Why is the healer class basically a one spell dps class?

[Absurdity]

Did you forget Presence of Mind? Actually, making that as an aoe ability might be something they could look into as an upgrade to it. Also tanks and ranged dps have a slow in arm's length.

I didn't list PoM because I said "certain" utility is clunky. Presence simply buffs your own spellspeed and just like AST cards (when they originally buffed more than your damage) it works completely fine.

The clunky utility is mostly related to player movement or altering enemy behaviour. You can best see this in pvp where some abilities are actually frustrating to use because most of the time they have such a huge delay that they don't actually prevent what they were supposed to prevent.

Trying to rescue a low hp player out of a zerg? They'll probably die before it activates and you just end up pulling their corpse.
Trying to use an instant heal on a critically low hp player? They're probably dead before the heal registers. This is less of an issue in pve because incoming damage is easily predictable there.
Trying to stun or silence a healer while they're casting a big GCD heal? They'll probably get the heal off before your CC registers, even if you pressed it as soon as they started casting, so you just wasted your 2 second stun for nothing and they sit comfortably at full hp now while also being stun immune.

[Dzian]

CC got removed because people were sleep-gating mobs. That in turn evolved into the standard two pack gates we see now.

Partly true but the person you quoted was also right. People were complaining about cc being too difficult in a ton of early content..

coil for example, with having to silence high voltage in turn 1 to having to heavy / bind the golem thing in t7 and sleep /repose something somewhere (its been so long.)

Some of the primal to If I recall. Having to bind or heavy certain moogles to keep them away from the king.

Even LotA where you had to silence ancient quakes, heavy those slime thingies to stop them reaching the boss. And various other stuff that alot of the early content had.

Sleeping trash in dungeons was just a tiny part of the reason.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Partly true but the person you quoted was also right. People were complaining about cc being too difficult in a ton of early content..

coil for example, with having to silence high voltage in turn 1 to having to heavy / bind the golem thing in t7 and sleep /repose something somewhere (its been so long.)

T1 ADS was a case of needing at least 2 jobs with silences in party when only 3 jobs had usable silences at that time. Future fights were designed so that such a situation would not happen again.

Some of the primal to If I recall. Having to bind or heavy certain moogles to keep them away from the king.

You never needed to do that versus Moogle Mog. The Primal CC problem was that Shield Bash allowed you to pretty much stun lock Ifrit HM forcing them to alter the way status effect resistance worked.

Even LotA where you had to silence ancient quakes, heavy those slime thingies to stop them reaching the boss. And various other stuff that alot of the early content had.

Ancient Quake was only silencable during the WoD trash fight with Xande's Clone (pretty much party just healed through it because no one knew that i could be silenced). You are more likely thinking of the Succubus trash mobs in LotA who turn out to have a silencable Fire II cast than no one ever messed with because it was easier to just dodge.

The Spells that could be silenced used to be a mystery and for the most part handled by dodging or healing until they updated the UI to identify interruptible Spells and gave all of the tanks Interject and the ranged dps Head Graze.

Sleeping trash in dungeons was just a tiny part of the reason.

Sleeping trash was pretty much counter productive from the start. The most use it had in active content was in Wanderer's Palace where you would delay the fist Tonberry Stalker from spawning by sleeping the NPCs fighting at the start.

[GrimGale]

So essentially CC was removed because it allowed players to manipulate the scripted battle events allowing them to control the pace of the battle to the point they could "cheese" mechanics. Same with SCH shields. Critlo-deployment could allow a raid to survive certain mechanics, so in order for players to "respect" the content they need their tools to be just strong enough to just jump through the hoops.

[P0W3RK1D]

So essentially CC was removed because it allowed players to manipulate the scripted battle events allowing them to control the pace of the battle to the point they could "cheese" mechanics. Same with SCH shields. Critlo-deployment could allow a raid to survive certain mechanics, so in order for players to "respect" the content they need their tools to be just strong enough to just jump through the hoops.

pretty sure thats just the fault of the level designers. Even classeic final fantasy games encounters and boss battles arent that scripted.

[Dzian]

This is true to an extent, but only because the other cards were really just not very good most of the time. Balance and Spear (after it was changed to crit) were just straight-up better than the other choices. Spire was basically a dead draw (Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder only), Ewer was only very situationally useful (making it also Royal Road/Minor Arcana fodder), Bole was not possible to intelligently play around (because if you need mitigation you need it on-demand, not RNG), and Arrow was actively bad for most classes other than BLM because it resulted in misaligned burst windows. AST players weren't Balance/Spear fishing because of "elitism" (whatever that means), but because it was the only choice that made sense 99% of the time.

Ewer wasn't a bad card. It just didn't work on the jobs that could have used it..

Had no affect on blackmages in astral stance for example. Or even darks if I recall. That's a card that could potentially have had a nice impact on a blm letting them squeeze out an extra fire 4 and getting some extra oomph with that extra mp. Something similar with drks. I cant remember what exactly all I remember is being told my ewers didn't work on dark knights when I tried.

Bole had the same problem all defensive stuff has in that defence is a joke everything is deliberately
so incredibly forgiving that it makes defence useless.

Spire could have been decent but again resource management was almost a non issue at that point with all the changes they'd made you literally never ran out of tp outside of aoe..

[Beddict]

Ewer wasn't a bad card. It just didn't work on the jobs that could have used it..

Had no affect on blackmages in astral stance for example. Or even darks if I recall. That's a card that could potentially have had a nice impact on a blm letting them squeeze out an extra fire 4 and getting some extra oomph with that extra mp. Something similar with drks. I cant remember what exactly all I remember is being told my ewers didn't work on dark knights when I tried.

Yeah, didn't work on Dark Knight. The tooltip for Darkside was:

Increases damage dealt by 20%. MP regeneration stops during battle and Refresh statuses granted by others have no effect.

Ewer did nothing for them, sadly.

[Dzian]

Yeah, didn't work on Dark Knight. The tooltip for Darkside was:



Ewer did nothing for them, sadly.

Yeah it would have been a great card if it did. But alas..

[SieyaM]

I've said it a lot and I am sure people are sick of it but healers don't need a real DPS rotation what they need is to have support abilities rolled into their kit. That would make them more interesting to play and give them something to do with downtime between healing without turning them into more of a DPS job with heals just kind of added on to them. Support abilities are however incredibly hard to balance and can be difficult for players to optimize since they are an indirect way of contributing to the party. As it is though the only way to really enhance healer gameplay is to give them a whole DPS rotation and make them green DPS with healing abilities kind of sprinkled in their kit.

[Acece]

For me personally I actually enjoy being a green dps, I just wish there was more. If do want to go down the support type role I would like Whm to stay the green dps healer so we can at least keep the playstyle around (with a more robust rotation).