A summary of healer issues

[Sebazy]

Hiya, you can get around the oddball character limit by making a post and then editing it afterwards. I tend to write out my post in notepad and then edit the meat of it in.

You speak for high end players, theorycrafters, people ruled by parses/FFLogs, and those that follow what the above players tell them to think.

Eh, no not really. This thread covers a wide variety of issues. As far as the healing specific ones go, you don't need to be a high end player or even a theory crafter to realise that there just isn't much out going damage in regular content. You just need to realise that one oGCD combined with natural regeneration can routinely top a raid before the next AoE, from there it'll start dawning on you how overblown our kits are relative to what the game throws back at you. Sure it steps up once you head into Extremes and Savage, but not inordinately so. It's just less telegraphs and less likely to allow you to heal someone through repeated mistakes.

The vast majority of the player base disagrees with you. Even your aesthetic choices are subjective and not agreed on. For example, I hated WHM being a Geomancer. It was stupid. White Mages don't traditionally have anything to do with nature magics, that's generally BLMs or Blue Mage/Enemy Skill mages. I much prefer WHM getting back to Light Magic and dumping the nature stuff.

Eh, these forums aren't as unrepresentative of the community as a whole as you might think. Do I think that the opinions of the entire player base land here? No, but then players who aren't playing the game to any serious degree likely aren't bothered with here either. It's fair to say that someone who just wants to flail sparklies around, top all the HP bars and live the Yuna life will be perfectly happy with just about anything as long as it's not Living Liquid decking them in the face for 90 minutes at a time. It's final fantasy, it's pretty and it's easy and that's absolutely fine. Fixing the issues that more experienced players are finding doesn't need to come at the expense of the casual player base. There are always solutions to find a better middle ground for both sides of the coin.

I also love having a streamlined DPS kit I can do that takes the minimal amount of concentration away from my primary duties of healing and correctly performing mechanics. I hate involved and complex rotations - if I liked those, I'd play a DPS Job. I prefer healing and supporting my party.

As you state in your follow up post, this is a perfectly valid opinion and I agree with it in many respects. The solution here is to diversify the jobs within the healer role more. SCH could offer a more complex offensive play style, AST could lean more heavily towards buffing the team, Sadge can offer brute force offensive gameplay that powers it's healing kit, WHM can just be the champion of raw no frills potency. Balancing that isn't as easy as the bland soup that we have now sure, but then this is a game that alongside DQ:X brought in over aka 25 Billion Yen (or over 200 Million USD) last financial year. SE can damn well afford to balance it.

Other than "ignore everything the OP said", the only change I'd like for WHM is Aero/Dia to be replaced with Ruin 2 (but WHM version) - a direct damage instant cast to use for oGCD weaving or movement.

May I ask why? This seems a strange preference for two reasons really. Firstly, our Lily skills function as a 225 potency Ruin 2 style ability already, if you can line up the movement with some value from the heal as well, that's a double bonus. Secondly, I dropped some math here to demonstrate it, but an emphasis on dot damage over nukes makes maintaining our DPS contribution easier and more consistent for a wider variety of players. Going to an entirely nuke based model actually widens the skill gap and not in a way that benefits anyone (IMHO for what that's worth). Inshort, dots are easier to maintain an solid uptime on than nukes.

Healers need gear that isn't designed for female characters and clearly shows it. Looking at you, Eden 1-4 dress! Though we did get the Ronkan chain mail and Bozja overcoat, so...those are okay. Also be nice of some official artwork of healers, from time to time, weren't ALL women...male characters (and players) play healers, too!

Edengate aside, raid robes haven't looked good since Midan IMHO =(