A question: What makes a Healer "easy/simple" or "hard/complex"?

[ty_taurus]

What makes healer easy? Its simple really. We have too many healing tools that the game doesn't make use of and lack of interactions with them all. Someone already pointed out AST, but I'm going to use it since I know the class so well.

Collective Unconciousness (CU), Celestial Opposition (CO), Earthly Star (ES) and I'll even put Horoscope here are all on a 60 cooldown with raidwides (both in dungeons, raids, and EX) coming in at AROUND the 60 mark. That means I usually have 3-4 heals up every raidwide and can usually use the same one for the same mechanic - there fore, its boring.

You inspired an interesting idea... What if instead of Horoscope being a reactivated heal... the effect changes depending on which tool you activate it with. Even if it were something simple like, if you activate it with a regen heal, it increases magic defense by 10%, and if you activate it with a flat heal, it increases physical defense by 10%. In practice, it can be a lot more specific--even tool specific, but that's just a very simplistic example to communicate the idea. You could have Horoscope have a shorter cooldown, but other heals have longer ones, so you'll often have Horoscope to pair with heal mechanics, but you have to plan out your tools to better take advantage of the secondary effect.

[ASkellington]

You inspired an interesting idea... What if instead of Horoscope being a reactivated heal... the effect changes depending on which tool you activate it with. Even if it were something simple like, if you activate it with a regen heal, it increases magic defense by 10%, and if you activate it with a flat heal, it increases physical defense by 10%. In practice, it can be a lot more specific--even tool specific, but that's just a very simplistic example to communicate the idea. You could have Horoscope have a shorter cooldown, but other heals have longer ones, so you'll often have Horoscope to pair with heal mechanics, but you have to plan out your tools to better take advantage of the secondary effect.

Honestly, Horoscope is fine as it is. Its an okish heal by itself but becomes better and lasts longer if you cast Helios, either one. If you removed 2 of my other oGCDs, it'd be fine as is. Having so many secondary effects... no. Then it makes it bloated. Now if Nocturnal Sect was back and a stance dance where in Diurnal it did something and Nocturnal did something different sure.

Tl:dr if there was one more skill that worked with it, sure. Considering all the inputs that could work with it (ie. Exaltation and CI for example) I think we would have the same problem with Horoscope as I do with AST's current kit. Only instead of pressing 1 button I'd be pressing two. I want AOE mitigation? Horoscope + Exalt. I want AOE shields? Horoscope + CI. I guess if you really wanted to make it work it would need to be a longer cool down, not a shorter one. Kinda like Synastry is. Unless you propose the other skills would be on a longer CD.

[ty_taurus]

Honestly, Horoscope is fine as it is. Its an okish heal by itself but becomes better and lasts longer if you cast Helios, either one. If you removed 2 of my other oGCDs, it'd be fine as is. Having so many secondary effects... no. Then it makes it bloated. Now if Nocturnal Sect was back and a stance dance where in Diurnal it did something and Nocturnal did something different sure.

Tl:dr if there was one more skill that worked with it, sure. Considering all the inputs that could work with it (ie. Exaltation and CI for example) I think we would have the same problem with Horoscope as I do with AST's current kit. Only instead of pressing 1 button I'd be pressing two. I want AOE mitigation? Horoscope + Exalt. I want AOE shields? Horoscope + CI. I guess if you really wanted to make it work it would need to be a longer cool down, not a shorter one. Kinda like Synastry is. Unless you propose the other skills would be on a longer CD.

I didn't necessarily mean a different effect for every other heal, but rather you could connect the effect to a few specific heals, or even your card effects. And I used Horoscope as the baseline for thematic reasons. Reading the party's fortune feels like it should have some type of varying effect rather than something that's always the same.

[ASkellington]

I didn't necessarily mean a different effect for every other heal, but rather you could connect the effect to a few specific heals, or even your card effects. And I used Horoscope as the baseline for thematic reasons. Reading the party's fortune feels like it should have some type of varying effect rather than something that's always the same.

I'm not against the idea if done well (except NO to cards tying into it; as much as I would love that I cannot see that being done well at all by this dev team), but that would mean an overhaul to all of AST's heals to cut the fat (which, I'm not against but - dev team are they willing to do it? I don't think so).

Its why I wanted Noct Sect to come back because it could do that. Remove Neutral, and the Mitigation on CU in Diurnal, and Noct could do the extra interconnectivity - CI (if we want to keep it I wouldn't be sad if we lost it) could be its regen effect, CU in Noct would have the Mitigation only while Diurnal would have the Regen, Exalt could have a new effect under Noct, CO would have its shields.... and maybe Macrocosmos could stay as it is.

But something like that with AST's kit? I'm down. I'd love it honestly.

[Renathras]

Perhaps it would be useful to approach from the opposite direction: take a kit widely considered "good", and play evil job designer with it. Make one change that would absolutely slaughter the kit's fun, and you've probably discovered some key magic that makes the sausage machine work.

I think this is largely subjective. For example, removing Lilies on WHM (6.0 showed us how poorly that works) everyone probably agrees on, but some people might say "adding a DPS rotation to it" would break it while others think that would save it. That may be more an argument of kit functionality than difficulty.

Meaningful choice is a good thing to shoot for for fun, I agree...but that's not always a matter of difficulty or challenge or complexity. Indeed, some Jobs could have choice added that actually makes them simpler. To use your RDM example, suppose Jolt was removed and Stone/Fire were always up, not needing a proc. This would give the kit greater flexibility and choice (as you'd always have the option to use them where 50%ish of the time you do not currently), but reduce difficulty.

Don't overlook the impact of APM as well as well as how punishing it is for falling out of the 2 minute buff window. At least in my case, it's the core reason I absolutely hate playing AST in it's current form.

Fair points, although MCH is one of the higher APM Jobs in the game and considered one of the easier ones. So we'll add APM as another axis of challenge.

Simple and Complex are ultimately subjective but the issue with Healers stems more from what Semirhage says, a lack of meaningful interaction within the toolkit. Healer toolkits are hugely disjointed messes, with the most interaction between any job being "press this to heal more"; Temperance, PI, Protaction, Horoscope, Synastry, etc, all just make you heal more, with maybe some extra mitigation or something else tacked on for good measure but they don't really do anything other than that. The shallow DPS toolkit also doesn't help healers in any meaningful ways since it's spam 1 while using 2 every 30s, with minute differences here and there.

There either needs to be more DPS skills, interactions between Healing/DPS or both for Healers to be in a better spot. Something as simple as the Diacloud proc idea that's been thrown around occasionally would be a refreshing start to say the least.

I don't think they're "disjointed", but I do think that there are a lot of overlaps that make decision making less meaningful outside of optimization scenarios. This is probably because the community/players are so collectively focused on optimization/meta that the Devs have kind of had their hand forced since the alternative was putting their foot down hard. For example, when they removed Energy Drain, the message was clear - "We don't want you using healing resources to optimize damage!" The community response was a revolt. So the Devs went the opposite direction, giving Healers a lot of overlapping abilities - Medica, Rapture, Indominability, Holos, Celestial Opposition, Prognosis, and Ixochole all do basically the same thing (Sacred Soil does not, btw...) - so that players could optimize damage, since the message players collectively have told the Devs over and over is that they want healers to be about optimizing damage with healing as a mere aside. Though this problem extends well beyond Healers; it's the reason Tank stances were removed (players tried to actively avoid agro stance as much as possible, defeating the purpose of it even existing - no, it wasn't a challenging dance; people would actively just NEVER USE IT outside of the first 5 seconds of combat) and has wreaked havoc with the game when DPSers complained about things like positionals, boss hitboxes, downtime, disengages, and difficulty of aligning disparate CD buffs.

Though I'm a bit curious what you think heals should do other than...heal/mitigate/shield...?

I don't think that we need more DPS skills across the board (or healing/DPS interactions, whatever that may boil down to), but I do think the Healers need to not be carbon copies of each other.

The best example of the 'press whatever, itll probably work' is AST. CO is 700p, CU is 600p, Star is 540 (720 if charged). So if a raidwide occurs, which do you press? Uhh, turns out, any of them really, they're all kinda interchangeable in most situations. And if one of them isn't enough to deal with the damage? No matter, just use another. They're all 1min CDs anyway so it feels like they're always up

As for 'what is complexity', that's entirely subjective. I find SAM complex because of the 'filler GCD' thing. I found HW/SB DRK 'easy to understand' despite supposedly being 'complex' with Darkside management etc (implying Darkside management was hard in HW). So the thread's kinda pointless for asking 'what is complex' unless you're aiming to find out what we, each person specifically, finds complex.

Arguably yes.

It's constantly brought up how Healers aren't complex enough and how they need to be more complex. As that IS subjective, it's completely useless to the Devs - or, indeed, to our own non-Dev discussions.

Not until we actual quantify what that IS.

What makes healer easy? Its simple really. We have too many healing tools that the game doesn't make use of and lack of interactions with them all. Someone already pointed out AST, but I'm going to use it since I know the class so well.

One of the things I've said before (and gotten various levels of pushback against, though more on Reddit than here) is that we have too many oGCDs and they're too powerful. We need less of them and they need to be weaker such that people actually have a reason to use GCD heals. PART of the reason for this is how mobile fights are now, PART is the playerbase deciding damage optimization is the only thing that matters ("Green DPS" aside, "The only HP that matters is the last 1", "Killing the boss is damage mitigation/healing", and "The only utility that matters is damage" all are reflections of this), and PART of it is that MMOs just add more abilities over time. But it's clearly too much, though some Healer Jobs are worse offenders than others.

The pushback is generally from people that want more damage spells (yet complain about healing being trivial) and not wanting the solution to be "make healing non-trivial". People even have insisted it can't be done because it would require all past fights to be backdate changed...which is odd since (a) they've never had an issue with that before and (b) that's the way the game originally worked.

But I agree that too many oGCDs that are too powerful and up basically all the time have made Healers trivial/easy.

[Sebazy]

Fair points, although MCH is one of the higher APM Jobs in the game and considered one of the easier ones. So we'll add APM as another axis of challenge.

I think the AST issue with APM is that it's a lot of buttons and retargeting all dogpiled into each 2 minute burst window. Outside of that burst it's barely any different to SCH or WHM. I think MCH is more akin to DNC still no? The APM still rockets through oGCDs, but it's more of a pattern with no need to constantly change targets? Couple that with how punishing missing a burst window and falling out of sync with the group is and it's honestly a completely different problem IMO.

[Renathras]

I think the AST issue with APM is that it's a lot of buttons and retargeting all dogpiled into each 2 minute burst window. Outside of that burst it's barely any different to SCH or WHM. I think MCH is more akin to DNC still no? The APM still rockets through oGCDs, but it's more of a pattern with no need to constantly change targets? Couple that with how punishing missing a burst window and falling out of sync with the group is and it's honestly a completely different problem IMO.

Yeah. I think AST is the ONLY Job in the game that has to hyper-target-swap. Offhand, I can't think of any other one. MCH, NIN, and DRK all have the "high APM burst, lower APM filler", and MNK, NIN, and MCH under Hypercharge all have a reduced GCD (so much faster ability use compared to other Jobs) that give them higher APM both inside and outside of burst. In a strict sense, they have higher APMs than AST does, but ASTs is paired with target swapping, which isn't counted as an "action" but clearly IS one.

[ASkellington]

The pushback is generally from people that want more damage spells (yet complain about healing being trivial) and not wanting the solution to be "make healing non-trivial". People even have insisted it can't be done because it would require all past fights to be backdate changed...which is odd since (a) they've never had an issue with that before and (b) that's the way the game originally worked.

Yes the push back is more damage spells because

1 - Some fights would have to remade because even with less oGCDs, good healers are bored. Just because I'm more engaged at 70 than 90 doesn't mean I'm still PROPERLY engaged at 70. Bosses have too long of wind ups, not many of them target someone that ISN'T the tank, too much of their damage is avoidable and so most dungeons I'm STILL only healing with oGCDs in the 60-70 range. If you want more healing, the fights are going to have to change. Why is this a problem? Have you seen how long it took for SE to actually change them? If reducing the healing spells, and supplementing more damage spells is faster, then yes, I would rather add more damage spells.

2 - SE doesn't want to give the alternative: support tools. AST cards and BRD's change from SB to Shb speaks to this. They don't want to take the time to make impactful spells for healers to use outside of mitigation. Caster's are allowed to have an AOE sleep, but healers are stuck with Repose and NEITHER even work on the bosses. We can't even use either like a form of Head Graze/Interject. We don't even have an AOE Esuna! So if SE isn't going to give us any supportive tools, rather takes them away because if we don't use them then we're going to fail apparently, then all we're going to get is damage so we may as well ask for damage.

3 - EVEN IF SE decided to do the above, we will STILL have instances to where our dps rotation is monotonous. Especially in solo content where it is highlighted front and center. Support tools? Don't need them. Healing? Don't need them. What are we left with then? Broil/Dosis/Glare/Malefic and our DoT and w/e extra healing tools we use as damage because, while we don't need the healing at all we can still use the damage to kill the sponge (ES, Lord of Crowns, Toxicon, Misery, Assize). In group content, you're still going to have down time where you aren't going to be buffing or healing, so what is the excuse to not make all healer's dps tools a bit more engaging?

I replay plenty of fights I still find fun due to either wipefests if I'm lucky (Dun Scaith, Orbonne) or just because I don't have access to as many tools (60-70 fights), or even ones that are still relatively challenging (Amaurot, Dead Ends) at the "level cap", and I'm STILL pressing 1 way too much. And Amaurot actually hits hard.

All of this to say, SE doesn't design fights for engaging healing. DoTs are either Esuna'd and Esuna doesn't have a CD so if it is automatically reapplied who cares? OR hit like a ray of sun through a window glass and either don't need to be healed at all, or can easily be healing through with a simple HoT. Boss mechanics, as I've said, are way too spaced out (want a good example? Smileton is ridiculous with it) and again, don't usually hit random party members so you don't even have to do spot healing which would break it up. AoEs are too avoidable. Which usually leaves unavoidable raid wides and tank busters. Well tanks mitigate tank busters and they don't really hurt. And raid wides also, don't hurt. And both always come on a long enough cool down to where you have something up, even in lower levels.

We need more bosses like Diabolos or Ra La. The former has tank busters frequent enough in the second phase to where the tank CAN'T mitigate them all at 60 and the latter actually makes me cycle through all my oGCDs like a proper boss should.

That requires a major rework of too many fights for it to be feasible (and in some cases it doesn't need to be that drastic but you get the point) and I don't see SE even MAKING fights in the upcoming expansion like this let alone fixing older ones, which is why we ask for damage.

[ForsakenRoe]

Y
That requires a major rework of too many fights for it to be feasible (and in some cases it doesn't need to be that drastic but you get the point) and I don't see SE even MAKING fights in the upcoming expansion like this let alone fixing older ones, which is why we ask for damage.

Clearly what they should do is this: add damage tools (the quicker fix), under the pretense of 'oh yeh we're doing this so healers have something to do in 7.0, so that by 8.0 we'll have had a bigger time window to work out a better solution (eg, making fights actually do damage)'

Then if/when it turns out that actually, more damage tools WAS the solution all along, just nix the last part and say 'well we WERE going to look into alternatives, but the extra damage options were so well received we figured 'why rock the boat', so we'll be going ahead with adding even more damage options in 8.0'

[Silver-Strider]

Revolt

This occurred because of a combination of reasons.

They removed Energy Drain without reallocating the MP restore from it.
They increased the cost of Addlo/Succor to ridiculous levels that made them unsustainable.
Both Quickened Aetherflow and the Fairy Gauge required burning thru excess stacks to make the most out of them but with nothing but Lustrate there was very few ways to utilize either of them without overhealing.
Couple this with the butchering of WHM and the Revolt was inevitable. Viva la revolución.

As for what I would like for heals to do, being a part of a cohesive toolkit would be a nice start. There's too much overlap in terms of what skills do and no real justification for it. Why would I ever hit Cure 2 before Afflatus Solace or Tetra? Medica over Rapture or Assize when it lines up? There simply isn't any reason to do so because the former all have cast times and MP costs associated with them on top of being a DPS loss to utilize whereas the latter don't. I would like there to be a reason other than "shit has hit the fan". If Healers could also differentiate themselves from one another that would be a great bonus on top.

So, keeping with WHM for a moment, here's what I would do.

1. Turn Solace/Rapture into traits for Cure 2/Medica. If you have a Lily up, they turn into the corresponding skill. Throw in an Afflatus version of Cure 3 as well for good measure.
2. Return Aero 3 but have it and Dia function similarly to BLM's Thunder Spells so they don't overlap and include the Thundercloud proc into the mix, going off of Regen/Medica 2, so that good Regen uptime is actually rewarding to accomplish. With them frontloading their DoT damage on the initial hit, not only would they do slightly more damage than the 2 Glares that would be lost from Regens->Aeros but you also have short timers to maintain again, much like what people miss with the removal of DoT playstyles.
3. I would have Tetra grant a Lily upon usage as to justify why it has the longest CD and lowest potency of all the ST healing CDs.
4. I'd lower the CD of Temperance down to 60s and just flat out remove PI. Between Regens actually being worth a damn to keep up frequently, Afflatus skills now including Cure 3 in the mix and Temperance being a 60s CD, there's no real need for PI anymore. Only other option would be to turn it into an AoE Shield Effect and I wouldn't argue if that was the case but the current form of PI wouldn't be needed with the rest of the changes.

That pretty much leaves the oGCDs like Asylum, Assize, etc unaccounted for but that's the gist of what I would do with WHM. I might be more inclined to revert the 1.5s cast time on Glare back to 2.5 and give it Water/Flood as a Ruin 2 equivalent skill just to further differentiate it from the other healers but that just trades the 1.5s cast time for a Ruin 2 skill so its not that much of a difference.