Unmatched Madness & Insanity Ever Renewed

[Roeshel]

When are people on the healer forum going to get over the false and exaggerated claims of pressing only one button all the time?

I am trying to understand you but I fail to. The only time I got bored with WHM's gameplay was when I was playing for more than 3 hours every day and then came here and created this thread: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...pell-dps-class

The clipping issues got removed which was one of the main reasons I stopped playing savage after getting bis. WHM has more oGCDs to use, AST has more buffs to apply, SCH acquired access to their full healing kit in raids without losing DPS and Sage has 6-7 distinct DPS buttons that are actually part of a rotation that interacts with their healing kit. Something that healers never had. On the contrary, DPSing and Healing was a far distant concept for everyone but Scholar who was practically a SMN with an overpowered healing pet, whose attacks had no interaction with their gauge aside for bane and ED, leftovers of the Arcanist job. Both of them remained to make the class playable. Using those actions worked against you as a healer because they used AE charges.

Why it is difficult to grasp that having the same type of DoT ∞ + DoT WHM(Aero) shared across everyone on your bar plus healing with GCDs was actually a really bad design? Worse than the 1-oGCD-() gameplay that we have now.

[Sebazy]

When are people on the healer forum going to get over the false and exaggerated claims of pressing only one button all the time?

False?

Exaggerated?

Claims?

One button?

Don't care about the rest of your bait.

[AngeliouxRein]

What is your determination to not understand why we see raging red with the current healers? Heck, some of us are even accepting of the healers that are genuinely happy with this current version or just newbies enjoying a new game, no matter how bitter we are…

It feels like you keep going back and forth on how you truly feel about healers.. I mean are you genuinely trying to explain something and trying to express you like healers now or just bait at this point? If you like the current healers just say that and drop it already.

[Semirhage]

Why is it that defenders of current design philosophy take the statement "pressing one button over and over again is boring" and always counter with "Yeah well having three dots and pressing one button over and over again was worse", as if the first statement didn't stand on its own? Based on the preview yesterday, WHM is still going to spend a bunch of time casting glare. Over and over and over again. This is boring design. You don't need to compare it to previous iterations to make that statement, though you can use specific examples to strengthen or weaken the argument.

Spending the vast, vast majority of an encounter pressing Dia Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare with the occasional oGCD thrown in is garbage can tier design. It makes no difference whether you believe the previous iteration was the soil beneath said trashcan or the soiled napkins on top of the trash heap. It's boring. It has no decision-making. I can already hear the white knights countering with "BUUUHHH well MOST classes have no decision making either so NUHHH", as if "yeah well everything sucks" were some sort of brilliant defense for things...sucking.

Pressing one button several hundred times over and over again in an encounter is something I can do playing cookie clicker. Go away with this horse manure design and come back when healers in this game actually play like real jobs with something to do other than occasionally pressing an oGCD heal while maintaining a DPS rotation you could teach a cat to upkeep. I don't even care if Sage neatly solves all of these problems, as if designing one single healer well was an excuse for wretched tedium on the others because "some healers HAVE to be boring". I'm sorry, in a game where community hatred for a DPS job often is grounds for emergency redesign mid-expansion, I don't see the excuse. They just redesigned the hell out of Summoner, and the community at large wasn't loudly baying for blood there. We've been on these forums demanding we have SOMETHING to do other than spamming one button over and over and over again, and the devs said "screw you guys, you'll eat your one button spam and like it".

[Roeshel]

...

You gotta chill. Not everyone who plays this game shares your opinion. 50-60% is still not 100%. Exaggaration Definition

What is your determination to not understand why we see raging red with the current healers? Heck, some of us are even accepting of the healers that are genuinely happy with this current version or just newbies enjoying a new game, no matter how bitter we are…

It feels like you keep going back and forth on how you truly feel about healers.. I mean are you genuinely trying to explain something and trying to express you like healers now or just bait at this point? If you like the current healers just say that and drop it already.

My argument is that what we have now is better than what we had before. DoT management was not a complex design. It is actually easier to maintain 3-5DoTs and heal with GCD than to spam 1111 and heal with oGCD.

And no, I don't like the current state of healing. I don't have a lot of impactful DPS spells as part of my kit as a healer. As a whm I have only glare, I wanted Spiritual Ray, Flood, Water III, Tornado and some Earth-related spell and I still want them.

I don't even care if Sage neatly solves all of these problems, as if designing one single healer well was an excuse for wretched tedium on the others because "some healers HAVE to be boring"

If Sage is interesting then things are promising. We can all stop playing the dull roles and make them add more DPS buttons. The game will become unplayable if all healers refuse to play. The main reason I almost never play DPS is that I wait more than I actually play in DF. Bad healer design is affecting everybody, not only healers. I can't count the number of times I have instantly left because the tank is pulling one pack of mobs. I sometimes rescue into second mob pull and try to survive while the tank realizes what is happening. This is maybe as fun as it gets for me in dungeons. In any case, their healer design is attracting more ppl who want to do only DPS and heal in their spare time, which results in tanks dying from basic attacks in raids and trials, not casting raise on dead DPS and such. Actually, in normal raids, I would cast raise only on another healer, or tank if both are dead. DPS gets revived by me with LB3. It is the only interesting spell that I can use and the chances of me using it increases as more DPS are dead on the ground. It is only rational to keep them there. Generally speaking when healers are dissatisfied with their gameplay they have the means to make people around them feel not so great. RDM, a dps, can insta raise more frequently than any healer which is an incredibly dumb thing and it makes me not bother with rezzing anyone even more. I really hope that lilies are oGCDs or the DPS loss is removed because I don't feel like casting them instead of glare. In Bozja I learned that utility like Protect Shell is actually a very boring spell to have. We do need DPS buttons with cool SFX. About decision making idk. The only decision-making I know is to cast another glare or dia and figure out how to heal with an oGCD or lily if I need to heal because using GCD heal is the last thing that crosses my mind and I always think something is very wrong if I have to use them, except for regen in dungeons during pulls. There isn't great decision-making in the PvE aspect of the game in general and it doesn't bother me that much. I just want interesting and impactful DPS spells.

[Sebazy]

You gotta chill. Not everyone who plays this game shares your opinion. 50-60% is still not 100%.

Then you're not reading what I'm saying correctly. At least as far as Savage goes, I'm pretty sure I've not claimed that we spend 100% of our casts on nukes. If I have, I was likely referring to content like DR which was what made me give up and level Dancer in the first place. To be clear, in terms of GCD usage, I seem to land at about 70% for Glare alone. Not 100% for sure, but it's still too high IMHO.

Regardless, I'm talking about the volume of key presses, look at my posts a bit closer. My typical one is 'I don't want to press the same button 180 times in one single fight'. That is not an exaggeration and I can link logs where even my past my sell by date, HPS focused and over cautious playing self manages to hit that number. Meanwhile the better healers than me are managing 220+ in some Savage turns.

Show me another job in the game that comes close to pressing one button 220+ times in a single Savage fight. Best I can find is 138 on BLM.

My argument is that what we have now is better than what we had before. DoT management was not a complex design. It is actually easier to maintain 3-5DoTs and heal with GCD than to spam 1111 and heal with oGCD.

Eh, the problem is that you're oversimplifying how healing worked in HW. It wasn't just a case of smashing GCDs and then rolling dots in between.

You had your Enmity to watch out for. Remember, tanks didn't want to use tank stance back then.

You had hugely limited resources vs what you have now. Look at the APM and Active times on something like an early A3S Living Liquid clear, we weren't sitting around because we were bad or the boss was disconnected. We were canceling casts that we couldn't afford be it for MP, Enmity or even that GCD just being too risky.

Last but most certainly not least, you had Cleric Stance. This alone made DPSing in proper content far more imposing and daunting than anything we have today. Whilst I'm of the opinion that it was a lame punishment mechanic, it certainly made you think about when you were putting out DPS.

These factors combined to create a huge gulf in healer DPS output in Savage content compared to what we see now.

Here's two relatively simple punchbag fights, neither of which have particularly imposing healer checks or mechanics.

For HW, I'll use Refurbisher 0, the 'Healers mustn't DPS' movement was on the decline at this point and it was a relatively easy tier after Gordias and Midas so it's about the worst example I could use to make my argument.

For Shadowbringers I'll use Shadowkeeper since it's a good boy and a good punchbag.

If I really wanted to prove my point in a disingenuous manner I could go from the min to the max values which would have the worst WHMs doing less than 3% of the damage of the best WHMS in terms of DPS for HW, meanwhile in ShB that same gap is 70%.

However, it's important to note that these statistics only include the last two weeks for Shadowkeeper, whereas they include all runs for HW including early clears so I'll use the median to upper quartile figures to minimise the extremes such as the green DPS that weren't actually healing anything, the progression runs where the healers couldn't actually heal anything and the Sylphies who wanted to heal everything.

Remember, this is the percentage of damage a median run is doing vs an upper quartile run, the bigger the percentage, the closer they are.

For Refurbisher 0 (HW)

WHM - 47%
AST - 60%
SCH - 80%

Now for Shadowkeeper (ShB):

WHM - 95%
AST - 97%
SCH - 96%

I'll let you make of that what you will.

If Sage is interesting then things are promising. We can all stop playing the dull roles and make them add more DPS buttons.

I can fully agree with you on this one. If SE make just 1 (or ideally 1 barrier, 1 pure) healer have compelling downtime gameplay, that's a huge win in my book. As much as I rail against how things are, I'm not naive enough to think that it should be my way or the highway. SE should be using the varied jobs within a role to offer a choice of gameplay. Currently the choice is minimal, hopefully Sadge addresses that and yes. If it indeed does and the healer population flocks to it en masse, it'll force SE to try and tackle this issue properly.

[Mindiori]

Perhaps the real agenda at work is a concern for something taking any kind of effort. The low tier drivel that now frequents so many things is popular indeed. Because of that ''cookie clicker'' ability to not bother full stop. I enjoy challenge personally; which directs my preferences. That however has little to do with an objective look at a game, it's philosophy and who it is clearly marketed at now. The potato instant gratification player who wants to feel good - whilst having done nothing of any note to obtain it. I fail to see how an argument can be put forward to suggest that meaningful reward is anywhere remotely in the leagues of the one button hilarity they champion; and that perspective won't change.

Whilst it is my opinion certainly; there have to also be comparative standards between people to communicate. What SCH once was, compared to now, is a stark example of where opinion and reality collide. As so with the apt 'glare' commentary elsewhere.

Lets not pretend any thought is involved in a single button spam. Which is what it has become and it is pathetic. No other term does it justice for what is an insult to peoples intellect.

[Truen]

The OP is in the minority here--most healers hate the current healing meta. Currently the Scholar is boring as Hell...and the leveling experience spamming Broil is hardly interactive or fun. His entire posts postulates from the perspective of someone that's already reached endgame content, which is incredibly narrow minded and short-sighted.

[Saefinn]

When are people on the healer forum going to get over the false and exaggerated claims of pressing only one button all the time?

I am trying to understand you but I fail to. The only time I got bored with WHM's gameplay was when I was playing for more than 3 hours every day and then came here and created this thread: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...pell-dps-class

The clipping issues got removed which was one of the main reasons I stopped playing savage after getting bis. WHM has more oGCDs to use, AST has more buffs to apply, SCH acquired access to their full healing kit in raids without losing DPS and Sage has 6-7 distinct DPS buttons that are actually part of a rotation that interacts with their healing kit. Something that healers never had. On the contrary, DPSing and Healing was a far distant concept for everyone but Scholar who was practically a SMN with an overpowered healing pet, whose attacks had no interaction with their gauge aside for bane and ED, leftovers of the Arcanist job. Both of them remained to make the class playable. Using those actions worked against you as a healer because they used AE charges.

Why it is difficult to grasp that having the same type of DoT ∞ + DoT WHM(Aero) shared across everyone on your bar plus healing with GCDs was actually a really bad design? Worse than the 1-oGCD-() gameplay that we have now.

On the note of SCH, yes it was OP, but it was HW onwards that it was OP, it wasn't OP in ARR. The problem with SCH is that they added more pure healing options to it without really balancing it out with the other heals, with SCH being a shield focused healer it was already balanced to compensate its lack of potency. I feel the real issue in ARR with balance was a SCH/SCH set up due to the lack of shield stacking and shield stacking would mess with some mechanics. So SCH's design definitely worked. People talk about SCH's DPS side like it's left over from ACN and SMN, but I argue differently, because given the themes of SCH, stuff like Bio, Miasma and Virus all suit SCH better than SMN. And we have seen a SCH DoT mage before in FFXI. Coming from FFXI SCH the design choices felt reminiscent of that experience but in a way suited to this game's gameplay. Because when I healed in FFXI, I'd pop maybe Thunderstorm->Dark Arts->Klimaform->Ionohelix->Modus Veritas->Light Arts->Do healery things. In FFXIV I'd: pop Cleric Stance then Miasma->Bio II->Bio->Bane->Shadowflare->Miasma II->Drop Cleric Stance->Do healery things. So to me it was more in SCH's identity than SMN's.


As for the claims of pressing only button all the time?

That's exactly how it feels. If you look at Sebazy's data, this is on Savage content. If you're doing 50% to 60% of your time in Savage content pressing one button, THAT is the bad design. Then also consider for the majority of content that number is higher.

It's monotonous especially as it's normally in longer bursts. It's not as though it's just a higher number but you're weaving them with other spells. It really is "Dia, Glare, Glare, Glare, Glare, Glare, Glare, Glare, Glare,Glare, Glare, Glare" until you need to heal.

For a majority of content you're able to keep people's health up with ease whilst just spamming a very dull and monotonous DPS "rotation".


With Sage, I agree, it looks like they're getting 6 DPS moves so far, that I am happy about and I am hoping SGE is what brings me back to enjoying healing, but it's a cautious optimism. I've seen the translations and it only looks like 1 of them has a long recast so this might prove that healers getting access to a larger DPS kit is not a bad thing. I mean, it has already been shown, but still. And it looks like AST might also be getting more in that department. But it still looks like SCH and WHM are just left on the wayside here. As a SCH main, that is disappointing and heck, I ended up swapping from SCH to AST in ShB because it is THAT bad. AST was able to at least alleviate some of it. Though AST also go shafted in ShB because its cards got watered down, but it at least it has more to do in its downtime versus SCH.

But what ShB did was strip a chunk of what kept SCH and AST interesting during downtime. It increased downtime. And arguably the problem for WHM has been longer (because they've long been without love) but at least it was actually an improvement on SB, where SB WHM had some design choices that made no sense and WHM is more fluid now and its abilities meld better, but it still has the same problem SCH and AST has and that's an increased downtime and a downtime that feels like you're doing practically nothing.

You will struggle to convince people it's good design when you have people bored when before they were not. And they've identified what it is that is doing that. Something can be perfectly balanced, fluid and meld well with all its parts and still be dull as heck.

But really it is a terrible balance from a gameplay perspective, maybe not from the perspective of rDPS

Because we're probably looking at on average a split like this:
70% DPS
30% healing

Then let's look at our arsenal for that split

DPS - 2 or 3 spells, but typically 1 spammed heavily.
Healing - Maybe 10? Maybe more?

Then look at what's need to get people to full health? Maybe 1 or 2 healing spells.

So it does mean for a lot of content you're not actually getting to properly use your healing kit. And it doesn't feel like you're being pushed that much as a healer.

So it leaves 2 basic arguments:

That the DPS:Healing ratio should be adjusted, so maybe something like:
70% healing
30% DPS

But the problem with that is it can make healing less approachable because it means making healing harder. Whilst me, a healer main would love that, because you know, I became a healer to well...heal. But we know the devs like a low skill floor and I think that is fair, they want to keep the game accessible. And this ratio should then be achieved at a higher level of content, but it does make healing dull AF for other content, which leads me onto the second argument.

That the downtime should be broken up and given more variety, especially in the form of DPS because the game is designed that way.

But then this is where the complaints about that come about, where "healers are not DPS" and followed by some arguments about complexity (when they've never had a complex DPS rotation), but the reality of the situation is that whilst yes they're not DPS, if we're going to have a huge downtime where we're not healing, we should at the very least be doing something interesting.

Hence I'm in favour of a combination of those two arguments. Give us more to do in our downtime and start adding new content that reduces our downtime.