Healing in FFXIV vs healing in other MMOs?

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Originally Posted by Duelle

My take on Geomancer would be

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Neat take on GEO, borrowing quite a bit from shaman lol but I can see the logic. I was reading some of the nit picker comments on that post and they made awful points;

It doesn't matter if GEO had a similar background to CNJ as if lore wise they were CNJs who evolved in a different way, and here is why, FFXIV doesn't have specs so every WHM has the same spells/abilities that every other WHM has. To counter the lack of specs they need to add jobs.... lots of jobs (XI has 22 jobs) so even if 2 jobs have similar archetypes as long as they play differently that is perfectly acceptable. Take FFXI: BLM, RDM, DRK, SCH and GEO all used some of the same black magic elemental spells but feel different.

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Originally Posted by Jem

Neat take on GEO, borrowing quite a bit from shaman lol but I can see the logic.

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I appreciate the compliment. As I said in the post, it was in response to someone who said they wanted a rugged, "manly" healer. The request has merit since there's not much in terms of aesthetic variety for healers; it's always a guy in a dress (WHM and AST are particularly guilty of this) that use sparkly lights to heal.

Healers are nothing more than Mana to Life Converters ; )

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Originally Posted by Caitlyn

Healers are nothing more than Mana to Life Converters ; )

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I beg to differ. :O

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Originally Posted by Duelle

I appreciate the compliment. As I said in the post, it was in response to someone who said they wanted a rugged, "manly" healer. The request has merit since there's not much in terms of aesthetic variety for healers; it's always a guy in a dress (WHM and AST are particularly guilty of this) that use sparkly lights to heal.

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Haha as someone who plays a Roegadyn character called "Bara" (beware if you google that).... yes... yes i would defiantly like to see more manly mage stuff.

I played Sorcerer in RO2 as a sort of off-healer.. main job was to DPS, but stepped in to help with heals if things got dicey. Ended up as a DPS happy Scholar on FFXIV, so, similar role. I enjoy healing in FFXIV, especially with how well it works with a controller. Mostly I buff the faerie and DPS myself if I can help it, but switch in for support as needed. :)

I played a lot of the "old Days" MMORPGS, like Everquest I and DAOC also Anarchy Online and some more.

At this time Healing was something you had to concenctrate on.
You simply diddnt had the time to do something else, beside healing.

There where instances ( in EQ1 against undead foes for example) where you throw in a nuke here and there, but else it was always like throwing cotton candy against your opponents if you tried to actually fight something other then undead.
Then there came the more "Modern" type .. and that are only MMOs ( RPG is missing )
More and more the healers role shifted to doing damage, because a dedicated Healer was not needed anymore, the Mobs became easier and easier to beat. Even Bosses and raid targets.
Im not very happy about this. Today its all about DPS and nothing else. I actually loathe this. Its Boring and dosent need any kind of tactic or even timing .. just throw big numbers at the mob.

I learned to heal in Guild Wars 1 where I often had to heal 8 person teams alone. XIV has a nice system, but healing is too easy. A simple fix would be to drop the required second healer in 8 person queues. This would up the ante for not only the healer but team cohesion.

One of my favorite features in Guild Wars 1 was weapon swapping. I used three sets of healing weapons, a spear and shield, a staff, and a wand and focus. Each set had different purposes. Spear and shield helped me avoid Guild Wars' scripted aggro system by increasing my health and defense to that of a warrior's or beyond (the AI ignored high armor and hp targets, favoring high damage/low hp classes first). The staff was general purpose healing with its stats, and the wand/focus was for emergencies with mp boosts and other stat boosts (like faster cast time) for such situations.

I'd like to see XIV bring in different and more meaningful situational stats and weapon swapping.

I prefer healing in FFXIV to healing in any other MMO I ever played.
The toolkit is vast, creative and fun to play around with :)
The only thing I wish would change is more situations that actually require me to use it to the fullest^^
(no I don't mind throwing in dps, but I want more reasons to use abilities and skills that I normally do not need because a simple normal heal will already fix the problem)

As far as Healers in other MMOs go and i played a lot of mmos i can't really say i played any that really compare to how FF14 does its healing granted i haven't played every MMO with a healing class, and most of mind been 2D mmos.

But i will say this much Mabinogi i only remember the archer of that game. As far as the Healers goes Maple story healers were very OP they were a great DPS and healing. Mind you maple story was a 2d sidecrolling MMO it had whole screen aoes, i wouldn't want FF14 to have any of that. Though if i had to bring in anything from another game is the power to summon a pet to fight by your side the healer in maple story had a pet dragon they could summon X3

WHM... if you could only:
http://www.wowhead.com/spell=73325/leap-of-faith

My absolute favorite healing role was Dancer in FFXI. It was a hybrid DD/Healer job that used TP to use dances to buff, debuff, and restore HP. It wasn't just a constant (and slow) Cure fest like White Mage was in XI (or Red Mage being HASTE/HEAL/REFRESH ONLY in many cases).

TP was gained by dealing damage with auto attacks (say 3-10% per hit depending on your weapon, and DNC used daggers so generally on the 3% side), and you were limited to 300% TP (different dances used different amounts, curing Waltz 4 used like 65% TP if I recall). You had to use your Step abilities (which used 10% TP each per use) to gain stacks for flourishes to, in turn, restore TP (among other uses). A lot of TP management, but it was great. Had to keep dealing damage to regain TP in order to heal. Having a white mage or red mage cast haste on you + having haste samba up + equipping haste gear made dancer really fun.

And if you didn't need to heal much you could use your TP for a weapon skill, reverse flourish to regain TP, and do another weapon skill to skillchain with yourself for good burst damage. Was a great off healer though. And DNC could survive solo pretty well, actually did some content duo with my brother on his Warrior and my dancer. Worked pretty well (not very smoothly at the start usually, gaining TP could be a hassle sometimes).

Couldn't really main heal fights with DNC effectively though. Each type of dance shared a cooldown (all waltzes on the same CD), where spells generally didn't.

Dancer would make an awesome pseudo hybrid DPS/healing job in XIV in my opinion, especially if it were TP based. Drain Samba for a regen-like effect (restore a bit of HP each time you attack the same target as the DNC), Curing Waltzes for regular cures, Quick Step-Box Step-Stutter Step as a 1-2-3 damage combo like a melee DPS instead of spells. Pull a few abilities from other iterations of dancer (Like the dances in Final Fantasy Tactics) for abilities. Likely would be quite difficult to balance. But I, for one, would immediately switch to main DNC regardless of viability lol. Never was much of a caster even though I main heal in this game, like being up front (which is why I dropped Red Mage in FFXI for a long time lol) :P