Any support utility ideas other than heal & shields?

Defensive :

Debuffs that works on bosses ? blind, slow, paralyze, pacif.

It kind of is shielding/mitig, but a targeted (or small AoE) invuln could be nice, and I guess would feel nice when used at the right time.

AoE esuna
Erase, spell that can remove debuffs esuna can't ?
Addle/Feint
Silence
rescue-ga

for trash : AoE toad/kappa/pea/etc

Offensive :

Stackable vuln up (single debuff for all healers)

reverse Addle/Feint

Haste

Direction removal (make target a "plain circle")

That's mostly taking things that are already in the game and keeping it at "Utility".

Well, disregarding balance and brokenness, we could have spells that manipulate encounter scripts. For example:

1. Cause the next AOE attack to delay its cast.
2. Cause all AOE damage the party takes to reflect back onto the boss.
3. Heal for a percentage of the damage the player takes for standing in an AOE.
4. Speed up the boss's script in return for decreasing the boss's damage output.
5. Reset the boss's script to the beginning at the cost of increasing the boss's damage output.
6. Do away with all scripts at the cost of the boss ignoring aggro mechanics and increasing damage on single-targets.
7. Each time an enchanted party member dies to an instant death mechanic, the current HP of the party member damages the boss.
8. Zombify the target so healing magic can damage it. This would allow enemies to be targetable by healing spells.

Classic Final Fantasy spells that could be included:

Slow, Pain, Osmose/Rasp (so that MP-based attacks fail), Drain, Reflect, Thorns, Discord (halving attributes), Revenge, Temper, Quick, Haste, Doom, Death

Of course, these skills would need a major cost to them because of their power, but if SE insists on keeping scripted designs without allowing for proper control skills, allowing us to exploit the script at a cost could be interesting.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Use Float to make your party immune to ground effects

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Astro using Gravity or White mage using Aero to make the party float sounds amazing

Uneralted but on a similar note of flavor to healers, if the "tactic" healer, Scholar, could draw lines or markers in the floor (during combat), it would be really fun to use in teaching parties. But I can already imagine people using 3rd party tools to abuse the tool

Dps.

It's support (helps kill the boss faster), almost always useful, can be flashy and engaging. It's really a no-brainer yet we'll continue to dance around it forever and try to figure out compromises to please the stubborn devs we pay money to.

If the devs think trimming the useless buttons and replacing them with a handful of interesting damage buttons will explode poor Sylphie's brains, there's no way they're going to give us interesting forms of other utility, buffs, debuffs and so on either. Unless it's useless so new players aren't required to use it. And I really don't want more pointless fluff filler.

Just trim the rubbish, add more interesting dps buttons, make things hit a bit harder. It's so obvious and straightforward.

seconding DPS, it's the only thing anyone in this game actually cares about. With how reluctant to include 'esuna-able debuff' as a mechanic the devs are, I cannot see any chance of even something as simple as 'boss buffs itself, use Dispel to remove it'. If that can't get through, nothing can, so the only thing left is damage. But as Liam says, we're not going to get damage. Why, because players who 'more damage buttons' does not even affect, complain very loudly at every opportunity that they 'picked healer to heal', all the while conveniently ignoring that the most 'challenging content' they do is capping their tomes in EX roulette, content that has been proven to be so light on healing requirements, it does not require a healer.

Devs, please. Two camps of Healers have been telling you how to 'get people to play healers more' for 3 years now, one camp saying "by adding back some damage buttons, and some nuance to the damage rotation", the other saying "make us heal more, have bosses do more damage". You've had your crack at 'what if more healing is what they need' with this tier, and not only has it almost killed PF on multiple DCs, it also hasn't made the daily EX roulette interesting, quite the opposite. Instead of throwing in the towel and saying 'well we listened and it didnt work, time to go back to Asphodelos level healing so Savage is snoozefest too', please can we try the 'add more damage complexity' way?

I say this with all seriousness: it cannot possibly have a worse effect on the healer population than the 'add more healing required' experiment this tier did. Anyone who claims it'd kill the role harder than this tier did is doing such incredible mental gymnastics, they should try out for the Olympics.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XNJGY9B7VW4&t=712s

This guy has great ideas and he’s slept on se should incorporate some of them or just hire a dedicated dev for healers especially since they don’t play healers

Classic FF skills that Yoshi-P and the Dev's "can't seem to work right into ffxiv" (paraphrasing)


Protect: Medium length CD (60-90s) giving short term Physical Damage mitigation to group

Shell: Medium length CD (60-90s) giving short term Magic Damage mitigation to group



Bravery: Short CD (30-60) giving short term physical DPS gain to single member

Faith: Short CD (30-60) giving short term Magic DPS gain to single member


You can mix these up between the regen and shield healers to incentivize playing different jobs

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

There's an ocean of great stuff out there that's completely off the table because of the way Square has settled into an encounter design pattern: the less the player can interact with the fight the better. There is exactly one "correct" solution to every problem laid before you. This solution is (nearly) always some combination of movement and positioning. That's it. An encounter with gaze attacks where a support could cleverly blind their allies to hamper their view of the battlefield but immunize them from a nasty attack? Unthinkable. A boss that summons an add that needs to be put to sleep to keep it from killing the off tank with its strong attacks? No way. A hard CC that works on anything, but also puts a huge regen on its victim so you have to be selective when you use it? Heresy. You could Reflect enemy spells. Use Float to make your party immune to ground effects. Using Raise to instakill undead would be entirely within the Final Fantasy standard. Teleport weaker enemies out of combat in exchange for no reward. Zombify tanks to make them take damage from heals but immune to killing spells. Provide luck buffs. Enthrall weaker enemies into attacking each other.

None of the above works in FF14 because those things fly in the face of solving mechanics via moving and standing in the safe spot. Stacking and spreading. Light parties. Moving to the safe spot. Finding the uptime safe spot. In or out. An AOE that hits one half of the room, then the other. Clock positions. People make megathreads bitching about Rescue one of the tamest, least fight-intrusive abilities that can assist allies within the approved "positioning only" paradigm, so it's not like Square doesn't get feedback that the current flavorless gruel is A Good Thing, Actually. Fluid Aura was ground to dust under the heel of this design direction.

Heals, shields, and DPS+ abilities are what we're down to because that's all you get when fights -must- be solved via burning a boss down while moving and positioning, no further interaction allowed.

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While I don't disagree. It goes beyond them simply not wanting to do anything else except positional. The devs don't want any singular job to be prioritized. Take that Zomebie idea you cited. It fits perfectly on Necromancer and no other job except maaaybe Black Mage if we really stretch. The problem is that means for this one fight, you pretty much have to bring Necromancer/Black Mage or the fight becomes harder. Now you could say that's the solution: bring those jobs or you have to deal with the tanks taking substantially more damage. Unfortunately, we all know what would happen. Parties will force them because the healers don't want to deal with excessive healing. We even saw an example of this in P3S and Death's Toll. PF started locking Astro due to Macrocosmos invalidating the mechanic. The irony is it wasn't the high end raid community who cared but the more casual raiders. Which is precisely who SE appeals to.

This is just one example but I guarantee it's their thought process. And I hate to admit it, they wouldn't be entirely wrong for having it. Any form of support or crowd control needs to be universally available on one role. Which does limit the creativity to some degree. I do think they should invest more in that direction but we'll never see job specific things.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

While I don't disagree. It goes beyond them simply not wanting to do anything else except positional. The devs don't want any singular job to be prioritized. Take that Zomebie idea you cited. It fits perfectly on Necromancer and no other job except maaaybe Black Mage if we really stretch. The problem is that means for this one fight, you pretty much have to bring Necromancer/Black Mage or the fight becomes harder. Now you could say that's the solution: bring those jobs or you have to deal with the tanks taking substantially more damage. Unfortunately, we all know what would happen. Parties will force them because the healers don't want to deal with excessive healing. We even saw an example of this in P3S and Death's Toll. PF started locking Astro due to Macrocosmos invalidating the mechanic. The irony is it wasn't the high end raid community who cared but the more casual raiders. Which is precisely who SE appeals to.

This is just one example but I guarantee it's their thought process. And I hate to admit it, they wouldn't be entirely wrong for having it. Any form of support or crowd control needs to be universally available on one role. Which does limit the creativity to some degree. I do think they should invest more in that direction but we'll never see job specific things.

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I think one of FF14's biggest design failures is exactly this mindset they operate by. The pussyfooting around and refusing to take any stances on anything, trying to please everyone and nobody at the same time. Other MMOs, through accident or design, have no seeming problem with designing fights that favor specific jobs or party compositions. They just rotate around which kits are more useful in different places, disappointing everyone equally. The thing is, FF14 has the design to support this more than those other MMOs- you can be every job on one character! You aren't forced to make a bunch of alts in the hope that some fight will favor your class someday. You could just swap to one of your other leveled jobs with a little gear and you're good to go. The problem with putting this in FF14 is twofold: A. they want every single comp to be equally viable for every single piece of content, which means all kits need to be watered down to a bland melange of baseline functionality with an occasional pinch of flavor thrown in, and B. as I must keep beating the WHM drum, this is CBU3. If they were to swap to an "everyone gets a fight that caters to them" model, we know how that goes. The other three healers are good at everything and will be not only perfectly capable of clearing, but will be better than WHM at it no matter what they design into the encounter because they can't seem to understand that variety means everyone is good at something useful, not "the other three healers are good at everything and WHM is just objectively worse than them on every single metric".

What I'd ultimately like to see the healer balance look like:

- SGE: No buffs/No heavy utility. Very high personal damage--the BLM of the healers. Would reach tank levels of DPS and would still outperform buff healers, but has not utility other than good mitigation to carry them.
- WHM: Determination buff, strongest raise utility and/or party float buff--makes the party ignore puddle mechanics for 15 seconds. Weakest party buff, but highest personal damage of the 3 buff healers.
- SCH: Critical Hit buff (Chain Stratagem), combat sprint utility. second strongest party buff and second strongest personal damage of the 3 buff healers.
- AST: Raw attack buff (Divination), Macrocosmos--can invalidate certain heal checks. Strongest party buffs, lowest personal damage.

Gameplay:

- SGE: DPS rotation on the same level of complexity as GNB. Fast-paced and modestly complex. The healer that plays like a DPS.
- WHM: DPS rotation around the level of complexity as DRK, but slow-paced with low APM. More methodical like a BLM lite. Simple at a glance, but room to optimize.
- SCH: DPS rotation around the level of complexity as PLD. DoT focused with some light complexity, but easier to understand at a glance.
- AST: DPS rotation around the level of complexity as WAR. Simple, but also can filter their DPS through other party members on the GCD through a straightforward buff-focused rotation, allowing them to have a more passive playstyle to appeal to players who want a support-oriented healer to have something that functions in FFXIV.