Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Liam_Harper]

i honestly agree about the abundance of ogcd heals mudding down the experience. Not only are ogcds plentiful and strong, but the cooldowns are also super short. If i have a thoughtless free heal for every attack, theres nothing to plan anymore. if clearing fights without using gcds heals felt rewarding before, now it feels expected.

I don't see what's thoughtless about oGCD's compared to GCD's. You talk about a free heal for every attack and nothing to plan, or having short cooldowns when GCD heals have no cooldown and are always there for every attack, bar running out of mana entirely.

oGCD's have limits and if you mistime your Earthy Star or Asylum, waste your Bene and Tetra and sudden danger happens, you turn to GCD's. Your oGCD's are the ones you plan, space out and utilize well. Medica II you simply press when a raidwide happens or Regen you simply apply to the tank whenever and let it do it's thing. This is why high end healers utilize oGCD's well and inexperienced healers spam GCD's.
What we need is more frequent damage, so the toolkit is stretched a bit more and tested. We don't need a slow brainless 2.5 sec cast spam gameplay.

[ItMe]

I don't see what's thoughtless about oGCD's compared to GCD's. You talk about a free heal for every attack and nothing to plan, or having short cooldowns when GCD heals have no cooldown and are always there for every attack, bar running out of mana entirely.

oGCD's have limits and if you mistime your Earthy Star or Asylum, waste your Bene and Tetra and sudden danger happens, you turn to GCD's. Your oGCD's are the ones you plan, space out and utilize well. Medica II you simply press when a raidwide happens or Regen you simply apply to the tank whenever and let it do it's thing. This is why high end healers utilize oGCD's well and inexperienced healers spam GCD's.

I feel like I, personally, leveled up reading this.

[technole]

Bene and Holmgang matched up well back in Turn 13 for Akh Morn. If you pulled Bahamut Prime with WAR instead of PLD, you'd also get another use of Bene and Holmgang early on for the tank busters. It was also a time that pulling every fight with WAR was actually way more optimal than PLD. You'd get more tank cool downs with tank swaps, allowing healers to heal less and actually do some damage. Yes, healer DPS existed in ARR to a small extent.

But arguing about 2.x fight design and skills now is kind of worthless. Bene and Lustrate were the only healing oGCDs then, you could drop an Adlo and/or Stoneskin before tank busters hit for additional mitigation, there was only two tanks and healers, the whole meta has changed where manual casts of healing isn't exactly optimal anymore. In-fact this was proven to fall flat on it's face when they made 4.0 WHM lilies tied to Cure/II. It got so much flack that it took an entire lily rehaul to fix, like who in their right mind would be using that skill constantly.

I don't see what's thoughtless about oGCD's compared to GCD's. You talk about a free heal for every attack and nothing to plan, or having short cooldowns when GCD heals have no cooldown and are always there for every attack, bar running out of mana entirely.

oGCD's have limits and if you mistime your Earthy Star or Asylum, waste your Bene and Tetra and sudden danger happens, you turn to GCD's. Your oGCD's are the ones you plan, space out and utilize well. Medica II you simply press when a raidwide happens or Regen you simply apply to the tank whenever and let it do it's thing. This is why high end healers utilize oGCD's well and inexperienced healers spam GCD's.
What we need is more frequent damage, so the toolkit is stretched a bit more and tested. We don't need a slow brainless 2.5 sec cast spam gameplay.

We do get that in E11S Fatebreaker Savage final phase cycles and the E12S Junction Shiva to Diamond Dust stuff. It's pretty good fight design where you are doing moving mechanics, constant stream of damage and making use of instant AoEs, several times. Heal checks are nice, if anything I think that's what makes savage enjoyable as a healer.

[QooEr]

I don't see what's thoughtless about oGCD's compared to GCD's. You talk about a free heal for every attack and nothing to plan, or having short cooldowns when GCD heals have no cooldown and are always there for every attack, bar running out of mana entirely.

oGCD's have limits and if you mistime your Earthy Star or Asylum, waste your Bene and Tetra and sudden danger happens, you turn to GCD's. Your oGCD's are the ones you plan, space out and utilize well. Medica II you simply press when a raidwide happens or Regen you simply apply to the tank whenever and let it do it's thing. This is why high end healers utilize oGCD's well and inexperienced healers spam GCD's.
What we need is more frequent damage, so the toolkit is stretched a bit more and tested. We don't need a slow brainless 2.5 sec cast spam gameplay.

i was talking about optimization here. i can obviously just mindlessly gcd heal spam my way out of fights, but thats not quite what i was getting at. Ogcd heals have such short cooldowns that i dont really need to think about how im going to heal damage most of the time since i almost always something off cooldown.

back in heavensward and even some of stormblood, our cooldowns were longer, and heals were more sparse. moving around mitigation and heals to get the least gcd heals was interesting; contrast that with almost all of this expansion's savage fights where Ast can heal most of the fight if not straight up solo heal it without even thinking about it. e5s and e6s were especially bad about this.

The only fights where ive felt like optimizing healing was remotely interesting this expansion are TEA and e12s p1 because of how frequent damage is in those two fights.

[technole]

i was talking about optimization here. i can obviously just mindlessly gcd heal spam my way out of fights, but thats not quite what i was getting at. Ogcd heals have such short cooldowns that i dont really need to think about how im going to heal damage most of the time since i almost always something off cooldown.

back in heavensward and even some of stormblood, our cooldowns were longer, and heals were more sparse. moving around mitigation and heals to get the least gcd heals was interesting; contrast that with almost all of this expansion's savage fights where Ast can heal most of the fight if not straight up solo heal it without even thinking about it. e5s and e6s were especially bad about this.

The only fights where ive felt like optimizing healing was remotely interesting this expansion are TEA and e12s p1 because of how frequent damage is in those two fights.

Previous problems was also the fight designs in Eden's Verse savage. Like the designer for E7S never did a savage floor before, and I do agree E5S and E6S were easily heal out-geared out of the gate even E8S for that matter.

One streamer put it mildly that Eden's Verse got a lot of newer healers into raiding when they were close or at i500 during the content lul period, and many got a bit of a wake-up call when trying to heal i510 minimum ilevel this go around.

TEA and E12S P1 are good examples of where if certain oGCDs are not up for a certain mechanic, it can be pain. Give or take the other healer, or party ilvl and mitigation.

[Crushnight]

Snip because too long

Healers already slide cast and have been slide casting since ARR. Whm actually has it worse than Blm when it comes to movement, Blm has swiftcast, poly, triplecast, and instant procs from Fire and Thunders. Whm has Blood Lily, swiftcast and the 2 afflatus healing skills, 1 skill requires 3 uses of 2 of the other afflatus and they are only needed if no ogcd can cover the healing necessary, that is pretty damn restrictive. Sch fairs only slightly better due to ruin II.

If both sch and Whm got Ast's level of weaving ability you'd have a point but no 2/3 healers want to stay put more than a Blm and even Ast would rather stay still and do slide casts when needed than constant movement with every cast.


That OP is me trying to meet the developers half way with their goal, they want us to heal more, they want us to be more healing focused, that is why energy drain was recently nerfed.

Guess what that energy drain nerf was pointless, it did nothing but change dps output, no changes to any Sch's existing mindset of when they would use their stacks for healing, none.

The Shadowbringers changes were also along that mentality they want to enforce, guess what happened? We are dpsing more than even before, we are more bored when we do because it has been reduced to the barest possible, and they still have no idea why we healers have done things the way we have for over 7 years.

We dps more because our ogcds are more or as powerful and free compared to our gcd heals and you almost never need both so gcds go to dps. How do you counter that? By making them weaker or remove them, yes healing then becomes harder to do but it would fit their design mentality if wanting us to heal more

We dps more because we can plan all our skills around a fight to the second if we want. How'd you counter? randomness and a lot of it, would it be fun and rewarding? Oh my no but it would make us be more healing focused as we couldn't predict things(as for other roles I deliberately left them out because it would muddle the focus but yes more randomness would affect every role in a very bad way and guess what that shows how bad their design is when one of the better solutions to their problem of getting us to be more healing focused is to screw over everyone else)

So yes I can call them out on their bad design decision just like anyone else playing this game can, they don't have to listen but sometimes the community is right and the developers are wrong, this development team has a habit of being too stubborn sometimes (see Bow mage of 3.X, Mnk, Ast) and sometimes they need to be called out.

Last point I will make healers are already boring NOW, I think it is safe to say their approach to healing design is flawed already.

[Loki]

I just went to a dungeon with Scions and Urlanger was spamming Malefic again and again XD so it's not the playerbase which has a strange way to play a healer ^^'

Seriously SE i hope you will change our gameplay for 6.0.... give us more choices, healing/support/debuff/dps and each of us will play in his own way.

[LisSquid]

I just went to a dungeon with Scions and Urlanger was spamming Malefic again and again XD so it's not the playerbase which has a strange way to play a healer ^^'

Seriously SE i hope you will change our gameplay for 6.0.... give us more choices, healing/support/debuff/dps and each of us will play in his own way.

Every healer should be like our boy, Urianger.

To be honest I would like synergy between dps and healing buttons. In the same way using lilies on a whm builds up to a damage ability, I see no reason why these two stances shouldn't co-mingle a little better.

[QooEr]

So, if I understand correctly, you want to introduce less mobility to a job that doesn't have great mobility? and decrease other healers mobility? Sorry, no thanks. One of the reasons I found AST more attractive than WHM is precisely because I did not want to deal with WHM's lesser mobility .

Note that this is more of a personal limitation - I mained a job similar to BLM for years and really don't want to do that again whether as a DPS or a healer- I really do admire good BLMs in FFXIV.

when did i ever say that? i dont even know how you came to that conclusion.

[BloodRubyXII]

Pretty much agreed with "there's too much in the kit". Astrologian is a good example of this, for a while at the start of this expansion the kit was overloaded because up until the later part of savage raiding, you didn't even need half the buttons. No-one ever spams Benefic 1 for a B2 crit proc. People barely use B2 as it is because you can GCD loop on Malefic.