General Healer Discussion [The Echo Chamber]

[elioaiko]

The healer status quo has always been the same. Heal predictable choreographed damage go right back to one button spam.

This has never really changed despite what people might think with every healer rework every expansion. In fact, I do feel like every healer job has gotten worse over the years.

SCH was really fun, rewarding, individual fairies and had dots to compensate for Broil spam.

AST while becoming a monster in healing, has had its gimmick (cards) hacked away into this mess we have now. It's healing is more than fine and rewards good planning like SCH. It's just that the job is really busy for the wrong reasons. Cards are literally just singe target buffs and seals only matter for you and even then they don't because dps card choice is better.

Nearly everything on AST has a massive disconnect and doesn't flow properly. Divination is just it's own thing not rewarded for rolling seals. Astrodyne is really underwhelming and makes no sense. A selfish buff for a healer that's the least selfish of the healers? ShB wasn't perfect but at least there was a system. Draw, cast, seal alignment, Divination, repeat with filler cards being Lord or Lady. AST is just a giant timer at this point.

WHM is the only job that changed for the better. Because it had nowhere but up to go. Aero 3 removal is still painful.

They will inevitable screw up SGE and then the other healers some more. The dev team has shown time and time again, that they desperately need a seperate team to balance jobs. It's clear they are out of creative power which has lead to some horrible and dumb choices. Kaiten removal, NIN rework, all of MNK.

[Allegor]

I can't believe I'm saying it cuz normally I loathe that game mode....but they should seriously consider copy pasting the PvP templates into PvE, because those are far more engaging without making each job's niche feel convoluted. Or, at the very least, bring over the good aspects like aoe cards, or SGE actually being a damage-to-heal healer as it was promoted to be.

[ForsakenRoe]

In the case of these threads of complaints and requests to add more to the role, it's not as if you're not being considered. There are snide comments sometimes, yes, but ultimately, requests have evolved over time to acknowledge that players who play on the simpler side do, in fact, exist for many reasons and the forum threads have also evolved as a result, to try and incorporate ways to leave you with the gameplay that you have enjoyed so far while still allowing them access to the gameplay that they crave and have been denied. The hard part is finding a way to convey this to the development team in such a way that they (1) understand it, (2) care about it, (3) believe it, and then (4) implement it with enough care so that they don't accidentally leave out one side of the fence for the other (as they traditionally have done for the role).

While I can be very sarcastic at times, my ideas for how to change up healers have very much tried to include this fact, be it from making 'Glarespam' still possible via potency balancing, keeping the amount of extra buttons (and therefore extra spinning plates) in check, adhering to the lore as much as possible, considering how the engine works and limitations it'd create, etc. I'm sure other 'idea creators' have also had these considerations in mind when coming up with their versions. We might sound like we're mad about the players who enjoy current design healer, or 'just want to heal', but for me at least, maybe others too, a process occurs:

Me: "Hey here is my idea for how to make healers more interesting, by adding more damage stuff"

'Healer who only wants to heal': "I don't want to do more damage, I like how healers are now, I like it being simple and easy to understand like this"

Me: "I have changed the idea up, now it respects how simple WHM currently is, it can be played like current WHM and you'll do 98% of the current WHM's potential damage, it has strong thematic ties to the lore with new cool visuals, and everything feeds back in a loop to allow the damage skills to give you a really cool and powerful feeling healing tool. Also it has Stoneskin back, for those times where you get a greedy SCH who refuses to use shields at all, so you can pump your HPS even more if you want"

HWOWTH: "Stop trying to change the thing I like its perfect the way it is"

'Perfect' is subjective, and while us 'idea creators' have tried to keep the ideas under control to respect the wishes of as much of the healer playerbase as possible, some people just can't be pleased, because as someone else said in a different thread, they claim they don't want X, they want Y. But when you offer an idea that could provide X AND Y together, you realize: they don't want Y, if they get Y that's not a factor to them. They want 'Not X', that's the important part. As long as 'Not X' occurs, all else is secondary. In this case, Y is 'more to heal' and X is 'an actual damage rotation' I guess. It's kinda depressing to see such a desire to stamp out creativity or ideas, in this fervent rush to make sure that, apparently, 'healers only heal'. Still don't know where that idea came from, so I'm still guessing 'overtuned Cata Heroics'. And when we have 'more to heal', proven a bit by this tier's required healing, and also anecdotally I've seen a few times in dungeons with a 'curebot' healer, if you give some of these 'healers only heal' kind of players something to actually heal, they fall apart because they've never been pushed to actually heal, rotate CDs, manage MP vs Job gauge resource, etc. So maybe it's more accurate to say 'they say they don't want X (damage rotation), they want Y (more to heal). But what they actually want is 'Not X', and 'Not Y', instead they want Z (less to heal, so they can have the easy ride of pressing Cure 1 over and over while watching Netflix)'

[ty_taurus]

Outside of just healing, I've seen others describing EW thus far as feeling a bit tired--feeling those pre-expansion blues and we're only in 6.28 due to the content coming out feeling very short lived. I feel this a bit too, but I also just feel really anxious to see if 7.0 will do anything to address the healers. Not saying I have much hope that it will offer something I want, but I've grown really tired of not being allowed to play the role I want to play for over 3 years now and I feel this internal pressure to want to hit the fast forward button and see when healers become at least tolerable again. SB AST and SCH weren't perfect, but I was content with them even if I wanted more from them. With all the heat coming onto job design philosophy overall, SE really has to decide where they want to go from here on the game as a whole as a lot of prominent names in the FFXIV circle are feeling tired of EW's stagnancy.

There's a part of me that feels like something will have to give on healer design as well if they are capable of addressing these concerns and I just wanna be done with EW's gameplay model and move onto the next thing. I've not felt this way before about past expansions as a whole, and it really makes me sad that I feel this way. I've taken breaks before and have no problem with that of course, it's just even then I'd think "I'll come back in a couple months and see the new content" whereas now it's more like "Damn, it's still well over a year before 7.0 comes in and maybe/hopefully fixes some of this."

[ForsakenRoe]

There's a part of me that feels like something will have to give on healer design as well if they are capable of addressing these concerns and I just wanna be done with EW's gameplay model and move onto the next thing. I've not felt this way before about past expansions as a whole, and it really makes me sad that I feel this way. I've taken breaks before and have no problem with that of course, it's just even then I'd think "I'll come back in a couple months and see the new content" whereas now it's more like "Damn, it's still well over a year before 7.0 comes in and maybe/hopefully fixes some of this."

I'm only raidlogging at this point too, the real problem is that for the most part, when SE does something as an 'experiment', that experiment doesn't ever seem to be written off as a 'failure' it's just re-run until it sort of works. Which can be fine for some things, look how many times they redid Diadem before it became 'kinda ok I guess' tier. But the idea of 'Pure healer VS Barrier healer' is a failure in my view, and it should have been obvious it would be from the moment it was announced, as they tried thinking the same thing with tanks and rolled it back before it even got past the design pitch phase. The big problem here (and I really do mean big, with zero hyperbole or exaggeration) is that if they carry on with the 'failed experiment' path and double down on trying to enforce Pure vs Barrier, it'll just get so so much harder to undo all of that when they finally realize how non-functional the idea is. Of course, there's a chance they actually manage to pull it off in a satisfying way, but so far I've seen zero evidence they can manage something like that. SCH SGE still is a crazy strong combo, and WHM AST is a literal meme.

At this point, I'm checking out 'the other MMO', and having a very good time levelling healers there. Healers with completely different feelings to one another for their gameplay, they got melee healer, HOT healer, plain jane 'i press heal hp go up' healer, daamge-to-heal healer, new expansion's bringing a new one that has a load of time related skills like 'the next 3 spells you cast are stored. press this button again to replay them instantly, ignoring their CDs and resource costs', 'macrocosmos but you dont have to press it in advance of the damage', or 'the next damage instance the target takes is split. 50% is dealt instantly, 50% as a 10sec DOT'. IDK how much of the design limitations for SE is 'engine cant do that' and how much is 'we need to try and make the healers as similar as possible so it's easier to balance them' but their direct competitor is a game with an engine held together by spit and prayers at this point, and they've got so many more functionalities they can play with for their class designs.

Maybe a tiny bit of hyperbole, I feel like we're starting to see a shift. Originally it was FF as the underdog, who started their road to redemption by listening to the fans and working hard to win back trust. Now it almost feels like, with the mass exodus of streamers to FF, and the lawsuit stuff, it's like the shoe is on the other foot: it's the 'other MMO' that is down in the dirt, and is now starting to climb back to its feet (while the theme music plays in the background for hype). My question is, if FFXIV is known for being 'the MMO where the devs listen', how do people at media tour interviews like MrHappy keep raising the point over and over that healers have bland DPS rotations but are expected to use them by the enrage timer? How does it keep coming up at Live Letter Q+As? How many times do these people have to ask the question 'healers are in a bad spot, how are you going to fix them' before we hear an answer beyond 'hmm well...uhhh... let us collect some more data please'?

[Semirhage]

I do like popularity data, but I find it equal parts useful, depressing, and not-always-relevant. It's useful, clearly, because it gives us a view on what the current landscape looks like. It's depressing because White Mage could swap aesthetic to flinging piles of rotting garbage at enemies and belching on allies while underperforming the entire rest of the role by a good 30% and it'd come up BeST Job eVaR on any survey. It's dubiously relevant for a whole lot of reasons. Sometimes the data collected isn't reflective of what the surveyor wants to show (does a sweep of the Lodestone for the second coil savage titles tell us anything important about the content's popularity? Or does it show us a lot of people who solo unsynced it with a level 90 job?). Most of the time data is collected without any why attached to it (why is WHM the most popular healer? Any Sylphie will tell you it's due to the AMAZING job design. I *hope* that's not the case, but any reasoning I come up with is nothing more than speculation either). And at the end of the day, popularity is a metric that, charitably, exists in pseudo-overlapping magisteria with "good". Does being popular make something "good"? Does being unpopular make it "bad"? Welcome to a conversation the human species has had since at least the invention of writing. I don't like arguments that WHM's current job representation makes it "good" (because lord knows this boring crapass pathetic excuse for "job design" didn't even pass my smell test). So I'm also hesitant to use the current role unpopularity to argue that it's inarguable proof they're "bad". Personally, I like to stick with: I want my main job to be a superb multitasking support/healing/damaging hybrid that feels rewarding, has an aesthetic I enjoy, fun to play, engaging to juggle responsibilities, an asset to the party, and allows a satisfying level of skill expression.
WHM in particular for me, but all four healers in general, do NONE of these. Fix 'em.

[SargeTheSeagull]

I'm also really starting to sense that EW hasn't been great and a lot of people are feeling the same way. 7.0 has a lot weighing on it and though the graphics update is gonna be great, that won't do it for a lot of people. My biggest hope for the game overall in 7.0 is that the devs break the formula and do something just different. Even if it's something like giving each dungeon a criterion difficulty, reworking most jobs back to roughly how they were in stormblood (but more refined of course), instead of a dungeon at lv99 give us a 24 man raid, anything. I know it's not super likely but a guy can hope. 14's patch consistency is great because it makes it easy to tell when the thing you're interested in is coming out but it has become really boring. The fact that we know exactly what's coming in 6.5 despite the fact that its around a year away says a lot.

[ty_taurus]

I'm also really starting to sense that EW hasn't been great and a lot of people are feeling the same way. 7.0 has a lot weighing on it and though the graphics update is gonna be great, that won't do it for a lot of people. My biggest hope for the game overall in 7.0 is that the devs break the formula and do something just different. Even if it's something like giving each dungeon a criterion difficulty, reworking most jobs back to roughly how they were in stormblood (but more refined of course), instead of a dungeon at lv99 give us a 24 man raid, anything. I know it's not super likely but a guy can hope. 14's patch consistency is great because it makes it easy to tell when the thing you're interested in is coming out but it has become really boring. The fact that we know exactly what's coming in 6.5 despite the fact that its around a year away says a lot.

Well here's the silver lining: Leading up to EW, FFXIV has never been under such scrutiny by the community as it currently is. There has always been an underlying discourse about certain elements, some warranted, others not, but it's always been subverted by the otherwise overwhelmingly positive feedback otherwise. And that positive feedback was very largely earned, I'd argue, but lately a lot of these topics have been brought up even by FFXIV streamers and content creators--ones that have otherwise been firm supporters of the game. Our community as healers has been jaded from several expansions of neglect, but this is the first time a wider, louder audience is feeling displeased with aspects of the game, and we don't know how SE will respond to this.

[SieyaM]

For me I believe the problem I have with healer design right now is that it doesn't feel like we are working towards anything with our downtime. DPS and even tanks have some kind of burst phase that they are building resources or waiting for the countdown for in the case of SMN at least. You kind of do with WHM working to generate the blood lily but that feels kind of lackluster and after the fact when it's just making up for DPS lost to using a GCD on a lily ability. The Faerie Gauge on SCH might as well be nonexistent, it works with only one ability which could just as easily be put on a cool down and giving a fixed duration, and SGEs is just a ticking clock that builds over time. AST works for a very minimal return which for me is unnoticeable, maybe in savage and ultimate you can feel the difference between two and three seals but for what I do there just seems to be no reward. They need to find something for healers to be building towards.

[ASkellington]

AST works for a very minimal return which for me is unnoticeable, maybe in savage and ultimate you can feel the difference between two and three seals but for what I do there just seems to be no reward. They need to find something for healers to be building towards.

There is 0 difference between having that 6% damage or not. Same as there was barely a difference between 5% vs 6% Divination last expansion unless you were using a parser. The only upside to last expac's Seals BS is that Lord/Lady came from a card you didn't want.

Astrodyne and Seals-Divination were, are, and ever will be failures. They were better off making the Seals do the old card effects based on seal combination instead of this crap they gave us. But then that would take giving the healing role some thought now wouldn't it?