Healer Q&A in PLL LXVIII

[Liam_Harper]

i think healing is hard enough if they make it harder i wont be able to keep up with my static

Really, just stop.

Even if you were being legitimate and it was some sort of confidence issue, you know what your logs are. Saying you want healers to be simple because you're worried your 99's will become 95's is never going to be taken seriously and is an awful reason for class design to be boring. It just comes across badly, whether you're trolling or not.

[Saefinn]

You have to make it easier so more people can clear.
Honestly, I'm fine with that, if I want to challenge my healing more then I can take on more challenging content, just as with any other job.

But the question didn't ask about making it more challenging. It asked about having more to do as a healer, which yes, can be more challenging but it is not mutually exclusive. DNC & RDM for example are easy to play, but also they're more engaging than playing a healer because they are busy and have a variety of button presses and dynamics to work with.

Or one example I use for healers. The day I cleared Titan Savage my group did min iLevel synced Cape Westwind for the memes.
Titan Savage, without a shadow of a doubt as a healer is more challenging than Cape Westwind min iLevel.
But my heals on Cape Westwind min iLevel probably got more actions per minute than it did doing Titan Savage, because in Titan Savage there were greater periods of time where my focus was not on healing, it was on DPSing because people's health was up to full.

And I am pretty sure Cape Westwind was designed to be cleared by everybody at min iLevel, because back in the day when I started most people were level 49 and in bad gear. And it was, because it's not a hard fight. However, the incoming damage with frequent and big enough to keep me busy.

I think maybe there is a misunderstanding: busy healing doesn't mean challenging healing. Busy healing means casting more healing spells, challenging healing is when you have to think more. If you're standing around dealing with unavoidable damage, doing 2 healing casts per minute is not less complicated than 10 healing casts per minute, all your healer is doing between heal casts is spamming Broil/Glare/etc. at least if there are more heal to cast then you have a bigger variety of skills to choose from or rotate around.

And I get the principle of early content being easier is nothing new and spanned across previous expansions, and prior to Shadowbringers your ASTs had a more engaging card system and your SCHs had more engaging DPS and WHM's had slightly more than what they've got now in their downtime and were complaining about it even back then. That's what's changed and YoshiP has told us we can't go back to that.

In which case make the healing more engaging, give us something back. If you can't do that, accept the error and give us a secondary purpose that we can engage in our downtime that doesn't resort to spamming singular spells. Endwalker has steps in the right direction compared to Shadowbringers (for AST & SGE, though AST I felt was 2 steps forward 1 step back), but they're small steps and are not far enough. Like SGE has the foundation of something that could be a lot more engaging, but how its skills are prioritized for being a good SGE nullifies it.

And it's because the devs have stripped out what we do in our downtime that this is such a complaint. That's what's different.

Your less experienced healers won't even have to worry about it if they give us more because as YoshiP has said before, damage is optional and even if it weren't, then you don't have to be a good DPS as a healer until a small fraction of content where the people are of a skill level where I am sure they can handle it. If you wanna Broil spam, that's fine and you're at least doing something in your downtime and it's not like I should be parsing and/or telling you that you're playing bad because 1) it's not nice and 2) it would be against the ToS anyway and 3) it's not like I do it to a DPS who is not optimizing their abilities.

As once again, it just boils down to 3 main potential solutions to this issue:
1) More engaging healing.
2) More engaging downtime/DPS
3) A combination of the previous 2

Option 1 is nice for the healer purists who're not finding the game engaging enough.
Option 2 is nice for those who embrace the hybrid healer/DPS and accommodates those who inevitably will hit a level of optimisation where they have a bigger downtime. And benefits solo play.
Option 3 accommodates both categories.

And with the emphasis of Final Fantasy XIV being a good solo RPG experience...you need healer jobs who have an engaging DPS kit. Imagine playing through Final Fantasy IX and your options for abilities are: a boatload of cure spells, and 3 that do damage and playing through 70% of the battle content only using maybe, Fira. That is what the solo experience would be like as a healer job here.

[ty_taurus]

You have to make it easier so more people can clear.
Honestly, I'm fine with that, if I want to challenge my healing more then I can take on more challenging content, just as with any other job.

But the question didn't ask about making it more challenging. It asked about having more to do as a healer, which yes, can be more challenging but it is not mutually exclusive. DNC & RDM for example are easy to play, but also they're more engaging than playing a healer because they are busy and have a variety of button presses and dynamics to work with.

Or one example I use for healers. The day I cleared Titan Savage my group did min iLevel synced Cape Westwind for the memes.
Titan Savage, without a shadow of a doubt as a healer is more challenging than Cape Westwind min iLevel.
But my heals on Cape Westwind min iLevel probably got more actions per minute than it did doing Titan Savage, because in Titan Savage there were greater periods of time where my focus was not on healing, it was on DPSing because people's health was up to full.

And I am pretty sure Cape Westwind was designed to be cleared by everybody at min iLevel, because back in the day when I started most people were level 49 and in bad gear. And it was, because it's not a hard fight. However, the incoming damage with frequent and big enough to keep me busy.

I think maybe there is a misunderstanding: busy healing doesn't mean challenging healing. Busy healing means casting more healing spells, challenging healing is when you have to think more. If you're standing around dealing with unavoidable damage, doing 2 healing casts per minute is not less complicated than 10 healing casts per minute, all your healer is doing between heal casts is spamming Broil/Glare/etc. at least if there are more heal to cast then you have a bigger variety of skills to choose from or rotate around.

And I get the principle of early content being easier is nothing new and spanned across previous expansions, and prior to Shadowbringers your ASTs had a more engaging card system and your SCHs had more engaging DPS and WHM's had slightly more than what they've got now in their downtime and were complaining about it even back then. That's what's changed and YoshiP has told us we can't go back to that.

In which case make the healing more engaging, give us something back. If you can't do that, accept the error and give us a secondary purpose that we can engage in our downtime that doesn't resort to spamming singular spells. Endwalker has steps in the right direction compared to Shadowbringers (for AST & SGE, though AST I felt was 2 steps forward 1 step back), but they're small steps and are not far enough. Like SGE has the foundation of something that could be a lot more engaging, but how its skills are prioritized for being a good SGE nullifies it.

And it's because the devs have stripped out what we do in our downtime that this is such a complaint. That's what's different.

Your less experienced healers won't even have to worry about it if they give us more because as YoshiP has said before, damage is optional and even if it weren't, then you don't have to be a good DPS as a healer until a small fraction of content where the people are of a skill level where I am sure they can handle it. If you wanna Broil spam, that's fine and you're at least doing something in your downtime and it's not like I should be parsing and/or telling you that you're playing bad because 1) it's not nice and 2) it would be against the ToS anyway and 3) it's not like I do it to a DPS who is not optimizing their abilities.

As once again, it just boils down to 3 main potential solutions to this issue:
1) More engaging healing.
2) More engaging downtime/DPS
3) A combination of the previous 2

Option 1 is nice for the healer purists who're not finding the game engaging enough.
Option 2 is nice for those who embrace the hybrid healer/DPS and accommodates those who inevitably will hit a level of optimisation where they have a bigger downtime. And benefits solo play.
Option 3 accommodates both categories.

And with the emphasis of Final Fantasy XIV being a good solo RPG experience...you need healer jobs who have an engaging DPS kit. Imagine playing through Final Fantasy IX and your options for abilities are: a boatload of cure spells, and 3 that do damage and playing through 70% of the battle content only using maybe, Fira. That is what the solo experience would be like as a healer job here.

Very well-said.

Something I've talked about before that continues to baffle me on their approach to healing is that their design choices tend to have nothing to do with making healing easier--they just make healing simpler. There is a difference.

One of my friends started up after not having played since 5.4, and she's a SCH player. When reaching the level 81 dungeon, her tank died twice during the run from big pull damage, and as their HP was dropping, she was panicking and spamming Physick to try and keep her tank alive even though she had only used a couple of her OGCD. I think this is a great example of that division between casual/new/rusty healers and midcore/hardcore healers. They are quick to feel scared and resort to the most accessible tools in their kits, in her case Physick. But the HP restored by Physick is so low that even with blasting it with 100% uptime, the tank still died. The changes SE makes do nothing to offer easier or safer tools to the immediate eye of casual players, and choices like making DPS neutral returns on healing would actually compliment casual players because it would mean a percentage of their contributions would spike up to the same levels as that of midcore/hardcore players.

Gutting SCH's DPS buttons did nothing to make playing the job easier or safer. You know what would make it easier and safer?

- Physick: Increase the Potency to 700. Additional Effect: Reduces damage taken by 5% for 5 seconds
- Emergency Tactics: In addition to transforming your Galvanize/Catalyze into heals, also ensure your next Adloquium or Succor will restore Critical HP

There, two changes that would immediately make SCH feel a lot safer for casual players as it would greatly improve their go-to panic buttons. They'd still be avoided by hardcore/midcore players because they're a DPS loss and unnecessary, but they aren't there to make SCH stronger--they're there to catch the weak when they fall.

If SE really wanted to make healing easier to clear with, those are the kind of changes that will accomplish this. Neutering the role's offense has done nothing to make the weak more capable of clearing anything.

[Chopstix]

Personally I quite enjoy healing ever since i was able to solve the targeting problems. I would consider myself a high end player but healing is not currently my main role in hard content. Personally im not opposed to the current one dmg button, one dot style. However, in order to not feel bored, u should be compelled to use ur full kit, and think carefully how to space them. Regular content u can heal w/ like 1-2 aoe oGCDs. I expect more casual oriented healers will need to do more. This is fine. But in hard content i feel like dmg is lacking. More stuff that warrants ACTUAL regen healing (like the raidwide dot in e11s) would be nice. Hell, more dmg overall would be nice. U never need to put GCD regen on the tanks because they can sustain through it with the sage partner/SCH fairy and the healing b/w the two tanks.

There r a couple of intense heal checks currently, but only a few. Basically all of them in p4s haha. Orbs in part 1 into the tile explosion can be nasty, but it is not too bad. The last stack/spread into triple deco is quite nasty though. In part 2 ACT II can pose some challenges but like orbs it is not to bad. Curtain call on the other hand is much more demanding. But now with gear/BiS the most difficult heal checks r actually skipped entirely or only a small part of it is seen (curtain call).

TLDR more DMG throughout the fight with more heal checks that r not always at the end that eventually get skipped with gear.

[ty_taurus]

Personally I quite enjoy healing ever since i was able to solve the targeting problems. I would consider myself a high end player but healing is not currently my main role in hard content. Personally im not opposed to the current one dmg button, one dot style. However, in order to not feel bored, u should be compelled to use ur full kit, and think carefully how to space them. Regular content u can heal w/ like 1-2 aoe oGCDs. I expect more casual oriented healers will need to do more. This is fine. But in hard content i feel like dmg is lacking. More stuff that warrants ACTUAL regen healing (like the raidwide dot in e11s) would be nice. Hell, more dmg overall would be nice. U never need to put GCD regen on the tanks because they can sustain through it with the sage partner/SCH fairy and the healing b/w the two tanks.

There r a couple of intense heal checks currently, but only a few. Basically all of them in p4s haha. Orbs in part 1 into the tile explosion can be nasty, but it is not too bad. The last stack/spread into triple deco is quite nasty though. In part 2 ACT II can pose some challenges but like orbs it is not to bad. Curtain call on the other hand is much more demanding. But now with gear/BiS the most difficult heal checks r actually skipped entirely or only a small part of it is seen (curtain call).

TLDR more DMG throughout the fight with more heal checks that r not always at the end that eventually get skipped with gear.

Like I just brought up, though, the healer DPS gutting did nothing to make the role easier. The only DPS change that made healing easier was killing old Cleric Stance, which for the record was not a great way to encourage healer DPS. It was a system based on punishment--you're punished if you don't use it, and you're punished if you misuse it. Everything else has to do with how casual healers heal, which is ultimately not very well. They're quick to resort to Cures and Medicas, and they don't know how to weave quickly or efficiently. We've addressed everything BUT the problem in any meaningful way.

If anything, gutting certain DPS buttons actually hurts casual players. If you have someone who's too petrified to cast more than a few DPS spells at a time, Aero III offered more bang for their buck than a Stone IV. Stronger DoTs on shorter timers would be better at carrying weaker players, and if they don't DPS at all then what does it matter if the job has 1 DPS button or 20?

[MellowMink]

I’m happy to see that a similar thread has appeared under General Discussion and has exploded with responses; I hope this will be something that the director isn’t able to easily ignore, at least to the point of him deciding to write up a less dismissive and more respectful blog post.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I’m happy to see that a similar thread has appeared under General Discussion and has exploded with responses; I hope this will be something that the director isn’t able to easily ignore, at least to the point of him deciding to write up a less dismissive and more respectful blog post.

I wouldn't be surprised if they move it to healer's section though.

[IllyaPrisma]

if they don't DPS at all then what does it matter if the job has 1 DPS button or 20?

This is a major part of the reason why Healer DPS options were harshly reduced though. Healers having multiple DPS options creates (at least in the opinion of the developers) a large gap between the skill floor and skill ceiling of the Healer Job. They specifically targeted this issue after Healer damage complexity in Heavensward made it painfully obvious which Healers knew what they were doing, and which were completely clueless. I absolutely agree that SE has tackled this issue in the wrong way, as making something simpler is not the same as making something easier, but that leads to a question on the opposite end: Does increasing Job Complexity also increase Job Difficulty? I believe you will get some mixed answers to that question. We can easily conclude however that SE firmly believes complexity = difficulty, therefore the skill floor/skill ceiling issue they are intent on avoiding.

[SargeTheSeagull]

The thing of it is, complexity doesn't have to be a bad thing, nor does it have to take away from healing.

Let's grant some interaction between some skills.
For WHM, make Regen and Medica 2 be able to proc a Thundercloud-esque buff for the WHM that causes Dia to be free to cast and buffs its damage. You're still healing but now you also have a proc that lets me lean away from Glare spam every so often as Dia is now granting you higher damage during those procs than Glare. It's a subtle change but one that would make WHM somewhat more enjoyable because you're rewarded for good Regen uptime with more damage and it doesn't take away from healing.

For SCH, let's make the fairies unique from one another, if only mildly.
Eos can remain unchanged but Selene needs a slight rework.
Since Regens vs Shield have done poorly in the past, based off Diurnal and Nocturnal Sect on AST, let's not change how Whispering Dawn functions but rather, let's have Eos have more upfront potency but a shorter duration while Selene has a lower upfront potency but a longer duration. 120 potency:15s, 75 potency:24s. They both result in a 600 potency regen but allow for the SCH to decide which would be better for specific situations. Maybe you need a stronger regen to get people up before the next raidwide. Maybe a longer regen to help heal thru a DoT effect.
Fey Illumination could literally just be inverted in its effect for each fairy. Eos provides more healing and a small mitigation buff, while Selene offers more mitigation and a small healing buff.
Finally, let's adjust Fey Blessing to be a Heal or Shield based on the fairy. Heal for Eos, Shield for Selene.

These are just surface level changes but they would grant SCH some small level of complexity without taking anything away from the job.

Just those 2 changes would make the jobs feel different to play, if only mildly and wouldn't take away from their roles as healers.

I love these ideas. My idea for sage is also along these lines. Using an adder’s gall or any gcd heal grants an adders sting. Using toxicon reduces phlegma’s cooldown. Physis is no longer a regen, it grants kardia to all nearby party members for 15 seconds. More kit interaction is all we want.

[Deceptus]

This is a major part of the reason why Healer DPS options were harshly reduced though. Healers having multiple DPS options creates (at least in the opinion of the developers) a large gap between the skill floor and skill ceiling of the Healer Job. They specifically targeted this issue after Healer damage complexity in Heavensward made it painfully obvious which Healers knew what they were doing, and which were completely clueless. I absolutely agree that SE has tackled this issue in the wrong way, as making something simpler is not the same as making something easier, but that leads to a question on the opposite end: Does increasing Job Complexity also increase Job Difficulty? I believe you will get some mixed answers to that question. We can easily conclude however that SE firmly believes complexity = difficulty, therefore the skill floor/skill ceiling issue they are intent on avoiding.

So instead of teaching the lower performing healers how to play the game they gave the healing role in general a lobotomy so everyone was braindead.

Can't optimize play when there's only one button to push (heavy /s)