Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Ultimatecalibur]

Foul is dramatically better. Most players don't know that WHM Misery is only a partial "refund" for the lost DPS of using lilies and that 4 glares is more damage. The only way to ever really get ahead is using lilies during downtime, or getting the not always applicable fat return on AoE.

Glare + Glare + Glare + Glare = 1200p
Rapture + Rapture + Rapture + Misery = 900p

Which is a sign that the player perspective and the designer perspective are very different. Misery isn't supposed to be replacing 4 Glares, it is supposed to be a once every ~90 seconds x3 potency no MP cost Super Glare reward for using 3 of your once per 30s instant cast no MP cost Cure IIs/Medicas.

WHM's intended design seems to be built around maintaining an average single target HpS with Procs and Lilies upgrading Cure Is and Medicas to more powerful versions which create gaps to be filled by single casts of Glare(one of which is upgraded to Misery every 90s).

It is similar to how Benediction is intended to be used as an Emergency Full Heal button but tends to be more used as a way to quickly recover after spamming a bunch of Glares/Holies due to fights lasting long enough that it comes off cooldown multiple times in the fight.

[IDontPetLalas]

i dont know how to break it to you but healers already preposition and slidecast to move, and its been like that since ARR. if anything white mage currently has worse mobility than black mage.

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.

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.

[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.

[Absurdity]

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.

At the start of the expansion AST was probably the only job where it felt justified that it had so many abilities in it's kit, the healing was so laughably weak that you actually needed all of them. Not that it was super difficult but you actually needed to put in some work compared to WHM or SCH and used most of those abilities... except Benefic 1 because that thing is simply obsolete.

The further we got into the expansion the less this was the case as AST got several adjustments and we all know what the situation is now.

[technole]

Which is a sign that the player perspective and the designer perspective are very different. Misery isn't supposed to be replacing 4 Glares, it is supposed to be a once every ~90 seconds x3 potency no MP cost Super Glare reward for using 3 of your once per 30s instant cast no MP cost Cure IIs/Medicas.

WHM's intended design seems to be built around maintaining an average single target HpS with Procs and Lilies upgrading Cure Is and Medicas to more powerful versions which create gaps to be filled by single casts of Glare(one of which is upgraded to Misery every 90s).

It is similar to how Benediction is intended to be used as an Emergency Full Heal button but tends to be more used as a way to quickly recover after spamming a bunch of Glares/Holies due to fights lasting long enough that it comes off cooldown multiple times in the fight.

Incorrect. Benediction has never been intended for emergencies only in this game, ever. The animation delay is still there to this day and if you use it solely for that reason you'll lose many casts. It was always meant to align with tank buster mechanics. Case in-point, Eden's Promise E12S Savage. Both tanks get the buster at the same time and have to perform the tank swap because of the opposite debuffs. Tank one is likely to use several CDs, and other should be using going immunity. I always Bene the Gunbreaker in this opener and use Benison refresh and Tetra on the Dark Knight. The Dark Knight will use their immunity, Living Dead for the 2nd buster later in the fight and Bene is back up for it.

The original 4.0 Lily design was such as disaster because casting Cure/II is not nominal. Lilies today are able to be used for healing-on-the-move mechanics because WHM has the least mobility in this game, not BLM. In Savage you don't have to heal all damage right away, it can delayed to weave from movement and this is where it's nominal instead of casting Medica IIs. Damage goes off, stand there and finish the Glares, then move into your clock position(s) for the next mechanics while weave the lily heal. You can actually get Misery gain in a fight like E11S because of all the healer movement and downtime.

[Packetdancer]

It is similar to how Benediction is intended to be used as an Emergency Full Heal button but tends to be more used as a way to quickly recover after spamming a bunch of Glares/Holies due to fights lasting long enough that it comes off cooldown multiple times in the fight.

Benediction may often get used as an Emergency Full Heal button, but I would argue that's not its most optimal use (and I suspect not the intended use). In casual content in particular, I will frequently allow a tank drop to 20% health or so while doing damage or whatever, then hit them with a Benediction in order to top them off. That lets me use one oGCD to heal them to full, rather than using, say, three GCDs (three lilies), or two GCDs (lilies) and an oGCD (Tetra), or whatever. It's vastly more efficient -- especially since when I play WHM my oGCD healing options are considerably more limited than when I play, say, AST. As WHM I've got basically three immediate healing options for oGCD (Tetra, Benediction, and Assize), four if you count Divine Benison's shield as healing, and one of those (Assize) is really more a damage ability with a convenient healing side-effect.

Plus, if I reserve Benediction as only an emergency panic button, 95% of the time I will never end up using it at all during a run.

Lilies today are able to be used for healing-on-the-move mechanics because WHM has the least mobility in this game, not BLM.

*quietly sneaks over to BLM, casts Respose to knock them out, steals Triplecast, flees the scene*

[Ultimatecalibur]

Incorrect. Benediction has never been intended for emergencies only in this game, ever. The animation delay is still there to this day and if you use it solely for that reason you'll lose many casts. It was always meant to align with tank buster mechanics. Case in-point, Eden's Promise E12S Savage. Both tanks get the buster at the same time and have to perform the tank swap because of the opposite debuffs. Tank one is likely to use several CDs, and other should be using going immunity. I always Bene the Gunbreaker in this opener and use Benison refresh and Tetra on the Dark Knight. The Dark Knight will use their immunity, Living Dead for the 2nd buster later in the fight and Bene is back up for it.

Way back in ARR, Tankbusters came out a lot more often (some as often as every 30s) and Benediction was on a 300s (6 min) cooldown. It was more or less an emergency button and you could use it on average two times a fight at most. Tanks were also expected to swap roughly every 2 to 2.5 minutes in high end due to only having 3 mitigation cooldowns. This was also a time when WHM risked going OoM when sustained healing with Cure I, BRDs were needed during raids for TP and MP recovery and attacks could randomly Crit forcing Tanks to be topped off most of the time.

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.

Benediction started out as the WHM emergency button, but now has become one of the WHM's primary healing abilities due in part to a reduced cooldown length and lowered healing requirements.

The original 4.0 Lily design was such as disaster because casting Cure/II is not nominal. Lilies today are able to be used for healing-on-the-move mechanics because WHM has the least mobility in this game, not BLM. In Savage you don't have to heal all damage right away, it can delayed to weave from movement and this is where it's nominal instead of casting Medica IIs. Damage goes off, stand there and finish the Glares, then move into your clock position(s) for the next mechanics while weave the lily heal. You can actually get Misery gain in a fight like E11S because of all the healer movement and downtime.

Which is due to Fight Design and Job Design not aligning. Lilies were originally designed under the assumption that fights needed constant sustained gcd healing with ogcds being interwovent to cover the HpS deficit caused by increased incoming damage which would have been fine if fights required sustained healing of the level. Fights on the other hand had very spike heavy damage patterns which were coverable with ogcds, Shields, Regens and the occasional Cure 2 equivalent. The original Lilies were less relevant the fewer Cures a WHM casts and the player base figured that they didn't need any to clear content.
Also a lot of the movement troubles and lack of weaving windows that the WHM suffers from is due to Glare's 2.5s cast time which leaves no time between gcds. Where as Cure's 1.5s and Cure 2's 2s cast times leave a fair amount of time for weaving between gcds.

Benediction may often get used as an Emergency Full Heal button, but I would argue that's not its most optimal use (and I suspect not the intended use). In casual content in particular, I will frequently allow a tank drop to 20% health or so while doing damage or whatever, then hit them with a Benediction in order to top them off. That lets me use one oGCD to heal them to full, rather than using, say, three GCDs (three lilies), or two GCDs (lilies) and an oGCD (Tetra), or whatever. It's vastly more efficient -- especially since when I play WHM my oGCD healing options are considerably more limited than when I play, say, AST. As WHM I've got basically three immediate healing options for oGCD (Tetra, Benediction, and Assize), four if you count Divine Benison's shield as healing,

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.

"Optimal use" and "Intended use" tend to be vastly different. Abilities the devs think of as mostly Emergency buttons and design fights assuming that they are not used often get messed up when players find optimization strats that use them. It often feels like the devs forget that the tanks each has an Invuln that can cheese mechanics.

and one of those (Assize) is really more a damage ability with a convenient healing side-effect.

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

Plus, if I reserve Benediction as only an emergency panic button, 95% of the time I will never end up using it at all during a run.

There is a phrase “It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.” The devs seem to design the jobs with this mentality.