Worthless Live Letter

[ReynTime]

Realize that a big part of healer fun used to be managing cleric stance, cooldowns, debuffs and buffs, while having less OGCD heals.

Realize that healers also had a suite of DPS nukes in 3.X which you used based on available MP, and multiple dots to keep you paying attention during fights.

Realize that you have no idea what you're talking about.

They probably assume people just want a 123 combo because DPS and Tanks don't get much more complex than that anymore. If even DPS were stripped down, why would healers be any different?
This is the abhorrent direction they decided to go with job mechanics in XIV since ShB.

[Liam_Harper]

It's bad enough that healers are expected to heal as little as possible in order to pump out as much damage as possible.

We've been over this in the healer forums time and time again and people still parrot the same line...

You are not expected to heal as little as possible, you're expected not to waste your time overhealing and push useful buttons instead. It's really not that much to ask, yet people are constantly whining about being expected to contribute to the team.

"Don't play a healer if you don't want to be bored"
"Oh the queue is too long, maybe you should play a healer yourself then"
So which is it? Cuz it cant be both.

I think the playerbase mentality at this point is that healer is meant to be a role for the lazy players to get a free ticket into endgame content by pushing Medica II 2-3 times a minute. Not for the players who actually like healer and want to have an engaging experience. Why so many people are happier having the first example fill their queues is beyond me though.

[Saefinn]

I mean, you know how the role plays. You either go into it knowing that you might be a little bored during the healing downtime, or you play something else. You're not a dps, you don't need an overly complex damage rotation that'll punish you for stopping to heal.

It's bad enough that healers are expected to heal as little as possible in order to pump out as much damage as possible.

It's the "go go go, rush rush rush" problem that WoWs M+ has that keeps a lot of tanks and healers away.

If you want to have a full interesting dps rotation, then maybe you should play a dps job.

This is a tired old argument that gets repeated a lot.

But I guess the first point I'll address is:
"You either go into it knowing that you might be a little bored during the healing downtime, or you play something else."

I started playing this game before the ARR release. I've mained SCH since it has come out. This means I got into SCH when it didn't mean being bored during the healing downtime. So I've not got into this with those expectations.

This is because SCH had a good balance between its healing toolkit and its DPS toolkit.

The problem is this perception that more DPS abilities = more DPS focus.

I'd probably argue that there's more of a DPS focus in 2021 in ShB than there was in 2013 in ARR, because what controls this is the encounter design and the healing tools we have to handle it. We're at a poisition where downtime is higher and our DPS is mostly stripped down.

But let's actually look at what SCH looked like when the job was released just from a downtime perspective:

Ruin, Ruin II, Bio, Bio II, Miasma, Miasma II, Shadowflare, Bane, Energy Drain, Cleric Stance (from cross class skills), Aero (from cross class skills) and Thunder (from cross class skills), Fey Glow, Fey Light

That's a tool kit consisting of 14 different abilities you'd use in your downtime (3 of them from Selene). Granted Aero and Thunder were less commonly used but still were technically still useful.

Despite this, Scholar healing worked great. It complemented WHM very well and all of us still new to the game at the time managed to all handle this 'complexity' just fine because we build our foundation as healers first and learned to work in our DPS. Heck, I can look at my Titan EX clear, which is on YouTube and feel embarrassed that I didn't cast a single DPS spell, because it was a progression group (and we lost a tank) and I wanted to focus more on my healing...so I did. But once I did get better I was able to weave more and more of my DPS abilities in and it was a rewarding feeling. So when people on these forums here me talk about how DPS raises the skill ceiling without raising the skill floor? This is the kind of thing I meant. How complex DPS was didn't matter because my focus was on getting good at healing first and I was able to get as far as EX clears (and heck Twintania too) on that philosophy, because my DPS contribution was not required and for the vast majority of content, it's still the case. And it was the content and my healing kit that controlled how much focus I had on DPS.

Now SCH's old DPS kit sounds like a lot, but it was something you could weave between heals, so it's not like you had an upfront burst and open with dropping all your many DoT's at once, but was a gradual affair.

But a DPS contributing kit of some 14 skills was doable on a healer without it being detrimental in this game. Now I am not saying we need that many, but draw on this example to show that actually, we've done just fine with more complex DPS rotations.

So I might not go with as many as 14 in 2021 because higher content is balanced around a larger healing kit but I'd certainly advocate for something a lot better than what we've got. Especially with the downtime. Sage if anything is a step in the right direction here, it's 7 abilities and by the looks of it, many of the AoE abilities remain useful in a single target situation and its DPS & healing mechanics looks like it'll require you to weave Cardia target changes and shields as part of it (given shields build up Adder's Sting)


Compare those 14 to what SCH has now:
Biolysis, Broil, Ruin II, Art of War, Energy Drain, Chain Stratagem. And note: unlike SGE's abilities, fewer of these abilities are shared before single target and AoE target, so you are more inclined to your Broil spams and Art of War spams.

Now, I realise there's also this "healers are healers not DPS" rhethoric, but the following needs to be taken into consideration:
- This game was designed to favour healers DPSing. It has been a part of its design since the beginning. It's hinted in lore, in quests, in instructions etc.
- Your performance is purely measured around your overall rDPS regardless of your role because the objective of the fight is to get your enemy's HP to 0 in the quickest time, which is then further enforced by DPS checks, enrage timers and the ability to skip certain mechanics based on good DPS. Healing if anything counts as a contributor to rDPS because a dead DPS isn't doing DPS. ​
- Final Fantasy games have often given healing jobs/characters more to do than just heal. They sometimes embrace making hybrids. So if anything it works for an FF MMO, just as it did in FFXI
- The game is scripted and therefore predictable, it means healers can optimise their healing to a level where they've got a lot of room to DPS and don't have to keep people topped off constantly just in case they need to take damage and it makes sense for healers to have something else to do.

I feel the best answer for healers in this game is to embrace the concept healers and DPSing and Sage is an example of them showing some return-to-form on that.

And I guess finally because I feel like ShB has proven it: a complex DPS rotation makes little to no difference on healers forgetting to heal. It's an age old complaint we've had since ARR and if anything it's got worse in recent times and a factor I suspect is part of it is how easy it is tunnel vision when you're spamming 1 or 2 buttons for extended periods of time. This I put down to there being an advantage to DPSing as a healer and to some degree, an expectation to DPS and that's not going to change because of some core designs of this game (nor should it).

[Recon1o6]

Why should a game designed so a section of the playerbase is bored?

Healers used to have lots of fun. Then they changed it so we dont. Why should healers suffer while the other roles (minus dark who are in the same boat) get to have fun while we dont?

[FoxCh40s]

I've really just decided to stop arguing for Healer DPS skills, since it's clear both the developers AND majority of the community just don't give a flying fuck. They really don't care if we're bored out of their mind, because they occasionally play a healer on an Expert roulette once a week and think it's fine.

[Saimeren]

Now, I realise there's also this "healers are healers not DPS" rhethoric, but the following needs to be taken into consideration:
- This game was designed to favour healers DPSing. It has been a part of its design since the beginning. It's hinted in lore, in quests, in instructions etc.
- Your performance is purely measured around your overall rDPS regardless of your role because the objective of the fight is to get your enemy's HP to 0 in the quickest time, which is then further enforced by DPS checks, enrage timers and the ability to skip certain mechanics based on good DPS. Healing if anything counts as a contributor to rDPS because a dead DPS isn't doing DPS. ​
- Final Fantasy games have often given healing jobs/characters more to do than just heal. They sometimes embrace making hybrids. So if anything it works for an FF MMO, just as it did in FFXI
- The game is scripted and therefore predictable, it means healers can optimise their healing to a level where they've got a lot of room to DPS and don't have to keep people topped off constantly just in case they need to take damage and it makes sense for healers to have something else to do.

I didn't say healers shouldn't dps. I said that healers shouldn't be forced into a dps rotation that will punish them for stopping said rotation in order to heal.

As you've said, this game emphasizes everyone on the team dealing damage. I also understand and agree that when there's no healing to be done, a healer should be using their damaging abilities. What I don't agree with is what I see all the time on these forums is people asking for way too many abilities than are necessary for a healer to have. You don't need a 14 button dps rotation as a healer. Sure, give us a standard 3 button combo, and maybe an "alternate" finisher. (One applies a debuff/DoT, the other is a harder hitting finisher)

But I see people asking for what is essentially a Dragoon style dps combo system. And that would; in my opinion; ruin healing in this game. This game's strategy already seems to be "If you have to use a GCD, heavily consider not using it because you'll waste 300 potency of damage". So having a massive dps combo that; if stopped to throw out a heal might either break the combo, or disrupt your CD window, would cause this to be an even larger issue.

So, the whole "knowing that you might be a little bored during the healing downtime" line isn't me saying "Healers are healers, not dps. You shouldn't be dealing damage".

It's me saying "You're not a dps, and therefore are't going to have a massive 2 minute rotation to keep yourself busy. Your damage "rotation" is going to be significantly more simple, and therefore boring."

[Mindiori]

Ah, the battle of the veterans who liked effort and the braindead morons who can't fathom a time when the opposite was in place and how something to do beyond 'spamming one button', might have been fun. It never ends.

Ultimately Yoshi and co made it plenty clear they have no intent to revisit the depth of the past. Perhaps understandably so when idiot inc, makes them so much money. There never has been anything wrong with healers having extensive dps options. They have successfully in many past mmos. Hell they even had sufficient burst and cc, to rival dps. It simply couldn't be sustained and the balance was juggled between output windows and self maintenance. It was fun.

This drivel already is boring. There isn't much more to be said on the matter.

[Saefinn]

I didn't say healers shouldn't dps. I said that healers shouldn't be forced into a dps rotation that will punish them for stopping said rotation in order to heal.

As you've said, this game emphasizes everyone on the team dealing damage. I also understand and agree that when there's no healing to be done, a healer should be using their damaging abilities. What I don't agree with is what I see all the time on these forums is people asking for way too many abilities than are necessary for a healer to have. You don't need a 14 button dps rotation as a healer. Sure, give us a standard 3 button combo, and maybe an "alternate" finisher. (One applies a debuff/DoT, the other is a harder hitting finisher)

But I see people asking for what is essentially a Dragoon style dps combo system. And that would; in my opinion; ruin healing in this game. This game's strategy already seems to be "If you have to use a GCD, heavily consider not using it because you'll waste 300 potency of damage". So having a massive dps combo that; if stopped to throw out a heal might either break the combo, or disrupt your CD window, would cause this to be an even larger issue.

So, the whole "knowing that you might be a little bored during the healing downtime" line isn't me saying "Healers are healers, not dps. You shouldn't be dealing damage".

It's me saying "You're not a dps, and therefore are't going to have a massive 2 minute rotation to keep yourself busy. Your damage "rotation" is going to be significantly more simple, and therefore boring."

On the note of the 14 moves related to DPS, there weren't any combos but any DoTs generally were worked in gradually and were sustained and everything else also between heals. I'm not sure I'd be for a 1, 2, 3 combo because doing any kind of combo set up I think is going to result in that "punishment" of not being able to complete the combo because healing and opens more incentive to do try to complete it, even if it's not as long as DRG's rotation.

But the important point is that, no, the damage "rotation" doesn't have to be so simple that it's boring.

We've had it before and it worked fine. We don't have to necessarily have it to the same extent as I guess not everybody will like that and compromise I guess has to be found, but really, it was never really that bad, as per my testimonial.

Sadly YoshiP has said we won't be going back to how things were (though ironically, they're trying to do a Shield/Pure healing split when this only worked well in 2.0) but we don't have to use the same design, but just give us more to do and make that downtime not dull as heck. It is perfectly achievable.

As I was saying in my last post. More DPS abilities does nothing to raise the skill floor and only raises the skill ceiling, so IMO, it is the best of both worlds, give people something more interesting to do on the high end and not affect the entry level to the role. Because DPS focus is controlled by healing toolkit and mechanics as long as the person prioritizes heals, if they're not optimizing their DPS at that moment as a healer it's fine because healing always takes priority.

[ForteNightshade]

snip

Since when has anyone asked for a rotation equivalent to Dragoon? Most Healers aren't necessarily asking for a rotation, period. Just more option to flex across their job. In fact, several Healer mains have also asked for debuffs and buffs; anything else to help mitigate the frequent downtime. It's disingenuous to claim Healers want a DPS rotation. They don't. They want to actively engage with content beyond spamming 130 casts of Glare/Malefic/Broil. Whether that is accomplished through a huge increase in outgoing damage, new DPS abilities to break up the nuke spam or the aforementioned utility is a matter of debate, but most will welcome any of those approaches.

Saying players should just accept a role will be boring is just accusing poor design.

[FoxCh40s]

Since when has anyone asked for a rotation equivalent to Dragoon? Most Healers aren't necessarily asking for a rotation, period. Just more option to flex across their job. In fact, several Healer mains have also asked for debuffs and buffs; anything else to help mitigate the frequent downtime. It's disingenuous to claim Healers want a DPS rotation. They don't. They want to actively engage with content beyond spamming 130 casts of Glare/Malefic/Broil. Whether that is accomplished through a huge increase in outgoing damage, new DPS abilities to break up the nuke spam or the aforementioned utility is a matter of debate, but most will welcome any of those approaches.

Saying players should just accept a role will be boring is just accusing poor design.

I mean it's clear what the majority of Tank and Dps players want us to do. We just exist to facilitate their fun. I think the Veteran's should just stop arguing at this point.

We've beaten and beaten and beaten and battered our head on the titanium wall for years, and only have a bloody head and a fucking headache after all these years; the dev team made it clear that they DO. NOT. GIVE. A FLYING FUCK.

As far as I am concerned, enough is enough, I'll play another Role, and let them deal with the ever increasing need to make content even EASIER than it already is. They're going to hit a wall really hard eventually, and will have absolutely no one but themselves to blame.

By that point, I believe most of us Healer Veteran's will be gone entirely by that point, except for the masochistic people who enjoy suffering because of their pride.

I've just, had enough.

Know when to quit.