A summary of healer issues

[Derio]

Honestly at this point we are stuck with the current healer situation until 7.0 so healers will have to suffer 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5 with bad gameplay. I thought Sage would be a more unique healer with more damage buttons but once you level it up you find out its just like all the rest which is simply a 1 button spam.

I wish someone would ask Yoshi P why do the dev team feel as a whole that the one button spam is a satisfying gameplay loop. That may not be how the devs imagined the gameplay to be. But all the content in the game point towards that and its hard to understand how they are missing that.

[Recon1o6]

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

they clearly can. They made the fun and engaging pvp sets and the bulk of the work is already there if they wanted to add engaging dps because they can look up previous versions of the game

[ASkellington]

I wish someone would ask Yoshi P why do the dev team feel as a whole that the one button spam is a satisfying gameplay loop. That may not be how the devs imagined the gameplay to be. But all the content in the game point towards that and its hard to understand how they are missing that.

They are I don't want to say satisfied but ok with it for the same reason I suspect as to why many players from tanks to dps to even other healers that the model is fine because it achieves their goal of

• making the healer role easy to get into and
• keeping a stressful role from turning away new people from other people being toxic to new players

Making healing easier to get into is... not a bad idea, but the problem is how they've gone about it.

Making any class acceptable = giving the player tools to make it easier for them to learn not removing anything that would be "hard".


The "addon war" as I'll call it we have? Would be easily solvable if SE would give us some of those things.

Give us things to better see damage. P4S comes to mind. Give us party buff timers, something that I've asked for for years at this point, to make it easier to track HoTs and Buffs right there on the party list. We just now got a change to UI to make it easier to see our CD timers. This game is how many years old? And I'm pretty sure it isn't as good as the addon either.

There are plenty of things they could add to UI customization to make it easier on players and yet have either refused to do so, never thought of it, or <insert coding issue here>.

Many people have asked for a Med to Hard Training Hall and, yeah I guess that could help. Another thing that is also UI though? Actually telling us potency. Giving us raw numbers would be so much better. Being clearer in your wording would also go a long way.

And as for toxicity... I fully admit that, yeah, it does happen across MMOs. Why is irrelevant, it does happen and for many reasons. There is a report button that people can use, and sometimes, people also need to grow thicker skin.

I had one moron berate me on WHM for not using X skills without telling me why, yet, the party was healed fine and I still did my 1 button spam and DoT. Could that have made other people quit healing? Maybe.

But it is also a product of SE's own making since they barely tell us how our new abilities work, and some times we don't even need them. LOOKING AT YOU NEUTRAL SECT! I don't even remember the last time I had to use you in normal content!

So yeah, SE's at fault for not teaching new healers how to learn by "making it so that healing doesn't require much if any healing because its a hard/stressful role and we need healers to fill queues".

WHM can stay the easy healer for newer players, but that does not excuse it from getting any depth as a player learns to master it, and hey SE? SOME PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANT THE DIFFICULTY because we masochists yo

[ty_taurus]

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.

I hope this is the case, but perhaps this is just copium.

The thing is, having a fun and challenging Savage tier does nothing to address the rest of the game: MSQ, Role Quests, FATEs, Treasure Maps, Dungeons, Alliance Raids, Normal Trials, Normal Raids, Eureka/Bozja Content, Deep Dungeons... The list goes on of content that asks almost nothing of healers, and that content is not fun. Some people don't mind having multiple jobs they flex around with in these forms of content, so doing easier content as DPS and flexing into healer for Savage, but there are some of us who would like to play healer all the time, and healers are boring as sin in these easier forms of content. Good job design would ensure that the healers are always at least somewhat fun, but you really need a party that's falling apart in order for healers to get that engagement from easier content.

I would love to go back to being a healer exclusively but I want to do that when I know I can have fun with healers always.

[ForsakenRoe]

Actually telling us potency. Giving us raw numbers would be so much better.

playing classic wow and seeing how much damage exactly my skills will do is nice and all, up until the point where I realised it's just lying, because it's not factoring in my spell power from gear, external buffs, etc. it's just telling me the base value of the spell.

I think a compromise could be 'Hold this button while hovering over the skill and looking at tooltip for extra info' kinda like how DOTA gives you the basics on the default skill tooltips, but holding alt tells you all the really technical stuff like the projectile speed, animation lock after the skill, etc. SO in FF terms, looking at Cure 1 would say 'heals for 450 potency'. Holding, idk lets say 'Alt', while hovering over Cure 1 then tells you 'with current stats from gear, heals for an average of 13200'.

IDK part of me wants the exact values, but I do also see the merit in having 'potencies' as it makes it easier to compare skill strengths to one another. Plus, it helps a LOT with how readable patch notes are. If we read 'Fell Cleave potency increased from 470 to 500' in the patch notes we think 'damn 30 potency that's a massive buff', if we got 'Fell Cleave damage increased by 6%' that kinda sounds small right? It also doesn't tell us what Fell Cleave previously was, 6% of 'bugger all' would still be 'bugger all' we'd have to go look at the job guide to see it's old value and mentally add 6% to that, that's too much hassle for most people, so the readability of 'Potency increased by X' helps mentally picture the change. yes i know about how MCH keeps getting meme tier '10 potency increase lmao' changes, but i wonder which would be cooler to read, 'Drill increased by 15%' or 'Drill potency increased from 680 to 800'

[TheDustyOne]

Figured I may as well add my 2 cents to this.

While I'm primarily a tank main, I did enjoy casually healing a lot back in Stormblood, mostly with Scholar. Maintaining multiple DoTs, spreading them like an infection with Bane, finding the right opportunities to weave in my oGCD heals, it felt good to be able to play it at least somewhat well. Now current Scholar just feels like a shadow of its former self.

Of course it's not just Scholar, I did dabble in Astro a bit back then and liked the cards, being able to manipulate their durations, giving tanks with mitigation allergies a Bole, seeing Monks run out of TP with Arrow (I regret nothing ). Now it's all just a weaker Balance card with the time manipulation removed.

Anyway, enough of my history, my biggest problem with current healers isn't just the lack of a DPS rotation; it's that the kits are fighting amongst themselves and lack interactivity. oGCD heals are there to effectively make your GCD heals useless outside other players screwing up too much. Using GCD heals is punished as, despite those being the introductory skills you're taught as a new player to rely on, they eat up GCD time you could've spent dealing damage. And that damage kit is just 2 abilities, sometimes a token 3rd GCD or an oGCD, but primarily it'll be your nuke + DoT, or the singular AoE nuke in dungeon packs. The end result is that we end up spending most of our time casting a singular spell, sometimes interlaced with an oGCD heal whose sole reward is letting us press that singular spell even more. There's nothing exciting about it, there's very little interaction, and it actively makes a large portion of our kit sit unused for most fights, especially in casual content.

A few things I would personally do:
1) Make the individual healer DPS kits more varied. Nothing extravagant, we don't need a complex 15 button DPS rotation, but at the very least we need 3 or 4 active buttons to keep an eye on in a short duration, like a buff to maintain, an extra dot to maintain, a debuff to maintain, another oGCD damage ability that rewards uptime, a gauge to build and a couple of abilities to spend it on, procs, etc. There's a lot you can do here to make every healer feel different; White Mage could be the healer equivalent to Black Mage, a spell that starts a buff timer similar to Astral Fire (sans MP interactivity) that increases our damage and lets us use our powerful nuke so long as it's up, and Dia having a proc. Scholar could have Miasma and Bane back, along with Fester as an oGCD attack. Astro could have Dancer-like procs where casting Malefic will proc a stack that can be spent on another, more powerful spell. Sage could build up Adderstings with Dosis to spend on a powerful nuke that could also be used with Eukrasia to apply a debuff. All four healers should offer something different besides Nuke + DoT.

2) Cut down the amount of oGCD heals. This one's probably more a personal pet peeve, and I'm sure a lot of people here are fine with having a lot of oGCD heals that we prioritize over GCD heals. But as I said earlier, I feel like these mostly exist to make our GCD heals redundant and so a large portion of the kit ends up feeling like bloat outside emergency situations. I'd rather oGCD abilities focus on altering the effects of our primary heals, abilities like Neutral Sect, Plenary Indulgence, Deployment Tactics, etc. I'm quite happy with.

3) Make GCD heals less punishing to use. I'd personally do this by looking at the individual DPS kits of the healers, and deciding how best to "refund" the damage lost from using our primary healing abilities. I mentioned in another thread the idea of giving Scholar Fester, making Fester's potency equal to Broil, and having a GCD heal like Adloquium refund a charge. White Mage already shows that a refund system can work, just that it needs some creativity to make it feel unique amongst the healers. Speaking of White Mage, I'd rather scrap the Afflatus heal spells and just make Lilies affect all the base healing spells, at least then I'd have a reason to use Regen, Medica II, and Cure III.

Thoughts? Probably got a bit rambly there, and I'm sure more dedicated healer mains would be able to better pick apart my deductions and why my ideas won't work. But hey, just giving my 2 cents on healers as they are now and what I'd like to see.

[Aluja89]

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.

That's the gist of everything isn't it.

You can't have Savage difficulty without building the culture around it and it's only going to get worse.

[Liam_Harper]

they clearly can. They made the fun and engaging pvp sets and the bulk of the work is already there if they wanted to add engaging dps because they can look up previous versions of the game

PvP is very barebones, jobs have 6-8 unique buttons each. It's also more likely the little they managed to add to PvP drained their resources further, rather than being an indication of a healthy job design team.

It's not as easy as just pulling Seraph Strike from PvP, or looking at BLU or Bozja and pulling the fun buttons from it to tack onto healers. PvE needs to be carefully balanced and they're struggling enough even with 1 button healers and everything on 2 min bursts. Changes need to be carefully considered or you end up with jokes like Dia being a downgrade to Aero II and 1 button SMN macros. There's no way they can rework all 4 healers with the current state of the team.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not justifying the lack of improvement, quite the opposite. It's ridiculous that a huge company like SE stubbornly neglected their job design for so long until it ended up in this state. We should be able to expect engaging jobs from one of the largest MMORPG's. But until they do something about the lack of job designers I doubt we can.

[AmiableApkallu]

3) Make GCD heals less punishing to use. I'd personally do this by looking at the individual DPS kits of the healers, and deciding how best to "refund" the damage lost from using our primary healing abilities.

I disagree with that take on healing.

It's one thing to argue that healers should DPS when they're not healing and that their DPS kits should be more involved than one-button spam. That, I agree with. It's quite another to treat healers actually pushing a healing button for a GCD as some sort of burden that the game needs to design around. That's precisely the interesting question: is the party's continued DPS best served by me throwing another stone or by me casting a heal?

I might even go further and say that WHM shows how not to "refund damage." The goal should be to reward thoughtful, necessary use of an ability, à la SGE's Eukrasian Diagnosis or DRK's Blackest Night. Finding an optimization for feeding the Blood Lily when everyone is at full health just feels silly.

[ForsakenRoe]

à la SGE's Eukrasian Diagnosis or DRK's Blackest Night.

EDiagnosis loses you 330 potency, because the toxicon it gives is only 330. to be damage neutral it'd have to either be 660 (holy crit variance batman) or be OGCD which is... why isnt it OGCD? doesnt really make sense why it had to be on the GCD. anyway as it stands, getting toxicon charges is in the same boat as 'dump lilies outside of raidbuffs to power a misery in raidbuffs' but worse, because you want to put up diagnosis'es when the boss isnt targetable, in order to not lose damage in the first place

TBN i hear people complain that 'oh if i use TBN too much i dont have the mana to dump edges in raidbuffs' but im not a tank main anymore so im not 100% on how that works, but the point is, you cant really make things 'refund damage' because of raidbuffs. if you make it damage neutral, people will find a way to move the damage from 'outside' to 'inside' raidbuffs, as we see with misery. if it's 'slightly weaker so the raidbuffs compensate the rest of the way to neutral' it just means the way to use it is to put it in raidbuffs which hampers how players can use it effectively. the solution is imo to make it neutral like misery, and just accept people are gonna find ways to get creative with how to eke out more damage from their skills, it just adds more interesting-ness to the otherwise bland role