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.

[Packetdancer]

Not arguing that Benediction isn't being put to good, proper or optimal use. Just that usage has changed from the intended form over the game's lifetime.

I wasn't speaking of the original intended use in 2.x; I was speaking of the intended use from 5.0 onwards -- i.e., the intended use as of the most recent job redesign. I probably could have been more explicit in my intention there. Because I agree the community's use of the ability has certainly changed over time, but as you point out...

Fight design has changed so that most damage is avoidable and tankbusters are once every few minutes, Crits on most attacks have been removed, Benediction's cooldown has been halved and all cooldowns reset after a wipe.

...fight design has changed as well, which to me suggests that the devs are aware how people have been using that ability differently and design the fights accordingly now.

So, I know Benediction originally served a different purpose, but I don't think the devs necessarily still intend it to serve an identical purpose now. After all, the job has changed in plenty of other ways; back in 2.x we had Protect and Stoneskin, we had Cleric Stance to swap Mind and Intelligence around (and damage abilities were based on Intelligence), etc.

The job does not function the same way as it did in 2.0, so I'm not sure we need to assume that the intended use of an ability now is identical to the intended use when it was introduced.

Assize started out more as a once every 90s MP recovery tool that would also heal and deal damage.

Yes, but again: I don't think that's the current intended use. Look at the tooltip for Assize provided by the devs:

Assize
Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 400 to all nearby enemies.

Additional Effect: Restores own HP and the HP of nearby party members
Cure Potency: 400
Additional Effect: Restores 5% of maximum MP

The way that tooltip is set up, I feel like it highlights the damage-dealing aspect of the ability as its primary purpose; the MP-restoration is not only in the 'Additional Effect' section, it's the second of two listed additional effects. Even if the ability started as an MP-restoration ability, it feels to me like it is now viewed as primarily a damage ability even by the devs; in other words, what the devs intend us to use that ability for now is not necessarily the same thing as when it was introduced.

The community's use of an ability can change over time, on that we both agree. But I would also say that what the devs view as the intended part a given ability plays in combat can also shift over time, especially expansion-to-expansion as they rework jobs; just because something was the intended use back in 2.0 doesn't mean it's still got the same intended use now in 5.41.

And I do not feel that the intended use of Benediction now, in 5.x, is as an Emergency-Only "Oh Shit" Button.

[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.

[Maltothoris]

This highlights another problem in that the number of instances where it is healing intensive can be counted on one hand, two hands at most. Even in those fights they are kinda spread out. In TEA, p1 and p2 are pretty healing intensive but after that, p3 and p4 are rather healing with the exception of the enrage before perfect alex. In E12s, you got the shiva into titan back to back and the enrage part in E12s p2 but even then once you got everything mapped, it's much easier and you can sneak a few more gcds for damage. Of course this also has to do with gear as well.

Heavensward was still the start of this. I remember when a good sch could have their fairy do about 60 percent of their healing but like others have said, it really started to pick up in stormblood.

[LisSquid]

I just want more interesting play. Less healing buttons and more utility buttons, and hell yes I want more dps buttons. Even doing LoTA on a dps is more fun than doing shb leveling dungeons on a healer now. Content that should sync you down enough to keep its bite through this expansion cycle. Hearing "Just do savage/extreme" is insulting when healing should be fun at all levels of play. Savage and EX only make up so much content and you're looking at a giant mound of glare spam for the rest. Something has got to give.