Is the "healing portion" of healers hitting a wall in EW?

[IDontPetLalas]

You would guess wrong! Yoshida explicitly said they did it because "SCHs DPS too much leaving the WHM to heal" when the reality was the opposite. And SCH is still the second least popular healer, imagine that. If you enjoy 1 button spam so much, you can still enjoy that and ignore the DoTs. Everyone wins!
Also it's weird that SCH is somehow your favorite healer when it has Energy Drain and is the only healer left that doesn't actually want to heal, but I'm sure you have some take like "delete Energy Drain" so whatever.

maybe i'm odd but my first healer was a sch in hw and it was a lot of fun. it wasn't the easiest of healers to start with, however i really enjoyed - and miss- the skills the had, the fairies that we had, and the amount of decision making, even though it involved a lot more pet management. the current sch just makes me rather sad even though i fully agree that it gained some excellent skills such as expedient and better pet responsiveness.

[Atma]

You would guess wrong! Yoshida explicitly said they did it because "SCHs DPS too much leaving the WHM to heal" when the reality was the opposite. And SCH is still the second least popular healer, imagine that. If you enjoy 1 button spam so much, you can still enjoy that and ignore the DoTs. Everyone wins!
Also it's weird that SCH is somehow your favorite healer when it has Energy Drain and is the only healer left that doesn't actually want to heal, but I'm sure you have some take like "delete Energy Drain" so whatever.

Energy Drain's existence as a means to expend excess aetherflow is fine. But yeah, I don't recall every single rationale provided for every change that's been made in the history of the game. I guess thanks for highlighting what I said about how prevalent the "DPS First Heals Second" mindset was if they had to change the class because so many people were shirking their primary role obligation.

[IDontPetLalas]

Energy Drain's existence as a means to expend excess aetherflow is fine. But yeah, I don't recall every single rationale provided for every change that's been made in the history of the game. I guess thanks for highlighting what I said about how prevalent the "DPS First Heals Second" mindset was if they had to change the class because so many people were shirking their primary role obligation.

which as nizzi said is not the case. that has been shown - i.e. with actual metrics- to have been disproven. scholars were not shown to underheal in comparison to white mages. as for the reasons why they were thought to underheal by those people just going by empirical evidence, i have my suspicions however I'm sure there are enough threads already out there.

[Rilifane]

Energy Drain's existence as a means to expend excess aetherflow is fine. But yeah, I don't recall every single rationale provided for every change that's been made in the history of the game. I guess thanks for highlighting what I said about how prevalent the "DPS First Heals Second" mindset was if they had to change the class because so many people were shirking their primary role obligation.

Except that they didn't and it was the opposite as Nizzi said.
SCHs were healing circles around WHMs while dpsing yet SE claimed that WHMs would carry the healing while SCHs were the "off healers". WHM never carried anything when that statement was made. All it highlights is that SE has been out of touch with healers for many years or they wouldn't make statements that are the exact opposite of the reality.

It only shows that the perceived problem why this change was made didn't even exist. Let that sink in.

[Atma]

which as nizzi said is not the case. that has been shown - i.e. with actual metrics- to have been disproven. scholars were not shown to underheal in comparison to white mages. as for the reasons why they were thought to underheal by those people just going by empirical evidence, i have my suspicions however I'm sure there are enough threads already out there.

Never seen it, honestly don't really care about things that happened long ago. Trying to research any of that stuff to read it and/or verify any player-driven analysis is conducted with actual integrity and not cherry-picked is frankly just not worth the time or effort for something so completely irrelevant. There are reasons for both sides to attempt to skew the data.

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Edited (not to any one specific of you: I do have recollections of there being a no small amount of WHM vs. SCH animosity back then, but in general I work with data for my job a lot and I know that it's really easy to tweak things to present whatever narrative you actually want. So I frankly don't know what SE would have used to make that determination. Maybe it was completely wrong and they just didn't want healers spamming dots all day either. I have no idea, but this is *how* long ago we're talking about? Even if they hadn't lost it then, they'd have lost it by now given healer kits are very standardized. As for them being out of touch with healers for years, yeah you'll get zero arguments from me on that.

[Nizzi]

Energy Drain's existence as a means to expend excess aetherflow is fine. But yeah, I don't recall every single rationale provided for every change that's been made in the history of the game. I guess thanks for highlighting what I said about how prevalent the "DPS First Heals Second" mindset was if they had to change the class because so many people were shirking their primary role obligation.

You've misinterpreted what I said entirely if you thought I was highlighting any of what you said and not refuting it. What's incredibly odd to me is that you say "shirking their primary role obligation" while simultaneously saying that Energy Drain is fine. How? Miasma, Shadow Flare, and Bane were not "preventing SCH from healing" but Miasma II optimization with Energy Drain certainly was as it required ED to not be a DPS loss. SCH's healed primarily through the fairy (and still do, because of Energy Drain) in SB and because of how the pet GCD worked, SCH did not have to stop casting to command the fairy to do anything like you do with oGCDs.
The idea that "SCHs weren't healing and DPSing instead so we're removing their DPS tools" being the reason to remove Miasma, Shadow Flare and Bane is incongruent with reality and if you played ShB SCH at all you would know this. Moving your fairy onto the SCH's GCD as an oGCD REQUIRED Energy Drain to exist so SCH had some form of free healing. If they wanted SCH to heal and not focus so much on DPS, they could've simply given SCH 1.5s cast times in ShB and removed Energy Drain. Seems incredibly simple, yet they took the most ass backwards approach to it and left SCH in a hilariously inept and awful state because they do not understand how these jobs are played. Miasma and Shadow Flare weren't preventing SCH from healing in SB, Energy Drain was, and still is in EW. They homogenized SCH's DPS kit to play like WHM and AST's while failing at their accomplished goal, and it's felt the worst in dungeons when SCH previously had 4-5 AoE buttons and now is the only job in the game with 1 singular AoE button and the only job in the game that does not receive anything else in its DPS kit past level 46.

Furthermore, we can go entirely into where you hate the idea of healers even discussing things being DPS neutral or being DPS losses or DPS uptime etc - we do not do it because we want to be dirty green DPS healers in name only, but because we want to support our party and contribute as much as we can;

FFXIV is not tuned for "just do some DPS where you can!" but instead for healers contributing as much DPS as possible. These fights are tuned around healer DPS. To see that this is the case, all we need to look at is the top E8S speedkill.

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/qCnHW...pe=damage-done

This is the E8S Rank 1 Speedkill. The rDPS requirement for enrage is 90725 and this group logged 104357 rDPS. If you subtract the healers, 104357 - 20662, you end up with 83695 which is 7000 rDPS behind the enrage requirement for the fight. And these are the TOP players for the fight.

If the content was tuned around not requiring healer DPS or just having healers "DPS where they can", it wouldn't be impossible, if not close to impossible to clear even if you had 4 of the best DPS players and 2 of the best tank DPS on the planet. This is the core problem, healers are in fact not "meant to heal." The design encounters that they're sticking with demand that we DPS, and using our GCD healing/DPS negative abilities is always a DPS penalty not just to ourselves, but to our entire party's potential clear.

If you want a game where healers are not contributing with DPS as much as they can, at this point you want an entirely different game that isn't this one. Increasing diversity in our DPS kits SHOULD happen regardless of what they do because diversity is a good thing. Nobody wants healers to have big 20 button DPS rotations but having 1 button spam on all of them isn't acceptable in a game that requires us to be doing it. Believe me, I would much rather be healing. I'm in full agreement with you there. The problem is that the ENTIRE game is now designed for us to be stuck with this garbage 1 button spam and not actually healing. And even if they somehow enact the incredible effort of making sure healing is what we're doing a majority of the time - they still need to have some diversity in our DPS kits as well because these are jobs we should be able to play and enjoy in solo content, FATEs, map parties, etc as well and not suffer the monotony and boredom of 1-1-1-1-1.

[Silver-Strider]

As for your suggestion list etc, I know it wasn't written with myself or this conversation in mind. For the substance, I'll be completely forthcoming - you lost me at "add back Miasma" and you especially lost me at "make bane yet another dot on top of that." I've made my opinions on multi-dotting relatively clear. .

That's the beauty of having different classes. You want each to be different from one another so that people can play as they like without stiffling others. SCH was a DoT based class longer than it wasn't so it makes sense to build it as a DoT based class. Some people don't like DoTs and are more than welcome to try out any of the other 3 healers and see if they would be a better fit for you. Not everything has to be the same and appeal to everyone. I hate AST, always have. Stars and the like never appealed to me and I preferred the Druid-esque themes of WHM (until ShB killed that too). But, I'm not going to force people to give up what they liked to try and make it better for me.

I would like an AoE DoT. That doesn't mean I want it to stack with the single target DoT on every healer because I would like healers to be diverse. For SCH, it makes sense to stack their DoTs, that's their gimmick but for WHM, it wouldn't make sense since their gimmick is more big heals and DPS so something like the Diacloud suggestion that mimics BLM's Thundercloud proc would be better suited for them. Maybe we make AST's DoT just an AoE instead of them having a ST DoT because they have their cards to manage and "fire and forget" would fit better so they had more time to focus on their cards and not so much on which DoT they need. SGE could have no DoT at all and just have a series of oGCD attacks to make up the difference. And just like that, we have 4 distinct playstyles.

Variety is the spice of life after all but Healer variety is about as dull as stale bread and that needs to change.

[Atma]

You've misinterpreted what I said entirely if you thought I was highlighting any of what you said and not refuting it. What's incredibly odd to me is that you say "shirking their primary role obligation" while simultaneously saying that Energy Drain is fine. How?

Aetherflow is different. All of the aetherflow consuming abilities have cooldowns attached to them individually, and depending on circumstance it's entirely possible to end up with excess. If you're using Recitation, which... I mean of course you should, it's damn near probable you aren't going to have a great use for all of your stacks between cooldowns. Not once have I ever "not healed" due to wanting to save an aetherflow stack for energy drain. It just happens. That's the difference.

a bunch of stuff about how healing was 2 xpacs ago before SCH got culled

I'm really not interested in an argument between WHMs and SCHs that happened 2 xpacs ago that lead to the SCH kit getting culled.

Furthermore, we can go entirely into where you hate the idea of healers even discussing things being DPS neutral or being DPS losses or DPS uptime etc - (...)

If healers are having to obsess over this to succeed (I'll get to this in a moment), it means the content is overtuned and they have completely lost all sight into what healers should be doing in my eyes. I'd argue that they have, of course.

FFXIV is not tuned for "just do some DPS where you can!" but instead (... numbers)

I don't think I've tried to make the point anywhere healers should be just standing around - of course you should be doing something every GCD - But that is far from needing to obsess over those concepts. In this example, the healers were putting out roughly 3x the DPS needed. Even if one assumes you don't have the "best DPS/tanks in the world", 70-80% of what they did is night and day for that concern.

If the content was tuned around not requiring healer DPS or just having healers "DPS where they can", it wouldn't be impossible (...)

I fully acknowledge the current design mandates healers DPS and I'm not an advocate for the "healers should never DPS" side. My stance is, to reiterate, that the game's content should provide enough for healers to do that they *do not have time to manage* an in-depth DPS system. Everyone seems to be acknowledging this. I just know that's the end of the discussion if added. They won't engage on the topic any further.

If you want a game where healers are not contributing with DPS as much as they can, at this point you want an entirely different game that isn't this one. (...)

I'm just not, regardless of their obstinance, prepared to give up the fight for more engaging healer content that revolves around actually healing people.

[Atma]

That's the beauty of having different classes.

I feel that argument works right up until it's your preferred/favorite class conceptually that they change in a way you don't like. SCH has not been any more DOT themed than any other healer for a very long time, and isn't a good justification to chain it to that past. Nothing about Scholar screams "miasma and festering pestilence" to me (neither does broiling things, but I mean, you have what you have I guess...)

I'm the exact opposite from you. I love the stars and celestial bodies theme of AST. I hate playing it because of it's tempo and (what I view as) excessive amount of busywork for the sake of busywork that detracts from actual enjoyment of the encounters. Again, my opinion, but kind of highlights why (to an extent) classes end up a bit same-y at times.

[Nizzi]

Aetherflow is different. All of the aetherflow consuming abilities have cooldowns attached to them individually, and depending on circumstance it's entirely possible to end up with excess. If you're using Recitation, which... I mean of course you should, it's damn near probable you aren't going to have a great use for all of your stacks between cooldowns. Not once have I ever "not healed" due to wanting to save an aetherflow stack for energy drain. It just happens. That's the difference.

Lmao it's absolutely not "different" and SGE shows that you can have SCH without having a stack dump. It's not necessary anymore. You're even talking to someone who ardently defends Aetherflow and Energy Drain and doesn't want it removed. Don't kid yourself and come up with reasons on why "Aetherflow is different" when it's not. It prevents Scholar from healing due to healing being a DPS loss to use it and encourages SCHs chadding their cohealer. I don't care if you don't personally use it that way, but you honestly do not seem like you're a SCH main or like you do Savage on healers at all.

I'm really not interested in an argument between WHMs and SCHs that happened 2 xpacs ago that lead to the SCH kit getting culled.

You're not really interested because it shows you're wrong and your points have no basis in reality, got it. Of course I'm sure you'd love to use this as a point if it somehow did...

If healers are having to obsess over this to succeed (I'll get to this in a moment), it means the content is overtuned and they have completely lost all sight into what healers should be doing in my eyes. I'd argue that they have, of course.

Okay?

I don't think I've tried to make the point anywhere healers should be just standing around - of course you should be doing something every GCD - But that is far from needing to obsess over those concepts. In this example, the healers were putting out roughly 3x the DPS needed. Even if one assumes you don't have the "best DPS/tanks in the world", 70-80% of what they did is night and day for that concern.

Yes, these are the BEST players in the world and they're fully geared... I'm thinking don't understand what my point was at all, especially when considering these things REALLY, REALLY matter when your entire party isn't as geared. If they're doing 3x what they needed to meet enrage, imagine all of those players in the party at minimum item level. Do you get it?

My stance is, to reiterate, that the game's content should provide enough for healers to do that they *do not have time to manage* an in-depth DPS system. Everyone seems to be acknowledging this. I just know that's the end of the discussion if added. They won't engage on the topic any further. I'm just not, regardless of their obstinance, prepared to give up the fight for more engaging healer content that revolves around actually healing people.

You are never ever getting that in this game. They've said so many times. Yoshida has literally said within the past year that E12S was the top limit of what he feels like healing requirements are ever going to be in XIV. You also seem to be ignoring the part that these jobs should be FUN in all levels of content. You cannot heal enemies to death; so even raids suddenly radically being redesigned from how they have been in the past - what do we do for a majority of the time we aren't raiding?

I feel that argument works right up until it's your preferred/favorite class conceptually that they change in a way you don't like. SCH has not been any more DOT themed than any other healer for a very long time, and isn't a good justification to chain it to that past. Nothing about Scholar screams "miasma and festering pestilence" to me (neither does broiling things, but I mean, you have what you have I guess...)

Well I guess it's unfortunate the developers disagree with you and still see it that way based on its newest PvP iteration being almost offensively DoT based and even reusing Miasma's debuff icon along with giving it a new AoE called "mummification" lol