G-give it Back T---T; !! (Scholar Edition)

[Aravell]

At this point I’m just convinced they want the role exist to make tank & dps DF queues faster. /s

I've always said that the healer role as it is now looks like it was designed from the perspective of the person being healed instead of making it fun for the healer player. If you view the design from that lens, everything the team has done to the healer role will make sense in a twisted way.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I've always said that the healer role as it is now looks like it was designed from the perspective of the person being healed instead of making it fun for the healer player. If you view the design from that lens, everything the team has done to the healer role will make sense in a twisted way.

I was saying something similar to a friend in other day:

DPS:"Healer...!! Help..! I make mistake...!!"
Healer:*cast healing*
-DPS dies before the cast goes off-
***Instant Heals are born!!***

Healer:*chilling on not so full MP bar*
DPS:"What if you run out of MP...???"
***MP Management is deleted!!***

Healer:*Uses insta-heal.*
DPS:"You got more of those?"
Healer:"No, but we'll be fine, really!"
DPS:"But what if we make mistakes??"
***2nd charge is given to Divine Benison!!***
***More healing oGCDs that aren't needed are born!!***

DPS:*sees healer contributing dps* "What are you doing? :|"
Healer:"It's downtime."
DPS:"But you're a healer... you're supposed to heal!"
***Aero III, Shadowflare, etc are deleted!!***

Hidden because it's cursed.

[Maltothoris]

I've always said that the healer role as it is now looks like it was designed from the perspective of the person being healed instead of making it fun for the healer player. If you view the design from that lens, everything the team has done to the healer role will make sense in a twisted way.

I have always stood by the fact that the way the devs design healers is that they are dps thinking what healers need (they play healers but don't main them) but don't consider what healers actually need at the time.

[Raikai]

Ngl I especially love that the defunct Shadow Flare was also a mitigation tool for dungeon pulls.

[Supersnow845]

Reiner is 100% correct here, there is physically only so much healing uptime they can introduce before it overwhelms the average DF healer (and as we know that amount is quite low), for that region of healing could they make the healing aspect more engaging……yes, have they shown any ability to do that in 5 expansions beyond maaaaaaaaybe misery……..no.

Now even if they did fix the healing aspect there is still so much downtime in this game, what can they fill it with
-buffs - well they have deleted interesting buff actions beyond “make someone else’s damage go up” and the design of the two minute meta means any attempt at this will just end up like the trash fire that is EW AST
-debuffs - there is really only two types of debuffs in this game
1) enemy damage go down (aka mitigation)
2) enemy defence go down (aka party buff)
Neither of which you can build an engaging gameplay loop around without something like the boss simply being too strong if the healers don’t rotate 100% uptime debuffs which returns to the original problem of the average DF healer just not being that good
-damage - damage becomes the only logical conclusion to what to do in downtime because of the way square designs their own game and right now damage is boring as hell

[Renathras]

I don't know if you're being cheeky, but I'll take this in good faith... I'm probably making a mistake, but...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's being cheeky. That's a go-to for some people who haven't figured out tanking and healing are inherently different to suggest Healers need to be DPSers. Though I don't think it's in bad faith, per se - that is, the people using it, and Ty being included in that, genuinely see it as a persuasive and valid argument. I just feel lit leaves off some fundamental differences. This same conversation came up in the Tank forum, and the general consensus there was that Tanks are ultimately going to be modified Melee in most games, trading in damage CDs and complexities in rotation for defensive ones instead, while Healers are ALMOST always more like very slimmed down Casters, with very very basic damage spells of extremely low complexity that don't distract from their main mission of watching party health bars, which seems to be more generally considered to be more mentally taxing than Tanks managing their own defensive CDs (since they're only worried about themselves, what the boss is doing, and what the boss will be doing shortly while healers are worried about themselves, what the boss is doing, what the boss will be doing shortly, the rest of the party's health, party member mistakes, and what resources they have remaining to deal with issues, as well as needing to somewhat quickly respond to other party member mistakes and not be locked into things like rotations or burst phases.

Damage is the central aspect to gameplay that revolves around combat. That is an unavoidable truth to any game that features combat anywhere, and no role can fully escape that reality.

I don't think this is really true.

Everquest was a game focused on combat, yet Clerics would routinely be set in a chain casting big healing spells over and over again on the main tank then resting to regenerate mana. While that is a more extreme example, it's hardly the only one. Holy Paladins (healers) in WoW's Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King era (widely considered the height of the game's expansion history) routinely engaged in combat casting Holy Light over and over again on the MT due to extremely high mana efficiency big heals with a high crit chance and high chance to refund mana (on crits), and in Wrath, with Beacon of Light, the ability to heal both the MT and OT far more efficiently and consistently than any other healer, at the cost of them having rather limited AOE healing options for the raid team.

EQ and WoW were and are both combat focused games. And while they've adapted over time, these were functional systems for literally years, and some players didn't really enjoy them changing. So it seems that roles can, in fact, "fully escape that 'reality'", as it were. Now, one thing worth noting is, in both cases, some classes within the role didn't necessarily function that way. In EQ, Druids and Shaman were considered weaker at the healer role for the MT but were able to be functional party healers with some utility in other roles (moderate damage, buffing/debuffing), and in WoW...well, during that era, Healers really didn't DPS much because the mana cost of their damage spells were prohibitive. Hence "wanding" on Priest. But the options opened up over time.

Still, the point stands that a healer role not built around DPSing and DPS rotations is something entirely doable in our reality in games that revolve around combat.

Reiner is 100% correct here, there is physically only so much healing uptime they can introduce before it overwhelms the average DF healer

This really isn't functionally true.

YES, if they gave out Savage levels of damage raidwides every 10 seconds, that would overwhelm DF Healers. But the reality is that they could do raidwides every 10 seconds that do DF levels of raidwide damage (think the average 4 man dungeon boss) and Medica spamming WHMs could heal it without difficulty. There's a huge gulf between what we have and what we could have that would reward Healers using efficient heals, but still allow weak Healer players to complete the content just hitting Medica over and over at the cost of efficiency for the party. That's not a hard system.

Likewise, for high end players doing high end content (the only content they won't be bored in), the damage profile can be far higher (Savage, Ultimates) since you aren't worried about DF "Casual Timmy" in that content anyway.

EDIT:

For the people who think Aetherflow should only be used for healing, I only have one thing to say to them.

SGE is right there. You can play it. Addersgall is purely for healing.

Strictly speaking: SCH was first.

Honestly, at this point, they should just remove Faerie Gauge. Aetherpact is the only thing that uses it, just make it a toggle that sacrifices some of Eos' independent action for slightly focused healing. Make it just a bit more potent than Embrace spam for the trade-off of being locked to one target. If Faerie Gauge became "the healing gauge", then it would need to be completely redone. It would need to be balanced to give 30 charge per minute on its own, so not require AF spending to use, and would need all the AF spenders moved to it besides ED. This would also require completely reworking and rebalancing Dissipation, if not outright removing it, since the way it currently works with Faerie Gauge (you don't generate any during it) wouldn't work well. Doubly so if Eos was the one casting the spells, since you could easily lock yourself out of things like Soil for long periods of time, which would make SCH's healing kit nearly unusuable. At that point, AF would just be "the Energy Drain gauge", which would just be stupid, and would be removed, and the overall changes here would require far more than just removing ED from AF right now would.

And worries about "overcapping AF" are really kind of silly when you consider there's literally no downside/penalty to doing so other than "feelsbad", which is already an issue people have with...Energy Drain spending AF.

Granted, AF is a dates system, so just outright removing it and moving everything else over to Faerie Gauge and removing Energy Drain from the game at that point (since it would have no reason to exist) would make sense, but that would probably be even more upsetting to the pro-damage wing of this discussion...

On the flipside, as someone in the Sage camp, I hate the -choles. I wanted my main method of healing to be through interacting with Kardia, not standard OGCD heals that have ridiculously short cooldowns on a resource system more generous than Sweden's healthcare system.

I kind of agree with Ty on this.

SGE is already set up for WoW Disc Priest type "heal by doing damage" systems. Even the wording on Kardia/Kardion kind of suggests they thought about doing more with that ability. SGE seems built like it should be healing through Kardia with its oGCDs being more about mitigation/barriers/smoothing damage so that the weaker and slightly more cumbersome Kardia heals could sufficiently keep the party going, not a barrier/shield healer with massive free oGCD healing that rivals WHM in healing throughput while also having far and away more mitigation, as well as more accessible and easy to use mitigation than SCH.

I think you could take Aero from White Mage and Thunder from Black Mage. Good times!

Thunder was only cross-class from patch 2.0 to 2.1. Aero was after that, though. It is funny since a lot of people mention it, but it was only true for all of one patch in the game's history.

[ty_taurus]

I don't think this is really true.

In your examples, could a player get through the entire game without ever dealing damage to anything at any point at all? Was there no content that was meant to be done solo, even early level questing? I mean I'm sure you absolutely could if you got a player to party with you and clear any solo enemies for you. I'm not super familiar with either, so I don't know if there even was instance duties of any kind. But is that a really feasible for the average player in those cases? Would it be normal for a healer player to ask another player to defeat enemies for them?

Still, the point stands that a healer role not built around DPSing and DPS rotations is something entirely doable in our reality in games that revolve around combat.

And you could say the same of tanks, no? Why do tanks need to do any damage? Aggro is a metric that can be directly interacted with through actions. We even had an action like that on Paladin called Flash. Why isn't the tank role like Sentinel in FFXIII, where their only actions are provoking and defending? Countering was a thing, but you still need to get hit first to do it. FFXIII's roles are very bare-bones in general because the idea was about swapping those roles mid combat, but it does prove that you can have a tank that does no direct damage at all and still function perfectly fine. If it's reasonable to want healers to not have any DPS responsibility, then it is just as reasonable to want the same for tanks. And if the goal is to balance the roles, if you're going to do one that way, I feel like you should do the other that way as well.

I'm not saying anyone is directly asking for that right here. I'm just saying that because both are similar in that they are not DPS jobs, that they should approach DPS responsibilities the same way. Lean into it, or lean away from it. It doesn't make sense to have one lean one way while the other leans the opposite way.

[Aravell]

Strictly speaking: SCH was first.

What does this have to do with what I said?

Honestly, at this point, they should just remove Faerie Gauge. Aetherpact is the only thing that uses it, just make it a toggle that sacrifices some of Eos' independent action for slightly focused healing. Make it just a bit more potent than Embrace spam for the trade-off of being locked to one target. If Faerie Gauge became "the healing gauge", then it would need to be completely redone. It would need to be balanced to give 30 charge per minute on its own, so not require AF spending to use, and would need all the AF spenders moved to it besides ED. This would also require completely reworking and rebalancing Dissipation, if not outright removing it, since the way it currently works with Faerie Gauge (you don't generate any during it) wouldn't work well. Doubly so if Eos was the one casting the spells, since you could easily lock yourself out of things like Soil for long periods of time, which would make SCH's healing kit nearly unusuable. At that point, AF would just be "the Energy Drain gauge", which would just be stupid, and would be removed, and the overall changes here would require far more than just removing ED from AF right now would.

When did I say healing should be removed from Aetherflow? What are you trying to argue against here? I'm saying Aetherflow should be left alone as a mix gauge that handles healing, mitigation and damage and whoever dislikes that can go play SGE. SGE has exactly what they want, a gauge used entirely for healing abilities.

You know, for someone that has said before that you support people not having what they love taken away, you seem to be happily in support of what I love being taken away because you hate the way it works.

[Renathras]

What does this have to do with what I said?

That if one should change, it should be SGE, not SCH. It should be "If you want that, go play SCH" not "If you want that, go play SGE". SGE should do something else.

...

Collectively, this is a really weak argument.

When leveling solo, you deal damage. It's why no one (or nearly no one) ever asks that healers (and tanks) have all their damage buttons REMOVED. Though it should be noted even back then, there were players that did this. In some old school MMOs like EQ or FF11, it was most efficient to level by being in a party killing enemy spawns in an area ("camps"), and the healers would often ONLY heal, same as they did in dungeons and raids. This was due to MP use (more downtime resting/drinking/etc if they used attack spells) and agro management in those games where you REALLY didn't want your party's healer to go down; the DPS could always be raised if they got agro and the party survived the encounter, but the healer could not unless you had a spare.

We're not talking about soloing or leveling, which you can do with Glarespam without issue. We're talking about having DPS-lite damage rotations (all the way up to full on DPSer level rotations, though that's a bit more rare), not Holy Priest in WoW having Shadow Word: Pain (Dia) and Smite (Glare) back when I leveled and played one in BC and Wrath and Cata. (And Smite being so prohibitive, you almost never used it anyway; people sub-speced into Disc for Wand Mastery for additional autoattack damage until getting to level 40 and picking up Shadow if they wanted to solo level faster.)

As for tanks: No.

Tank's generate agro, which is done through dealing damage or healing. You'd have to implement an entirely new game system of damage-less-agro-generation, at which point, what's the point? Unlike "healers are for healing", "tanks are for agro ONLY" requires rebuilding the game to be less intuitive and more complex to achieve the same result. And I don't mean encounter designs, I mean damage calculations, enrage tuning, and an entirely new agro system where you have to make abilities and program in agro values for them, and do this for every Tank ability. That's a lot of work to "prove a point" vs doing exactly zero work now. Conversely, healers having simple DPS rotations does not. It functions entirely within the normal game systems (MP costs, cast times, damage calculation, and agro generation values) with no additional action, work, programming, or etc.

...and I say this as someone that liked FFXIV's take on Sentinel; it's an interesting idea but requires a lot of changes to the back end to implement and make it work. (Also note that unlike WHM with Glarespam, a Sentinel would NOT be able to clear the MSQ solo instances - take things like the Zenos fight where you have to DPS down the nail things/clones/whatever it was - you can't do that with only Counter).

Not to mention, as you note, literally no one's asking for that, while people ARE asking for healers to have simple DPS kits. Not everyone is, but enough are to justify having at least one healer (*cough*4 Healers Model*cough*) function that way. So NO ONE is asking for Tanks that work like that, much less the entire role, meaning there's no reason to do or consider doing all this work for something literally no one seems to want. Conversely, there ARE healer players that DO "just wanna heal", which justifies some consideration to that.

Note as always - 4 Healers Model - this doesn't preclude a or some Healer Jobs having more involved DPS kits. It just means not all of them should.

.

TL;DR:

I get this is one of your favorite go-to counter-arguments, but it's a REALLY bad one.

[Aravell]

That if one should change, it should be SGE, not SCH. It should be "If you want that, go play SCH" not "If you want that, go play SGE". SGE should do something else.

Your stance is all over the place now. You always said things should be preserved for people who love them, it's the very premise of your "one healer must stay the same" argument, but here you're saying they should change SCH into something that appeals to the people SGE appeals to right now and also change SGE into something that appeals to SCH players of old? I don't get your point. SGE already fulfills what these people want, they can go play that instead of trying to ruin a system that people enjoy.

You always say that people who want SMN to change should go play BLM, how is this different?