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

[Renathras]

Heavenward Scholar had a kit that fit the damage and healing profile of encounters perfectly. You spent most of your time dpsing and it was fun. You had plenty of skills to manage to do damage. When it was time to heal you had a few skills but they required thought to be put to full advantage. Your strong heals had cool downs that needed to be respected. You couldn't blow everything on Energy Drains because the same resource was the cornerstone of your healing and you couldn't rely on Succor spam to fill health bars.

I agree with this.

But not this:

Every healer should have been made into Scholar with a robust DPS kit to fill the healing downtime in causal content and a healing toolkit that required some actual brainpower to function well.

The problems this game has worst, imo, is when they make everything the same. This goes for making all Jobs simple but ALSO for making all Jobs complex. There should be a spectrum. In HW, when SCH was that way, WHM was not and AST was...well...AST.

Moreover, I think the reason for the "no way to fail" is because so many Healers quit the role in HW and SB that the Devs were trying to make it so people didn't have "Healxiety" and would actually que up as Healers more, since there were massive Healer shortages.

As you say, though I don't agree with it personally, the Devs also thought "Healing NEEDS to be easy." But that thought extends to Healer damage kits. They also NEED to be easy, otherwise almost no one will play them. People who want complex damage rotations play DPSers. Giving Healers a mediocre damage kit will just alienate the people who don't like damage rotations (and play Healers for that reason) while also not appealing to people who want a "real" DPS kit, who will keep playing DPSers. It will only please a narrow sliver of the population, like as not. Which could already be achieved by just giving SCH its SB kit back.

when we could be enjoying a fun mini game like every other class that involves DPS or support.

Not everyone "enjoys" damage rotations. Again, if we did, most of us would be playing DPS Jobs. Many people do solo content, FATEs, and instanced duties on Healers and enjoy them. I love playing on Healers now, for example. I do Experts, PotD/HoH solo runs, Extremes, 24 mans, and occasionally Savages. I did the latest Extreme, Ex5, on RDM (since it was the only Practice party up when I had time) and got my clear, and hated almost every minute of it. I did it, but I did not enjoy it. On the other hand, I've healed all the other Extremes and enjoyed those (except Ex3, because Eff that place, lol), and I even tanked a few. But I've never enjoyed DPSing any of them. Did some ZodEx on SMN. It was...meh. I did it for farms and it wasn't abject misery, but I wouldn't describe it as fun. On the other hand, I healed it, even solo healed it on SGE quite a few times, and had a blast every time on Healer.

I'm not saying some people are DPSers or anything, but I am saying not everyone loves DPS rotations. I contend that some Healers should have them while others do not, then players may gravitate to the one they find most acceptable.

...but this is an aside we've had in dozens of threads and not really directly on topic, isn't it...

DPS can range from two or three buttons to most of your kit and encounters can be tuned to allow extreme failure with every option on the scale.

In theory, yes. But I've yet to see it happen. Until encounters are tuned with Enrages so generous to Healers doing 100% or 1% DPS - which would be so generous as to make them trivial (and that gray parsing SAM would still blame the Healer if the party hit an Enrage) - then "extreme failure" isn't allowed, and likely won't be.

But, again, I think the solution is a joint one: Make SCH SB again. Make AST SB again. Leave WHM alone. Tune SGE up around the edges. Then launch the expansion and see who gravitates to what and which Healers get played and to what extent. From there, more decisions can be made if necessary, though it may not even be necessary at that point.

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'

Firstly: One could argue this for damage changes instead (e.g. encounter damage and oGCD cooldown, potency, and abundance decreasing)

Secondly: We could just do this with one Healer from each category (Pure and Barrier) and then run the test that way. Because if we do it all at once to all the Healers and it DOESN'T work, then what? All of 7.X there's a massive Healer shortage and almost no one can clear any content? That's a pretty big gamble...

Yes the push back is more damage spells because...

*ahem* Yeah, that is an example of the typical response.

(1) Fights wouldn't need to be remade. First of all, they TEND not to make a lot of changes other than a few balance tweaks on previous bosses. Second of all...you didn't really give a reason that fights would need to be remade. If the oGCDs were removed/weakened, you'd need GCDs for those cases you mention, and GCDs we still have. I'm not saying which is faster, I'm saying which is the problem. More DPS spells is a band-aid treating the symptom, not a treatment addressing the cause. It's saying "Encounter design sucks, but with a DPS rotation I'm slightly less bored (and people who don't like DPS rotations now hate playing the game)", which isn't a solution. It's like if you have a snake wrapped around your throat strangling you so you can't talk giving you a notepad and a pen so you can communicate despite the situation. It's not actually fixing anything.

(2) I think is more a case of balance/tuning and that FFXIV is designed to be much more strict and rigid than, say, FFXI is. Though I'm genuinely curious of the logic behind Repose vs Sleep. At one time, when they were Cross-Class, it might have made sense, but they aren't anymore. Casters have Lucid, why don't Healers have Sleep? There's no logic to it that I can tell. We don't have an AOE Esuna...but when do we NEED one? Like......ever? We have other tools besides damage. Mitigation actually is one. A part of me wishes they'd give the DPS mitigation kits to Healers. People certainly are quick to blame Healers when they die due to not enough mit, so may as well let us actually be the masters of mitigation.

(3) Is complex because a lot of people play Healers EXPLICITLY BECAUSE they don't like DPS rotations. I personally don't like DPS rotations. I avoid playing DPSers if at all possible. I will Tank for friends before I'll DPS because their "dps rotations" are slimmed down. I've never played a class in any type of MMO where I enjoyed the damage rotations on it. Ever. I've never found any that I liked, just some I hated slightly less than others, like Cataclysm Arcane Mage in WoW, which didn't play too differently than FFXIV Healers do. HOWEVERR, as I've noted before, the solution may be to mix and match. Give some Healer Jobs more DPS rotations and others less so players who like either can pick the one that matches their preference. But legit, giving Healers complex DPS rotations would probably cause an exodus of Healer players, and some would leave the game entirely since there are no other options. It MIGHT get some DPSers to try out Healing (GNB did with Tanking), but that was ONE Job in the role, not all four. It was what I was hoping SGE would do and was surprised when it did not.

(4) Honestly, I enjoy playing old content on WHM just fine. Again, this is a case of different people liking different things, I think. And there's only one solution that would actually satisfy everyone. And it's not giving all the Healers more DPS buttons...

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.

This I somewhat agree with, though. But keep in mind those examples are from casual content for the most part. Don't cast a heal for all of P5S and see how far the party can prog before wiping. Heals ARE needed, they're just needed in short bursts, all at once, via overpowered oGCDs. That's the problem.

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.

They wouldn't rework any of them. Just as they haven't gone back and made all ARR and HW fights require EW oGCD toolkits. If you could go into ANY of those old encounters ilevel synced but with your full EW toolkit, they'd be trivial because of the amount of mitigations the Tanks have and how many oGCDs the Healers have. The team don't worry about old content outside of making sure players can still clear it. Any changes like this are forward looking. Prior content you can already unsync and completely one-shot, and the Devs aren't going back and changing it all. That's not the way they work.