How to easily have healers dps engaged ( yet another thread)

[Renathras]

Healers currently have the lowest job satisfaction, besides WHM they have the lowest player number and they regularly rank amongst surveys for “needs changing the most” plus they are most in demand role for duty finder and it’s not even close

If the game got bigger but the amount of healers either didn’t get bigger or got bigger at a smaller rate then it’s evidence that the role isn’t doing well and healers haven’t had a positive survey in years

Got any sources for this?

My personal experience and knowledge more matches this guy's statements:

Depends on datacenter though. PF healer slot fills faster than DPS in JP datacenter since patch 5.2. I've tested it even before the release of datacenter traveling.

Healers also have slower queue time in Duty Finder. Rare instant pop-ups. Usually have to wait around 3-5 minutes even with Healer-in-Need.

However, healer number seems to drop a little in Abyssos. My fellow healer-main raiders who run with randoms a lot concluded that some healers got scared away by those spicy dots in this raid tier.

Healers are disliked by some, but it doesn't seem there's been some mass exodus and groups aren't having trouble finding healers. So a lot of people seem at least satisfied with the current state of things. Healer ques are OFTEN near-instant, but no moreso than tank ques are (and generally less-so), the only exception being 24 mans due to the different party setup (1/2/5 instead of 2/2/4;1/1/2 ratio), and in those, DPS is often the AIN and quickest ques.

Healers ARE frequently in demand, but no moreso than SB, and less so than early ShB (when a lot of people complained initially about the role and left it, only to either later come back or be replaced by new people flocking to the role)

Again, I get that some of you don't like the current state of healers, but your anecdote isn't exactly data, and overall, healers aren't exactly in short supply overall in the game right now. It's definitely been worse in the past. Ironically, during the periods that many of you say we should go back to - HW for example healers had effectively instant ques all the time and were widely seen as a role in shortage. Tank is always the most short role (except during a VERY brief time in early ShB partly due to the disgruntled healers and partly due to a lot of DPSers trying Tank for the first time seriously in ques as GNB), but outside of that, it's been pretty consistent as it is now as the most shortage role, not healers.

EDIT:

My personal experience with PF is that the healer slots takes the longest to fill. Longer then tanks even. A quick look through PF right now shows me a ton of groups needing healers. So I have to wonder what your evidence is for "there are more players using healers now then ever" because it certainly doesn't match up with reality.

I find this a bit curious. EVERY PF I'm in (whether or not I start one as a healer), healers are often either the first slot or second to fill. Even at different times, they're rarely the last (that's consistently tank, and sometimes DPS). I often have to swap to my tank or DPS Job to get into PFs for a lot of stuff because the healer slots are already all taken.

The Problem is that from my experience, doing high end counted that requires optimization and class understanding on the part of the player is counter-intuitive to healer design, which punishes optimization with higher 1 button spam uptime and makes one grasp how not very exciting a majority of healing tools in this game are, especially since most healers have exactly the same with different mild flavors.

Exactly this, healing is more fun the less you know about high end healing because high end healing just shows the healing role is a complete mess, dungeon healing can be somewhat interesting if you get like a quad pull with an undergeared tank or your DPS all stand in stupid but raid healing is just horrid because all you do is spam broil

I think...a lot of you need to learn to grasp a concept:

No one speaks for everyone, and it's rare one person even speaks for a majority of like-minded people.

I see a LOT of comments like this, but I've literally never met a fellow healer that feels this way, nor do I. To many of us, we want to help our team, but don't want to be TOO stressed out, and would find 1 button spam "rewarding" not "punishing", and just getting to support our friends and clear content "fun" not...what you guys consider fun, which sounds terribly stressful and un-fun to a lot of us.

Now, everyone's different, and I don't claim to speak for a majority, either. But I think folks with your mindsets tend to vastly underestimate the number of healer players who don't think like you. It may be a meme, but many healer players really ARE like the Anime mmo healer characters where they don't think they're good enough and just want to be useful to their friends. That is legitimately a thing irl as well as in fiction. Not everyone fancies themselves the star player of the game, many just want to be a team player and help their team win, even if that means they aren't making all the game winning shots or on the cover of the Wheaties box.

I'm not saying it's wrong to do one or the other, I'm just saying you may vastly underestimate how many people DON'T like optimizing things to a T or having detailed "healing CD plans" for encounters and the like; people who don't find any of that fun at all.

[Rolder50]

Let me see the receipts.

Last I checked, the game is doing phenomenally well, and there are more players using healers now than ever. The devs have even quadrupled down at this point that they are not going back to the old healers. Seems to me there is just a loud minority of nostalgic healers.

My personal experience with PF is that the healer slots takes the longest to fill. Longer then tanks even. A quick look through PF right now shows me a ton of groups needing healers. So I have to wonder what your evidence is for "there are more players using healers now then ever" because it certainly doesn't match up with reality.

[ty_taurus]

My personal experience with PF is that the healer slots takes the longest to fill. Longer then tanks even. A quick look through PF right now shows me a ton of groups needing healers. So I have to wonder what your evidence is for "there are more players using healers now then ever" because it certainly doesn't match up with reality.

The only reasoning I can think of is, by virtue of there being more player accounts than there has been in previous expansions, the healer population is technically larger even if the percentage in contrast to other roles has dropped.

[ty_taurus]

It has nothing to do with whether I am fan of those skills or not. No one is trying to restore SCHs identity as a more offensive healer. There are only those who have never been able to move past the direction the devs chose to go. That version of SCH is gone and it does not matter if this fact is to the chagrin, or the delight of any given player. This does not mean that SCH cannot be given more offensive tools, and again I ask why is the only acceptable implementation of this have to come in the form of old SCH?

I don't really know who you've been talking to but the vast majority of SCH players miss its DoTs, its Shadowflare, its Virus, its Eye for an Eye, its faerie's identities. There are plenty of people who are willing to still play the job, but of those of whom the conversation came about in regards to old SCH, all of them from my experience unanimously agree that it was better when it had more DoTs. And then there's the forum discussions that have popped up multiple times about SCH and wanting its DoTs back. The only players I know to dislike DoTs are now you and like 2 other people on the forums. You seem to be in the minority on that one. One thing I want to send back to you though... You ask why is it only acceptable to take from the old SCH tools, I want to ask again what makes them not work with the current SCH? I don't think you've yet to explain how those old mechanics would disrupt their current gameplay.

It's not sass. It's intent is as honest as when you asked me the same question.

Perhaps this wasn't the intention, but the part of the post I saw as sass was you suggesting I look in the mirror, which comes across as very "have you looked in a mirror lately?"

You even assume I didn't like old SCH. What makes you think that? Why do you deal in absolutes? Do you think I don't like old SCH because I reject the proposition to revert it back to that? There is also the possibility that you think I dislike it because I am in favor with the direction that devs have gone with healing? Are these what draw your conclusions? You also think I'm afraid of losing something. Mentioning things like barriers being taken away when I haven't used anything like that in my arguments. Then the metaphor you choose to use to express your own grief is one of a child losing their toy.

I assume you don't like old SCH because you seem to have a distain for its core identity. I'm also not sure what about new SCH you like better because the only thing that's changed about SCH's gameplay has been the gutting of its DPS and the removal of Selene. SCH has gotten new buttons, yes, but those newer forms of utility did not have an impact on SCH's gameplay flow. They're not changing how you think about your GCD and what you do with it, like what those gutted DPS buttons did, or on a non-DPS related instance, Recitation and Deployment Tactics. Those are tools that actively changed how SCH thinks and handles its flow. Expedient is great, but it doesn't do that. That's not a bad thing. Not all tools are supposed to have a direct effect on gameplay, but SCH hasn't received anything that has developed its gameplay, but has had lots of things that did taken away from it.