Is it fun?

[ItMe]

I noticed that you said healing and not any particular healing job, [...] I am not asking this to be antagonistic but can you explain what it is about healing you are enjoying?

Sorry, lemme clarify:

I like AST (though I also dabble with SCH I find I only enjoy it conceptually)
AST is a lotta fun and I get that big dopamine hit when my preplanned horoscopes or stars go off at exactly the right times~
Synastry is also super groovy knowing I never need to prioritize between healing the tank or healing myself.
And with the cards there's always something to do and I never feel like I have "down time," but not in an exhausting way.
And healing in FF14 is pretty focused on optimizing oGCDs, so AST having short cast times is just... so perfect for me. Perfect to the point where I actually have a hard time playing other healers since rocking AST lol.
AST is super juicy and I like it specifically a lot ♡

Beyond simply enjoying it's kit, cohealing with your friend in voice chat is super fun. There is more teamwork there than between any two other players, especially if the other healer is an AST and you're both frantically calling out who you have a buff to so we aren't overwriting each others bluffs. But yeah, AST being a hybrid job it is also (currently) built to coheal super well in any comp. And with the homogenization and Yoshi P's interest in making any comp viable I'm not expecting AST to become bad at healing with any partner.

Other than playing it in combat, AST is just neat.
I like its lore and it's job quest storyline is one of my favorites. And the weird tarot star globe is unique and cool and lends itself to some really interesting glams.

which lends to my argument that jobs themselves aren't fun to play, your just playing a numbers game with different visuals.

Yeah, I can see why people can see healing as a numbers game with different visuals, but the inversion of how you're interacting with the numbers means a lot to me too. Being a job not about DPS, but about undoing enemy DPS makes me feel like I'm interacting with the enemies more directly and intimately than when I play as a DPS (and as a tank I largely feel like a blue DPS). But as a healer I'm engaged in a real back and forth game with the boss and that's cool to me.

but it seems over the years the more we moved towards balance of the healers, and other jobs, the less fun they become. When you log in and select your character and the world is loading, are you genuinely excited to get in the world and play your job? Or are you thinking about what kind of DPS numbers the job has and if you should just change to something with better numbers? The fact the people change back and forth between jobs nearly each patch because of the numbers suggests to me that no one is really enjoying the way each job plays, most are just doing the math and playing what has the highest DPS.

I've never been one to do that (and not just because all the balancing makes the jobs with better numbers stand out less and less as FF14 balances it's jobs further and further)
I really only care about:
-- Does it click with me?
-- Do I enjoy it?
-- What is the glam game like?
-- (And to a lesser extent if the job is at odds with my character concept)
Those are the only things I consider lol.
If anything all the balancing is helping me enjoy AST more. As I log in I don't have to wonder or worry about if I should be playing something else. I can just hop into the classes I like and go~
I never get harassed for playing something that's not meta, I just joke around with people and jam.
And since I'm not playing any job because of it's numbers I'm free to really settle in since I know I'm not going to be flippantly swapping all the time.


But yeah, healing or otherwise I almost always log in excited ; )

[AC9Breaker]

It depends on the encounter for me. I enjoy healing, more so as AST then WHM or SCH. Although I do get a lot of satisfaction when I time my shields/critlo for tankbusters and raid wides just right.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I think it is fun—healers has always been my go-to roles regardless whether the community deems them as redundant or crucial. This is one of the game that I’d think it works well with the saying: ”If you like it & you want to, you can make it work.”

But I definitely could use more stuffs to do while I’m doing my 1 2 1 1 1 1 heartbeats.

[EthanMoonkin]

No. Shadowbringers ruined that for me.

I recently watched some savage raid content from Storm blood and got really sad thinking about how fun it was to play as a healer back then. Sure it wasn't perfect, but there was so much more to do in your downtime. Dots to manage, extra DPS skills to add, even extra utility skills in niche situations.

Now, healers have more healing skills then they'll ever need, low class identity, and mind numbingly dull DPS rotations.

This is something I am hoping(but not expecting) the devs to change in Endwalker, or I'll be leaving the game again, possibly for good.

[NorthernLadMSP]

I used to be. Shadowbringers has ruined that for me. My last hope is that Endwalker brings back the fun I used to have playing healers.

They're the least fun they've ever been in the 7 years I've been playing this game.

[Deceptus]

I see a lot of people talking about the balance of healers and how they can make them all play evenly, but I never see people asking the better question. Are they fun to play? I have been playing healer more since the queues are faster and I enjoy it well enough but it seems over the years the more we moved towards balance of the healers, and other jobs, the less fun they become. When you log in and select your character and the world is loading, are you genuinely excited to get in the world and play your job? Or are you thinking about what kind of DPS numbers the job has and if you should just change to something with better numbers? The fact the people change back and forth between jobs nearly each patch because of the numbers suggests to me that no one is really enjoying the way each job plays, most are just doing the math and playing what has the highest DPS.

Fun? Absolutely not.

Are they functional? I guess, but "fun" they are not.

In dungeon content, they're overpowered. So much so you can go entire runs without even using multiple abilities.

In higher end content, almost everything is pre-planned so as long as you can do the dance you're still spending a majority of your time spamming a single GCD damage spell. Again, not fun.

[Anhra]

Fun? Absolutely not.

Are they functional? I guess, but "fun" they are not.

In dungeon content, they're overpowered. So much so you can go entire runs without even using multiple abilities.

In higher end content, almost everything is pre-planned so as long as you can do the dance you're still spending a majority of your time spamming a single GCD damage spell. Again, not fun.

You can clear any Dungeon even as a Conjurer (even with mass pulling). I don't have solid proof for this but i tested this so far on any ShB Dungeon, and a few SB Dungeons (ran those with randoms btw during daily roulette on expert,lv80 and50/60/70).

Medica 2 and Cure/Cure2 are more than enough to cover for pretty much anything Dungeon Content has to offer, thats how easy things have become already. Even with the new dungeon out from Patch 5.5, the first thing ill do is running it as Conjurer just to see if they have improved on anything, but i highly doubt they do.

[ASkellington]

No, they got rid of what I find fun with healers:

resource management

[P0W3RK1D]

Are Healers Useful?: Absolutely. healers are pretty much essential to any big fight, not only as a second chance to thoes who get hit and die, but to sustain others in places where they are otherwise forced to take damage. 9 out of 10 times someone in a party would die in a serious raid or dng, or trial, or most party-based content without a healer

Are Healers Practical? : Again, absolutely, a healer can defend themselves decently well, they are by all means not defenseless, and again, they are pretty much just as essentai as the tank is in dngs and boss fights -- No Tank? party is dead, No DPS? eh, unless its an enrage timer youll get by somehow?...No Healer? party is dead 3 times over.

Are healers Balanced? : Sure, seems like Yoshi-P and the dev team has spent a rather....excessive amount of time balancing every class to make sure it plays perfectly in end game and savage content. Its balanced if i ever seen it.

Are healers Unique? : Healers have about as much uniqueness as an orange does to a grape-fruit or a mandarin orange -- They all look kinda the same, you peel and eat them in the same way, the biggest true difference is the size, and the taste of when you bite into them, but other than that they are basically the same fruit in a fruit basket of bananas, watermelons, apples, grapes, straw berries, Tomatoes and a bunch of other fruits that are unique to each other (a game that is supposed to have a core mechanic of class diversity, but refuses to give healer more than a sprinkle of that). .

Are Healers Fun? : Sadly, not really, we aren't given engaging mechanics, each healer when you boil it down plays in basically the same way, we dont have a dps rotation, and scholars lost what "dps rotation" it had in stormblood, the closest thing Healers have to a rotation is spamm the single target dps, and throw in the dot every now and then. Our mechanics aren't exactly "complex" they took the fun and fun rng cards, buff extensions and debuffs out of AST, took the fairy control and uniqueness of fairy choice away from scholar, removed a few especial things such as a push from WHM, Healers get no special mobility, strange buffs/debuffs (like blue mage gets), All of the lv 80 moves given to all the healers are just "HEAL STRONGER!!" buffs, the healers barley stick to their own class identities, Thier resources are poorly utilized because there is not versatile application for their gauges and bars in their spells...alas, its the way the game is built healers cant really afford to be unique, les the meta in savage content be shattered, WARPED BEYOND ALL RECODNITION...if only the nonexistant healer-main devs at SE would look down from heaven and bless us with some transparency that at the very least they hear our prayers.

[Jaelommiss]

I've found two situations where healers are fun to play.

1) Everything is going wrong in casual content and healing becomes a fast-paced resource management game. Shinryu normal was great for this before everyone overgeared it because the average DF player would die frequently. I fondly recall a 31 death clear that included two healer LB3 and snap decisions between who gets healed and who dies. This sort of engagement stems from a rare combination of underperforming players, a lack of hard wipe mechanics, and a skilled tank to keep the boss off the healer.

2) Early prog in 'hardcore' content. This is all a learning and resource allocation game. When is the next raidwide? How hard does it hit? Do we need shields or can it be mitigated safely? Which oGCD do I use there? Should I use a GCD heal and save that oGCD for a movement heavy mechanic in 20 secs?

The common theme is having to adapt to unknown situations. Clean clears are routine, and healers' kits are so basic and predictable that routine rapidly becomes boring. It's unfortunate that the majority of content in this game is all identical for healers. Damage from trash in dungeons is very standardized. Tankbusters and raidwide frequency is similarly standardized in dungeons and normal content.

I will mention that SE has been changing the shape of damage in recent patches and that it has made a big difference in how progging fights goes. The opening mechanics of WoL normal and E12S P2 make a nice change from opening with a heavy raidwide to strip away preshields. Attaching a heavy bleed to the raidwide in E11S changes how a healer approaches raidwides in that fight because the bleed will often expire as the subsequent mechanic occurs. Neither of these are novel mechanics, but it's still good to see that SE is at least trying to change how healers play. It's just a shame that they are refusing to budge on the >90% downtime issue that condemns healers to repetitive, dull gameplay for the majority of the time.