Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

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Originally Posted by KenZentra

So, do you want to play a DPS that heals, or a Healer that can DPS?

I play healer sometimes in FFXIV, but I main Healer in WoW as a Holy Priest. As a Holy Priest, in terms of what i can do when I DPS, I have:
Smite - Deals Single Target Damage
Holy Fire - Deals Single Target Damage and applies a short DoT
Shadow Word: Pain - DoT Damage.

Thats it.

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/thread

This is the thing right here.

Some people want to play a DPS that heals - we have that, it's called RDM, and they never heal because it's "suboptimal".

Some people want to play a Healer that can DPS - this is what encounter design (regarding damage done to the part) and healer kits should be designed around.

And yeah, Holy Priest in WoW manages this with just a few damage buttons (I think they might actually have 5, though you don't use Shadow Word: Death as part of the rotation in a more general sense, and WHM has 5 DPS buttons anyway - Glare, Dia, Assize, Misery, and Holy; also Presence of Mind as, effectively, a DPS CD and Solace/Rapture as combo actions to get a Misery).

WoW Holy Priest: https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/holy-p...owns-abilities

Surge of Light on Holy Priest is just a neat ability, too, since it triggers from heals but also from Smite. It'd be like if Glare had a chance of triggering Freecure...which is actually not at all a bad design idea. Rhapsody is also a neat ability. Every 1 sec increases its healing and damage by 20%, stacks to 20. Imagine if Holy had a small heal attached and worked like that. Would even give you a reason to use Holy in your single target rotation for big damage when the buff maxed out.

It's less that FFXIV's healer kits don't have as many damage abilities (or too many healing ones) and more the abilities don't interact. Other than Lilies and Misery or Cure 1 and Cure 2 via Freecure or Plenary boosting AOE heals by 200 potency, there's not a lot of "this affects that", so abilities are kind of used in isolation. And the cases that do exist are MOSTLY cooldowns. Plenary is, Lilies are (due to being resource gated). Freecure is the only thing that really isn't, and again, Glare having a chance to proc Freecure would kind of be neat. Hell, have Freecure make "the next Cure 2 OR Medica 1 instant cast and cost no MP", that way you have the option to use it for single target OR aoe healing, and it would also mean Medica 1 isn't totally undeserving of a place on people's hotbars.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Complex healing kits can't really happen the way this game is designed (every boss fight is a dance). Only need to heal so much damage.

So more complex DPS kits are really the only other option if CBU3 isn't going to lean into the "support" role.

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And yet, in ARR, healing was more GCD based than now and damage more consistent meaning healers were using far less Stone/Ruin 1 casts - even ignoring their DoT refreshes - to cast healing spells. The game has literally done this before. No, more complex dps kits are NOT the "only" option.

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Originally Posted by ThaCa

If healing is going to stay as is and even tanking keeps getting simplified, they should just go all in on the DPS playstyle. Consolidate the kits to have the core few skills to deal with raid wides and have spot healing option or two, move all mitigation to Tanks and fill the bars with variety of DPS or buff options.

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That...is an absolutely horrible idea. Forget healers, I can't imagine TANKS would be happy with that, nor would at least half of DPSers. NIN, BRD, DNC, SMN, and RDM would probably not like that, either. The only people I can imagine liking that are SAM and BLM mains.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

I'd rather have more engaging healing mechanics and things that would have me spend more time actively healing or thinking how to improvise to certain situations other than just mapping out my cooldowns on a timeline spreadsheet. That would require not just healer mechanics changed, but actual encounter design changes.

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Very much agree with this.

Also agree the healers should have different damage rotations. One having nuke+DoT is probably fine. Maybe even two. But do we really need all four to have the exact same (more or less) damage kit? Probably not...

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

As a career WHM since launch, I would like to see more healing, less need for healer dps and possibly more utility spells for healers. That could include reducing individual job self heals and transferring mitigation and dps boosting spells. That alone would keep healers busy and justify our existence.

As it stands now, my WHM can be replaced by a WAR and that feels so sad it hurts.

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God I feel this.

The problem isn't we don't have enough DPS buttons.

The problem is we use the ones we have so much because encounters have far less healing than they used to and far more non-healing Jobs that do healing/mitigation/sustain. I also have been playing since ARR (2.3) and all the people that say "The game's always been like this" - no. No it has NOT.

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Originally Posted by Nabril

I used to think healers in this game should focus on healing, but having healers do DPS has been an important staple in this game since the beginning.

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No, no it has NOT. In ARR, it very much wasn't this way.

PARTLY because we were all less knowledgeable back then, but also because kit and encounter design didn't work that way. WHM had one oGCD heal, Benediction, on a 5 min CD. There was no way in hell a WHM could oGCD only heal like you can now. And we didn't have a fixed 10000 MP pool with fixed MP costs for spells. You had to use GCD heals, meaning you'd go OOM if you did too much damage, so WHM's often would do less damage and more healing. "healers do DPS" was not a "staple in this game since the beginning". Where that really took off was HW, because some of the raid bosses were so overtuned you HAD to have healers DPS otherwise you couldn't clear the Enrage, and this was something Yoshi P said they didn't intend to balance around, which is why no raid fights have been that bad since Gordias, which almost killed the game a second time and devastated the raid scene.

You may have heard that "over and over", but it's a lie and always has been.

And no, healers shouldn't have complex DPS kits and maybe 3 healing spells. That's not a healer, that's a DPSer. Hell, DNC already has almost that, as does RDM. Those aren't healers, they're DPSers.

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Originally Posted by Gember

What would you all like?

- Faster auto attacks and casts from the mobs.
- Everything hits a lot more harder. Raidwides, autos, tank busters, & etc.
- More RNG damage targeting different roles. Healer stacks going on DPS or tanks. Yes it exist in the game already, but the RNG I am mentioning is more of it in a shorter amount of time. Healers worship Chaos. (Tankbusters not included)
- All the of the healing potencies get reduced so healers have to do a little more sweatwork. This also includes support abilities from other roles.
- Reduce the gear creep. Yes, players will be stronker overtime, but not as much as were witnessing now. Make that materia worth it!
- More nasty debuffs that eat HP like candy, and the healers have to do something about it. Non-curable poison, heal to full doom, and something something else to that effect. Esuna doesn't get to be king of every single one of them. That's boring.
- or all of the above?

-shrugs-. There is plenty ol ways to make healing fun, and it really just boils down to balancing the stats of the game, the speed which the game fires off mechanics, finding quirky things to throw healers off in a fight, and the people you play with too. There is a lot of great players in this game, so if you're bored; just blame them for all of your problems. /s

I am all about healing. Finding ways to weave more DPS while taking care of my team is always a fun challenge, but the fun should truly be in just knowing that I do a good job keeping my team alive through nuts and all. I don't feel that way when my heals are too powerful, when fights are too slow, or that other roles can take care of themselves without the help of a healer. I can spew a long list of current issues that is involved with the potency stats in this game, but this is not the thread to talk about that.

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ALL of this. I kind of said as much here:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6385101

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Originally Posted by Renathras

It's because there are several types of healer players.

The simplest way I've ever thought of to explain it is imagine there are three general types of people that want to play healers:

Pure/True Healer (in the sense of "True Neutral" in Baldur's Gate being the "Neutral Neutral" alignment). These are "Healer Healers". They like filling party health bars and generally helping people out in need. This is like what I am. I don't get any dopamine hit from seeing a big damage number (I couldn't even tell you what my average Misery hits OR crits for since I can't even see the number in the general explosion of VFX that is the boss model during a given encounter). But what I love is salvaging a crazy situation or keeping people alive. Throwing a Tetra on someone, landing a Cure 2 on someone, and throwing a Benison on someone else, all who were damaged right before a big boss attack, all of whom survive due to the quick actions. Recitation + Adlo + Deployment Tactics making big yellow bars such that the incoming attack doesn't even scratch anyone's health bar. That kind of thing I love. That's where my joy in this role comes from. Such people derive a lot of joy from just healing and aiding others, just generally helping out, aiding players through encounters they'd have trouble clearing on their own, patching up others mistakes, and they LOVE kits with a wide variety of heals and mitigation/shielding abilities that let them really crank out the healing or block damage outright from applying in the first place. This is your WoW Holy Priest, your FFXIV ARR WHM, your Everquest Cleric.

Support-Buffer Healers (also "Support role" players in the few MMOs that have Support as a fourth role). These people tend to want to help out their allies and are natural synergists. In life, they derive joy from making other people successful, empowering others to succeed is their jam. They love "combat-adjacent" type abilities. Stuff like AST Cards (the old/good ones or the current PvP ones), they loved that Caster role action in SB that let you give people MP and that old NIN ability that gave people TP, they love Dance Partner, Expedient, and so on. Stuff that boosts other people's capabilities, whether it be doing more damage, moving faster so they can more easily resolve mechanics, or having more resource generation. This sub-role/discipline/focus has been mostly removed from the game, though it somewhat lives on with AST and DNC (yeah, SCH has Expedient but that's about it). "part time healer, full time buffer". A sort of side-version of this is the saboteur (btw, I'm using those two names as they correspond to the two sides of this exemplified, in all places, in FF13 - the Synergist and Saboteur classes), which instead of boosting allies likes debuffing and debilitating enemies so their allies can hit them harder or better survive their attacks. This...doesn't really exist in FFXIV. It'd be a Job based around using abilities like Addle and Feint as its main rotation, if that makes any sense. "part time healer, full time debuffer", as it were. In the more extreme cases, they may not really like "healing", per see, all that much, though most like having some healing, such as an EQ Bard being mostly about buffing their allies, but also having some token or off-healing it can contribute to the party or in a pinch shift into healing if the main healer goes down or OON. This is your WoW Classic Shaman/Paladin, Everquest Shaman/Enchanter/Bard (the saboteur side, Necromancer?), FFXIV AST or DNC.

Support-DPS Healers. This is the group most dissatisfied with current healers in FFXIV. These are people that like juggling a DPSer rotation but also like not being limited to being "just a DPS". They really, genuinely ENJOY "doing 1000 dps in HW aoe packs when DPSer Jobs often had trouble pulling those numbers". They tend to be highly competitive and love blowing parses out of the water and quickly burning enemy packs as "healing via damage mitigation". But they also like to keep the corner of their eye on party health bars so they can flex the healing side of their kit at the same time. They derive pride from knowing both halves of their kit inside and out and often from being forced to use both sides to their maximum. They love having a DPS rotation and weaving heals between them without missing a beat, or cycling back and forth seamlessly between dealing damage and delivering healing. Jacks of all trades, these people would love RDM in FFXIV _if_ it wasn't for the fact RDM's (as a DPS Job in FFXIV's rigid trinity combat system) are expected to avoid Vercure for the most part and be strictly DPSers as their total focus outside of Verraising people on occasion. Like DPS players, they define their skill not just by what healing they can do but how much damage they can push, and they tend to be highly competitive unlike the Pure Healer and Support-Buffer Healers, which are more like the anime healer archetypes that just want their party to be happy/successful and measure their performance by that. This is your WoW Discipline Priest, Everqust Shaman, and in FFXIV, there really isn't one, but in ARR, HW, and SB, SCH was this. Note that this group CAN enjoy complex healing challenges, but they need to be complex and push them, and they still want at least a somewhat complex DPS experience with it.

...

The first step to any solution is acknowledging that there are different types of healer players AND that they all have a seat at the table. The people demanding higher DPS complexity on all healers aren't willing (or able?) to do the latter of those two things.

The sad thing is: FFXIV used to accommodate all four types.

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Pure/True Healer players just love HEALING. Pure/True Healer and Support-Buffer Healer players love knowing their team succeeded and define a job well done as that.

PROBABLY the bulk of people that pick healing in games are one or the other of those, so healer Jobs should generally be designed around them.

This doesn't mean nothing for the others, as you can also have a healer Job for people that are Support-DPS Healer players. But that should not rule ALL healer Job design nor should it displace the other type of healer players or dictate bad encounter designs having too little healing requirements.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

And yet, in ARR, healing was more GCD based than now and damage more consistent meaning healers were using far less Stone/Ruin 1 casts - even ignoring their DoT refreshes - to cast healing spells. The game has literally done this before. No, more complex dps kits are NOT the "only" option.

[...]

God I feel this.

The problem isn't we don't have enough DPS buttons.

The problem is we use the ones we have so much because encounters have far less healing than they used to and far more non-healing Jobs that do healing/mitigation/sustain. I also have been playing since ARR (2.3) and all the people that say "The game's always been like this" - no. No it has NOT.

[...]

No, no it has NOT. In ARR, it very much wasn't this way.

PARTLY because we were all less knowledgeable back then, but also because kit and encounter design didn't work that way. WHM had one oGCD heal, Benediction, on a 5 min CD. There was no way in hell a WHM could oGCD only heal like you can now. And we didn't have a fixed 10000 MP pool with fixed MP costs for spells. You had to use GCD heals, meaning you'd go OOM if you did too much damage, so WHM's often would do less damage and more healing. "healers do DPS" was not a "staple in this game since the beginning". Where that really took off was HW, because some of the raid bosses were so overtuned you HAD to have healers DPS otherwise you couldn't clear the Enrage, and this was something Yoshi P said they didn't intend to balance around, which is why no raid fights have been that bad since Gordias, which almost killed the game a second time and devastated the raid scene.

You may have heard that "over and over", but it's a lie and always has been.

And no, healers shouldn't have complex DPS kits and maybe 3 healing spells. That's not a healer, that's a DPSer. Hell, DNC already has almost that, as does RDM. Those aren't healers, they're DPSers.

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As a former career SCH (2.x-5.99), I can say that's mostly wrong - at least for that job.
Yes ARR was mostly GCD focused, so it was more balanced between attacks and healing. The kit was also more balanced and not just ST/DoT/AoE for damage and you had cleric stance and pet actions to pay with too.
The fights were a bit less scripted : The goal was keeping the tank/party alive. after that you either payed with your dps kit or sat around.
You also had more utility as you could chose between Eos or Selene.
MP management was a thing, but it still was more forgiving that TP management at the time.

While increasing healing requirements and healing complexity would be fine, They have stated that they won't do it to not scare "new healers" (up to ultimate I guess), so what's left ? DPS and utility. Since utility can't affect difficulty, it either goes back to utility for DPS or irrelevant/niche.

What I want for Christmas is ...

1. Higher healing requirements.

• The level of healing difficulty for Savage floors 1-2 should be similar to TEA p2 and floors 3-4 similar to TEA p1 but requiring less attention to other things like movement.
• TEA p1 itself should be a blueprint for healer design in Ultimates.

2. Rewarding Situational Awareness

• I want a large part of my attention to be spent on monitoring the battlefield and react to dynamic events such as players getting single-targeted by enemy abilities.
• I want to be able to recover mistakes by reacting swiftly and spend my resources doing so. Ex7 green orbs DoT is a good example. P10S poison dot is too punishing.

3. My Actions to matter

• Incoming damage is too random and unpredictable courtesy to the abundant mitigations and shields being possibly used. Some variation is alright but the party ending up with either 100% HP or 20% HP after a single raidwide is too much.
• WAR Nascent glint is a stronger single target healing ability than any healer's save benediction. It needs to be brought back in line.
• Extreme and up content should require healers.

4. Content to stay fun even with better gear

• Remove magical mitigation from gear. Better gear already yields more healing done and max hp on targets. When it also decreases damage taken, healing gets trivial too quickly.
• Heal checks should not be at the very end of a fight and get skipped with enough DPS.
• Having to raid week 1 in order for the content to be challenging should not be the default solution.

5. Resources spent on Healing vs Dps to matter

• WAR Shake It Off and PLD Divine Veil need to have a cost attached, so that they do not inflate the healing game but remain as a decision to support the healers when needed.
• Tank LB needs a cost like decreasing party damage done while active or Heal LB3 to resurrect people with half a weakness timer.
• Resource management should be slightly emphasised. Put MP costs on oGCDs.

6. Less gimmicks that eliminate or cheese a mechanic

• Tank invulns should not be able to cover all TB mechanics in a fight. Preferably they are emergency tools but not part of a rotation.
• Macrocosmos should not be able to make P3S' Life's Agonies trivial.

7. New toys

• I would like to have either a (GW1) Divine Intervention type of ability that prevents death once or a (EQ2) Stoneskin type that nullifies a unit of damage taken once. The target being hit by damage should still be inflicted by additional effects of the attack hit like debuffs/kb. It should cost around 2.4k mp and have 120s cd, idm if it replaced Rescue

8. Reworked Abilities

• Esuna should take effect immediately as opposed to the ~1s delay it has now.
• Macrocosmos should be reworked so it does not require coordination with the whole group to be effective.

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Originally Posted by Lailani_Fey

What I want for Christmas is ...


7. New toys

• I would like to have either a (GW1) Divine Intervention type of ability that prevents death once or a (EQ2) Stoneskin type that nullifies a unit of damage taken once. The target being hit by damage should still be inflicted by additional effects of the attack hit like debuffs/kb. It should cost around 2.4k mp and have 120s cd, idm if it replaced Rescue

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Maaaan Gw1 had so many interesting healing and utility tools it's insane. I've been playing a lot recently and there's just so many cool and impactful abilities. It's gotta have of the most robust healer/support options of any game I've played in a loooooong time [my old characters had 80years worth of birthday presents saved up lmao] SE could just copy/steal 5 of them at random and it would be a marked improvement.

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Originally Posted by Calysto

As a former career SCH (2.x-5.99), I can say that's mostly wrong - at least for that job.

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I said that. And have over and over again.

SCH is kind of a weird exception to the rule. In ARR, Lustrate ignored Cleric stance, and by the end SB, SCH had a ton of oGCDs.

ARR was never balanced between attacks and healing. SCH was balanced around leaning heavily into attacks and doing light spot healing or pre-shielding while WHM was balanced leaning heavily in to healing and being main healer for groups, only dealing light damage in most situations. The balance was not that all healer Jobs were balanced between attacks and healing. It's that SCH was balanced around mostly attacks and WHM around mostly healing, so that together, they completed each other and balanced around both. SCH actually had relatively few heals. Physic, Adlo, Succor, Lustrate, and Wispering Dawn, I believe (Embrace if we count it), and could Cross-Class Stoneskin. By contrast, it had an extensive DPS suite of Ruin, Ruin 2 (same damage, high MP cost to pay for free movement), Bio, Bio 2, Miasma, Bane, Shadow Flare, Energy Drain, and could Cross-Class Aero (from CNJ) for yet another DoT and Blizzard 2 (from THM) to give it a spamable AOE attack, something it otherwise lacked at the time.

My one problem with the "they won't increase healing because they've said they don't want to do it since it will scare new healers" argument is that ALSO means no new damage buttons, since they've said they don't want to do that since it scares new healers, too. All their actions have been towards reducing the healer DPS footprint in terms of abilities and complexity, and even making things like Misery and SGE MP regen that directly reward healing - even overhealing.

They aren't likely to go back on the DPS one but not the healing one, since they've been much more explicit about it and designing specifically for healers to have less DPS actions over time.

So "DPS and utility" is not what's left, as "DPS" is also not allowed.

The only thing left is actually utility. And as you say, that's irrelevant/niche. So that means we can hope for no changes at all.

...but there's no fun in that, so instead, we talk about the things we want to see.

I want to see more healing and more GCDs devoted to healing.

It obviously doesnt have to be either or but i just cannot see how to make healing more interesting without touching incoming damage.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

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I'd argue that WHM was the exception ; not SCH, as of HW AST had more going on in utility too ; there was never any need to nerf every healer to that level and not deliver on anything substantial in 6.0.

I'd like more "complex" healing too, but as the primary role is "keeping the party alive", it's probably the last aspect they'll touch for "accessibility reasons"
It would be nice to talk about fun and exciting new things, but we must dance around SE arbitrary and imaginary constraints ; if not for that it would be fun.
The answer to the thread question is of course "why can't we have both ?"

You usually agree to different play-styles across the role being a viable option.
Problem is SE don't as it require balancing, so we're stuck as optional HP batteries that can't do much of anything.
We could play the jobs we liked, but we're not allowed to ; "there is no fun in that" is the current healers situation.

EDIT : just nitpicking , not worth a post

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Strictly speaking, I was talking about ARR.

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Strictly speaking, you can't really have an exception out of 2. They were just different then

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Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull

Title. Would you rather...

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I can't say fully yes or no to both points for one single reason: I want BOTH front of the kits getting their well deserved refining. Yes. I want healing to be more complex than just "push health bar to the right". Yes. I -also- want damaging to be more than just 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 plus maybe occasional other button every 40s or so.

Breaking that down brought me to my ideal wish list in no particular order:

• A proper, gradual increase of healing requirement.

  This part is super obvious. When you soften your healer playerbase with the joke that is healing requirement in casual content from lv1 to lv90 (outside from few exceptions like Bardam), of course this means they lack the incentive to actually get better. Why bother learn how to heal with Addersgall when Diagnosis spam will work for everything, amirite? Give them a proper learning curve; make the learning healers accentuate this increase. It has to remain easy enough but not too easy that even a Diagnosis-mage in The Dead Ends can satisfy the healing requirement.

• An increase to healing complexity.

  Pretty similar to first point. The difference is, this point wants to tell you that having almost all healing button basically boils down to single button press of "push life bar to the right" is very boring. Few exceptions like Macrocosmos, Earthly Star, damage refund Lilies, and opportunity cost-ridden aetherflow are fine. We need more of those. A whacky tidbit of idea that comes to mind when I wrote this reply: WHM keeps their old Cure III radius at 6y and 550p potency. But storing each lily increases its cure potency by 75 and increase its radius by 2y.

• Reduce the amount of overall healing buttons

  This one should goes without saying: we just have too many healing buttons. Cull some of the excessive ones (looking at you Fey Blessing vs Indomitability) to make more room for additional non-healing buttons.

• Additional & more spread out utilities/non damaging abilities

  Expedience is one of the best addition they ever gave in EW. Lv86 abilities are superfluous (if only they're more interactive i.e. Protraction can be deployed). Either make them interesting, or remove to add something that's actually interesting. Didn't we used to have Virus before too? Oh yeah, they now exist elsewhere... can we have that back? :^)

• An engaging dps kit to play around when healing requirement are satisfied.

  The most dreaded change of all, perhaps. Please, 22 Nuke + 2 DoT refresh per minute is beyond insulting; even moreso when all healers are condemned to this stupid a$$ 'rotation'. Also an equally important aspect of this point: make them noticeably rewarding. Otherwise there is not a proper incentive to master the job itself.

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Originally Posted by RitsukoSonoda

Yeah, I feel the kit's themselves aren't the issue and that the real problem is the battles/encounters/duties themselves with a small amount caused by additions to some non-healer job kits.

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I dunno, I find the way you heal incredibly boring. Earthly Star is mildly interesting etc but that's about it.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

As a career WHM since launch, I would like to see more healing, less need for healer dps and possibly more utility spells for healers. That could include reducing individual job self heals and transferring mitigation and dps boosting spells. That alone would keep healers busy and justify our existence.

As it stands now, my WHM can be replaced by a WAR and that feels so sad it hurts.

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My feelings exactly.

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Originally Posted by KenZentra

I play healer sometimes in FFXIV, but I main Healer in WoW as a Holy Priest. As a Holy Priest, in terms of what i can do when I DPS, I have:
Smite - Deals Single Target Damage
Holy Fire - Deals Single Target Damage and applies a short DoT
Shadow Word: Pain - DoT Damage.

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Obligatory note that this is not how even the most basic healer, the aforementioned Holy Priest, played just 1 expansion ago, wherein even the still-almost-solely-healing-focused meta builds included...

• A (suppressive) nuke attack on a Haste-scaled short CD
• A 1-minute-CD nuke with incap (upgradable to stun)
• A 20s linear AoE CD (fires a skillshot that goes out and then comes back, damaging in both directions - healing and damage)
• Or, 40s radial AoE CD (slowly growing massive explosion - healing and damage)
• Means of generating, through your attacks, additional charges of Holy Fire, which could stack even on the same target
• The ability to cause an enemy's attacks to instead heal their victims up to some (very high) total amount converted
• Or, a super-saiyen mode that allowed you to float around at greatly increased speed, converting your attacks to make them more powerful, instant-cast, and therefore (since they'd normally take up more than a GCD's time) take less uptime each
• Or, another 1-minute-CD AoE 15s-DoT that also caused enemies who attack the victims to be healed
• Or, the ability to distribute three buffs among your allies (MP from attacking, mitigation, and core cooldown recharge rate) per 90s
• Your rushable (each ST heal reduces ST CD's CD; each attack reduces your attack CD's CD) CDs would cause your next heal or attack to deal far greater potency
• An execute skill that can be used earlier at HP cost and on CD
• Buff from damaging enemies in execute range, potentially augmentable for further benefits when killing an enemy with your execute

And among other non-healing actions that were nonetheless important to your value...

• Lifegrip (Rescue)
• Movement buffs (via 3 charges of ground-placed buff-on-pickup or from shielding an ally)
• Purging enemy buffs (spammable ST and AoE on CD)
• Cleansing debuffs on allies (short-CD ST and AoE on CD)
• AoE fear (enhancible, or replacible with an at-range version or a draw-in)
• Incap on undead and demons
• Dominate Mind (controls mob instead of self)
• Soothe Mind (greatly reduces aggro range, allowing party to sneak past)
• Give ally +20% attack speed
• Give ally cooldown reduction on their defensive (think Riddle of Earth, Manaward)
• Give party/raid MP
• Teleporting past enemies in your soulshape (increased movement speed) form would slow them

And that's for your most "vanilla" healer.

I keep repeating that what Shurrikhan just listed is not atypical, I had a similar selection of similar abilities in at least 2 games that I played, if not more.

Here's a link to the classic version https://aionpowerbook.com/powerbook/...&aionclassic=1 of one game, the skill list isn't going to give the complete picture due to skill customization (the stigma system, in that game) - but if you hover of the list, as I filtered on max level, classic version- you'll see that there are far, far more DPS skills for the game's sole healer - the only other being a support job, which- as the game went on, was quite capable of solo- healing easier content.

Also, for variety, SWTOR gave these specs as described here https://swtor.fandom.com/wiki/Jedi_Sage - as I enjoy playing the underdog I went Republic, and got to throw pebbles :D . In one spec, Sage goes pure healer and couldn't squash a bug, however in the other 2 specs they're quite fun , in both PVE and PVP, as both burst or dot spec.

What I want is to actually heal as a Healer, Doing damage should be something that you can maximise for skill expression instead of just something you can upkeep 100% the time. If we reduce those then we have a chance of making Utility actually more useful in "saving healer gcds" and being more useful and impactful... Especially tanks should feel the need to actually use their cd's to make the healers life easier instead of just kitchen sink tank busters.

How can we get healers to heal?
-Reduce Healer OGCDs.
-Reducing Potencies in general, mainly a reduction to AOE healing, this can also apply to abilities like Shake.
-Increase fight design's damage.
-Reduce tanks default (no mitigation) defensive value, so the healer and tank's both have to think about their kits more.

I wouldn't also mind adding stuff like damage Proc's, different dot timers, just in general slightly more damage buttons, I think the actual issue is more that healers aren't really going to click any of their other gcd actions often... healing at the high end should be about decision making. It's all well and good to give healers more DPS but they will still be boring DPS without adressing the issues that both Healer and Tank have currently.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

What I want is to actually heal as a Healer, Doing damage should be something that you can maximise for skill expression

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That's already what it is. Healing comes first, it has to. The way FF14 works right now that doesn't prevent healers from having 100% DPS uptime. I don't see it as a problem though. It's just the way the game is designed.

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How can we get healers to heal?
-Reduce Healer OGCDs.
-Reducing Potencies in general, mainly a reduction to AOE healing, this can also apply to abilities like Shake.
-Increase fight design's damage.
-Reduce tanks default (no mitigation) defensive value, so the healer and tank's both have to think about their kits more.

I wouldn't also mind adding stuff like damage Proc's, different dot timers, just in general slightly more damage buttons, I think the actual issue is more that healers aren't really going to click any of their other gcd actions often... healing at the high end should be about decision making. It's all well and good to give healers more DPS but they will still be boring DPS

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I'm struggling to see the appeal with a focus on constant heal GCD uptime. OGCD's are good thing. They aren't spammable and have cooldowns. They make healing more interesting than GCD's because you can't just mash them on demand. They require more planning and thought. GCD's are a safety net, or at best something to use occasionally when incoming damage is really big. GCD heals don't have any more appeal than OGCD's to me, but maybe I'm missing something. If I had to press Medica constantly, it wouldn't make content feel rewarding or fun.

Increasing the damage dealt to party is fine, it's too low in some areas, but trying to force healers to case heal GCD's instead of damage GCD's won't improve anything.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

That's already what it is. Healing comes first, it has to. The way FF14 works right now that doesn't prevent healers from having 100% DPS uptime. I don't see it as a problem though. It's just the way the game is designed.

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Healing comes first? Sure but It's not like healing comes before damage when you can already do both at the same time, Pressing your ogcd button once in a while when a AOE or stack comes out isn't really fun "healing"

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

I'm struggling to see the appeal with a focus on constant heal GCD uptime. OGCD's are good thing. They aren't spammable and have cooldowns. They make healing more interesting than GCD's because you can't just mash them on demand. They require more planning and thought. GCD's are a safety net, or at best something to use occasionally when incoming damage is really big. GCD heals don't have any more appeal than OGCD's to me, but maybe I'm missing something. If I had to press Medica constantly, it wouldn't make content feel rewarding or fun.

Increasing the damage dealt to party is fine, it's too low in some areas, but trying to force healers to case heal GCD's instead of damage GCD's won't improve anything.

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You're misunderstanding what I meant by more GCD healing, I don't think pressing medica 10 times in a row is fun gameplay either, OGCD's barely require planning you just press one and heal/mitgate a mech and have the rest of your ogcds. Planning OGCD's would actually be more impactful if you had fewer because they could lead to gains in the first place, right now you really don't need to plan much... maybe in harder fights but a lot of them don't even need healers. OGCD's being a good thing only works if you don't have a abundance of them, I personally think having the need to gcd heal here and there would make it more fun then just pressing one of your 5 OGCD raid wide buttons while ur cohealer also does so in raids.

I'm not saying oh yeah healers should spam medica! fun gameplay, but healers should be actively pressing gcds more often in my opinion, Healer is at it's most fun when you've got to make choices between DPS/Healing, It should be difficult to maximise damage output while healing that's what makes it fun, That also has a helps other Job's utility abilities be more impactful.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

Healing comes first? Sure but It's not like healing comes before damage when you can already do both at the same time, Pressing your ogcd button once in a while when a AOE or stack comes out isn't really fun "healing"

You're misunderstanding what I meant by more GCD healing, I don't think pressing medica 10 times in a row is fun gameplay either, OGCD's barely require planning you just press one and heal/mitgate a mech and have the rest of your ogcds. Planning OGCD's would actually be more impactful if you had fewer because they could lead to gains in the first place, right now you really don't need to plan much... maybe in harder fights but a lot of them don't even need healers. OGCD's being a good thing only works if you don't have a abundance of them, I personally think having the need to gcd heal here and there would make it more fun then just pressing one of your 5 OGCD raid wide buttons while ur cohealer also does so in raids.

I'm not saying oh yeah healers should spam medica! fun gameplay, but healers should be actively pressing gcds more often in my opinion, Healer is at it's most fun when you've got to make choices between DPS/Healing, It should be difficult to maximise damage output while healing that's what makes it fun, That also has a helps other Job's utility abilities be more impactful.

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You're right, I misinterpreted your post. While OGCD's themselves aren't bad, they need to be balanced against the amount of damage the party is taking. Currently we have too much healing/too little damage, and most of it is tightly scripted, which takes away a lot of the planning and resource management aspects that we could have.

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Originally Posted by Calysto

I'd argue that WHM was the exception ; not SCH, as of HW AST had more going on in utility too

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Strictly speaking, I was talking about ARR.

That said, the split was still more apparent in HW. AST, for example, was the pioneer of the "one spamnuke + one DoT" model of healing DPS kits.

Should also note here: Even WHM had more utility options back then. Protect (CNJ/WHM was the only one that got the Pro-Shell trait) and Stoneskin were, for the time period, utility actions.

I think what people have to realize is that 4 mans are always going to be kind of boring. It doesn't matter what they do, they're going to keep it simple for MSQ stuff. Anything MSQ and probably 24 mans are made for an extremely general audience. So at the end of the day, changes to make things "more exciting" (damage OR dps kits) won't happen there. So the discussion is really on Extremes and higher, since the other stuff...probably isn't going to change much, and if anything (e.g. Pantheon 24 mans) they're moving in the more accessible direction.

So are healer kits AS A WHOLE. What I mean by this is that they design healer kits for a really general audience. It's why I pitch my 4 Healers Model all the time, because it allows for wiggle room. BLM and MNK clearly aren't made for entry level play for the most part. MNK is pretty complex with high optimization but also a higher skill floor than a lot of Jobs due to both the unusual and more intricate base rotation as well as the faster GCD. Then you get into is resources and cooldowns and high end abilities and it completely throws it for a loop. But the Job is able to exist this way because there are other DPS Jobs - even Melee DPS - that are far simpler to pick up and play as well as to master.

Likewise, even with ShB SMN, The Caster role has had RDM since SB as an easy to pick up, play, and optimize/master member of the Caster role.

But the Devs are on record saying they got rid of Cleric because of the community fighting about it and new healers feeling too pressured both to DPS and to DPS in a way that compromised healing. Since that change, though, Yoshi P has also said that there was still too much, which is why they removed even more going into ShB. So the Devs are on record saying they consider DPS kits on healers to be too difficult for "accessibility reasons". That's their position. Meaning we won't likely ever have a case where they make the DPS kits more fleshed out BUT refuse to change healing requirements, since they've been even stiffer on less DPSing healers being more accessible than they have even on healing requirements. Recall in ShB, when they were saying that less damage was good, they were teasing at the time an intent to increase healing requirements, showing of the two, that was the one they were more willing to change.

I do agree that SE doesn't seem to like things being different because of balance...and yet, the Melee, Ranged, and Casters ALL have more diversity in their kits than Tanks and Healers do. And if anything, DPS Jobs are the ones where balance is more significant. If SCH did 2% more damage than WHM, that's 2% of 60% (since healers do ~60% of DPS Job output), which is 1.2%. On the other hand, if DPSers are off by as little as 1.5%, that's a bigger difference in overall party damage than a healer doing 2% less than another healer.

Not to mention we have RDM/SMN and BLM sharing a role, so even there the argument completely folds.

I still think they're more likely to say "We'll have an easy, couple mediums, and a hard for each role" than "We'll have all members of a role being hard/complex". Granted, complex is entirely subjective, but Yoshi P talks about old school MMOs where healers effectively had little to no damage kit and mostly only used it for soloing. I think he might be more willing to budge on something like GNB/SGE being more damage focused than on making all healers damage focused, since he's afraid of another healer exodus like SB.

It's why I think a solution that allows both to coexist has the most chance of success. Which is more likely, EW WHM + Aero 3, or HW WHM being readded to the game, or WHM with a full on "elemental phase" burst rotation along with more GCDs to optimize and shorter duration DoTs to drop? If we're being honest, we'd be kind of lucky for them to give us Aero 3 at this point. And how much LESS likely is it that we'll get a full on tank-level DPS kit for all the healers?

.

I know I get maligned a lot for "wanting braindead rotations", but my own proposal includes adding complex rotations to a couple of the healer Jobs, and strikes me as the most likely one Yoshi P would listen to. "So, WHM will still be easy for people picking up healers, so I don't have to worry about a mass exodus of healer players, but I also will have some people coming to the role that typically main DPS Jobs?", or "So now all healers are complex, trying to appeal to the types of players that like to DPS, but it's risky since we don't know how many of them will actually take on the added stress of managing player health bars AND we run the risk of people that don't enjoy DPS rotations leaving the role, causing a healer shortage?"

I feel like the mixed approach/4 Healers Model is actually more likely to get more damage buttons on a couple of the healers than any demands of a blanket "all or nothing" approach that demands all of the healer Jobs get more.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

What I want is to actually heal as a Healer,...
...It's all well and good to give healers more DPS but they will still be boring DPS without adressing the issues that both Healer and Tank have currently.

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Basically agree with most of this post. I don't even think we need more damage on all of the healer Jobs, some are already in a good place, they just need to actually need to use GCD heals. I'd add one other thing - MP/resource management so you actually DO think about which heals you want to use. Do you want to use that expensive Medica 2, or Medica 1 that costs half the amount but does far less healing? Cure 2 to heal a lot now or Cure 1 to be sustainable with your MP pool or Regen to be somewhat sustainable as well while healing for more but taking more time to do so (is it safe enough to take time to heal or do you need the healing now, and if now, do you need a LOT that justifies the high MP cost of Cure 2, or will a Cure 1 or two be acceptable?)

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

I'm struggling to see the appeal with a focus on constant heal GCD uptime.

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Because a lot of people play healers because they want to heal people. They want their gameplay focused around a healing rotation/skills, not a damage one.

The big problem with oGCDs isn't that they exist, it's that they're as or MORE powerful than our GCDs, often enough to do all the healing on their own, and we have so many of them (other than WHM) that you can heal entire encounters without ever hitting a GCD heal. This would be fine, except then what do you do with that empty GCD? Do you just sit in place? Well, you want to do something productive, so what do you do? Well, you spam a damage spell, and that's boring. People often complain that around 80% of their GCDs cast in an encounter are Glare/Broil/Malific/Dosis.

There are two ways to fix that, only one of which is "more DPS buttons as part of the rotation". The other is "more GCD healing required", since a GCD spent healing is a GCD NOT spent casting a boring spam nuke over and over again.

That is the appeal.

oGCDs are NEARLY spamable because we have so many of them. Let's take SGE as an example. Here's a list of oGCDs it has and their CDs:

No CD (limited by Addersgall, 1 per 20 sec): Durochole
30 sec: Ixochole, Kerochole, Pepsis
45 sec: Taruochole
60 sec: Physis, Krasis
90 sec: Soteria, Zoe, Rhizomata
120 sec: Haima, Panhaima, Holos (arguably Pneuma)

While not all of those are direct healing, a lot of them are healing + bonus additional effects, and they're both frequent and powerful, replacing GCD needs entirely. SGE is a big offender here, but other than WHM, all of the healers have a ton of oGCDs. WHM itself has a lot, having Benediction, Assize, Asylum, Tetragrammaton, Divine Benison, Temperance, Aquaveil, and Lilybell as outright healing or mitigation, with Presence of Mind, Plenary Indulgence, and Thin Air working to make your GCD heals stronger/faster/more accessible. And that's also not counting Afflatus Solace/Rapture as "oGCDs", despite them effectively being equivalent to them in the sense of having no MP cost, a resource based CD, and damage neutral.

They're too powerful AND too many/too frequent, so they outright replace GCD healing for the most part.

Which is fine if we have a couple healers that work that way, but not for a healthy overall healing model.

But having too pick and choose which heal is best based on the situation, how quickly the healing needs to be applied, how much healing needs to be applied, what resources you have available, and what resources you need to save is really engaging and fun. Far more fun to many people than doing a DPS rotation and weaving the occasional oGCD heal.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

Healing comes first? Sure but It's not like healing comes before damage when you can already do both at the same time, Pressing your ogcd button once in a while when a AOE or stack comes out isn't really fun "healing"
...
That also has a helps other Job's utility abilities be more impactful.

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Yet again I find myself saying I agree with your posts. Well said.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

No, no it has NOT. In ARR, it very much wasn't this way.

PARTLY because we were all less knowledgeable back then, but also because kit and encounter design didn't work that way.

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This really depends on your perspective. To you it might not have been a staple, but to a high end healer it likely was:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlj5BQPQwnw

Oct 2013, long before patch 2.1, Note, healer doing significant DPS when cooldowns permit. Skip to 3:40 and check out the cleric uptime on the first boss, beastly!. Also note the gear, primarily Darklight with Relic weapons.

Random reddit discussion about how to deal with super long pulls in WP during patch 2.0 in 2013. People are already mentioning healer DPS potential despite how brutal some of those pulls were if you weren't boss gating them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...derers_palace/

Waffle_Slapper 1 point 10 years ago
I usually let my hots do all the healing. I'll start with divine seal> cure2 > regen > swift cast > medica2 > eye for an eye > presence of mind > cleric stance > holy untill everything is dead or shroud due to aggro or mp.

Joffrey_is_so_alpha[S] 1 point 10 years ago
I wish you could come on some of my FC runs! I occasionally go with 2 other WHMs and a SCH, and we tear the place up with Holy spam. (Note this was from the OP who was complaining about the mega pulls in the first place!)

Basically, Nabril's choice of wording is poor, but he's not entirely wrong. Healer damage and it's value was pretty well understood and was a known quantity from pretty early on. People just generally didn't place much importance on it until Faust came along and introduced everyone to our future evil overlord, Mr DPS check.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

This really depends on your perspective.

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It does.

But we're talking about the general community here, not just high end raiders. Not only that, it wasn't even consistent among the high end raider community yet, and world first clears (for example, First Coils) had the WHM not casting DPS spells and focusing on party healing. It became more a point of contention with Second Coils since theorycrafting started picking up and since the Savage was released and was...well...VERY savage. But this also wasn't the way the game was being played by many people at the time, and arguably not the way it was designed and intended to be played.

When that became more mainstream was in HW, which resulted in Cleric being deleted because of all the problems it causes. This is also where we start to see the design intent as that's where the famous Yoshi P quote about them not factoring healer DPS into balance came from, and where they shifted to making raid bosses less DPS demanding, and then removed Cleric Stance outright (as a toggle) with the launch of the following expansion.

But the point remains that from the outset, FFXIV was GCD healing focused, not oGCD healing focused. Not only that, our kits were weaker vs the damage we had to deal with back then.

So people arguing against it can't really rest on the weight of inertia or "it's always been this way" to make their arguments for them.

The game was arguably at its best when it accommodated different types of healer players and different types of healing. The most diverse healer kits we've ever had were in SB where SCH was basically an ARC/SMN without Fester and Bahamut, but AST was a mainline buffer with a spamnuke + DoT rotation and WHM was a mainline healer with two DoTs and a spamnuke, which then was improved in ShB and EW. The problem was, WHM was fixed as SCH and AST were broken, and then encounters became more scripted (less random attacks, boss autoattacks, and boss crit autoattacks) at the same time, leading to a massive kit/encounter disconnect.

ShB or EW WHM existing in SB would have been very popular (vs the kind of garbage that was SB WHM), as it would have actually fit the encounter designs of the time a lot better.

If you could shift encounter design and damage profiles back to SB levels, then take EW WHM and combine it with SB SCH and HW AST, you'd probably have a really good set of healer Jobs and most players would probably be pretty happy with that result, like as not.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

That said, the split was still more apparent in HW. AST, for example, was the pioneer of the "one spamnuke + one DoT" model of healing DPS kits.

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That wasn't the case in HW, though. We had 3 DoTs, one being Aero from crossclass. This really started being a thing in Stormblood.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

FFXIV was GCD healing focused, not oGCD healing focused. Not only that, our kits were weaker vs the damage we had to deal with back then.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

So people arguing against it can't really rest on the weight of inertia or "it's always been this way" to make their arguments for them.

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Lustrate's % healing working in Cleric Stance? Whispering Dawn (double buffed or not) being completely busted until like Shadowbringers? This used to be the main way to heal allies during raidwide due to how often and how bombastically strong it was comapred to what it is today.

Please don't try to rewrite history like that. Ask anyone else who has been raiding since ARR and they'll tell you how it has *always* been this way, like. They are still playing the game, come on.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

It does.

But we're talking about the general community here, not just high end raiders. Not only that, it wasn't even consistent among the high end raider community yet, and world first clears (for example, First Coils) had the WHM not casting DPS spells and focusing on party healing.

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Find footage of those world level progression players doing content that wasn't a world first T5 and lets see what we find:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8SgT6Hdnis

Yes, it's a solo heal Titan Extreme in 2.1, and yes, that's cleric stance opener from the WHM.

As for Turn 5 and healers not DPSing in the videos you see, you do realise why they weren't DPSing right?

Healers didn't DPS in the Twintania race because risk aversion was *EVERYTHING*. Groups weren't hitting enrage. They were hitting twisters and dying without being able to understand quite how the mechanic was supposed to work. Thus prog teams were doing literally everything in their power to minimise any element of risk and chance of failure elsewhere so they could consistently hit twisters to try and understand what was going on. The entire T5 race boiled down to who could scratch 8 people together who could pull off the twister puzzle consistently enough to get through the phase with enough damage done to rush the home stretch.

Go watch https://youtu.be/TDJde_SZfNw?si=In3hdEuZVI1ePcez&t=586

Look at how cautiously people are playing for that entire phase. From memory this wasn't the first time they got through twisters fairly cleanly, but I guarantee you they were clenched so tight they could have doubled as pipe cutters after that last collar went down. The silence followed by the cheers says it all.

*Edit* and this is without even broaching the horror show that was healer accuracy and missed damage GCDs on bosses which was a topic in itself.

TLDR: You're throwing around assumptions and conjecture like they are fact. That's super risky sir.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

When that became more mainstream was in HW, which resulted in Cleric being deleted because of all the problems it causes. This is also where we start to see the design intent as that's where the famous Yoshi P quote about them not factoring healer DPS into balance came from, and where they shifted to making raid bosses less DPS demanding, and then removed Cleric Stance outright (as a toggle) with the launch of the following expansion.

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Because this is all stuff you experienced right?

Fun bit of history for you. You do realise that the actual reason that Manipulator-chan was such a stern DPS check was because we were killing half the raid to skip a mechanic that didn't play nice thanks to slow server ticks and horrible latency (afaik the only region with a legitimate first kill as intended was CN much later down the line?) and also having to kill adds in a VERY precise window whilst juggling res weakness and no resources. Midas wasn't all that different in terms of DPS requirements if you overlook A4S's unintended suicide strat oddities.

Even a blanket suggestion that bosses were overall less demanding for DPS later in HW is bit of a sketchy claim. Was ThordanEX a bigger DPS check than SephirotEX? I remember hitting Sephirot's enrage a pretty healthy amount, meanwhile seeing Thordan's Enrage was like seeing a solar eclipse. And sure, Creator was absolutely an easier tier than either Gordias or Midas, but how much of that was down to the fight being plain easier and how much was down to all the silliness that was skipping entire phases thanks to poor design choices from SE at that time (Something that was seen in ZurvanEX as well, so it was clearly a failure in their production and scripting processes at that point in time).

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Originally Posted by Doragan

Lustrate's % healing working in Cleric Stance? Whispering Dawn (double buffed or not) being completely busted until like Shadowbringers? This used to be the main way to heal allies during raidwide due to how often and how bombastically strong it was comapred to what it is today.

Please don't try to rewrite history like that. Ask anyone else who has been raiding since ARR and they'll tell you how it has *always* been this way, like. They are still playing the game, come on.

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/thread
/mic drop
/I feel dirty and need a shower for making this pun

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

You're right, I misinterpreted your post. While OGCD's themselves aren't bad, they need to be balanced against the amount of damage the party is taking. Currently we have too much healing/too little damage, and most of it is tightly scripted, which takes away a lot of the planning and resource management aspects that we could have.

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Yeah I can fully get where you're coming from if you thought I meant Healers should only gcd heal and barely attack, I could have worded it a bit better, I think ogcds are good with the right amount with the right amount of strength, The big issue I should have highlighted was fight design but that's also the most hardest one to rework.

I think A lot of my issues is I usually play healers/Tanks In a lot of games I'm not just a pure DPS minded player (although I think I play DPS more then healer in ff14 for obvious reasons.) and I think a lot of DPS players look at Healer and go "oh that's boring, one damage button seriously?" when the issue is more that Healers fail to appeal to healer players. While DPS buttons may make healer slightly more fun, I almost always would still rather Just play a DPS at that point,

I think DPS buttons and differences could even be fun on healers it just has to be interesting Like what I loved about SHB white mage is that you had Long cast times so it felt more like a healer version Black mage and positioning was more important, Now you barely need to cast to move (1.5 with slide casting), So that feels a bit lost to me... Personally With DPS I just want the healers to have slightly different things without being a actual rotation with certain things like proc's or different cast times as I mentioned.

The Thing about Healer design I think people don't realise is that it actually negatively effects a lot more then just healers, Utility is a key example which I've already talked about I love that some DPS actually have utility and support options but if it doesn't even help most the time nor save Healer GCD's then it feels pointless to have said utility.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

The big problem with oGCDs isn't that they exist

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Right, if OGCD heals are too strong and are all purpose problem solvers, then the balance gets thrown off and healers are left with oversimplified DPS rotation and oversimplified healing tools (press random OGCD).

I lean more toward encounter design being the problem, but you can approach it from the class design standpoint and weaken OGCD abilities to make healers think more about healing. Just don't go too far and reverse the problem so that healing is pressing the same spells constantly.

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This would be fine, except then what do you do with that empty GCD?

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The thing about damage is that it's the easiest kind of filler to have because outputting damage is never a bad thing. With healing you can overheal, so there is such a thing as too much healing. I think you can have an interesting healing system even if the rotation is DPS heavy, maybe by tweaking OGCD skills to work in combinations rather than stand alone abilities. Things as they are now are far from perfect, but I can see potential in weaving heals between damage casts. The system looks salvageable, though the best way to do that would need to be worked out.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

The big issue I should have highlighted was fight design but that's also the most hardest one to rework.

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That's true, especially when it comes to reworking existing content. On the other hand I feel like some amount of encounter design evolution needs to happen to bring the most out of healing.

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While DPS buttons may make healer slightly more fun, I almost always would still rather Just play a DPS at that point

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Without healing, healers just become simplified DPS like you said, so the healing aspect does need to be prioritized. FF14 is naturally very focused on damage by design, and I think that's partially what lead to the current situation we're in regarding GCD vs OGCD healing. Predictability of damage is a big factor as in most cases you can map out what to press through a fight and stick to that list unless things go very wrong. Simply adding an element of randomness should do a lot to shake up how players approach healing, and I think it would also naturally increase the value of GCD based healing since it's more responsive without cooldowns.

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what I loved about SHB white mage is that you had Long cast times so it felt more like a healer version Black mage and positioning was more important

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I completely understand how you feel about WHM. With the long cast times it made positioning feel a lot different than AST for example which gave them both a bit more identity.

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The Thing about Healer design I think people don't realise is that it actually negatively effects a lot more then just healers, Utility is a key example which I've already talked about I love that some DPS actually have utility and support options but if it doesn't even help most the time nor save Healer GCD's then it feels pointless to have said utility.

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I usually look at DPS utility as more of emergency buttons than something to help healers, but there is a bit of both. Addle and Feint are definitely support tools while Manaward and Second Wind either help the caster directly or are reserved for atypical situations. When I'm healing I sometimes notice the DPS trying to help by using their own skills, but sometimes it doesn't really amount to anything because I'm going to just AoE heal everyone anyway. Circling back to what I said about unpredictability, I don't mind keeping the utility tools as infrequently used backup options, but I can also see your viewpoint where they would become more commonly relied on to help maximize party performance through cooperation between DPS and healers.

Also sorry for the really short quotes, I was trying to keep the post under the text limit so I wouldn't have to edit in my response, but I went over anyway.

I always believed using GCD heals was an artform in itself back in 2.x days before they started to get replaced with oGCDs. I loved figuring out when I needed to time my heals so they would do the most good. Regen was always up on the tanks and stone skin for tank busters, I managed those like I would a DoT. I didn't have to worry about DPS much back then as healing was needed more, real healing, not an Assize and let the players regen up for the rest of that part of the fight. I enjoyed having to think a bit about how and when I use my heals but now, its just a reflex oGCD use and back to spamming DPS.

I firmly believe that the entire healer kit must evolve together as a whole. Both the healing kit and the damage kit are important to the job, advancing one over the other is a mistake and would eventually lead to the stagnation of the portion that remains the same and not evolved. Not allowing one portion of the kit to evolve risks alienating players who enjoy that portion, as much as people rag on the ones who want more damage buttons, they are also healer mains, possibly even healer mains for longer than you.

There has not yet been a compelling reason why one side of the kit has to remain the same and stagnate while the other portion is allowed to evolve. There is also no singular solution to the healer problem.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

and this is without even broaching the horror show that was healer accuracy and missed damage GCDs on bosses which was a topic in itself.

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Oh no... I feel like I'm relapsing. Must.. add.. accuracy.. on the anima..
Well, I say that, but atleast I got the most PRECISE codex one could get, I suppose.. I think we can be all in agreement that precise mechanic wasn't it. ;)

I do agree about evolving the role, but considering the PLD changes and the upcoming AST "rework", I'm sincerely worried about how the role is going to play out in DT.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

If you could shift encounter design and damage profiles back to SB levels, then take EW WHM and combine it with SB SCH and HW AST, you'd probably have a really good set of healer Jobs and most players would probably be pretty happy with that result, like as not.

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Why did you specify HW Astro specifically instead of SB? There are differences, but what about SB are you suggesting we avoid? Cause that could imply dropping Earthly Star which is probably the most well-liked heal on Astro’s hotbar, and/or imply going with CDR Spear instead of Crit Spear. Or is there something about HW Astro you’re wanting returned? A second DoT? Or Stella?

I don't neccessarily need a complex DPS kit but I would like fights to force me to use my entire healing kit. I want fights where I don't just throw down 1 or 2 OGCDs and call it good. I want situations where healing over time is needed, where big instant heals are needed, situations for delayed and compound healing, situations for shields, etc.

It's not exactly what I mean but Thordan Unreal has been a blast for me because it's tuned to where I have to actually GCD heal sometimes and I feel like I'm actually doing something beyond being a shitty DPS.

I would prefer to see more complexity added to damage abilities and a streamlining of healing abilities. If the devs are afraid of adjusting encounter design, the other option is to lower healing output. Reducing access to AOE healing and creating true differentiation between healing job capabilities would go a long way.

It might be influenced by the times I’ve harped on about how SB AST was a regression in terms of QOL and playability with regards to cards in particular. The loss of MICON OFF and clicking cards zapped a whole optimisation branch and just the way you applied cards in general was a little more cumbersome overall needing more buttons to do the same job. 3.4 HW AST’s cards and time extension mechanics with 4.x’s overall healing kit would be the best combination of the two IMO+++

To get the thread back on track with a new page:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...e-with-a-twist

• First off, we apply a flat DPS reduction of healers via the MND to potency calculation by 30%.
  
  
• Then we add the Cleric Stance toggle back in, instead of flipping MND/INT as before, it simply increases damage done by 30%.
  
  
• Instead of nerfing your healing potency into the floor, it causes your next healing GCD to 'fizzle' (Yes I am digging up an Everquest term for this). Fizzling a heal this way removes the Cleric Stance effect in the process and starts a 10 second cooldown before you can recast Cleric Stance.
  
  
• Fizzling a spell causes a 1 second GCD reset and causes the spell to consume no resources or gauge.
  
  
• It's important to note that unless you fizzle, Cleric Stance has no recast time, you can drop it, cast a Medica II or Lily, then recast straight back into Cleric akin to how it used to be.

TLDR, Cleric Stance returns, but the penalty for ‘failing’ is a ~1 sec delay on your next GCD heal and you’re locked out of putting Cleric back up for 10 seconds. Ignoring it entirely = 30% damage hit as opposed to a 90% or more reduction as before. Importantly, healing oGCDS can still be used at full potency whilst in cleric. Effectively encouraging and rewarding the use of oGCD healing even in content where it’s not close to being needed.

Thoughts and why?

How do you foresee this and burning lilies interacting? In casual content and especially stq I find I end up burning lilies to not overcap and get that bonus damage in raid buffs. Would this just require half a second more awareness to dismiss the stance and not fizzle? Sage doesn’t have a similar issue as its mp renewal is from oGCDs and wouldn’t be subject to the same penalty.
Then again this would help the jobs feel more differentiated if they all interact with the same mechanic in different ways.

So correct me if I'm wrong here, but it often feels that the Devs saw min-maxers and the community chasing optimization and then said, what players like are to do more DPS. And so they leaned into that to the point that I've heard "Good healers never cast a heal GCD if they can help it". So to me to make healers more interesting they would have to revise their encounter design. more than just give them more damage options. I don't mean to say that the bosses should hit for more damage or give you a nasty DOT every AoE, that's the equivalent of "It's difficult because the boss has more HP and hits twice as hard". There should be more mechanics that are healer oriented. The only thing that comes to mind is that phase in Shinryu where you have to heal some dragon heads.... some more stuff like that where the healers interact with the encounter differently.

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Originally Posted by Volgia

The only thing that comes to mind is that phase in Shinryu where you have to heal some dragon heads.... some more stuff like that where the healers interact with the encounter differently.

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Since they just recently removed the Epstein heal check from the aery, I can’t see them having that idea anytime soon.

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Originally Posted by Doragan

That wasn't the case in HW, though. We had 3 DoTs, one being Aero from crossclass. This really started being a thing in Stormblood.

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Yes...AST was the first healer Job to do this as WHM still had a second DoT (Aero 3) in SB.

Sorry for the confusion since I did mention HW right there, but yeah, AST was the first healer that went for spamnuke + DoT (in SB). AST also was the first healer to have a 1.5 sec cast spamnuke for weaving (SCH had to use Ruin 2 or Miasma 2, depending on MP, to weave without clipping, and WHM had to use Aero 1 [Aero 2 in SB] or Regen [or Cure 1, I guess...] to avoid clipping).

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Originally Posted by Doragan

Lustrate's % healing working in Cleric Stance? Whispering Dawn (double buffed or not) being completely busted until like Shadowbringers? This used to be the main way to heal allies during raidwide due to how often and how bombastically strong it was comapred to what it is today.

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...for SCHOLAR.

Not for WHITE MAGE.

WHITE MAGE did not have Lustrate. WHITE MAGE did not have Whispering Dawn. WHITE MAGE had one oGCD heal in ARR - Benediction on a 5 min CD.

This is the point I'm making: In ARR, healing was not "always this way". It was FOR SCHOLAR, yes. I've said that over and over again. I've pointed out that SCH and WHM have been two sides of the healing coin from the start. My point is that, in ARR, it worked with one part of your healing pair being a GCD healer and one part of your healing pair being a DPS focused Job with oGCD weaving.

What part of that statement is wrong?

Please, don't belittle someone just because you disagree with them. At least make sure they're saying what you think they are first. Healing in ARR could NOT have *always* been this way, because WHM didn't have the tools FOR oGCD healing in ARR. It was on SCH. It was NOT on WHM. Yet both existed in this same shared space.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

[*]Then we add the Cleric Stance toggle back in, instead of flipping MND/INT as before, it simply increases damage done by 30%.

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Oof, hard disagree.

Cleric stance was not fun. Yes yes, it was fun for some people. Give it to SCH. Cleric Stance as a role-wide action is bad design and should stay in the dustbin of history where it belongs. They removed it for a very good reason.

I do think part of the solution is to make healing less on demand and potent, while also lowering how much damage encounters do in single hits, instead spacing that damage out across more frequent, but smaller, hits.

IF it does come back, it won't be as a role action but would be limited to a single Job like SCH or SGE which would probably be designed around it. For example, if SGE's Eukrasia wasn't a single ability but a stance that turned its heals into attacks (and got Kardia ticks), and deactivating it defaulted you to your base heals. In such a case, it wouldn't have attack and heal GCDs at the same time. It would have Cure 1, Adlo, Regen, Medica 1, and Succor (for simplicity of names), and when turning on "Eukrasia Stance", these would be replaced with Dosis, Bigger Dosis (maybe a dualcast mechanic like RDM), DoT, AOE attack, AOE DoT attack. While in this stance you can oGCD heal and you can hot-swap Kardia (no CD or a 1 sec CD on use to allow for swapping), and probably have some kind of AOE Kardia on a 1 or 2 min CD for party healing. Slap on an Energy Drain (Toxicon?) to compete with the AG heals and you've got a "damage dealer focused healer" Job. If damage is too great, you drop out of Eukrasia to do your GCD healing to get the situation back under control before going back into Eurkasia Stance.

If we ever see a Cleric Stance as a toggle type ability again, something like that is probably how it would work. Some continuous passive healing while it's active, oGCD healing options while it's active, but which compete with an extra damage oGCD to force an opportunity cost on use.

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Originally Posted by Volgia

So correct me if I'm wrong here, but it often feels that the Devs saw min-maxers and the community chasing optimization and then said, what players like are to do more DPS. And so they leaned into that to the point that I've heard "Good healers never cast a heal GCD if they can help it". So to me to make healers more interesting they would have to revise their encounter design. more than just give them more damage options. I don't mean to say that the bosses should hit for more damage or give you a nasty DOT every AoE, that's the equivalent of "It's difficult because the boss has more HP and hits twice as hard". There should be more mechanics that are healer oriented. The only thing that comes to mind is that phase in Shinryu where you have to heal some dragon heads.... some more stuff like that where the healers interact with the encounter differently.

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Yes please.

We need more healing things to do, and that really requires encounter design as well as kit design.

Ren:

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Cleric stance was not fun.

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Also Ren in the very next paragraph sentence:

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Yes yes, it was fun for some people.

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I expected no less from you tbh.

Let's stick to the topic, not your attempt at a bad faith gotcha. You want me to lie?

Cleric stance was NOT fun. It was clunky and obnoxious. But worse, it divided the community and generated a lot of toxicity, while also being a trap that actively harmed newer players trying to learn it. It was often used less as a toggle and more a "set and forget" or turned on and off at set points in fights. When soloing, it was mostly turned on and left on. In ARR, with SCH, it was also mostly turned on and left on, and for WHM, either ignored or turned on for DoT refreshes and then turned off again. It was like a much worse Eukrasia.

However, some people do enjoy clunky, badly designed, obnoxious things. You would like me to ignore that or not say that? Then let me change the wording to suit your grammar nazi-like precision:

Cleric stance was not fun to most people.
Yes yes, it was fun for some very few people.
But everyone else hated it, it divided the community, it actively harmed newer players, it generated massive toxicity, it made the game more difficult for the devs to balance, and Yoshi P is on record saying that the change was beneficial and what they're going with moving forward.

Better?

It changes literally nothing about what I said, so of course you grab onto it and ignore everything else - you know, the actual arguments. Because that's how ad hominem fallacies work.

I expected better from you, tbh.

Just bring back cleric stance and give healers another 2 to 4 dps buttons

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Originally Posted by Renathras

...for SCHOLAR.

Not for WHITE MAGE.

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So, please. Remind me, which healing job was mandatory in EX trials and savage in ARR (where healing started being important), and to a lesser extent, HW?
Most of the damage comes from raidwides. And the strongest, most spammable tool used to heal those was double buffed Whispering Dawn.

Therefore,

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Originally Posted by Renathras

FFXIV was GCD healing focused, not oGCD healing focused. Not only that, our kits were weaker vs the damage we had to deal with back then.

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Is a wrong statement. oGCD healing has always been the most important, our strongest tools, and what raiders focused their uses on. Where healing matters, not a WHM using Medica II on a 80% hp group on Amdapor Keep or whatever. That's whats wrong, Ren.

Besides, Stoneskin, benediction and Lustrate were all used in Cleric Stance as well. Lustrate in particular was really strong for TBs.

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Originally Posted by Doragan

Is a wrong statement.

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No, it isn't.

You could both two WHM and two SCH heal in ARR, but having one of each was generally better. In HW, SCH could do stupid amounts of damage while also healing, which somewhat broke the system (and started the tend of SCH being meta for every single expansion in the game).

Moreover, the game is not just raids. Never has been. And in every expansion aside from possibly SB (though probably then, too), WHM was the single most played healer Job.

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Anyway, this is a tangent to a tangent.

People need to stop saying "herp derp always been this way" when people are saying (a) it hasn't (universally) always been this way and (b) that people don't WANT IT to be this way. Saying it's always been this way is rarely a good argument at the best of times, and then getting into fights over it when pointed out that isn't even strictly true doesn't help matters.

The fact is, people don't want it, and there is game history supporting it not being forced on everyone in the past and the game working just fine - arguably better than it does today. You can have whatever last word you want, but the fact remains that GCD healing was the ONLY way WHM healed in ARR because it didn't have oGCD heals. I'll note you have not disputed that fact thus far. Therefore, you can't say it was wrong.

Simple question: Did WHM GCD heal or oGCD heal in ARR?

GCD heal.

And WHMs were prevalent across all kinds of content - including raids but also outside of them - as GCD healers because of this. So it is not "a wrong statement" to point this out.

WHM did not have Lustrate, and had 1 Benediction every 5 minutes. And you weren't going to do all the healing you needed with Stoneskin...partly on account of the fact Stoneskin didn't have any heal component.

If you're asking for SCH to be an oGCD focused healer and WHM to be a GCD focused one, that is what the history of the game supports.

.

EDIT:

Anyway, for my part - I think it's fine to have some of both. That's the point of my argument.