A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

Late night musings: though my question was butchered in the 6.1 live letter to be about lack of healing to do, we did still get something to heal at least this patch in the regular trial, the ex and savage. possibly some bits of criterion too but i aint seen enough yet
We know yoshida has heard about the lack of participation of healers, but also heard from 2 healers that they did like the increased healing requirements

I'm seeing 2 possibilities here the devs will take forward
1. they lower healing requirements to beg back sylphies but not to the degree it was in the last tier
2. they sustain the increased healing requirements but reduce savage loot to be less grindy to gear. maybe even role locked loot if lucky

perhaps next time there's a q&a from the forum I will have to make my question purely "Can healers get damage buttons and cards returned? The removal made healers boring since shadowbringers and turned off many veteran healers"

after all, they did give more healing this patch

I think the wording is going to be incredibly important. No shade on your question because I'm glad it ultimately got seen, but I think in hindsight, it could have been more clear and concise about the problems. Then the misunderstanding got exacerbated by having a non-native English speaker translate and paraphrase the question live.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think the wording is going to be incredibly important.

unfortunately, and i wish i wasnt this pessimistic, but i think you could literally say 'here is a problem, here is the solution, will you implement it' about some things in this game and yoshi-p will go off on one about some completely unrelated thing and not address the actual question. we could directly say 'healers are quitting en masse because the rotation we have to fill downtime with is boring. we naturally trend towards more dps during downtime, as a result of getting better at a fight. the better we get, the more downtime there is, the more damage opportunities arise. this is an unavoidable inevitability due to the design of the game. no amount of 'we have added more healing required in the fights' is going to solve this, as gear causes players to heal for more per action and take less damage from enemies due to the defense stat increasing. will you embrace this inevitable outcome, and add more dps actions for healers during this downtime?' and he'll go on about the hypothetical 'new healer who is going to be stressed about these buttons', which means tl;dr no you can't have a rotation vaguely resembling a tank, because what if Johnny Nothumbs can't keep up with having Fluid Aura back on the hotbars?

no yoshi-p those buttons are not going to matter in any content you'd find a 'new healer' in so that point just does not fly. noone is going to notice if Johnny isn't using a fully optimised rotation in Dusk Vigil, Holminster Switch, or indeed any dungeon that isn't in the EX roulette. and even then, if someone DOES notice in EX roulette, they cant do anything except grumble to themselves that it is taking an extra 7 mins, because Johnny is protected by the TOS

sorry if this seems especially terse but i was doing criterion today (normal, not savage) and while it feels fun to be a healer there now, i can already see the writing on the wall in it's design, it's fun because we dont know the mechanics and we're constantly in 'oh fk' mode. once we have the mechanics down it is going to be just like any other savage fight where we end up at 80%+ of our actions being dps actions. we got more 'healing required' this savage tier too, and look at it: its not even more 'healing required' it's more MIT required. and since healers have a certain amount of mit they provide, that 'requirement' has just spilled over to meaning the dps have to use their mit tools too (and sometimes they dont because why would they? they didnt need it before!). more 'healing required' would be having raidwides more often, not 'instead of 120% of your hp before mit, they do 150%'. regardless, while i appreciate having more to do for week 1 healing, it's just that: week 1. it's painfully apparent how quickly that 'extra healing required' evaporates due to gear difference.

if we keep the healing required as it is, then we keep on this same downward spiral of healers leaving. we revert it a bit back towards asphodelos, maybe you get the more casual healers to stay/come back, but this is a bandaid on the bullet wound. the solution is, in my opinion, to stop trying to change the 20% of our time spent as 'healing time' to 30% or 40%, and instead focus on making that 80% 'dpsing time' actually engaging and fun.

[GrimGale]

unfortunately, and i wish i wasnt this pessimistic, but i think you could literally say 'here is a problem, here is the solution, will you implement it' about some things in this game and yoshi-p will go off on one about some completely unrelated thing and not address the actual question. we could directly say 'healers are quitting en masse because the rotation we have to fill downtime with is boring. we naturally trend towards more dps during downtime, as a result of getting better at a fight. the better we get, the more downtime there is, the more damage opportunities arise. this is an unavoidable inevitability due to the design of the game. no amount of 'we have added more healing required in the fights' is going to solve this, as gear causes players to heal for more per action and take less damage from enemies due to the defense stat increasing. will you embrace this inevitable outcome, and add more dps actions for healers during this downtime?' and he'll go on about the hypothetical 'new healer who is going to be stressed about these buttons', which means tl;dr no you can't have a rotation vaguely resembling a tank, because what if Johnny Nothumbs can't keep up with having Fluid Aura back on the hotbars?

no yoshi-p those buttons are not going to matter in any content you'd find a 'new healer' in so that point just does not fly. noone is going to notice if Johnny isn't using a fully optimised rotation in Dusk Vigil, Holminster Switch, or indeed any dungeon that isn't in the EX roulette. and even then, if someone DOES notice in EX roulette, they cant do anything except grumble to themselves that it is taking an extra 7 mins, because Johnny is protected by the TOS

sorry if this seems especially terse but i was doing criterion today (normal, not savage) and while it feels fun to be a healer there now, i can already see the writing on the wall in it's design, it's fun because we dont know the mechanics and we're constantly in 'oh fk' mode.

My first time doing Variant Dungeon we were four inexperienced players. Two tanks two dps. I had Variant Raise on. We didn't need at healer at all.

In fact, every time I go in, I encourage players to switch off healer.

With raise and cure, healers are absolutely useless in Normal variant dungeons.

[AmiableApkallu]

In fact, every time I go in, I encourage players to switch off healer.

With raise and cure, healers are absolutely useless in Normal variant dungeons.

That's literally why Raise and Cure are Variant actions: So that you're not required to take a healer in with you. That is by design; no news there.

Here's my question, though: I went in as a two-person party, me on tank (PLD), a friend on healer (SGE). Funny thing: We had almost the exact same max HP. Mine was what I expected, which means my friend's/the SGE's HP was scaled up by quite a bit. Does that mean their damage was also scaled up, meaning they wouldn't be as useless as you might otherwise think?

[Kabooa]

That's literally why Raise and Cure are Variant actions: So that you're not required to take a healer in with you. That is by design; no news there.

Here's my question, though: I went in as a two-person party, me on tank (PLD), a friend on healer (SGE). Funny thing: We had almost the exact same max HP. Mine was what I expected, which means my friend's/the SGE's HP was scaled up by quite a bit. Does that mean their damage was also scaled up, meaning they wouldn't be as useless as you might otherwise think?

The HP of the boss scales depending on how many players enter. It's possible that the HP might scale up depending on number and job, where tanks and healers increase the HP by less than a DPS would.

Criterion absolutely requires healers though.

I highly recommend doing Criterion completely blind. It is some of the most fun I've personally had in this game.

[ForsakenRoe]

yeh variant is designed like POTD, 1-4 players of any role. the variant actions are there to fill in for the missing roles, eg a non-healer will have access to raise because you cant guarantee that dps will be a RDM or SMN, so instead everyone has access to a raise. when i said 'criterion' at the end of my little rant, i meant 'another sildihn subterrene (normal)'. there it is scaled for 1 tank, 1 healer, 2 dps, but my point is that, as with any content in the game, as the party gets more familiar with the mechanics, the amount of 'oops i stood in the ice' etc kind of mistakes goes down. we get to the point where the only damage we take is the 'unavoidable damage', we work out how to most efficiently mit/heal through that damage, and eventually we're back where we started: an ever growing amount of glarespam.

i know some players want to see more healing to do but i fear that the devs cannot work out how to do 'heal more damage' in a fight without excluding parts of the playerbase. we see this tier that healers stopped playing healer in PF because it took more mit to survive, so clearly 'it hits harder' isnt the solution. if the devs added raidwides more 'often', or a 'raid bleed' like P3S's fire rain, i feel like that would just be factored in to the healing rotations once we're geared, a sort of 'ok we use a medica2 here to counter the firestorm' and then back to dpsing. personally, going from current glarespam to 'current glarespam, but you also cast medica2 once every 15s to counter a constant bleed' isnt going to suddenly make the role more engaging.

this is why i think the solution is to have healing requirements a little more lax than what we have in current tier (instead of raidwides doing 140% of your max hp before mit, i think 120-125% so you can afford for the melee to forget what Feint is occasionally, numbers are estimates/for comparison, not exact values for this tier), and have the skill expression come from our dps rotations. players can say 'i play healer to heal' but the design of this game just does not lend itself to that concept. there is too much 'dead time' where there is no healing needed, so we fill it with dps to help kill the enemy faster. ideally in my mind, we'd have ways to either cause healing, directly or indirectly, via doing damage, or at the very least, stuff like macrocosmos or pneuma where it's damage neutral to use the tool. for example, i suggested a WHM gauge that fills when using stone, aero or water, and at 50 gauge you get a massive, strong, instacast aoe heal, almost as strong as Cure3 but costs gauge instead of MP, and via a refund system, works out to be damage neutral. players who want to do damage can use this tool to be rewarded with healing tools when they do damage, players who dont want to do damage dont have to use this tool and can instead stick to medica and cure3.

[GrimGale]

That's literally why Raise and Cure are Variant actions: So that you're not required to take a healer in with you. That is by design; no news there.

Here's my question, though: I went in as a two-person party, me on tank (PLD), a friend on healer (SGE). Funny thing: We had almost the exact same max HP. Mine was what I expected, which means my friend's/the SGE's HP was scaled up by quite a bit. Does that mean their damage was also scaled up, meaning they wouldn't be as useless as you might otherwise think?

Damage doesn't seem scaled up to compensate for roles, at least in the potency of regular actions. Tanks and Heals do get access to Spirit Dart which is really strong. That is meant to compensate, though Tanks do win over Healers, considering Spirit Dart is equally as potent for Tanks than it is for Healers. (Tanks baseline kits provide them with higher DPS than healers do.)

[Llynethil]

A a sage I feel like most of the first post counts if you're with a static.

Doing random roulette partyfinding ... just the amount of times I think to myself "How did you manage to go down to 30% hp on regular mobs mister bard?" or "Does the tank know what rampart is?"

When you get a competent team, healing can be a little boring, but when you get an incompetent team, for the love of god am I glad I have the tools that I have, nerfing it would make it impossible to finish at times.

[Semirhage]

I'd go a step further and say it's not even a static thing. If you have 2-3 competent people in a party it's a snooze. The tools healers have are more than enough to float a few goobers through anything under an EX trial level of difficulty.

[Recon1o6]

at least for the first two exes this expansion you can have 3 dead players for several minutes and still clear if your remaining teammates are competent enough as i learned recently. that sch was a diehard in the hydaelyn fight

another note: my healing bunny was ecstatic that she got to use miasma 2 again as a sch in criterion. I'm not sure why, its 2 ogcds a minute from the window made by gcd dot