didn't have that much variability in them either. Ranged demanded a DRG. Tanks demanded a NIN. NIN demanded a WAR. And so on. And this game is incredibly slow to make balance adjustments, so if something is grossly unbalanced you pretty much have to put up for it for the next two years. That's why it's so important for them to get it right at the start of an expansion.

To make things worse, there are a couple of jobs that have been kicking around since ARR that are just consistently on top because they've been grandfathered into a bunch of advantages, and there's a very vocal playerbase that gets real, real mad if you try to take those advantages away because they're used to ruling the roost. We're only more recently starting to see those jobs finally get gently moved out of the meta, and it's a massive step forward for the long term health of this game.

I would say that it's critical that the dev team take an iterative approach to balance and show ongoing, active responses to player feedback. You can't wait two years between balance adjustments. Because if people feel that the job that they want to play is completely ineffective and that they aren't being listened to, then it definitely won't be fun, and it they'll likely just lose interest and find something better worth their time.

I just want to do healing. Why are you telling them to make me do damage. Stop speaking for me I just want to do healing when I play a healer.

This was far too good of a setup for it to not be deliberate, but someone had to do it.

Jokes aside, though, I think anyone who is truly serious about healing focused gameplay would want a major revamp of both the current healer job designs and the current approach to raid design. Both are inadequate as they stand.