A summary of healer issues

[baklava151]

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

I've only ever played healer in normal content and I think healers are boring.

[Jonathan_Clover]

Having a "streamlined" DPS kit sucks when DPS spells become your primary thing you cast.
Seriously, I don't consider myself a high-end player by any means(I guess above average) and I can say with a straight face that Healing has no longer become my PRIMARY duty, because nothing I've done has required me to cast enough healing where it would be, and nothing in this game requires it, not even Ultimate!
(For clarification, I consider anything above 55% to be your primary duty/action, and it sure isn't healing.)

So I don't understand where all of this hatred of asking for more downtime activities(be it buffing/debuffing/damage spells) comes from. If they're not going to give us anything intensive to heal, is not asking for more downtime options a reasonable request?

[Visanis]

So the super short version:

You're wrong.

I also have a super short version:

No you.

[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 =(

[Recon1o6]

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

I absolutely do not speak for solely these groups like you insinuate
-I hate parsers, I hate parsing players
-I also dislike players that after 80 levels do not perform the bare minimum of their jobs, whether that's tanks using mitigation on a tankbuster, or samurai's freestyling and not using combos, or healers that don't contribute during the shocking amount of time where they don't need to heal.
All that stuff you get taught in your class quests and the hall of the novice. You know, those tutorials.
-I especially don't like arrogant forum users that are rude without providing evidence of their points to further the discussion instead of having a thread descend into bickering

I wrote that post using feedback gathered from healer forums, in game, reddit and various discords. I tried to cover as many people as possible when constructing the post. Is it perfect? of course not, that's fundamentally impossible. I don't claim to voice everyone's concerns, only as many as I could.

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.

You cannot claim that the majority of the playerbase disagrees with me, conversely I have not claimed to speak for everyone.
What you can see is that this forum, reddit, twitter etc are flooded with various complaints about healers. Because a lot of people aren't satisfied.
On your elements point, here you go, a thread about whm flavour containing posts that want our conjury back. Which the WHM lore as you know says is an extension of conjury.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-Flavor-in-6.0

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.

While your point is valid, denigrating those who have an opposing point is not.

I enjoy having something variable and fun to do when I don't need to heal like I did during the 6 years before SHB. On whm that was juggling a couple of buffs and cleric stance. On sch that was dots, bane and shadowflare. On astro that was my cards. Granted I sucked at sch so I didn't play it much.
Nobody is asking for complex rotations. We're just asking for a few buttons so that its not a miserable affair.
Look around the forum, a lot of people want more support buttons as well. WHM's especially have been asking for more utility and support actions for years. AST lost their support aspect almost completely- the cards got gutted. SCH's also lost their support buttons when they could silence and slow.

Can you honestly claim that pressing stone and aero vs ranjit or zenos, or even when fighting a fate by yourself, or grinding in bozja for a glowy stick, or on a treasure map is fun? Because for many people of many skill levels, it is not.

Though I did agree with you on exactly one point: point 9

I'm someone who plays a female character, and I can't stand the sheer volume of feminine gear. Robe after robe after robe, coat after coat after coat.

They couldn't even leave judge drace's armour alone without making its awesome cape into a skirt for the law's order healer/caster set.

[ItMe]

They couldn't even leave judge drace's armour alone without making its awesome cape into a skirt for the law's order healer/caster set.

I found this as shocking as I did disheartening.
What a let down.

[Renathras]

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.

Ah, that's interesting.

I'm not really ever on these forums because I enjoy the game - an old adage of gaming communities that is generally accurate is "The people enjoying the game are playing it, not on forums rebutting the people not enjoying the game that are complaining about it on the forums".

The OP included things like "holy attack magic is worse than earth/air", which is hardly a universal position held by the community, for example.

EVERYONE speaks for themselves. Now, there are people that agree with us, and by proxy we are speaking to their concerns as well, but I'd wager the majority of the playerbase doesn't have a problem with current healing, nor even the majority of healers. Of course, there's absolutely no way to prove this either way. To a couple of your points (since you actually addressed my post respectfully and not with snark and insults):

"Fixing the issues that more experienced players are finding doesn't need to come at the expense of the casual player base" - I would agree with this, but this is the danger. Most "solutions" proposed change casual play as well as mid-core play, not JUST Savage/Ultimate play.

"As you state in your follow up post, this is a perfectly valid opinion and I agree with it in many respects" - I WOULD agree - I like the idea of having different Jobs that appeal to everyone - but this is a case of "This is why we can't have nice things". In SB, SCHs had a more involved DPS kit. But they complained. "SE, make it where we aren't having to work 3x as hard and only doing the same damage as WHM". As the warning goes: Be careful what you wish for. They wanted MORE DAMAGE, SE thought "that's a balance nightmare and would make groups always take SCH > WHM...so instead we'll make their DPS easier. They complained about having to do more work, after all..." This is why SCH has the same DPS kit as WHM now, and does comparable raid damage when Chain is factored in.

Now, if THE COMMUNITY could accept not getting hyperbuffed classes that leave others in the dust, that'd be different...but it's already shown it cannot.

My personal IDEAL would be all four healers to work differently. I know it's anathema to mention WoW, but one GOOD THING that WoW did was that all its healers had niches and worked differently for years and years. This is partly allowed for by larger raid sizes (25/40 man) since you're more likely to have one of each present. Paladins were hyper-mana efficient with big single target bomb heals but little else, which made them excellent tank healers. Druids had a wide assortment of mana efficient but slow burn HoTs that they would "roll" across the raid, making them fantastic raid healers. Shamans had pulsing and AOE heals, which made them good for when you needed to heal a lot of people all at once before a following mechanic. And Holy Priests were kind of the Swiss army knife that had a little of each in one kit along with good sustain. Later Discipline Priest was brought up as a healer that heals by doing damage and using shielding.

Such a system is great in a game with enough heal slots and a raid system designed to bring 5-7 healers so that one being amazing just means you bring 2-3 of it and 1 of each of the others. This does not work with this community where people hyper-min-max (even for content that absolutely doesn't deserve it - I've had people say you shouldn't use GCD heals...in LEVELING DUNGEONS!!! Like what, that 200 potency foregone Stone 2 is going to make you miss an enrage or something?!) and will actively exclude players/Jobs that are seen as "not meta/optimal" in Ultimate raids. It's beyond stupid...but it's one of my few consistent gripes with this community. Missing a single Glare for a Cure 2 somewhere in a fight IS NOT going to change the outcome unless you're in an Ultimate MAYBE, yet the community acts like casting any GCD heal other than Lilies (and them only during movement) somehow is going to result in disaster and you should be excommunicated from the game.

...I again chalk this up to "forum community" vs "actual game community", because normal people just playing the game aren't even likely aware we're having this conversation. Yet it somehow fills PF frequently, and did often in SB.

"May I ask why?" - Because I HATE DoTs. I've ALWAYS hated DoTs. I greatly dislike what I call "upkeep buffs/debuffs" IN GENERAL. Abilities that you hit once then ignore for the next half a minute or so, but if you don't then REMEMBER to refresh them, your damage tanks. This is also why I hate "attack speed" buffs like NIN's. Enochian doesn't bother me AS much because once you put it up, it just stays up as part of your rotation and isn't something you have to stupidly refresh. Dia/Biolysis/etc are buttons that I just need a water dipping bird set to a 30 second periodicity by my keyboard to hit for me every 30 sec so I don't have to bother with it. 30 seconds is long enough for me to forget to track it, but not long enough for that not to matter. I'd prefer 15 or 60 sec duration if I DO have to have DoTs, since I DO tend to think about it around 15 sec in and see it doesn't need refreshing, and 60 sec is about long enough my brain says (for ANY 60 sec CD) "You haven't used X in a while...might wanna look at that".

I'm annoyed because EVERY SINGLE HEALER has the same "nuke + DoT" kit. I'd rather there be some diversity there, wouldn't you? SCH having 2 DoTs and WHM having 0 DoTs would be just that kind of diversity. As to the why vs Lily - because it just "feels bad" to cast a Lily for movement when everyone's at 100% health even though that's technically a DPS gain. It's counter-intuitive and just FEELS wrong. And as for the widened gap, I'd wager a lot of novice and some mid-level healers let their DoTs fall off far more often than they miss casting a GCD attack spell, but it's hard to say for sure. Part of the problem is selection bias in the data. E.g. the people most likely to be posted to FFLogs are the people most likely to run parsers, which tend to be the people most likely to have high DPS to begin with, and who often won't post their own parses where they do worse.

Does that adequately answer your question?

Agreed on robes.

And agree with whoever complained about the healer/caster Judge armor. Like what the heck? It's like the designers think only girls play healers...the thing is literally an armored corset with a skirt attached!

.

Are there solutions?

Yes.

The problem is the solutions proposed by the high-end playerbase and min-maxing theorycrafters affect EVERYONE, not only them, in all parts of the game...and the community as a whole has not shown an ability to be responsible with such changes in the past. Do we deserve a second chance? I'm always a fan of second chances. But will this one work well or not? I'd wager, based on past history - and even me asking people a simple question like "If we gave SCH back their full kit, would you be content doing the same damage but not being bored?" that is answered with "HELL NO! I should get more damage since I'm working harder! The scrubs should learn to git good and reach my level!" kind of nonsense - indicates that it cannot be responsible as a whole.

[Renathras]

Without getting into a bickering argument with you - I'll point out that my views are relatively common, yet were not in your OP. I'm not sure what echo chamber you're getting your points from, but they represent those echo chambers, not the whole community. And I wasn't trying to be mean to you, I was just pointing out the people you're speaking for are not healers as a whole and should not be represented as such, and that I personally didn't like most of your ideas, and I doubt I'm alone in that.

They couldn't even leave judge drace's armour alone without making its awesome cape into a skirt for the law's order healer/caster set.

...but this I agree with. Seriously, it's an armored corset with a skirt attached. Who thought this was a good idea? As I've noted before, all the artwork of healers are always females (with one exception I've seen of a very feminine looking Hyur male) and that's it. It's like they don't get that non-females like to support and heal. CONVERSELY, all the males are tanks...but even there, they occasionally give them dresses/skirts to mix things up.

[Rilifane]

[...] or you're so unlucky that you've managed a broken-geared tank in every single roulette.

I'm at a point where I want one of those above all else.
I miss the non-Augmented Shire tanks in Doma/ Abania or barely passing min ilvl groups in Qitana doing the spicy pulls. Bonus points for one or more pieces being broken. Forgetting mitigation is also an option.

[Deceptus]

I absolutely do not speak for solely these groups like you insinuate
-I hate parsers, I hate parsing players

Shouldn't hold hate friend, it's not healthy. Some people parse for themselves and themselves alone and never bring it up. Do you hate them as well?