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

[Maltothoris]

You here when they added the Lily job gauge to White Mage in Stormblood and everyone trashed on it and the Lilies remained useless for almost the entire expansion even after loads and loads of people complaining how bad they were? They totally listen to feedback alright.

For anyone who doesn't know just how bad Lilies were for a huge portion of Stormblood: You had a 20% chance upon using Cure 1 or Cure 2 to generate one Lily. Divine Benison was locked behind getting at least 1 lily. Lilies were consumed upon using certain healing cooldowns and lowered their cooldowns by a percentage. People complained constantly how badly they were only to finally be changed late Stormblood. Plenary Indulgence was equally as bad but is a whole other can of worms.

Now you see why I have a pessimistic outlook on healer design, reworks and healer changes.

Only correction I want to make sure was that Cure 2 was changed to 100 percent before release because the negative press that they got from the media tour concerning that and cure 1 to 50 percent chance but this made cure 1 moot so they changed that to 100 percent in either patch 4.05 or 4.07 think it was the earlier one. And bension got changed in 4.2 which was to me them admitting defeat to the whole lily system, Don't forget they never even changed the lvl 78 trait which was the 20 percent chance that a crit cure 1 or cure 2 would lower assize or asylum's cd by 5 seconds so you had a proc on a proc chance so basically 2-3 percent chance of it happening. Instead of trying to do anything with it they just outright super buffed assize to make up for it but too little too late and the same for the enmity changes that people were asking for 5-6 years at that point.

Of course given that fights were scripted, it still mean that the effect of the lillies were moot overall.

[Reksanden]

We had close to that in SHB launch. Healers were in extremely short supply.

The lack of a new healer at the time was also a pretty strong gut punch.

I started as AST back then but couldn't stand the ShB launch state of it, and swapped to WHM... And had an "ehh" experience overall, sans the story blurring my memory of how not-fun playing it was. And I can guarantee that even without the times that I didn't queue with friends, every single queue was still instant.

Overall, their state is roughly better (poor SCH), and AST was a complete turn-around from 5.0 and it's actually somewhat enjoyable to play these days - but god I miss HW and SB AST so bad it hurts

[technole]

SHb will end where all three healers ended up the most balanced it has ever been in this game. Let's go back a little bit where White Mage was laughing stock of the community at the end of HW and beginning of Stormblood with the atrocious confession stacks tied to Cure/Cure II. Astro just kept getting its peg lowered since the HW buff, but it was never in a bad position, MP getting tied to cards was something we always wanted from day one and that allowed fixing party memes. Scholar had QoL things, but it was never in a poor state.

With that they upped the ante on end-game savage healing this go around. If you were a healer you had your pick of raid groups to join, raid ads everywhere looking for a healer. E12S party finders always had the healer slots last to fill, some waited hours. People just didn't want to heal or should I say learn to heal that fight. It's a handful, but fulfilling as well.

There will likely be a healer resurgence in 6.0, people always want to try new jobs and sometimes make a drastic main change

Of course be prepared for the usual a lot of subpar healers too since they are changing the meta with pure/barrier healing and how they want healers to do more. When Dark Knight arrived a lot of red DPS that were not good at the game tried to tank, with mixed results.

[Truen]

Yah SCH plays so boring now...I actually hate it. Went from my favorite to worst. The ridiculous notion of a "pure healer" needs to go away forever. We waited. We tried it. It sucks.

[Lyth]

In Shadowbringer press / media tour Yoshi-P said "He doesn't like taking away abilities from jobs"

I find this bit of developer/player interplay to be interesting in FFXIV. You can't actually balance anything without having the ability to remove actions and apply nerfs. In the vast majority of games, whenever a job/character starts dominating, the dev team just tells you to stuff it, applies some nerfs, and everyone moves on, the better for it. FFXIV's dev team just can't seem to handle that sort of confrontation. They want to create the impression that they're only handing out nice things ("you get a buff, and you get a buff"). But you can't balance anything through upward balance. That just leads to this realm of progressive power creep, especially defensively, where everyone can sustain, rez, and invuln with impunity.

It also leads to situations in which certain jobs are forever powerful. So rather than being open about the fact that they want to nerf a job that's viewed as mandatory, the dev team quietly do most of their nerfs on expansion release, when players are least likely to notice. Then people start complaining and those historically dominant jobs start making their way slowly back up to the top. This whole 'pure healer' (WHM/AST)/'shield healer' (SCH) is about power balance as well. It's really about offering up a better SCH alternative to the playerbase, just to keep everyone from running the same comp for ten years. It's the same thought process why they created an entire 'BRD' sub-role, and then proceeded to build a better BRD. You get a lot less pushback that way.

[technole]

Scholar is just ok, the job had been a headache to YoshiP from the get-go. Seraph was a cool change, giving Scholar a weaving double shield ability almost like Neutral Sect, so you can broil/ruin/move and get shields up. However it doesn't preclude the fact the job is kind of boring after awhile, because you just really hit dawn on cool down, and tell your raid group to stand in the soil for mitigation/regen things. Nevermind all the knock the party around mechanics this savage tier, that your fairy has to be constantly re-placed.

This expansion they only did numbers/potency changes outside of the major job changes they highlighted on live letters such as Monk and Astro. I liked this approach, because they can do small things without causing havoc or having to reverse decisions. Although it always gives them breathing room to "reset" things when new expansions come out so they can quietly delete/replace skills.

[NorthernLadMSP]

Yah SCH plays so boring now...I actually hate it. Went from my favorite to worst. The ridiculous notion of a "pure healer" needs to go away forever. We waited. We tried it. It sucks.

Yep, this 100%. It was always my favorite job in the game, and I barely play it anymore.

[Cithaerias_pyropina]

Only correction I want to make sure was that Cure 2 was changed to 100 percent before release because the negative press that they got from the media tour concerning that and cure 1 to 50 percent chance but this made cure 1 moot so they changed that to 100 percent in either patch 4.05 or 4.07 think it was the earlier one. And bension got changed in 4.2 which was to me them admitting defeat to the whole lily system, Don't forget they never even changed the lvl 78 trait which was the 20 percent chance that a crit cure 1 or cure 2 would lower assize or asylum's cd by 5 seconds so you had a proc on a proc chance so basically 2-3 percent chance of it happening. Instead of trying to do anything with it they just outright super buffed assize to make up for it but too little too late and the same for the enmity changes that people were asking for 5-6 years at that point.

Of course given that fights were scripted, it still mean that the effect of the lillies were moot overall.

I'm just too lazy and wish they had patch change logs so looking it up is easier, unless there is already something like that. It is not easy to look up accurate accounts of old abilities.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I'm just too lazy and wish they had patch change logs so looking it up is easier, unless there is already something like that. It is not easy to look up accurate accounts of old abilities.

Here you go: FFXIV's Patch Archives.

[Semirhage]

Here you go: FFXIV's Patch Archives.

Fun game to play while crawling through the patch notes. Keep a tally on the number of times you see "Holy: Potency has been reduced" or something close enough. There will come a point when you see it one more time and go "*sigh* Really?"

Naoki "We don't like nerfing things, only buffing them!" Yoshida.