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

[T-Owl]

“Just play ultimate.”
Legend titles and weapons are locked behind the hard content, should that be made easier?
Gear progression does not matter in this game at all for anything other than doing even harder content.

The just play ultimate argument is kinda the most toxic and gaslighting one in this discussion if you ask me, as it operates under the assumption that the glarespam only affects players elite players and basically tries to frame anyone who cares about laying the job correctly and being engaged, instead of like people admitted her being drawn to the job for being easier and less engaged than other ones, as some hardcore elitist. People start to run into the issue of glarespam as early as being very new to the role and learning about it being prefered by the community if healers dps. In my case, that was as low as Sastasha when I started the game very fresh and I think just by reading the forums out of curiosity learning about this trend. So, when I was a sprout (though naturally, I didn't noticed it being a problem back then because combat isn't particular fun for any class until higher levels). The issue affects players from msq casuals up to ultimate readers.

[T-Owl]

Wait, I'm a bit confused here.

The issue is that without the current ogcd healing kit and being more reliant on gcd heals, a majority of in effect halfway interesting healing abilities would be lost and the role itself would become extremely slow to play. Which is okay for one healer, white mage especially would be an ideal candidate for the turret healer who should push big numbers both in dps and healing with an elemental damage rotation akin to Black Mage while others should be afforded more active rotations, both in dps and healing. The issue with the current gcd toolkit, especially the non-cooldown or gauge restricted one, is that it is exceptionally boring. It is bare bones. With regen healers, in terms of single target healing you have one spell that is always the right answer to use while the weaker but less costly spell is always the wrong answer, because it is plainly less efficent. All the spells with more interesting effects are the ogcd ones.

Wow, this is an amazing bit of...I'm not even going to say what it is.

You express constant smugness over healers who care about their dps, when really in most content in this game dps is the only skill expression a healer can have and the biggest contribution they can bring. Being able to heal the content is the skill floor, it is the bare minimum of being able to play the role. And to be honest, I think your talking about elitism and WoWs supposed toxicity all the time, it kinda feels like you can't get over the trauma of being called out once in your time there. My position is not one of elitism but of basic competency. I literally picked up healer during Endwalker fresh after not playing it for years and was immediately capable of playing with pretty high dps uptime and barely having to cast heals, basically reducing it to zero outside of emergency situations during the course of leveling from 70-90. Hell, when I was a sprout I was immediately able to dps fairly often and engage with cleric stance very early on during the first dungeons of the game just after picking up that Healer DPS is expected in this game and finding that pretty cool. And to be honest? Healer DPSing being a thing is pretty much the most unique and stand out thing in this game, because it was already an established norm and common courtesy when I started the game, arround the end of heavensward. It is kind of the games special shtick for healers and the only thing that makes them stand out, especially since both the job stories and their quest heavily lean into the combat abilities of healers.

And to be honest, I feel like story content being so easy that it is impossible to fail is kind of immersion breaking. It would be okay if the WoL would be defined by being just there and special, but they are supposed to be a legendary combatant but the story itself has no casual skill checks for the player to test and proof that.

[ty_taurus]

Healer DPSing being a thing is pretty much the most unique and stand out thing in this game, because it was already an established norm and common courtesy when I started the game, arround the end of heavensward. It is kind of the games special shtick for healers and the only thing that makes them stand out, especially since both the job stories and their quest heavily lean into the combat abilities of healers.

I mentioned this in the other thread, but back during ARR and HW, healing was praised for being such a breath of fresh air in contrast to old WoW healers. I distinctly remember an article stating that SCH took the idea of what a healer is meant to be and revolutionized it, and being so proud that that was my main job. People regularly praised the healers back then for being everything that healing currently isn't. It wasn't perfect, of course. Nothing is nor will ever be perfect, but it had a truly unique feel to it and felt great to play in most ways. Stormblood had its ups and downs, but SCH and AST at least were in great places, and the issues with WHM would've been easy to rectify if the game continued in that direction rather than trying to sterilize the role.

[T-Owl]

I mentioned this in the other thread, but back during ARR and HW, healing was praised for being such a breath of fresh air in contrast to old WoW healers. I distinctly remember an article stating that SCH took the idea of what a healer is meant to be and revolutionized it, and being so proud that that was my main job. People regularly praised the healers back then for being everything that healing currently isn't. It wasn't perfect, of course. Nothing is nor will ever be perfect, but it had a truly unique feel to it and felt great to play in most ways. Stormblood had its ups and downs, but SCH and AST at least were in great places, and the issues with WHM would've been easy to rectify if the game continued in that direction rather than trying to sterilize the role.

I mean, WoW had Fistweaver and Discipline priest as dps oriented healers from MoP onwards but generally yeah, dpsing as a healer was really that thing that was really big in FF14 compared to WoW, that was at this point still very traditional in terms of healer gameplay. It was the first thing I learned about FF14 healers and I think it was fairly exciting, especially since when jumping over from WoW, even White Mages Stone felt quite chunky and was visually fairly impressive, not to forget Holy back in the day being quite a powerful nuke. And it was if you ask me the only organic evolution for classical WoW Style MMO Healers to go. When it comes to tanking, we lived in the post DK era of tanks after all, they moved from pure sword and board punching bags who are all about gaining threat to becoming more offensive, pulling dps rotations. So Healer DPSing just felt like the way to go. And I can't imagine who in their right mind wouldn't enjoy it, it was a blast feeling more involved with what the rest of the party does by throwing in stones and actively assisting the party in combat and you mentioned it, SCH was a beast with its dot gameplay and offensive capabilities.

I genuinly feel like since these days, FF14 really lost its touch in terms of what made it so different and exciting compared to WoW. And its not only the healers, I think Bard was fairly cool originally as well with how the devs managed to creat a support role in the physical ranged, just for the entire system nowadays predominantly holding these classes back due to their dps tax which hits Machinist the hardest.

[Renathras]

I like how someone says "Stop the walls of text", but then...

I also wouldn't have to post lengthy posts if there weren't like 5 people replying, so..

Did find the hb tag, so hope that helps a smidege.

Remember, as a White Mage, your soul stone derives from A-Towa-Cant;

While this IS true, it doesn't mean you ARE A-Towa-Cant, nor does it mean his purpose was going through the world and purging things everywhere. A-Towa-Cant's thing was somewhat more exploring the world and interacting with its people, spreading SUCCOR not DESTRUCTION far and wide.

As for Final Fantasy history - historically, WHM's get VERY few damage spells. In fact, the Water/Aero/Earth spells are a somewhat new to White Mage thing. Traditional FF games, WHM has the Holy spell, which is powerful but late-game, occasionally a light damage spell like Dia (which is generally a low-to-mid tier in damage amount), and that's it. The rest of their spells in most FF games are the Cure line, Raise line, Regen line, status effect cleansing line (from the specific statuses like Poisona to the mid-game cure-all of Esuna), defensive utility spells Protect and Shell(which we SHOULD HAVE imo, if nothing else they could be short term defensive tools like Temperance), often Haste and Reflect if Time Mage isn't in the game, more rarely offensive debuffs that aren't overly detrimental (Sleep) and general utility spells like Float, Teleport, or Warp.

White Mages have used hammers and bows, but I'd wager you aren't asking for FFXIV WHMs to be auto-attacking beasts? Though I wouldn't at all be opposed to cure spells working on undead to harm them! I'd love Cure 2 to be offensively useful in some fights, but FFXIV doesn't do stuff like that outside of BLU content and spells aren't coded to have offensive or defensive use like that (you have stuff like Assize which is offensive AND defensive, but it is against all creature types)

I do think your last question is instructive. I'd say we already have a good picture of that: Look at FFXI's versions of the Jobs that FFXIV has: https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki...nal_Fantasy_XI)

Considering FFXI is an old school MMO and is menu based, WHM in an old school FF console game in MMO form would likely be basically what FFXI's WHM is, because...that's what FFXI is.

You don't have to nitpick every other sentence, just summarize it all up in a paragraph.

I have a general philosophy when replying to people: People are important. What they are saying is important. Therefore - I would so be an Ent if I lived in Middle-Earth - if it was worth the time for them to say it, it's worth taking time to respond to it, at least all the major points. You may think it funny, but it's how I show respect to people. I actually reply to all the points they make instead of trying to dumb it down, oversimplify, straw man, or hyperbole their arguments, which is what I consider to be insulting the person and disrespecting them. IF, however, that's what you WANT, I'll try doing that instead.

Yes, I did use hyperbole. It gets the point across. No one is complaining when you use pickle anagrams or whatever to simplify the argument.[/QUOTE]

The problem is when hyperbole falls into the slippery slope fallacy, as it no longer gets the point across. If WAR was made into a single button rotation that had Storm's Path and literally no other spell, that would be pretty bad. But I'm not arguing WHM have Glare AND ONLY GLARE, am I? So you're arguing against a strawman, which is a fallacy. It does not "get the point across", it vastly overstates your argument while not addressing what you're actually arguing against. That makes it a strawman fallacy.

IR = PoM makes more sense as crit weaponskills are automatic baked in and don't require an additional button press. Infuriate compares directly to Lucid Dreaming since both are generating a resource. It's not a perfect comparison (MP is more like TP, but TP no longer exists) and something like Rhizomata is a more exact comparison, but WHM doesn't have a Lily generating ability. Though if you want, we could pretend WHM had a Rhizomata/Aetherflow button and Infuriate was that? Either way, it shows your position is fault and a strawman fallacy, and that doesn't change, no matter what specifics we apply here.

Healer state:

Content: Extremes, Savages, Ultimates, yes, but ALSO some dungeons with enrages Gimlit that ends with the two sisters powering up their attack, the first boss in Troia, as well as a number of normal mode trials with add phases; I distinctly remember doing normal Titania when it was brand new first time in ShB and people were wiping to the add phase, and you get the unusual stuff like Baldession Arsenal and Delubrium but their damage rotations include some off the wall stuff.

I don’t want someone who doesn’t want to put in effort to clear hard content.

They're putting in effort, that's the problem. They're putting in effort to things other than DPS rotations. This is a consistent problem I have with your argument. It assumes that the only form of effort in this game is "herp derp I push button make boss go ouchie!" and literally nothing else is effort. Doing mechanics is not effort. Pressing healing buttons is not effort. What if we did this in reverse and pretended that pressing DPS buttons was not effort, only using tank mitigation was? Then we'd have to say all DPSers are not "putting in effort to clear hard content", wouldn't we?

“Just play ultimate.”

You put this in quotes, yet I didn't say it, did I?

Gear progression does not matter in this game at all for anything other than doing even harder content.

Did you not see where I preemptively answered this question already? You can't just ignore that I already "pre-rebutted" it. You can clear P8S in tome gear. You don't need Savage gear for it, either. You lose this one.

We’re not Padjali though,

We aren't. But you didn't ask that. You said WHM lore, and I'm pointing out that you're wrong on WHM lore, which is much more to the healers and much less to the damagers.

Also, what happens to Sylphie when she only uses healing spells?

Do the quest again. You don't remember it. Let me quote from the Journal for you:

"Brother E-Sumi explains that Sylphie's powers of healing draw not upon the boundless energies of nature, but upon her own limited life force. Should she continue to practice her magic, the young conjurer is in danger of sharing her mother's tragic fate. Deeply concerned, the Padjal pledges for a way to save the girl, and hopes you will aid him should a solution be found. Returning to the subject of your education, the guildmaster expresses his satisfaction with your mastery of conjury's fundamental principles, and bids you strive to attune yourself ever more closely to the elements."

You anti-Sylphie's have used her as a punching bag so long, you don't remember what her "crime" was. She was trying to be a Red Mage. This goes a bit into the weeds, but if you do all the THM/BLM, CNJ, and RDM quests and know their lore, you know that the difference between THM and BLM is that THM's rely on their own internal stores of Aether to cast spells, which is why their magics are ultimately limited. Shantotto discovered one could channel the ambient Aether AROUND them to cast spells, making them far more powerful and unlimited. The White Mages of Amdapor discovered a similar method of using magic (interestingly, it's not stated, but the SCH's of Nym likely did NOT do that, and so didn't contribute to the 5th Calamity). The 5th Calamity was the result of their war and depleting and destabilizing the land's Aether as a whole. After it, it was why Black Magic and White Magic were banned and persecuted. RDMs specifically use their PERSONAL Aether, with techniques that amplify and efficiently reclaim it so the practitioner doesn't drain themselves dry and kill themselves in the process, which requires a great deal of physical conditioning, precise motions in casting, and is both mentally and physically taxing, so RDM's in lore have to be in fantastic physical and mental shape.

Conjurers, though, had a different path. The Elementals decided TO let them channel ambient Aether, but only a trickle, so they would not repeat Amdapor's mistake. Curative magics are more taxing, apparently, and will kill the user trying them at high levels with their personal Aether, as a THM does to cast their basic Fire and Ice spells. Sylphie's mother was a healer that did so, and died. Sylphie was following her mother's path, which would have killed her had she expended too much of her own personal Aether/life force.

Sylphie's crime was never "she cast only healing spells and no attack magic". It was she was drawing on her own life force to cast spells (in general) rather than on the Elemntals.

WHMs follow after the CNJ example, but, because they are entrusted by the Elementals to do so and are relatively few in number, do not have the cap/limit on how much they can channel, and so are capable of using far more powerful spells without, in theory, destabilizing the balance of the natural world.

THAT is WHM's lore and mechanics in FFXIV.

You’re using hyperbole here

Fair enough. My point was, it doesn't mention attack spells or offensive magics AT ALL. Going just by the lore blurb on the class, one would be forgiven for thinking WHM's WERE pure healers. My overall point that you aren't correctly representing WHM lore stands.

Caster design:
Honestly I don’t understand your point here. Do you also admit that SMN does not do casting well either? What does that have to do with Glarespam?

The point is you're citing an appeal to authority that does not exist. You're saying "Casters are X, Y, and Z" when they clearly are not, and you're ignoring the one outright example that proves you're wrong. Casters, in FFXIV, are clearly not limited to needing to stand still and turret. And, my point still stands: Healers are not Casters. They are classified distinctly, just as Tanks (and MCH) are not Melee.

No. I’m attacking flawed game design.

I didn't say you weren't?

I commented on who the arguments were coming from.

Moreover, Glarespam clearly DOES fit the game design. You can argue it makes for a BORING game design, but it was designed by the Devs to fit it. You may not like the fit, but it fits just fine. Glarespam very clearly allows WHM's to participate in and clear content, thus it's more than adequate at it.

Seriously? Since my forum profile says Scholar, that means I don’t have WHM at level 90 and I’m never interested in its aesthetic?

Now who's imagining being attacked? I didn't say you couldn't be interested in other Jobs - I play SCH about as much as I play WHM. But I'm willing to give one up to make other people happy as long as one remains in a state I enjoy it. It's selfish of you to not be willing to do the same, especially since you're the one benefiting from the change.

You also don't understand the options you have here. The option is NOT "you get all 4 healers to your liking OR you get 3 healers to your liking". The option IS "you get 3 healers to your liking OR you get NO healers to your liking and everything stays the same as ShB/EW". You're arguing as if from a point of already having everything you want and being asked to give something up, when the actual situation is you have nothing that you want and are wanting to get everything that you want. You're arguing from a position of weakness but acting like you're arguing from a position of strength.

.

The issue is that without the current ogcd healing kit and being more reliant on gcd heals, a majority of in effect halfway interesting healing abilities would be lost and the role itself would become extremely slow to play.

I'm going to try to read this carefully, because there's some good density to this. Have you looked at the APM across Jobs, by chance?

It's oddly not a super accessible number (as far as I can tell on the abacus, you have to look at individuals the Casts and you can't do it by an aggregate across all records of a given Job), but a quick look at the current top of the pile has AST around 42.4 (this doesn't include targeting, btw), which is comparable with MNK (also about 42.7 with a bit higher of a decimal). The SCH on their team was 35.6. The first team down that list with a WHM has 33.7, their SCH co-healer 35.7, and for some more reference points, the first NIN on the list is 47.7 vs first BLM with 33.4 and the first MCH is 46.4. For Tanks, the top team (double DRK) each were 41.5, first GNB is 44.8, first WAR is 34.6, and first PLD is 36.6. Oh, and the first SGE is 35.0.

These are all 99 players except the AST, who is 100, and this is Proto-Carbie, as I figured it'd have the most smoothed numbers (higher fights having more forced movement and downtime and such). We can examine some other fight, but I wager the general story will be similar.

What do we see here?

Overall, we see that healers have a similar APM profile to Tanks, and though I didn't break down all DPS Jobs, the ceiling is likely NIN or MCH around 48 and the floor BLM around 33. And again, note that these are all 99s with a 100 thrown in there, so this represents high end players and optimization and all that.

Is this "extremely slow" to play?

Well, if it is, so are BLM and WAR, and no one is demanding they be loaded with more abilities. And I agree, it's okay for one healer. Which is literally all that I'm asking for/stating as necessary.

No, WHM doesn't need an "elemental rotation". Especially if they actually bite the bullet and add GEO to the game already. Krile needs a new Job for 7.0.

I do agree, though, that I'd like to see more GCD variation. I believe I stated that, too.

You express constant smugness over healers who care about their dps,

No I absolutely do not. You, on the other hand, are constantly talking down your nose to me.

I do agree that I'd like to see healer skill expression - IN HEALING - as more prevalent in the game.

And to be honest, I think your talking about elitism and WoWs supposed toxicity all the time, it kinda feels like you can't get over the trauma of being called out once in your time there.

To be honest, I was never "called out" in WoW. I defended other people who were attacked by meter worshiping crapbaskets, though.

My position is not one of elitism but of basic competency.

I don't think it is. If that was all it was, we wouldn't be having this discussion. You note yourself that basic competency is merely being able to heal the content (your "floor" doesn't include any damage at all, I'll note). Yet you're not talking about/asking after that. You're talking about adding DPS rotations to exclude people from various forms of content. "basic competency" that is not.

I literally picked up healer during Endwalker fresh after not playing it for years and was immediately capable of playing with pretty high dps uptime and barely having to cast heals,

Yes? This is because of how powerful and frequently available oGCDs are. Have I not said over and over that's a problem? And have you not over and over defended those systems and demanded they remain in place, even in this very post, insisting that healers would be "extremely slow to play" without them?

You can't argue for something and then complain about the result of that thing existing at the same time.

If oGCD heals were less prevalent, it would require more GCD heals. But my contention - correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems this way to me reading your posts - is that you don't want to have to press healing GCDs. You want healing to be exclusive oGCD so you can use all your GCDs on damage spells. Is this not so?

With which you then get bored, because there aren't very many of them to press. In effect, your philosophy of healer design creates a problem, then you complain about the problem to achieve an objective of shifting healers ever closer to dpsers.

Healer DPSing being a thing is pretty much the most unique and stand out thing in this game,

To you, perhaps. Many people would say it's the story and characters.

because it was already an established norm and common courtesy when I started the game, arround the end of heavensward.

It really wasn't. There was, in fact, a big fight/discussion over it at the time within the community. So much so the Devs removed Cleric Stance because of the toxicity it fostered.

And to be honest, I feel like story content being so easy that it is impossible to fail is kind of immersion breaking. It would be okay if the WoL would be defined by being just there and special, but they are supposed to be a legendary combatant but the story itself has no casual skill checks for the player to test and proof that.

I feel like this is one of those "depends on your point of view" things. To me, the WoL being able to do all of this without me MECHANICALLY AS A PLAYER having to do crazy stuff is the proof of their legendary prowess. Among the most hated (by many players) parts of EW was the segment where you control the Garlean (basically Gladiator skillset) who is super weak. While we can destroy magitek armor with ease, it's a certain death if you do so during that segment. You have to be extremely careful and cautious as you work your way through the city and use limited resources to struggle to make it.

And most players seemed to HATE it.

I thought it was fantastic because it showed how powerful the WoL IS and why the rank and file Garleans look at you the way they do. It was using game mechanics to explain a point, but was a one-time thing.

If that was happening all the time, if every fight was a struggle at that level, THAT would be immersion breaking.

[AmiableApkallu]

As for Final Fantasy history - historically, WHM's get VERY few damage spells.

That is true, but a lot of Final Fantasy history is single player RPGs where you, as the player, are (1) controlling an entire party, in a combat system that features (2) plenty of randomized outgoing damage and (3) plenty of status effects and elemental affinities.

Point (1) means that you, as the player, don't notice the repetitiveness of any one job as much. Points (2) and (3) mesh well with kits heavy on addressing HP and status effects.

None of those points are true in FFXIV. The actual mechanics of "white mage", and of "healer" in general, need to fit the combat model as it actually exists. (I'd love for the combat model to change, but my gut says that's less likely to happen than changes to job design.)

---

WHM is my preferred healer, but after playing FFXIV for a year, it's too simple. Temperance on a 2min cooldown effectively means my only solution to a healing problem is "hope no one dies and fix HP bars after the damage hits." The lily heals and Tetragrammaton are much too close to the bread-and-butter Cure/Medica spells. The DPS kit, maybe also the healing kit, could lean more heavily into CNJ's elemental roots.

If I had to pick a specific play style to aim for, I'd model WHM as a healer after what BLM is as a DPS.

[Renathras]

That is true, but a lot of Final Fantasy history is single player RPGs where you, as the player, are (1) controlling an entire party, in a combat system that features (2) plenty of randomized outgoing damage and (3) plenty of status effects and elemental affinities.

I agree well enough with that. That's why I look at FFXI as the "This is what WHM adapted to an MMO should probably be". If you do a deep dive - I've never played FFXI other than a free trial, but we can look over the webpages like the one I linked above - you can see that it's a similar story to FFXIV's WHM in terms of damage tools. Basically Glare, Dia, Holy with both single target and AOE versions of the spells.

Granted, FFXI is a pretty different game, but as you look through the spell list, note there's no Water, Earth, or Aero spells in the White Mage toolkit. Like...at all. Instead, WHM has access to the Bar- line of spells (which are basically Protect/Shell for specific elements), single target (Cure line) and AOE (Curaga line) heals, and a far more complicated debuff cleanse system than Esuna, as well as having utility spells like Teleport, stat buffs for main stats like Vit and such, and even Sneak. That's what I think a WHM in an MMO has that's fitting to it.

Honestly, I personally feel like the Class -> Job system is just going to go at some point, because there's a lot of wonkiness in it. It's probably only still in the game because changing it would be trouble on the coding side, even though every Job introduced from HW on didn't engage with the system, especially once Cross-Class was removed. WHM coming off of CNJ was a disjointed mistake that causes a lot of confusion with some players liking the Druid-like nature of CNJ and being upset when they put on the White and gradually progress into being what a traditional White Mage is instead. Most game lore doesn't go Druid -> Holy Priest, so people that like the Druid are upset that the end up with Holy Priest.

I am a bit curious, though. Why is WHM your preferred healer? Aesthetics?

I don't ask to pry, just curious. You note it feels too simple to you, but all three of the other healers (even SGE) is more complex in their own ways. So I can't think of any reason other than Aesthetics OR that WHM is easy/straightforward that someone would prefer it, but if said person thinks it is too simple (near synonym for too easy?), then I can't quite square that circle.

How would you make a more simplified BLM rotation for a healer? Isn't that arguably what RDM is? Their Mana system makes their caster rotation arguably a simplified BLM rotation. And, as I noted above, WHM has a (slightly higher, but still) similar APM to BLM. In effect, WHM right now is arguably the Healer version of what BLM is to DPS - and what WAR is to Tanks.

.

The just play ultimate argument is kinda the most toxic and gaslighting one in this discussion

And literally WHO is asking for it?

And come now, it's hardly "the most toxic" OR the most "gaslighting" thing in THIS discussion. You can't say a thing is happening (and the most toxic thing) in a discussion when it isn't even IN this discussion. It wasn't even mentioned in this discussion, I don't believe, until Flowerfairy said it.

.

To follow-up ...
"I can't speak for White Mages, but I can say that healing at endgame as a Scholar is a blast. With DoTs, off-global cooldown abilities, dodging, and pet management to deal with I am rarely ever bored. I am literally always doing something in dungeons, and that feels amazing.

I think this is what's lost (from you guys' side) in this discussion. Note the first 6 words there. I put them in italics.

Contrast that by looking at the part you bolded. Other than DoTs and dodging, those were things SCH had that WHM did not. WHM had 3 oGCDs, Presence of Mind (which was used for healing not damage), Divine Seal (which was used for healing not damage), and Benediction (which was used for emergencies at that point in the game's history, not as a routine use tool). WHM had no pet management, and no DoT interaction, nor as many DoTs as SCH had since it could Cross-Class WHM's Aero, had Shadow Flare's field effect, and for a BIT anyway, could Cross-Class BLM's Thunder (though that was removed fairly early on)

WHM didn't play that way, SCH did. A LOT OF PEOPLE happened to like that. A LOT OF PEOPLE also happened not to, and played WHM. Keep in mind at the time WHM was primarily a GCD healer that healed through use of Medica 2, Medica 1, Cure 2 AND Cure 1 (because MP was an issue back then), and occasionally dipped into Cleric to apply DoTs if the fight was braindead snore easy, which no hard content was.

But how about we actually look at ARR history?

I think it might be instructive for us all to look back to the time we're talking about here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fsPp9IQXuc

This is MTQCapture's "The Binding Coil of Bahamut - Turn 5 Raid Guide" (man this brings back memories!) I want you to watch this and look at the enemy health bars (bottom center of her screen). Specifically, I want you to look for how many times you see Aero spells on it. Secondarily, I want you to watch the healer cast bars and watch what they're casting.

...given it a few minutes yet?

While SCH's damage spells - Bio, Miasma - appear frequently, notice how Aero does not? And what spells is that WHM casting? Surely Stone II right?

...well, they are casting something with stone in the NAME: Stoneskin. Quite a bit of Stoneskin, actually. Cure 1 seems to be the most frequently cast spell, followed by Stoneskin, with Cure 2 and Medica 2 being frequent, and WHM standing still regenerating MP being...also frequent.

Now, you might argue "This was a bad WHM", but this was what progression raiding looked like AT THE TIME in 2.1. Notice how little it looks like how you remember it?

Now, SCH does. Those SCH buffs have high uptime and are there clear as day. While I don't see any Ruin 1 casts, if you watch close you can see a lot of Ruin 2 going out. But you don't see that from the WHM.

.

Now, in the interest of fairness, let's have a look at end end of Second Coil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_lnPoQNu7w

It still kills me the PLD casting Stoneskin on herself here.

Here, you can see Aero MORE often...but not anywhere NEAR 100% uptime. There's also a second Bio 1 on the boss a lot, but that may be coming from the BLM (which could Cross-Class ACN abilities)

Again you'll see the WHM consistently using Stoneskin and hardcasts of Cure 1 and Cure 2 frequently. I also see the SCH pretty often in Cleric Stance...but the Cleric Stance buff doesn't seem to be used much by the WHM (still watching the video all the way as I type this, but I haven't seen the WHM activate Cleric since I've been watching the party list, but you can see it from the SCH somewhat often). Also amusingly, at 3:48, you can see this amazing thing - beautiful, terrifying, or hilarious depending on your perspective: The BLM casting Physic!

No, legit go to that timestamp and see for yourself.

Even when the WHM is tanking - and yes, you read that right, "White Mage tank" is legitimately a phrase from that video/strat - the WHM is not in Cleric Stance. In fact, skimming through the video (she got video from several runs based on the party makeup changing), I can't see any point of WHM in Cleric Stance, can you? And I may have missed one somewhere, but I don't see Stone casts.

But overall, we see a similar situation:

The SCH is basically a de-facto Support fourth party role, throwing out damage while also contributing off-healing, while the WHM is a acting almost as a Pure Healer, using GCD hardcasts of heals and seemingly not casting many damage spells other than an occasional instant cast Aero and doesn't seem to be using Cleric Stance - for all the talk about how healers were this high paced dance of in and out of Cleric Stance...that seems to be ABSOLUTELY TRUE of SCH...but not true of WHM.

Now, I'm sure there are other videos out there, and we can make various arguments and analyses - here's Mr Happy's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H75f6SgM6Sg - from the era. But here again we see little Aero, no heart-pounding Cleric Stance dancing, and filler GCDs were Cure 1s with Cure 2 and Medica 2 as needed, no Stonespam.

In other words: Far more like WHM as I remember it than what you guys are saying ARR WHM was like.

Being fair, what you're saying ARR healing was like WAS like that...for SCH.

...but I've spent this whole time advocating for that, so...

And AGAIN in the interest of fairness - the thought DID occur to me maybe this was true in the "wild west" days, so we should look at later raids once the raiding community was more developed and see if they had changed to what you guys remember - let's look at the FINAL turn of the FINAL Coil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbmd4eRNwnE

Again - little Cleric use (even by the SCH), low uptime on Aero (higher on SCH's DoTs, again some may be from the BLM/SMN). And notice how high and crazy the damage is here, and healers were dealing with it WITHOUT the use of their current generation oGCD kits. WHMs had to use "hardcore/skill expression" HEALING buffs. It wasn't "press this oGCD to top off the party from 10% health". It was "Press this button. Now use your GCD heals intelligently on the party with boosted potency to get through this tight spot."

So again, where is this WHM you guys are remembering? I'm not seeing it from these bleeding edge ARR raiders.

I _AM_ seeing something akin to it on these bleeding edge ARR raiders' SCHOLARS, but not their White Mages.

.

It is interesting seeing JUST HOW MUCH Stoneskin was used, which makes me even more upset that they removed it. I remember using it myself a lot back then, and being upset when it was removed, but I had forgotten how much it was used and how useful it was (and because it was based on the target's HP, Stoneskin was also not nerfed by Cleric Stance, much like how Benediction (100%) and Lustrate (25%) were also based on HP instead of Potency/Mind.

(I should note here, I was not a raider and didn't have a static then, either, but I did get a Twintania clear during ARR, probably around 2.4, though I only started playing in late 2.2 and didn't know anything about gearing, so I was wearing a mix of Crystal Tower pieces when I did so - truly, it was the wild west. Didn't even know about tomestone gear and normal gearing up until SB, as in HW and half of SB, I was using Dungeon gear until I joined an FC where some players did 8 man normals and blew my mind when we did the first two Omega tiers to get my unlocks [and some other new members] and weapons and stuff.)

.

In short: I think this MIGHT be part of the problem.

A lot of healers now that played SCH in ARR forget WHM didn't play that way. A lot of people that came to WHM later, or even played it then but it's just been 8-9 years, have kinda forgotten that, with their memory blurring with either later expansions or with SCH. As someone who has played WHM all this time, and apparently (given the period footage in those videos) played it as per norms of the time, I am remembering it correctly. And my assessment of EW WHM as being an improvement over SB WHM likely still stands. It shifted WHM from the ARR model to the SB/ShB/EW era healing requirements while keeping their GCD healing somewhat in-tact.

It's also funny the opinion piece calls out Physic when you actually can see that SCH casting it. (And the BLMs in some cases, but let's not mention that, haha!)

And this clearly isn't asking for the game to be redesigned, since this was the ORIGINAL (2.X) design of the very same game we play. So I'm not the one asking for the game to be changed from what it always was...

The amazing irony here is:

...and neither are you guys. Well, more or less.

For SCH, you are correct.

For WHM, I am correct.

This is one of those RARE cases where everyone is correct simultaneously. Which ALSO strongly lends to my 3 change, WHM remain the same perspective, does it not?

[ty_taurus]

Snip

Did you really take a single clause from a 2013 opinion piece meant to talk about SCH and use that to go into a diatribe about WHM?

Let's get a few things straight here. You keep trying to white knight the WHM, but let's remind the classroom that you don't speak for all WHM players either. In fact there's another player that drops by the forums on occasion who will quite literally go to war with you to fight for the right for WHM to have actual complexity and how it's infuriating that WHM is always forced to hold the baby raddle.

Secondly, MTQ Capture both then and now uses prog footage for her guides. Do you know how frequently her videos feature people blatantly failing mechanics, dying, or are already KOed? In ARR, damage meant using Cleric Stance, and also WHM had far more restrictive MP problems, so conserving MP and waiting to see what mechanics were coming up were common when learning a new fight as a healer--particularly as a WHM, because the consequences of being in Cleric Stance at the wrong time or running out of MP were significantly more severe. But also, ARR was an experimental time. Every job was trying to figure out how to play correctly, and WHM players were, across that 2 year period of time, learning how to manage their DPS more effectively, and that was one of its talking points going into HW. While SCHs were thinking about ways to make it easier to heal when you have 2 SCHs together, WHMs were looking for better MP management and an easier time utilizing their DPS tools. And what did HW give WHM? All OGCD healing, Assize which restored some MP, Stone 3, and Aero 3--more damage, more ways to heal while doing damage, better MP management, and a new DoT.

I will say it until I'm blue in the face. No job in FFXIV should ever have its gameplay reduced to largely 1 button spam. It is a disgrace to the entire combat system of FFXIV. It is bad game design. That is fact based on the systems of FFXIV, not an opinion. If you're happy with 1 button spam, go play a Mario Party minigame.

[ty_taurus]

To follow-up on what I was saying about how healing was praised during ARR, this wasn't the article I remember, but I did find one article on SCH specifically from 2013. This is really just an opinion piece from one game journalist, so certainly take it with a grain of salt, but I just wanted to highlight this specific part that I find hilarious in hindsight:

"I can't speak for White Mages, but I can say that healing at endgame as a Scholar is a blast. With DoTs, off-global cooldown abilities, dodging, and pet management to deal with I am rarely ever bored. I am literally always doing something in dungeons, and that feels amazing.

What's so special about SCH anyway?

Everything!

Okay, well maybe not everything. Physick certainly isn't."

The full article is here. Again, it's just an opinion piece, but it's another pieces of anecdotal information to toss onto the pile of people loving all the things SCH has lost.

[Tiramu]

I agree with the wall of text thing, I found it really hard to follow. Sometimes shorter posts, or if long posts are needed then splitting into mutliple posts replying to different things is better.

Anyway, I wouldnt want to change the basic healing tools WHM has (cant speak for other healers).