A summary of healer issues

[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).

[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.

[Absurdity]

For now PF is still stubbornly locking healer slots so you can't play double shields.

Not exactly a surprise there since PF has the flexibility and critical thinking skills of a concrete wall. We're talking about the same people who insisted on using ilya for Light Rampant despite it's obviously terrible success rate in random parties...for 8 months.

[Mortex]

Not exactly a surprise there since PF has the flexibility and critical thinking skills of a concrete wall. We're talking about the same people who insisted on using ilya for Light Rampant despite it's obviously terrible success rate in random parties...for 8 months.

Well new ex trial is also really good in pf. 500 million strats and no one can effectively can come to terms for 1. Every bloody party you ask 2/4 or 1/3 or boss relativ or true north. Combined with the one player that can’t bait in a circle ground aoe so he isn’t in time in mid. Also not dodging the hardest mechanic, slow moving tornados that always spawn in the same formation. And the same with sephi unreal.

[Recon1o6]

One of my dnd players paid my sub as he wanted someone to come do the story with him and it was the least I can do to oblige him for that. Still it allowed me to come back on and get my bonding anniversary done at least and barbarricia was an excellent trial.

The useful part was being able to see this forum again. I'm genuinely surprised the jpn folks asked not one but two questions related to healers. Transcribed from reddit's ever faithful unofficial translators

Q2: For Savage this time there seems to be a serious lack of healer participation going on. My question is that are you aware of the reason and is there anything you will reflect on, and if any are there plans to address this issue (that is within the means and intention of the dev team), and if there is, may I know the plan to address the issue?

YoshiP: (Super long paused followed by hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........) things to reflect on......things to reflect on? I did see something written on Matome (Summary) sites, something about "Green skin"※......Hmmmm? (another long pause) ...n...nothing much I can say about that...

※ - A meme referring to "actually a DPS job in a healer skin"

But we also have situations where there are lack of tank participations and this seems to depend on the timing and situation...(another long pause) If I have to make a comment about it, I think the reason would be because it's a high difficulty content, and there are other factors which contributed to this issue....this is hard to answer, I mean there's also the request we got that asks us to create more situations that require healers to heal, among other things that is asked of us as well...(another long pause) So in this case, in some circumstances due to certain wall that caused deviation (bias?) to occur, and this is definitely a possibility after operating this game for a long while, but as for the state of healers right now, I think it's just an extremely...
I mean this simply is due to the healer population in general as well as the population of raiders participating in this tier...but if I have to say anything about this matter what I am able to say at this point is "give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you can be multiple roles, and if you're playing in a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting in doing so....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

Q7: This is a question regarding the fourth floor of Savage (P8S), the Savage content, which includes the DPS check required, is definitely a challenging content, the healing check for the second half of this battle was really tight and compared to Dragonsong Reprise (DSR), I feel that there are certain parts in the second half of the battle contains healing check that is required which is comparable to what Ultimate would require, personally I welcome the increase in healing intensity but it causes the parties to be lack of healers when it comes to PF recruitment (be it progging or weekly clears) so I wonder what is your thoughts and opinion on the matter?

YoshiP: Ok I mean as I said before (and this happened before), if I give an answer to one question, it won't work on the other one (for some reason).
Ok, we are told that (healers) are free (to do damage) which is why healers tend to focus on firepower (dps) instead, and we should give healers more situations where they need to heal, and we increased the healing work required here...well I mean for the entire expansion and we did it but as expected this happens...(healers that never had to actually heal quitting)
so what are we supposed to do now hahaha...oh god if any I should be the one trying to discuss with you guys here.
Aaaaaaahhh I mean yeah I knew this will definitely happen (long sigh). Well I mean I thought we've achieved quite a good balance here....(long ponder)
Well yeah I mean if I have to start decreasing the difficulty and I'll get comments that it's too lax (laughs). Well I will need data...either way we did indeed increase the intensity for sure, although this was the balance that was asked of us...I mean this is personal disparity, yeah, there are healers who are completely fine with this tuning, and there are other healers who would go "this is too hard I can't do this".

Yeah I apologize but please allow us to continue ponder on this matter and find out what is best for the matter, and this is what we can do here.


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It seems pretty obvious at this point given he was practically ranting in the second question that he knows there is a problem with the healer population at large and this tier has demonstrated that a lot of good healers have quit
the moment there was some healing to do comparable to E11s or E12s checks before the enrage, the freeloading healers noped out

I note something fascinating. The first question was "are you aware the issue causing the lack of healers and what do you intend to do about it". If yoshida thought it was the heal check was high, then why did he first think of a green dps meme
He later went on to talk about healer population in general having a problem and asked for players to give healing a try.

Its plausible to assume at this point he knows that the lack of dps buttons is really upsetting healer players and caused quitting but doesn't want to admit and act on it. So as a stopgap askign more players to try healing.

[Absurdity]

Its plausible to assume at this point he knows that the lack of dps buttons is really upsetting healer players and caused quitting but doesn't want to admit and act on it. So as a stopgap askign more players to try healing.

It's a problem of their own making. Due to how incredibly boring they made the jobs a lot of veteran healers have simply abandoned their role while the new healers who filled those spots are too used to incoming damage basically being a joke, even in higher end content, so they were totally unprepared for this raid tier.

Add on top of that the general lack of difficulty in all other content and the nonexistent in-game explanations of a job's kit leading to tanks and dps also having no idea about their defensive party utility.

Everything combined results in the current state where the healers aren't able to cope with the incoming damage, due to both their own abilities and the lack of support from the rest of the party, so they just stop doing savage.

Can't say I'm particularly surprised.

[Nizzi]

YoshiP:.but if I have to say anything about this matter what I am able to say at this point is "give healers a try", and that's what I want to convey, since this is a game where you can be multiple roles, and if you're playing in a completely different role you'll definitely find something interesting in doing so....hmmm...well we will need to observe the situation a little more...yeah.

Asking DPS or Tanks to play healer? How about you play healer yourself for a tier, Yoshida? I quit my main, SCH that I played for YEARS this tier to play BLM and I am having more fun than I've had in years in this game. If I can swap to BLM for a tier and quickly understand even more so why healers are boring in this game, surely you can swap to a healer and understand why so many healer mains have been telling you for YEARS that there is a HUGE ISSUE with these jobs? BLM has the level of "plate spinning" engagement that so many healers are looking for. It has multiple timers - Enochian, Astral/Umbral, Thunder III, - unique and interesting optimizations with nonstandard lines, Firestarter procs and even using Lucid Dreaming to get back into Astral Fire as quickly as possible, etc. And none of these optimizations are something any normal Black Mage player has to interact with if they don't want to and they can still perform fine. Healers have none of this, and optimization for a healer is 2 things - healing less and spamming your 1 key more. Every healer DoT wishes it could have the level of complexity that Thunder III does with Thundercloud and Sharpcast, and while it's not "big brain" by any stretch, it is certainly more interesting than Bio, Dia, Combust and E. Dosis combined.

Sorry to be a bit mad at that response, but seriously, before you start asking the players to give healers a try, how about you and your team do so first? Maybe you'll understand why so many people want to do anything but play healer? I don't even want to play a DPS job - I see my main character as a Scholar and that's all I'll ever be able to be happiest seeing them as, but I play this game to have fun and be engaged, and that's something Scholar and every other healer isn't at this point anymore.

[Liam_Harper]

Its plausible to assume at this point he knows that the lack of dps buttons is really upsetting healer players and caused quitting but doesn't want to admit and act on it.

I wonder at this point if the real reason they refuse to add engaging dps is their job design team can't handle it.

Their tiny 4-5 person team has been really struggling these past few expansions and there's more jobs coming in the future. The best they could do with a new healer was a SCH clone without a pet. Fixing AST's cards is such a strain it has to wait until 7.0.

Honestly I don't think they can actually do it anymore. Reworking all 4 healers to have engaging dps that synergizes with the toolkit in unique ways and is easy to pick up but rewarding to master is way beyond the current team. They have major issues with job design and ignored it for too long, stubbornly trying to keep things going with their tiny group. And they probably don't want to outright admit that. It's one thing to say "server limitations", but another to say "our job designers can't design jobs anymore".

I don't think it's that they refuse to fix healers, but at this stage they can't.

[ForsakenRoe]

One of my dnd players paid my sub

If they hear 'healing boring', add more healing required, then even more people leave cos it's too hard to heal now, maybe the 'healing required' was not the issue in the first place. But this is SE, so they'll go 'yeh we adjusted it too high sorry', put it back to Asphodelos numbers to bring back the people who left because a raidwide with a bleed is too much to handle, and then forget to try a different fix (like adding more DPS interactivity) for 2 more years. You'd have thought since there's always so much chatter about the state of healer as a role, they'd have more of an answer than 'yeh uhhh we made it harder, now everyone quit (yeh we can see that ourselves), uhhh we need to get more data'. But any illusions I had about them reading the not-JP forums were put to rest when I heard them say that they had not heard anything about Blood Weapon being an issue with ping. It was only complained about in the forums for all of SHB! and LD was memed on since it's release in HW, but it took till 6.1 to get changed to be 'not complete dog', you can see it even now with MCH, people ask 'can we get stacks on Hypercharge and Wildfire it's hell with ping' and they get 'we tried it, it's fine', at this point I think SE testing doesn't actually weave the Gauss Rounds or something


i'm personally grateful for all you have done to try and catch SE's eye on this stuff Recon, like getting that fateful question asked at the Q+A (the one that had all the important examples conveniently cut off, and was hit with 'lmao go try ultimate'). Isn't it ironic, the VERY ultimate Yoshi-P was so confidently telling us burned out healer mains to try before we're allowed to express our opinion, has also now been solohealed? Yes it took luck, and a certain mit heavy comp, but the fact it's solo healable at all (or any ultimate for that matter) just shows how not only was YP's response incredibly dismissive, it's also just a case of 'confidently wrong'. I hope you keep fighting the fight while you have sub time, and again i'm thankful you care about the healer role this much. Because apparently, SE doesn't hahAAAA

One of my dnd players paid my sub

If they hear 'healing boring', add more healing required, then even more people leave cos it's too hard to heal now, maybe the 'healing required' was not the issue in the first place. But this is SE, so they'll go 'yeh we adjusted it too high sorry', put it back to Asphodelos numbers to bring back the people who left because a raidwide with a bleed is too much to handle, and then forget to try a different fix (like adding more DPS interactivity) for 2 more years. You'd have thought since there's always so much chatter about the state of healer as a role, they'd have more of an answer than 'yeh uhhh we made it harder, now everyone quit (yeh we can see that ourselves), uhhh we need to get more data'. But any illusions I had about them reading the not-JP forums were put to rest when I heard them say that they had not heard anything about Blood Weapon being an issue with ping. It was only complained about in the forums for all of SHB! and LD was memed on since it's release in HW, but it took till 6.1 to get changed to be 'not complete dog', you can see it even now with MCH, people ask 'can we get stacks on Hypercharge and Wildfire it's hell with ping' and they get 'we tried it, it's fine', at this point I think SE testing doesn't actually weave the Gauss Rounds or something


i'm personally grateful for all you have done to try and catch SE's eye on this stuff Recon, like getting that fateful question asked at the Q+A (the one that had all the important examples conveniently cut off, and was hit with 'lmao go try ultimate'). Isn't it ironic, the VERY ultimate Yoshi-P was so confidently telling us burned out healer mains to try before we're allowed to express our opinion, has also now been solohealed? Yes it took luck, and a certain mit heavy comp, but the fact it's solo healable at all (or any ultimate for that matter) just shows how not only was YP's response incredibly dismissive, it's also just a case of 'confidently wrong'. I hope you keep fighting the fight while you have sub time, and again i'm thankful you care about the healer role this much. Because apparently, SE doesn't hahAAAA

I don't think it's that they refuse to fix healers, but at this stage they can't.

i'm starting to think part of the reason is that they fear driving away the 'i play healer to heal' crowd, the ones who start breaking out in a cold sweat at the mention of 'Aero 3'. maybe they think that the amount of 'people doing content as healer' will be lower if they drive away the healbot crowd, so instead they'd rather just let the 'savage raider' crowd slowly fade out over time. as for job design, idk about you but at this point i'll probably be willing to just not have any more healers added at all ever again if it means they can make the 4 we have fun, but i dont really trust them to even get that right considering how safe they played it with SGE.