A summary of healer issues

[Recon1o6]

OP here. The majority of these issues if any of you go back and read is how each healer feels awful and boring to play right now. If potencies were buffed through the roof, it won't change that as you are all fully aware. That is not to say potencies are a none issue, but its lesser compared to the feel of the job.

Remember how in HW people still played Astro when it was undertuned and Whm when it wasn't meta? But in SB everyone abandoned whm because it got reduced to being the first pure healer?

Its because they were fun even if they were weak in the former. The latter was not fun in the slightest

Fun>balance because ilvl tends to make up for lower parse numbers.

[Roeshel]

i agree, i forgot to mention the free healing from the fairy that both also lacked and cut into their combined dps even more.



I wouldnt say any of the healers are bad rn, just boring. If anything ast is too strong for the same reasons scholar was too strong pre-shb (most dps, endless free healing).


I concede that embrace was too strong back then, but at least fairy micromanging was something else you had the option to do if you wanted to try even harder to optimize healing. Current healing optimization is mostly letting ast do everything, begging your party to use their mitigations and healing whenever a weave window comes up. zzz

AST is not that strong when compared to the other healers at min item level. It is just the healer that scales better and it becomes more apparent in 8-man content.

AST is a favorable choice only for raids and trials. For casual content at level cap, WHM and SCH win hard over AST with over 2k rDPS in Paglth'an. You are simply more effective as a WHM or SCH in dungeons than as an AST.

From what I learned, SCH was better than anyone in anything, including dungeons.

Edit:
We can just compare healers rDPS in Amaurot(item level sync) with Matoya's relict(no item level sync):
Amaurot: :
AST: 9k-9.5k*
SCH: 10,5k
WHM: 11,3k
*The first AST has 9k rDPS patch 5.3 but the 2nd has 9.5k and they are from patch 5.4

Matoya:
AST: 16,1k- 13.1k*
SCH: 15k
WHM: 16,6k
*First and second-best again. If SCH was in a party with yellow parse players like the #1 AST instead of gray they would have probably gone up to 16k as well.

The out scaling is visible. AST is a good role to pick when people around you know how to play but that's rarely the case in dungeons. AST's damage output falls off quickly in casual content.

[Axxion]

OP here. The majority of these issues if any of you go back and read is how each healer feels awful and boring to play right now. If potencies were buffed through the roof, it won't change that as you are all fully aware. That is not to say potencies are a none issue, but its lesser compared to the feel of the job.

Remember how in HW people still played Astro when it was undertuned and Whm when it wasn't meta? But in SB everyone abandoned whm because it got reduced to being the first pure healer?

Its because they were fun even if they were weak in the former. The latter was not fun in the slightest

Fun>balance because ilvl tends to make up for lower parse numbers.

you and i know reading is hard around here

[Imora]

*sigh* how many times do I have to say it's not about the NUMBERS, it's about the gameplay?

Scholars gameplay loop right now is absolutely AWFUL, coming from a Scholar main since 2.3 (7-8 years ago). It is NOTHING like it used to be gameplay wise; no shadowflare, no using fairy actions in between casts, no micromanagement of fairy embraces, no Miasma 2, no Eye for an Eye spread, no original virus, no Malady debuff, no slow debuff.

NOTHING.

If anything, i don't want embrace micromanaging back.

That was tripe.

[Lyth]

...

Actually, I remember many healers in Heavensward complaining that once they had finished their prog on WHM, their groups kept badgering them to swap to AST to individually inflate their numbers. If players can optimize the fun out of the game then they will, and then they will complain that you allowed them to do it.

[Recon1o6]

Actually, I remember many healers in Heavensward complaining that once they had finished their prog on WHM, their groups kept badgering them to swap to AST to individually inflate their numbers. If players can optimize the fun out of the game then they will, and then they will complain that you allowed them to do it.

that's nothing to do with white mage not being fun though? that's the problem of parsers being parsers and wanting their epeens bigger because role dps wasn't a thing then.

healers were still choosing white mage to play because it was fun which is the point, were it not for other people, they would have stuck to whm. Most people do not parse, but instead pick jobs to have fun. Plus, they still picked whm when they were progging which is the most important time- getting the clear.

[Grimoire-M]

Don't cite the magicks to me, I was there when it was written.

How could nerf Scholar even harder? It's objectively the worst healer right now, just sounds like you're one of the people who would Rage at Scholar no matter what state it was in. Scholars wanted everyone brought up to their level, not everyone brought down to White Mage.

Can we not argue old semantics that no longer matter, this is a tired old, VERY DONE, arguement.

Easy. Reduce all of their healing potency to the lowest values they existed at, and undo some QoL. Indom goes back to 300 potency, Lustrate down to ARR physick at 400 potency, excog matches ARR cure II at 600 potency and loses the auto detonation buff. Adlo goes to a 300/300 split as does Succor to 150/150. You know, just back to your good old ARR numbers. Fairy doesn’t keep the pet action resolution improvements that came with ShB but remains tied to our oGCD space so if you ever overcrowd her queue she drops actions consistently even without ghosting factored in. There’s more you could do, but you can survive on that.

Again, Scholar’s design is what makes it broken. The numbers just keep it fair. In a game all about minimizing healing having the easiest time sacrificing the least of its DPS resources kept it relevant even when it’s DPS was the worst of the three. I don’t think it needs this grand revival. Just good tuning and an actual rotation like every other healer. Every single one of its problems aren’t even unique to it thanks to Summoner. Scholar has been balanced around high oGCD frequency to make up for its throughput issues and as long as it has that edge in flexibility it’s going to synergize well enough with WHM and AST to always remain relevant. SE has to screw up Sage just for it to be preferred over Scholar. If that isn’t proof of just how little attention it needs don’t know what’ll convince you otherwise.

[FoxCh40s]

Easy. Reduce all of their healing potency to the lowest values they existed at, and undo some QoL. Indom goes back to 300 potency, Lustrate down to ARR physick at 400 potency, excog matches ARR cure II at 600 potency and loses the auto detonation buff. Adlo goes to a 300/300 split as does Succor to 150/150. You know, just back to your good old ARR numbers. Fairy doesn’t keep the pet action resolution improvements that came with ShB but remains tied to our oGCD space so if you ever overcrowd her queue she drops actions consistently even without ghosting factored in. There’s more you could do, but you can survive on that.

Again, Scholar’s design is what makes it broken. The numbers just keep it fair. In a game all about minimizing healing having the easiest time sacrificing the least of its DPS resources kept it relevant even when it’s DPS was the worst of the three. I don’t think it needs this grand revival. Just good tuning and an actual rotation like every other healer. Every single one of its problems aren’t even unique to it thanks to Summoner. Scholar has been balanced around high oGCD frequency to make up for its throughput issues and as long as it has that edge in flexibility it’s going to synergize well enough with WHM and AST to always remain relevant. SE has to screw up Sage just for it to be preferred over Scholar. If that isn’t proof of just how little attention it needs don’t know what’ll convince you otherwise.

The point just soars right over your and Roeshel's head doesn't it?

[Roeshel]

The point just soars right over your and Roeshel's head doesn't it?

The point is that the glorified DoT management was awesome gameplay but I really doubt that. You just used the exact same type of attack under different names with no interaction between one another when it comes to a single target. For AoE you used bane which consumed AE and that's the only interaction SCH actually had with their DoTs. If you look at SMN you will see that their DoTs are actually a fundamental part of their gameplay since they have Fester, Bane, Tri-disaster, Summon Bahamut & Summon Phoenix both of which are resetting Tri-disaster's cd so that you can apply your DoTs again for free.

DoTs were never a part of a healer's rotation. They were just there. Having access to 5 DoTs on GCD does not bring depth into the role. It's just chaos that you are trying to make sense of.

[Irenia]

It's just chaos that you are trying to make sense of.

Actually, I wonder if that is what people enjoyed back then. I've been pondering what the essence of MMO healing is, and one of the answers I've come to is "Managing Chaos".