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

[Ixon]

snip

Every role has a "crayola" job, healers don't get a free pass. Most non buff/non top DPS jobs usually fall out of meta in competent, well orchestrated groups, again, no role is getting a free pass. Plus, unless you are going for the top colors or even if you are, meta doesn't mean jack to 99% of players. WHM held it's meta for a lot longer than most of you get credit for in ShB. Go check the top speedkills, they are still there for a decent amount compared to other jobs in other roles with no/less utility/damage. WHM is great for prog as it's straightforward and simple kit allows you to focus more on mechanics than pre-timing heals and their high aDPS akin to SGE is better when your group isn't as sync'd trying to learn a fight. Many World First groups of this savage tier had a WHM. Plus it's the only healer with Bene, making it psuedo mandatory for groups with a DRK.

WHM's simplistic, easy to grasp, kit has it's place in the healer role. Just as simpler tanks and simpler DPS also have their place. This DOES NOT mean the job HAS to be bad, nor does it mean you have to agree with the direction the dev team is taking with your job or role. I am fully aware and in agreement that the healers need adjusting starting with WHM then AST then SCH then SGE. Some people do enjoy the direction since ShB and some don't, and that's fine, that's their opinion. However, when the majority of people here are midcore healers at best(lot's of blues and greens from people complain about an ez pz role), echo chambering "111111111" without providing legitimate suggestions other than "more dps" not backed by any sort of proof as to why those changes would be beneficial to ALL players, from starting out casuals to hardcore veterans, all this just falls on deaf ears. This thread was in a good, productive, "here is what should change and why it should change and why it's healthy for all players" like a few pages ago, what happened?

[Shurrikhan]

Every role has a "crayola" job, healers don't get a free pass.

"The problem is widespread. Surely, despite frequent suggestions as to how to mitigate it, this is proof that the problem cannot be addressed, and thus we should stop talking about it."

Most non buff/non top DPS jobs usually fall out of meta in competent, well orchestrated groups, again, no role is getting a free pass.

Yet this has no bearing even on world first groups, who plenty often just take whatever the hell they enjoy, and the percentage difference between a top-3 performer and a given job has always been far more relevant than the lower job's rank. A 2% difference, for instance, falls within the deviation frequently seen by the same player in the same fight and in nearly the same party, regardless of whether that 'mere' 98% of the top job's theoretical performance would make the given job the "worst" in the game.

I'll agree that "echo chambering '11111111' without legitimate suggestions" or the like isn't great, but this kind of blasé dismissal is notably worse.

A problem being widespread doesn't make it any less a problem; it merely shifts the tenor of how we ought to address it. That there will always be a last place, similarly, doesn't excuse large performance gaps.

________________

Finally, I'll agree that some jobs ought to have a lower barrier to moderate competency (say, being able to solo-heal most Extremes, but not necessarily with great optimization) than others, but that doesn't mean the true ceiling of the job need also be any lower. (That said, I also feel that the relative simplicity of WHM is often overstated, especially given its current underperformance under typical conditions.)

[Reiryuu]

WHM's simplistic, easy to grasp, kit has it's place in the healer role. Just as simpler tanks and simpler DPS also have their place. This DOES NOT mean the job HAS to be bad, nor does it mean you have to agree with the direction the dev team is taking with your job or role. I am fully aware and in agreement that the healers need adjusting starting with WHM then AST then SCH then SGE. Some people do enjoy the direction since ShB and some don't, and that's fine, that's their opinion. However, when the majority of people here are midcore healers at best(lot's of blues and greens from people complain about an ez pz role), echo chambering "111111111" without providing legitimate suggestions other than "more dps" not backed by any sort of proof as to why those changes would be beneficial to ALL players, from starting out casuals to hardcore veterans, all this just falls on deaf ears. This thread was in a good, productive, "here is what should change and why it should change and why it's healthy for all players" like a few pages ago, what happened?

Healers have been giving suggestions for years. Pages upon pages of it. All ignored and dismissed. They listened.... a little in the 3.X series, but after 4.0 it was pretty much brushed off and the role has been going downhill since. It's been a cycle. Healers start commenting and giving suggestions on job action trailer... white knights say "wait till media tour" ... same feedback because all the predictions turned out to be warrented... "wait till launch" still no changes and it's just as people thought it would be... "wait till X.1 patch" still nothing.... "well, wait till next expansion"... repeat... repeat... repeat...

The feedback tends to be 11111 because adding a damage spell or something seems to be the only real thing SE might actually do because they have dismissed just about everything else especially for WHM... for... reasons... *shrug* WHM mains have asked for utility since AST was introduced and we've been basically told "not happening." So... yeah...

Edit... funny thing is... techincally WHM has always been made fun of for this... Everyone used to joke that "WHM out there throwin' their rocks at the mobs lul" since all our main dps spell was Stone... then they're like "Oh, we'll make sure you're not throwing rocks anymore!" when ShB came out... only... they just changed it from rocks to light balls... -__-;

[Irenia]

Edit... funny thing is... techincally WHM has always been made fun of for this... Everyone used to joke that "WHM out there throwin' their rocks at the mobs lul" since all our main dps spell was Stone... then they're like "Oh, we'll make sure you're not throwing rocks anymore!" when ShB came out... only... they just changed it from rocks to light balls... -__-;

Haha I was so mad about that. I liked being the nature cleric in this game, and somehow the complaint about rocks was interpreted as aesthetic rather than mechanical.

[Shuuli]

I personally suggest for anyone wanting to have some good old heal fun to revisit some old content on minimum item level no echo. For example Shinryu. - there is a mechanic where you needed to heal the dragon heads that were linked to your teammates. Felt pretty cool mechanic to me. Would be great if they implemented something like that in majority of the content. That felt pretty creative to me.

[Silver-Strider]

I personally suggest for anyone wanting to have some good old heal fun to revisit some old content on minimum item level no echo. For example Shinryu. - there is a mechanic where you needed to heal the dragon heads that were linked to your teammates. Felt pretty cool mechanic to me. Would be great if they implemented something like that in majority of the content. That felt pretty creative to me.

Or I could play BLU and have fun while healing.

[Rilifane]

I personally suggest for anyone wanting to have some good old heal fun to revisit some old content on minimum item level no echo. For example Shinryu. - there is a mechanic where you needed to heal the dragon heads that were linked to your teammates. Felt pretty cool mechanic to me. Would be great if they implemented something like that in majority of the content. That felt pretty creative to me.

I can also have a whole party that strips down to an ilvl where we barely survive a regular aoe, put a cat or two on my keyboard for additional difficulty, flip the monitor upside down for even more difficulty...

Or they could design healers in a way that we don't need to bend over backwards to enjoy outlier content, let alone content we all do on a fairly regular basis like dungeons.

[HyoMinPark]

I personally suggest for anyone wanting to have some good old heal fun to revisit some old content on minimum item level no echo. For example Shinryu. - there is a mechanic where you needed to heal the dragon heads that were linked to your teammates. Felt pretty cool mechanic to me. Would be great if they implemented something like that in majority of the content. That felt pretty creative to me.

I felt the opposite in Shinryu. It felt like a cheap way of forcing healers into GCD healing without really making it meaningful. It wasn’t hard or challenging—it was just there. If you got into a PF with two WHMs, it was even more trivial, since Benedicition was dedicated to one dragon head automatically.

I don’t know how much of minimum item level old content is healing requirements going up, and people just not understanding the mechanics and taking more damage than they should as a result. Running Dun Scaith during the current Moogle event heavily leans towards the latter: nothing particularly hits harder (outside of a handful of raidwides, like during Proto-Ultima and Diabolos Hollow), but people take a lot more damage due to standing in the bad and just not being familiar with the content itself.


That said, both of these are still issues with healer design: why do we have to do minimum item level content OR be paired with a party of clowns to feel “engaged”? Why can it not be engaging in current content? Why do we have to purposely gimp ourselves or jump through hoops for it?

[ForteNightshade]

I personally suggest for anyone wanting to have some good old heal fun to revisit some old content on minimum item level no echo. For example Shinryu. - there is a mechanic where you needed to heal the dragon heads that were linked to your teammates. Felt pretty cool mechanic to me. Would be great if they implemented something like that in majority of the content. That felt pretty creative to me.

Does this not all but scream how poorly designed healers are that in order to feel engaging—at least, theatrically—they have to do several year old content at minimum ilvl instead of the brand new content? Not to mention, like HyoMin said, I also didn't find this mechanic engaging nor creative. It arbitrarily forced GCD healing and overhealing, two aspects of healer gameplay you don't want to do. It's similar to their obsession with "heal to full" mechanics throughout Stormblood ala White Hole and Heartless Angel. Neither challenged a healer so much as it forced them to waste their abilities because someone only reached 97% of their HP, which isn't enough.

[technole]

There were several ghosts in DR savage to have to heal from zero HP, much more than Shrinyu. Although the phase was skippable with good DPS. It was a cool idea since you'd have likely 10 healers to handle them so lustrates or EDs here and there they'd be done. Although I felt like aside from bleeds requiring tank aethershields, the healers were mainly managing damage buffs and doing raid mechanics over pure healing most of the time. An opportunity could have been made to up the ante on healing aside from queen enrage.

Being i600 now as a healer trivializes all the savage heal mechanics. Some things still hit hard, but you just hit single buttons to react instead of GCDs. Even P4S final phase enrage is just another lazy attempt to punish healers for enrage mechanics, which is getting rather old. It's a rat race and it's just sucks every other tier, heal again and again for enrage and hope boss dies. There is hope that the next ultimate will bring some of that healing phase 1 isn't easy in TEA things. Mr. Ozma is doing it and also designed some of the best fights in this game like Cruise Chaser.