A summary of healer issues

[Azurarok]

I just think they're designing healers from the perspective of a DPS player. If you look at the changes made from the start of SB until now, you can see them very slowly removing anything that can distract us from healing while giving us more and more healing tools. There's no nice way to say it, they're designing heal bots, not an actual enjoyable role.

Ah, yeah I do see that a bit. Kinda reminds me of how a good handful of older Tales games don't actually make their healers nearly as fun to play as others.

the gauge I suggested is for a healing skill that is damage neutral (like how Lilies pay for themselves via Misery's refund), and is damage positive only by spending the refund skills in buffs ala Misery (since the refund is tied to casting Glare/Dia/the other one, this would mean using the gauge at X:58, else you'd have to AFK til the buffs go out), and B: I rewrote it to also include non Lily heals, such that if there's a hard HPS check (Harrowing Hell for example), the player can still build gauge, because it seemed silly to be locked out of building towards a healing tool because you were too busy healing. I wouldn't want to have a gauge spent entirely on 'damage positive skills' on a healer. Rather, I think the way to do it would be what I went for, a gauge that gives access to more healing or mitigation tools, that, if used well, can increase the player's DPS indirectly by removing more 'damage-loss GCD heals' like Medica 2. Well, at least for WHM

This is kind of the point I was wanting to get back to, circling back to my first post in this thread regarding SGE's Toxicon and GCD heals in general. I think we need more designs where different attacking and healing skills interact with each other so that they somehow lead to the healer being dps neutral to even positive on a personal level for the role to be fun to play in all ranges of content. And by that I mean not only have healing help your attacks, but have ways attacking can also help with healing (e.g. make Glare also have a chance of proccing Freecure)

[Renathras]

https://reddit.com/r/ffxiv/s/OuogcTQXoU

Just for a bit of fun here is mainsub discussing healers, the most GCBTW of the the major Internet communication sites for 14 and even they are 80/20 or so split on healers being trash

If you have lost mainsub wheye are you getting your ideas that anyone likes healers anymore

Uh...

...80/20 is literally what I use all the time to justify 1/4 or 1/5 healer Jobs being this way. 1/5 is 20%, and 1/4 is 25%, so close to 20% (closest to possible given a ratio with a denominator of 4). Indeed, if we added Diurnal/Nocturnal stances back, that effectively gives us 5 overall Healer Jobs, so 1/5 (as long as it wasn't both AST stances) under that would be 20%, or the 20 part of 80/20 that "likes healers".

[IlluminaMentia]

Healers are awful to play during Solo content, I'm a rather casual player and the only cool moments in the story I enjoyed were the fights where I didnt play healer, solo content like Palace of the Dead and the brand new Eureka Orthos and mind numbing as a healer, I just want some more depth, even during Shadowbringers when I started the whole gcd cast time at least made weaving an interesting choice!

[AnotherPerson]

Sorry, I had to get this out of my chest.

It's been a long time since I queued into roulettes as a SCH, so today I queued into dungeons as one. My first dungeon pull I was ready to Bio and then spread it with Deployment Tactics... and then I remembered that was specifically for PvP now.
... So I applied the DoT to each mob and then spammed Art of War until everything died. I continued with the dungeon, only to realize I haven't casted a single heal for the entirety of the first boss until I stepped onto an orange aoe. Even then, it was when the boss was about to die, so the lustrate was pretty pointless. I was just throwing energy drains and whispering dawn was rarely used. We had a WAR and 2 DNC in the party.

By the end of the dungeon, I have used 1 lustrate + 1 indom + 4 whispering Dawns to actively heal. That was it.

It occurred to me that I was not actually having fun on SCH. I was not healing. I was actually spamming the same 2 to 3 button DPS. Sometimes changing Broil for Art of War. I didn't have as much fun as I did with PvP SCH that can spread DoTs. It felt so lackluster. I didn't enjoy the gameplay at all.

I think I actually hit the limit of how much I can tolerate healer gameplay. In the past I would still queue into dungeons while grumbling about the state of healer gameplay because I still have tomestones to farm and healer queues are instant, but I think I'm actually done... The current healing design for dungeons is no longer enjoyable for me in the slightest.

I'm too fed up with it all.

[BRVV]

So many heal skills and yet we can not heal our own issues -- Poetic statement by me

[Renathras]

Sorry, I had to get this out of my chest.

I have to ask this question: Why is spreading DoTs fun as opposed to applying them individually?

How is spreading DoTs fun in a single target (boss) encounter that has no adds?

I was running a 4 man earlier as SCH and had to keep healing my Tank using a number of my GCDs, but the Tank was a DRK, not WAR, which probably makes a difference. I was using Soil, Whispering Dawn, and Excogitation every pull, and would pre-Adlo shield as they were running to the enemies. I used Biolysis on each enemy as the Tank was still running/gathering them all (if we just used it once then spread it, THEN it would be boring since I'd have literally nothing to press besides Ruin 2 until the Tank came to a stop). The Tank was taking enough damage I had to use other abilities like Aetherpact and Lustrate in a few cases.

I'm not sure what you describe is a healer problem so much as its a WAR problem, as I have done 4 mans with WAR where I pretty much never had to use any healing actions at all.

Though again, I have to ask about the DoTs. I'm curious how spreading a DoT then spamming Ruin 2 would be "fun", or the ability to spread a DoT in a single target fight would be fun.

[Connor]

snip

I can’t speak for other Scholars, but personally I enjoy spreading the PvP DoT because of the additional effect.

8% damage down isn’t much, but it can still be enough to keep someone alive where they otherwise wouldn’t, especially with fixed attack potency. Contrast that with Adloquiums 8% damage buff which is mostly the same - doesn’t sound like much, but it can still assist with people getting kills where they otherwise might not have managed to get the enemy low enough before they spam Recuperate etc.

It creates an interesting situation where you have to decide whether you want to leverage the maximum damage potential of Biolysis, maximise uptime on the damage buff from Adloquium, or a balance the two. Or even things like, if there’s a bunch of battle highs slightly further from the alliance, do you Biolysis one of them to make them less lethal or target the main alliance for pressure/kills. The two charges on Deployment Tactics and being 15 second cool-down means you can ever either keep one going indefinitely by constantly reapplying or need to consider the situation when using the two.

For me it’s not the DoT itself that’s interesting, it’s the ways in which it can be tactically applied based on the situation and the necessity of balancing uptime between Biolysis with Adloquium is what makes it enjoyable in the end. I also feel like, without some kind of additional effect on them that need for balance wouldn’t exist in normal PvE. If they just made Biolysis spread with Deployment as it is now, it wouldn’t really be much of a decision. Either Adloquium shielding would be so necessary you could never spread DoTs or Biolysis damage would be good you’d never spread Adloquium.

[Shurrikhan]

I have to ask this question: Why is spreading DoTs fun as opposed to applying them individually?

How is spreading DoTs fun in a single target (boss) encounter that has no adds?

I was running a 4 man earlier as SCH and had to keep healing my Tank using a number of my GCDs, but the Tank was a DRK, not WAR, which probably makes a difference. I was using Soil, Whispering Dawn, and Excogitation every pull, and would pre-Adlo shield as they were running to the enemies. I used Biolysis on each enemy as the Tank was still running/gathering them all (if we just used it once then spread it, THEN it would be boring since I'd have literally nothing to press besides Ruin 2 until the Tank came to a stop). The Tank was taking enough damage I had to use other abilities like Aetherpact and Lustrate in a few cases.

Wait... why wouldn't you just be spamming Art of War during the gather if there are 4+ enemies in the pack? You're not a WHM; it's not like you have a cast-time on your AoE that you can't nullify. Just run right next to the tank.

That said, if your options truly were just between the likes of a 700p DoT and 220p Ruin II... that'd also be a reason not to spend an Aetherflow on spreading those DoTs unless an extra Lustrate would be unable to spare you a GCD heal anyways. Across the full gather, AoW's 165n ppgcd is likely to almost double the DoT's ppgcd and the couple earlier ticks on 1-3 mobs for some 280p max isn't going to reliably kill off the first half of mobs so much earlier as to save you a GCD heal you'd otherwise need to throw out towards the end.

If you could DoT-spread, you'd still save it for the the first moment you've reached the full gather, not the run-in, unless all mobs would die in less than the DoT's duration. Outside of a 2-minute burst, it's pretty rare that enemies get less than 30s TTK in a random party.

And if we wanted to actually balance Bane without again relying on absurd drop-off percentiles, it would probably follow something like the old HW suggestions of sharing, doubling, and then re-spreading the DoTs of all enemies in range, while causing enemies hit by Bane to also take on a debuff that causes them to detonate upon death (spreading their remaining durations split among onto enemies nearby -- stacking up to the original max duration -- or just bursting for a portion of the periodic damage stored.)


EDIT

To be more concise: What you're saying would be impacted by Bane almost certainly would not be because you wouldn't use Bane over that the gather (because it'd be a waste to put it on CD, let alone spend AF on it, before the full gather). Heck, Stormblood Bane came with massive damage-falloff (wasn't a damage gain over separate unnerfed DoTs until high enough target counts that you'd just use AoW instead during the gather). And even if Bane were returned, it would probably be in a slightly different form which could easily then actually provide more use of DoT GCDs than are presently optimal in dungeons.

[Icecylee]

I'm not sure what you describe is a healer problem so much as its a WAR problem, as I have done 4 mans with WAR where I pretty much never had to use any healing actions at all.

While WAR is certainly the easiest tank to faceroll through dungeons on - if I'm with 3 other DPS, even if they're not all fully geared, i can usually get by with *a single Bloodwhetting per mass-pull*, which yeah is it's own unique kind of stupid. But when on GNB, which has the second lowest sustain of the tanks, I can still get through an entire dungeon without any healers. I just have to remember to actually use all my defensive cooldowns instead (and this is also still not in the best gear possible, as I cannot be assed to do modern savage fights). It's not really unreasonable to assume that even in DF with an average party a healer isn't actually pushing very many healing buttons.

[Sebazy]

I have to ask this question: Why is spreading DoTs fun as opposed to applying them individually?

Can't talk for PvP, but as far as old SCH bane in dungeons or bosses with adds goes...

It was significantly more engaging than dotting mobs in a dungeon one by one. You had to think about which mob you were dotting to ensure your bane was going to reach everything whilst the pack was in motion. You had the potential to snapshot your dot spread off group buffs and debuffs. You had the potential to time your dot spread to land on adds right as they spawned to maximise uptime. It was also more interesting because of cast times on some dots making it more challenging to get a full stack going mid pull.

You could do a LOT with spread dots back in the day, it's how I did 1k dps in Nevereap at the start of HW, a figure that many other DPS jobs had a tough time matching. It's also how Scholars had crazy damage potential in fights like A2S.

As Connor says, the various spread mechanics have offered headroom for skill expression and optimisation. It's why Aero III is fondly remembered as well IMO, paying attention offered genuine benefits and improved performance. The same can't really be said for tabbing through a pack mashing a GCD dot that can be cast on the move.

I'll pretend to ignore your disingenuous question about spreading dots on a single target boss for the sake of keeping things civil.