Healers Exist for DPS fun only?

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Originally Posted by nalgene

Does anyone on that posts on the Healer Roles subforum actually enjoy healing

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Yes, but that's more because I'm bad at it (so everything is always hectic and fun) and less because of their actual design.

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Originally Posted by Brandedblade

This whole thread reeks of bitter paranoia.

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Yeah, mostly being ignored since Heavensward but that's paranoia for sure.

Come on...

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Originally Posted by ItMe

Yes, but that's more because I'm bad at it (so everything is always hectic and fun) and less because of their actual design.

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I do, and I say that with a straight face despite technically maining White Mage since ARR - arguably the most simplistic in terms of both healing and damage. My gripe rests solely on the shoulders of people I see on a daily basis who are either rooted in the belief that "I'm just here to heal", or think that doing their daily queues is a good time to watch Netflix and play like half their buttons are missing.

I'm quite literally out of a dungeon just now that went 25mins or more with a Scholar who pressed a grand total of ZERO aggressive buttons whatsoever for the entire run -- and I mean zero with no exaggeration -- which irritates me as a healer main who knows all too well just how much downtime this game gifts you, especially when the two DPS (including myself) are going all-in on the damage, avoiding all mechanics, the tank's health bar is barely moving, and every opportunity is being given to pre-emptively heal and give you more free time to do ANYTHING other than stand around drooling out the mouth while watching everyone else work while waiting for a health bar to go to 99% so you can spam overhealing. Without naming and shaming, I find it ironic how their name legitimately contained the word "Lazy" in it.

You could ask for engaging healing systems that busy the healing process, despite the fact that half of it won't be needed in casual content. You can ask for a more involved damage kit (which a tonne of players will no doubt avoid using for no good reason). You can ask for tougher content, to which you'll be told to head to Extreme/Savage/Ultimate and let the casual side be casual. Whatever way you want to feel about it, it's pointless to assume that the current state of Healers is intended as some kind of 'bridge' for the other roles to have more fun. That's not the case, even if the game may make people think it.

There's just no incentive for people to try and push beyond the basic requirement in this game, and Square have already proven that they really, really, really don't want to even remotely risk the possibility of even the most minor over-complication of what is already an excruciatingly reactive 'dance' routine, unlike WoW, which is all about sporadic reaction and chaos in the likes of Mythic+.

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Originally Posted by RopeDrink

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Agreed, the issue here is that the overwhelming majority of group content asks so little of healers. You have to go right the way back to 2.0 and Amdapor Keep bosses to find a noteworthy DPS check in a dungeon. And whilst we've seen a few more HPS checks on certain big pulls, they are still far and few between, not to mention random and erratic enough that it's understandable if it spooks a new healer that likely had no idea that a difficulty spike was about to run them over. Why does the first pull in a completely random and innocuous looking dungeon hit harder than almost any dungeon boss in the game? It's absolutely laughable.

It's no surprise that new healers hit the end game with literally no idea of what to expect or what the game is about to ask of them once they move up to Extremes unless they've been watching guides or speaking with peers. 2.0 did an excellent job of using dungeons to prepare people for the endgame. But they've turned into HP sponges pretty much ever since Pharos got nerfed hard.

With regards to adding more engaging gameplay for healers. It still absolutely boggles my mind to this day that SE didn't take AST and give it the ability to feed it's potency into someone (or something) else rather than nuke directly. Generate cards with GCDs. Add some diminishing returns on the card buffs so the AST can't just autopilot everything on one person. Experiment switching to flat potency rather than percentages, perhaps even a mix of the two to spice things up. Allow them to throw cards at Earthly Star for AoE buffs to add more depth. There's so many novel directions SE could go with this.

But instead we get 1 nuke, 1 dot.

As a tank i can couln't say we only exist as a minnor complementary DPS experience but i can say right now both roles exist in this oversimplifed mindless gameplay experience so DPS players can casually pick our jobs and chill out on the roles with the minimun effort in order to bring more players on it even at the expense of the gameplay value veterans and invested players use to have and i personally hate the current state of our roles.
I have nothing against DPS players but i hate how for the dev team there is absolute nothing but what the DPS players need and leave us in this eternal limbo of trial and error where they only care to try to fix stuff 1 time every 2 years by usually trying to solve problems by creating a new one worse.

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Originally Posted by shao32

As a tank i can couln't say we only exist as a minnor complementary DPS experience but i can say right now both roles exist in this oversimplifed mindless gameplay experience

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Sorry, what? Tanks are over simplified? Try being reduced to 1 single attack, a dot, an AoE attack and 20 buttons just like rampart, then we'll talk about tanks being oversimplified.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

Yes, but that's more because I'm bad at it (so everything is always hectic and fun) and less because of their actual design.

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I think this is also me. I've only ever DPSd since 2.0, but lately I've enjoyed healing because, at least for the content I play (PF and roulettes, no static or FC) it's a relatively dynamic all the time. I guess if you play with competent players all the time and people aren't making mistakes and your healing comes down to healing during set / expected periods of encounters I could see it being boring.

But yeah I do actually enjoy the more random nature of healing over dps rotations, even if that randomness results in simply clicking a party list name and pressing a heal.

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Originally Posted by Reiryuu

Sorry, what? Tanks are over simplified? Try being reduced to 1 single attack, a dot, an AoE attack and 20 buttons just like rampart, then we'll talk about tanks being oversimplified.

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They are, just not to the same degree as healers. Which goes to show just how awful healers currently are when the tanks are in such a poor state

Tanks even have an equivalent of the whm/ast situation with dark and warrior.

Cut the non gnb tanks some slack, they are on an identical boat, they just haven't been sailing as long yet

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Originally Posted by Reiryuu

Sorry, what? Tanks are over simplified? Try being reduced to 1 single attack, a dot, an AoE attack and 20 buttons just like rampart, then we'll talk about tanks being oversimplified.

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To be fair, tanks got dumbed down too with le removal of enemity management and simplification of their rotations.

But i agree with you : right now tanks are in a spot of "basic dps" that choose to be "in charge" gameplay-wise.
Their kit is some dps rotation complemented with tanking tools.
And the dps rotation isn't even that "basic" either :
-gnb got dual rotation every so often
-war got kinda branching path ? (given it was better than that at some point)
-pld got magical kinda path and utility ? (i don't really play pld)
-drk got ogcd weave and kinda ressource managment

The point was not to bash on tanks for complaining ; like a said they also got hit with the homogenization and lost a part of their kit.
The point is that SE was able to give them a kit that was kinda on par with dps instead of what healers got.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Agreed, the issue here is that the overwhelming majority of group content asks so little of healers. You have to go right the way back to 2.0 and Amdapor Keep bosses to find a noteworthy DPS check in a dungeon. And whilst we've seen a few more HPS checks on certain big pulls, they are still far and few between, not to mention random and erratic enough that it's understandable if it spooks a new healer that likely had no idea that a difficulty spike was about to run them over. Why does the first pull in a completely random and innocuous looking dungeon hit harder than almost any dungeon boss in the game? It's absolutely laughable.

It's no surprise that new healers hit the end game with literally no idea of what to expect or what the game is about to ask of them once they move up to Extremes unless they've been watching guides or speaking with peers. 2.0 did an excellent job of using dungeons to prepare people for the endgame. But they've turned into HP sponges pretty much ever since Pharos got nerfed hard.

With regards to adding more engaging gameplay for healers. It still absolutely boggles my mind to this day that SE didn't take AST and give it the ability to feed it's potency into someone (or something) else rather than nuke directly. Generate cards with GCDs. Add some diminishing returns on the card buffs so the AST can't just autopilot everything on one person. Experiment switching to flat potency rather than percentages, perhaps even a mix of the two to spice things up. Allow them to throw cards at Earthly Star for AoE buffs to add more depth. There's so many novel directions SE could go with this.

But instead we get 1 nuke, 1 dot.

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I'm one of the few who enjoyed Cleric Stance because it emphasized the need to differentiate between downtime and healing requirement, often showing who knew fights like the back of their hand and who was uncomfortable in their role, and could offer the odd heart-skip to keep you awake (despite orbiting around reactive moments in the game, eg. a DPS eating an otherwise avoidable mechanic). Alas, this just compounds the present-day problem -- because if we still had Cleric Stance, the unincentivized simply wouldn't use it, and I recall a lot of them using it as a beat-stick to justify their lack of desire to press an aggressive button.

As such, it was eventually removed, and the simplification continued, with nothing being added in return to counter-balance it. I tried AST - back when it actually had the mini-game of card management, which has since turned into all cards doing the exact same thing. I remember when each Scholar pet was unique in their own way and could even be targeted, much like Hunter pets in WoW, which are now basically background noise beyond having to summon one before you start your duty. White Mage was the one that constantly remained in a very similar place, even when the Lily system was added, which is simply fuel towards an occasional AoE nuke to replace the lack of second DoT.

Again, I'm one of the few who enjoy healing even in this state (as my fun doesn't rotate around how the Healer actually functions), but I can see why people complain, and I have no hope of this changing overmuch for the foreseeable future due to the very one-directional way Square has handled it for the past few years -- but I would be happy if they at least started to incentivize pushing beyond the basic requirement. Thus far, the only thing telling new players that they should occasionally do a little damage during downtime is a bit of dialogue during the Adventurer's Guild role-trials at the start of the game which nobody actually does unless they want the "Brand New" gear.

EDIT:
Bear in mind that me saying I liked CS doesn't imply I think it was good or that it should come back.

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Originally Posted by RopeDrink

Bear in mind that me saying I liked CS doesn't imply I think it was good or that it should come back.

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I honestly think old cd could come back but ONLY as a tool for high end optimization. If all cs did was increase damage by 5-10% and reduced all healing by 50-60% or something like that, it would only raise the skill ceiling considerably. casual players would absolutely not touch it and still dps normally, but someone trying to optimize and squeeze as much damage as possible would try to get as much damage under cleric as possible. The reduced healing is also not so much that accidentally helaing with it on makes the heal completely useless


i dont think it would ever happen though

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Originally Posted by Reiryuu

Sorry, what? Tanks are over simplified? Try being reduced to 1 single attack, a dot, an AoE attack and 20 buttons just like rampart, then we'll talk about tanks being oversimplified.

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My apologize for the late reply, to answer your question yes they are, as Recon say we don't have it as bad as healer situation but we can't and shouln't deny that tanks has been hit pretty hard this expansion too.
Tanks gameplay has been reduced to execute a very simple dps rotation and use a mitigation every 10 years, mitigation management has been totally absent in SHB and all tanks suffer from heavy homogeinity, even on the JP forum haved a lenght discusion about tanks being boring now.
The dps deartment is aceptable for PLD and GNB but DRK and WAR are in shame, remember the lily gauge in SB? well i present you the Darkside gauge in SHB with extra useleness and the whole DRK and WAR being virtually the same job with a esential minor question, what do you want? a WAR with buffed fell cleaves or a WAR with a coulpe of oGCD more?

So yeah i wasn't trying to say we have it as bad as healer, my apologize if i make you undertand that but tanks have the same problem, not as bad like the stuff you mention but they have been oversimplified in so many fields the situation is pretty absurd overthere too, at the end of the day both roles need help since both roles and on the same boat.

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Originally Posted by FoxCh40s

Thoughts?

I'm starting to get the feeling, even going to tanks, that the other two roles besides DPS exist to solely and completely facilitate their fun.

Ours and tanks, starting in ShB, is second thought.

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No, they don't. The DPS exists to fill queues. You can always let them die when they are eating aoe, you are actually not required to heal them. You can do that if you want their comms.

Healer jobs are the ones with the greatest amount of impact on a run. You can literally dictate the pace of the run whereas the dps players have absolutely no say in how much should be pulled. And those who are overstepping should be put in their place.

I have no clue how healing in FFXIV felt like but right now if the skill ceiling for healers is increased either the skilled players are going to become omnipotent DPS or all of the cure bots are going to start feeling the weight of their laziness. The latter is something SE definitely wants to avoid.

I actually want healers to be able to achieve the same dps out-put as dps players in terms of ST. We are already dealing approximately the same DPS when it comes to AoE. Make raids a little bit more difficult and include more healer-targeted stack markers so that a party of 6 healers and 2 tanks can't clear it. Everything is a dps in this game with a gimmick so I am certain it would happen eventually.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

No, they don't. The DPS exists to fill queues. You can always let them die when they are eating aoe, you are actually not required to heal them. You can do that if you want their comms.

Healer jobs are the ones with the greatest amount of impact on a run. You can literally dictate the pace of the run whereas the dps players have absolutely no say in how much should be pulled. And those who are overstepping should be put in their place.

I have no clue how healing in FFXIV felt like but right now if the skill ceiling for healers is increased either the skilled players are going to become omnipotent DPS or all of the cure bots are going to start feeling the weight of their laziness. The latter is something SE definitely wants to avoid.

I actually want healers to be able to achieve the same dps out-put as dps players in terms of ST. We are already dealing approximately the same DPS when it comes to AoE. Make raids a little bit more difficult and include more healer-targeted stack markers so that a party of 6 healers and 2 tanks can't clear it. Everything is a dps in this game with a gimmick so I am certain it would happen eventually.

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People who don't DPS already exist so it doesn't really matter, all this design does is hold back good players and push them eventually away from the role.

I don't know if my perspective will change as I level, but I'm currently loving my lvl 59 WHM and much prefer to heal than DPS in group content. I enjoy figuring out which heal to use when during encounters while accounting for mistakes and weaving in as much DPS as I can during downtime. I don't feel like healers need complex healing/dps rotations to feel valued of challenged. Unless your group is playing to perfection, which I've yet to see in Duty Roulette, you can make the difference between a wipe and a kill by throwing out a timely heal, turn the tables with a raise or get that last add down in time by squeezing in that extra dps.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

I don't know if my perspective will change as I level, but I'm currently loving my lvl 59 WHM and much prefer to heal than DPS in group content. I enjoy figuring out which heal to use when during encounters while accounting for mistakes and weaving in as much DPS as I can during downtime. I don't feel like healers need complex healing/dps rotations to feel valued of challenged. Unless your group is playing to perfection, which I've yet to see in Duty Roulette, you can make the difference between a wipe and a kill by throwing out a timely heal, turn the tables with a raise or get that last add down in time by squeezing in that extra dps.

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Nobody talks about feeling valued. Healers are by default the most valuable role in any MMORPG that has it, regardless of their actual gameplay.

Healers do need complex dps rotation to keep us entertained. Unless the content is hard, which in FFXIV it rarely is, saving the party from a wipe becomes meaningless. Figuring out what type of heal to use is learning the basics of healing. Once you've learned it, all you are left with is one nuke spell and dot.

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People who don't DPS already exist so it doesn't really matter, all this design does is hold back good players and push them eventually away from the role.

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Yes, it does. The healer's design is a work in progress for more than half a decade. It's 2021 and we still have absolutely useless and detrimental synergies present. 15% chance of acquiring a Free Cure II proc or Crit Benefic II by spamming your baby heal. There is no doubt that the GMs have no clue what to do with the class. This is why I am eager to see how they designed Sage. I want to check if they figured out how to clean the mess or if they made a bigger mess with that new Healer job. I am honestly expecting a more engaging type of gameplay, maybe not for all healer classes but at least for sage. The Endwalker benchmark was like meh, but we will see how things really are soon.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

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This entire discussion is about feeling valued.

Value comes from scarcity. It happens when you are able to offer something beneficial that many other players cannot. That, unfortunately, requires a skill differential.

There is no intrinsic value in healing something that everyone expects you to be able to heal. Sure, if you don't press the heal button sometime over the course of the next three raidwide casts, everyone dies. But you are expected to be able to heal that. If you fail to do a basic task like that consistently, there are more than enough players who are up to the task and are able to replace you after the team silently disbands. You will not get applause and accolades from your teammates for just doing your job.

There is a gameplay mode where healers are intrinsically the most valuable players on the field, and that's PvP. That's because damage is not scripted, and players know that when you pull off a clutch save on a teammate who is being focused down, you've done something that another healer may not have been able to pull off. You're also everyone's priority target, so you've probably also pulled off said clutch save while kiting circles around their melee.

Healers are also valuable in entry level content. Your team doesn't know what they are doing and everyone dies to a mechanic. But wait! You LB3 and everyone is back up again. Or perhaps you keep the tank alive and the two of you take the boss down from 80% to the clear. Everyone showers accolades on you. It feels great.

This stops working the instant you go near anything with a non-trivial dps check. Which is as it should be. Everyone should carry their weight. But the only things that matter at that stage are pass-fail mechanics which you are expected to perform correctly, and dps.

Historically, the reason why tanks and healers have been okay with this design in harder content is because if you were good, you could become a 'fifth dps' while performing your primary role. So even after you've learnt the pass-fail mechanics, there was still something of value to optimize. There were no clutch saves, but at the end of the day, everyone was blown away by the fact that you put out more damage than the BRD.

It was fun, but the dev team doesn't want this.

So sure, you can be the best player that you can be and put out as much damage as you can while doing the mechanics. But does it really matter? The real heroes are the DPS, because that's where the majority of the raid damage always comes from irrespective of how grossly inept they are. The only thing left for you to do on one of these other 'support' roles is to do your job on pass-fail mechanics. Nobody will value you for when you succeed, but they certainly will chew you out if you fail.

I think that even if you try and reverse this by giving healers more complex dps rotations and giving them a bigger portion of the raid damage pie, you're still at a disadvantage. Every job has an action budget of around 25-30 actions. DPS jobs are always going to have more elaborate rotations than you do because they don't need to budget for nearly the amount of support actions that you do.

The most impactful change that could be made is to re-evaluate how fights are designed in this game. The current standard of completely scripted, choreographed rail-shooter fights has to stop. Damage patterns need to be more complex and less predictable. Fights should deliberately force attrition of your defensive resources and require smart resource management to survive. You need a skill differential that impacts the end outcome.

The problem right now is that healers have nothing of value to contribute. You can only do your job, and that's it. You don't need to be good, most of your team can't tell the difference either way. You just need to exist.

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Originally Posted by FoxCh40s

Thoughts?

I'm starting to get the feeling, even going to tanks, that the other two roles besides DPS exist to solely and completely facilitate their fun.

Ours and tanks, starting in ShB, is second thought.

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It's unlikely they purposefully with the desire to facilitate the enjoyment of DPS and make healing and tanking boring, but certainly their design choices have resulted in it. I feel like it's more likely 1 of 2 things (or possibly both), 1) to make the roles more accessible 2) people complain about healers and tanks, whether it's for wipes or something to do with balance for raiding.

Point 1, I'd say fair enough but let's not lower the skill ceiling. It's why most of my suggestions have taken in mind a low skill floor but takes an interest in raising the skill ceiling. DPS, sadly, I feel is the best way to do that. But they can also try to match your healing requirement with the difficulty of content. I think one thing we've learned is that the complexity of a DPS rotation isn't the reason why healers cause wipes. I'd argue that oversimplifying things makes it worse because it makes it more likely you're tunnel visioning, there's been multiple times in ShB where even I've said "whoops, I forgot I was the healer", which I didn't tend to do before ShB. This approach I feel keeps current content from being too monotonous, avoids the need for a massive overhaul and means future content can be better balanced to feel better for the healing aspect.

Point 2, The reason I think point 2 is probable is because we only need look at the types of changes we've seen over the years. . And again I think we've found that dumbing/watering things down is not the answer. We still go into dungeons and complain about the healers and tanks. This is not something they're going to resolve for a few reasons: some people are new, some people are affected by a handicap, these roles have a responsibility that affect the life and death of a party, rDPS is how performance is measure in this game so that means everybody's gonna end up focusing on their DPS at some stage. With DPS checks, enrage timers, DPS affecting the pace etc. it's going to be inevitable there's gonna be a culture of encouraging healers to DPS.

With balance, it shouldn't come at the cost of enjoyment. But with one of the new changes coming I at least see potential for this to be addressed, because if they do it well then every healing job will only have 1 other healing job to balance against. Whereas currently each have 3 (if we count Di and Noct AST as separate things to balance).

But I accept with the stat crunch there is some possibility that the healing requirement goes up. But as it stands I feel like for the majority of the game's content I'm not really utilitsing my healing kit and am left as a spam bot.

With tanks, my biggest gripe is Dark Knight, yet, it flows well now but it's...dull. I liked that it used to be more technical, to me that was the part that felt rewarding, not them being an edgy equivalent to Warrior. And Warrior I think lost some of its charm, but I've not played much Warrior since ARR because Dark Knight became my favoured tank.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

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The discussion is about GMs not paying enough attention to healers and tanks. The fact of the matter is, no matter how poor the gameplay is for those two roles, they are always going to be more valuable than a dps job in-game. The value comes from the role itself and its place in the game.

Healers in this game have been given the opportunity to correct stupid and blatant mistakes. It is more or less a consequence of a bad player base in general. In any case, I went through FFlogs to check historically how much dps were the healers doing. The top SCH was not out-dpsing the top bard even in Heavensward. They had like 5 different DoTs, healed almost nothing, and still couldn't deal more than a dps that's playing properly. Back then they didn't have rDPS so we can't really check the real raid-contributing dps of a player. As far as I know, bards have raid-wide buffs so the DPS value that is seen is not really the correct one.

Right now in terms of rDPS, healers can achieve around 60-70% of a dps' max rDPS output. For the Oracle of Darkness, the strongest healer (AST) has dealt 64% of the rDPS of the strongest DPS job (Black Mage) and 73% of the rDPS of the weakest DPS job (Machinist).

Healers' dps is not negligible at all. We are achieving that amount of DPS with a 2-button rotation. Obviously, we are a little bit more complex than that. And I think we should be even more complex and allowed to reach 100% of the rDPS of the strongest DPS when we play perfectly well which should be next to impossible but still possible. The skill ceiling needs to be raised.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

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Sure. You need tanks and healers to queue in, and their population numbers are smaller than DPS. That makes them a "valuable commodity". But most people want to be more than just a warm body. I'm talking about being valuable in the sense that people respect your skill as a player on the job. That only happens when there's a skill differential, which is what you're asking for here.

You can really only correct mistakes to a point. For a lot of mistakes, the penalty is either less damage, or player death, which also translates into a damage loss. And in the latter case, raises are so ubiquitous and you don't even need to be a healer to perform one. And I suppose that's where part of the problem exists. Because raises are trivial, it's an expected outcome. It's not precious: this is not a 'once every ten minutes' battle raise. There's nothing to celebrate; everyone knows that you've lost raid damage because of the death and the damage is done. The raise is merely the inevitable follow-up event that nobody bats an eyelid at unless you somehow mess it up.

While you won't surpass a the very best DPS players in terms of damage output while on a support role (as should be the case, or else we'd run only tanks and healers), there definitely was a lot more overlap in earlier expansions than there is now, even when comparing at relatively skilled players. Actually, if you want to look at a time before raid buffs were so prevalent, in late ARR some of the best players at the time got together and scribed in their abacus totals on a mottled excel spreadsheet that's still floating around the internet, if you know where to look. And there definitely was a lot more overlap then than there is now. Which is hardly difficult, given that there is none.

I think for long term satisfaction, you need to see some degree of personal growth as a player. That in turn requires a meaningful skill differential that impacts your team's performance. A novice player should see someone more skilled and want to put in the hours of practice to become that player. That could involve having more dps complexity for tanks and healers which translates into a significant raid impact. The dev team is not at all interested in this, and the STR accessory fiasco in Stormblood should have clued people into this if they weren't already aware. Tanks are there to take damage. Healers are there to heal damage. Yay.

Working under this constraint, you have to suggest something that allows you to be challenged and allows for a skill differential in the role. For tanks, I think that could come out of allowing more control over boss positioning and movement. For healers, I think that could come out of having greater variability in fight damage patterns, unpredictable damage spikes, and more challenging resource management, but I don't see any simple solutions here. Well, aside from the obvious, which is swapping to DPS. Hey, did you know that they'll be doing a media tour/live letter on Reaper, the new healer job? Looking forward to it!

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Nobody talks about feeling valued. Healers are by default the most valuable role in any MMORPG that has it, regardless of their actual gameplay.

Healers do need complex dps rotation to keep us entertained. Unless the content is hard, which in FFXIV it rarely is, saving the party from a wipe becomes meaningless. Figuring out what type of heal to use is learning the basics of healing. Once you've learned it, all you are left with is one nuke spell and dot.

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A healer's job is primarily to heal and their toolkit is designed accordingly. A DPS' primary job is damage, hence why they get the complexe rotations and we get the vast healing repertoire with a few simple damage spell to weave in when the opprtunity presents itself. If you want complexe DPS rotation with the ability to heal and raise people on the side, try Red Mage, it's what drew me to the class initially and I loved it.

If healers get the DPS potential of ranged DPS, why would anyone play a ranged DPS ever again? They'd just be inferior to healers in every way. Healers should never get a complexe DPS rotation and I'll never understand why people want to gatekeep the healing role to the top percent of players.

If healers get this kind of potential, fights will be balanced around it and dps queue times will skyrocket because no one will want to/be able to keep up with the insane demands of the class.

If healing bores you, please just play a DPS.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

The discussion is about GMs not paying enough attention to healers and tanks. The fact of the matter is, no matter how poor the gameplay is for those two roles, they are always going to be more valuable than a dps job in-game. The value comes from the role itself and its place in the game.

Healers in this game have been given the opportunity to correct stupid and blatant mistakes. It is more or less a consequence of a bad player base in general. In any case, I went through FFlogs to check historically how much dps were the healers doing. The top SCH was not out-dpsing the top bard even in Heavensward. They had like 5 different DoTs, healed almost nothing, and still couldn't deal more than a dps that's playing properly. Back then they didn't have rDPS so we can't really check the real raid-contributing dps of a player. As far as I know, bards have raid-wide buffs so the DPS value that is seen is not really the correct one.

Right now in terms of rDPS, healers can achieve around 60-70% of a dps' max rDPS output. For the Oracle of Darkness, the strongest healer (AST) has dealt 64% of the rDPS of the strongest DPS job (Black Mage) and 73% of the rDPS of the weakest DPS job (Machinist).

Healers' dps is not negligible at all. We are achieving that amount of DPS with a 2-button rotation. Obviously, we are a little bit more complex than that. And I think we should be even more complex and allowed to reach 100% of the rDPS of the strongest DPS when we play perfectly well which should be next to impossible but still possible. The skill ceiling needs to be raised.

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Why is this always the counter arguement? It's not about numbers for dps skills, it's about COMPLEXITY. We have 1 button that we push in excess, how is this a difficult idea to process?

What if Monk was just Bootshine, Bootshine, Bootshine, Bootshine?

Of if all you did was Full Thrust on Dragoon?

Is that interesting? F**ck no? If the thought appeals to you, please leave the conversation, as you will never convince us otherwise.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

A healer's job is primarily to heal and their toolkit is designed accordingly. A DPS' primary job is damage, hence why they get the complexe rotations and we get the vast healing repertoire with a few simple damage spell to weave in when the opprtunity presents itself. If you want complexe DPS rotation with the ability to heal and raise people on the side, try Red Mage, it's what drew me to the class initially and I loved it.

If healers get the DPS potential of ranged DPS, why would anyone play a ranged DPS ever again? They'd just be inferior to healers in every way. Healers should never get a complexe DPS rotation and I'll never understand why people want to gatekeep the healing role to the top percent of players.

If healers get this kind of potential, fights will be balanced around it and dps queue times will skyrocket because no one will want to/be able to keep up with the insane demands of the class.

If healing bores you, please just play a DPS.

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This take is so bad I hope you're trolling

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Originally Posted by Lexis

A healer's job is primarily to heal and their toolkit is designed accordingly. A DPS' primary job is damage, hence why they get the complexe rotations and we get the vast healing repertoire with a few simple damage spell to weave in when the opprtunity presents itself. If you want complexe DPS rotation with the ability to heal and raise people on the side, try Red Mage, it's what drew me to the class initially and I loved it.

If healers get the DPS potential of ranged DPS, why would anyone play a ranged DPS ever again? They'd just be inferior to healers in every way. Healers should never get a complexe DPS rotation and I'll never understand why people want to gatekeep the healing role to the top percent of players.

If healers get this kind of potential, fights will be balanced around it and dps queue times will skyrocket because no one will want to/be able to keep up with the insane demands of the class.

If healing bores you, please just play a DPS.

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nobody wants to "gatekeep" healing to the top percent of players. to even do that you would need story content to do ultimate levels of damage. People are asking for healers to have more damage options because there is simply nothing else to do in downtime than to spam a single spell.
You say we do damage "when the opportunity presents itself" but that opportunity is very often over 95% of any given encounter, even with party members making mistakes.

i personally dont want to do more *damage numbers* as much as i want to have more *damage buttons*. Or anything to do while not healing. The reason i stuck with ast all expansion is because the cards fill that hole, but its ridiculously overtuned healing ogcds take away all the fun from healing itself.

if veta dont like healing, its because they ruined how the role plays, not because they want to play dps

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Originally Posted by Lexis

A healer's job is primarily to heal and their toolkit is designed accordingly.

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Sylphie, is that you?

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Originally Posted by Lexis

A DPS' primary job is damage, hence why they get the complexe rotations and we get the vast healing repertoire with a few simple damage spell to weave in when the opprtunity presents itself.

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This is FFXIV. Not a game where healing or tanking and mitgating is a full time job.
Everyone dpses for the vast majority of a fight, regardless of role. "When the opportunity presents itself" isn't something that happens occasionally during a fight, it's what you do the vast majority.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

Healers should never get a complexe DPS rotation and I'll never understand why people want to gatekeep the healing role to the top percent of players.

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Gatekeeping healing would mean making healing itself more complex. A complex dps rotation affects the skill ceiling, not the floor. And as such, it isn't gatekeeping. But the "b-b-but the new/ inexperienced players...!" is always used as an argument, even if it doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

If healing bores you, please just play a DPS.

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Yes, definitely Sylphie.

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Originally Posted by FoxCh40s

Thoughts?

I'm starting to get the feeling, even going to tanks, that the other two roles besides DPS exist to solely and completely facilitate their fun.

Ours and tanks, starting in ShB, is second thought.

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Yes. The sole root of my enjoyment while playing a healer involves juggling dps with healing responsibilities. The entire reason I HATE 5.0 healers is they ruined that balance and left me spamming 1 dot and a single dd...

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Right now in terms of rDPS, healers can achieve around 60-70% of a dps' max rDPS output. For the Oracle of Darkness, the strongest healer (AST) has dealt 64% of the rDPS of the strongest DPS job (Black Mage) and 73% of the rDPS of the weakest DPS job (Machinist).

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I stand corrected when I said it was 50%. Although that's a symptom of raid buffs and the Echo, as you can see by how WHM falls behind by at least 1500 rdps. I think 75% would be a good figure to settle at, but of course that should be with more engaging gameplay and a skilled player.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

A healer's job is primarily to heal and their toolkit is designed accordingly. A DPS' primary job is damage, hence why they get the complexe rotations and we get the vast healing repertoire with a few simple damage spell to weave in when the opprtunity presents itself. If you want complexe DPS rotation with the ability to heal and raise people on the side, try Red Mage, it's what drew me to the class initially and I loved it

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Says who? This misconception that healers should only heal, tanks should only take hits and dps should only do damage is invented by players. There is actually no rule that gameplay has to follow a strict, bland trinity and MMO's have been giving all 3 roles utility outside their role for years now. It makes roles more interesting, because once you've mastered the basics, like keeping your party alive or holding enmity, you can push even further and still become even more valuable to the team as you get better at your role.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

If healers get the DPS potential of ranged DPS, why would anyone play a ranged DPS ever again? They'd just be inferior to healers in every way. Healers should never get a complexe DPS rotation and I'll never understand why people want to gatekeep the healing role to the top percent of players.

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This is just pure exaggeration and nonsense to try and push your point. No one said healers should have equal dps to ranged dps. But there's no harm in it being closer. If that damages your ego because you're only playing dps at half the potential and really good healers are making you look bad, that's your problem and it's bad game design to punish the good players to cater to that ego.

No one is gatekeeping healing to the top percent of players either. In the majority of content, healers don't even need to do damage and no one cares if you are, even though it's basically pressing one button. If dps became more engaging, there's still no expectation to be doing high damage. It's just an option if you want to contribute more.

Players like yourself who say "just play dps" only hurt the game. The healer role is under-represented. Simplification isn't helping and has sent the quality of gameplay in Duty Finder down the drain. Why shouldn't the devs encourage more good healers to help the queue timers by making it a powerful, engaging and rewarding role?

It's pretty clear people are taking whatever they want from my post to push their narrative further rather than engage in proper discourse so I'm not gonna bother anymore with this thread. From trolling accusations (forums usually have posting histories you can check to verify before making baseless accusations and if you had, you'd see I'm just your average user engaging in what I thought to be a conversation) to pretending I'm what I can only assume is a frequent poster that is disliked? (new here, wouldn't know. Again, you can probably verify this by checking my posting history).

I come from a game where they over-complicated healing for the sake of the elite crowd and it's not something I'd like to see repeated here as I've been thoroughly enjoying my healing experience here in FFXIV. Twist my words around however you please from here.

And for the record, someone literally was saying healers should have 100% of the ranged dps damage potential, hence my response to that statement. But I guess I'm the one trolling.

I know to stay away from the healer forums now, unfortunate :/

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Originally Posted by Lexis

It's pretty clear people are taking whatever they want from my post to push their narrative further rather than engage in proper discourse so I'm not gonna bother anymore with this thread.

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I hope you see the irony - supposedly wanting better discourse while handing out defunct labels and telling people if they don't like it to just go play a different role, then leaving in a huff, after your own misinterpretation as to what Healers are actually asking for. I'll hazard a guess that absolutely nobody (with any real sense) is asking for Healers to be on par with actual damage dealers in terms of output. The main gripe is that the game (due to low healing requirements) provides so much downtime it's not even funny, and that downtime can only be spent doing three things: (a) absolutely nothing, (b) overhealing, or (c) mashing a single DPS button in between the occasional DoT (at least in terms of something like White Mage).

As someone who was watching Limit/Naguura progressing in min-itemlevel Eden last night, who are all serious WoW raiders giving FFXIV's raiding scene a serious min-il push, I wasn't in the least bit surprised when they admitted to being absolutely bored stiff spamming Glare for 90% of battles. Personally, I have no problem with that myself, but it doesn't take a genius to know that it could easily be made into something more than that -- be it increasing the healing requirement and/or adding more engaging HEALING systems, or giving the DPS side of it a shake-up, because all they've done for the past few years is dumb both down whilst the healing requirement barely moved.

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Originally Posted by FoxCh40s

Why is this always the counter arguement? It's not about numbers for dps skills, it's about COMPLEXITY. We have 1 button that we push in excess, how is this a difficult idea to process?

What if Monk was just Bootshine, Bootshine, Bootshine, Bootshine?

Of if all you did was Full Thrust on Dragoon?

Is that interesting? F**ck no? If the thought appeals to you, please leave the conversation, as you will never convince us otherwise.

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I totally get your point. I agree that healers need complexity when it comes to dps. However, I do not need more complex rotation to deal the same amount of dps. I want more complex rotation because I want to deal more dps while healing.

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Originally Posted by FoxCh40s

Thoughts?

I'm starting to get the feeling, even going to tanks, that the other two roles besides DPS exist to solely and completely facilitate their fun.

Ours and tanks, starting in ShB, is second thought.

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Until you made this post, not once I've thought about this way of thinking. I think I get why would one caught this perspective about healing in FFXIV.

But no, I still don't think it is for their fun. To me it's more about them increasing the complexity and fun factor of the DPS side but barely change the healing requirement and the system behind them since beginning of time.

I don't mind the 1 2 1 1 1 1 ad nauseam. I gravitate toward healer mainly for the responsibility in group play---whatever tools they give me I will most likely find my joy there. But the least they can add is more situations for me to use my plethora of healing buttons they gave me, which doesn't take a galaxy brain to understand why.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

I totally get your point. I agree that healers need complexity when it comes to dps. However, I do not need more complex rotation to deal the same amount of dps. I want more complex rotation because I want to deal more dps while healing.

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Then we are exactly on the same page! That is EXACTLY what we want, we merely wish a return of our previous damage kits, with additions to dps kits for healers.

Because God knows we have WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too many healing oGcds. We could never another healing ability, and it would be absolutely fine.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

...

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I think that the difference between a skilled healer and a novice is very apparent especially on large mob pulls which is the most common game encounter. This is the instance where a skilled healer will constantly put out the same amount of dps if not more than their dps party members while healing the tank that is tanking 10 mobs. I find it hard to do that with AST though, so I usually don't pick it for dungeons. For raids and trials, it is not that obvious because there are more people and there is a 2nd healer.

I do not consider it as fun having a complex DPS rotation that at max level of gameplay would lead you to have only a portion of what a max DPS job can do. It is better to have a simple but weaker rotation than to have a complex but also weaker rotation. It would feel unfair to be putting an extra amount of effort into maintaining your rotation because you also have to heal, and still do less than a DPS player.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

I do not consider it as fun having a complex DPS rotation that at max level of gameplay would lead you to have only a portion of what a max DPS job can do. It is better to have a simple but weaker rotation than to have a complex but also weaker rotation. It would feel unfair to be putting an extra amount of effort into maintaining your rotation because you also have to heal, and still do less than a DPS player.

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Healing is work, it's basically a community service if nothing else. We should have interesting and dynamic dps options while facilitating gameplay for our groups. Players that are 'good' and can min/max their class should be able to show out with their ability to effectively weave damage while also healing. That balancing act has historically always been what made healing interesting.

5.0 healing just sucks so bad. Don't even get me started on how mundane questing and farming are either...how many damn times can a person spam "Broil," "Glare," etc before it becomes excessive? That's literally ALL we do outside of duty finder.

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Originally Posted by FoxCh40s

Then we are exactly on the same page! That is EXACTLY what we want, we merely wish a return of our previous damage kits, with additions to dps kits for healers.

Because God knows we have WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too many healing oGcds. We could never another healing ability, and it would be absolutely fine.

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I actually don't mind having more oGCDs for healing. We have too many GCD heals if you ask me. Cure, Cure II, Physick, Benefic I, Benefic II, Helios, Medica, Medica II, Cure III. The last two should be turned into oGCDs. But seriously, considering the amount of healing needed in this game, all of the GCD heals can be scrapped. They should give us a good dps rotation with strong potency and we will weave the oGCD heals every once in a while in accordance with the scripted game design.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

I think that the difference between a skilled healer and a novice is very apparent especially on large mob pulls which is the most common game encounter. This is the instance where a skilled healer will constantly put out the same amount of dps if not more than their dps party members while healing the tank that is tanking 10 mobs. I find it hard to do that with AST though, so I usually don't pick it for dungeons. For raids and trials, it is not that obvious because there are more people and there is a 2nd healer.

I do not consider it as fun having a complex DPS rotation that at max level of gameplay would lead you to have only a portion of what a max DPS job can do. It is better to have a simple but weaker rotation than to have a complex but also weaker rotation. It would feel unfair to be putting an extra amount of effort into maintaining your rotation because you also have to heal, and still do less than a DPS player.

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*sigh*

This is exactly why the game is in this state.

So yall want to do as much dps as a dps, while healing.

How about no.

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Originally Posted by Imora

So yall want to do as much dps as a dps, while healing.

How about no.

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How about yes? We are already doing that when it comes to AoE. WHM is capable of contesting a black mage's 4 flares. I do 35% of the dmg, she does 35% of the dmg, the rest is left for those who were too slow to press their buttons. Mobs die in 30secs. Same thing for SMN in Phoenix state. Every time I run level 80 dungeons as WHM, I am genuinely surprised if someone deals more than me on mob pulls.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

I come from a game where they over-complicated healing for the sake of the elite crowd and it's not something I'd like to see repeated here as I've been thoroughly enjoying my healing experience here in FFXIV. Twist my words around however you please from here.

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If you’re not playing healers for their inherent focus on resource management and support, which necessitates some complexity both in class and battle design if it is to feel impactful and represent a meaningful skill curve in the long run, why are you even healing? The role in XIV’s case is literally defined by a minimum optimization point: healing/mitigating unavoidable damage with as few resources as necessary, thereby increasing DPS opportunities and the ability to cover for mistakes more effectively. The only way to make that feel meaningful past endgame (which you yourself admit you are nowhere near at this point) is to have DPS and healing kits that allow you to play more efficiently if you’re prepared to juggle that responsibility.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

And for the record, someone literally was saying healers should have 100% of the ranged dps damage potential, hence my response to that statement. But I guess I'm the one trolling.

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That was in reference to a prior iteration of healers, not a demand for the future iterations to be as close.

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Originally Posted by Lexis

I know to stay away from the healer forums now, unfortunate :/

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This is why healers don’t get nice things. You’re not even at the point where you have the necessary context to understand these complaints. Play long enough at endgame and you’ll get it. You’re currently at the point where healing tuning was at its ‘best’ historically. The game only gets faster but easier to manage from HW-cap onward.

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Originally Posted by Imora

So yall want to do as much dps as a dps, while healing.

How about no.

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Maybe not as much. But certainly more than we are. Unfortunately this is how the game is designed and the devs trying to defy it has resulted in something unengaging and unrewarding.

Give healers more DPS abilities in our down time.
Make future content tuned to make the most of our healing tools.

Older content, levelling, MSQ, solo content etc. loses a chunk of its monotony with a better selection of DPS abilities.
Future content can start to make better use of our toolkits, it's already too later for existing content and when run into that lull where they've learned mechanics, have a high iLevel and are being extra efficient as healers? They have something to fill their downtime, because inevitably in how this game is designed it will happen.


When you consider there's content in this game when you only need to cast 2 or 3 healing spells and be done, it's crazy. And maybe an average of 70% DPS, 30% healing for that majority of this game's content and when the DPS rotation is monotonous and dull as heck, it's gonna be a satisfying experience healing.

Improved DPS makes the best of a bad situation without any major overhauls & helps when people are over-geared and know what they're doing.
Aiming to improve how future content is tuned then improves the situation as that content comes out and healers end up better using their kit.