A summary of healer issues

[Sebazy]

See, someone says “I had a bad experience on healer forum”

But they didn't.

They called it 'an extremely vitriolic echo chamber of salt'.

Do you always have this hard a time with simply stating the truth?

Besides, I'm not here to pick fights randomly, I'm providing corrections if I see them. As stated above, I actually agree with their sentiment as seen above. No issues from me there.

[Silver-Strider]

This is exactly a main part of the reason they can't make things more ngaging for high-end healers.

I'd argue the opposite. These people already aren't hitting their DPS buttons so whether it's 1 or 100 buttons is irrelevant to them. You already have healers that don't touch their DPS buttons in casual content as is and we can't really call them out on it without the ToS biting us in the ass for it, so whatever toxicity that could amount from the change already has a counter to it. You're not raising the skill floor for healers by giving them more to do during downtime. That only occurs if the healing demand is increased.

[Kolaina]

To refresh your memory the post in question included "I visited the healer forums once. It was an echo chamber of salt. And when I dared speak my own opinion about how I liked healer as it is now, they got extremely vitriolic".

So what is unclear, that this person had a post with *one* person in whhich there was a disagreement, rather than "they = more than one person" , and that a disagreement does not equate to a personal attack or "extreme vitriol"?

Not to mention, if you are concerned about drama , maybe try to avoid using terms like "jerk" and " twitter-esque drama"?

So they said they liked healer. Guess we are fact checking opinions now /thumbs up

[DragonFlyy]

Why post here? No one at SE reads these forums.

[IDontPetLalas]

So they said they liked healer. Guess we are fact checking opinions now /thumbs up

Nice attempt to distract from what I quoted-ever hear of the red herring logical fallacy by the way? In any case I'm not interested in any one-upmanship, and by far most people in the healer forums are more invested in positive discussion on healer jobs because there is still a hope that some of it may reach the ears of people who can introduce some improvements ergo there is no mythical "echo chamber of salt" - which, mind you- does not say that there are no complaints.

[Renathras]

Though most of that comes down to the unbearably scripted fight design more then the healers themselves.

I think this is the crux of it. It's also why solo healing Ultimates is possible at all - because of how scripted the fights are. No matter how hard to learn they are, they play out the same way (or almost the same way with minor variations in cases of fights like SoS Extreme). To a point, games can't be infinitely variable, but when the fights are scripted and the design intent is people learn the mechanics to where they take almost no damage (since so much is avoidable and NOT avoiding something is pass-fail and often an outright KO), then it majorly cuts down on healing, making the kits and encounters somewhat disjointed.

Though that is only part of it - FFXIV fights have mostly always been this way, but it wasn't AS much of a problem in the past. The issue now is compounded by how much free healing Tanks and DPS have, as well as how many and how powerful oGCD healing Healers have. It makes the damage to health bars/refilling health bars part of healing trivial for the most part - if people AREN'T getting hit by avoidable mechanichs or collected vuln stacks, it's relatively easy to keep their health topped off - which, in turn, leads to a weird situation of you only have "excitement" healing when everything's going wrong, but when everything's going that wrong, you tend to wipe anyway. Conversely, once people have mastered the fight, there's little to do because the fights are designed to have very little unavoidable healing, relative to the Healer oGCD toolkits + Tank/DPS oGCD toolkits if we're just talking unavoidable damage.

EDIT:

...

You're kind of proving them right, you just don't realize it...

[IDontPetLalas]

@Renathras, if anything, that "quote" is a stellar example of how to rebut someone in bad faith.

[Jojoya]

I should note, for the record, I disagree a good deal of the post quoted.

What I'm trying to see is what a more general audience thinks of it. The place it was posted is a bit of an echo chamber and I'm curious what people not part of that echo chamber feel related to it.

The more general audience is too busy playing the game to take the time to read all that.

Healer is always going to be a hard role to design because what a healer will be doing is dependent on the skill level of the entire party (including the healer).

Are you a good (or better) healer in a good (or better) party? Expect to spend most of your time dealing damage because your party is not taking avoidable damage.

Are you a bad healer in a bad party? Expect to spend all your time healing and praying you don't run out of mana because they're taking so much damage and you have a hard time deciding where to prioritize your healing so you're probably just spamming your AoE heals.

Are you and your party somewhere in between? Hard to say what might happen.

Damage dealing in this game (at least for the other roles) is generally based on combo priorities. You build through a combo (or set of combos), unleash a finisher then start over. Fail to execute the combo correctly and your potency is significantly reduced.

YoshiP has said in the past that they don't want healers to be placed in the position of having to choose between keeping up a damage combo for the damage output or healing a party member. They want the core function of the role - healing - to be the priority at all times. Thus damage dealing in the healing role is simplified. We can interrupt damage to heal then immediately go back to damage without a loss of damage potency.

That means the good healers in the good parties are likely to end up bored because most of their time is spent using the simplified damage abilities. That's unavoidable in Normal content, which has to be designed with less skilled players in mind.

What about design for Savage and Ultimate? That's a question best left to those participating in Savage and Ultimate, not the general player base.

I can't raid at that level anymore myself but I would say to SE you don't need to make things easy on healers in Savage. Challenge their healing abilities instead of their ability to weave the occasional oGCD heal in between damage spam. If they were busy healing, they wouldn't be worried about having only 3-4 buttons for DPS.

[ASkellington]

YoshiP has said in the past that they don't want healers to be placed in the position of having to choose between keeping up a damage combo for the damage output or healing a party member. They want the core function of the role - healing - to be the priority at all times. Thus damage dealing in the healing role is simplified. We can interrupt damage to heal then immediately go back to damage without a loss of damage potency.

And yet we just as this expansion now have combo abilities that aren't broken by an ability. In Shb if you used your ranged attack as a tank c-c-c-c-c-combo breaker. Now? Yeah doesn't happen. Your argument no longer lines up YoshiP. What's your excuse now?

[Sebazy]

Though that is only part of it - FFXIV fights have mostly always been this way, but it wasn't AS much of a problem in the past.

That's not entirely true. Don't forget that crits on tanks used to be a thing, as well as a lot more bosses having secondary non telegraphed tank busters that were on their own cooldown independent of anything else the boss was doing (Although in some cases would effectively queue to land alongside a cast ability).