A summary of healer issues

[QooEr]

I think part of it comes up to how the question is asked.

If it's "(some) healers are bored" or "healers suck", there's not much to say other than "Oh well?"

"im bored" should not be responded to with "do ultimate". ever, really. difficulty should not be conflated with how engaging or fun something is. UCOB is one of the hardest fights in the game, and i think the fight is miserably boring for the first 11 minutes of the fight. conversely i actually had fun doing titan and shiva unreal. hell, i used to have fun doing leveling dungeons as scholar back in HW and stormblood.

someone in another thread said something that i think should be taken more into account when telling the devs that we find healing insufficient.

Any professional dev team has a laundry list of 'ideas for things they could do'. The probably have pages of discarded ideas, implementations, etc. that just didn't fit. Heck, nearly every idea we've proposed they've probably already considered at some point or another. They don't need our ideas.

And they don't need to know numbers - because their analytics and data can tell them that.

The one thing they do need, [...] is how playing the game makes us feel.

if healers feel healing is boring, thats probably the most concerning feedback they can get. they can have all the participation metrics in the world, but without so much as even a survey they cant really tell if the majority are enjoying healing, or if as you yourself put it, merely tolerating it. i dont think the LL question itself was worded perfectly, mind you, but thats because its ONE persons feedback thats representing many who at the very least agreed on the sentiment that healers are boring.

if anything we should be telling the devs that healing, is in fact, still boring even in ultimate. glare and broil and dosis and malefic 150 times is boring. pressing a single spell more times than every other skill combined is boring, no matter the difficulty of the fight.

[Renathras]

"im bored" should not be responded to with "do ultimate". ever, really. difficulty should not be conflated with how engaging or fun something is. UCOB is one of the hardest fights in the game, and i think the fight is miserably boring for the first 11 minutes of the fight. conversely i actually had fun doing titan and shiva unreal. hell, i used to have fun doing leveling dungeons as scholar back in HW and stormblood.

someone in another thread said something that i think should be taken more into account when telling the devs that we find healing insufficient.

I guess what I mean is "I'm bored" isn't a course of action. I was in the military and something my bosses were fond of saying is "Don't come to me with problems; if you see a problem, DO come tell me, but come armed with a proposal for a solution."

I think one big problem in this discussion is that not all healers ARE bored. And many who are not bored aren't bored all the time - during prog, people often say, healing is far more engaging and not boring since mistakes are being made and chaos is everywhere, so healers actually have to use their healing tools and don't have the (boring as all hells) "healing plan" set up yet. Once those things are no longer true, THEN healing becomes boring. When you're actually having to hardcast heals because all your oGCDs are on CD, you aren't just pressing 1 button over and over. The viewpoint from these people is that healing is fun UNTIL farm, and that the better their team gets, the more bored they get healing.

A second problem/third group of people is that many players LIKE that style of healing and don't like being damage dealers - if they did, they'd be playing damage dealers. They enjoy simplistic rotations allowing them to focus on healing and boss/fight mechanics.

The issue is that a solution has to address all three perspectives - those who are bored, those who are sometimes bored, and those who are not at all bored - and simply saying "I'm bored" or "Give us more DPS buttons" doesn't do any of that. It's also why my solution always involves doing something for each group of people.

[glamazon]

What gets me is that this guy has come up with plausible simple design changes that they could implement for the better…

https://m.youtube.com/c/Sarixis/videos

I wish it was in Japanese so that they would pay attention to it. I fear these forums are basically irrelevant because it’s in English.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Hello again thread! Seen some few minor changes from the 6.2 note. No better time to bump up this megathread.

• Lilybell got a nice QoL imho. Not many instances of repetitive attacks that occurs within 15s, not even picking up DoT can guarantee detonating entire stacks.
• SCH Embrace and SGE Kardion is... 'eh'? Less annoyance for tanks I guess.
• SGE Holos reminds me of that feel of using oGCD shield as the old Noct AST. In practice, it'll probably just make SCH/SGE more powerful(?).
• AST redraw finally have -some- bad RNG mitigation? Yeah sure I'll take it. Still doesn't change my mind of how terrible Trashdyne is though. This feels like a bandaid overall.
• Crown Play being gone? Good riddance.
• The part where they mentioned about giving some ease to healer enmity management, mainly from Embrace, Kardion, and HoT ticks... I mean, do we really have any -enmity management- at all prior to this? Or perhaps they're doing this for the upcoming criterion dungeon?

What's your thoughts?

[einschwartz]

[*]The part where they mentioned about giving some ease to healer enmity management, mainly from Embrace, Kardion, and HoT ticks... I mean, do we really have any -enmity management- at all prior to this? [/LIST]

While enmity management is practically none prior to this change, it's another few reason left we could tell new healers not to overheal... gone.
Let them all keep the Medica 2 uptime I guess.

[UkcsAlias]

While enmity management is practically none prior to this change, it's another few reason left we could tell new healers not to overheal... gone.
Let them all keep the Medica 2 uptime I guess.

Tbh, i rather would them change the system in such way overhealing becomes rewarding to do. Forcing healers to heal more. The problem is mainly that there arent that many good ways to get that focus back, since even if it gives a DPS boost, if the healing is never demanded to begin with, a DPS remains generaly better as long as the enemies simply cannot dish out enough damage. With some casters having a revive, even that part is covered.

A few things that generaly need to be done are obviously increasing the incoming damage, and applying better ilvl caps. But there are a few more things they can do:
- Nerf self sustain significantly. There is no need for a DPS to be able to sustain themselve this strong. Even more when such healing is oGCD. For a tank some self sustain can be needed, but being able to self sustain against any boss should simply not be possible. I know this is done because of the 'healer is dead, so the party also dies' problem that it would otherwise create. Which takes me to the next issue:
- Give other classes also an option to revive others. But have additional restrictions with it. The phoenix down item used to be a major item in older FF games for this. But the many ways to revive made this obsolete. The issue here is that potions cost gil, which in turn makes them not prefered to have, but surely something can be made that resolve this.
- Make the party receive boosts depending on party health (or punish low health - since it requires some more reworking its effectively the same). Sure, the healer might barely get any benefits on his own. But if the party being at full health gives an over 10% DPS boost, compared to a party at 50%. It means that quick healing can effectively grant more DPS in the end.

Enmity management was only a thing on pure healers as their regens could cause issues. Barrier healers didnt have this issue for that reason, so the fix here is to simply balance the 2 types, and on that fine. But i agree, it sadly means that excessive overhealing isnt punished anymore (overhealing on its own isnt an issue when you arent going to be using a dps spell within the next 2 seconds and have plenty of mana).

But yes, a way to punish (excessive) overhealing would be nice to have, simply because its a teaching mechanic to get a healer not blindly spam healing and ignore dps. Emnity was a realy good way to do this as the punishment was directly visible (you got attacked).

[Liam_Harper]

What's your thoughts?

Fluff. A major patch and all healers really got are a few small QoL tweaks and nothings.

[Rilifane]

• Lilybell - a simple but good change. Lilybell is a strong cooldown, admittedly too strong for most situations but 20s paired with the ability to detonate it at will trivializes several mechanics. Even if it was able to cover an entire mechanic before with proper timing, ground targets sometimes still being a bit finnicky means you have more wiggle room for timing now.
• Minor Arcana - aboout time ... bringing it back was a mistake but at least it's not as annoying as before
• Redraw - in theory good, in practice near pointless as long as Astrodyne is as bad as it is. It would've been a godsend during ShB
• Holos - SGE seemed to have had trouble keeping up with SCH for shields/ mitigation in DSR? It's not bad, obviously but I don't have the experience with this content to judge whether it was necessary or not
• Regen enmity - if the reason were Criterion dungeons then seriously? The entire point of these dungeons is that you're supposed to be competent and not letting your healer get nuked from an Embrace includes that. Our enmity management was basically "don't stand out of tank range" and I suspect it has more to do about complaints in DF that regens on the run are baaad

Honorable mention to crit buffs increasing autocrit damage. Because SCH really needed a bump, it was so far behind in dps it barely stood a chance

[ForteNightshade]

• Holos - SGE seemed to have had trouble keeping up with SCH for shields/ mitigation in DSR? It's not bad, obviously but I don't have the experience with this content to judge whether it was necessary or not

Having done DRU with both a SCH and SGE, it's quite noticeable how much better SCH is overall. While SGE is far from a slouch, it just can't hope to keep up with Spreadlo. For example sake, Ultimate End requires roughly 30% mitigation to barely survive. With a Spreadlo, everyone lives well above 10k. The same occurs with both subsequent transition as Nidstien and Dragon King hurt. SCH trivializes both. With the change to Holos, it gives SGE a little more flexibility being a near oGCD equivalent. So I think it's a good change overall. Of course, another thread brought up an excellent point: this has actually made SCH/SGE as a comp significantly better.

As for the rest of your assessment. I agree wholeheartedly. Especially with the honorable mention. Clearly, SCH was really struggling here. Nobody ever wanted it.

[Rilifane]

Having done DRU with both a SCH and SGE, it's quite noticeable how much better SCH is overall. While SGE is far from a slouch, it just can't hope to keep up with Spreadlo. For example sake, Ultimate End requires roughly 30% mitigation to barely survive. With a Spreadlo, everyone lives well above 10k. The same occurs with both subsequent transition as Nidstien and Dragon King hurt. SCH trivializes both. With the change to Holos, it gives SGE a little more flexibility being a near oGCD equivalent. So I think it's a good change overall. Of course, another thread brought up an excellent point: this has actually made SCH/SGE as a comp significantly better.

As for the rest of your assessment. I agree wholeheartedly. Especially with the honorable mention. Clearly, SCH was really struggling here. Nobody ever wanted it.

Interesting. As I said, I can't judge that for myself but it's not exactly a secret that SCH has the edge when you simply need to survive at all cost. SGE can hold out longer without losing dps and SCH has to bite the bullet sooner there but the strongest shield in the game on a 2min GCD is invaluable if a party struggles with just surviving hits.
The only reason why SGE/ SCH isn't more popular in all content is likely because it's considered "unusual" after SE said you'd need one regen and one shield healer for content and we all know that SE knows perfectly well what they're talking about when it comes to healers, don't we?
But naturally, the community took it as gospel.
I wonder how long it will take until SGE/ SCH becomes popular. For now PF is still stubbornly locking healer slots so you can't play double shields.