Healers need an overhaul

[WaxSw]

I'd be happy if healing was more 50/50 dps and actual healing, with more support style skills in there too.
Sage is almost there as far as I'm concerned, it has a couple more dps skills than the others, but really... that's just back where healers were 2 expansions ago.

Sadly, no. Sage is the exact same 1 button crap as the rest, look Sage in savage:


vs 6.0 Whm


If that's the dev idea of a difference between a pure healer and the new dps healer they need to learn what "difference" means.

[Seraphor]

Sadly, no. Sage is the exact same 1 button crap as the rest, look Sage in savage:


vs 6.0 Whm


If that's the dev idea of a difference between a pure healer and the new dps healer they need to learn what "difference" means.

But Sage does have more dps skills, and even if you're still hitting the same button 65% of the time, it feels like there's more depth to it. The experience is what matters, I don't really care about the maths. If you analyse BLM I'm sure you find the top level is just spamming Fire IV 65% of the time right?

[rewd]

"Your job sucks, but it's about the experience. Close your eyes and pretend there is depth. Besides, BLM spams Fire IV too, why are you even complaining?"

Ok. Bind Glare to five different keys, guys. We fixed healers.

[Seraphor]

"Your job sucks, but it's about the experience. Close your eyes and pretend there is depth. Besides, BLM spams Fire IV too, why are you even complaining?"

Ok. Bind Glare to five different keys, guys. We fixed healers.

Yeah that's not what I said. I even said healers DO need more skills.
I said Sage was closest to what I would like.

And why else are you playing any game if not for the experience?
What else is there? I'm not spending 20 minutes performing a rotation just so I can jack off to my parse afterwards.

Depth improves the experience, but the illusion of depth is just as valid to that experience. Healers don't currently have that, which I get, but as I was saying, Sage is closest, and wouldn't need much more to get it there.

[WaxSw]

But Sage does have more dps skills, and even if you're still hitting the same button 65% of the time, it feels like there's more depth to it. The experience is what matters, I don't really care about the maths. If you analyse BLM I'm sure you find the top level is just spamming Fire IV 65% of the time right?

Actually not either.

In a raid Sage has: Dosis, Eukrasian Dosis, Phlegma and Toxicon (Dyskrasia is AoE only and Pneuma outside of AoE is used as a heal). Out of those Dosis and Eukrasian dosis are the bulk of the rotation, Toxicon rarely sees more than 3 uses per fight and Phlegma is used every 45s (with the option to delay for movement)

Whm has: Glare, Dia, Assize and Misery. Glare and Dia=Dosis and Eukrasian Dosis, Assize is used as much as Phelgma (both dps gain 45s cds) and Misery is used every min to get damage under raid buffs which is far more often than toxicon.

Their rotation is not that different and there is barely any depth there, doesn't matter if you have cooldowns if you don't get to use them frequently enough and they do not change the way you approach to an encounter.

BLM actually shows why healer's spam is so badly designed:

The difference with Fire 4 are the implications:
-First fire 4 is not spammed nearly as much as healers spam their nuke
-Second fire 4 doesn't refresh the damage buff so they can't spam continuously otherwise they'll lose damage, this creates a distraction as Blm have to manage other things while spamming
-Third fire 4 has huge mp costs, this creates a resource management problem that Blm has to solve in order to maximize the damage distracting further from the spam and gives room for attacks like Despair to exist.
-Fourth Fire 4 has a long cast time which means a Blm is restricted in when they can spam it, creating optimization puzzles around that, cds like swiftcast and triplecast and the procs

Healer on the other hand:
-Spam their nuke much more often
-The nuke doesn't interact with anything in their kit
-The Mp costs it has are so low its negligible, so there are little to no resource management involved
-With the cast time reduction healers have high mobility which leads to further spam and there is very little management involved (dot refresh and then lilies for whm and Phlegma and Toxicon for Sge vs BLM with Procs, triplecast, different casts, xenoglossy/foul, cds related to xenoglossy/foul and procs...)

That's why healers complain about spamming and Blms dont. For a BLM fire 4 spam is a reward for good playstyle, for a healer nuke spam is the baseline of what they do.

Edit: To show the point more look at the cpm Fire 4 has in the following BLM log (is the same fight)


Fire 4 barely reaches 30% of the cpm while in the case of Whm and Sge their nuke was well over 60%

[Akiudo]

"Your job sucks, but it's about the experience.

completly ignoring the question of "do healers need more depth" yes, it is about the experience or "feeling" more than it is necesseraly about absolute numerical values. if they just changed every 1-2-3 combo to a 1-button "rotation" most classes would press "1" nearly as often as healers do right now, even though 1-2-3 is pretty much the most artificial depth to a class imaginable.

that being said, i would love for healers to get "something" more, but there are people here that wouldn't be happy with anything less than a full dps rotation and i'm pretty sure that would not work out the way these peole imagine.

for what it's worth, give healers a second dot , preferably not on a 30 second timer and maybe something like a stack mechanic, where every succesfull attack gives 1 stack and you can spend 5 stacks on an ogcd attack or something like that.

[currentlemon]

At this point why? We damn near no longer need healers. I'm actually waiting for no healer EX clears and I'm sure there'll be some mad lads who attempt Savage and Ult no healers.

Actually, that would be a great wake up call for Yoshi and Co. to clear their hardest content with no healers and then turn to them saying "What was that about healers needing to play harder content for more engagement?"

Savage Pandaemonium all WARs.

Uh, the first two Extreme Trails can be completed with no healers. And I believe the first two Savage Raid tiers can be cleared by an all Warrior Team. Back when Eden Titan Savage released in 5.08, it was also clearable without healers. Heck, I've been hearing that Japanese players have been doing dungeon runs with no healers as of late.

As for the first two Extreme Trails, the Healer forum made a thread about it.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ithout-Healers

[Seraphor]

Actually not either.

In a raid Sage has: Dosis, Eukrasian Dosis, Phlegma and Toxicon (Dyskrasia is AoE only and Pneuma outside of AoE is used as a heal). Out of those Dosis and Eukrasian dosis are the bulk of the rotation, Toxicon rarely sees more than 3 uses per fight and Phlegma is used every 45s (with the option to delay for movement)

Whm has: Glare, Dia, Assize and Misery. Glare and Dia=Dosis and Eukrasian Dosis, Assize is used as much as Phelgma (both dps gain 45s cds) and Misery is used every min to get damage under raid buffs which is far more often than toxicon.

Their rotation is not that different and there is barely any depth there, doesn't matter if you have cooldowns if you don't get to use them frequently enough and they do not change the way you approach to an encounter.

Then some credit has to go to Sage's design to have it feels so different to WHM despite having the same number of buttons, which is exactly what I mean by illusion of depth. I enjoy playing Sage in dungeons, whereas I can't stand playing WHM or SCH. Also Dungeons have more use for the full toolkit, the AoE's, the Eukrasian Diagnosis, etc. There's (some) more toolkit is there, but Savage doesn't utilise it all, so Savage design is at least partly to blame here too.
I mean the reason Sages don't use Toxikon in savage is because they're not using E.Diagnosis to generate Addersting. So they're clearly designed around dungeons more than savage.

I stand correct on BLM, which is definitely the best designed job in the game. However I'd be keen to see what it looks like when you exclude the oGCDs, after all its the GCDs that constitute the button spam.

[rewd]

Yeah that's not what I said. I even said healers DO need more skills.
I said Sage was closest to what I would like.

And why else are you playing any game if not for the experience?
What else is there? I'm not spending 20 minutes performing a rotation just so I can jack off to my parse afterwards.

Depth improves the experience, but the illusion of depth is just as valid to that experience. Healers don't currently have that, which I get, but as I was saying, Sage is closest, and wouldn't need much more to get it there.

WaxSw already showed you why your argument is extremely weak.

No, Sage doesn't have more DPS options. No, Sage doesn't have depth. No, illusion of depth does not have relevance. No, I won't pretend healing jobs are something they are not. Yes, I want and deserve real depth on healing jobs. Or I want Yoshida to clearly state healers are meant to be a subpar role so I can move on.

[WaxSw]

Then some credit has to go to Sage's design to have it feels so different to WHM despite having the same number of buttons, which is exactly what I mean by illusion of depth. I enjoy playing Sage in dungeons, whereas I can't stand playing WHM or SCH. Also Dungeons have more use for the full toolkit, the AoE's, the Eukrasian Diagnosis, etc. There's (some) more toolkit is there, but Savage doesn't utilise it all, so Savage design is at least partly to blame here too.

I stand correct on BLM, which is definitely the best designed job in the game. However I'd be keen to see what it looks like when you exclude the oGCDs, after all its the GCDs that constitute the button spam.

If you feel its different is probably due to inexperience and not proper job design. In reality whm and Sge are very similar in their AoE rotation too, both want to use actions between pulls to get dps gains (shielding with sage to get toxicon and lilies with whm to get misery) and then their rotation devolves into 1 button spam (holy-dyskrasia) in the middle of the mob pack with the eventual 45s cd of aoe damage (phlegma and assize). The main difference is Pneuma which is an extra AoE Sage gets to use every 2m and barely gives depth to its rotation. Compare that to the difference for example between the 3 casters in AoE damage

If we compare GCD only Healers actually look even worse:

-BLM actions get reduced to 167 so fire IV with its 67 casts gets a 40,1% of the cpm, an increase of around 10%.
-Sage is the one healer that fares the best thanks to eukrasia increasing its gcd count, being 184 so the 143 dosis casts are 77,7% a 12% increase
-Whm gets down to 173 GCDs and 158 of those are Glare so 91,3% of all their GCDs, an almost 18% increase