The Healer Double Standard

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Originally Posted by george357

if i need to use a healer i will pick one that still works and wait for the others to get fixed.

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They all suffer from the same design problem. They are all 1 button jobs.

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Originally Posted by george357

if i need to use a healer i will pick one that still works and wait for the others to get fixed.

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Warrior it is then! (heavy /s)

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Originally Posted by Rabbid

In savage and ultimate, they rely on instant kill aoe, to keep it interesting for healers.

I think it would be a good idea if they add a damage buff when your Hp is above a certain percentage.
And a dps debuff when the Hp drops below.

Then there is more to it than just staying alive, it will give the Hp more meaning and it will give barrier healers more responsibility.

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I'd say that what makes healing interesting is unpredictability, which currently is primarily a function of the party you happen to find yourself in. Furthermore, healing is a response to what the combat environment throws at the party; a healing kit can be only as interesting as the combat environment.

Taken together, I'd like to see more unpredictability in combat: More mechanics, more variations to those mechanics, none of them according to a fixed script. Then, we can see how class designs need to adapt (or not…).

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Originally Posted by george357

if i need to use a healer i will pick one that still works and wait for the others to get fixed.

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The entire role has problems that need fixing.

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

I'd say that what makes healing interesting is unpredictability, which currently is primarily a function of the party you happen to find yourself in. Furthermore, healing is a response to what the combat environment throws at the party; a healing kit can be only as interesting as the combat environment.

Taken together, I'd like to see more unpredictability in combat: More mechanics, more variations to those mechanics, none of them according to a fixed script. Then, we can see how class designs need to adapt (or not…).

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Unpredictable damage (skills on timers rather than on a script) is indeed part of what made healing fun in other games. While you can track the timers (looking at you, WoW), the order in which a boss uses skills once the cooldowns are over are random. It's this unpredictable nature of damage that adds to healer gameplay, for the most part. It may not be the be-all end-all argument, but it's there.

However, the healers for FFXIV have kits that aren't designed for that kind of gameplay style. We've had one fight that was on timers, not a script (Urth's Fount if memory serves). So I'd agree that if we had more unscripted fights, healers would need an overhaul.

Honestly, I'd like to see the removal of homogenization among the healers. As it is, all of my abilities are on the same slots no matter what healer I'm on. Medica II is on Aspected Benefic is on Physis II is on Whispering Dawn. They all have basically the same function, and it's not the only similar skill or spell between them.

There is another big problem with making fights less predictable, namely the netcode/server ticks/whatever you want to call it, the way the game detects whether or not you got hit by something.

In higher end content you often simply do not have the time to quickly react to mechanics without already knowing what is going to happen.
This would end up either making unpredictable fights either too hard because you simply don't have time to dodge it, or too easy because you have too much time.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

In higher end content you often simply do not have the time to quickly react to mechanics without already knowing what is going to happen.

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If you already know what's about to happen, you're not reacting to anything. You're following a script.

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This would end up either making unpredictable fights either too hard because you simply don't have time to dodge it

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If the goal is to give healers something interesting to heal through, that sounds like a plus to me, not a minus. (I'm assuming that with unpredictable fights, mechanics are tweaked such that the fight doesn't come down to pure luck.)

Avoidable damage that everyone simply avoids as a matter of course isn't interesting. Scripted, unavoidable damage isn't interesting. That leaves unscripted, unavoidable damage — which, I don't know, is that interesting to heal through or just busy work?

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

If the goal is to give healers something interesting to heal through, that sounds like a plus to me, not a minus. (I'm assuming that with unpredictable fights, mechanics are tweaked such that the fight doesn't come down to pure luck.)

Avoidable damage that everyone simply avoids as a matter of course isn't interesting. Scripted, unavoidable damage isn't interesting. That leaves unscripted, unavoidable damage — which, I don't know, is that interesting to heal through or just busy work?

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I'm not really disagreeing there, it is just not feasible to implement with the way the game currently works without making it either impossible to deal with or way too easy. Neither of which is good in a savage fight.

If you make the avoidable damage oneshot people and then make the mechanics unpredictable, with the wonky snapshotting that XIV has, it will entirely depend on your luck and end up frustrating.
If you make the mechanic not oneshot people or make the cast so long that you can resolve it, with both the additional time needed to figure out what mechanic the boss is doing and the wonky snapshotting, then it will be way too easy.


This game currently just can't really do mechanics that require split second reactions.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

I'm not really disagreeing there, it is just not feasible to implement with the way the game currently works without making it either impossible to deal with or way too easy. Neither of which is good in a savage fight.

If you make the avoidable damage oneshot people and then make the mechanics unpredictable, with the wonky snapshotting that XIV has, it will entirely depend on your luck and end up frustrating.
If you make the mechanic not oneshot people or make the cast so long that you can resolve it, with both the additional time needed to figure out what mechanic the boss is doing and the wonky snapshotting, then it will be way too easy.


This game currently just can't really do mechanics that require split second reactions.

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It can do automatic attacks that are light at first but compound into problems if not reacted to, though. Like slows, stacking poisons, petrification, or layering multiple attacks so that they overwhelm if you're not staying on top of them (like Urth's Fount or Karlabos). This could be a mechanic for healers specifically, or for everyone by way of a cleansing interactable/duty-specific action/consumable antidote.

Karlabos is actually a fantastic example of the kind of design we need so much more of, insofar as you can deal with his DoT+Tail Screw attack sequence in multiple ways:

-healers/bards can esuna the slime so Tail Screw is harmless
-tanks/melees can stun the Tail Screw so the slime is not fatal
-a shield can be used to give an eHP cushion against the slime since Tail Screw only reduces blue health
-or you can throw a potion/heal at the exact right second to not die before the slime ticks

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

I'm not really disagreeing there, it is just not feasible to implement with the way the game currently works without making it either impossible to deal with or way too easy. Neither of which is good in a savage fight.

If you make the avoidable damage oneshot people and then make the mechanics unpredictable, with the wonky snapshotting that XIV has, it will entirely depend on your luck and end up frustrating.
If you make the mechanic not oneshot people or make the cast so long that you can resolve it, with both the additional time needed to figure out what mechanic the boss is doing and the wonky snapshotting, then it will be way too easy.


This game currently just can't really do mechanics that require split second reactions.

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IMHO the easiest solution there is to lean more on auto attacks persisting through casts with the ability to crit whilst also giving bosses short cooldown non-telegraphed tank busters and cleaves again.

Kaliya from Coil T11 during prog was a great example of how bosses should hit. It wasn't the hardest hitting boss of the time, but you needed both tanks to soak those cleaves initially and it was nothing like as predictable as what we have now because the bulk of the damage didn't have a huge long telegraph announcing it's arrival.

https://youtu.be/1WwRDVQotgo?t=15

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

IMHO the easiest solution there is to lean more on auto attacks persisting through casts with the ability to crit whilst also giving bosses short cooldown non-telegraphed tank busters and cleaves again.

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They honestly should have never taken out the crit autos. But heaven forbid a healer have to actually monitor their tanks’ HP all the time instead of being able to mostly ignore them.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

They honestly should have never taken out the crit autos. But heaven forbid a healer have to actually monitor their tanks’ HP all the time instead of being able to mostly ignore them.

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Careful now, there might be some window lickers that would be incapable of playing healer with such a change.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

They honestly should have never taken out the crit autos. But heaven forbid a healer have to actually monitor their tanks’ HP all the time instead of being able to mostly ignore them.

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Kardia main tank and go brain afk 1 spam. The “dps” healer only healing one person with dps is the greatest scam they could have done In this game. God I miss my discipline priester. Actually healing all people when I deal dmg and I still had to react because healing in wow is atleast not 100 % script stuff.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Careful now, there might be some window lickers that would be incapable of playing healer with such a change.

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Don’t you dare disrespect the crayon eater. They do try there best being afk and watch Netflix while they stay afk the entire fight………. I mean heal you every 50 seconds once. And hopefully the rest of the raid doesn’t mess up or they gonna have a meltdown trying to fix anything that isn’t one button.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

IMHO the easiest solution there is to lean more on auto attacks persisting through casts with the ability to crit whilst also giving bosses short cooldown non-telegraphed tank busters and cleaves again.

Kaliya from Coil T11 during prog was a great example of how bosses should hit. It wasn't the hardest hitting boss of the time, but you needed both tanks to soak those cleaves initially and it was nothing like as predictable as what we have now because the bulk of the damage didn't have a huge long telegraph announcing it's arrival.

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I'm curious: When did that change?

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

I'm curious: When did that change?

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Crit autos specifically were removed from most bosses after SB. Older content still has them, but none of the dungeons, trials, or raids in ShB or EW do.

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Originally Posted by Mortex

Don’t you dare disrespect the crayon eater.

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Purple is the best tasting crayon. Fight me.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Purple is the best tasting crayon. Fight me.

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I like red ones. In my mind the always taste like strawberry………

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Purple is the best tasting crayon. Fight me.

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How can you still eat that colour? The ACT fflogs elitists cheating with all their addons that play the game for them ruined the colour for me. It's always "be purple or u suck!" everywhere. Reddit, twitter, OF, ingame... even NN. I swear I have seen at least 5 people write that yesterday in NN. They ruined the color. I now prefer gray crayons to show them what I think of their elitist bullshit.

Wait, you're meant to eat them? I thought they went up your nose...

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Wait, you're meant to eat them? I thought they went up your nose...

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Liam and his pro crayon strats. Eating them is the party finder strat. What you do is the advance uptime nose start and we can’t have that here. It’s way to advanced for the eater people.

I've had a lot of overzealous healers in my Orbonne runs lately, an AOE goes out and they're blowing through all their healing cooldowns.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I've had a lot of overzealous healers in my Orbonne runs lately, an AOE goes out and they're blowing through all their healing cooldowns.

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Are they overzealous or just bored? Those fights don't even have an enrage so your DPS literally doesn't matter. You only have two buttons to press for DPS anyway and they aren't remotely exciting. I find myself overhealing sometimes just because I want to see a different animation from Broil. Are shields pointless? Heck yes most of the time but I apply them before a raidwide cause it's something to do at least. Healers have so many useless buttons and sometimes you just gotta press them for no reason to keep from falling asleep.

Chiming in just to say yeah, agreed on all points. Seriously. I have to play AST in order to not fall asleep at the keyboard now if I want to heal. It's infuriating. It's like they just don't want healers to have fun, just serve everyone else who wants to have fun.

They could gut half of the healing from all healer kits and the jobs would be more fun simply by virtue of being forced to GCD heal once in awhile to break the monotony. Even in "Extreme" content having to GCD heal is a rarity.

Also make dungeon bosses deal damage to tanks. We all know they don't deal any damage. Trash packs are more interesting than bosses at this point.

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Originally Posted by Pyitoechito

They could gut half of the healing from all healer kits and the jobs would be more fun simply by virtue of being forced to GCD heal once in awhile to break the monotony. Even in "Extreme" content having to GCD heal is a rarity.

Also make dungeon bosses deal damage to tanks. We all know they don't deal any damage. Trash packs are more interesting than bosses at this point.

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Ex?
After our p2s run at minimum itemlvl and synced so no materia either I used a grand total of... 0 AF heals on SCH. Nevermind GCD healers from either healer. There were even a lot of skipped fairy skills because it was simply not necessary - I saw 2 regens already ticking, no point in using one. And I kept Dissipation on cooldown too, so even more time when I was locked out of my only free heals aside from Recit.
It's a bit disappointing that the first two floors don't have anough incoming damage at minimum item level to even warrant AF heals, let alone GCD heals.

Hopefully the next Ex won't be done without healers at release.

Remember when we were dissuaded from our worries 6.0 was making healers even more braindead, by the promise high-end content would be specifically designed with our stupidly bloated kits in mind? lol

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Originally Posted by ThorneDynasty

Remember when we were dissuaded from our worries 6.0 was making healers even more braindead, by the promise high-end content would be specifically designed with our stupidly bloated kits in mind? lol

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You mean those instances where i can get away with the absolute bare minimum amounts of healing? Yeah, funny how that turned out huh.

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Originally Posted by Pyitoechito

Also make dungeon bosses deal damage to tanks. We all know they don't deal any damage. Trash packs are more interesting than bosses at this point.

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I find the boss encounters of the game (I'm a casual who doesn't raid) dull. Once you memorize the script, you're good. Trash, on the other hand, remains interesting when the tank pulls wall-to-wall. I find Aurum Vale one of the most fun dungeons to heal, especially with sprouts and first timers. I would be perfectly happy with dungeons that have nothing but hard-hitting trash mobs, no bosses please! Well, unless SE stops using scripted mechanics. Then, I may find bosses interesting. I never liked rote memorization.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

You mean those instances where i can get away with the absolute bare minimum amounts of healing? Yeah, funny how that turned out huh.

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And we jaded veterans were told to "wait and see". The same thing we've been told for the past 2 expansions since the great purge of Stormblood.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

And we jaded veterans were told to "wait and see". The same thing we've been told for the past 2 expansions since the great purge of Stormblood.

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Sorry, but what even would there be to 'wait and see' about?

Healer oGCDs are so powerful and so plentiful and so bland that if there were ever a piece of content designed to actually make them burn through them all to the point that they need to dip into GCD healing, it would have to be blasting the entire party to critical health every five seconds -- because healers certainly don't have any role-wide oGCDs about curing statuses or applying some kind of utility that we can pander to, it's all chunk healing and mitigation -- and if it's damage by rote like the rest of FF14 damage, it'll be extremely stressful for the healers who can't map out their healing while being about as boring as current content for the ones who can. And if that level of damage goes out pseudo-randomly, that's even more terrifying!

So I'm confused and alarmed as to what the content we're supposed to be waiting for with this healer design would look like.

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Originally Posted by ThorneDynasty

Remember when we were dissuaded from our worries 6.0 was making healers even more braindead, by the promise high-end content would be specifically designed with our stupidly bloated kits in mind? lol

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I enjoyed the predictions for Endwalker.

"Yoshida said they would be giving healers more to heal! Pure healing is going to be a playstyle, the way of the filthy dps healer is over! You won't have time to dps next expansion, we're going to need our GCD heals!"

It was entertaining. And of course it turned out exactly the way we said it would.

Again, if they want to give us more to heal, they're going to have to completely rework all the healers to where GCDs are our only healing sources and oGCDs can only provide mitigation or buffs. But we know they won't do this, they don't have the guts to bring us back to HW levels of healing, because people would just cry that it's too hard, like they did back then.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

Again, if they want to give us more to heal, they're going to have to completely rework all the healers to where GCDs are our only healing sources and oGCDs can only provide mitigation or buffs. But we know they won't do this, they don't have the guts to bring us back to HW levels of healing, because people would just cry that it's too hard, like they did back then.

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They really don’t even have to do even close to that

If they left the healing exactly how it is but then every time the boss hit the tank it did a small 5-10% raidwide we would need to be GCD healing a lot more (sort of like how you can’t leave people low health during FOA because of the fire rain ticks), I’m not saying this particular example would be terribly fun but it’s an easy example of how they can keep our bloated kits, keep damage predictable and still force us to heal a whole lot more than we currently do

Lul, I can still basically play WHM with nothing but Regen and Medica II for anything that's not Extreme or Savage (and even then I forget to use a lot of abilities because I simply don't need to). Or an Alliance raid where everyone stands in mechanics.

Healing is such a joke. It's the class I play when I want to turn off my brain and just concentrate on mechanics, because only needing to use less than 6 buttons aside from movement is pretty laughable.

The fact that current Savage tiers have been completed without healers is proof enough that the role is practically superfluous these days. We're more a safety blanket for the greed-god DPS players that mistime the AOE snapshots.

I think that’s a bit much..

Can Savage be cleared Week 1 without healers? Has P3S been cleared without healers?

It points less to the healers and more about how power scaling of players from gearing might need to be reined in a bit.

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Originally Posted by ToodlesElNoodles

I think that’s a bit much..

Can Savage be cleared Week 1 without healers? Has P3S been cleared without healers?

It points less to the healers and more about how power scaling of players from gearing might need to be reined in a bit.

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Falling back to an ever-shrinking perimeter of where healers are allowed to be necessary is not a defense, it's a step away from giving up.

Remember back when auto attacks were the tankbusters? Remember when W2W pulling required the entire team to be good or it would fail with a party wipe? Remember when healers had to use everything including their GCD heals to avoid the party wiping? Emet-Selch remembers.

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Originally Posted by ToodlesElNoodles

Can Savage be cleared Week 1 without healers? Has P3S been cleared without healers?

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I think the fact that you're having to even ask the question instead of being confident in knowing that it cannot happen at all is reason enough to know there's a glaring fundamental problem with this rotting, dead role.

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Originally Posted by vetch

Falling back to an ever-shrinking perimeter of where healers are allowed to be necessary is not a defense, it's a step away from giving up.

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It’s literally just another way of saying “lol go play ultimate”,

Got a game people endlessly laude as being amazingly casual friendly and fun for everyone they sure do like to make healers completely irrelevant for all but the absolute most difficult content, but then again they are aiming for the “I spam cure 1 and love it (while the WAR heals himself and grounds his teeth into nubs over cure 1’s horrible sound effect)” audience so maybe irrelevant healer that feels like they are contributing without any actual chance of messing anything up is what they are going for