Healers need an overhaul

[Raven2014]

the reason cohealers dont heal is the same as it has always been: heals dont feed into dps, dps doesnt feed into heals.

And this right here is a splendid example of what I meant by "mentality". Even for WHM, there is nothing inherently wrong with the class, it simply has a different healing style to other healers. The problem with WHM has nothing to do with its ability to heal the party, or even contributing meaningful DPS (without going muppet on it) comparing to other healers, the issue is the player compare their WHM to other WHM on FFlog, that have always been the one, and only problem. WHM has no defficiency from a gameplay perspective, its only flaw is that if you want to have a good FFlog, you have to be selfish. That, and you will hear me say it again and again, has nothing to do with the game.

Outside of Ultimate and first week Savage, there is no content that requires healer to squeeze out every last bit of DPS for a clear. The reason for healer greed is because if the next FFlog ranking requires 90 Glare, so healer don't want to cast only 89 and will push for 91 Glares even if it means jeopardizing the party. This is a problem self-invented by the community due to the internet culture when people care about impressing a bunch of people they will never meet in real life.


You know what, what you said is exactly why SGE is the best designed healer class, since there is almost no trade off between healing and DPSing. But still, that doesn't mean I want all healers to be rework similar to SGE. People complain about class homogenizing because "developers are lazy", yet I think it is the players who are the main reason for that trend, because they can't stand one class having "different" performance at the cost of gameplay diversity while such difference made next to zero difference in game.

[IDontPetLalas]

And this right here is a splendid example of what I meant by "mentality". Even for WHM, there is nothing inherently wrong with the class, it simply has a different healing style to other healers. The problem with WHM has nothing to do with its ability to heal the party, or even contributing meaningful DPS (without going muppet on it) comparing to other healers, the issue is the player compare their WHM to other WHM on FFlog, that have always been the one, and only problem. WHM has no defficiency from a gameplay perspective, its only flaw is that if you want to have a good FFlog, you have to be selfish. That, and you will hear me say it again and again, has nothing to do with the game.

Outside of Ultimate and first week Savage, there is no content that requires healer to squeeze out every last bit of DPS for a clear. The reason for healer greed is because if the next FFlog ranking requires 90 Glare, so healer don't want to cast only 89 and will push for 91 Glares even if it means jeopardizing the party. This is a problem self-invented by the community due to the internet culture when people care about impressing a bunch of people they will never meet in real life.


You know what, what you said is exactly why SGE is the best designed healer class, since there is almost no trade off between healing and DPSing. But still, that doesn't mean I want all healers to be rework similar to SGE. People complain about class homogenizing because "developers are lazy", yet I think it is the players who are the main reason for that trend, because they can't stand one class having "different" performance at the cost of gameplay diversity while such difference made next to zero difference in game.

Or maybe people :
- don't only do group content?
- like to do both DPS and healing - one does not necessarily negate the other.

You are saying that there is some e-peen measuring mentality at work that leads to people expecting that they squeeze every last bit of DPS and not healing people. That doesn't sound like 95% of my co-healers- rather the reverse, a fair percent over heal. I wouldn't be at all surprised that some healers may underheal- just like I wouldn't be at all surprised if some don't DPS- nor would they if more options for DPS were added.

Also, i haven't seen anyone asking for healing to "squeeze every last bit of DPS" we don't even ask DPS to do that in most content aside from Ultimate and Savage - so I really don't know why or where this idea came from

[Deveryn]

Or maybe people :
- don't only do group content?
- like to do both DPS and healing - one does not necessarily negate the other.

You are saying that there is some e-peen measuring mentality at work that leads to people expecting that they squeeze every last bit of DPS and not healing people. That doesn't sound like 95% of my co-healers- rather the reverse, a fair percent over heal. I wouldn't be at all surprised that some healers may underheal- just like I wouldn't be at all surprised if some don't DPS- nor would they if more options for DPS were added.

Also, i haven't seen anyone asking for healing to "squeeze every last bit of DPS" we don't even ask DPS to do that in most content aside from Ultimate and Savage - so I really don't know why or where this idea came from

The mentality exists. People tell newer healers to do things like slot lots of DH and focus dps. It results in some rather poor healers that show up in roulettes, stressing out all kinds of people. I remember one WHM in particular. I was tanking Vanaspati and they would blow their afflatus stacks between pulls to charge lily and have nothing to really sustain me. Even in other areas, like BLU content, there are those that insist it should be ALL about dps and there should be little help for the person tanking. Again, I found myself in a bad situation, with wipe after wipe because there was no way I could hold up to all the damage going out.

[Raven2014]

Or maybe people :
- don't only do group content?

I don't think I ever said anything about people doing outside of group content. But if they join a group as a healer, I would expect them to ... heal?

- like to do both DPS and healing - one does not necessarily negate the other.

And did I say they do?

You are saying that there is some e-peen measuring mentality at work that leads to people expecting that they squeeze every last bit of DPS and not healing people.

When an AOE coming up, the party is not full, and you still see Broil/Glare/Melafic going off. Or when you have to burn through your kits healing succession mechanics without any help ... I would like to hear a different explanation if you have one.

i haven't seen anyone asking for healing to "squeeze every last bit of DPS"

And ... that's exactly the problem? Indeed nobody is asking the healers to do that, the content definitely doesn't need the healers to do that. What, you think when tank/DPS or even healing, I prefer the healer to DPS as much as possible over keeping the group alive? In case you missed the point, the healer is doing for the shake of their parse over the group's well being, that's the point.

[Silver-Strider]

Snip.

Those people were doing that before when we had DPS rotations and nothing short of removing all DPS skills will change that. Bad players exist in every role of this game, else we wouldn't have Tales from Duty Finder complaining about No Mitigation Tanks, Green DPS Healers, No AoE DPS, etc. all the time. It's not an argument because it's just bad players being bad and will continue being bad regardless of what they're given.

[Hezhi]

So because parsers and bad players exist healers should be boring forever? Come on man.

The green DPS meme is real, and I hate it. The only change I would ever advocate to the healers are fight make it so that healer DPS is a luxury and not the main function of healer.

I hate to pull this meme comparison but WoW does exactly that and ALL healers in that game still have more than 2 DPS buttons to use lol. There is just no excuse for healers to be this boring.

[Raven2014]

So because parsers and bad players exist healers should be boring forever? Come on man.

Boring to who? I clear savage 4 times a week, and I main healers on all of them. I don't find them "boring". You're mistaken if you think my advocacy has something to do with exciting/boring. I simply don't want the system to change to make a bad mentality worse, that's all. If we can overhaul the mentality of players first, I'm down to overhaul any class or role you want.

Here is a parallel example for you:


Remember the time when tank-stance matter for enmity, give reduction damage taken but also damage down? SE "simplified" it by taking all that away, and I bet part of the reason because there are so much drama about it. I lost count the number of argument/drama both on PF and static around the issue. The fact is ... again, outisde the highest tier of content there is no reason for a tank not permanently have it on, it's better for everyone else in the party. The only problem is it hurts tanks's FFLog ... and thus the ensued drama. There were so many time I sit there on the party watching the argument (is it the DPS not watching their aggro, is it the healers healing too much, is it the tank taking too much damage ...etc...), you know ... the kind of **** show in which ALL problems can be solved by the tanks keeping their stance on more? But hey, no self-respected tank caring about their Log would agree to that. My argument for healer is no different.


FFlog shape the mentality of the community (at least the vocal part of it) far more than people realize, and as such it also greatly affect many of the design choice. You know why I think the current healers are not as exciting as they can be? It's because it's the best compromise SE can come up with, it let people to chase their dream parse and not putting more risk to the party at the same time. Asking healers to have better DPS rotation is like asking SE to bring back the old tank stance, I let you think for yourself what the chance of SE doing that, and why.

You know what, if FFlog just straight up disappeared, I would actually not mind if healer DPS are made more complicated. Because without something like that to promote the parse chasers, I think at least most people will still heal when needed even with an interesting DPS rotation. The current system may not be what the community want, but totally what we deserved to have.

Those people were doing that before when we had DPS rotations and nothing short of removing all DPS skills will change that. Bad players exist in every role of this game, else we wouldn't have Tales from Duty Finder complaining about No Mitigation Tanks, Green DPS Healers, No AoE DPS, etc. all the time. It's not an argument because it's just bad players being bad and will continue being bad regardless of what they're given.

Oh I certainly agree a player can be bad for many reasons. It's not like you don't have bad healers during Coil when healer DPS wasn't really a thing or the FFlog nonsense. The point is, that list of reason is already large enough I don't feel more factor being added to it.

[Nizzi]

"bad player exist mean i dont want you to do more than spam 1-1-1-1 sorry that scares me and gives me anxiety"

Some of the biggest babies imaginable in this brilliant community.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Here we go again :shrug:

Let’s gut BLM into 1 nuke + 1 DoT rotation as well since bad BLMs exist. Let’s gut PLD to the point an AoE Shield Lob with 8y radius is all they have because bad PLDs exist. ALL BLM & PLD playerbase should be fine, right? /s

[AngeliouxRein]

Of course that's going to be a strong mentality because this game made damage to be king.
It doesn't help when a large portion of this community wants their time to not be wasted, thus they push for faster clears and faster clears for healers translates into doing more DPS. Healer mains have asked for things to be more heal intense before but that would most likely mean content to take longer, newbie/bad healers to be stressed out and cause even more wipes, along with people instant quitting anything that's too difficult. It's why the only thing we can really ask for is more DPS (variety of buffs for AST) to avoid all that. This game didn't attract the usual MMO crowd that would like all of the increasing dangers the higher level we got but a really casual/first time playing an MMO crowd instead. And some give vibes of this being their first game ever or something.