Major flaws in healing design.

[Absurdity]

Such backwards design. I've never played any other game where it's only fun to play when you're playing poorly. Games should reward you for playing well. Absolute disaster that healers in this game are punished for doing good.

It certainly is a backwards design, welcome to Shadowbringers.

[Rilifane]

Such backwards design. I've never played any other game where it's only fun to play when you're playing poorly. Games should reward you for playing well. Absolute disaster that healers in this game are punished for doing good.

I think as long as you're still on the road of figuring things out, it's fun. Learning how to reduce weaving and movement to a minimum on WhM and Sch, learning the burst windows of various classes on Ast, mapping out the fights on healers, seeing how low you can go to maximise oGCD effectiveness. Making plans and experimenting is fun but once you have your plan and can stick to it, it gets boring.
Even if things go wrong, trade a few Broil/ Glare/ Malefic for a few GCD heals and you're back on track. It's not even neccessary to change your oGCD mapping.

Part of the problem here is that there is too much emphasis on trying to change game and job design to accommodate people who fail at the balance between DPSing and healing that they've dumbed down the DPS aspect and people haven't stopped making those mistakes

But the problem is actually quite simple, yet unresolvable for a very simple reason. People make mistakes. They are human. I like to think I have a good priority over healing, but I am capable of misjudging and if that happens, somebody dies, I also own up to it and apologize.

I'd be surprised if it is because that healer would rather DPS (if they did, they'd play a DPS), chances are, yes, they are trying to play optimally, which is also what your tanks and DPS might be doing, before 5.0 that'd be your tanks dropping tank stance, for both your tank and DPS that might be eating an AoE, but in those cases, it's all right, because your healer has your back. For example, some people will purposefully eat AoEs to keep their DPS up, I rescued a MNK out of an AoE yesterday only for them to run straight back into it (they weren't even in a position where they'd lose stacks)

Tanks make mistakes. DPS make mistakes. And healers will also make mistakes. Let's not berate them for it and instead help them learn from them and stop screwing with job or game design.

It is inefficient for a healer to keep everybody's health 100% of the time. We are playing a game where our performance is marked by rDPS and healing is also marked by out overheal too. And many people will strive to improve on that, because the end result is they are a more efficient healer and makes their contributions greater.

But you can misjudge a tankbuster, you can misjudge their gear, you can misjudge how well the tank uses their cooldowns. I mean, i've healed the same pulls over and over and found tanks whose health slowly drops, so I can do more DPS, I also see tanks whose health drop very quickly. If I am used to the former because I have mainly got the former and not the latter, then there is a greater chance I can misjudge it. I still prioritise healing, but you might think you have your healing in line. Even at 60% health the tank will be fine in exception of a tank buster, if your healer misjudged that tank buster, there's your problem.

And when you make a mistake you learn and do better next time.

But thing is, I am surprised for you to find it is THAT common, because my experience is the opposite, it is rarer. Though if you are finding it is common, it proves my points about dumbing down DPS on a healer not preventing it (and to give us a more complex rotation again)

This is on point.
People make mistakes and they need to be allowed to make mistakes even if they are negatively affecting another players' performance at first.
A dps that greeds will eat stacks and additional damage, the healer can fix it bei either healing or (at worst) ressing them later. A tank that greeds or uses mitigation poorly eats additional damage, the healer can fix it. In both cases, people generally don't bat an eye. And I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with this. But healers need to be allowed to make mistakes aswell, even if they misjudged and someone dies from it.
That's how you learn and improve.

During ARR and HW when it was arguably most risky to balance healing and dpsing because of Cleric Stance, which could really screw you over if you accidentally locked yourself, healers still generally dpsed while healing and the amount of healers "refusing to heal" wasn't any higher or lower than now with the dumbed down design.

Shaming and berating people for making mistakes will not prevent them from making them. Only being able to learn to do better will.
No matter how much you dumb down design and make mistakes more punishing for the one making it, you will keep running into people who have yet to figure things out and will occasionally misjudge a situation.

Even if weakness and damage down had a much stronger effect, people would still greed. Even if healers had a lifebond with their tank and would immediately die if they die, they would still greed. Testing your limits is important. Even if our dps spells only had 10 potency, healers would still dps and test their limits.

And I strongly disagree with the notion that mitigation/ survival should be the sole responsibility of healers.
This is an MMO; we shouldn't live in our own little bubbles where we're only ever affected by our own actions. Encouraging teamplay by giving tanks and dps tools to mitigate damage or heal them is part of it. Besides, do you really think two buttons with 120s cooldown will suddenly make healer gameplay interesting when we spent almost every hardcast on dps? We don't need more buttons we only push every few minutes, we need more buttons we need to push constantly.

[Saefinn]

And I strongly disagree with the notion that mitigation/ survival should be the sole responsibility of healers.
This is an MMO; we shouldn't live in our own little bubbles where we're only ever affected by our own actions. Encouraging teamplay by giving tanks and dps tools to mitigate damage or heal them is part of it. Besides, do you really think two buttons with 120s cooldown will suddenly make healer gameplay interesting when we spent almost every hardcast on dps? We don't need more buttons we only push every few minutes, we need more buttons we need to push constantly.

This reminds me of when emnity wasn't just tank responsibility with skills for emnity dumps, if your tank struggled or heck there was a big gap iLevel where the DPS found it easier to get aggro, they could just drop that emnity. Emnity management wasn't just something tanks had. When you think about it, tanks could had other jobs help with emnity, dps have other jobs that can help with damage and healers have jobs that can help with healing, there's your teamwork right there.

And because of my experience playing healer, when I play DNC, I will Curing Waltz to help out if I see healthy look risky. I've also done it as a PLD, had a dungeon where the healer was having bad connection issues, he offered to leave, but between us we had the tools to keep going, so we did. When you look around, there are quite few jobs that can contribute.

[Miminming]

removing migitation from dps is like removing the only part where dps is invlude to teamwork...

[bundythenoob]

removing migitation from dps is like removing the only part where dps is invlude to teamwork...

I agree with this. I wouldn't remove the mitigation from DPS at all. I like the idea that a skilled DPS has a chance to show off their knowledge by debuffing tankbusters or raidwide aoes. If anything, I'd rather see Protecc/shell be added to healers, and remove that ridiculous tank "mastery" trait. this would not only make a tank's mitigation skills much more valuable, but would also boost the value of DPS mitigation, and the healer mitigation.

[Sylvain]

Not sure how healer expecting a tank to survive a TB with only 60% of their health in savage is a design flaw...
It's a tank burster, it's meant to hurt and require proper mitigation and healing. If they consider doing 3 Rez is more optimal than hard casting one extra healing spell well too bad for their group .

[Saefinn]

Part of the problem here is that there is too much emphasis on trying to change game and job design to accommodate people who fail at the balance between DPSing and healing that they've dumbed down the DPS aspect and people haven't stopped making those mistakes

But the problem is actually quite simple, yet unresolvable for a very simple reason. People make mistakes. They are human. I like to think I have a good priority over healing, but I am capable of misjudging and if that happens, somebody dies, I also own up to it and apologize.

I'd be surprised if it is because that healer would rather DPS (if they did, they'd play a DPS), chances are, yes, they are trying to play optimally, which is also what your tanks and DPS might be doing, before 5.0 that'd be your tanks dropping tank stance, for both your tank and DPS that might be eating an AoE, but in those cases, it's all right, because your healer has your back. For example, some people will purposefully eat AoEs to keep their DPS up, I rescued a MNK out of an AoE yesterday only for them to run straight back into it (they weren't even in a position where they'd lose stacks)

Tanks make mistakes. DPS make mistakes. And healers will also make mistakes. Let's not berate them for it and instead help them learn from them and stop screwing with job or game design.

It is inefficient for a healer to keep everybody's health 100% of the time. We are playing a game where our performance is marked by rDPS and healing is also marked by out overheal too. And many people will strive to improve on that, because the end result is they are a more efficient healer and makes their contributions greater.

But you can misjudge a tankbuster, you can misjudge their gear, you can misjudge how well the tank uses their cooldowns. I mean, i've healed the same pulls over and over and found tanks whose health slowly drops, so I can do more DPS, I also see tanks whose health drop very quickly. If I am used to the former because I have mainly got the former and not the latter, then there is a greater chance I can misjudge it. I still prioritise healing, but you might think you have your healing in line. Even at 60% health the tank will be fine in exception of a tank buster, if your healer misjudged that tank buster, there's your problem.

And when you make a mistake you learn and do better next time.

But thing is, I am surprised for you to find it is THAT common, because my experience is the opposite, it is rarer. Though if you are finding it is common, it proves my points about dumbing down DPS on a healer not preventing it (and to give us a more complex rotation again)

[ForteNightshade]

Part of the problem here is that there is too much emphasis on trying to change game and job design to accommodate people who fail at the balance between DPSing and healing that they've dumbed down the DPS aspect and people haven't stopped making those mistakes

Unfortunately, the dev team's response to just about anything is to make things "more accessible". What they've (hopefully) discovered is going the opposite extreme also upsets people because now you're only real challenged as a healer in two fights; last tier of Savage and Ultimate. It's frankly inexcusable just how little healing is required yet they continue to try and focus on giving healers more healing abilities—or dumbing down other aspects so baby healers have less to focus on. But this, in turn, gives them nothing to strive towards. Which is why more and more healers who don't even touch Savage are complaining how boring the jobs have become.

[Ilenya]

I would *love* if we had more buffs/debuffs to work with as healers, but SE seems unwilling to even give us that, it feels like.

[Saefinn]

Unfortunately, the dev team's response to just about anything is to make things "more accessible". What they've (hopefully) discovered is going the opposite extreme also upsets people because now you're only real challenged as a healer in two fights; last tier of Savage and Ultimate. It's frankly inexcusable just how little healing is required yet they continue to try and focus on giving healers more healing abilities—or dumbing down other aspects so baby healers have less to focus on. But this, in turn, gives them nothing to strive towards. Which is why more and more healers who don't even touch Savage are complaining how boring the jobs have become.

I pretty much tick that box. I'm semi casual, I'll do EX fights every so often. Savage is once in a blue moon if I touch it. Not that I am incapable, just requires more dedication and works better if you have a static.

But I try to take accessibility into account with all my feedback. But if they just give us a varied DPS rotation, all it'd do is raise the skill ceiling without even touching the skill floor.

Newbie healers shouldn't be expected to DPS. I've just started helping a newbie friend learn AST and my advice has been "learn to heal first, start with the basic, try it in more forgiving content and build from there".

The big problem is healer down time. When I can be DPSing 70% of an on-content dungeon, then we need to break up the monotony. We have a great healing kit on all 3 healers, granted not perfect, but when used they are fun to use.

But I feel the need to quote my comments to my Discord

I sense myself doing an Arthur Vines here:
"Despite some of its flaws, Scholar has an interesting and well put together healing kit. IF I EVER GET TO USE IT!"

But I am willing to compromise for accessibility, keep the downtime, give us more to do in it, make me think about my healing in more challenging content instead. In easy content, let me have a semi-interesting DPS rotation to keep me going.

And thinking on that, making things to easy for all normal content I would argue makes it harder for a healer to learn to heal harder content. Because after Normal Raids your next difficulty level is extreme, which is a big jump.


I have suggested "Challenge Mode" dungeons, fulfill the purpose "hard" mode was supposed to, except it's the exact same dungeon but with the difficulty increased, where it can be easier than EX but harder than Normal Raids. Plus more content without really adding anything new.