Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

The point of a game is to be fun, and the sad reality is that for many healer players right now FFXIV simply isn't, or at least, the state of enjoying the healers is so conditional that it only applies to a eyedropper's worth of content that the game actually offers.

The sentence should just be "Healers are fun." None of this "Healers are fun when..." "Healers are fun if..." "Healers are fun except..." BS. Whether I am clearing the MSQ, farming Treasure Maps, progging Savage, soloing Deep Dungeons, I should be able to have fun as a healer. What kind of fun can vary from one piece of content to the next, but jobs need to be designed with all types of content in mind from multiple skill thresholds, from the novice to the master.

I was trying (and failing) to be facetious as opposed to literal. Which, in hindsight probably doesn’t make sense since I don’t post enough to make my overall view clear.

Without posting more paragraphs of my random musings, I’ll try and sum up the overall view.

Basically I think we can have both increased healing requirements and more dps options, and I don’t think one can/should be affected without considering the other. Like if we have more dps options, I think having more to heal comes as a necessary caveat to that.

I feel like healing requirements are being held back by this belief that if someone fails a healing requirement the Final Days is going to happen again. Even if someone is struggling with keeping up with higher healing requirements there’s also the co-healer, tanks, Red Mages/Summoner, Dancers (I guess we can throw Bards in there too lol).

And even if it does come to the worst and the party wipes, is that really so bad? I’d say it’s inevitable every now and then unless everyone’s a robot, so I think the idea that healing always needs to be so easy it can’t be failed by newer players doesn’t really work ultimately. I mean, it’s nobody ever can go higher when they’re just walking across a line instead of going up some stairs - if people don’t have reasons to improve, they’re probably going to stay the same as how they are.

I just worry that somehow the devs are going to read the feedback and mistakenly conclude ‘so it’s ok if healing stays the same as long as we give them more damage abilities’ (they’ve made weirder conclusions lol) which I don’t think is the answer. It’s only a combination of the two that’s ever actually going to make healers enjoyable.

and maybe some buff/debuff gcds as filler during downtime lol

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Originally Posted by Connor

I just worry that somehow the devs are going to read the feedback and mistakenly conclude ‘so it’s ok if healing stays the same as long as we give them more damage abilities’ (they’ve made weirder conclusions lol) which I don’t think is the answer. It’s only a combination of the two that’s ever actually going to make healers enjoyable.

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I've personally always been arguing for cutting down redundancies in the healer kit, making fights more heal-intensive and also giving healers a good downtime kit, many others have a similar opinion as well. If the devs truly looked into the healer forums and genuinely think that they only need to add a couple damage buttons to completely satisfy us, then I really don't know what to say.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

I've personally always been arguing for cutting down redundancies in the healer kit, making fights more heal-intensive and also giving healers a good downtime kit, many others have a similar opinion as well. If the devs truly looked into the healer forums and genuinely think that they only need to add a couple damage buttons to completely satisfy us, then I really don't know what to say.

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I’d truly like to hope so too, but at the same time my mind just goes back to them deleting Energy Drain and expecting Scholars to dump their Aetherflow on idk Sacred Soil lol. They’ve made so many ‘far-out there’ decisions it’s a little hard to trust them not to continue the trend

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Originally Posted by Connor

Basically I think we can have both increased healing requirements and more dps options, and I don’t think one can/should be affected without considering the other. Like if we have more dps options, I think having more to heal comes as a necessary caveat to that.

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The way to do this would be (i think) to have more DPS actions to balance the split in our kit to be less skewed towards 'bloated with heals we don't need all of', and then build interlinking gameplay between the two halves. As it stands, on any given GCD, we mostly choose between 'do damage this GCD' or 'do healing this GCD'. However, a select few, positively received, actions, buck this trend. Lilies are healing, but later give damage via the refund of Misery. Pneuma and Macrocosmos are immediately refunded the damage, as they deal the same damage as a filler GCD when executed. So, with a more robust rotation for damage, the devs would have room to create ways for us dealing damage to, directly or indirectly, help us with healing. Be that with 'SGE heals better with Kardia' by making Kardia be something more, or 'damage builds a gauge that can then be spent on powerful healing tools when the moment calls for them'. A recent suggestion made over on healer forums was for SCH to have it's two fairies cover healing, and damage, and you the SCH cover the half the fairy does not. So you'd cycle between the two, having one phase where Eos handles healing and you DPS, and then a phase where you handle healing more (via AF heals), and Selene covers the damage. Rather than the halves of 'damage' and 'healing' be two distinct things, an idea like that blends the two, interlinks them, and makes them feel like one whole kit

As it stands, we look at our healing tools through the lens of 'how can I use this to create as much DPS time as possible'. What we could have is the reverse, of 'how can I use the DPS time I'm given to build up resources to access these powerful heals/mits', which then leads into asking the former question again, like a cycle. Medica spam should not be the 'moment of power' reward in a heal check, it should be the fallback option for when you have nothing left

The problem with healers and with most jobs is that SE feels compelled to add a new job every expansion but their resources to manage the jobs is not increasing. This means that having proper variety of healers is getting harder to maintain with their own identity. The raid design also makes it hard to have a variety of healers due to the number of slots, balancing so any combo of healers works and the “meta”.

Side comment, I always sigh when I hear them refer to WHM as a pure healer when all we do in raids is cast Glare/Dia while the other healer gets to heal. I don’t want to be a Glare Mage, I want to heal! Sadly, all I get to do is glare at the devs and Glare at the boss.

Wait, you mean we are all DPS? <hears some behind me> Yes… click

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Originally Posted by Connor

Did we? I saw that one person saying it was an issue, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else say it was something ‘too difficult’. I’ve not had any party wipes to it that I can think of either, and while I do generally play healer myself anyway, but I never felt like the Co-healers weren’t always ready to immediately deal with it, usually using the ‘button that now exists solely for this type of mechanic’ lol, like Painhaima / Macrocosmos / Litany / Seraph

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I went back and did a bit of digging/logs stalking, the occasions that came up first look like they may have been referring to Savage rather than normal. So it's possible that's an error on my part if so.

Eitherway, I'm not against healing requirements going up at all. IMO if SE can bring themselves to consistently and sensibly tune *everything* up in a manner that also forces healers to pay attention then the player base will adapt and improve to suit. It's definitely fair to say that a big part of the reason that swathes of the player base are as bad as they are is because the game openly allows and in some cases almost encourages it.

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I feel like healing requirements are being held back by this belief that if someone fails a healing requirement the Final Days is going to happen again.

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This has always absolutely boggled my mind tbh.

Deaths in Everquest could literally lead into horror stories like losing whole sets of gear at low levels or being tied down into all night raid corpse recoveries at the end game.
In WoW you could get corpse camped and effectively locked down for hours leaving you unable to do anything outside of logging for the day and praying you could sneak away tomorrow.
In FFXI you could be forced into spending hours just to build up buffer EXP to prevent deleveling on an inopportune moment, and god forbid you actually develed mid raid.
In FFXIV you lose somewhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes on a run or pull and some completely irrelevant amount of gil.

Despite the penalty for deaths being minuscule compared to what we've seen in older MMOs, people in FFXIV in general tend to take failure so much worse and it's not even just people attacking others over failures. People are far harsher on themselves than there's any need for. I've seen all too many people sit and dwell on problems mid raid when they should be learning from it if applicable and then getting over it.

Perhaps taking healing to levels where it's just a given that you're not going to one shot everything would be the reality check people need?

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Originally Posted by Connor

If these mythical ‘new players’ are so completely incompetent in their understanding of tooltips that literally struggle with the tiniest bit of healing requirements are as common as everyone in the forums like to say, doesn’t that make current design literal perfection ?
...I just don’t understand how we can reconcile that ‘new players can’t handle any more healing’ but ‘new players can handle plenty additional damage options’. Either they’re smart enough to adapt to new abilities or they’re too unskilled for those options to ever be increased in the future without ‘massively impacting’ their ‘enjoyment of the game’ or w/e. I don’t understand how the former can be true without the latter becoming false

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This.
Entire.
Post.

The whole thing is correct. THANK you, good sir. Been barking up this tree a while myself.

Firstly, these players don't exist.

But, if we assume they DO, then more DPS buttons would make their heads explode faster than "Medica 2 more" would.

The answer is always "Well, they don't have to push them, healer DPS doesn't matter"...but from the same people that insist "Healers are green DPS and always have been because encounters are tuned around Healer DPS mattering to beat enrage". But if you bring that up, they say "Jonny Newhealer isn't doing Savages, so they don't have to worry about enrage". But then why can't we talk about raising healing requirements in Savage if JN isn't running them? "Because we need normal content to be less boring for the good players", but then we run into the same problem.

It's a big circular reasoning that doesn't make sense.

Either more requirements (healing or dps) will make people's heads explode or they won't. If they won't, then more healing is as good or better of an option. MSQ content doesn't need to be tuned to Savage difficulty, and high end players have never been challenged by normal dungeons and stuff since ARR's Hard modes.

It's a vacuous argument that doesn't really stand up well and requires the assumption that Newhealer will never do Savage anyway and that hardcore players will be completely content running 4 mans if they just have 2-3 more DPS buttons that will be sufficient to prevent their boredom...but that the changes also need to raise the skill ceiling significantly so they can show up anyone who isn't using them. It's all kinds of "This does not hold up".

"not properly engaging with (healing required)" will result in a wipe?

Tanks can SOLO encounters as it is now in casual content. I'm pretty sure a little more healing required isn't going to cause wipes left and right.

Same with your post further down, Connor. Correct on all points.

Healer DPS needs something. I don't think the job needs to be a DPS that occasionally heals people in terms of what buttons it has (I know that's what it is now once fight mechanics have been optimized), but just some kind of DPS mechanic.

I thought they made a great step in the right direction with the Blood Lily on WHM and the Sage getting Addersting when one of their shields gets broken, plus Kardia. Some kind of interaction between healing and DPS was something I thought had been missing from the game.

Now if they could just add some additional mechanic, it would be about perfect, if you ask me. For example, in World of Warcraft, the Restoration Shaman occasionally gets an instant cast Lava Burst whenever a target suffers damage from their DoT, and Lava Burst itself is guaranteed to crit whenever it strikes a target suffering from the DoT. Something like that would be fun to have.

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Originally Posted by Connor

I just don’t understand how we can reconcile that ‘new players can’t handle any more healing’ but ‘new players can handle plenty additional damage options’. Either they’re smart enough to adapt to new abilities or they’re too unskilled for those options to ever be increased in the future without ‘massively impacting’ their ‘enjoyment of the game’ or w/e. I don’t understand how the former can be true without the latter becoming false

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While I don't agree that we'd be unable to add any further healing requirements (I'd guess we could get away with almost half more than we have now, so long as it doesn't require saved oGCDs atop GCD spam (i.e., is only added between the existing bursts and does not increase the size of our near-lethal hits... causing a brief period of upheaval while people adjust, but calming quickly)...


It has nothing to do with the cognitive load itself. It has to do with the cost of failure.

If you give healers 10-20% more damage they can do, even if you were to increase boss health by some portion of that, if the healer fails to take advantage of it... oh well. It is incredibly unlikely that that will be a significant factor in whether you hit Enrage, especially compared to just the damage optimizations already available to them.

If you give healers significantly higher healing requirements, let alone enough that our paucity of downtime actions makes sense, though, the cost of failure is... repeated wipes.


Now, I'm willing to risk/weather the adjustment period of repeated wipes for a better healing experience, but the two things are night and day.