A summary of healer issues

[DixieBellOCE]

I manage to save people many times in 50 level alliances/trials with Cure1 only coz of 0.5 second faster cast, this 0.5 second allowed me to apply heal right before Boss mass AOE hits the target, other time it allowed to heal almost on walk, while I was avoiding tricky mechanics myself.

So the spell is useful because somebody else made a mistake and took avoidable damage in level 50 content, from 10 years ago.
Obviously they had no defensives or self healing, or they just didn't know that those abilities existed. Fair enough.

But in actual content, cure 1 is not used at all, cure 2 might get a single cast during a fight in savage/ultimate/ex.

Well usually yes. And under normal conditions I never use Cure 1. But when the tank decides to pull the whole dungeon, does not use cooldowns and the DDs aren't that good as well, especially in a lower level dungeon when you don't have that many tools als a WHM... Spamming Cure 2 to keep the tank alive will result in a wipe because I will be out of mana pretty soon. The combination of Presence of Mind and spamming Cure 1 works wonders in such situations.

Sure it happens only once a month or so, but that I have access to Cure 1 does prevent a wipe sometimes.

Regen, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy.
Tank isnt full hp? Use an OGCD heal between Holy spam.
Need to GCD Heal? Use one of those 2 lilys your sitting on to Afflatus Solace him, since it is not a DPS loss to spend a lily.

A dead or stunned enemy does no damage.

[Renalt]

Regen, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy.
Tank isnt full hp? Use an OGCD heal between Holy spam.
Need to GCD Heal? Use one of those 2 lilys your sitting on to Afflatus Solace him, since it is not a DPS loss to spend a lily.

A dead or stunned enemy does no damage.

I don't always agree with Dixie...but when I do...you are screwing up badly.

As soon as Cure 2 becomes available Cure 1 should be tossed in a bin. As soon as you get all your lilly heals then Cure 2 needs to be put on a back burner.

Can you get by with Cure 1 spam in most content till the end of the game? Probably. Yet it is the worst and barest of bones way to do it when there are so many better ways being ignored.

[Tint]

Regen, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy.
Tank isnt full hp? Use an OGCD heal between Holy spam.
Need to GCD Heal? Use one of those 2 lilys your sitting on to Afflatus Solace him, since it is not a DPS loss to spend a lily.

A dead or stunned enemy does no damage.

The tank would be dead before the first Holy stuns. Yeeees I know about Switcast Holy.

I am not that stupid, I know how WHM works >.>

I had a tank in Dusk Vigil for example who did not know what cooldowns were, who simply pulled everything. When he finally stopped he was basically already dead. Maybe I had 1 Lily at the time, the dungeon just started, Benediction, Presence of Mind and that's it.

I kept him alive thanks to Cure 1. And thanks to everything else I had available of course, which is not much at level 52.

Sure I could have let him die, the tank was horrible and didn't deserve a carry through the dungeon. But wouldn't that be griefing? Even more so than using Cure 1?

[Remolia]

So the spell is useful because somebody else made a mistake and took avoidable damage in level 50 content, from 10 years ago.

Yes.

Obviously they had no defensives or self healing, or they just didn't know that those abilities existed. Fair enough.

Not my problem. But if some one got ded, and I was able to do something to avoid this (as a healer) - now this is my problem.

[R041]

As an AST main since HW, the OP makes me want to scream into a pillow.

[hunkygladiator]

Both you and fulminating aren't contradicting each other though.

The majority of competent healers had left a long time before 6.2 so the increase in pressure this raid tier destroyed healer participation for savage, because the healers that still remained were incapable of dealing with it and just gave up. And who can blame them when they had an easy time for an entire expansion? Heal checks in ShB were a joke, so all these new healers ever knew was basically getting a free savage carry by spamming 1 and occasionally an oGCD to solve any incoming damage... until they suddenly hit a brick wall in the current raid tier.

It was so bad you could notice it on any role, I stopped counting the amount of times I died to autos as a tank because the random pug healers neither expected nor were able to deal with the increase in tank damage compared Asphodelos.

Literally just AspBen lol. ShB baby healers smh.

[MaxCarnage]

And this is exactly why increasing the amount of healing required also doesn't work. You have 90 levels worth of content that healing is easy enough that you can get by with the bare minimum in most cases and still compete it. Hell, there's a short clip of a P4S run where the WHM was literally Medica 2 Spamming during the last 8% of the fight.

THIS IS NOT A JOKE.

There is no excuse to be casting Medica 2 back to back like this man was but here he was, in the final fight of the last raid tier, doing exactly that. This is how low the bar of entry is for savage that this type of player could get that close to clearing the raid tier by using Medica 2 spam.

This tier may as well have been Goridas levels of difficulty for this type of player that it really isn't a wonder at all why Healer participation wasn't particularly high this time around. I have no doubt this type of player struggled and probably quit the savage tier entirely, along with any other healer that fell back on their Medica 2 spam as their primary crutch because there was probably no way for them to handle it. Now imagine this type of player being asked to do even the slightest bit more healing in average content and I just don't see it ending well at all.

This is exactly a main part of the reason they can't make things more ngaging for high-end healers. The skill ceiling is so low and yet there are still so many people who can't reach it.

My co-healer in Euphrosyne last night died to every mechanic because they couldn't even heal themself. I was handling the rest of the party, but they couldn't heal themself. They would die and not use tetra or bene on themself when rezzed. The only "cure" they casted was Cure III. And that was only when they were missing health. And they would cast 3 medica 2s in a row. The only reason to cast medica 2 is for the regen. The regens don't stack. It's a pitiful heal otherwise.

I saw them assize once. Just medica 2 and cure 3. And no, I'm not kidding when I say they used cure 3 to heal only themself. The rest of the party was full every time.

And as taboo as it is to say, this is a result of the coddling ToS. Where you can report someone for "telling you how to play". You can't give unsolicited advice without the risk of someone getting mad. Until the lower end players get better, you're never going to get harder casual content. Or even harder high end content. Because when they do, they're going to have people screaming and crying that they can't do it, just like Coils in ARR.

[Tint]

This is exactly a main part of the reason they can't make things more ngaging for high-end healers. The skill ceiling is so low and yet there are still so many people who can't reach it.

If they can't even reach a low skill ceiling then who cares if they also can't reach a higher skill ceiling? We really don't have to cater towards people who can't even keep themself alive.

Either people hit a barrier and try to improve or they quit. Of course SE will lose money when that healer quits. But... how many people quit the game because healing is just too boring?

SE was trying to play it safe for the last years, but the unsatisfied healer community gets louder every year and SE has to decide on a path:

Either increase healing requirements. Or give healers a fleshed out dps rotation and healing becomes only a gimmick like dances, songs and cards. We are on that path already anyway, where tanks and DDs have enough healing and mitigation tools available to carry that healer who can't even keep themself alive through content all the way to Euphrosyne, where you took over then.

How long can they keep healers in this weird state of 1 button rotation and barely enough healing that you can't go into content without them - or can you? How many people will quit healing - or the game altogether - when the next expansion is still just the same old one button spam?

[Absurdity]

This is exactly a main part of the reason they can't make things more ngaging for high-end healers. The skill ceiling is so low and yet there are still so many people who can't reach it.

My co-healer in Euphrosyne last night died to every mechanic because they couldn't even heal themself. I was handling the rest of the party, but they couldn't heal themself. They would die and not use tetra or bene on themself when rezzed. The only "cure" they casted was Cure III. And that was only when they were missing health. And they would cast 3 medica 2s in a row. The only reason to cast medica 2 is for the regen. The regens don't stack. It's a pitiful heal otherwise.

I saw them assize once. Just medica 2 and cure 3. And no, I'm not kidding when I say they used cure 3 to heal only themself. The rest of the party was full every time.

And as taboo as it is to say, this is a result of the coddling ToS. Where you can report someone for "telling you how to play". You can't give unsolicited advice without the risk of someone getting mad. Until the lower end players get better, you're never going to get harder casual content. Or even harder high end content. Because when they do, they're going to have people screaming and crying that they can't do it, just like Coils in ARR.

At some point you unfortunately just have to put your foot down and tell players to "get good" or your game will be in an endless spiral of making everything dumber than previously.

[kyyninen_kirahvi]

This is exactly a main part of the reason they can't make things more ngaging for high-end healers. The skill ceiling is so low and yet there are still so many people who can't reach it.

My co-healer in Euphrosyne last night died to every mechanic because they couldn't even heal themself. I was handling the rest of the party, but they couldn't heal themself. They would die and not use tetra or bene on themself when rezzed. The only "cure" they casted was Cure III. And that was only when they were missing health. And they would cast 3 medica 2s in a row. The only reason to cast medica 2 is for the regen. The regens don't stack. It's a pitiful heal otherwise.

I saw them assize once. Just medica 2 and cure 3. And no, I'm not kidding when I say they used cure 3 to heal only themself. The rest of the party was full every time.

And as taboo as it is to say, this is a result of the coddling ToS. Where you can report someone for "telling you how to play". You can't give unsolicited advice without the risk of someone getting mad. Until the lower end players get better, you're never going to get harder casual content. Or even harder high end content. Because when they do, they're going to have people screaming and crying that they can't do it, just like Coils in ARR.

This is why I want some kind of reason to have all healing actions introduced in game. As I said before, I got way too far with Medica 2 and afflatus/cure 2 spam. I can't blame the game for that. I'm still not very good but I'd like to think I'm at least competent with how I try.

I had to make a consious choise to use the other actions, which was kind of hard and ridiculus after I leveled up some DPS and tank classes. With them it comes naturally to try new actions to do more damage. Healers have no reason when the old strategy still works fine and everyone is alive. Healers are bloated with healing and nothing to use it on in solo content. Dungeons don't really need lot of healing unless people have no idea what to do and/or refuse to learn. It's a bit sad in my opinion that even a casual like me can recognise that. I enjoy support roles but it's becoming harder and harder.