Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Jirah]

I mean, shield healers have always been a lot more fun than pure healers, so this is nothing new. Even in the glory days of healing.

Curious but what are the glory days of healing?

[Semirhage]

Haven't they already by saying healers should heal, give us all these healing tools, but still failing to deliver damage to use them all?

Ah but see that would give you the ability to decide whether a run succeeds or not, and as we've seen for the past few expansions the Critically Acclaimed Single Player RPG FFXIV requires as little teamwork as possible. Denise DPSmain needs to be able to clear a fight without that silly healer's contribution giving them any chance of failure in the slightest.

[MintnHoney]

Haven't they already by saying healers should heal, give us all these healing tools, but still failing to deliver damage to use them all?

I was speaking more about the internal dev team potentially facing backlash for going against the higher-ups' design choices, but if you mean backlash from the healer forums, then, yeah, they've been facing backlash for ages. It just doesn't seem to matter to them.

[P0W3RK1D]

Curious but what are the glory days of healing?

the closest thing you might get to "glory days" for a healer is probly somewhere betweene HW and Stormblood, atleast healers still had identity and were somewhat fun and enguaging -- the moment shadowbringers hit we lost almost everything that made us special and fun.

[Caduagm]

I mean, shield healers have always been a lot more fun than pure healers, so this is nothing new. Even in the glory days of healing.

Not true. Nocturnal Astrologian was not fun at all, specially comparing it to Diurnal AST in 3.0 and 4.0.

[AziraSyuren]

Not true. Nocturnal Astrologian was not fun at all, specially comparing it to Diurnal AST in 3.0 and 4.0.

Yeah but SCH was the most fun healer in HW and even throughout most of StB once they gave back the AoE they removed for some god forsaken reason.

Curious but what are the glory days of healing?

Truth be told, we never had them. Healing in this game has always been shit and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sell you something. The only time it was "better" was in Stormblood. Accuracy and Cleric Stance together made healing anything except the most casual of content even more unrewarding than it is now because trying to optimize still resulted in you missing like half of your spells.

It was ass.

[Hazama999]

I miss cleric stance. It's kinda nuts how it's just one button, but knowing when to use it made all the difference.

[Sebazy]

Yeah but SCH was the most fun healer in HW and even throughout most of StB once they gave back the AoE they removed for some god forsaken reason.



Truth be told, we never had them. Healing in this game has always been shit and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sell you something. The only time it was "better" was in Stormblood. Accuracy and Cleric Stance together made healing anything except the most casual of content even more unrewarding than it is now because trying to optimize still resulted in you missing like half of your spells.

It was ass.

Eh, ARR was a decent time to heal TBH. Pre Gordias there wasn't nearly as deep an emphasis on healer's squeezing everything into DPS GCDs yet whilst the healing requirements were much tighter because we didn't have the wealth of oGCD instant casts that we do now whilst debuffs like Infirmity often made sure even Lustrate was off the menu for anyone other than the tank.

Sure Cleric Stance was a nuisance to deal with but actually healing and keeping tanks alive through Coil progression was a completely different animal to what we have now and in my eyes at least, it was far more rewarding.

Progression T5 and dealing with Death Sentence was a great example. In pre coil gear you'd need a Virus chain, Stoneskin, Adlo, a lustrate and a timed Cure II to land between the Death Sentence hit and the infirmity debuff landing which was a window of about half a second or so from memory. And you had to land that whilst Twintania was spamming auto attacks and a 10 second plummet the whole time. With proper organisation you could afford one of these to miss safely. If you missed two you were risking a tank death to the auto attack that immediate followed later in the fight as the damage ramped up.

T13 was another good example of this with heals needing to be landed between the flare breathes and stomp to keep tanks up safely.

Basically, healing was better because you actually had to pay attention to it, some situations forced you to concentrate on and time your heals to land at an exact time and the fact that we weren't so laser focused on converting every last second of the fight into another glare cast. We could actually do that without feeling bad about it.

Now it feels like even Regen is barely worth the GCD in Savage anymore. In P4S the tank busters hardly register with the majority being flat out ignorable because of invulns/tank switches and a general lack of healing needed for them.

[ty_taurus]

I miss cleric stance. It's kinda nuts how it's just one button, but knowing when to use it made all the difference.

It wasn't Cleric Stance that created that choice though, it was the fact that healing actually required you use your GCD back then because OGCD healing was extremely limited. There was no reason to DPS without Cleric Stance, so much like protect, it may as well not exist if it's always going to exist. It just served as a punishment for anyone who messed up on it. Whether or not you have a button to press before and after switching from DPS to healing or vice versa doesn't actually change the interaction you're making, nor would it alter the experience we have now by itself.

Actually, it would be kind of annoying with how OGCD focused healing has become. Either it doesn't affect OGCD healing and you basically just leave it on the for entire fight, or it does affect OGCD healing, and you get this really ugly window on your GCD anytime you try to weave healing as your damage spells do next to nothing during that time, but you still have no need for the overhealing that would come with using your GCD heals for weaving during that time.

[Teno]

I miss cleric stance. It's kinda nuts how it's just one button, but knowing when to use it made all the difference.

I do too so very much. But as was just said above, I feel like it'd have a hard time finding its place with all the current oGCD healing kit. It was good when GCD healing was the "only alternative".