#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Moqi]

Despite how much they keep butchering WHM it's still the most fun healer to play for me, both mechanically and aesthetically. I just wish we actually still everything that made WHM fun to play: MP and aggro management, uptime, CGD healing, Cleric Stance, and big DPS/Heal bombs that are impactful and actually needed in content...

[Kacho_Nacho]

Well that’s kinda my entire point

What incentive does square have to improve the design of the healers and really allow the other three to do something unique when people point to WHM as an example of having some kind of ephemeral “power” or “good feeling” to it as an example of good direction (if flawed) design when in reality the class is literally so weak it’s externalising its own responsibilities onto its cohealer

I don’t know a single shield healer main who doesn’t groan when a WHM joins a party. Is a class really well designed when it’s “fun” because it’s simple but in reality it’s simplicity comes from forcing its cohealer to work harder to compensate for it

Maybe it's because I'm running in different content; but, I've never encountered this. From my perspective, WHM meshes well with every other healer in the game.

Players who enjoy playing White Mage don't need to apologize for enjoying their job, no matter if another player might groan because the RNG system didn't provide them the optimal healer grouping.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think it's less that 'WHM doesn't do enough so it burdens their cohealer', but moreso 'AST has way too much' (especially with DT's changes to it). And with AST having Netural Sect (which then stacks with any other barrier, and can be reapplied multiple times, while Divine Caress can only 'protect' the party once), AND Sun Sign being semi-comparable to Temperance (but it's also stronger), AND Collective Unconscious giving AST a seperate, 60s CD mitigation option that WHM just... doesn't have an equivalent for, it's pretty undeniable that AST's kit is a lot more versatile, and that allows the cohealer to be a lot more flexible in their own timings. In a game design which focuses so little on 'HPS throughput' and so much on 'reduce the damage of the attack to a manageable amount', it's easy to see why people might see 'the 'all HPS/no mit' healer design as being less favourable in some way, and focus on that so heavily

It should also be noted, that 'it provides no mitigation, and has no raidbuff' is the exact reason that people thought DRK was 'bad' in SB, leading to its rework in 5.0 (along with the APM complaints about Dark Arts). And also the same reason that WHM was in the situation it was in with SB. So depsite changing Lilies to be 'not an abomination of game design', WHM's perception still suffers because of this insistence that it should be so focused on dealing out big HPS

[Maltothoris]

Indeed, you have to go far and beyond to break perception. Look what they did with astros in 3.4 and pld in 4.0. Both of them had trouble throughout hw and then in 3.4 you have astro getting huge buffs through and pld getting a lot of decent stuff in SB that made people forget about the previous patches.

The issue I would say with lilies was that the bar was so low when they first debuted, any improvement would of been made with huge applause. I still have no idea what they intended to do with the original set.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]The issue I would say with lilies was that the bar was so low when they first debuted, any improvement would of been made with huge applause. I still have no idea what they intended to do with the original set.

Concept-wise, I don't even hate OG StB lilies, as in "Gauge that I have to manage so I can have XYZ actions empowered later on". But of all buttons they could choose as the catalyst for the gauge, they've chosen the worst of all for whatever reason.

"Use a lot of Cure I/Cure II so you can reduce one of your chosen healing oGCDs cooldown that maybe you get 1-2 extra use in a single fight! P.S. exception for Benediction because that thing's too OP and needs to remain on their god awful long cooldown!! :P"

Yeah, that totally would fly... lmao.

[Tint]

The issue I would say with lilies was that the bar was so low when they first debuted, any improvement would of been made with huge applause. I still have no idea what they intended to do with the original set.

The idea was that you could heal more the more you healed, making WHM an HPS powerhouse (together with original Plenary, which was basically a 400 / 500 / 600 potency off-GCD heal on a 15 second cooldown). The more Cure / Cure II you would spam the more off-GCD heals were available to you. But of course nobody was playing WHM in such a way...

[Maltothoris]

Fair enough. If I remember Sebazy said somewhere, this system was very much design for the Gordias and Midas. However, the problem with that was Stormblood was them making the fights wah less intensive and no where near the burden the hw fights were.

[Aravell]

Fair enough. If I remember Sebazy said somewhere, this system was very much design for the Gordias and Midas. However, the problem with that was Stormblood was them making the fights wah less intensive and no where near the burden the hw fights were.

That's the standard way of how things go, the dev team tends to overcompensate too far in changes.

The best example is how people talked about how hard it was to do damage as a healer back in HW, so they reworked Cleric Stance in SB and made damage spells scale off of MND, which is ok so far, then they deleted a bunch of spells in ShB so the bulk of your damage output comes from 2 buttons, which is now a step too far in overcompensation for a problem that was already fixed after the first change.

[Neft]

EDIT:

Conclusion
Ultimately, all this "strike" is is just a message to the community management team that many of us aren't healing in Dawntrail until at least the healer role becomes more fun to play always--not just in ultimate. While many of these points may take time to address, a simple one we can do right now is take the attacks spells we already have on each healer and make them a more frequent part of that healer's gameplay loop. Reduce DOT durations, shorten cooldowns, and disconnect these new 2-minute attacks from their respective buffs and make them available more frequently.

as someone who mained healer from ARR-SHB then tank from SHB to now.

your tanks could solo stuff as far back as SHB maybe even farther back for high skill floor players, the issues now is that mitigating if you know 50% of your rotation can be done by effectively anyone making it more apparent.

at one point on one tank to solo a boss for NEW content while hitting the mechanics i was seeing for the first time, i had to push my class nearly to it's limits, but towards the end of SHB and start of EW it became vastly easier.

Dark knight can still be tricky to solo a boss with and sometimes depends on how good you are at balancing your timers depending on level and other times it depends on the bosses health.

but regardless being able to solo a boss while level sync'd should not happen, period.

that said, its not just tank mits and such that are the issue, i've also managed to solo bosses as pictomancer without kiting in certain level syncd dungeons.

and as for healer i stopped playing it long ago, because it started to genuinely feel bad to play, i felt like i was useless and not needed and this can be proven at literally any dungeon.

you can clear literally every fight in the game almost without a healer.

the only absolute exceptions are current end game high ends and anything that forces level sync - but even then i wouldn't be surprised if someone makes an FC raid with all dark knights or paladins or warriors or something and runs the high end dungeons down without a healer.

its probably possible assuming they can meet the dps checks and do the mechanics flawlessly

[Supersnow845]

When you really step back……..far the idea behind SB lilys wasn’t actually terrible. Use a heal to get more uses of a different better heal. It was just flawed in every single other aspect (and in a way there are shades of it that actually work like how WAR is encouraged to use fell cleaves to generate infuriate stacks to use more fell cleaves)

Even SCH’s quickened aetherflow is an example of a similar system working, it’s just that WHM lacked the depth in its healing kit to feel like it was building towards anything