My idea for Healer 'engagement'

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

Healers, the ones who main healers, and not the ones that play it for a faster queue time and are screaming for more dps options, but people who play healers because they enjoy healing... do not need more dps options.

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It's been the other way around. Healers have a really low ceiling in this game and mains that play healer day in and day out are bored with no room for growth within the role. We don't necessarily care for our filler rotation to be DPS skills but we want more to do than just heal the very little outgoing damage the content throws at us.
The non-mains with lower mastery of or low investment in the role are fine sticking with the current paradigm. (and why wouldn't they, it looks more and more like that's been the design philosophy).

Edit: Sometimes it just feels like healers have had low adoption so the devs have just been trying to fill the queues so that the other players can enjoy the game. Regardless of the impact on healer mains.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

so, basically Lastelli, you just want to become green dps.

got it.

by the way, I was not saying heal ALL the time, but it would be nice to use more than a couple heal buttons for a more engaging time.

as for my length of time playing, I certainly lack your obvious age and veteran status, but I am not exactly new or inexperienced, while it hardly makes me the expert you are, I started at the end of Heavensward

what I was hoping of course, is that there was some way to make healers do more healing, instead of a dps with a healer side job. I dont think homogenization is a better direction.

but thats just my newbie inexperience talking it up I imagine ^^

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While you won't find a single person disagreeing with you on homogenisation being a bad thing. The unfortunate circumstances is that Green dps for healers and Blue dps for tanks is how the game is designed to be played because SE's design formula isn't changing.
There's hardly any tanking checks in the game and all of them are in savage. Enmity no longer exists and boss positioning is automatic in most cases. This was most notable in the unreal trials, ARR trials that did require tank positioning causing a lot of tanks that started later in the game's life cycle to struggle.

As for healers fights are almost completely scripted and the incoming damage is both very low and comes in small bursts. The healing power afforded to players is far too strong, cheap and plentiful for such a low level of damage. Consequently you are left with lots of downtime in party duties. Solo duties well, you don't even need to heal much.


So what else are tanks and healers to do to contribute other than be dps with a different icon? sit around doing emotes? SE have said they won't tune damage any higher despite pleas from players. The answer is dps since that's always useful.

Have a look at this thread over on the healer forums.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-healer-issues

The majority of healers want more damage to heal. But SE has said numerous times they can't do that. That's why so many want dps actions. We used to have them and still healed. Adding more dps actions won't raise the skill floor, it will only raise the skill ceiling and better still, get shut of some of the terrible homogenisation

I might be fitting an action to an idea but before the rebalance was announced one idea to make healers more fun was to address scaling. The issue with healers is as everyone gets stronger healers get less useful. When your tank can heal themselves better and take less damage, your role becomes less relevant. So I thought to make things scale not so aggressively would help, among a few other ideas.

Anyway, so I am imagining besides helping address some overflow like bugs by changing scale that we might also see an effect where the healing action is actually overall more valuable for longer periods of time even as gear quality increases. Which is going to then require more attentive healers or the team fails, good for the idea of healers needing to heal but will be interesting to see (if I'm right) if it also causes some people not to want to be healers because there is now a higher demand to be more active (in a lot of content, given half decent gear you could just oGCD heal and so some healers use this as a way to sleep at the wheel, of course others use this as a chance to weave in damage and naturally were a bit annoyed when that weaving in damage became one button spam).

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

Most veteran healers with a deep knowledge about xiv's mechanics will tell you the same thing: it's practically impossible to change the game to force healers to heal the majority of the time. That would require drastic changes to the whole structure of ffxiv's battle content and a complete rework of the healers' toolkits. It's simply NOT going to happen, sorry. That's why many of us simply ask for more interesting dps options. At this point we fully understand that the devs will not make the changes required to achieve what you're currently advocating, so we ask that at least we have something interesting to do once we get closer to the skill ceiling and healing becomes a snoozefest even in savage content. You'll understand that too in due time.

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This is accurate, the content will not be changed enough to require more healing. In fact the devs have tried with the latest savage tier and admitted themselves that they pushed it as far as they could and wouldn't comfortable go further. And it wasn't anywhere near close enough.
I use this example way too much but it's because I think it's a decent one: The reality is that the hardest content in this game (only done by 3% of the player base) still only requires about 20-30% healing and the rest of the time is spent dpsing. The devs would never impose that on the entire player base even though "that" is still, technically, not enough for a healing-centric gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

If SE wants healers engaged and having fun, trash mobs need to be dialed up in damage output, make me heal, make the healer have to spend 85% of their time healing more than just the tank. Make healers have to actually heal. That will get my attention, and my engagement, and I will have fun. I suspect others who main healers would agree as well. I have a stack of buttons for healing, why do I not have to use most of them? Tanks use theirs, DPS uses theirs.. why don't I?

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To be honest, we don't need to change a thing. There's plenty of healing and raising to be done if you run with PUGs. If you're running with the same group every single week, then by the end of the month everyone knows all the mechanics, no one takes damage, and the healers are bored. That's the nature of the game. Amping up the damage taken just so that the healers running exclusively with the best and most organized groups can continue to have a challenge may be fine for extremes and ultimates, but doing so in regular content is just screwing over that vast majority of players out there who are running with different players of varying skill levels. In high level (as in level 60+) PUGs, I'm already regularly spamming my entire stack of healing buttons for the majority of the fight.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

so, basically Lastelli, you just want to become green dps.

got it.

by the way, I was not saying heal ALL the time, but it would be nice to use more than a couple heal buttons for a more engaging time.

as for my length of time playing, I certainly lack your obvious age and veteran status, but I am not exactly new or inexperienced, while it hardly makes me the expert you are, I started at the end of Heavensward

what I was hoping of course, is that there was some way to make healers do more healing, instead of a dps with a healer side job. I dont think homogenization is a better direction.

but thats just my newbie inexperience talking it up I imagine ^^

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I think a tune down on healing potency, especially those oGCD heal nuke, have a more strict ilevel sync, might increase the healing uptime abit. There was a time a tank could barely survive Titan HM triple storm, there was a time healer have to spend every trick to keep up with wall to wall pull.

ultimately, ARR do a more engaging dungeon. We have to kite adds, we have to sleep a small boss to stop it killing NPC, we have to remove poison on tank before it get too much too handle, and we have to use knock back to interrup some spell/skill.

It is overall the game mechanic tune down so low and healing power being so strong we could just pop 1-2 oGCD and not to worry about anything. Every expansion I was hoping we will have more intense healing and weaken our healing skill especially oGCD, but it just seem getting dump down evenmore, and those of us who want more intense healing just starting to vanish.

I do agree giving DPS rotation will not change the healing side but only satitfy the Green DPS mind community. Why not both, more intense healing to satisfy us and give a 1-2-3 to satisfy those green DPS. I do not believe tuning damage receive up would exclude more of the community as the current situtation is the bar setting so low. pushing the bar little higher will not hurt

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

just screwing over that vast majority of players out there who are running with different players of varying skill levels.

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Out of curiosity what would you consider screwing those players over? Scaling potencies would indeed be an issue but we all know that's never going to happen. Adding filler skills to make non-healing gameplay more engaging and raising the ceiling a bit shouldn't screw anyone over.

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Originally Posted by EaMett

Out of curiosity what would you consider screwing those players over? Scaling potencies would indeed be an issue but we all know that's never going to happen. Adding filler skills to make non-healing gameplay more engaging and raising the ceiling a bit shouldn't screw anyone over.

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yeah, suppose thats true enough. I dont see SE changing anything soon, I just kinda dislike their thinking on "we cant possibly make them heal more, but we can make more dps options" Just seems like a limited vision, and likely, as one posted said, its likely none play healers much to actually know how dull it is.

I agree with this OP. Dosing is fine, but our primary responsibility is to heal.

Make us work for it.

The strangest thing is that non-healers have some of the most interesting support abilities and healing skills.

TBN gives a free hard hitting damage skill, but only if it is fully consumed. Requires planning and knowledge of the fight to get the most out of it.

Curing Waltz is a short range free AoE heal which doubles in potency if the assigned person is also standing nearby, or heals from afar if the assigned person is on the other side of the platform. This could be used whenever people stack or when we have to split into two groups for a mechanic.

Nascent Flash could be an interesting alternative for HoT spells if your tank knows how to do their rotation. It could even be an AoE "heal" and a great tool in situations that require passing a damage check whilst the party is also taking damage.

Abyssal Drain heals more the more enemy targets it hits. This seems like an obvious addition to a healer's kit if it healed other players, yet we have nothing like it. Could have been how the blood Lily worked, for example.

Intervention reduces the damage another player takes. Seems like something that would help healers perform their primary task, keeping people alive. AST cards used to have this option but that got removed.

What I enjoy about healing is that I play the situation more than a rotation. If my party is good I do more DPSing, if my party is bad I tend to do a lot more healing. That adds variety in the same encounters which makes it a lot more fun for me.

If they add more layers to DPS that's fine, if they tune things towards healing more that's okay too. I just like having to pay attention to what is happening now, and not just playing each encounter exactly the same.

I personally like being a green dps, but they could use more healing and dps buttons. doesn't have to be one or the other. Healers in wow have to heal way more then we do but also have a more robust healer dps rotation.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

"Fixing" healers isnt about giving us more dps options, its about letting us do our prefered job, which is healing. If SE wants to give me another dps button in the hopes that it will improve my life, its a waste. Just another thing to add into downtime. If they change things so I have to use the rest of my buttons... thats a win.

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This doesn't improve anything though? It just means you end up spamming cure 2 instead of glare. It's still the same problem in the end which is that nobody wants to just be pushing the same button over and over (well except for worthless honest healers who already do just spam cure 1 over and over like complete reprobates) and that's all that upping the damage output in dungeons would do since proper cd and resource management is already the name of the game.

Right now, you're weaving in heals between DPS spells. What would it look like if healers were busy casting various short buffs and debuffs while healing, instead of using one nuke?
The debuffs could be stuns, silence, pacify, forced march, turning mobs against their buddies for a few seconds. Then support jobs would use attack speed, critical hit, direct damage, evasion, cast speed, that would synergize, and tanks and DPS could exploit status effects for big bursts.

Or you could forego all this, play as usual, but you wouldn't be rewarded with as big numbers or as fast a run. There would be a payoff for good team play and paying attention to what your team mates do.

Healers could be a lot of fun.

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Originally Posted by EaMett

Out of curiosity what would you consider screwing those players over?

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Like I quoted, it was the OP's idea that "trash mobs need to be dialed up in damage output." That would screw newer players over. It's already bad enough with the wall-to-wall pulls that are the norm in this game. Ungeared healers, especially in lower level instances, already have their hands full with ungeared tanks who wall-to-wall pull without even popping a CD. I'm sure that would be a non-issue if I were exclusively running with an experienced and geared tank from my FC, but I'm equally sure that it would be an absolute misery for a baby healer who's already struggling to maintain these paper tanks.

I agree that scaling is a horrible solution to a problem that doesn't exist. I also don't agree with the idea of adding filler skills. If you want a healing class that saddles you with a bunch of extra garbage to manage, the Astrologian with its cards is a perfectly acceptable way to go. I really don't want this game to go the way of WoW where the developers cater to long-time players' demands for more and more challenge to the point where the game is simply unplayable for anyone who doesn't want to treat an MMO like a way of life.

The way I see it, if you join the Balance Discord, min-max your character, practice on target dummies to the point where your rotation is on auto-pilot, and run exclusively with the same players in your FC over and over, you've turned the game into easy mode for yourself. It's not on the developers to make things harder on the majority of players who play rationally to compensate for a minority's obsession.

The OP's complaint boils down to, "Trash is boring. Make it fun." Given that trash isn't even going to give XP going forward, I think we're better off simply removing trash as opposed to buffing it.

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Originally Posted by Arkdra

worthless honest healers who already do just spam cure 1 over and over like complete reprobates

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I know better than to do that now, but I just have to point out that SE kind of trains new players to do this by causing Cure I to proc a Cure II buff. In most cases, when one skill buffs another, the intended mechanic is to spam the skill in order to proc the buff. How are new WHMs to know that this is an exception to that rule? It's kind of weird that most of the healing buttons you're given as a baby WHM are completely ignored at level 80. Seriously, they should merge the two skills and give WHMs a trait that promotes Cure I to Cure II instead. That's effectively the way it works now. In high level instances, Cure is a last resort anyway, for when you've gone through Tetragrammation, exhausted all the lilies, applied both regens, and popped Benediction already.

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

I know better than to do that now, but I just have to point out that SE kind of trains new players to do this by causing Cure I to proc a Cure II buff. In most cases, when one skill buffs another, the intended mechanic is to spam the skill in order to proc the buff. How are new WHMs to know that this is an exception to that rule? It's kind of weird that most of the healing buttons you're given as a baby WHM are completely ignored at level 80. Seriously, they should merge the two skills and give WHMs a trait that promotes Cure I to Cure II instead. That's effectively the way it works now. In high level instances, Cure is a last resort anyway, for when you've gone through Tetragrammation, exhausted all the lilies, applied both regens, and popped Benediction already.

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On the one hand, yes, all of the above is correct and I completely agree. But on the other, the cnj class quests are all about how you need to do stuff other than healing lol. Also it's not like ast's and sch's don't do the same thing. But yes they do need to kill freecure for sure and probably just make it upgrade like the main dps nukes.

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Originally Posted by Arkdra

the cnj class quests are all about how you need to do stuff other than healing

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Imagine you could actually do other stuff. Use a water spell to pacify or silence a mob, make it unable to use skills/spells. An earth spell to slow the mobs down, to stun it, with a small chance to petrify (and the next hit shatters the mob).. that would be fun.
Scholars could cause diseases that have a chance to jump to other mobs whenever they get hit, and these diseases would do things like lower their damage, or a chance to heal the tank instead of hurting them.
Astrologians could do all the time magic stuff that used to be in their lore but never really got used. speed up the group, slow down the mobs. Maybe make a mob go "Benjamin Button", and it shrinks and gets weaker, and then has a chance to pop out of existence.

There are some crazy things that could be done to make healers more fun, and if you could do crazy stuff, more people would pick up the role for that kind of gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

I agree that scaling is a horrible solution to a problem that doesn't exist. I also don't agree with the idea of adding filler skills. If you want a healing class that saddles you with a bunch of extra garbage to manage, the Astrologian with its cards is a perfectly acceptable way to go. I really don't want this game to go the way of WoW where the developers cater to long-time players' demands for more and more challenge to the point where the game is simply unplayable for anyone who doesn't want to treat an MMO like a way of life.

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Surely there's a middle ground here. The complaints are centered around the fact that current healers (in a game genre that is designed to be played over long periods of time) don't allow for much player growth. It's a design flaw, one that other roles don't suffer from, at least not on this level. Nobody is advocating for a savage tier healer with a crazy barrier of entry. SCHs would be happy to simply get the old scholar back. They wouldn't need much more. And even then, many of us acknowledge there might've been too much button bloat so cutting some stuff out would've been fine. But the current iteration of healers is a far cry from a satisfactory level of gameplay.
If you've ever seen a flow theory chart (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/...fig2_260037278), healers start off in the flow channel but quickly dip down into boredom. Adding features to the gameplay that don't impact beginner players too much but allow veterans to pull the maximum out of their gameplay is what this is about. Miasma II was a great example of this. A beginner player could ignore it and clip or use ruin II to weave ogcds. An experienced player could sort out the best place to stand, use miasma II to weave (but only if the dot wasn't on), deal with melee mechanics etc. It was a viable mechanic, the only thing to make sure of was that the difference between the two playstyles didn't create too big of a dps gap.

Saw a lot people assume OP wants to be doing little other than healing and I want to dispel this notion as I think we're mentally in a similar or the same boat.

I enjoy that healer dps matters. I don't enjoy when healer healing matters very little. My favourite moments as a healer are when my job as a support demands a lot while also putting pressure on me to dps. I enjoy balancing the two roles at the same time. I don't enjoy spamming dps spells and healing only very occasionally. That's not balancing the two roles. That's being mostly a dps. On the flip side I don't want to be almost only healing all the time either. Yes I would enjoy it more than almost only dpsing but what I love is handling both roles at once. In most bosses in DF content I'm often bored unless something goes wrong. On bosses I spend 90% of my time experiencing only one part of my kit and it's not even the main role of my kit.

We're not supposed to deal with trash the way that we do. Chain pulling is a community generated aspect of combat. It's not intended by the devs. If it was then individual trash packs would be much bigger and/or would be far more punishing on party hp. But they're not unless more than is intended is actively pulled.

So in DF content healers either have to count on trash being intentionally handled in a way not intended by the devs, or have something go wrong on bosses to be presented with a remotely interesting situation. In DF content we literally have to wait for players to, for lack of a better phrase, play incorrectly in order to have some real fun.

I'm not saying "change all the DF content in the game!" because it's a stupid thing to ask for. The devs have better things to be dealing with than readjusting old content that isn't bugged. What I want is for future DF content to demand healers use their support kit more often. Trash is somewhat in an okay position due to how the community typically pulls them, but bosses are often so bloody boring unless poop hits the fan.

And again yes SE could make dps more interesting to reduce the monotony of playing a healer. But that wouldn't be forcing healers to balance both their offensive and support roles. If I wanted a more interesting dps experience then I would play a dps. What I want is for DF boss content to demand more use of support abilities so that I can enjoy balancing the duality of being a green dps and a healer more often. I really think something is wrong when DF bosses are so often the chill-out time for healers. It's almost laughable to call these entities bosses. Bosses of what? Bosses of not being a threat?

Making DF bosses a bigger threat on player hp isn't going to ruin the game or make the community have a fit. WoW's DF bosses demand more healing and yet players there can handle it just fine. There's no reason why players here cannot either. I'm not suggesting that the demand on support abilities should skyrocket. I just want to be dealing with incoming damage on DF bosses at least 25% of the time instead of a measly 10% or less. I don't think this is an unreasonable thing to want.

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

If you want a healing class that saddles you with a bunch of extra garbage to manage, the Astrologian with its cards is a perfectly acceptable way to go.

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Why is only Ast allowed to be any fun? I used to love scholar and now i cant stand playing it.

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

The way I see it, if you join the Balance Discord, min-max your character, practice on target dummies to the point where your rotation is on auto-pilot, and run exclusively with the same players in your FC over and over, you've turned the game into easy mode for yourself. It's not on the developers to make things harder on the majority of players who play rationally to compensate for a minority's obsession.

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What? DPS and tanks make the game HARDER for themselves by minmaxing and still have to adjust to encounters even when their rotation is on autopilot on a dummy.

DPS and tanks still get to have fun when they play with their friends or statics. Why do healers have to be any different?

I suspect most of it has been covered already but here's my two cents anyway:


SE have designed themselves into a corner with healers, this trend started with Stormblood, continued with Shadowbringers and looks as if it will go further down the rabbit hole with Endwalker.

I would argue that our healing toolkits are too strong relative to our hp pools and that we regenerate resources too quickly. This is 'offset' by us having small resource pools that we can deplete rapidly if we don't stay ontop of shroud and/or make some effort to get value out of abilities and oGCDs vs just hammering the Medica button.

IMHO SE have 3 options to move forward:

1) Try a WoW Cataclysm and inflate people's HP pools relative to healing and damage potency and switch to a battle of attrition style healing model. This would be highly controversial and still require significant tuning to the current healer role's cool downs and abilities. If we can just endlessly sustain people anyway by juggling cool downs, it'd likely only make things worse.

2) Embrace the green DPS and just make the healer role into a support role, effectively 4 DPS jobs with much more primitive healing kits with a focus on group healing as a by product of DPSing. Let's be clear now, I'm only putting this here because frankly, this should have been done at the end of Heavensward at the latest, if not at the start of ARR. If attempted now this would turn the healer community on it's head, cause huge amounts of outrage and require an obscene amount of developer work to retune and test old content. Even as someone who has healed in MMOs since MMOs were a thing, I'll be the first to admit that this is the road SE should have gone down in hindsight.

3) What I think is the most feasible and least disruptive angle. Embrace the downtime and give each healer within the role their own gimmick to spend GCDs on. WHM can stick to it's straight forward roots by just lobbing pure raw potency around. AST should be able to spend it's GCDs dropping it's potency onto other players via being allowed to pull cards on the GCD without cool down. SCH should be stacking dots and debuffs. Sage should be generating healing and buffs as a splash style byproduct of DPSing. Making buffs and debuffs work with fixed potency values rather than percentages would be one angle to make things much easier to tune and less likely to overinflate through the course of an expansion.

So yeah, just to be clear, whilst I think 2 would have been best for the long term health of the game. It's just too late for that at this point. 3 is the only direction I can see them going without splitting the community in half as a result.

However, I honestly can't see that ever happening at this point either. Why?

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ealer-designer.

An old thread, but it's still stands to this day. Yoshida *needs* to invest into the battle system team to have the manpower to solve this and that doesn't seem to be something that he is willing to do.

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Originally Posted by QooEr

Why is only Ast allowed to be any fun? I used to love scholar and now i cant stand playing it.

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"Fun" is a relative measure. If you consider AST to be fun, then play that. If you can't stand playing SCH, then don't play it. I'm personally not a huge fan of either of those jobs. I'm perfectly happy with how WHM plays, so I generally stick with that. I would rather see various jobs cater to various playstyles than have one homogenous playstyle to which all the jobs conform. I don't like the way that some of the jobs play, and that's OK. I still plan on leveling all the jobs to level cap just because I'm a completionist and because I want to gain a rudimentary understanding of how each one plays, but I doubt I will ever run group content with most of them because I despise their frenetic pace. I realize that many players love those jobs because of their frenetic pace, so I'm not ever going to advocate for slowing jobs other down or removing buttons to suit my preferences. By that same token, I get really irked when I see players demanding more buttons and more OGCD skills because they're bored with the way some "slow" or "simple" jobs play.

If there's any change I can get behind here, it's the idea of adding more debuffs and making their removal matter. Of course, if they were to do that, I'd prefer that they make Esuna instant-cast with the cast time folded into a cooldown instead.

I get the point, I agree halfway. Though, I dont think its fun when your entire group dies, because either you or the healer in general cant keep up.
When I remember those very first days in Holminster Switch, damn the trash mobs hit like a truck. Wall to wall pulls were really dangerous.
I am not sure if I want to heal more, with a higher risk to wipe multiple times in a dungeon/raid.

The real solution would be, again imo: Tying healing abilities and damaging skills; so when you do one - you get rewarded for the other.
Lily system works like that and they should expand on it.

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

To be honest, we don't need to change a thing. There's plenty of healing and raising to be done if you run with PUGs. If you're running with the same group every single week, then by the end of the month everyone knows all the mechanics, no one takes damage, and the healers are bored. That's the nature of the game. Amping up the damage taken just so that the healers running exclusively with the best and most organized groups can continue to have a challenge may be fine for extremes and ultimates, but doing so in regular content is just screwing over that vast majority of players out there who are running with different players of varying skill levels. In high level (as in level 60+) PUGs, I'm already regularly spamming my entire stack of healing buttons for the majority of the fight.

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What are you talking about? In what 60+ normal content does plenty of healing exist?

I main white mage - always have - and I do think we need more variety in terms of damage abilities. To actually make 'healing' itself more enjoyable would require quite a bit of an overhaul in terms of tuning, and class/encounter design, while also making it accessible for new, learning, or lower end players. Simply increasing damage taken across the board isn't really the solution here, in my opinion.

For me as a white mage main for the past 7 years, I only dps because SE isn't giving us anything else to do. I don't think just upping mob damage is going to fix things, since that will make the role harder on those already struggling. I've always advocated for more support abilities instead of dpsing. Damage shields, buffs, debuffs, etc. Let me manage that in a fight and make it relevant. They can change the role name from Healer to Support.

This is also why I prefer PUG runs. Unexpected things happen and it tests your abilities as a healer. There is nothing more boring for me than a flawless run where I barely heal and we wall-to-wall while I stand there continuously Holy spamming. It's pretty, but it's not engaging in the slightest. And I also chose this role instead of pure dps because I want to support my party. So my pipe dream is for SE to let us do that in other ways.

We need things like elemental weaknesses, different damage types (swap weapons to help complete specific skill chains - ala Hexa-strike), and elemental staves back...hehe, who am I kidding, people would be dying left and right, though some if that old school complexity would be fun ^^ At least give us Haste as another buff to keep up on everyone :)

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Originally Posted by Momo_Kozuki

More healing would add burdens to the healers, which SE has been actively tried to avoid for the sake of casual players. Remember the reason they don't make harder difficulty for 4-man dungeons? Because healers must be good or it is a wipe.

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But "casual" isn't equall to "incompetent". If there was any real reason to make healing what it is - it's either "new players" or "faster faster faster" mentality in the community, with second one probably contributing the most.

I like OP's idea both as tank main and healer-2nd (probably other way around in 6.0, not sure yet) with maybe some adjustments (most being already mentioned by other healer mains), but I feel like with what our "playing culture" currently is - it will meet a lot of negative pushback if implemented. Because what I currently see in the community isn't "how to make our dungeon runs interesting", it's "how to make our runs as fast as possible and don't you dare waste 5 more seconds of my time". There are obviously people who don't think this way, it's just the overall feeling I get every time I enter any dungeon, and it's not solely devteam's fault.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

What are you talking about? In what 60+ normal content does plenty of healing exist?

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Bardamm's Mettle (65) tbh is the only thing I can think about. That one hits like a truck if you go wall-to-wall.
Well, maybe also 71+ leveling dungeons if you're going with people who're still leveling and as result usually aren't geared really well. Level sync and the lack of some abilities might make things a bit more complicated, but honestly not much.

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

I also don't agree with the idea of adding filler skills. If you want a healing class that saddles you with a bunch of extra garbage to manage, the Astrologian with its cards is a perfectly acceptable way to go. I really don't want this game to go the way of WoW where the developers cater to long-time players' demands for more and more challenge to the point where the game is simply unplayable for anyone who doesn't want to treat an MMO like a way of life.

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The irony of this comment. Back in HW, healers were way less braindead. You actually had to pay attention to mp, know exactly when damage was coming to precast your heals since we didn't have so many instant skills, know when you could afford to turn cleric stance on to do some damage, and we had WAY more dps buttons. It was still very easy to heal normal content, but a good healer in savage content was a sight to behold. You had so many different ways to optimize and it was incredibly rewarding.

And then SB came and healers were made easier because we need accessibility and we need to cater to the lowest common denominator. We can't have good players be too good otherwise mediocre players will feel bad about themselves. But at least we still had a few things to pay attention to so it wasn't too bad.

And then ShB came and the devs thought it was a brilliant idea to force a 1 button rotation on all 3 healers that basically doesn't change from lvl 1 to cap because, again, they want to make sure that playing a healer is as simple as possible and bad players don't feel bad about themselves. And healers complained loudly.

Cater to long-time players? You can't be serious. Job design was changed to cater to new, inexperienced players in the last 2 expansion while veteran players are left with some jobs that are nothing but empty shells of their former selves and this is particularly evident for tanks, healers and ranged dps.

And in EW, it looks like SMN will receive the MCH treatment and become the next simplistic and flashy dps job that, once again, caters to inexperienced/casual players that only want to press buttons randomly and feel good because the can do decently without any effort. They're slowly forcing accessibility and simplicity (rather, shallowness) on every single job.

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Originally Posted by Halivel

Bardamm's Mettle (65) tbh is the only thing I can think about. That one hits like a truck if you go wall-to-wall.
Well, maybe also 71+ leveling dungeons if you're going with people who're still leveling and as result usually aren't geared really well. Level sync and the lack of some abilities might make things a bit more complicated, but honestly not much.

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Bardam's Mettle is actually easy to do when the tank is using their CDs properly and has pulled mobs the right way. I have seen a lot of bad tanks going for the wall to wall, while also letting the ranged mobs deplete their hp because they didn't use their gap closer & sprint to create distance aside from the fact that their usage of CDs appears to be so random in most cases where they used any.

In that dungeon, there are plenty of mistakes to be healed which is the case with almost any piece of content in FFXIV, you heal mistakes. But healing mistakes is not needed nor is it a healer's responsibility. The healer's job is to heal the mitigated damage, in Bardamm's Mettle is just so happens that you can carry obviously poorly performing tanks and/or DPS.

Dungeons 71+ appear to be hard only when the party is bad. Item level does affect the easiness of the content but item level alone is not enough to change the fact that all of my GCD go for an offensive ability when I am playing SCH. I am just less likely to use Aldo with max item level because my oGCD healing is stronger and I can cover more of the tank's mistakes for free.

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Originally Posted by Penthea

Saw a lot people assume OP wants to be doing little other than healing and I want to dispel this notion as I think we're mentally in a similar or the same boat.

***snip***

Making DF bosses a bigger threat on player hp isn't going to ruin the game or make the community have a fit. WoW's DF bosses demand more healing and yet players there can handle it just fine. There's no reason why players here cannot either. I'm not suggesting that the demand on support abilities should skyrocket. I just want to be dealing with incoming damage on DF bosses at least 25% of the time instead of a measly 10% or less. I don't think this is an unreasonable thing to want.

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Thank you Penthea, that was a lot more elegant than what I was trying to put across and is what I was trying to say without being very good at it ^^

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

The OP's complaint boils down to, "Trash is boring. Make it fun." Given that trash isn't even going to give XP going forward, I think we're better off simply removing trash as opposed to buffing it.

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actually, my complaint is more about "healers are boring as dps, give me more to do with my actual job skills" at the end of the day, trash is trash, I was just thinking of them as an "easy" thing to boost

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

actually, my complaint is more about "healers are boring as dps, give me more to do with my actual job skills" at the end of the day, trash is trash, I was just thinking of them as an "easy" thing to boost

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How does amping up the trash solve your problem, though? I've seen plenty of paper tanks in the duty roulette who keep me busy enough as it is. Boosting the trash DPS is simply going to take those tanks down before we can even get a heal off on them. Like I said before, towards the end of an expansion, all the long-time tanks are going to be geared and experienced enough to make the need for healing scarce. That's perfectly natural. It's not a problem that needs to be fixed.