The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[AnotherPerson]

WHM reached the compromise position in ShB - as I think we can all agree at this point, SB WHM sucked.

Is this not more or less what I've been proposing this entire time? Return SCH and AST to their SB kits (including nAST), and WHM should probably be "ShB WHM + Aero 3". Granted with their EW abilities tacked on and SGE in the game. This would give us a simple healer more or less as it is today with the only big difference being DoT cleave for AOE and macroing Cleric Stance onto Presence of Mind (WHM), a DoT and plate spinning healer (SCH), not one but two buff healers (dAST and nAST for both Pure and Barrier healing spots), and a semi-WHM equivalent barrier healer (SGE). I think that is the ideal solution.

Indeed, when they were adding RDM at that time, I briefly considered it could be the next healer Job. It had White Magic (presumably some heals and a raise) while also having black magic (so substitute Stone, Aero 1, and Aero 2 for Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder). RDM would have fit into SB-era FFXIV healing model as a healer with no one really batting an eye if you think about it.

With all due respect, ShB WHM still sucked. It only sucked less because it was the only job that was uplifted because everyone kept complaining the job gauge still sucked, and the job gauge finally upgraded to get a DPS refund skill. However, if you look at the big picture, WHM gameplay still sucked even in Endwalker 6.0 and only finally got DPS Neutral lilies in later patches (finally making the gauge something you use instead of avoid or use as sparingly as possible). The problem still exists, however. Until lv 74, where you don't want to touch your gauge since regen is more potent than Afflatus Solace per GCD. Even Medica II is probably better than Afflatus Solace in most circumstances until you unlock Afflatus Misery. Doubly so if you need to pop a Confession before Medica II at level 70.

WHM is the only healer that takes until Heavensward to get their job gauge, which is ridiculous in its own right. At the same time, WHM is also the only healer that doesn't want to utilize their job gauge until lv 74. Just because WHM got improvements, it's a far outcry from actually being "good" when you look at its state as a whole. It's just serviceable.

[ty_taurus]

With all due respect, ShB WHM still sucked. It only sucked less because it was the only job that was uplifted because everyone kept complaining the job gauge still sucked, and the job gauge finally upgraded to get a DPS refund skill. However, if you look at the big picture, WHM gameplay still sucked even in Endwalker 6.0 and only finally got DPS Neutral lilies in later patches (finally making the gauge something you use instead of avoid or use as sparingly as possible). The problem still exists, however. Until lv 74, where you don't want to touch your gauge since regen is more potent than Afflatus Solace per GCD. Even Medica II is probably better than Afflatus Solace in most circumstances until you unlock Afflatus Misery. Doubly so if you need to pop a Confession before Medica II at level 70.

WHM is the only healer that takes until Heavensward to get their job gauge, which is ridiculous in its own right. At the same time, WHM is also the only healer that doesn't want to utilize their job gauge until lv 74. Just because WHM got improvements, it's a far outcry from actually being "good" when you look at its state as a whole. It's just serviceable.

The only thing that is genuinely a positive about WHM is that it's the only healer to offer an incentive to use recovery GCDs over DPS GCDs once you've learned Afflatus Misery; however, that does come with caveats. Like with what you stated, level 74 is far too high to actually gain access to your gauge mechanics, and there's no reason for Afflatus Solace to exist without Misery. Really, both of these should become accessible (while also scaling with your current iteration of Stone or Glare) in the ballpark of level 30. Additionally, there is a pressure to throw away lily heals to nourish the blood lily during all instances of downtime. I mentioned this before in my scribbles of ideas, but a really simple way to address this issue is to just give WHM a Meditate/Anatman for the blood lily. I normally don't like these types of actions, but I feel discouraging throwing away lilies unnecessarily and encouraging players to use them for actual healing is important in accomplishing this.

[ForsakenRoe]

Is this not more or less what I've been proposing this entire time?

You'll have to forgive me for assuming that, when you said your wish for healers is 'change 3, leave one as is', that meant that WHM would be completely untouched. Adding back Aero 3 (and not just as 'it does dia but in an aoe', but as 'a seperate second dot timer to manage') would be 'touching' it, right?

WHM is the only healer that takes until Heavensward to get their job gauge, which is ridiculous in its own right. At the same time, WHM is also the only healer that doesn't want to utilize their job gauge until lv 74. Just because WHM got improvements, it's a far outcry from actually being "good" when you look at its state as a whole. It's just serviceable.

Exactly, with SHB, if we were to assign 'out of 10' scores, we could say WHM went from a 2/10 to a 4/10, SCH from a 8/10 to a 5/10 and AST from a 8/10 to a 3/10 (cos its healing potencies on launch sucked bad). The fact WHM went up from a 2 to a 4 is an improvement yes, but it's still only a 4/10, there's a lot more work that needed to be done. It could have been eg a 7/10 if the only change was adding the better lilies and making the MP cost changes, but they counteracted those changes with 'oh also you are down to just one nuke one dot. Like AST, but without the Card system that partially justifies AST having that'.

[Connor]

I agree with most of this…

Yeah, I do agree that it’s not so binary as just being ‘all dps’ or ‘no dps’; there are definitely lots of players that fall into any end of those two extremes, just as there are surely many who are right in the middle with ‘some dps’.

For previous post (on mobile so can’t do double quoting magic please bear with me lol), I agree that Stormblood was a good compromise between ‘some dps’ and ‘some healing’. Personally I also miss some of the pure utility stuff we used to get like Scholar’s Eye for an Eye or even Astrologian’s Disable. Even Stoneskin (though I get they had to remove that because of inflated HP values). They’re not the most useful or game changing but it was still fun to have some utility that was just there to support lol.

That’s just a personal aside though, I feel the same about things like Bard’s Foe Requiem (rest in peace gone but not forgotten. In terms of the dps I’m most familiar with Scholar, and utilising the three DoTs, Shadowflare, etc was definitely more engaging than what we have now.

In terms of dps options for a Scholar personally I like the idea of them being for tactical usage as opposed to a direct dps rotation. Like a DoT with lower potency than Broil/Bio but an additional effect like reducing damage dealt. Or a shield that deals damage when broken or struck similar to Eye for an Eye, but has no direct healing potency so it won’t replace Adloquium. I liked Shadow Flare’s slow effect too, again it wasn’t particularly useful or game changing but it still felt nice to be dealing damage with more purpose than just ‘damage for damage’s sake’ (if that makes sense lol)

[glamazon]

I'm thinking they should eliminate shield healers and regen healers being two diff kinds of healers and instead give every healer some form of direct heals, shield healing, regen healing and then to give each healer a distinct feel and play style have them focus on other things.

Sage: Direct Damage. healer who has the most personal damage and damage options.

Scholar: Debuffing. healer who has a solid number of debuff options to affect the enemy.

Astrologian: Buffing. healer who has a solid number of ways to buff his party more than just attack bonus.

WhiteMage: Mix of all three other healers. Second most personal dps, debuff spell like pollen slows enemy attack speed, buff thorns damages enemies when they hit players, all used with lilies.

[Renathras]

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Agreed. I'm not at all opposed to more complexity in healers as long as there's an out/escape for it that isn't "gimping your party/getting carried".

I would love to see SB SCH back, possibly with some PvP SCH for good measure. I love the way Adlo works with a spread and damage boosting mechanic and Bio with a reduced damage dealt that you can also cleave across the enemy party. I've thought for ages SCH should have an AF dump Divine Benison. When they removed ED in ShB, the problem wasn't "you couldn't optimize DPS anymore", the problem was "okay, so Soil and Excog are on CD, everyone's at 100% health, and I have 1 AF stack to burn before it comes off CD...what do I spend it on?" situations. There was nothing to do but just burn a Lustrate for funzies or, more correctly (since that would require either Ruin 2 or clipping a Broil), just sitting on the stack as you refreshed. Major "feelzbadman" from that. And I've thought for ages that Art of War should have some kind of tactical effect. I'm not sure WHAT - I thought Heavy but (a) that would make more sense for Gravity and (b) that could muck with tanks trying to do wall to wall pulls I guess...though arguably so can an early Swiftcast Holy... - with another alternative being Slow +10% or Vulnerability on the boss of some small amount - but those could also have complications. I'm not sure if those things have diminishing returns like Stun does, and it might be weird (even if they do) to have a meta of SCH using 3x Art of Wars every 1 minute or whatever in boss fights for the Vuln, lol. But I do feel it would be neat if it had SOMETHING, and that would also help differentiate it from Dyskrasia. Right now, the two are basically identical other than AoW doing 10 more potency and Dyskrasia working with Kardia (but since that's SGE's Eos, it's in practice not much of a distinction.)

I think they also need to acknowledge that Faerie Gauge is a total failure. It doesn't HAVE to be, but it is. If they had made Fey Blessing have no CD and just consume 30 gauge, that would have been the answer. But they seemed to not what SCH to be able to stock several AOE pulse heals, which is also a bit silly considering (a) all of SCH's other healing and (b) that Fey Blessing is one of their weakest potency AOE heals anyway. They could just remove it and make Aetherpact a toggle so you can use it like Kardia when you want to focus Eos or something. They also should probably do something with the anti-synergy between Dissipation, Seraph, Aetherpact, and <all Fairy abilities>, but I suppose at least some of that was SB accurate.

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Likewise, a lot of people loved AST. I've never been particularly partial to it, but I like that options exist. I think everyone agrees the Card simplification - while UNDERSTANDABLE given the way raiders tended to play and optimize at the time - was a mistake and a move in the wrong direction. Even PvP AST has figured this out. Ideally, there should be a way to make the "busywork/bursty" part of AST less likely to give people arthritis while also giving it back some flavor and a focus on buffing gameplay that people really enjoyed the interplay of.

Likewise, as I said above somewhere, there was no good reason to remove nAST. Misshapenchair is hardly the only or first person to mention it. If nAST was in the game today, it wouldn't be causing any realistic issues. Some people think they removed it to make SGE more attractive, but the two have markedly different, non-overlapping playstyles, and if anything, SGE plays far more like SCH than nAST anyway. This is a place they could essentially be adding "a 5th healer" without actually having to do any design work. Not to mention the disconnect now between AST's lore and AST's gameplay is pretty stark.

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There are so many little ways to make things better without revamping the entire system, and of course there's also ways they could make things better if they DID want to revamp the entire system. And there is a way they could do this with pleasing basically everyone.

I think right now, the Devs honestly don't know what to do with healers. They gave more oGCD heals because people asked for it, removed the damage interplay because some people asked for that, simplified systems because people either asked for it or (AST Cards) were playing like it anyway, etc. They've tried shoehorning all healers, together, into a single paradigm and are confused because people are always complaining and they have no idea how to please everyone because they're trying to make all healers fit into the same single mold at any given time.

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I'm thinking they should eliminate shield healers and regen healers being two diff kinds of healers and instead give every healer some form of direct heals, shield healing, regen healing and then to give each healer a distinct feel and play style have them focus on other things.

Not sure I agree with you on WHM or on every healer having the same healing kit (part of the distinctions between healers IS their healing kits being different). I think the Pure/Barrier split has been a failure, but that's just because (a) every healer needs mitigation the way raids are tuned now and (b) dAST and nAST were combined, so AST is a Pure healer with Barriers anyway.

Splitting dAST and nAST apart again and giving dAST and WHM one more mitigation would probably fix that.

But I do agree with the niches/specializations being a good direction to go.

[IDontPetLalas]

I still don't see a reason to promote the "leave one healer as it is, change the others". I am listening, I can understand the motivations, I can see why some people may like it, just as with anything , you will have a segment that feels that they are perfectly happy, or are indifferent since they have adapted, or those that are apathetic. There are also those people who will resist change, for multiple reasons.

i can also see that some people that play healers want a simpler type of gameplay, I don't want to exclude those players at all, however I don't feel that it is fair for those people who may have been with a job for years to be unable to grow within that job. There should be a way to start in each healing job and have a feeling of accomplishment, and to have some accomplishment, and ideally some options in gameplay- i.e. skill selection. This is why i would want to see those changes in each job, I don't see that reflected right now in the healing jobs.

I stress that as others have said, this affects those players who are interested in optimizing their gameplay, those players who don't participate in that type of content now aren't going to be affected, but it would help in retention and might attract more healers.

[Katish]

I was thinking of a round about way of "fixing" healers and what of inventing mechanics, enemies, buffs, that convert healing into also damage...that way healing would seen more to be worth it when it isn't and it would be in a step in the right direction. Think how good is would feel that healing affected undead...

[ty_taurus]

I was thinking of a round about way of "fixing" healers and what of inventing mechanics, enemies, buffs, that convert healing into also damage...that way healing would seen more to be worth it when it isn't and it would be in a step in the right direction. Think how good is would feel that healing affected undead...

So something like the Ocean-Hued Clam set from Genshin. It's a set of artifacts--equipment basically (for anyone not familiar) that grants this passive to whomever you equip it to:

"When the character equipping this artifact set heals a character in the party, a Sea-Dyed Foam will appear for 3 seconds, accumulating the amount of HP recovered from healing (including overflow healing). At the end of the duration, the Sea-Dyed Foam will explode, dealing DMG to nearby opponents based on 90% of the accumulated healing. (This DMG is calculated similarly to Reactions such as Electro-Charged, and Superconduct, but it is not affected by Elemental Mastery, Character Levels, or Reaction DMG Bonuses). Only one Sea-Dyed Foam can be produced every 3.5 seconds. Each Sea-Dyed Foam can accumulate up to 30,000 HP (including overflow healing). There can be no more than one Sea-Dyed Foam active at any given time. This effect can still be triggered even when the character who is using this artifact set is not on the field."

In layman's terms, Your overhealing is stored for a few seconds to a maximum of 30,000, and once the duration ends, that stored value explodes, dealing damage to nearby enemies.

Something like this can potentially function in this game, but it would be tricky to balance the numbers just right. Someone would end up needing to math out the DPS relationship with this overheal attack vs just direct DPS, and it would probably need to be limited by some factor like a cooldown or a gauge resource or something.