[Snake]

The current scaling system for it is not going to cut for it, Polk, it'll just further widen the gap between elves and other race healers.

[MothEnthusiast]

The current scaling system for it is not going to cut for it, Polk, it'll just further widen the gap between elves and other race healers.

I'm not sure I see the logic here. How is removing SWA scaling (to the point where heals have to be constant to be effective) going to not have an even more pronounced effect in this way? Either one would probably have to come with a slight Elf nerf / tweak either way, if the raw numbers are going to be hit.

[Skullcatrons]

Horrible thread. Horrible suggestions to a 'problem' that doesn't exist. Horrible stance on anything regarding to healers.

Healers do not need any '10% FP cost per heal', healers do not need to lose more of their scaling, healers do not need more punishments. Otherwise why the hell would you play a Mercala-forsaken healer in this damn period, and era? For love of god, for what purpose would you want to play a healer if we implement ANY of these changes? For WHAT REASONS?! You don't like that healers exist? Pack a interference, black bubble, silence, hell - Dark water vial their ass. 

In the olden days of olde, healers received a """"""healthy"""""" loads of nerf over the years.
- Skill became mandatory skill investment for ALL magic casters, this include priests who want to deal damage and be contributing member. Rebellious 1* Light tomes were relic of the past as hits were more important than not having them.
- All healing spells were granted cooldown compared to previous iterations where they did not have cooldowns originally. 
- Malmelo used to be flat % based on rank, but was nerfed to Scaled FAI up to capped % on rank to prevent spellthieves becoming overpowered.
- Mass rescue on paper may look overpowered, but when you realize that priest have grouped all his buddies on him, that if you have slight bit of braincell, you could AOE-dump on that location right there and then to inflict even bigger damage than the heals done. Bear in mind the healers had to spend 1 momentum to prepare mass, 3 momentum to rescue, and then 3 final momentum to cast a graft spell. Generally these healers tend to be 350~ per party-member. If your friends have AOE. They could drop two AOE on the stacked group, and they would've dealt more damage than the healer originally did barring that if none of them are DR-doom wall... Which is a thread of it's own (Bodyguard moment)
- The Curate buffs hadn't even received a single glow-up, and became a relic of the past neglected with no real forgiveness. Let not forget treatment skills were BUGGED for so damn long!
- SHINE KNIGHTS ARE THE WORST THING TO EXIST AND ANYONE TRYING TO DEFEND SHINE KNIGHTS WILL BE DEMANDED TO MEET THE DEMOCRACY OFFICER ABOARD THEIR SUPERDESTROYER FOR CORRECTION!

Healers didn't need a nerf. What you need is a better party composition that have someone with interference. What kind of psychopath don't pack interference for healers who surprisingly isn't running a LB Quetzal to prevent interference? Hell. if you wanna make healers easier to deal with. Then take away Quetzal's interference prevention, and you might be surprised how easily healers would fold.

Speaking of other things - 

Cantus of Consideration is not very good heal. It's flat 100 with additional 25 per every song buff. This includes Cantus of Consideration so bare minimum is always 125. But it's not exactly good as graft plus this is on six cooldown round. SIX. BLOODY. COOLDOWN ROUND. 
SIX -
WHOLE
FUCKING
ROUNDS!

Graft have 4, and that thing can be massed and heal far more than Cantus of Consideration

THIS GARBAGE HAVE SIX. WHY THE HELL IS IT SO LONG FOR A MIDDLING HEAL? Sure you could argue PERFORMERS but who in their sick-deranged mindset with absolutely no ethic would play an even worse class with zero offensives.

In fact the posters' entire complaint include dancers -  Dancers aren't a healing class - they're a DAMAGE class with Rest Beat and Idol Steps which is more of self-heal than actual healing for everyone else. Everyone knows Dancers are annoying but if there's ONE benefit to fighting dancers - they can't hit a side of the barn if they tried!  

This thread is uninformed - uneducated - and fallible. Black knights come prepared with interference. Evokers have interference. Hexers also have interference. Spellthief can steal a spell to inflict interference. Magic Gunners get interference. Base Soldier's Incise can inflict interference if said soldier is wearing lightning badge. Thenos can get a racial that inflicts interference in a radius. And even then! There are also silences! Some classes get 'em too! Sure a Priest can silent prayer it off, but that doesn't mean that they're still having to spend momentum for it!

Why are you trying to nerf when there's plenty of methods to counter them? Maybe you should consider fixing your party composition.

[FatherCrixius]

i think it's bm to necro a thread with a troll post like that skullcat
but yeah dedicated healing is a problem (not just on elves)

[Poruku]

Local priest copes beyond all reason

Yeah 150 hp heal to your party is a middling heal. Now imagine if you didn't have that ability at all. This is what it's like to play most characters. If you seriously think healing is fair and balanced in its current state then maybe you should consider fixing your party composition

However there's two issues here that are vastly different.

1: super tanky character that heals itself and destroys everyone in 1v1
This is a type of build I've played before. Absolute cancer. How are you gonna interference me at 190 sr. You deal 84 damage I heal for 200.

2: aoe healing
Insane value in events and team pvp to the point where if there's a healer in a group I know for a fact they can handle more difficult mobs. And if I fight a team with a healer I know I'm screwed. Give an elf spellthief priest to ANY pvp team and it's suddenly a god tier team cause they will never die.

Interference is useful but not gonna fix all the problems. Not even mentioning the fact not everyone has access to it. You want a "either heal or get interference" meta??

[Autumn]

Personally I see less of an issue in the healing amounts that are present in the game and more in the ease of access to their best use case scenarios is, rarely will you ever find anyone complaining about the likes of Healing Discharge, Healing Cantus or Gentle Garden given their respective ranges. But you'll always find those people complaining about massive AoE healing that really doesn't ever fall off in usage, such as Second Set, Malmelo, Phoenix and sometimes even Graft when paired with Mass + Rescue.

It might be more prudent to target the access to healing than to target the healing amounts themselves cause I quite genuinely think in most cases the amount of healing that can get done is quite manageable (Except maybe Elves, you'll finally get me to admit that), maybe hit Priest's +50% healing passive to +25% instead if numbers are still an issue.

[Shujin]

Necromancy!

C-can Amalgama heals get buffed? Q.Q 54/60 globally or 108 to yourself with 4-5 CD is kinda really bad with their 50% health condition!

aside from that, I think I mostly agree with Autumn. But an increasing debuff that decreases the amount healed, for heal spamming, is both ICly accurate and probably healthy for too long going heal slog fests, and might be worth considering. thinking of something like 25% of healed HP related to Max Hp. (Example: 1000MHP is healed for 50% of max health, so all heals in future are only 75% effective) . But I do not think its needed, in case of single healers. It only gets annoying with more than one healer in a team. But...Interference, Silence, Confusion. *shrug*

[Skullcatrons]

1: super tanky character that heals itself and destroys everyone in 1v1
This is a type of build I've played before. Absolute cancer. How are you gonna interference me at 190 sr. You deal 84 damage I heal for 200.

2: aoe healing
Insane value in events and team pvp to the point where if there's a healer in a group I know for a fact they can handle more difficult mobs. And if I fight a team with a healer I know I'm screwed. Give an elf spellthief priest to ANY pvp team and it's suddenly a god tier team cause they will never die.

Interference is useful but not gonna fix all the problems. Not even mentioning the fact not everyone has access to it. You want a "either heal or get interference" meta??

Number one's issue comes from DR Doomstacking meta which escalates to something else, and isn't entirely exclusive to healers. Most of your problems when facing against DR Doomstackers was to Fray, Acid-Rain, Burn, Ravage, etc. Any form of methods to shred armor and DR%. 

This unfortunately is a problem that wouldn't really be solved if you nerf healing. In this case, heals are like extra needle in this needle-infested haystacks of balancing issues when it come to DR-Doomstackings. It wouldn't solve the problem. But then again...

the second problem is even more clearer. Spellthieves and Elves. If you were to just put a handcap on spellthieves' healing capability, they would flicker out like ashes to the wind. It's not like Dev hadn't nerfed Priest's Malmelo because priests were overpowered. (Spoiler: Malmelo's HP% was originally based on ranks and not on FAI% capped by rank. This change was done because of Spellthieves stealing Malmelo spell.) There's also additional problem that need to be confronted, and it's elves. One, if not most notorious race to be found among hardcore healer-players. Especially moreso now that Jade Whistle exists. Meaning that elven players could run Performer/Spellthief build. Why Performer? Because Performer's song-passive would empower Cantus of Consideration to cure debuffs. Not only did this serve to further empower Elves because it scales off SAN, but also lead to whole can of worms in a lethal sense. 

What you're looking for is not a heal nerf, but racial nerf toward elves. Something I'm all about for so damn long.

Interference is useful but not gonna fix all the problems. Not even mentioning the fact not everyone has access to it. You want a "either heal or get interference" meta??

You may be joking, you may be jesting. Hell, you might be jousting.

But that's exactly the way about it. We've three status debuffs that you could employ. They are silence, interference, and confuse. Dev have been slowly adding more confusion-inflicting conditions. And with confusion, healers cannot heal their companions. They can heal themselves, but they can't heal their buddy. Interference prevents any kind of healings. And silence forces a healer to spend a 3M, be a race with increased FP cost, get a consumable Throatopener, use a screamer tome, or just cry about it.

It's not like it's any worse than

Hit vs Evade meta.

[Poruku]

Well, the difference is that everyone can (in theory) have hit and tools to deal with evade, but not everyone has interference. But let's not go too much into that comparison.

The big issue with heals isn't only elves and spellthief I'm afraid. Elves are op for sure, and spellthief is one of the best, but imo there's a much deeper issue with healing, and it's the fact they turn any lengthy battle into a win, especially when kiting or reviving comes into play. The value of heals is always present.

From a purely mathematical standpoint, healing is not reduced by defenses. So healing for 150 is more effective in the "damage race" than dealing 150 damage, unless you have like 0 defenses. (Which is why healing is so powerful on tanky builds). It's like heals are protection ignoring evade ignoring resistance ignoring abilities in that sense. It's inherently superior to an attack.

Secondly, healing is almost always useable, because it only needs to hit your allies, not your enemies. Whenever there is a slow down in the pace of the fight, as in, both parties are mostly out of rangr, it's to the advantage of the healers because they are always in range to heal. If their formation is good, their aoes also hit a lot of allies, but it can be hard to hit many enemies with aoe.

All in all this means that the side with less heals in any engagement is constantly needing to put pressure on the healer party, because otherwise they will quickly lose the progress they made in damage without being able to recoup themselves. This dynamic means the non-healer party may need to take excessive risks to keep up pressure.

This is obviously exacerbated when the healer has even decent kiting capability. You have to catch up constantly and keep attacking. But if you kite, then you are effectively delaying and thus getting more heal cooldowns to go down. Even if it's 1 for 1 on momentum. I move, heal. You move, attack. In a long fight this can mean slowly gaining value, and the enemy is forced to keep up or the match slips out of their hands due to the point above.

[MothEnthusiast]

After a long break from the game, I have returned. My hatred for healing spurred a looc conversation, and reminded me of this thread, and I come back to see... a lot of aggression towards me and others in this thread. Fun! I'm going to shamelessly necro this thread because I feel the problem is very important.

Let's break this down, because to say that a pretty lukewarm take is 'uneducated' and that the problem I'm talking about 'doesn't exist' is insane to me.

Pack a interference, black bubble, silence, hell - Dark water vial their ass.

Going to talk specifically about dark water here. Dark water vial? Walk out of it. 1M move out of it. Hell, slap down a sanctuary and it's not even an option. There's too much counterplay to the supposed counterplay. It might help if you're lucky, but generally it won't be enough.

In the olden days of olde, healers received a """"""healthy"""""" loads of nerf over the years.

Just because it's been nerfed doesn't mean it's balanced now. Simple as.

- All healing spells were granted cooldown compared to previous iterations where they did not have cooldowns originally.

Cooldowns don't mean a whole lot when you can rotate through 3+ healing spells, which is why Priest was the first thing mentioned in my original post. You combine that with another class with multiple heals, and you can pop off 200+ heals per turn without pause if you really want (or need, which you likely won't) to.

- Mass rescue on paper may look overpowered, but when you realize that priest have grouped all his buddies on him, that if you have slight bit of braincell, you could AOE-dump on that location right there and then to inflict even bigger damage than the heals done. Bear in mind the healers had to spend 1 momentum to prepare mass, 3 momentum to rescue, and then 3 final momentum to cast a graft spell. Generally these healers tend to be 350~ per party-member. If your friends have AOE. They could drop two AOE on the stacked group, and they would've dealt more damage than the healer originally did barring that if none of them are DR-doom wall... Which is a thread of it's own (Bodyguard moment)

The AoE argument is all nice and good until you remember that the turns are staggered. Ally, opponent, ally, opponent. One person will get all of the people with their AoEs, and that's assuming the next in line is in range with both actions if they want ANY chance of overcoming that healing. By the time the second opponent rolls around to do damage, the positioning can look very different.

Healers didn't need a nerf. What you need is a better party composition that have someone with interference. What kind of psychopath don't pack interference for healers who surprisingly isn't running a LB Quetzal to prevent interference? Hell. if you wanna make healers easier to deal with. Then take away Quetzal's interference prevention, and you might be surprised how easily healers would fold.

Never in my life will you get me to accept statuses as scattered as interference to be a PROPER counter to healers. As a Hexer Papilion with 60+ scaled will and skill, I had 20ish inflict against a healer at one point. The best odds I could've had build-wise, and I had a 1/5th chance of actually getting the effect that could stop them. That's not accounting for the fact that the spell in hexer that gives interference uses a stat that most hexers won't be running. Now consider other classes. BK? Will-running BKs are fairly rare. Status infliction chance. Evoker? Infliction chance. Fact of the matter is, a solid chunk of healers aren't going to be affected by anyone but the best of the best of infliction chances. It's not a real counter with how inaccessible it is in practice.

Cantus of Consideration is not very good heal. It's flat 100 with additional 25 per every song buff. This includes Cantus of Consideration so bare minimum is always 125. But it's not exactly good as graft plus this is on six cooldown round. SIX. BLOODY. COOLDOWN ROUND.
SIX -
WHOLE
FUCKING
ROUNDS!

I just included this skill for the sake of contrast to classes with ZERO heals, and to illustrate the point I was making about rotating heals. The skill itself isn't much compared to other heals, but it's far from useless.

In fact the posters' entire complaint include dancers -  Dancers aren't a healing class - they're a DAMAGE class with Rest Beat and Idol Steps which is more of self-heal than actual healing for everyone else. Everyone knows Dancers are annoying but if there's ONE benefit to fighting dancers - they can't hit a side of the barn if they tried!

You could split Idol Step into 4 separate skills and they'd all be at least situationally useful. A damage skill, a healing skill, a 25% charm, and a wear-out to drain them heavily of their FP. I'm not taking further comments on Dancer's woes until it's nerfed, thank you. Also just here for further contrast between the 'has healing' and 'has no healing' camps.

Why are you trying to nerf when there's plenty of methods to counter them? Maybe you should consider fixing your party composition.

Party composition? What about 1v1s, where the problem is just as severe? What about when classes don't have access to these counters, or you simply don't have inflict? Are you supposed to just lose with zero contest?

Number one's issue comes from DR Doomstacking meta which escalates to something else, and isn't entirely exclusive to healers. Most of your problems when facing against DR Doomstackers was to Fray, Acid-Rain, Burn, Ravage, etc. Any form of methods to shred armor and DR%.

This unfortunately is a problem that wouldn't really be solved if you nerf healing. In this case, heals are like extra needle in this needle-infested haystacks of balancing issues when it come to DR-Doomstackings. It wouldn't solve the problem. But then again...

Any amount of DR, doomwall or not, amplifies the effective value of healing. Even a meh 30% def/res is still a world of difference in healing that scales the same (or better, even!) compared to a skill that has to hit against defenses. 200 healing vs 200 damage is 200 health back vs 140 health lost. I've had fights against people who weren't doomwalls where I had to do 3x their max HP by the end and I STILL lost.

Honestly, reading these posts almost makes me feel like we're playing entirely different games. I simply don't understand how you can come to the conclusion that healing is in an okay state, especially compared to builds that have no access to them.

During times where opponents are far from one another, what is a non-healer going to do? Evoker, for example. What are you going to do, throw down a shitty enchant? Refresh your CM for your whole turn that you probably already had up turn 1? Meanwhile, the person opposite of you just got their entire HP bar back. Anywhere from 2 to 10 turns of progress lost during that downtime.