Are you the loud minority? (Healer feedback)

[Melorie]

For the record one of the reasons why healing "dps" is so simple is because it's been a problem when it wasn't. Clearly you guys don't remember the days of this.
https://imgur.com/a/4eM33

And threads like this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...nd_the_cleric/

Total flame war over healers not dpsing going back and forth. Why? Because back then it was so annoyingly difficult to get into most people just didn't ever do it and you ended up with way more "bad healers" at least now the entry into average/good healer/raid healer is far easier than it was back then.

Except that once again, I still haven't seen someone here asking for cleric stance again, nor even telling SE that they should go back to 2.x style. Most of the time, although people miss a thing or two (I personally miss SB combat the most, it was a good balance imo), that doesn't mean they aren't open for other possibilities that are bigger than just going back into the past. Most people here are just asking to not spam glare and this isn't asking a lot. The healer situation doesn't need to be a black and white situation in which you either have something extremely over-the-top (though I wouldn't mind at least one option of this for variety) or one skill over and over again forever and ever. The devs clearly can be creative and create solutions that embrace a good deal of different levels of gameplay instead of letting everyone at stage 0. Acting like any discussion regarding this is people asking for gatekeeping is simply being unfair, since a big majority of the discussions here have showed a bunch of different viewpoints that covers a lot of different grounds - class kit synergy, encounter design, stat squish, etc.

To think that they're incapable of achieving this and refusing any discussion or changes to accommodate people that have poured their love and time in this role and are left spamming glare can only be admitting that the dev team is incompetent, because there's zero reason to see this situation as something that is either 8 or 80.

[AFuzzyMu11in]

Except that once again, I still haven't seen someone here asking for cleric stance again, nor even telling SE that they should go back to 2.x style. Most of the time, although people miss a thing or two (I personally miss SB combat the most, it was a good balance imo), that doesn't mean they aren't open for other possibilities that are bigger than just going back into the past. Most people here are just asking to not spam glare and this isn't asking a lot. The healer situation doesn't need to be a black and white situation in which you either have something extremely over-the-top (though I wouldn't mind at least one option of this for variety) or one skill over and over again forever and ever. The devs clearly can be creative and create solutions that embrace a good deal of different levels of gameplay instead of letting everyone at stage 0. Acting like any discussion regarding this is people asking for gatekeeping is simply being unfair, since a big majority of the discussions here have showed a bunch of different viewpoints that covers a lot of different grounds - class kit synergy, encounter design, stat squish, etc.

To think that they're incapable of achieving this and refusing any discussion or changes to accommodate people that have poured their love and time in this role and are left spamming glare can only be admitting that the dev team is incompetent, because there's zero reason to see this situation as something that is either 8 or 80.

To be honest, they prob have fixed this problem. If I had to guess, they are going to use sage as a test to see if they can give the raiders/bored healers who don't enjoy simplistic rotations, a chance to shine. If it works out, more than likely they will just continue to make sage "harder" and treat it as a high skill cap job that requires a lot of "skill" to pilot at it's highest level.

[Dogempire]

For the record one of the reasons why healing "dps" is so simple is because it's been a problem when it wasn't. Clearly you guys don't remember the days of this.
https://imgur.com/a/4eM33

And threads like this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...nd_the_cleric/

Total flame war over healers not dpsing going back and forth. Why? Because back then it was so annoyingly difficult to get into most people just didn't ever do it and you ended up with way more "bad healers" at least now the entry into average/good healer/raid healer is far easier than it was back then.

Eh, on one hand I get why removing cleric stance was necessary since it was really clunky having to swap your stats just to deal decent damage, but on the other hand just because a role is difficult to play because of x or y reason doesn't mean that it should be changed so that everyone can play it regardless of skill level.

I mean I'll admit that I'm terrible at playing BLM because I'm bad at keeping enochain up, and same with monk because the constant positional and rotational changes are confusing to me, doesn't mean I can't respect that other people have the skillset to play classes like that and that the fundamental playstyle of a class shouldn't be changed just to give it mass appeal, especially when it alienates the existing players and brings in new ones that just want something easy but effective

Healers don't need more complex rotations, but we've moved away from more nuanced play where constantly mitigating is just a waste of a GCD and encounters have mostly devolved into "Pull boss, dodge mechanics, tank and spank till dead"

We don't even have TP anymore, or aggro reduction tools, what else is there even to give healers to occupy their time?

[Halfgeeek]

Unsure what the heck is going on above me but I shall post one thing here, well perhaps two.





You can go so full ostrich and burry the head so deep in the sand you isekai into FF14 and pop out in Cutters Cry but reality shall remain the same. The only accurate part of vocal minority is that the ones who chose to be vocal are in the minority, everyone else simply quits playing the job without saying things and we wait in 20 minute queues instead.

For another perspective, I play on JP & US server (due to lag issues), on JP server queues are 9/10 needing tanks, with alliance needing DPS and sometimes healer in need pops up. On US its more varied.

I just went back to playing on JP a few days ago, and the queues were still nearly always tanks in need. Might be some cultural differences going on, IDK.

[Melorie]

Eh, on one hand I get why removing cleric stance was necessary since it was really clunky having to swap your stats just to deal decent damage, but on the other hand just because a role is difficult to play because of x or y reason doesn't mean that it should be changed so that everyone can play it regardless of skill level.

Yeah, for me they could've simply added a very easy healer (whatever that means for them tbh) instead of gutting 3 classes at once and then introducing one that would supposedly be a "fix" for the people that enjoyed them more than 2 years later (which doesn't seem like it will, given that sage rotation doesn't really change that much from the rest, but well). Specially since besides SCH, WHM and Ast did not even have that huge amount of buttons before anyway. Personally I despise sage's aesthetic, I will try it for the lack of a better options, but I'm not optimistic.

[Misutoraru]

Yeah, for me they could've simply added a very easy healer (whatever that means for them tbh) instead of gutting 3 classes at once and then introducing one that would supposedly be a "fix" for the people that enjoyed them more than 2 years later (which doesn't seem like it will, given that sage rotation doesn't really change that much from the rest, but well). Specially since besides SCH, WHM and Ast did not even have that huge amount of buttons before anyway. Personally I despise sage's aesthetic, I will try it for the lack of a better options, but I'm not optimistic.

A quick brainstorm

We can have

SCH: return the DOT, strengthen the fairy healing ability,

AST: rework card system focus on buff and debuff, e.g. damage up, spell/skill speed up, crit up, def down, damage down etc,

WHM, the simple power healer

We could have 3 very different play style healer

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

I rarely feel like a "glare mage". With my main focus in the game being casual content, and solo stuff such as deep dungeons, my group content is my daily roulettes, and that's PUGs.
As tank, I sometimes die to healers being stuck in doing damage rotations, or not paying attention and dying, whereas as healer, I get tanks wearing toilet paper for armour and not having any mitigation buttons on their hotbar.
Most of the problems people talk about on these forums are irrelevant for my day to day gameplay, because I never have the luxury to stand there and nuke-spam. I rarely even get to put a dot on every mob, because I'm busy keeping just the tank alive, meanwhile the ninja has 3 stacks of some debuff and the dragoon is on fire and about to jump off a cliff.

[Melorie]

I rarely feel like a "glare mage".

Well, I'm glad to hear you feel engaged. I do the same as you, and I glare a lot. All the time. To the point that doing roulette feels like a chore (if you look at my gear you'll see how little i've cared about it). I feel like most people here do the same, and aren't into statics doing hardcore stuff all the time. Sometimes I do stuff as sch with follow on and fairy going... while playing animal crossing, never once someone asked me to dps either, I mean, most of the time people don't even say hello. But your statement is interesting: you're not even using glare that much, and you still clear your things I suppose, so adding any other layer of depth to the kit won't affect you. You can keep doing what you're doing, and you wouldn't be affected. Isn't that nice? So people that are looking to step ahead into their gameplay, that know the dungeons fight well or even play this game with friends as it does happen in multiplayer games can also be rewarded for doing so.

As for healers that dps too much, tanks with bad gear... There are bad players everywhere. I mean, SE shouldn't balance healers around exclusively bad players because the role is healer, not nanny. There are DPS that don't properly do their rotation, tanks that don't use cooldowns, whatever. And once I went into an expert roulette as summoner without bahamuth or phoenix and still cleared it (sorry for the group that had me, it was a very specific situation lol). I was a terrible partner in this situation, and at the end of the day no one even cared. It's normal to get a special case in roulette every once in a while, but still, there's only so much they can do to make you work as a healer. I can't remember other supports from other games in which their kit are 99% reliant on people doing mistakes, without anything going on for themselves as well.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

...

You're reading an awful lot into my reply, and you seem to experience a completely different game than I do.

If you're interested in my opinion: A healer should heal mainly, with occasional DPS spells thrown in when there's time.
The way they developed the healing classes has it exactly backwards, and to make it worse, the DPS isn't even interesting (just one button on repeat).
I'd fix this by taking away all but one instant heal, make all heals have cast time, but giving healers something like an easy rotation consisting of instant damage spells that isn't broken by using heals, so you can "weave in" a DPS rotation between heals.

The reason healers are so unpopular isn't the healing itself, it's the fact that you're the only healer in a group, have no control over how much damage other people take, but have to clean it all up. So now they tried to spread out some of that burden of responsibility by adding heals to tanks (massively) and DPS (to some degree). If the result is that it doesn't matter if the healer dies, which I assume is a possibility, unless the encounters are more difficult than in ShB, then people who would normally have enjoyed playing healer, will no longer feel like an important part of the system and bow out of the role, which will make the problem worse.

Healer has always been a minority role, and if I were to solve the problem, I'd do it by changing group size to 6: 1 tank, 1 heal, 4 dps. That should fix the queues and give healers more to do, along with above mentioned way I'd change cast times.

But please, Melorie, don't read anything into what I say that isn't there. Doesn't feel like you're interested in discussing with me, more like you slapping your opinion in my face.

[Sebazy]

For the record one of the reasons why healing "dps" is so simple is because it's been a problem when it wasn't. Clearly you guys don't remember the days of this.
https://imgur.com/a/4eM33

And threads like this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...nd_the_cleric/

Total flame war over healers not dpsing going back and forth. Why? Because back then it was so annoyingly difficult to get into most people just didn't ever do it and you ended up with way more "bad healers" at least now the entry into average/good healer/raid healer is far easier than it was back then.

Eh, the blame for this stuff rested at the feet of Cleric Stance, not the rest of our kit though. The whole healer DPS debate pretty much died within a tier of Stormblood landing despite the fact our kits hadn't been entirely chopped to bits at this point.

You'll see some people looking back at Cleric fondly, but you really have to go looking to find anyone asking for it back in the last couple of years.

I rarely feel like a "glare mage". With my main focus in the game being casual content, and solo stuff such as deep dungeons, my group content is my daily roulettes, and that's PUGs.
As tank, I sometimes die to healers being stuck in doing damage rotations, or not paying attention and dying, whereas as healer, I get tanks wearing toilet paper for armour and not having any mitigation buttons on their hotbar.
Most of the problems people talk about on these forums are irrelevant for my day to day gameplay, because I never have the luxury to stand there and nuke-spam. I rarely even get to put a dot on every mob, because I'm busy keeping just the tank alive, meanwhile the ninja has 3 stacks of some debuff and the dragoon is on fire and about to jump off a cliff.

My biggest tip to you is to relish the challenge whilst it's still there TBH. Said challenge evaporates rather quickly as you hit the level cap and start getting more natural with your kit and keys. I've got plenty of logs from absurdly extreme situations and the common denominator is there's still plenty of time to throw DPS in all of them.