Thread: 7.0 Healer Wishlist

“SCH but easier” is a bad design philosophy but I don’t think “barrier healer but easier” is necessarily bad, SCH has unequivocally the hardest of the healing toolkits to master and the shield healer is infinitely more instrumental to the party than the regen healer so while AST has the highest ceiling SCH has by far the highest floor

SGE is fine to be an easier barrier healer with its own niches, it just shouldn’t be so similar to SCH

It would be nice if the fairy was even integral to SCH anymore

Sure she throws out a few heals you want to prioritise but what’s the point of whispering dawn being able to be cast from a distance off the fairy if every modern heal has a 30 yalm radius anyway

Half the time eos feels like flavour text and it’s made worse that 3 of SCH’s biggest niches (chain, deployment and expedient) are all skills from the SCH not the fairy

Originally Posted by Bole

Considering that this is still going on ^

I’m guessing that no one from square reads these forums? So all of our ideas and suggestions - we’re just shouting in the void?

To be serious for a moment; you are exceedingly optimistic if you believe SE is reading any of this or that they actually care about any feedback, suggestions or ideas anyone here has. They do not care. We've had this healer design for nearly 5 years now and we will have it for another 3+ with Dawntrail. It's terrible... but that's the point. They've said they're happy with this design and this is the most accessible to the most amount of players. They've also said many times that they are not going to increase the DPS complexity of the healers because they don't want to overwhelm newer healers; and after the way Savage PF turned out this expansion, we're not going to get harder healing as well. The role is stuck in a corner it can't get out of, but... the developers don't consider it stuck, or a problem at all. So it's going to stay there. Forever.

This forum is a fun distraction at best but ultimately a waste of everyone's valuable time; no shade to any of the nice and smart people here who spend a lot of time coming up with cool and interesting ideas, but Square Enix does not care and they don't value anyone's input on here - have any of the actually interesting and engaging ideas posted here been reflected in the changes we've seen over the past 5 years at all? No, what we got with Endwalker was... stock Glare/Broil upgrades, healing potency increases, a ST oGCD and a 2/3m button. With the same gameplay loop sanded down to have even less interesting parts than Shadowbringers did. There's nothing to suggest at all that Dawntrail will be some sort of change in direction; that would require a harder look at the healer role than SE is going to want to give.

The game is committed to the churn of trying to replace unhappy older players with fresh faced, newer ones that will only ever know the current design and thus have no reason to complain about it in the same vein. That's where we get so many of the people defending it today, the "I play healer to heal, not DPS!" crowd, etc etc. Have you seen anything over this current expansion that shows they're trying to appeal to you - a player who isn't new? Or actually, have you seen anything in the past half decade that shows that they actually care about you as a healer player?

The biggest thing for anyone here to consider is that it took many expansions and years to get where we are now; it wasn't just Endwalker that put this role in the gutter, it was Shadowbringers too and it even started going down in Stormblood - which was 7 years ago. Dawntrail won't save this role nor this game unless maybe exceedingly minor changes like an extra DPS button on a CD timer like Phlegma would make the role more enjoyable for you. Unfortunately, we aren't getting anything close to any of the ideas we see in here. WHM will play the same, SCH will play the same, and SGE will play the same, and AST will... likely play more like WHM than it does now. Those are your Dawntrail healers.

For what it's worth, I salute anyone here who still cares and is (IMO unfortunately a bit delusionally) still trying their best to make a difference. After I cleared TOP, I felt something in my brain break with this game. I don't care anymore - thank god my sub runs out soon and I'll never be able to post here again. This game sucks. The job design is terrible and it's not getting out of the rut it's in with one expansion. Job complexity is not coming back. People thought and hoped that things would change with Endwalker and it wasn't the case. It won't be the case with Dawntrail. How many years are you willing to spam your Broil button before you give up too?

Originally Posted by Bole

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I am in a similar situation as you. I did all the hard content that 5.x had to offer, savage, ultimates, parsing. I got bored of just standing still and pressing broil, and that left me with no motivation to play endwalker.

My copium is that Endwalker was an exception in that it didn’t make major changes to jobs. Every other expansion before it has made huge changes (for better or worse). I don’t think most people are going to like Dawntrail if it is going to be the 3rd installment of Shadowbringers (or 4th stormblood for some). So I expect at least something to shake things up, whether I like it is a different story.

I don't disagree with anything you've said, really. My personal opinion with job design is that they have a very tight vision, and they will give small concessions within that vision; I think Energy Drain was one of these concessions but that was also nearly 5 years ago that it was returned, and a lot of the other changes within healers have ended up making them easier to play for the "lower skilled player" over being appealing towards people who want to spend time as a healer. While that's certain okay in some regard, SE doesn't care at all about how it feels to spend hundreds of hours playing healers, and as yourself, myself and countless others come across, when you get into progging Savage or Ultimates where you will be spending a lot of time playing these jobs, having no room to grow and having your core loop be 1-1-1-1 with your occasional 2 DoT press, it's a quick ticket to burning out because it just isn't fun. It doesn't inspire joy.

The main problem as I see it, is that SE knows a lot of people hate the design and are unhappy, but the gap between a good healer and a terrible one is almost entirely based on how well a healer is able to deal damage... which is not the main responsibility of a healer in SE's eyes. Anyone who did TOP can pretty much tell you that when you're meeting enrages in clean phases, the first thing you look at is what your healers are doing DPS wise because it's nearly always the healers that are not doing enough damage. Even for myself, having to actually try hard to opti Ruin II out of my presses as much as I can and just slidecast Broil IV everything for movement heavy mechanics like Pantokrator where it just *feels* like I should be pressing it was a bit of a challenge.

Imagine how much worse that would be if the healer jobs went from 1-1-1-1-1 to 1-1-2-1-4-2-3 or whatever else. The discrepancy would grow and the valley between a "good healer" and a "bad healer" would make things much harder for the groups that already have issues with people who cannot keep good uptime on 1-1-1-1. This is at the core of the current healing design imo, way more than just "uhh healers shouldn't have dps buttons because they're healers!" because SE thinks that people who cannot keep a single GCD rolling on a healer *should* be able to clear even though they don't design the encounters that way. I don't think they'll get themselves out of it in 7.0 because they don't think it's an issue. The fights are getting more and more mechanically complex; and while I personally believe that doesn't mean there isn't room for more meat on the healers bones, I think SE solely cares about making sure as many people can clear as possible with as little friction as possible, and they don't like the idea of a healer being told to "do more damage" even if that's just how the game is designed. And convincing them that it's okay to tell healer players to do more is a very hard task, but it's absolutely what is required to have any sort of complexity within our "rotations" again.

The only thing I'm curious about is what they could have potentially learned from Anabaseios having what felt like nonexistent DPS checks, but I feel like it was only in part because of not wanting another Abyssos situation twice in a row and not out of any sort of testing to see how the community responds to more lenient DPS checks. Frankly, I don't think the developer team is going to make healers more mechanically complex in 7.0 unless the fight design shifts with it, so we'll see I guess... but I'm not optimistic. Getting healers into a "good" state will be a multiple expac process, just like getting them here took multiple expansions as well. I'm well past the point of waiting, but I guess we'll see with the Media Tour. I just think there's no reason to expect anything else than business as usual, honestly.

Originally Posted by RyanCousland

Bruv I cleared half of both the 2 tiers before going on break for IRL stuff so congrats you got me I have things to do outside of this game , was this the own you thought it would be?

You being incapable of clearing in a timely manner doesn't mean others don't have things to do outside of this game, it just means most players don't spend 20+ weeks trying and failing LOL

Not a SCH player, and this is an interpretation of how SCH exists in the game currently, but to me SCH is a job about giving orders. You should be able to tell your buffs, and debuffs what to do, you tell your fairies what to do, and you can now kinda tell your party what to do with Expedient. What I would like to see with SCH in DT is dramatically expanding what can be affected by abilities like Deployment Tactics, Emergency Tactics, and Recitation, and generally make their cooldowns significantly more flexible. Deployment tactics should work on any buff or debuff applied by the SCH such as Excogitation or Biolysis, Recitation be able to buff any buff or debuff.

What I think should also be fleshed out a little more is being able to give orders to enemies. I would like to see Chain Stratagem be changed to be a little more interactive, but I'm sure what that could look like.

Originally Posted by Nizzi

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Your comments (as well as few others) are the most ironic/inconsistent I've seen, if you want to dps then play dps quit trying to homogenize everything by asking for things other classes have (this is how dumb you sound with this rhetoric) aside from some people not knowing what they want or even know what they're talking about (yourself included), the game goes in cycles based on both the devs looking to try new things & player feedback, also unfortunately when its time for a dirt nap ill be going, knowing you call yourself daddy, I don't know whether to laugh or start doing drugs to forget this

Originally Posted by RyanCousland

Your comments (as well as few others) are the most ironic/inconsistent I've seen, if you want to dps then play dps quit trying to homogenize everything by asking for things other classes have (this is how dumb you sound with this rhetoric) aside from some people not knowing what they want or even know what they're talking about (yourself included), the game goes in cycles based on both the devs looking to try new things & player feedback, also unfortunately when its time for a dirt nap ill be going, knowing you call yourself daddy, I don't know whether to laugh or start doing drugs to forget this

Before you try swinging at zaddy, just remember you were incapable of clearing a single Savage tier this expac. LMFAO