My take on the simplicity of healers and the healer problem

[BelleStarlily]

Hello,

I'm a healer main that joined after the release of Shadowbringers and as a person who is used to the new alteration of healers I am mostly happy and generally don't mind the homogenization amongst their spells but I can't deny there are some issues.

Healing overall is a job that has a really low skill floor and no skill ceiling to keep more experienced players having fun with the role. Also the job design largely matches the hardest difficulty of the game (ultimates, min ilvl savage), where planning cooldowns around actually matters. This leaves the rest of the people with an overload of healing buttons with little to no use.

I have touched every piece of content in the game from casual to ultimate and played all 4 healers, so here are some things I'd like to see change in the future.

Fight Design:
1. More vulnerability debuffs instead of damage downs
2. More % damage raidwides or ones that require you to have a shield in order to survive
3. More 1HP drops that require a quick topping off before the actual damage hits.
4 An actual heal-through enrage not the 2 soft enrage aoes into hard enrage we currently have.

WHM:
1. A party wide shielding ability. - AST has shield, SCH/SGE have regen abilities, so I don't see why not.
2. Another aoe regen ability tied to lilies. Can even be as simple as reworking freecure to give a regen to Afflatus heals. This will make Rapture/Solace stand out and not be a Medica/Cure 2 equivalents but with a fancier effect and no cast.

AST:
1. Rework Astrodyne - I want the fantasy of buffing my allies, why on earth do I need a selfish buff?
2. Make Minor Arcana a card you can draw out of combat and allow astro to pick if they want a heal or dmg card.

SCH:
1. Remove/rework Energy Drain - it should reward you for healing not punish you for using your healing gauge for damage.
2. Make fairies unique again.
3. Allow Seraph's Fey Illumination/Whispering Dawn equivalent abilities to match the capstone ability that Seraph is meant to be, rather than it being the same but with a fancy new name.

SGE: I think it's a really good base that has improved over the patches and it can only be improved further with spells that build upon the fantasy of being this combat medic that heals by doing damage.
1. Give a spell that is locked behind a cooldown and it gives the whole party a Kardion like effect that heals them up for a limited amount of time while you're dealing damage.

This is my take on the issue surrounding healers and the things I'd like to see introduced to make things more engaging.

[Avoidy]

Agreed, especially on AST. I don't know who asked for Astrodyne in its current state but it's absolutely terrible. Just gutted the core mechanic of Divination (a group buff) to give it to Astrodyne (a personal buff that I don't care about) while Divination becomes just another boring button to hit every 2 minutes and forget about. I played AST a lot in shb but dropped it kind of hard in EW. And WHM not having an on demand shield option while ast does, and all the "barrier" healers have aoe regens is such a nasty oversight.

But, honestly... after Yoshida-san said the new dungeon would force healers to use a skill they're not accustomed to, and that skill turned out to be Esuna, I sort of gave up on the whole healing thing. And when they playtested Aglaia, they even mentioned dropping the healer playtester because he got too good at it and they wanted to balance content around someone who was basically a total scrub. The devs don't trust the players to rise to any semblance of challenge offered by a complex kit. For a long time this level of mistrust was on display towards healers, but now this mentality is spreading to DPS jobs so people are finally starting to wake up. The quest for broad appeal has given us a heaping pile of shit and a player base that behaves like they're blind and suicidal in duties/raids.

[BelleStarlily]

Yeah I heard about the healer playtester thing and overall the simplifying thing has spread to both DPS and Tanks. As much as I agree that jobs should provide a low skill floor it's a much better design to also have a skill ceiling. It provides depth to the game and makes it more engaging at the same time to people who have already passed the introduction.

It's probably a lot of Copium but I hope in 7.0 and above they make a distinct separation between what a skill floor and skill ceiling is for the separate jobs.. cause currently both are on the same lvl and only fight's difficulty raises it a little bit but I don't think that's enough.

[Jeeqbit]

Healing overall is a job that has a really low skill floor and no skill ceiling to keep more experienced players having fun with the role.

I don't agree with that because although I am not a healer main, I have observed healers planning cooldowns with eachother and having a learning curve. If you were at the skill floor, you would probably just spam cure into cure II instead.

Also the job design largely matches the hardest difficulty of the game (ultimates, min ilvl savage), where planning cooldowns around actually matters. This leaves the rest of the people with an overload of healing buttons with little to no use.

I agree with this, but there are some exceptions, such as leveling dungeons where the item level has a tight sync or very specific pulls in specific dungeons, which can cause you to burn through your entire kit. Most dungeons don't sync well enough and barely require healing though.

1. More vulnerability debuffs instead of damage downs

I agree that vulnerability debuffs made expansions like Heavensward more challenging. From what they have told us, they moved away from it to damage downs to allow us to see further into the fight even if the rest of the party wasn't very good, while still making it difficult to beat because of lack of DPS. Players are more likely to greed a vuln than a damage down as well because of their obsession with DPS.

2. More % damage raidwides or ones that require you to have a shield in order to survive

I do like this because it prevents a fight from becoming easier because of gear, but that is a problem as well because gear progression is important in an MMO, otherwise what is the point of trying to get the raid gear?

I am mostly happy and generally don't mind the homogenization amongst their spells

Their abilities were always pretty homogenized anyway. They always had a cure, cure 2, a single target shield (Adloquium/Stoneskin), aoe regen, aoe shields (even white mages had aoe shields known as Stoneskin II), an esuna, an aoe attack, a single target attack you can spam, a damage-over-time, a healer bubble of some kind, a rez and before role actions, they would cross-class Cleric Stance to do attacks. I could probably find more.

It's true that scholars had a few more dots from being an arcanist which made them busy, but even white mages had accumulated a lot of these by Stormblood.

Astrologians were the most unique with their card system. None of the healers had anything like it and I agree that their card system has been nerfed to the point of not being nearly as fun. I found it really fun at the start of Shadowbringers so they should at least go back to that and work from there.

What created the concept of a shield healer was the value people placed on scholar for the task over white mages. White mage's stoneskins got meme'd to the point of being removed, turning them into a pure healer, a distinction that still exists today but was kind of started by players.

1. Remove/rework Energy Drain - it should reward you for healing not punish you for using your healing gauge for damage.

I already address how WHM had a shield ability before, so another history lesson. They did remove Energy Drain once and the backlash was so big they rushed to bring it back as fast as possible in the next patch. Scholars love Energy Drain and they get upset when it's taken away.

[VerdeLuck]

I don't particularly like that AST and WHM changes, especially not combined. WHM has the issue currently that it has no identity other than massive overhealing, and being "the easy one". It suffers from a lack of utility and 2 minute party buffs in a game where healing is done as infrequently as possible, and only dps, shields, mitigations, and party buffs matter. Since WHM directly competes with AST, adding even more party buffs to it while only adding an extra regen to WHM, which lets be honest would rarely be used, only widens that gap.
Instead, I think WHM needds to be given a new identity in the game. It's seen as the easy one, and the bad one out of the healers, and aside from early prog and people who really like the job, everyone would rather have an AST instead due to what it brings for damage, shielding, mitigation, and party buffs. Having big heals on GCD with very little utility is not a very good identity or fit for the healing requirements in this game since almost no duty actually has the healing throughput required for it to make a difference. As we've seen with Paladin as well, the 2 minute buff meta is here to stay and either jobs bring a buff and contribute to the 2 minute burst window, or they get left behind.

I think more is needed than you even list here, WHM probably needs a rework in 7.0, or at least heavy adjustments to fit in with how people play the game.

[Rilifane]

They did remove Energy Drain once and the backlash was so big they rushed to bring it back as fast as possible in the next patch. Scholars love Energy Drain and they get upset when it's taken away.

As a SCH main, I don't want it get taken away and I'll definitely get upset if the solution is yet again "delete it" instead of working on the flaws. If someone wants to play SCH without ED then I'll kindly direct them towards SGE.
If the choice is only "get it taken away or keep it" then I'll always choose "keep it" because this and Dissipation is the last, sad bit of a skill ceiling we have left since it allows us to optimize a bit more even if the reward is boring. At least the path to optimizing it is still fun, requires coordination and a little bit of skill.
If they could rework it into something far better then by all means, go ahead.
But just deleting it? No. And from the reactions many other SCH mains seem to feel the same. SE has a habit of just deleting things without giving anything back. That is exactly the reason why we are where we are and part of the playerbase is definitely also guilty of pushing for just deleting something instead of reworking it into something better.

[BelleStarlily]

I already address how WHM had a shield ability before, so another history lesson. They did remove Energy Drain once and the backlash was so big they rushed to bring it back as fast as possible in the next patch. Scholars love Energy Drain and they get upset when it's taken away.

I agree that Energy Drain is a huge part of SCH's kit and it does provide it this little sense of optimization and a learning curve.. that's why when I said remove/rework I had something different in mind. I'd rather see it removed as an ability that shares aetherflow stacks with your healing abilities and work similar to how Ruin 4 worked for SMN. Make it reward you for being efficient and this way you have more resources to react to emergencies without sacrificing your entire mana pull on GCDs.

Like imagine SGE's Toxicons were Addersgall stacks instead.. that would be awful.

[BelleStarlily]

I don't particularly like that AST and WHM changes, especially not combined. WHM has the issue currently that it has no identity other than massive overhealing, and being "the easy one". It suffers from a lack of utility and 2 minute party buffs in a game where healing is done as infrequently as possible, and only dps, shields, mitigations, and party buffs matter. Since WHM directly competes with AST, adding even more party buffs to it while only adding an extra regen to WHM, which lets be honest would rarely be used, only widens that gap.
Instead, I think WHM needds to be given a new identity in the game. It's seen as the easy one, and the bad one out of the healers, and aside from early prog and people who really like the job, everyone would rather have an AST instead due to what it brings for damage, shielding, mitigation, and party buffs. Having big heals on GCD with very little utility is not a very good identity or fit for the healing requirements in this game since almost no duty actually has the healing throughput required for it to make a difference. As we've seen with Paladin as well, the 2 minute buff meta is here to stay and either jobs bring a buff and contribute to the 2 minute burst window, or they get left behind.

I think more is needed than you even list here, WHM probably needs a rework in 7.0, or at least heavy adjustments to fit in with how people play the game.

I absolutely agree with everything you said. Most of WHM's identity was stripped away in earlier expansions to be given to other healers as cross class actions and it wasn't given anything to compensate for what was taken. On top of all, those cross class actions are now completely gone. But generally I do think that WHM's current version is a step in the right direction it just needs some love to make it proudly stand next to AST rather than quietly sitting in it's shadow.

[ty_taurus]

I don't agree with that because although I am not a healer main, I have observed healers planning cooldowns with eachother and having a learning curve. If you were at the skill floor, you would probably just spam cure into cure II instead.

Planning cooldowns isn't really the same as having a higher skill ceiling. A skill ceiling is about technical difficulty in performing your job at its apex whereas healing resource management is really just about fight knowledge. That isn't to say there isn't any overlap, but doing something like performing your Mudras correctly as a Ninja is always providing some level of technical challenge, whereas saying "Hey, I'm going to use Macrocosmos for Fire/Ice in P8S" is a button press.

For more challenging content, using your Cure > Cure II combo is not the floor as it will get your party killed. Recognizing the relationship between GCD and OGCD heals, and when to use either is the skill floor, but that's kind of where the road ends as well. Using your cooldowns more effectively can result in more opportunity to cast Glareficoilosis, but that's the extent of your skill ceiling. Your DPS toolkit is the barest of minimums, so you can't really squeeze additional damage out of the time you spend attacking other than during burst windows, which would result in a higher ceiling. And from a healing/support side, healers aren't capable of undoing mistakes 95% of the time. If the first tank dies to Flameviper, that's it. The other tank is dead. There's NOTHING you can do to stop that.

This is, of course, all through the lens of Savage content and to a lesser degree EX. Anything less, and the skill floor is just having a pulse.

[Nizzi]

Energy Drain optimization isn't a punishment, it's a reward for gearing and properly learning fights and where you can get by using your free heals. Unfortunately, it's pretty much the only slightly interesting thing a healer has in reclears beyond more Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis ""optimization"".

I wish the community would stop characterizing any sort of choice in any job as a "punishment" if it doesn't just give you an immediate reward; this is why skill ceilings of jobs continue to meet the skill floor with each passing expansion because the community continues to call any sort of choice a punishment if they're given the opportunity to make the wrong choice.
Straight out, if a Scholar dumps all of their Aetherflow into Energy Drain during prog, they're a very bad Scholar. If a Scholar uses it willy nilly and then forces their cohealer to use their own resources that they would've had for future mechanics to cover for that, they're a bad Scholar. But it's okay to be a bad Scholar as long as you try to do better and improve.

If you don't like Energy Drain, SGE doesn't have it while having a similar toolkit to SCH. If you want a "rewarded with damage for healing" mechanic, WHM has that. Aetherflow/Energy Drain optimization is fun for a lot of Scholar mains, and the huge part of SCH's appeal is tactically using your entire toolkit to the best of its abilities to ensure you can do more damage, which Aetherflow/ED fits into really well. This is also what I love about things like Dissipation or Recitation, multifunctional tools that can change on the fly with how you need them - making proper decision apart of the skill ceiling for SCH. Healers need more of that, not less IMO.