The Problem with Healer Feedback, and requested changes

[IDontPetLalas]

Incidentally, you missed neutral sect, so this part "They have no party shields and no high uptime mitigation potential, though AST's isn't terrible because it's up frequently " , so I would say that "isn't terrible" doesn't apply in many cases.

[Renathras]

Incidentally, you missed neutral sect, so this part "They have no party shields and no high uptime mitigation potential, though AST's isn't terrible because it's up frequently " , so I would say that "isn't terrible" doesn't apply in many cases.

I...didn't?

Note I said party shields. Single target shields don't affect the whole party. (I'm not trying to be snippy, that's just what I mean by "party shields"). So like, if there's damage coming in that will one-shot people, SGE can use Holos, Zoe + Eukrasian Prognosis, and Panhaima. SCH can use Seraph + Consolation, Succor, or far better, Recitation + Adlo + Deploy, and people often forget but Expedience also has a damage reduction component...and it lasts for a lengthy 20 seconds. And they can use some of these in conjunction with each other as well as with their damage reduction CDs. SCH can pair Soil with Fey Illumination (for magic type damage; also increases the size of that Spreadlo shield), SGE can stack Kerachole + Holos (Kera and Tauro don't stack, but they both will stack with Holos)

So they have mitigation that affects the whole party, including ones that are up every 30 seconds, and they have both CD based party shields and spamable party shields that can be used at any time (Succor and Eukrasian Prognosis can be used at any time unless you're outright OOM)

Conversely, AST has 2 single party shields and a 10% damage reduction every 1 minute. WHM has the same shielding (a slightly stronger 500 potency vs 400) and the same damage reduction...once every 2 minutes. While AST's is up frequently ENOUGH to be up for most major mechanics you need to reduce the damage from, WHM's tends to miss every other (every second) major damage spike mechanic. AST's is up JUUUST frequently enough to not have this problem all the time. Each of them can save exactly 2 people from "you don't have enough HP to survive this attack" per minute. And the spamable Adlo and EuDiagnosis (non-crit) generate 580 potency barriers vs Benison's 500 and Intersection's 400...

Oh, I'm stupid. Neutral Sect. XD

Yeah, best part is, when I typed that up, I was thinking AST had an AOE barrier, but then I was looking through their abilities and didn't see it outright (I have said many times AST is the healer I don't play - have it at 90, but haven't messed with it and mostly CT Roulette, Cutscene Roulette, and Frontline Roulette leveled the thing), and so I was like "Well, I don't want to say it has something it doesn't" and so removed it. But yeah, add Neutral Sect's 312.5 potency AOE healing AND they can slap an additional 400 potency heal on whoever the two weakest party members are to ensure they survive just in case. It's a 120 sec CD, but...it still exists.

So yeah, AST is basically a "Barrier-lite" healer.

So WHM is the only actual non-Barrier healer in the game.

POINT: We don't have a Pure/Barrier split. We have a WHM/everyone else split.

EDIT:

Besides, nobody takes AST over WHM for mitigation of all things.

I mean, yes but also no. The answer's a bit nuanced.

Even IF WHM had the same party buffs as AST, AST would still be the meta choice because it has the party buffs AND mitigation potential. The slightly higher personal DPS that WHM brings wouldn't make up for that. With AST you get 0.5x a second Barrier/mitigation healer AND you get party buffs.

SCH is the given choice because it has both. AST and SGE are roughly interchangeable in the second slot because SGE offers a bit more additional protection for prog while AST offers more party damage and half the mitigation anyway. WHM has literally none of the things the meta cares about.

I do agree that SCH/SGE works well because it's easy to not overlap incompatible shields. Adlo > Diagnosis > Prognosis > Succor is the order of precedence, which arguably also favors the strongest shields anyway, and Adlo's crit secondary shield, EuDiagnosis' crit secondary shield, Holos, Panhaima, and Consolation/Seraph shields (and Neutral Sect) all stack just fine.

Again: This ends with the result of it's not Pure/Barrier, it's WHM/everyone else.

Consider, Medica 2 ticks are 150 now (god i remember when they were 50, and it lasted 30s...), Soil and Kerachole both tick for 100 per tick. 15s duration, 30s CD. For the (arguably) low cost of just two lost Energy Drains per minute, a SCH/SGE comp can have 100% uptime on '66% of the potency of Medica 2', but without having to spend 4 Glares worth of potency (or MP) on maintaining it. It's ridiculous how much HPS the 'barrier healers' have, and with the change that happened a while back on the naughty website, where Mit now counts as HPS, often I see logs where I (the WHM) am doing 2/3 or even HALF of the 'effective HPS' of the Barrier healer. Maybe that's me being trash and a bad cohealer, but I also have the same happen in reverse when I'm on SGE, they have 66%ish of the healing of me

And I think the issue is simple: Healing throughput only helps if there's healing to do, but Mit ALWAYS has some effect. And if the Mit is strong, the Healing required is lessened. Weird isnt it

Exactly!

That's why I noted that raw healing always has to be LARGER than mit + healing because mit has additional effects (it's always useful as you say, but it also allows people to survive things that otherwise would kill them, and raw healing doesn't revive the dead), meaning to be balanced, raw Pure healers need to do something like 125% to 150% the healing of the Barrier healers. The problem is, the Barrier healers can arguably output comparable healing to the Pure healers AND mitigation. AST can do the Pure healing bit but also provide some decent mitigation, and stupidly has better MP economy than WHM while doing so.

It seems that WHM should have SOMETHING going for it. Either the biggest heals OR the best MP economy when spamming them OR more mitigation.

"It has Cure 3" seems not to be a valid answer, especially since Thin Air was neutered to curtail its usability in high impact situations. And Lilybell, Macrocosmos, and Panhaima all EXIST anyway, somewhat neutering Cure 3's use case of "spam during periods of high damage to save the party from pulses/waves of high damage". NidhogEx was the "When I learned to love Cure 3 fight" for this reason, but all those abilities, in addition to other oGCD tools combined with them, now exist which didn't then. Back then, you had Soil/Collective + Thin Air Cure3 spam. Now you have all these other tools to the point a SGE could - at level in entry level 90 gear - soloheal ZodEx's multi-hit healing checks as long as you killed him before that very last one (9 hitter) before the Enrage. Which, if you were solo healing to pick up a 5th DPS, your party should have been able to do.

Also, I agree with you on a lot here, though I think mitigation, not shields, is what should be healer-wide. Or at least more NORMALIZED - every healer should have at least one up every 1 minute, and ideally a stronger one up every 2 mins and a weaker one up every 1 min. Like imagine if Consolation had a 5% mitigation when used and Collective was 5% while Neutral was reworked to remove the barrier but provide 10% (basically inverting WHM's 60 sec boosting AOE heal potency + weaker mitigation vs 2 min boosting healing done and 10%, AST's would be 60 sec boosted healing done with the HoT with the lesser 5% mitigation while the 2 min would be the AOE healing boost and 10%).

As we learned from P1-8S (if we didn't already know it before), mitigation is king and when the party isn't mitigating, the healers who can't are blamed for people dying. It'd be nice if all the healers had those tools. We'd still get blamed, but at least we'd have the agency to actually do something about it.

[Rilifane]

I mean, yes but also no. The answer's a bit nuanced.

Even IF WHM had the same party buffs as AST, AST would still be the meta choice because it has the party buffs AND mitigation potential. The slightly higher personal DPS that WHM brings wouldn't make up for that. With AST you get 0.5x a second Barrier/mitigation healer AND you get party buffs.

SCH is the given choice because it has both. AST and SGE are roughly interchangeable in the second slot because SGE offers a bit more additional protection for prog while AST offers more party damage and half the mitigation anyway. WHM has literally none of the things the meta cares about.

I do agree that SCH/SGE works well because it's easy to not overlap incompatible shields. Adlo > Diagnosis > Prognosis > Succor is the order of precedence, which arguably also favors the strongest shields anyway, and Adlo's crit secondary shield, EuDiagnosis' crit secondary shield, Holos, Panhaima, and Consolation/Seraph shields (and Neutral Sect) all stack just fine.[/hb]

The answer for what is meta and why is usually lacking a lot of nuance.
If people go for strong comps it's "Would we survive? Yes -> More deeps" - which ironically meant that people switched off AST early tier when mitigation would matter most because their buffs weren't nearly as strong from the lack of gear of the rest so WHM brought less mitigation on paper but more than enough to survive in practice and the reliable dps.
There's also a long list of mechanics or chains of mechanics where you can't use CU for mitigation because it wouldn't catch enough people. Especially on the problematic mechanics that are most likely to kill people from damage taken like Ruby 5, Cachexia 1, towers & birds, all Harvests, Hippo jumps, Fourfold, Snake 2, NA1/2 except for stack, towers. That often leaves huge gaps when you can't use it fur survival.
You can't rely on CU for survival in these cases because you'll not catch everyone and it needs additional single target shields/ mit from someone else for them to make it work which isn't always available or feasible to apply in time on the right target.
AST is nowhere near a second barrier healer. WHM is lacking mitigation but AST isn't that much better off to consider it the healer that brings "half the mitigation", that's just exaggerated.


And the priority for shields in terms of opportunity cost/ efficiency would be:
EDiag (since SGE gets a damage return from Toxikon) > Adlo > Physick (since SCH fairy keeps healing) > Diagnosis
ET Succor + EProg works just fine most of the time too, if someone really doesn't want to coordinate properly then you're, Succor + Prog works and is easy. But I have yet to see a single time when we both need to spam GCD aoe heals, including on the "cursed boss for SGE/ SCH".
But for ease of use, Adlo + Diagnosis and Succor + Prognosis does the job.

[Renathras]

The answer for what is meta and why is usually lacking a lot of nuance.

With this, I totally agree.

But the reason WHM is so non-meta is it doesn't win any of those arguments. SGE does comparable DPS to WHM while also offering additional benefits; and is arguably about as easy to play once you get how it works. AST does comparable healing to WHM while also offering additional benefits. SCH does comparable damage and comparable healing to WHM while also offering additional benefits.

This varies during the tier and based on gear, but WHM's personal damage is not significantly greater ENOUGH to make up for the difference. You always want at least one mitigator early in the tier because of lower ilevels and that raidwides now seem tuned to where they do absolutely one-shot the weak Jobs (Healers and Casters) outright if not mitigated. This pretty much guarantees you will want at least one of SCH, SGE, or in a pinch, AST. Because of all its benefits, SCH is pretty much the in demand choice if you can get your hands on one. After that, AST is the only one that does significantly less damage than WHM. Because SGE does comparable damage, SGE is actively competing with WHM for the non-SCH spot in early gear levels. And as people gear up and AST buffs become more powerful, AST moves up into that competition since its raid damage contribution is now competitive or better than WHM and SGE's bulk damage.

Right now on the forbidden site for P5S, WHM, despite being the most played overall, is the least represented at the top end. SCH/AST is still the meta, with SCH/SGE being an entirely functional alternative.

[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.

[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.

[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.'