A summary of healer issues

[Deceptus]

I feel like a lot of the "healers don't heal" issue can be solved by increasing raid damage. Tank busters are trivialized, especially if you have a WAR. Raid-wides don't happen often and are predictable. Lack of add phases spawning with the main boss present. All these are missing in 5.0 savage. It wouldn't solve everything but putting your healers in more situations where the tank will die or a party member needs to be topped off for a mechanic, it would encourage them to heal more.

Maybe they should double down in the healer job gimmicks? cards, lilies, faeries etc. Imagine playing AST and most of your gameplay around healing and manipulating cards by placing them on the field, players, and enemies. Maybe WHM plants lilies on the ground and it eventually grows in to a larger aoe that heals whoever stand in it and damages enemies. SCH could get its tactical abilities faerie utility back, i.e aoe esuna, shadowflare. Maybe have two faeries out at the same time and combine them to make Feo Ul appear. /showerthoughts

Funny thing is, leveling dungeons are tougher than end game ones.

Remember getting chucked in Bardam's Mettle? First time in Holmister Switch having to single pull until you started figuring things out?

Vs

Pagl'than where Bahamut hits like a literal wet noodle. His "Devastating" attacks barely do 20% of players HPs.

[Alex073088]

Only concern i have with adding new skills is button bloat.

Where the heck am I supposed to put new skills? Looking at endgame play, sch is already full on a controller. It's the healer i want to play but at the same time that many buttons is super daunting.

I am sorry, but for the health of the game, they should not tune gameplay based on controller standards.

[Deceptus]

I am sorry, but for the health of the game, they should not tune gameplay based on controller standards.

As long as they allow a console based platform they have to tune to controller standards.

[Dearche]

You know, I'm pretty curious. Mind citing some specific examples here? I don't go perusing the landscape these days as much as I used to.

They're a bit unconventional, but sure.
The first and most obvious is DnD. The healers are all dual purpose roles. Paladin and Cleric are both tank/healer hybrids, and the tanks are just DPS that happen to have high HP pools, since you have to make some sort of concession for rogues. Any other healer is a healer/DPS hybrid as well. Healing exists to either keep people on their feet after a hard turn, or to prevent a death. Both things only come up a handful of times per dungeon, as healing in between fights is a hell of a lot more sensible. It's better to just kill the thing than waste a turn or two undoing the damage the bads just did. One takes a lot more resources than the other, both in spell slots and in turns.

Another is most JRPGs. There's no such thing as a dedicated healer. Everyone has to fight, or else be relegated to the bench. It's always more economical to just kill the bad quickly with more DPS than to be forced to fight longer just because you're able to heal more.

A third is Monster Hunter. Over there, there's no specialized roles. Everyone's a DPS, tank, and self healer. Though some people do take a healer role, they still actively take part in the others as well. They just pull back a bit more often than others to keep others healthy. Maybe this is cheating though.

But Overwatch definitely isn't. At least back when I used to play that game, Lucio was by far the most popular healer. Ana was difficult to play, and Mercy was just plain boring. But Lucio, he could heal passively while doing actually fun stuff. In the end, I think most Mercy players were either forced into that position and played her despite not liking her, or didn't actually want to play a shooter and was content sitting in the back, avoiding interacting with the actual game as much as possible.

Obviously, they're not 100%, as there's always exceptions. Some people enjoy being a healbot. But the scarcity of them in games where it's particularly obvious that's how you're supposed to play is quite telling, especially in the endgame. I know that most beginner healers play that way even in FF, but that style tends to adapt to something more aggressive as the players get used to the role. I almost never see the heal-bot style in FF's endgame, and the reason is that it's a pretty boring style of play unless if the game is designed around it.

Healing is boring as contrary to popular belief, it's not very adaptive. There's not much more you can do than spam one or two buttons until everyone's at max HP or dead. The fact that there's almost no synergy between each of our healing abilities is quite telling. Everyone else gets a rotation, but healers? Just a grab bag of skills that each do their own thing.

[Mesarthim]

I don't know where people get these "controllers are running out of buttons" problem from. I play with one and have quite a number of buttons to spare.

Up to 40-48 easily accessible ones, and an additional 16 for misc stuff. Controllers aren't the handicap, people not fully utilizing their own hotkeys is.

[GrimGale]

I find World of Warcraft to be a better reference that highlights the "problem" much better.

WoW combat system is faster, damage is much more randomized and much more frequent.

Therefore, the healing that comes to meet the damage must be able to respond in kind:
-Random damage means healers must do triage, making choices on the fly about who to heal with what tool in order to be efficient.
-Frequent damage means healers must stay on their toes, and seldom have the chance to do anything but heal. There is healing downtime in WoW, and so healers are able to throw dots, and deal damage inbetween aswell, but mostly they stay on healing. It also means MP is a much more precious resource.
-Faster damage means healing is a fight of attrition. You will rarely see a party stay at full health for long. Most of the time players stand at around 30seconds from death. Less if they don\\'t take care to not stand in the bad.

And despite all that, despite the fact that you can change your talents to DPS builds for questing without changing your class,
healing classes still have many more buttons for DPS.

Clearly, if you want healers to heal, increase the need to heal, rather than remove DPS abilities.

[Levirre]

At this point, just give us a dps rotation, move all healing into ogcd skills, and then add job flair where you actually have to pay attention to the gauges. At least maybe then they could let us have as much fun dpsing like gnb.

I don't think they will ever be able to make healing fun with how the game plays. Any instance not max level strips you of huge utility compared to other classes, plus you barely even need healing anyway at those levels. Raids from primal to Savage are already scripted to the point you just memorize when big damage is coming and pop your ogcds anyway. As someone said, It's definitely weird how healing is designed for randomness yet everything is predictable.

With Scholar, I think at this point they should just remove the old pet system and reorient everything into the faerie gauge. I haven't even bothered with pet actions since Heavensward. For me, the need to classify healers between pure and barrier doesn't matter in the end because I can't interact with it past placing it on someone. The only decent decision I've liked are the tactics skills where you can change galvanize barriers into additional healing. I'm positive there won't be any interesting changes with healer just like the release of GNB where the only saving grace is that at least gnb was fun. This will probably be the same situation with Sage. I guess I'll have a nice looking pomodoro clicker with crafting, gathering, and mahjong at least if healers aren't fun to play with endwalker

[Recon1o6]

hrm can't find the exact pet tax potencies for sch anywhere. So I'm going to do them all as 30% tax rate since it makes nice round numbers as opposed to 1/3 which is what it seems to be. Stay tuned

[Recon1o6]

Secondary update, I got summoner to 60 a couple of days ago on my main, and in order to get that last chunk of exp I did the scholar quests and my friend persuaded me to do crystal tower with him for the last 500k exp

It was the second most soul crushing experience I had after astro this expansion. Gone was my beautiful dots and crowd control. Gone was selene, whose colour I hated but abilities I liked. Eye for an eye, virus and shadowflare, all consigned to the bin.
Its a long time ago now, years ago I got scholar up to level 54 on an alt before deleting the alt. While I stopped because my patience for those moogles was not sufficient to do them a second time, I did remember occasionally dabbling in scholar for a change of pace from WHM and AST.
I could never really get to grips with the healing style of sch, I always ended up fumbling it partly due to the shoddy internet I had with my ps3, and partly because I could never quite pin the timing down on the shields. But when I did it right, when I burned down the boss while eos and selene helped the party, it was brilliant.

[AutumnsHollow]

No thanks. Healing is fine the way it is. I say just give all healers an aoe dot for dungeons and add a debuff to their aoe dps skill like whm. Maybe add slow or heavy to gravity and maybe attack down to scholar and move on.

So...basically you want them to revert the shadowbringers changes. Because that's what we all used to have (besides aoe dot for astro).