The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[Silver-Strider]

With this, I totally agree. But the reason WHM is so non-meta is it doesn't win any of those arguments.

The reason WHM is non-Meta is because of YEARS of being shafted and people just accepted for the most part.
In HW, WHM had MP issues, even with the inclusion of several oGCDs and the MP restore on Assize being added to its toolkit. AST would go on to receive several buffs to its toolkit that made it not only comparable to WHM in terms of healing output but had significantly better sustain AND offered utility that WHM couldn't match.
In SB, they fixed WHM's long standing MP issue with the creation of Thin Air but shafted it in literally every other category. Removal of Stoneskin so no on demand shielding, Divine Benison requiring Lilies to even work but using up ALL lilies when used, the original conception of Lilies/Confessions being RNG based, as well as the trait Secret of the Lily 2. Let's also not forget that they also decided to just rip out several of WHM's skill entirely from the class to make them Role Actions, like Divine Seal becoming Largesse so that SCH and AST could just buff up their already powerful heals even more than WHM could ever hope to catch up with.
It wasn't until ShB that WHM became even remotely close to being meta that some people even asked for WHM to be NERFED because "It's the simple job, it shouldn't do more damage than the complex AST/SCH".

There has never been hope for WHM to be meta since it just kept getting worse but people just kept gaslighting any and all complaints towards the job because it was "simple" as though that was an excuse. Which is why I can never understand people that argue to keep the terrible Healer design on WHM when it so clearly needs SOMETHING to make it stand out more.

[Gember]

Yeah I keep telling some of my FC mates that the healer role is very "situational". Even doing the same fight is gonna be different depending on the players in the party. Take day 1 alliance raid. The new one recently stirred the community some because some groups breezed through the content while other groups really put up a struggle. Thus healers work very different in those two types of groups, and its the same across the board with all content. I don't EVER expect a healer to do a complicating DPS rotation while they are in a very high maintenance group. I've already got hounded by some statics to do more damage while they still make mistakes in savage content. Its almost like you can't win as a healer, so the feedback is not helping at times.

[Liam_Harper]

They don't allow shield stacking precisely because it can cause some funny business with cheesing mechanics, and they don't really want that.

It's worth noting that the only shields that can't stack are barrier healer GCD shields. Basically, Eprog. They added a shield to Holos that's almost as much as a plain Eprog. Neutral Sect shields also stack with Spreadlo.

I'm quite certain that allowing Eprog to stack with Galvanize won't make the slightest difference when we already have Spreadlo and a huge range of stackable mit, oGCD shields and tank lb. There are no lethal mechanics you can skip or ignore by adding a Zoe Eprog to the current selection. We can already stack ridiculous shields and mit and Eprog is a drop of water.

Really, they don't have a legitimate reason. They just don't want to change it. Same with many other outdated things on healers, their tiny job design team is already strained simply lining up SGE/WHM and PLD with the 2 minute burst window and heal reworks are bottom priority.

[Deceptus]

They don't allow shield stacking precisely because it can cause some funny business with cheesing mechanics, and they don't really want that.

Yet Macrocosmos completely invalidating certain raid mechanics is perfectly fine (heavy /s)

[Renathras]

The reason WHM is non-Meta is because of YEARS of being shafted and people just accepted for the most part.

No, it's not really that. WHM hasn't always been shafted, per se. WHM in ShB was one of the stronger healer options in vacuum. The problem is it continues to not have buffs in a game where the meta is always chasing buffs. You can see a similar situation with MCH. In a vacuum, MCH was fine. In an average party, a skilled MCH would bring more DPS than a DNC or BRD's buffs would. But the meta said it was trash anyway. And so how do they (finally) fix it? Boost its damage (a 3rd time) but also giving it a...mitigation. And I don't mean this as a slight, as the community collectively seems to think MCH having Feiddle is actually a huge deal and seem to prize it as the utility MCH needed.

So it doesn't even have to be damage buffs/utility NECESSARILY. It just has to be strong if its not. Healers could also be balanced based on mitigation vs buffs, but they aren't. The lowest mitigation Healer (WHM) is also the one with no party buffs. The highest mitigation one also has a strong party buff (SCH) which is why it is guaranteed a spot. Then we have AST with buffs (and some mitigation) and SCH with mitigation, and it's easy to see why WHM is out in the cold.

I guess it depends on how you define "shafted", but WHM is okay in terms of functional. SB I would consider shafted. EW I consider lacking. And it's not lacking in vacuum. It's lacking compared to all the other healers having buffs (AST), mitigation (SGE), or both (SCH).

In ARR, WHM was fine and accepted as the "main" healer in parties.

In HW, AST was total garbage on release and took several buff passes to get it to "be good', and for most of its existence, there was always a "great" and "meh" AST spec. In ShB, for example, Diurnal was considered pretty good and preferable to Nocturnal.

In SB, WHM was total garbage because the Lily system sucked buns and the game was shifting hard against GCD heals and WHM didn't have oGCD heals to really speak of to cover that gap. ShB turned this around with Lilies as a stand in straddling oGCD and GCD heals effectively for WHM, and SCH was clunky enough many people didn't play it. But the bigger reason ShB worked and EW didn't is because...


...EW screwed the pooch with the 2 min meta. It strongly forced buff synergy as optimal play. In ShB, because buffs were all over the place and some comps legitimately didn't have buffs to speak of to bring, and so damage was more normalized. That's why PLD worked in ShB and not in EW. It's also why WHM's consistent and higher personal damage worked. The second problem is that SGE was added. nAST was a second Barrier healer, but still did low personal DPS. But SGE roughly matches WHM in damage output, while bringing more mitigation and almost as much healing to the table. Without SGE, the meta right now would be WHM/SCH for prog and SCH/dAST for farm, and possibly solo WHM for solo healing. Instead, it's SCH/SGE for prog and SCH/AST for farm, and either AST (high end groups, AST buffs >>> WHM's personal damage) or SGE for solo healing as both can do it just fine.

So in EW, it's a combination of the 2 min meta making non-buff Jobs, non-burst Jobs (sustained/smoothed damage) less desired, and a healing competitor was added that does comparable damage to WHM while also providing comparable healing with more utility (SGE) while its existing direct competitor (AST)'s healing was buffed to essentially match WHM's anyway.

The problem with WHM isn't that it's bad or "worse", it's that the 2 min meta has force shifted the game to a specific set of abilities being highly desired, a second set being somewhat desired, and WHM hasn't been given either while it's competitors were largely given both.

Yet Macrocosmos completely invalidating certain raid mechanics is perfectly fine (heavy /s)

One. And they went out of their way not to make another like that in the next tier (not to mention Lilybell and Panhaima have similar outcomes), and that is nothing compared to Critlospread LB3 cheese.

It's worth noting that the only shields that can't stack are barrier healer GCD shields.

Oh, I don't disagree with you - this is another reason Barrier Healers are OP right now. I meant that's the entire reason they were skittish about that for a while. Before completely forgetting they were skittish about it. I feel like it was KIND of not intended, since if they didn't care they wouldn't have made it where shields didn't stack. They did that originally to prevent nAST and SCH shield stacks, and then kept that tradition with SGE. When Seraph was added, it was a big deal as a special CD because they stacked, but now everyone and their dog (except WHM) has a party shield. Hell, PLD and WAR both do! It's one of those "Here's a cool special thing, doesn't it feel awesome to use?!" "Oh, crap, we've given you so many, they feel normal to use! Well, guess we'll just keep doing that since it's normal now." XD

It's kind of like the automatic Crit Direct Hit stuff. Felt amazing when you had one or two, but then it became normal AND required reworking other skills and stat boosts because of how they upended the optimal builds and stuff.

It's a lot of stuff like that where they need to really either turn back the clock on healers or go in a different direction or split them or something. But it makes the Pure/Barrier split a laughable failure. I feel like next expansion, Pure/Barrier will be like Main Tank/Off Tank was from ShB.

Context matters. Negating the Damage Down in E10S for the wall-orbs (for uptime) is clearly cheese and not intended. Negating the Ifrit KB via shielding is memes, because it's not a threat, just a mild inconvenience. Negating the same Ifrit KB, but in UWU, is the intended strategy for the fight. It's 'cheesing the mechanics' only because the design wasn't made with it in mind. But if it WAS made with it in mind, then it's no longer cheese. It's the intended solution. There may need to be a clear indication that 'hey if you have a shield up for this mechanic, you can negate it/not get a debuff/it's a good idea to' for newer players to understand the concept, but maybe not. After all, how many people completely ignore all the interject-able casts in the game

Accurate.

Fair enough. I think they intend KB Immunities to be used on those "intended" ones, though. Generally. Ultimates are kind of weird in that they are their own animal, but not something we can base the rest of the game (including Job mechs) around, really.

Yeah I keep telling some of my FC mates that the healer role is very "situational". Even doing the same fight is gonna be different depending on the players in the party. Take day 1 alliance raid. The new one recently stirred the community some because some groups breezed through the content while other groups really put up a struggle. Thus healers work very different in those two types of groups, and its the same across the board with all content. I don't EVER expect a healer to do a complicating DPS rotation while they are in a very high maintenance group. I've already got hounded by some statics to do more damage while they still make mistakes in savage content. Its almost like you can't win as a healer, so the feedback is not helping at times.

Mhm. Agreed.

[Shurrikhan]

No, it's not really that. WHM hasn't always been shafted, per se. WHM in ShB was one of the stronger healer options in vacuum. The problem is it continues to not have buffs in a game where the meta is always chasing buffs.

That seems an overly constrained way to look at the situation. If you could get the same effect, as a party, as having those buffs without actually needing those discrete actions... there'd be no real issue.

That's not to say WHM should never get buffs (though I do hope they won't be more hit-on-CD <5% dmg amp raidbuff garbage), but neither is their presence or lack the delineating factor.

Moreover, the reason for WHM's leading value in certain fights in ShB wasn't anything to do with its supportive kit or even its sustained DPS, but simply because it could cleave adds with a banked Misery. It, in those rare cases, actually offered a potential net advantage in features over other healers.

You can see a similar situation with MCH. In a vacuum, MCH was fine. In an average party, a skilled MCH would bring more DPS than a DNC or BRD's buffs would. But the meta said it was trash anyway.

When are we talking here? In Endwalker before the latest wave of buffs, MCH's rDPS (which already includes DNC/BRD buffs' value) was far enough behind DNC and BRD at over the 50th percentile that their advantage in aDPS (i.e., how well they could exploit raidwide buffs) wasn't about to make up for it.

Assuming you had a player with equal skill in practice on any of the three jobs, it'd be in the party's favor at that time for them not to take MCH, even before accounting for the further advantage in non-rDPS utility DNC and BRD hold over MCH.

[Renathras]

Uh...I'm not sure WHM's value in fights was because once every 60 seconds it could cleave 2 adds for around 1200 potency (once all buffs factored in) Misery.

WHM's value in ShB was its raw healing (pre-nerf Thin Air Cure 3 spam made anything that didn't outright kill the party and that people could stack for entirely survivable, largely by WHM solo spamming Cure 3) and WHM's consistent DPS in the pre-2 min meta buff world where sustained consistently high damage actually was more relevant than high burst buff window damage and said buffs.

.

As for MCH: For most PF groups, the team as a whole isn't above 50%, so MCH's damage was comparable. Moreover, with lower skilled parties (the average in PF and in random ques), a decent MCH was doing comparable overall damage to a decent DNC/BRD if they were in a party of low-gear middle-to-scrub level players (e.g. the average playerbase)

In other words, MCH was the better option to the average player party. You know, those people who don't know what the Balance is and eat crayons while waiting for their ques to pop. But because the meta said it was trash, people who were WELL below the meta even mattering were ditching it for DNC/BRD even though MCH would have brought their party more damage in the content they were running (stuff like HydEx farm parties and the like).

It's in the party's favor to have a DNC/BRD if the party collectively is anywhere above 60%. It's not if they're collectively below 40%.

[ForsakenRoe]

Accurate.

Fair enough. I think they intend KB Immunities to be used on those "intended" ones, though. Generally. Ultimates are kind of weird in that they are their own animal, but not something we can base the rest of the game (including Job mechs) around, really.

We can definitely salvage parts that are useful and can be made to fit with the 'rest of the game' though. There's a fair few things we see that some of the ultimate raiders will make comparisons to. For example, in the latest EX there's a bit where 2 people have to take tethers, and keep swapping who's taking them before the stacks they give hit 5. At the same time, 'limit cut' numbers are above people's heads, saying who's gonna get cleaved. As soon as I saw it, I said 'ah wormhole' and we tried to solve it in the same way, ie 5/6 takes the tethers first, so there's time for the debuff to fall off before their cleave. It's actually 7/8 who start with the tether here, but the point remains the same: I associated it with an ultimate mechanic, and it turned out to be very similar solution. They love to do this with other mechanics from savage too. EG: the patch after Titan and his big halfroom punches, we got Engels in the 24man and his big halfroom punches.

People say 'dynamo/chariot' for in/outs because of UCOB, people say 'rot' for literally any mechanic where a debuff is passed via contact (even if the debuff doesn't work like rot, 'it times out you die' is rot everything else isn't), people say 'limit cut' every time a 1-8 number appears above their head

And for the UWU KB, negation via shield was definitely the intended solution. At the time of release, BRD and MCH did not have Arm's Length in their kit. Nor did tanks, PLD had Tempered Will, WAR had Holmgang and IR (if it lined up), and DRK had to try and time it right with Plunge. And at the time, Plunge's animation-vs-effect difference was awful. Like, Benediction level of delay. Still remember having to use Cover as PLD to allow both myself and the BRD to avoid getting kb'd by Vacuum Wave in Exdeath (doorboss ver), had a macro for it and everything.

Reminiscing aside, yeh, we could definitely have mechanics which say 'hey have a shield on for this'. As a very quick example, let's take an example boss, who has a raidwide called, idk Blast Wave. Instead of casting it, and it does damage once, we could have this raidwide do TWO instances of damage. One with a static value of say, 200 damage, and one that is scaled to however much for the raid's difficulty. This '200 damage' raidwide could be flagged as 'unique' damage typing, or even better, introduce a new 'yellow shield' icon to say 'hey shield against this one to negate something'. Since that 200 damage is calculated 'first', the shields you apply would protect against it before the 'real damage', and it's such a low amount of damage, literally any shielding at all will protect you against it. Debuffs would be even easier. Have a raidwide that applies a debuff, with a description saying 'Does X effect. Fully negating the damage of the attack that applied this debuff will prevent it's application.'

[Renathras]

We can definitely salvage parts that are useful and can be made to fit with the 'rest of the game' though. There's a fair few things we see that some of the ultimate raiders will make comparisons to. For example, in the latest EX there's a bit where 2 people have to take tethers, and keep swapping who's taking them before the stacks they give hit 5. At the same time, 'limit cut' numbers are above people's heads, saying who's gonna get cleaved. As soon as I saw it, I said 'ah wormhole' and we tried to solve it in the same way, ie 5/6 takes the tethers first, so there's time for the debuff to fall off before their cleave. It's actually 7/8 who start with the tether here, but the point remains the same: I associated it with an ultimate mechanic, and it turned out to be very similar solution. They love to do this with other mechanics from savage too. EG: the patch after Titan and his big halfroom punches, we got Engels in the 24man and his big halfroom punches.

Right, but this is exactly why this doesn't work: That mechanic has been unclearable in PF so far. Either people do enough damage to clear the boss before it starts (which is possible) or it wipes parties. Most of us have no idea what "Wormhole" is. I saw it come up in a Reddit discussion where people were talking about how hard the mechanic was and I pointed out it's the most difficult version of Limit Cut I've ever seen, and someone said "It's easy, it's just like Wormhole", and everyone else in the thread was like "wtf is 'wormhole'? o.O"

Mechanics that aren't obvious aren't obvious.

As a healer, I figured out a while back no damage negates knockbacks, but that's because I've been healing since 2.3 and noticed it in my Praetorium runs (Ultima Weapon) where sometimes I'd get punted and other times I did not, and I eventually figured out that was what was going on. Had I been a Tank or DPS, I don't think I ever would have realized that was going on.

I've literally never heard anyone say "dynamo/chariot". People say "in/out" or "ring/point blank". Rarely (Hunt community), you'll hear "Bog/Flush" because of ShB's Mudman A Rank, but usually people only say it related to that fight. I've never heard "dynamo/chariot" before ever. I think you're overestimating how universal things within your subgroup of the community are to the community at large. I've also never heard "rot". The term is "tethers". Most people also say "cleaves" not "Limit Cut". Raiders say "Limit Cut". Everyone else calls them "cleaves".

UWU or original? I'm trying to remember when UWU came out, but everyone's had a KB since they implemented Role Actions in place of Cross-Class, right? I never remember when that was, but I think it was when SB/4.0 came out. Though I guess maybe it was just Melee at the time...? But either way, that was kind of my point: The Devs demand more from Ultimate raiders, who have to know a lot of specifics and special nuance. For example, people at one time knew that Fleche used Piercing damage type.

Though I do agree there could be a "shield this" indicator. I mean, we have all kinds now, from stack to spread to lightning rod to prey and on and on. They could have some kind of "this needs to be shielded" indicator just the same.

I'm more saying I highly doubt they'll do it. Could be wrong, but seems like it.

What they'd do instead of weird debuffs, though, would probably just be make attacks that one-shot unshielded people. But then we still run into the mitigation vs shielding thing. They also prefer people being able to avoid stuff like that unless it's a healing check (e.g. the bleed in ZodEx), but in those cases, they're designed to be healing checks (spamming heals/oGCDs after the damage), not pre-sheidling checks that are just a "can you press button <AOE shield> before a mechanic or fail?"

[DayHealer]

There were two questions, transcript is on Reddit here.

Question 1:

Question 2:

This was eye opening, thank you. I hope they continue with the road started from P8S, is a step in the right direction.